The Main Wall of the Three Gorges Dam Is Completed

In 2006, engineers in Hubei province finished pouring the concrete body of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River near Sandouping. Rising 185 meters above sea level and stretching more than 2,300 meters across the waterway, the structure completed a massive engineering effort to harness one of the most critical rivers in central China. The concept originated almost a century earlier, when Sun Yat-sen proposed a vast barrier capable of producing substantial hydroelectricity in his 1919 work on Chinese development. Subsequent survey efforts during the Nationalist era collapsed amid war and civil conflict, leaving the river unobstructed for decades.

The Communist government renewed interest in taming the Yangtze following devastating floods in 1954, but economic and political upheavals, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, slowed progress. By the late twentieth century, rising industrial demand led the National People's Congress to approve the initiative in 1992. The legislative vote was notable for unusual resistance, with roughly a third of delegates declining to support the plan. Construction began in 1994, and the dam structure alone used some 16 million cubic meters of concrete, a world record at the time.