Liujiaxia Gorge 刘家峡

About Liujiaxia Gorge

Liujiaxia Gorge (刘家峡) is a Yellow River gorge on the eastern edge of Liujiaxia Town (刘家峡镇), the seat of Yongjing County (永靖县) in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture (临夏回族自治州), Gansu, where the Liujiaxia Dam (刘家峡大坝) holds back the Liujiaxia Reservoir (刘家峡水库).

The gorge, whose name means 'Liu Family's Gorge', lies about 70 km west-south-west of Lanzhou (兰州), or some 100 km upstream along the river, just below the point where the Tao River (洮河) flows into the Yellow River. The concrete gravity dam across it rises 147 m and runs 840 m including its side sections. The reservoir it created covers more than 130 square kilometres and, at its normal level of 1,735 m, holds about 5.7 billion cubic metres. Sediment carried by the Yellow River and the Daxia River (大夏河) is building a delta at the reservoir's upper end, and a sandbar at the Tao River mouth lies only 1.5 km from the dam.

The dam came out of a 1955 plan for Yellow River hydropower that assigned one dam to each of three river gorges: Liujia, Yanguo (盐锅峡) and Bapan (八盘峡). Building began in 1958. In 1961 work stopped when the aid experts left and took all the design drawings with them; from 1964 Chinese engineers redesigned and resumed it. The reservoir began filling in October 1968, the first unit generated power on 29 March 1969, and the station was finished in December 1974. Its powerhouse, below the dam, received China's first home-built 300,000-kilowatt internally cooled generating unit, and People's Daily (人民日报) calls it the country's first self-designed and self-built million-kilowatt hydropower station. Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) came here in December 1968 as a new hydraulic engineering graduate of Tsinghua University (清华大学), and Guo Moruo (郭沫若) visited in 1971 and wrote a poem about it.

Each spring, before the ice breaks up on the Gansu stretch of the river, Liujiaxia is run together with the Bapanxia and Yanguoxia stations downstream to cut the flow; ice-jam disasters on the reaches through Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia have dropped from about one every two years to about one a decade. Upstream, the Bingling Temple grottoes (炳灵寺), inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 as part of the Silk Roads, sit just north of where the Yellow River enters the reservoir, and boats to them leave from near the dam.

What to look for

• Liujiaxia Dam, a 147 m concrete gravity dam 840 m long including its side sections
• Liujiaxia Reservoir (刘家峡水库), backed up behind the dam
• The Tao River (洮河) confluence just upstream of the dam
• The silt delta of the Yellow and Daxia rivers at the reservoir's upper end
• Boat trips across the reservoir from near the dam to the Bingling Temple grottoes (炳灵寺)

Location & getting there

Getting to Liujiaxia Gorge

• Search for 刘家峡 with 临夏回族自治州 and 永靖县.