The White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang) Underwater Museum is an archaeological site that is now submerged under the waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Among the world’s oldest hydrological inscriptions, it records 1,200 years of changes in the water level of the Yangtze River. The stone ridge is over 5200 feet long and 49 feet wide. Before the dam was built, the water level dropped in the winter, revealing the stone fish figures and rare inscriptions recording water-level changes, harvests, positions and titles from the Tang Dynasty onwards. Sightings of the carvings were said to be a promise of a good harvest. We took a very long escalator down to view the ridge and its inscriptions, now encased in glass. I pressed colorful stamps of a fish and a crane in my travel notebook.

My hand-pressed fish and crane – a memory of my visit now forever in my travel notebook