little trouble in big china

I'm back! Apologies for the disappearing act -- I took off for a few days, not to Beijing, as one might expect, but to the middle of the country. I met up with a friend who's over for the Olympics, and we took a 4-day cruise down the Yangzi to see the famous Three Gorges and the infamous Three Gorges Dam.

The gorges are pretty cool, but I don't know whether I'd say they're China's best scenery. It's a big country; there's a lot of scenery. Also, this isn't the best season to see it -- lots of summer rain also means lots of fog, and very muddy water (more so than usual, if the tour guides are to be believed). However, there are still some very good sights.

I was most interested in the "hanging coffins" found in the rock cliffs along the river. They're believed to have belonged to the Ba people who lived in the area around 500BCE, and to this day no one knows for sure how they got the freaking coffins up there (context: from the bottom of the picture to the bottom of the treeline is roughly 20m, and the water level until a few years ago was 60m below the bottom border). Many of the coffins have been removed and put in museums or are being studied, but a few have been left behind, I suppose either for posterity, tourism, or because they're too hard to get to and not in any danger of being reached by flooding (the guides point out the ones that you can see from the river). Some of the coffins are in what look deep enough to be called caves, while others are squeezed into a sort of three-sided tunnel indentation on the cliff face. In some places a bar (wood or bamboo; it was too far away to tell) is placed across the cave opening, presumably to keep the coffin from falling out.

These coffins don't actually hang; I think they're just called that because the practice wasn't exclusive to the Ba -- they just get lumped in with other ancient peoples' high-coffin practices, some of which date back to 3000BCE, and include such sights as coffins lodged on stakes driven into cliff walls. Anyway, they were neat.

[Right: View from the "Observation" Deck]

On our last day, we went to see the monstrous Three Gorges Dam. It's 600 feet high and 1.4 miles long (NB: Wikipedia disagrees with me on the height by half, but that's what we were told and what the Chinese embassy has to say on the matter). I'd elaborate more on what that kind of scale looks like in person, but it was raining so heavily -- I was very soggy after walking up to the hindered-observation tower --  that we couldn't even see all the way across it. There were many generators, and it was very large. Take my word for it.

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