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If there was still any doubt, it has been banished: Small is not beautiful to the builders of the world’s biggest dam.

China has announced that boats made of wood or cement, and those with removable oars, will be prohibited from entering the Three Gorges reservoir as of Oct. 1. Specifically, such vessels will no longer be allowed to use the five-step ship lock, which is the only way to get around the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River.

Also banned from the lock system are “disqualified passenger boats, oil tankers and vessels carrying chemical materials,” Xinhua news agency reported. Ships with a capacity of less than 100 tonnes will be barred starting next year, while those of less than 200 tonnes will be out of luck at the lock in 2005.

“The greatest challenge facing the ship lock is that there are too many non-standard ships entering its chambers,” said Fan Qixiang, vice-director of the construction department of the Three Gorges Project Corp. “Vessels of a different size, shape and condition do have an impact on the effective operation of the ship lock. I think it should be treated like an expressway on which vehicles such as carts, wagons, tractors and bicycles are not permitted.”

The decision, announced by the Ministry of Communications on Aug. 28, is a blow to the many small-boat owners who are about to lose the right to sail freely on China’s longest river, known locally as the Golden Waterway. Some of those affected are migrants who have been displaced by the dam, whose livelihoods depend on the small shipping companies they run.

One such boatman is Mr. Yuan, a Yangtze veteran who has earned his living on the river for 40 years. He worked for a state-run shipping company for 25 years before starting up his own freight business 15 years ago. He and his two sons own their own boat and make an excellent living from it, earning at least 80,000 yuan renminbi (US$10,000) a year.

Mr. Yuan and his family were moved from Xiangxi, Zigui county, 30 kilometres upstream of the dam, to Pinghu village, Zhijiang county, 100 km below the dam. Though they live close to the river now, they prefer to keep their boat berthed at their old hometown of Xiangxi, where they have many contacts. But now they face a difficult situation: Soon their boat will be deemed too small to enter the ship lock. To keep their freight business running, they will need to purchase a new boat, but fear no one will be interested in buying the old one now.

Even boats still permitted in the ship lock will sometimes find the way is barred. The Yangtze River Three Gorges Navigational Bureau ordered the ship lock closed on Sept. 3 because of severe floods in the upper reaches of the river. According to the rules governing operation of the reservoir, the ship lock must shut whenever the water flow exceeds 45,000 cubic metres a second at the dam site. On Sept. 3, it had reached 46,000 cubic metres a second. The two-day closure of the ship lock stranded vesselss on either side of the dam, including four tourist boats whose 1,300 passengers had to continue their trip by train or bus, the Chongqing Evening News (Chongqing wanbao) reported on Sept. 5.

Accidents, maintenance work and sediment-flushing will also periodically force closure of the ship lock. The single-step lock at the Gezhouba dam, 40 km downstream of the Three Gorges project, is out of commission an average of 45 days a year for these reasons. An accident occurred there on June 25, for instance, when one passenger boat became wedged between the wall of the ship lock and another passenger boat. Five hundred passengers had to be rescued, and many more had to wait at least five hours for the ship lock to resume operating.

There is a common belief that filling the Three Gorges reservoir and creating a wider, slower-moving river will make for smoother sailing on the Yangtze. However, shipping officials also expect new problems to emerge. Tan Xiaofu, vice-director of Chongqing Marine Bureau, told the Chongqing Business News (Chongqing shangbao) on June 17, just after the reservoir was filled to 135 metres above sea level, that a wider river will also be a windier one, with more collisions and other accidents likely to occur. In addition, more accidents are to be expected as pilots adjust to changed shipping conditions on the river, he said.

But there were also two pieces of good news for boat operators as the reservoir was being filled in June: The Three Gorges Project Corp. announced that passage through the ship lock would be free of charge, and that it would take just 2-1/2 hours for ships to make it through the five-step structure.

But now certain categories of ships are to be barred from the lock system altogether. And for the others, the touted short trip through the locks has proved illusory. One traveller reports that it takes 50 minutes to go through each of the five chambers of the ship lock, which adds up to a journey of more than four hours, even before factoring in the time spent waiting to enter the first chamber.

Concern about operating costs is likely to make that wait even longer in future. “It is uneconomical to operate the ship lock for just one or two boats,” Fan Qixiang, a Three Gorges Project Corp. official, is quoted as saying on the company’s Web site. “We have to seek a scientific operating model to deal with this problem.” In other words, boats arriving at the ship lock just as its gates are closing, or when no other vessels are already there, should not expect to break any speed records getting around the big dam.