Sanmen Gorge

Sanmen Gorge, gorge enclosing one section of the Huang He (Yellow River) in western Henan province, eastern China. The gorge is the site of a large dam and hydroelectric installation.

The gorge is some 20 miles (30 km) east of the city of Sanmenxia. At the gorge the Huang He narrows to flow between steep cliffs, and the current is further impeded by two rocky islands—Gui and Shen—which divide the stream into three channels, known as the Gate of Ghosts (Gui Men), the Gate of the Spirits (Shen Men), and the Gate of Man (Ren Men). Below these the river is somewhat obstructed by three smaller islands—Dizhu Rock, Zhanggongshi Island, and Shuzhuang Terrace—the last two being connected by extensive sandbanks on the northeast bank below the rapids. The Sanmen Gorge is the point at which the Huang He descends into the North China Plain, where it becomes a slow-moving and meandering river.

From early times this difficult passage, known as Dizhu, has constituted the principal obstacle to navigation on the Huang He. Of the three channels, only the Gate of Man on the eastern bank was normally passable by ships, while the Gate of Ghosts was completely impassable. Under the Former Han dynasty (206 bc–ad 8)—when the imperial capital was at Chang’an (near present-day Xi’an) in Shaanxi province on the Wei River—various attempts were made to widen the channel and thus permit river traffic to pass from the grain-rich North China Plain westward to the capital, but all of these efforts ended in failure.

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During the Tang dynasty (618–907), when Chang’an once again was the capital of a united empire, it became even more important to overcome the obstacles. During the late 7th and early 8th centuries, tracking paths were constructed on the cliffs of the north bank, many of them supported by trestles built into the bank, in order to enable ships to be hauled up the rapids. In the 730s, when the transportation system was improved, an attempt was made to construct a road through the hills on the north bank suitable for cart traffic, thus connecting transshipment granaries above and below the rapids. In 743 an effort was made to cut a completely new channel—remnants of which exist today—to the west of the Gate of Man. This channel, however, known as Kaiyuan Xin River (“New River of the Kaiyuan period” [713–741]), was rapidly blocked by silt. As a result of the failure of these attempts to make the Sanmen Gorge passable to shipping, transport from the Wei River valley to the plain generally continued to travel overland from Luoyang along the Gu River valley to Shanxian—roughly the route that is followed in modern times by the Longhai Railway.

In 1955, as part of a multipurpose plan to control permanently the Huang He and with Soviet help, it was decided to build a large dam 295 feet (90 metres) high across the river at Sanmen Gorge to act as a flood-control, silt-retention, and water-storage project and also to feed a hydroelectric station joined by a high-tension grid to the rapidly expanding industrial bases of Xi’an, Taiyuan, Luoyang, and Zhengzhou. The dam formed Sanmenxia Reservoir, which occupies some 1,350 square miles (3,500 square km) and reaches up the Huang He to the region of Linjin (Shanxi) and well up the valleys of the Luo and Wei tributaries to the west. The reservoir flooded a densely populated area, requiring the resettlement of several hundred thousand people.

The enormous silt load of the Huang He, now mostly deposited in the lake, became problematic with completion of the original dam structure. The project’s main objectives were to make it possible to regulate the flow of floodwater into the North China Plain and to maintain the water level of the Huang He during the winter drought while also making navigation and irrigation possible. However, siltation quickly reduced the reservoir’s capacity and prompted reconstruction projects in 1965 and 1970 in an attempt to increase the dam’s discharge capacity for both flood and silt. Performance was improved (notably water retention in winter), but the project was unable to control summer flooding because it was necessary to discharge so much water at that time. In addition, the dam proved to be a disappointment as a generator of electricity. The withdrawal of Soviet assistance after 1960 delayed completing the installation of equipment, and the enormous accumulation of silt in the reservoir has limited power generation to a fraction of total capacity.