Recently, China Post issued a set of three commemorative stamps marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region. The third stamp, "Happy Plateau," incorporates a number of landmark projects and elements of people's livelihood. The Pando Water Conservancy Hub, built by the Sinohydro Foundation Engineering Bureau, appears on the stamp as a representative of Tibet's major water conservancy projects, together with the Tibet Museum, the high-speed train of the Lhasa-Nyingchi Railway, and the Lhasa River Grand Bridge, highlighting its important role in regional development and the improvement of people's livelihoods.

The Pando Water Conservancy Hub Project is located in the middle reaches of the Lhasa River. It is one of the 23 key projects designated on the 10th anniversary of the national Western Development Strategy, and is also the comprehensive water conservancy project with the most complex geological conditions, the highest technical difficulty, the greatest construction difficulty, and the most remarkable comprehensive benefits since the peaceful liberation of Tibet. The project focuses on irrigation and power generation while also serving flood control, water supply, and ecological protection functions, and is known as the "Three Gorges of Tibet."

The dam foundation treatment works undertaken by the Sinohydro Foundation Engineering Bureau mainly include key components such as the concrete cutoff wall, earth and rock excavation, curtain grouting, and concrete works. The concrete cutoff wall is 1.0 meter thick and reaches a depth of 120 meters, with a wall area of approximately 105,000 square meters. The project is located in a high-altitude, severely cold, and oxygen-deficient environment with deep overburden, making construction extremely challenging. As a critical-path element of the dam, the cutoff wall works faced multiple difficulties, including complex strata, difficult control of the verticality of embedded pipes, high risks in high-slope construction, and high precision requirements for curtain grouting hole drilling.

Faced with these extreme conditions, the Sinohydro Foundation Engineering Bureau achieved multiple technological breakthroughs and set three world records: the deepest cutoff wall body (201.47 meters), the deepest pipe extraction depth for connecting panel sections (158 meters), and the deepest underwater concrete placement (201.47 meters). At the same time, it obtained four national patents and achieved "zero accidents" affecting the ecological environment during construction, strictly protecting the black-necked crane habitat and demonstrating the advanced concept of harmonious coexistence between the project and the ecology.

Since being put into operation in 2016, the Pando Water Conservancy Hub has delivered significant benefits in flood control, water supply, and irrigation. By storing floodwater and reducing peak flows, it has further improved the flood control capacity of the Lhasa River Basin and ensured the safety of life and property of nearly one million people in the basin. On December 1, 2019, the irrigation water conveyance tunnel of the Pando Water Conservancy Hub was officially opened, bringing the irrigated area to 652,800 mu, including 366,000 mu of newly added irrigated area and 286,800 mu of improved irrigated area. It provides approximately 94.7 million cubic meters of irrigation water to the Penpo irrigation district each year and supplies 85 million cubic meters of industrial water to Lhasa, raising the water supply guarantee rate from 73% to 95%.

The completion and efficient operation of the Pando Water Conservancy Hub fully demonstrate the backbone role of the Sinohydro Foundation Engineering Bureau, as a national team, in the construction of major water conservancy projects. It has injected solid and reliable foundational support into Tibet's economic and social development and stands as a vivid practice of the Bureau's commitment to national strategy and service to border regions.