Largest project of its kind, proposed in 1952, took more than a decade to construct

More than 1,400 kilometers of canal and pipeline began transferring water on Friday from China's longest river, the Yangtze, to the country's arid northern regions, including the nation's capital, Beijing.

Completion of this section marks major progress in the enormous South-to-North Water Diversion Project, costing an estimated 500 billion yuan ($80 billion) and the largest of its kind in the world.