Gansu City Moves Mountains in Search of Transformation

Construction site at the Baidaoping area of the Lanzhou New City

Just north of the arid western city of Lanzhou, an army of excavators is flattening mountains truckload by truckload, obscuring the city's burgeoning skyline with clouds of yellow dust.

They are making way for a vast project that aims to transform this narrow gateway to Xinjiang and Tibet into a broad boomtown and suck water from a hinterland with little to spare.