China's Three Gorges Dam: a region transformed
Geography · Key Stage 3 · The School
Why it was built
The Yangtze river has flooded badly throughout China's history. Some floods have killed hundreds of thousands of people in a single event. The Three Gorges Dam was completed in the early 2000s. It was built to control this flooding, to make huge amounts of power, and to let bigger ships travel further upstream than before.
What it delivers
The dam is the biggest power station on Earth. It makes electricity without burning fossil fuels. It has cut the scale of flooding downstream since it was built. It has also made the river easier to sail. Bigger cargo ships can now reach cities far upstream that smaller boats once had to serve alone.
What it cost
Filling the dam's reservoir meant flooding a stretch of the Yangtze valley about 600 kilometres long. Thirteen cities went under water. So did over a thousand villages. Thousands of old and important sites were lost too, many before they could be fully studied. More than 1.3 million people had to move. It is one of the largest forced moves of people in modern times.
Was the Three Gorges Dam worth building? A one-word answer misses the real geography of it. Flood control has genuinely saved lives downstream ever since. Clean power has genuinely replaced fossil fuel power elsewhere in China. And 1.3 million people genuinely lost their homes. Thousands of old, irreplaceable sites genuinely lie underwater today, for good. None of these facts cancels out the others. A geographer's job here is not to call the dam simply "good" or "bad". It is to hold both the benefits and the costs in view together, and say clearly what each group truly gained and lost.