How China Built the Impossible 2,588 km Canal that You've Never Heard Of

South–North Water Transfer Project construction: how China built three canals — 1,432km by gravity, 1,156km by pump, and one more still being engineered at 4,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau — to move the Yangtze River north and save 185 million people. Northern China was running dry. Engineers drew three lines on a map in 1952. It took fifty years to work out how to build them. The Eastern Route revived the 2,500-year-old Grand Canal — 13 pump stages engineered to lift Yangtze water 65 metres uphill, a poisoned waterway cleaned and rebuilt, operational November 2013. The Central Route went the other way: engineers raised the Danjiangkou Dam 14 metres while the river kept running, carved 1,432 kilometres through four provinces, and let gravity carry the water to Beijing with zero pumps in December 2014. The Western Route is still being built — 4,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau, boring through the hardest rock on Earth. This documentary covers all three — the full South–North Water Transfer engineering and construction process. What’s in this video: How engineers raised the Danjiangkou Dam 14 metres while the river kept flowing behind it How 13 pump stages were built to lift water 65 metres through a 2,500-year-old Grand Canal How twin TBMs bored under the Yellow River at 45m — China’s first slurry shield tunnel How the world’s longest aqueduct was built at 1,410 metres to carry a river through the sky Why the Western Route at 4,000 metres is the hardest construction challenge any of them faced Subscribe to NEXTGEN MANUFACTURING to understand the incredible machines, blueprints, and megaprojects that built our world. #SouthNorthWaterTransfer #Megaprojects #HowItsMade #China #FactoryTour #Engineering #HydraulicEngineering #Construction #InsideTheFactory #ChinaEngineering #River #FullProcess #Aviation #Trending Music from #InAudio: https://inaudio.org/ Track Name. Life Goes On