Lake of Jiudianxia (Oil Painting) by Pu Zhijun [Photo provided to gogansu.com]

The Tao River Diversion Project is the largest inter-basin water diversion project in the history of water conservancy construction in Gansu province.

The areas including Dingxi city and Huining county in the central part of Gansu province are situated in the hilly and gully region of the Loess Plateau. Severe water scarcity has restricted local economic and social development. In order to address this issue, Gansu province proposed to divert the maximum water volume from the upper reaches of the Yellow River's main tributary, the Tao River, to the central region of Gansu as early as the 1950s.

The project is designed to deliver an average of 550 million cubic meters of water every year from the Tao River, a major tributary of the Yellow River, the country's second-longest, to cities and counties suffering water shortages in the central part of Gansu, through its nearly 1,070-km-long canals.

In November 2006, the Tao River Water Diversion Project was officially launched, with construction divided into two phases. On Dec 28, 2014, the first phase of the project was officially put into operation. In November 2023, the second phase of the project passed the acceptance inspection for water diversion.