DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9711100271

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN TRAVEL EDITOR 

                                            LENGTH:  354 lines

RIVER OF THE DAMMED CHINA HAS BEGUN WORK ON A MASSIVE DAM PROJECT THAT WILL DOOM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT SCENIC ATTRACTIONS, THE THREE GORGES OF THE YANGZTE RIVER. THEPLANS HAVE SPARKED A RUSH OF TOURISTS SEEKING TO VISIT THE REGION BEFORE IT IS OBLITERATED.

WITH AS MUCH ceremony as an authoritarian government trying to justify a $25 billion expenditure can muster, Chinese officials on Saturday performed major, and probably irreversible, surgery on the liquid spinal cord of the nation.

As Premier Li Peng, a one-time hydroelectric engineer, looked on, workers closed the main course of the Yangtze River to begin work on the central section of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest flood-control and hydroelectric project.

This is the symbolic beginning of the end of one of the world's great scenic attractions, the Yangtze's Three Gorges, as well as the popular side attraction, the Lesser Three Gorges of the Daning River, one of the Yangtze's tributaries.

The scale of this undertaking, like so many things in China, is gargantuan. As is the controversy it has generated.

When completed in 2009, the giant dam, 600 feet high and 1.2 miles wide, will create the world's largest water-storage reservoir - a lake 370 miles long that would cover more than half of Great Britain.

At least 1.3 million people will be displaced, 30,000 of them in Chongqing at the uppermost reaches of the impoundment. It would be as if everyone living in what is called the Hampton Roads Market Area - on the southside from Virginia Beach westward to Suffolk and Isle of Wight County and on the lower peninsula from Old Point Comfort to somewhere west of Williamsburg - were told, ``Load 'em up and move 'em out.''

Drowned will be 13 cities, 153 towns, 4,500 villages, 600 factories, thousands of mines, factories and businesses and about 600,000 acres of incredibly fertile, alluvial farmland.

There is great concern on the part of world environmentalists (there are few in China, and they lack a significant voice), who find themselves on the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand, the dam will produce about eight times the hydroelectric power of Egypt's Aswan High Dam and will greatly reduce dependence on coal burning, which will, in turn, reduce the massive pollution in the region. Which is good.

On the other hand they anguish over the fact that the lake also will change forever - unless the treasury or the dam goes bust - one of nature's most awesome creations. The gorges' soaring cliffs and narrow canyons, still relatively pristine scenery that has inspired generations of Chinese painters and poets, will be inundated beyond recognition.

Well, not all poets. Revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung gave the dam his blessing in the 1950s in the form of a poem, musing about ``walls of stone'' that would hold ``clouds and rain till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.''

Actually, the idea has been around since 1919 when the pragmatic Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, proposed it in his ambitious blueprint called ``Grand Tactics to Build Up the Country.''

As the modern blueprints manifest themselves in walls of concrete, the water at the dam will rise in three stages: to about 264 feet beginning next month; to about 445 feet in 2003, when half of the dam is complete; and to 557 feet when the project is complete.

In the gorges, just upriver, the drowned river will be twice as wide and about 300 feet deep. Tourism will be a washout by about 2003.

In the meantime, the project has created a see-it-before-it's-gone frenzy of Western tourism on the Three Gorges section of the storied Yangtze. The volume of foreign visitors has grown in recent years from a trickle to a torrent. I made the trip aboard a ship of Victoria Cruises, one of two United States-based lines on the river.

The Yangtze River is to China what the Mississippi is to the United States. Yangtze is its English name, really, or a corruption of what British merchants in the 1800s around the port of Yangzhou heard as ``Yang zi jiang.'' It meant Yangzhou's river.

The Chinese call it Chang Jiang. That means simply long river. It is, at a little over 3,900 miles, the third longest in the world. Only the Nile and the Amazon are longer. Rising in the cold, treeless steppes of central Asia north of Tibet, its waters annually carry 680 million tons of silt and mud through China's heartland, adding one square mile of land every 70 years at its mouth near Shanghai on the East China Sea.

Superimposed on a map of the United States, it would rise in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, head sharply southeast to Dallas, then swing east-northeast through Memphis and end at Washington, D.C.

On or near the Yangtze's banks, more than 350 million people live - a third of China's population and, roughly, one in every 15 human beings on the planet. Think of it as the world's longest Main Street.

For a stretch of about 125 miles, after it leaves the Szechwan Basin behind and surges eastward beyond Chongqing, the Yangtze cuts through steep ranges of the Wushan Mountains of south-central China. Here are the fabled Three Gorges.

There are some who, with great hyperbole, call the Three Gorges the Grand Canyon of China. No. There is only one Grand Canyon, and there isn't even a second place in that category.

The Three Gorges are not really like any single thing I have seen in 50-some countries in the world. They are rather a composite: more like the Snake River Canyon - Hell's Canyon - between Idaho, Washington and Oregon, stark and desolate, than anything else, but parts also are similar to the steep, terraced banks of the twisting, turning Rhine River Valley of Germany.

There are scenes that resemble the Norwegian fjords, without the waterfalls, others that bring to mind the Inside Passage of Alaska. One enormous mountain of bare rock looks like the twin of Halfdome in Yosemite National Park.

And there is an ever-present fog or haze or smog that often makes viewing this spectacular scenery difficult if not impossible.

The swirling water is rosy milk chocolate in color and carries a disgusting amount of debris. The riverside inhabitants bathe in it, wash clothes in it, drink it and who knows what else. The turbulent stream is congested with other tour boats, hydrofoils, junks, sampans, tugs pushing commercial barges.

There are sheer rock cliffs thousands of feet high; ancient pagodas and little white buildings with red trim that house the ``river mayors'' who occasionally dictate one-way traffic flow on particularly tricky stretches of the river. There are gentle slopes terraced for fields of rice, wheat and rape; rock quarries and gravel bars; and between each of the three gorges, dense, grimy towns with coal chutes and gritty industrial complexes belching smoke and steam.

The most popular tours run between Chongqing and Wuhan, primarily because they have major airports. Victoria Cruises is based here. Chongqing claims to have a population of almost 15 million. Its city center is a peninsula shaped like a goose's head and neck between the Yangtze and Jialing rivers.

An industrial city, it is called the ``Pittsburgh of China'' by those who haven't heard that Pittsburgh has recently washed its face. Chongqing is as hot as Phoenix and as humid as New Orleans for most of the year, as hilly as San Francisco (which explains a lack of bicycles, ubiquitous elsewhere in China) and ugly as sin.

The first day out of Chongqing we stop at Fengdu to visit a mountaintop ``Ghost City'' reached by cable chairlift (or a 600-step staircase). It is a Buddist-Taoist-vaguely Disneyist, make-believe nether world with a whole lot of hocus-pocus. There is a temple dedicated to the Gods of Hades, with displays of instruments of torture and a lot of larger-than-life wild demon images made of plaster.

It is rather like an American Halloween ``haunted house'' run amok or the display room of a horror movie's special-effects department.

The bilingual Chinese guide focuses on silly superstitions. Approaching a double-entry doorway, she says men should go through the left door, women through the right. Then, apparently confused over the translation of left and right, she says maybe it's the other way around. She smiles.

When we approach the foot-high threshold of the Ghost Gate, she says men should step over with their left foot, women with their right. Or . . . is it vice versa? In either case, you do not want to step ON the threshold because evil spirits will go up your leg.

I compromised on the left-right thing, stepping left once, right the second time. I did NOT step on the threshold. Some risks I am unwilling to take.

Day 2 will be packed with activity on the river: the first two of the Three Gorges and a side trip to view the Lesser Three Gorges.

We anchor in midstream off the city of Wanxian most of the night while the river is closed. It is unsafe to travel in darkness because many of the vessels on the water do not have radar, or they are too small to be picked up quickly enough on other radar screens.

We begin our journey at 6 a.m. It is still dark, so what I have just said doesn't have much meaning. The moon, just days past full, is still high in the sky. Our ship's deep horn blasts at frequent and regular intervals, resounding off the river's rock walls. Searchlights sweep the stream and banks for small boats that may have escaped detection by radar.

In a ghostly dawn we sail past Fenjie, an ancient city of 50,000 with most of its walls from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) still intact and long stairways leading up from the river to three old city gates. This entire city will be lost to the dam's backwater.

As we approach Qutang Gorge, the sun gradually lightens the gray-blue sky. This is the shortest of the three gorges, about five miles, but also the most perilous. At its narrowest it is less than 300 feet wide. The rushing water funnels through nearly perpendicular cliff faces, some rising nearly 4,000 feet.

Passage is quick. The scenery, as predicted, is awesome. The scale of this marvel of nature dwarfs all things made by man. Riverboats and barges look like toys in a tub.

In September of 1929, high-water season, the level of the water here rose to 245 feet. A steamboat captain likened his passage through the gorge then to plunging through a trough, with the water banked up on both sides. His ship was carried down broadside. He vowed, ``Never again.''

To give you some idea of the volume of the Yangtze, our captain said that on the downstream trip he uses five tons of fuel on the 840-mile journey between Chongqing and Wuhan that takes three and a half days. Against the current the ship burns 35 tons of fuel in a six-day voyage.

Emerging from the first gorge, we see black-clad coolies, like thin lines of ants, loading dusty bags of coal and white sacks of something onto barges driven into the sandy shore.

Barges being built on flats above the water's edge. Sparks of the welder's torch bounce off rust-orange rectangles of steel. Their completion date comes when the water rises to that level. They don't know exactly when that will be, but they'll know when it arrives.

A Russian-built hydrofoil with Cyrillic markings attempts to pass us in a narrow stretch with coal-barge traffic oncoming. Our captain lays a serious cussing on him over the loudspeaker. In Chinese, but anyone can get the drift. The hydrofoil skipper backs off momentarily, then apparently decides that if that is as bad as it gets, he'll pass anyway. And off he zooms.

We dock at Wushan for a side trip up the Daning River to view the much-heralded Lesser Three Gorges, open to tourists only since 1985 and largely unspoiled except for the 100 or so small, motorized sampans on the jade-green waters that are broken here and there by rapids.

Helpers use long, steel-tipped bamboo poles to help push the sampans over the rapids.

We are told that this is a ``pristine passage through narrow precipices, terraced hillsides and luxuriant wilderness.'' The setting is idyllic, indeed, but the excursion wasn't nearly as romantic as it sounds. This is the way it really was:

We leave the Victoria and climb up a steep path recently hacked out of the soft silt bank - a few are carried in sedan chairs - past the usual hawkers of souvenirs, tangerines and putrid-smelling food. At the hilltop road, the buses reserved for our ship aren't there. A Chinese tourism official shrugs. Another ship beat us to them. We wait.

When substitute buses finally arrive, we board and creep through a long, wretched, crumbling, drab, filthy, squalid city of 15,000 on a steep, narrow, twisting street filled with aimless wanderers and fume-spewing, horn-blowing vehicles. This is a city condemned to death by drowning. No one seems to care about anything.

At the Daning docks, we cross rickety gangplanks across a half-dozen dirty, steel-hulled sampans to the scruffy ones assigned to our group.

These boats may be the most over-rated part of the excursion. The one I draw doesn't have enough seats for everyone assigned to it, and those unfortunate enough to board first and move to the back half can see little and photograph nothing.

The scenery is as spectacular as it is touted to be, but because of the bus delay, we are able to see only about half of what is on the prescribed tour before we have to return to the comfort of the Victoria.

Leaving Wushan (with no regrets), we make for the misty Wu Gorge (Witches Gorge) and its fabled Twelve Peaks, immortalized in Chinese folklore and poetry.

The gorge extends for about 25 miles - a narrow and zigzag corridor, dark and somber, with almost vertical walls of heights of 1,600 to 2,000 feet. Because of the swirling mist and fog it is difficult to distinguish one of the green-clad peaks from another. But it is a remarkable sight.

Emerging from this second natural marvel, we again find smoking factories perched high on the river's steep banks looking, in one's imagination, like the castles of the German river barons along the Rhine - or the way they probably looked centuries ago before they were mostly destroyed.

After another night's rest at anchor on the Yangtze, we awake bright and early for the trip through Xiling, the third and longest (47 miles) of the Three Gorges. This is historically the most dangerous of the Yangtze gorges, although it has lost most of that reputation in recent years owing to some serious dynamiting of many of the more troublesome shoals and a rising of the water level as a result of the Gezouba Dam not far downstream.

The Xiling, which is actually made up of seven small gorges, still has rushing, winding channels and two of the fiercest rapids on the river. It also has some remarkable geologic formations, particularly the tilting, stratified layers of rock that resemble stacks of books in disarray.

And there are several narrow, incised valleys with tiny - at least they seem tiny from this distance - arched bridges. The sort of scenes that I thought only manifested themselves in ink-on-ricepaper paintings from the minds and brushes of Chinese artists.

After passing the vast site of the new dam below the Xiling Gorge, we make a final stop at the city of Shashi. At the Jingzhou Provincial Museum we visit a 2,000-year-old man, a bizarre, macabre and most of all enduring testimonial to Chinese herbs.

The man is dead, of course. ``Some people call this mummy,'' says our guide, Oliver. ``We call this corpse.'' It is more like a med-school cadaver on opening day, except he's already been opened.

Unearthed during a construction project a few years ago, this old fellow, Mr. Shui, was an important county official in his time, which is to say around 160 B.C.

When he died at about age 60, he was packed in herbs and placed in a coffin-size box. That was placed inside a shipping-crate-size box, and that inside a really BIG box, the size of a storm sewer culvert, made of heavy timbers.

Mr. Shui is displayed in a sort of pit, white walled with a white tile floor, in a sort of coffin filled with some kind of yellow fluid, lit with fluorescent lights.

Basically what you see is a naked guy. His skin appears to be yellowish red, with white splotches like lichen. His eyes are closed, his mouth open, displaying 32 healthy teeth. He has what looks like a Velcro strip running from collar bone to crotch. This is because modern scientists opened him up when they found him.

His brain is displayed in a clear plastic circular pot beside his head, and his internal organs are laid out in a rectangular box beside his chest cavity, just as you'd see them in ``Gray's Anatomy.''

Which reminds me of another environmental concern created by the dam. Important ancient archaeological sites will be submerged - and with them perhaps significant links to China's long and intricate history of failed totalitarian dynasties.

But the recent dead will have to do.

Upriver, bodies buried less than 60 years, which is a lot of bodies, are being exhumed to avoid tainting the future reservoir. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

VICTORIA CRUISES

The spectacular cliffs of Qutang Gorge...

STEPHEN HARRIMAN

...Yangzte River...

Tour boats struggle upriver...

Map

VP

Photo

VICTORIA CRUISES

Suite accomodations aboard the Victoria I...

STEPHEN HARRIMAN

The dam project will displace more than a million residents.

Graphic

THE BEST TIME to cruise the Yangtze River is spring or fall.

Summer is hot, and low water may stop cruises in the winter.

More than 80 boats offer excursions on the Yangtze; two are

United States-based: Regal China Cruises and Victoria Cruises, both

in the luxury category. I cruised on one of the Victoria line's

three nearly identical ships named Victoria I through III (Victoria

IV is expected in the spring).

Apparently there is a wide range of service and comfort among

these competing ships. Many do not cater to Western travelers. For

what it's worth, I was told, separately, by two American ex-pat

couples, one living in Zurich and the other in Guangzhou (Canton),

that they had heard ``horror stories'' about Yangtze River cruises

and had researched the boat companies extensively before selecting

Victoria.

Most travelers to China combine a Yangtze River voyage with a

visit to major Chinese cities, including Hong Kong. Among those

Western tour operators offering a package that includes a trip on

Victoria Cruises are Chinasmith, China Travel Service (USA), Grand

American Travel, J&O Tours, McIntosh, Maupintour, Olson-Travelworld,

Pacific Bestour, Pacific Delight, Ritz Tours, Sita World Travel, TBI

Tours, Travcoa and Uniword.

Victoria's ships, which have double-bottomed hulls and a shallow

draft to negotiate the river's rapids and occasional shoals, each

carry a maximum of 154 passengers and a crew of 112. They cruise

between Chongqing and Wuhan from March through December. Prices for

the four-day downstream cruise from Chongqing start at $760 per

person, double occupancy, during peak season (April-May and

September-October) and $680 during off-season; prices for the

six-day upstream cruise from Wuhan start at $700 during peak season

and $620 off-season. Shore excursions are $75 per person.

The Victoria boats have 77 comfortable outside staterooms and

suites with picture windows to view the ever-changing scenery, two

lower berths, closed-circuit TV and private bath. Amenities include

a picture-window dining room, lounge and bar, library, panoramic

observation deck, beauty salon and fitness facilities.

Food is a mixture of Western and Chinese dishes. Breakfast and

lunch are served buffet style; dinner is a more elaborate feast. The

service staff is trained at the five-star White Swan Hotel in

Canton. Senior management comes from the United States and Europe;

cruise directors are Americans fluent in Chinese. Land excursions

are conducted by bilingual guides.

For information on Victoria Cruises, see a local travel agent or

call (800) 348-8084. For information of package tours of China, see

a local travel agent.

For general China tourism information, contact the China National

Tourist Office, 350 Fifth Ave., Room 6413, New York, N.Y. 10118;

phone (212) 760-9700.

- Stephen Harriman

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