Longyang Gorge lies in Gonghe County, within Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Here the Yellow River enters a narrow gorge after crossing the grasslands of Qinghai. A county geography page places the hydroelectric station on this stretch of the river; the gorge is both a landform and an engineered passage in the upper Yellow River system.
From the journal
Longyang Gorge: A River Diverted
At Longyang Gorge in Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the Yellow River’s 1979 diversion through a tunnel marked a turning point in the construction of a major hydroelectric station.
The gorge in Gonghe
A five-hour cutoff
On the evening of 29 December 1979, crews blasted the rock sill at the entrance to a diversion tunnel. The Yellow River shifted into the tunnel, and after five hours the Longyangxia station achieved its first river cutoff. The project had been approved in 1976, following a national decision in 1955. Water was impounded in 1986, and the station’s generation and supply systems were completed in 1989. The sequence turns a vast infrastructure story into a series of dated acts: survey, tunnel, cutoff, closure and power generation.
