Three Gorges assisted Yu the Great in controling the waters and guiding boatmen. The Xiling Gorge comprises a series of famous gorges, including Military Book and Sword Gorge, Yellow Cow Gorge, and Lantern's Shadow Gorge. In 1919, after Sun Yat-sen had put forward the concept in the Plan for Industrial Development of his (), experts investigated damming the Three Gorges, but it was not until 1994 that the Three Gorges project officially started. In 1944, the Nationalist government recruited John L. Savage, the Chief Engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, who came to China and made a 10-day investigation of
Three Gorges the Three Gorges. Afterwards, he wrote an enthusiastic report on the prospects of a dam. Construction was started on the first of the dams at Upper Tsing Yuan Tung, but was halted on August 15, 1947 because of the Chinese Civil War. In February 1958, as the expanded meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee was held at Nanning (), the Three Gorges Project () was discussed for the first time, and fierce disputes broke out. In the end, this project was delayed. Over the following three decades, people continued to discuss it. In the early 1980s,