Eight kilometres of the narrowest water in the Three Gorges

Kuimen is the western entrance, where the river passes between Chijia Mountain on the north and Baiyan Mountain on the south; the narrowest point is a few tens of metres across, and the back of the ten-yuan note carries the view. Qutang is the shortest of the three gorges at eight kilometres and the narrowest, with a widest point of only 150 metres. The mountains on either side reach 1,200 metres. That combination of tight water and high rock, with several switchbacks packed into eight kilometres, is what the old descriptions were reaching for when they called this the most beautiful of the three.

Boats could come down on oars, but going up they needed rope. Gangs of men harnessed to a tow rope walked the cliff footpaths and hauled the hulls upstream, and those paths were cut from the Western Han and kept up until the middle of the twentieth century. In the gorge the marks survive as the Meng Liang Stairway, a zigzag of rectangular holes about a metre apart and a metre deep, cut for wooden poles. By the late 1700s the river carried 210 million kilograms of grain downstream each year, and cargo two-thirds that size was towed up by hand.

The south bank at the entrance carries the Chalk Wall, a white cliff face cut with nearly a thousand characters, the oldest from the Song and the largest about 1.7 metres across. There are hanging coffins on the cliffs, a burial custom of the Bo and other southern peoples, and at Daxi the first site of the Daxi culture was found. All of this sat low. When the reservoir filled, the water covered the Ancient Pathway, the Meng Liang Stairway, the Chalk Wall and the cave in the Bellows Gorge; elsewhere on the river, coffins and inscriptions that could not be protected went under too.