KEY POINTS:
The rest of the world, particularly those with green concerns, may have doubts about China's monumental Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtse River, but few Chinese have any such reservations. Day after day the tour buses roll up and thousands of visitors, the great majority from within China, pour out in homage to this stupendously ambitious piece of engineering.
They are keen to see and, as usual, to have their pictures taken against the backdrop of something to be proud of, a very concrete symbol of great national achievement. There's a tangible holiday mood of celebration.
As a tourist spot, visually it leaves something to be desired unless you're an engineer - if you've seen one big dam you've seen 'em all - and the construction site is frequently shrouded in the mist that hangs over the river. It's not the tallest or the widest in the world, although it's claimed to be the biggest in potential power output, but the barrage of figures which the tour guides disgorge as if over a verbal spillway compel the attention.
Whether or not you share the environmental reservations as to the wisdom of the project, it's difficult to leave without being glad you have seen such a phenomenal piece of human endeavour.
For most Chinese, the rationale for the dam is convincing, the realisation of a project mooted as early as 1919 by the nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen.
It is justified as a multi-purpose operation with the prime motive of flood control. In the past 100 years it is said that one million people have been killed in the floods which sweep down the Yangtse. As recently as 1998 more than 13 million people were driven from their homes and more than 4000 were killed.
There is also a compelling economic case. The project is already supplying electricity - and helping to pay for itself - and in a non-polluting way for a nation that gets most of its energy by burning coal.
As the figures are bandied about there are claims the dam will eventually produce a tenth of Chinese demand. But as that keeps growing exponentially there is some scepticism about just how much the project will contribute. It will also improve navigation on this vital waterway, allowing ships as big as 10,000 tonnes to get as far as the boom city of Chongqing and eventually provide water transfer options for China's expanding cities far away from adequate supplies.
All this comes at a cost and not just the US$30 billion ($57 billion) for construction and resettlement.
The dam is at Sandouping, once an unremarkable village at the mouth of the lowest of the Three Gorges, an area of legendary natural beauty and as the water level rises the deep narrow defiles have become shallower and less grand. In some ways the most telling visible testimony to the extraordinary effect of the dam is not the sprawling construction site but the markers along the river showing the 175m mark which the water will reach when it hits its full design level this year.
The dam's defenders point out that while the main gorges will be diminished, the rising water level will make some of the smaller and equally beautiful gorges accessible to tourist boats. Whatever the effects on the scenery the human cost is poignantly visible as you pass people devotedly cultivating strips of land for their last harvest before they disappear under the river.
As so often in China, the numbers are so big as to stun comprehension. It's outside our experience that a government can impose a relocation demand to at least 1.2 million people who will have had to abandon their homes by the time the project is finished.
We were taken to the resettlement "village" of Fengdu - a village where the population is 120,000 and more are to come. It's an odd sort of showpiece. Work started in 1994 but already some of the buildings have a dreary, slightly East European look as we wandered through a dusty park that had a vaguely dispirited air. But the people were cheerful enough, almost alarmingly so in the entertainment group led by a gentleman of advanced age but undiminished energy conducting his charges through renderings of Baa Baa Black Sheep, You Are My Sunshine and Jingle Bells.
The facilities of modern life are on tap for formerly isolated villagers. We were free to amble through a pleasant, if modest, shopping mall and a terrific fresh food market where acupuncturists plied their trade on the street and the sharp dressed teenagers didn't seem to be harbouring any regrets for their drowned rural life.
But this is the new, more open China and there was an acknowledgement that for the older people relocation had been hard - as it had been for those farmers given no option but to switch to land near Canton where they didn't even speak the local dialect.
The resourcefulness of the Chinese is clear with the farmed terraces moving further up the slopes into ever steeper horticultural plots, reminiscent of the fields of Pukekohe tipped on their sides, but the loss of some of the more fertile land is obvious.
Many green critics of the scheme seem less worried about the people than the endangered river species. The Yangtse dolphin has been declared functionally extinct but population impacts on the river had meant it was on its way out before the dam came along. Fears about other species such as the paddlefish and sturgeon were batted away by one guide with the suggestion that the sturgeon had learned to adapt its breeding patterns to the barrier to its progress upstream.
Given the law of unintended consequences you would be brave to forecast what the eventual outcome will be. We may have visited a spectacular exhibition of human hubris, a decision taken for political benefit and appalling in its monstrous interference with nature. Or we could have been seeing a celebration of mankind's dauntless ingenuity. Either way, it turned a load of 26 million cubic metres of concrete into an unmissable experience.
John Gardner travelled courtesy of Viking River Cruises and World Journeys Limited of Ponsonby. Host hotels were the Shanghai Pudong Shangri-La, The Xian Golden Flower Hotel and The Beijing Westin.
GETTING THERE: Air New Zealand flies direct to Shanghai and Beijing. See airnewzealand.co.nz.
CRUISING: Viking River Cruises' Imperial Jewels of China trip includes a six-day Yangtse cruise, three nights in Beijing, two nights in Shanghai and one night in Xian. Internal flights in China are included and all meals are provided. All hotels are five-star. The company also has a 16-day China's Cultural Delights itinerary with an 11-day cruise on the Yangtse, visits to Suzhou and Nanjing, Mt Jiu Hua, the Dongting Lake and Jingdezhen.
FURTHER INFORMATION: See vikingrivers.com
