Yichang

Yichang sits at the point where the Yangtze breaks out of the gorges, and that geography has decided its history. A walled town stood here in the Warring States period under the name Yiling, in the border country between the states of Chu and Ba. In 222 the Battle of Xiaoting, fought nearby, ended the Shu emperor Liu Bei's campaign against Wu and became one of the set pieces of the Three Kingdoms story. For centuries afterwards the town lived on transhipment: cargo coming downstream had to be moved from the small, tough boats used in the rapids of the gorges into larger craft for the open river, and crews of trackers hauled junks upstream from the bank on ropes.

That trade made Yichang a target of foreign commerce. It was opened to foreign trade as a treaty port under the Chefoo Convention, agreed in 1876, gaining a customs house, missions and a small foreign quarter. The port handled tung oil, salt and cotton, and river steamers began fighting their way up the rapids in the early twentieth century. In 1938, as Japanese forces advanced, Yichang became the bottleneck through which factories, universities and refugees were evacuated upstream to Chongqing in a hurried operation remembered in China as the Yichang evacuation.

Modern Yichang was made by hydropower. The Gezhouba Dam, begun in 1970 and completed in 1988, spans the main Yangtze at the edge of the city and brought tens of thousands of workers. The far larger Three Gorges Dam at Sandouping, built through the 1990s and 2000s, drowned the rapids, raised the water level far upstream and displaced well over a million people from the reservoir area. The city grew with the projects, and hydropower remains its best-known industry.

Yichang's cultural identity leans on two things: the river and the poet Qu Yuan, traditionally held to have come from Zigui County just upstream. The Dragon Boat Festival is taken seriously here, with races on the Yangtze and on the reservoir, dragon-boat associations in the riverside villages, and zongzi made at home in the days before. Local societies keep alive the Qu Yuan legends and the recitation of his poetry.

The hill counties to the south and west are Tujia country. The Tujia are one of China's larger recognised minority peoples, and Changyang and Wufeng are autonomous counties, with their own building styles, traditions of antiphonal song and the richly patterned brocade known as xilankapu. Much of this is now performed for visitors at scenic areas, but the counties hold their own festivals as well.

River work shaped local manners. Generations of boatmen, trackers and dockers gave the city a plain-spoken, physical culture, remembered in work chants that are staged as folk performances. Everyday life follows the rest of Hubei: loud, direct speech, breakfast eaten out, tea drunk continuously, and long summer evenings on the embankment. Residents are conscious of living beside one of the country's largest engineering projects, and the dam features in local pride, local employment and local conversation alike.

About 3.9 million people were counted in the Yichang prefecture at the last census, most of them outside the built-up urban districts strung along the north bank of the Yangtze. The city is long and narrow, hemmed between the river and the hills, and has grown eastwards and across the water as new bridges opened.

Electricity underpins the economy: the two dams and their associated grid companies, research institutes and construction firms employ a great many people, and the cheap power they produce has drawn in chemicals, phosphate processing, aluminium and a substantial pharmaceutical industry. River freight remains important, with container and bulk terminals below the Gezhouba locks, and tourism has grown steadily around the gorges. The surrounding counties grow citrus, tea and tung trees on the terraced slopes.

The rhythm of the day is provincial and unhurried by Chinese standards. Markets and breakfast shops open before dawn, offices break for a long lunch, and the embankment fills in the evening with walkers, dancers and children. The recurring concerns are those of a city built around a single industry: what happens to employment as the big construction phase recedes, the environmental management of the reservoir, landslides and silt upstream, and the summer heat that settles in the river valley.

Yichang eats like the rest of Hubei with a mountain accent. Breakfast is the serious meal: hot dry noodles with sesame paste, soupy beef noodles, fried dough sticks and sweet fermented-rice soup, taken at shops that open long before work. Freshwater fish is the centrepiece of a proper meal — steamed whole with ginger and spring onion, or braised with chilli and pickled vegetables — and although the wild catch from the Yangtze has been restricted, reservoir and pond fish are plentiful.

From the hill counties come the flavours that distinguish the city from Wuhan: cured and smoked pork hung over the kitchen fire, maize and potato staples, sour-pickled vegetables used as a cooking base, and heavy use of chilli and Sichuan pepper as the province shades towards Chongqing. Tujia dishes such as maize-and-rice staples and hotpots built on cured meat are served in restaurants across the city, not only in the countryside.

Summer belongs to crayfish, boiled with chilli and spices and eaten by hand with beer at outdoor tables, and to cold noodles. Citrus is the local crop: mandarins and navel oranges from the terraces around Zigui are sold by the sack at the roadside in autumn and winter. Tea from the hills of western Hubei, mostly green, is the everyday drink.