The Three Gorges—comprising the Qutang, followed by the Wu, and finally the Xiling gorges—span 193 miles (311 km), beginning at Baidi City of Chongqing, in the west and ending at Nanjing Pass, at Yichang City, Hubei Province, in the east, between which are the Fengjie and Wu Mountains of Chongqing, as well as Badong, Zigui, and Yichang of Hubei Province.

As the limestone bed is gradually undercut, parts of it fall into the river along vertical fractures, forming precipitous cliffs.

The gorges run from southwest to northeast, then turn, and from west to east, with terrain lowering gradually from south to north.

The overlapping rocks make up layers of barriers that shield against sky and sunshine so that the sun can only be seen at noon and the moon will merely show at midnight.

Yuan Shansong (袁山松) of the Eastern Jin dynasty wrote a Record of Yichuan's Landscape, which depicts the Three Gorges' grandeur.

He wrote, People were always warned literally or orally of the Gorges' swift currents, saying they are horrific, and no one praised the local landscape [as] beautiful.

In his poem Setting out from Baidicheng, Li Bai (李白) depicts this place, saying, While monkeys keep howling at both sides of the river, the boat has swiftly passed thousands of mountains.

When the sun starts to rise or frost falls in the morning, forests and streams are chilly and solemn, and one can often hear monkeys howling from peaks.

In 1944, the Nationalist government recruited John L. Savage, the Chief Engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, who came to China and made a 10-day investigation of the Three Gorges.

Construction was started on the first of the dams at Upper Tsing Yuan Tung, but was halted on August 15, 1947, because of the Chinese Civil War.

[3] In February 1958, as the expanded meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee was held at Nanning (南宁), the Three Gorges Project (三峡工程) was discussed for the first time, and fierce disputes broke out.

[citation needed] Both the dam and the Three Gorges Reservoir has had a massive impact on the region's ecology and people, involving the mass relocation of towns and villages.

However, after the dam was built and used to store water, a large number of cultural relics, including hanging coffins and stone inscriptions that cannot be protected, were covered by the reservoir.