Taming China’s longest river has been the dream of emperors and dictators for centuries. The first water diversion works on the Yangtze were built during the Han Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago and the Three Gorges dam was first proposed by Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary father of modern China, nearly 100 years ago as a way to mitigate the river’s frequent and devastating floods. The project was championed by Mao Zedong in the 1950s but decades of disastrous political blunders and fierce domestic opposition meant it would take another 50 years and the crushing of a nascent democracy movement before Mao’s dream of building the world’s largest hydropower station could be realised.