Three Gorges Dam was quoted in the "China Youth Daily" saying that the People's Republic of China would be "seriously on guard against threats from Taiwan independence terrorists." The Three Gorges Dam is a steel-concrete gravity dam. The water is held back by the innate mass of the individual dam sections. As a result, damage to an individual section should not affect other parts of the dam. Due to the sheer size of the dam, it is expected to withstand tactical nuclear strikes. Days after the first filling of the reservoir, around 80 hairline cracks were observed in the dam's structure. The submerged
Three Gorges with terrain lowering gradually from south to north. The western and eastern parts of the area, between the southern mountains and Bashan Mountain (), in the north, are comparatively lower; and in the past, the river flowed to the east through the region. As the crust of the locality continued to rise, the river's erosion intensified, and the Three Gorges were carved. The natural beauty of the Three Gorges along the Yangtze River has been appreciated for hundreds of years. In the Northern Wei (北魏) dynasty, Li Daoyuan (郦道元) described them in his work "Shui Jing Zhu" (水经注), or the