More than twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam and three times longer than the railway to Tibet, the 50-year, $62bn (£40.67bn) project aims to channel a greater volume than the Thames along three channels – each more than 600 miles long – from the moist Yangtze basin up to the dry lands above the Yellow river.
At Jiaozuo, giant drills have already gouged out more than half of the 2.5 mile-long tunnel that will take the water under the Yellow river. At the foot of the construction shaft, the nine-metre wide concrete pipe stretches into the dark far below the farm fields that stretch towards the river. "This is a first in the history of the Yellow," one of the engineers, Han Jiping, says proudly. "There is nothing to compare."
