Yichang
Home to the world's largest hydroelectric dam and massive phosphate reserves — Yichang controls both the energy and the limiting nutrient of modern China.
The world's largest power station generates less than 1% of China's electricity. The Three Gorges Dam sits just west of Yichang, a prefecture of 3.9 million in western Hubei, and its 22,500 megawatts of installed capacity have produced over 1.7 trillion kilowatt-hours since the first turbine went online — enough to displace 550 million tonnes of coal and 1.49 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The dam is the largest concrete structure ever built: 2,335 metres long, 185 metres tall, 28 million cubic metres of concrete. And yet China's electricity demand reached 9,852 terawatt-hours in 2024, making the world's greatest hydroelectric achievement a rounding error in national energy supply.
Wikipedia covers the dam in detail. What it undersells is Yichang's second strategic resource: phosphorus. Hubei, Yunnan, and Guizhou hold nearly 60% of China's phosphate reserves, and Yichang's Yiling District alone contains 1.5 billion tonnes of phosphate rock at unusually high grade. Hubei Xingfa Chemicals controls 446 million tonnes of reserves and operates 32 hydropower stations. Yichang Pacific Chemicals is one of Asia's largest phosphate producers. The Yangtze provides both the transportation corridor and the cheap electricity these operations require.
Twenty years ago, Yichang was heavily polluted — chemical plants lined the river. The city has since converted former factories into clean-energy technology parks, and hydropower has driven a 12% increase in Hubei's green GDP. Meanwhile, the dam continues its secondary functions: intercepting nearly 70 floods, enabling 2.1 billion cumulative tonnes of cargo throughput, and generating an average annual economic benefit of ¥34.4 billion ($4.8 billion).
The biological parallel is the beaver. Beavers are the original ecosystem engineers — their dams reshape entire watersheds, creating wetlands, altering water tables, and generating habitat for hundreds of species that would not otherwise exist. Yichang is the beaver lodge of the Yangtze: a single city whose dam restructured the hydrology, economy, and ecology of China's longest river basin. The difference is that a beaver dam is self-maintaining. The Three Gorges Dam requires a civilisation to operate.