The Dujiangyan Irrigation System, located in the west of Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province, is perhaps the most well-known ancient irrigation system in China, and is also a famous scenic area. The Qingcheng Mountain and the Dujiangyan Irrigation System were certified as World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000.
Dujiangyan stands at the entrance where the Minjiang River runs down to the Chengdu Plains from the mountainous area. Before the irrigation system was established, people who lived along the banks of the Minjiang River were plagued by annual flooding. In 256 BC，Li Bing, the chief of the Shu prefecture in the Qin State, and his son organized local people to build a water conservancy project by drawing on the experience of previous generations. They took advantage of the specific terrain of the river entrance, and turned potential calamity into an advantage. It is a great feat of “ecological engineering” that combines human, earth and water together harmoniously, and it opened a new era in the history of China’s ancient water conservation and flood prevention.
Over 2,000 years ago, the difficulty of accomplishing this great engineering feat was unimaginable as the tools and techniques available to Li Bing were limited and primitive. Cutting a channel through the extremely hard rocks of the Yupingshan Mountain proved to be a hard and slow process although numerous people labored at it diligently. Later, Li Bing took advice from an experienced old worker and dug some grooves into the rocks first, and then piled up some hay and branches around the rock and set them alight. Afterwards cold water would be poured on the scorching hot rocks. In this way, the rocks would crack as they expanded and then suddenly contracted. When they built the levee to control the quantity of water flowing through, they encountered another problem: the weir would collapse under the huge heavy stones they tried to use, but smaller ones were easily washed away. It was a tough dilemma. One day, Li Bing saw several women busily washing clothes in the river with the clothes in baskets of woven bamboo. A brilliant idea came to his mind. He decided to construct the levee with long sausage-shaped baskets of woven bamboo filled with small stones. This brilliant idea proved successful.
The Dujiangyan Irrigation System is a crystallization of the wisdom of the ancient Chinese people. The system is still performing its functions perfectly today. It has been called “a living water conservation museum”.
