Three Gorges dam receives record number of tourists  

Tourists visit the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang city of central China's Hubei Province on Thursday. (Photo/Chinanews.com)

The Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, received the record number of daily visitors Thursday, the second day of the week-long National Day holiday, authorities said.

As of 4:30 pm, tourists to the Dam in Yichang city of central China's Hubei province had reached 40,000, the upper limit for a single day, China Three Gorges Corporation said in a press release.

The previous record of daily tourists to the Dam was 35,000, it said.

Of Thursday's tourists, 392 were international visitors and 39,608 were domestic tourists, the document said.

It expected the number of visitors to remain high throughout the holiday week.

Starting from Sept. 25, the Three Gorges Dam opens for free to all Chinese tourists, including overseas Chinese and those from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

Tourists can make online reservation or walk up with an identity card. But the maximum number of tourists every day will be restricted to 40,000.

The dam receives an average of 1.8 million tourists every year, about 15 million tourists since its completion in 2006.

The Three Gorges project is a multi-functional water control system, consisting of a 2,309 meter long, 185 meter high dam, five tiers of locks, and 26 hydropower turbo-generators. It generated 82.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2013, accounting for 1.55 percent of the country's gross power generation.