Tragedy Strikes Popular Chinese Cruise Route
At the offices of the Xiehe Travel Corporation in Shanghai, distraught relatives of some of those on board the Eastern Star gather for any snippets of news.
Shanghai is 600 miles downstream from the spot where the boat sank. It is where nearly 100 of the 458 on board were from.
They had bought their tickets for their Yangtze cruise at the Xiehe Travel Corporation and then travelled west to the city of Nanjing where they boarded the “luxury cruiser”.
The Eastern Star is one of hundreds of similar river cruisers which navigate a particular stretch of the Yangtze every week of the year.
The boats take passengers along one of the most spectacular stretches of water in the world – through China’s Three Gorges and past the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, and an engineering wonder.
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A rescue worker uses a hammer to tap on the hull of the capsized ship in the Yangtze River, in Hubei province, China
The passenger ship was carrying 458 people, many elderly Chinese tourists, and sank in the Jianli section of the river during a storm
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