Longyang Gorge of Qinghai
After the Yellow River running through the Prairie of Qinghai, Longyang Gorge is the first opening entering the Yellow River valley area, with the mouth 30 meters wide and the hard granite erupting about 200 meters high on both sides, which is a precious place for Dam construction. It is the 1st large-scaled cascade hydroelectric power station, called the leading power station on the Yellow River, with a distance of 1684 kilometers from Yellow River's origin in the upward, a distance of 3376 kilometers from the convergence to the sea in the downward.
Longyang Gorge is 40 kilometers long, 9 kilometers wide, with Yellow River running through in it. The whole valley is a huge natural reservoir, whose sides are precipitous Chana Mountain or continuous Plateau, and center is even, wide, and abundant basin. At the mouth nearby, the cliffs erect abruptly, the distance between the two banks that are 150 meters high of 30 meters length, which forms
the unique place for building hydroelectric power station. The biggest dam in Longyang Gorge hydroelectric power station whose whole length is of 1140 meters length is 178 meters high, entitled as the 1st dam in China and Asia, whose bottom is 80 meters wide and top 15 meters wide. And the main dam is 396 meters long and affiliated by high dams on both banks.The whole dam not only can stop the130, 000 kilometers flow of upper Yellow River, but will form the largest artificial reservoir in China covering an area of 380 kilometers with a capacity of 24,000,000,000 cubic meters.
The artificial reservoir in Longyang Gorge has been an attractive landscape, with dams on the Yellow River and gorges above the lake, hills and blue sky reflected into water ripples. Circling the lake by boat, tourists feel comfortable and then sense that Yellow River here is crystal which is bestowed by Nature but explored by Man.