Three Gorges Dam Trivia
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49 free Three Gorges Dam trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Three Gorges Dam is the biggest power station on Earth, and this quiz treats it as a story rather than a spec sheet. It starts with Sun Yat-sen's 1919 dream, an American engineer's 1944 survey, Mao's poem after the 1954 floods and the unusually grudging 1992 vote in the National People's Congress, then follows the concrete: 185 metres high, 2,335 metres long, 32 turbines of 700 MW each, and the ship lift that hoists 3,000-ton vessels 113 metres in a few minutes. There are questions on what the dam is for (flood control, shipping, power) and what it cost (180 billion yuan, 1.3 million people, the baiji and the Chinese paddlefish), on the underwater museum built to save 1,200 years of carved fish, on the world output record of 2020, on why it now supplies less than 1% of China's electricity, and on the odd fact that NASA says it made the day slightly longer. Easy questions suit anyone who knows where the Yangtze is; the expert tier asks about lock dimensions and Francis turbines. For dams in general, try our Dams quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the dam, the Yangtze, the gorges and the species affected, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Three Gorges Dam spans which river?
The Yangtze
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.
Q 02In which central Chinese province does the Three Gorges Dam stand?
Hubei
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.
Q 03Which dam on the Brazil–Paraguay border did the Three Gorges Dam overtake as the world's largest hydroelectric plant?
Itaipu
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.
Q 04The Three Gorges Dam site at Sandouping was chosen partly because the bedrock there is which kind of rock?
Granite
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.
Q 05China broke ground in 2025 on a hydropower project set to generate three times the Three Gorges Dam's electricity in which region?
Tibet
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.
Q 06Which Chinese revolutionary leader first envisioned a great dam on China's longest river, in a 1919 book?
Sun Yat-sen
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.
Q 07In 1944, a dam designer from which wartime ally of China drew up a plan to dam the Three Gorges?
The United States
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.
Q 08Which Chinese leader's 1956 poem "Swimming" imagined a great stone wall raising a lake in the Three Gorges?
Mao Zedong
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.
Q 09Which smaller dam, just downstream of the Three Gorges site, did China start building first, in 1970?
Gezhouba Dam
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.
Q 10Which body approved the Three Gorges Dam in 1992 with a third of delegates abstaining or opposed?
National People's Congress
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.
Q 11In June 2006, engineers set off nearly 200 tonnes of explosives to demolish what at the Three Gorges Dam?
A temporary 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.
Q 12Which Moscow-trained Chinese premier championed and launched the Three Gorges project?
Li Peng
Li Peng had studied hydroelectric engineering in Moscow, and as premier he revived the stalled dam plan after years of delay.
Q 13Where were the Three Gorges Dam's last six generators installed?
Inside a mountain
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.
Q 21What device, opened at the Three Gorges Dam in 2016, carries smaller vessels past the locks in under an hour?
A ship lift
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.
Q 22The Three Gorges locks raise ships up to 113 metres, over four times the climb on which canal?
Panama
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.
Q 23After floods in 2010, what piled up behind the Three Gorges Dam so thickly that people could walk on it?
Floating rubbish
Q 14Which American dam stands taller than the Three Gorges Dam?
Hoover 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.
Q 15The Three Gorges Dam's rebar could build 63 of which landmark?
Eiffel Tower
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.
Q 16Which gas do the marshy banks of the Three Gorges reservoir give off in summer, adding to global warming?
Methane
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.
Q 17The Three Gorges reservoir lets larger ships sail inland from Shanghai all the way to which megacity?
Chongqing
Chongqing. The reservoir stretches about 660 km upstream, drowning the rapids that once made the gorges the most hazardous part of the voyage.
Q 18Since the Three Gorges Dam was built, the river has carried far less of what down to its delta?
Silt
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.
Q 19About how many people had to move to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir?
About 1.3 million
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.
Q 20Which Canadian photographer of vast industrial landscapes documented the Three Gorges Dam's impact on towns such as Wanzhou?
Edward Burtynsky
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.
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.
Q 24The Three Gorges reservoir drowned old Zigui, home town of the poet Qu Yuan, who is honoured by which festival?
Dragon Boat 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.
Q 25Which city downstream of the Three Gorges has a riverside monument to its battle with the 1954 flood?
Wuhan
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.
Q 26Which dolphin of the river the Three Gorges Dam blocks was declared functionally extinct in 2006?
Baiji
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.
Q 27Which giant fish of the river the Three Gorges Dam blocks was declared extinct in 2022?
Chinese paddlefish
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.
Q 28Which critically endangered bird winters almost entirely at Poyang Lake, downstream of the Three Gorges Dam?
Siberian crane
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.
Q 29NASA scientists calculated that filling the Three Gorges reservoir would have which tiny effect on Earth?
Lengthen the day
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.
Q 30Scientists link the yearly rise and fall of the Three Gorges reservoir to swarms of small what?
Earthquakes
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.