To its opponents, China’s Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is all the more tragic because it has a historical precedent. Built in the 1950s, the huge Sanmenxia – literally Three Gates Gorge – dam in central China is today regarded as a catastrophic failure with senior Communist party officials blaming it for many of the environmental and social problems that afflict the region.

The Sino-Soviet engineering team that designed it was asked to control flooding, produce electricity and improve transport on the Yellow River – the same ­reasons cited for building the Three Gorges dam, which after 13 years of construction is now nearing completion.