Baihetan Dam: One Finger, 330 Tonnes, 400 Years

Baihetan Dam, on the Jinsha River in southwest China, is the world's second-largest hydroelectric station by installed capacity. Three hundred and thirty tonnes, turned by one finger. Sixteen machines, each as heavy as the Eiffel Tower, buried inside a mountain on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan. It is the last of six dams on the Jinsha River — a staircase run as a single system, so the same water is used six times on its way to the sea. Its sixteen units are the largest water turbines ever built: one million kilowatts each. This is a ledger of how it was built: concrete placed without a single temperature crack, a runner balanced so precisely that no counterweight was needed, and more than 400 caverns and tunnels driven through the banks. Your turn: last time the vote was between this dam and the ship lift that lifts ships a hundred metres. The dam lost — narrowly. Want the lift next? Say so in the comments. FULL SERIES Manmade Giants — how the world's biggest things are built, one structure per episode. Watch in order:    • Manmade Giants — The Series   CHAPTERS 00:00 A Machine Turned by One Finger 00:15 A River Falling Off a Plateau 00:36 Sichuan Meets Yunnan 00:57 One Step in a Staircase 01:22 Six Records, No Reference Design 01:45 Sixteen Turbines, One Million Kilowatts Each 02:07 Fifty Metres Tall, Eight Thousand Tonnes 02:30 Three Hundred and Thirty Tonnes of Balance 02:51 The Factory on the Riverbank 03:12 A Hair's Width of Vibration 03:35 A Double-Curvature Arch 03:54 Carrying the Load Sideways 04:17 Eight Million Cubic Metres of Concrete 04:37 Why Mass Concrete Cracks 04:59 Three Million Metres of Cooling Pipe 05:20 A Continuous Core, 36.74 Metres 05:39 Twenty-Five Million Cubic Metres of Rock 05:58 The Power House Inside the Mountain 06:16 Eight Surge Shafts 06:37 A Bypass for the Whole River 06:56 Fifteen Minutes to Fill a Lake 07:17 Linings Polished Like a Mirror 07:39 Built for an Earthquake Zone 07:58 Five and a Half Years 08:23 Sixty-Two Billion Kilowatt-Hours 08:41 Two Thousand Kilometres East 09:03 Six Stations, One Cascade 09:23 One Drop, Six Times 09:45 The Carbon Arithmetic 10:05 Where It Started 10:31 The Chain Closes 10:54 Lift, or Canal? SOURCES Official project data and reporting on the Baihetan station and the Jinsha River cascade (SASAC; China Three Gorges Corporation; CNR; China Workers' Network). Numbers are rounded; where sources disagree, the conservative figure is used. The '400 years' in the title sets one hour of full-load output from a 1,000 MW unit against a typical household's annual consumption — an illustration of scale, not a measurement. VISUALS & LICENCE Footage is produced for this channel or licensed for commercial use: original engineering diagrams; AI-assisted visualisations made for this channel, reviewed before use; and stock clips from Mixkit under the Mixkit Free License. No third-party footage is used without a licence. Diagrams explain the engineering — they are not construction drawings, and proportions are exaggerated so that they read at all. PHOTO CREDITS Stock video: Mixkit (mixkit.co) — Mixkit Free License. Licence text: mixkit.co/license/ — MANMADE GIANTS How it was actually built — the numbers, the methods, the machines. New episode every week. No hype, no politics. #Engineering #Megaprojects #Megastructures