American Scientist

The Three Gorges Dam, so controversial a project in both the abstract and from the perspective of a fully developed nation, appears to be quite a different thing in person. Regardless of what members of our civil-engineering delegation may have thought of the dam in the comfort of their homes in the U.S. or the pampered conditions inside a Boeing 747 flying over the Pacific Ocean, once we stood face to face with the concrete megalith rising from the exposed bed of the Yangtze River, it was, even in its incomplete state, a thing of awesome beauty and a monument to the ingenuity of humankind.