NEW DELHI: For once the Chinese mandarins were caught napping by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his informal summit with President Xi Jinping in Wuhan, China’s Ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui has revealed.
During his first one-on-one meeting with President Xi at the Hubei Provincial Museum, Prime Minister Modi told his host that this was his second visit to Hubei province, surprising the Chinese officials, who otherwise keep a track of all bilateral and official visits minutely.
“We didn’t know that Prime Minister Modi had visited Wuhan earlier,” Luo told the participants of a seminar on the two-day informal summit between the leaders of India and China held in Wuhan city from April 27.
Modi told Xi that when he was the Gujarat chief minister, he had an opportunity to visit central China’s Hubei Province on a study tour to learn about the massive Three Gorges Dam. Modi was the Gujarat chief minister from October 2001 to May 2014
“The speed with which you constructed this dam and its scale inspired me. So I came on a study tour and spent a day at the dam,” Modi had told Xi.
As the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges project is a multifunctional water control system on the mighty Yangtze River. It comprises a dam stretching 2,309 meters long and 185 meters high, 32 hydropower turbo-generators, a five-tier ship lock and ship lift system. PTI
