Before I left for China in 2017, I tried to tell my Chinese friends where I’d be going. This was, as always, a challenge, since I speak almost no conversational Chinese (only Taijiese!) and only a few of them speak any English at all.

But the biggest stumbling block was a complete surprise. I managed to say I would be going on a boat—on the Yangtze River. This drew an absolute blank. What river? Never heard of it. The Chinese don’t call it the Yangtze River!

Changjiang, literally “long river,” is the Chinese name for what Westerners call the Yangtze. The Yangtze is indeed long: 6,300 kilometers (3915 miles) long.

Many temples and palaces in China are built on top of mountains. But the Three Gorges Dam raised the level of the Yangtze to where it is possible to cruise right up to the steps of the Red Pagoda and the White Emperor’s Palace. We saw both.

At the end of the cruise, at the Three Gorges dam, we rode down the world’s largest ship elevator—our boat was lowered about 100 meters. It was very strange—freaky, in fact—sailing right up to the edge of the reservoir. Look at this:

That’s the bow of our boat in the lower righthand corner of the picture above. The Chinese are fearless engineers!