49 Fun Facts About Three Gorges Dam

The Three Gorges Dam spans which river?

The Yangtze. China built the dam partly to tame floods on Asia's longest river, which are thought to have killed some 300,000 people in the 20th century.

In which central Chinese province does the Three Gorges Dam stand?

Hubei. The dam stands near the city of Yichang, and the reservoir that backs up behind it drowned well over a thousand towns and villages upstream.

Which dam on the Brazil–Paraguay border did the Three Gorges Dam overtake as the world's largest hydroelectric plant?

Itaipu has under two-thirds of the Chinese dam's capacity, yet for years it generated about as much electricity, because the river at the Three Gorges runs low for months each year.

The Three Gorges Dam site at Sandouping was chosen partly because the bedrock there is which kind of rock?

Granite. Limestone lines much of the gorges, but at Sandouping the river crosses hard granite, a far sounder footing for a concrete wall more than two kilometres long.

China broke ground in 2025 on a hydropower project set to generate three times the Three Gorges Dam's electricity in which region?

Tibet. The Medog project taps a bend where the Yarlung Tsangpo drops about 2,000 metres in 50 km, and it has alarmed India and Bangladesh, which lie downstream.

Which Chinese revolutionary leader first envisioned a great dam on China's longest river, in a 1919 book?

Sun Yat-sen proposed it in The International Development of China, but war and revolution meant three-quarters of a century passed before construction began.

In 1944, a dam designer from which wartime ally of China drew up a plan to dam the Three Gorges?

The United States: John L. Savage of the Bureau of Reclamation called the project a "classic", and 54 Chinese engineers went to America to train before civil war shelved it.

Which Chinese leader's 1956 poem "Swimming" imagined a great stone wall raising a lake in the Three Gorges?

Mao Zedong. His poem pictures a swim across the river and a wall of stone to the west; two years later, engineers who had criticised the dam plan were imprisoned.

Which smaller dam, just downstream of the Three Gorges site, did China start building first, in 1970?

Gezhouba Dam, finished in 1988, later helped pay for its giant neighbour out of its profits, and water leaving the Three Gorges turbines still drives its own.

Which body approved the Three Gorges Dam in 1992 with a third of delegates abstaining or opposed?

National People's Congress. China's legislature usually passes what is put to it almost unanimously, so 177 votes against and 664 abstentions were an unusual show of dissent.

In June 2006, engineers set off nearly 200 tonnes of explosives to demolish what at the Three Gorges Dam?

A temporary dam: the concrete cofferdam had kept the river off the building site, and blowing it up let the newly finished main wall start holding back floods.

Which Moscow-trained Chinese premier championed and launched the Three Gorges project?

Li Peng had studied hydroelectric engineering in Moscow, and as premier he revived the stalled dam plan after years of delay.

Where were the Three Gorges Dam's last six generators installed?

Inside a mountain: the six extra units sit in an underground powerhouse south of the dam, an addition that pushed full operation back from 2009 to 2012.

Which American dam stands taller than the Three Gorges Dam?

Hoover Dam rises 221 metres to the Chinese dam's 181, but it only has to plug a narrow canyon; the Three Gorges Dam runs more than two kilometres across its valley.

The Three Gorges Dam's rebar could build 63 of which landmark?

Eiffel Tower: its iron is an open lattice weighing only about 7,300 tonnes, whereas the dam's 463,000 tonnes of steel bars lie buried out of sight in a record pour of concrete.

Which gas do the marshy banks of the Three Gorges reservoir give off in summer, adding to global warming?

Methane. The water level drops by about 30 metres every year, baring a wide rim of shoreline that turns to marsh, where plants rot and release the gas.

The Three Gorges reservoir lets larger ships sail inland from Shanghai all the way to which megacity?

Chongqing. The reservoir stretches about 660 km upstream, drowning the rapids that once made the gorges the most hazardous part of the voyage.

Since the Three Gorges Dam was built, the river has carried far less of what down to its delta?

Silt. The slow water behind the dam lets sediment sink, so in places only about half as much now reaches the coast, leaving the low-lying delta more open to erosion.

About how many people had to move to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir?

About 1.3 million people were resettled, and the moving has not ended: landslides along the new shoreline have since forced tens of thousands to relocate a second time.

Which Canadian photographer of vast industrial landscapes documented the Three Gorges Dam's impact on towns such as Wanzhou?

Edward Burtynsky leaves his pictures open in meaning, neither condemning nor celebrating the ruin they show, and his Three Gorges work features in the 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes.

What device, opened at the Three Gorges Dam in 2016, carries smaller vessels past the locks in under an hour?

A ship lift: a German-designed basin of water climbs toothed racks like a giant elevator, carrying vessels of up to 3,000 tonnes up the dam's 113 metres; the locks take about four hours.

The Three Gorges locks raise ships up to 113 metres, over four times the climb on which canal?

Panama Canal: its locks only have to reach Gatun Lake, 26 metres above the sea, whereas ships at the Three Gorges must climb the full height of the water held back by the dam.

After floods in 2010, what piled up behind the Three Gorges Dam so thickly that people could walk on it?

Floating rubbish: storms had washed so much debris and household litter into the reservoir that it threatened to jam the dam, and crews in boats spent days fishing it out.

The Three Gorges reservoir drowned old Zigui, home town of the poet Qu Yuan, who is honoured by which festival?

Dragon Boat Festival: its races are said to recall villagers rowing out to save the drowning poet. Zigui's people were moved to a new town beside the dam and his old temple was pulled down.

Which city downstream of the Three Gorges has a riverside monument to its battle with the 1954 flood?

Wuhan. About 33,000 people died in the 1954 flood, and the disaster brought fresh urgency to plans for a flood-control dam in the gorges upstream.

Which dolphin of the river the Three Gorges Dam blocks was declared functionally extinct in 2006?

Baiji: a six-week search in 2006 found none. Fishing nets, boat traffic and dams had all taken their toll, and the Three Gorges project is blamed for hastening its decline.

Which giant fish of the river the Three Gorges Dam blocks was declared extinct in 2022?

Chinese paddlefish: it could grow several metres long, but an older dam downstream, built with no fish ladder, had cut it off from its spawning grounds decades earlier.

Which critically endangered bird winters almost entirely at Poyang Lake, downstream of the Three Gorges Dam?

Siberian crane: nearly the whole species flies from Arctic Siberia to this one lake each winter, so changes to the water flowing out of the dam could threaten them all at once.

NASA scientists calculated that filling the Three Gorges reservoir would have which tiny effect on Earth?

Lengthen the day, by 0.06 millionths of a second: shifting 40 cubic kilometres of water slows the planet's spin very slightly, the reverse of a skater pulling in her arms to spin faster.

Scientists link the yearly rise and fall of the Three Gorges reservoir to swarms of small what?

Earthquakes: the changing weight of the water strains faults beneath the reservoir, and tremors became far more frequent after it filled, though nearly all are too small to do damage.

Once expected to supply a tenth of China's electricity, the Three Gorges Dam provided roughly what share in 2024?

About 1%. The dam generates as much as its designers planned, but China's appetite for power grew so fast that its share had already slipped to about 3% by 2006.

What let the Three Gorges Dam set a world record for yearly electricity output in 2020?

Unusually heavy summer rains: five flood crests rolled down the river in 2020, and riding them out let the turbines run at full load, lifting output to about 112 terawatt-hours.

Still Life, a 2006 drama shot in a town being demolished for the Three Gorges reservoir, won which festival's top prize?

Venice: Jia Zhangke's film won the Golden Lion. Into scenes of Fengjie's real demolition he slipped a passing UFO and a building that lifts off like a rocket.

What kind of turbine, the most widely used in hydropower, drives the Three Gorges generators?

Francis turbines cover the middle ground: a Kaplan turbine is built for low falls and a Pelton wheel for very high ones, while the dam's water drops about 80 metres.

Siemens, GE and Alstom built the first Three Gorges generators under contracts that also handed what to Chinese partners?

Their turbine technology: the transfer deal was signed with the contracts, and by 2007 Chinese factories were delivering 700-megawatt units of their own for the dam's right bank.

In 2011 the Three Gorges Dam's state owner became the biggest shareholder in the main power company of which European country?

Portugal: China Three Gorges paid about €2.7 billion for the state's 21% stake in EDP when it was privatised, and in 2018 it bid, without success, for the rest.

After catastrophic floods in 1998, China's premier banned what on the river's upper reaches, above the Three Gorges, to curb erosion?

Logging. Scientists blamed the floods partly on hillsides stripped bare by decades of felling, so the ban came with a huge replanting drive in the basin above the dam.

Archaeologists racing the rising Three Gorges reservoir found which relics, credited to the ancient Ba people, in riverside cliffs?

Hanging coffins: wooden coffins were lodged in caves and on ledges in the cliffs centuries ago; some were rescued before the water rose, while others, too high to move, were left in place.

Baiheliang, a rock ridge carved with 1,200 years of low-water marks, survived the Three Gorges reservoir as what?

Underwater museum: since 2009 visitors have ridden a long escalator some 40 metres down to windows onto the carved fish, whose eyes once marked the river's lowest levels.

The Three Gorges Dam stands in which gorge, the last and longest of the three?

Xiling Gorge, 66 km long, was the stretch boatmen feared most for its hidden rocks and rapids, until dams raised the water over them.

The Three Gorges Dam's river is the world's third longest, behind the Nile and which other?

Amazon: it and the Nile are each put at about 6,400 km or more, and geographers dispute which of the two is longer, while China's great river measures about 6,300 km.

Public criticism of the Three Gorges Dam, led by journalist Dai Qing, was silenced in the crackdown that followed which event?

The Tiananmen protests: after June 1989 Dai Qing was jailed for ten months and her book of essays against the dam was banned, and the project was approved three years later.

A 2004 Pentagon report said some strategists in which place saw the Three Gorges Dam as a target that could deter Beijing?

Taiwan: a Chinese general retorted that any strike on the dam would mean war, and that no conventional missile could break concrete more than 100 metres thick.

Before engines and dams, what did the men known as trackers do in the Three Gorges?

Hauled boats upstream by rope: teams of up to hundreds, harnessed to a junk, dragged it along footpaths cut into the cliffs; today trackers pull boats only on side streams, largely for tourists.

Which small cetacean is the last one left in the river the Three Gorges Dam blocks?

Finless porpoise: after decades of decline its numbers rose to roughly 1,250 by 2022, helped by a ten-year ban on fishing along the river that began in 2021.

Fengdu, a town drowned by the Three Gorges reservoir and rebuilt across the river, has afterlife temples that earn it which nickname?

Ghost City: legend makes Fengdu the place where the spirits of the dead go to be judged. Its temples stand on a hilltop above the new waterline, so cruise boats still call there.

Alongside 32 giant generators, the Three Gorges Dam has two small 50 MW units whose job is to power what?

The plant itself: a hydro station needs electricity of its own to open intake gates and control its turbines, and these two units bring the dam's total to 34 generators.

Baidicheng, the hilltop 'White Emperor City' at the mouth of the Three Gorges, became what when the reservoir rose?

An island: the water rose around the hill that Li Bai made famous in his poem about leaving Baidi at dawn, and visitors now cross a bridge to reach its temples.

What type of dam is the Three Gorges Dam?

A gravity dam: its sheer weight, not the curve of an arch, holds back the water, which suits a valley more than two kilometres wide, far too broad for an arch to span.