The dawn broke to brilliant sunshine and after a hearty breakfast from a buffet comprising western as well as Chinese dishes we left the Viking Emerald for a hastily re-arranged visit to the Three Gorges Dam site but more of that in the nextblog. Let me introduce you first to Sandouping a town in the Yiling District of the Yichang prefecture in the province of Hubei! It is located on the right (southern) bank of the Yangtze River and is best known as the location of the Three Gorges Dam, which as we shall see is the world's largest electricity-generating plant.
The predecessor of today's Sandouping, the village of Huangniupu - "Yellow Cow Post Station" - was established during the reign of the Hongzhi Emperor in 1496. The current town was created in 1984 and used to be a small fishing village until it was selected to be the site of the Three Gorges Dam. At the peak of construction in 1999, 40,000 workers lived in Sandouping. According to Wikipedia six out of nineteen Sandouping's villages are populated by families that have been resettled from the areas flooded by the waters of the Three Gorges Reservoir but moreabout this massive resettlement in future blogs.
The Viking Emerald was docked in the Huanglingmiao Village, and opposite the Huangling Temple (Pictured) after which the village is named. We were told that this is the ‘Temple of the Ox’, which I suppose is pretty close to the Wikipedia version of the "Yellow Cow Post Station".
The town's economy is closely connected to the Three Gorges Dam, although other local industry includes a shipyard and other associated vessel servicing activities. Three main agricultural products include citrus fruits, silkworms and tea. Judging by the extensive souvenir market neatly arranged to funnel us to the waiting coaches, tourism is also a lucrative source of income for the ever-increasing number of cruise vessels on the Yangtze!
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