The reservoir behind the Three Gorges dam would drown whole sites under several metres of water. The state invested more than a billion yuan in rescue archaeology to recover what could be recovered, and the Three Gorges Museum was built as the main storehouse for the results. It holds more than 170,000 objects out of a possible 300,000, among them more than 3,000 graded pieces of second class or above dug out of the gorges themselves. The building is 157.3 metres long, 98.085 wide and 32 high, with a floor area of over 40,000 square metres and a cost of 650 million yuan. It opened on 18 June 2005.
From the journal
The museum built around what the reservoir took
The Three Gorges Museum opened in 2005 to hold the objects rescue archaeology lifted out of the valleys the new dam would drown.
In the same city · Yuzhong District ↗What the reservoir would have kept
Four halls and a panorama
The exhibition floor covers 23,225 square metres and is organised around four main halls: Glorious Three Gorges, Ancient Ba-Yu, Chongqing: the City Road, and the Anti-Japanese War, 1937 to 1945. Around them sit subject displays of Chinese painting and calligraphy, porcelain, coins, Han dynasty sculpture and the folk customs of the south-west, plus a set of objects donated by Li Chuli. There is a 360-degree film of the gorges as they were before the dam and a half-panorama painting of the bombing of Chongqing. The museum faces the People's Great Hall across People's Square.