China Hydraulic Engineering - Yellow River And The Grand Canal

I am reading Philip Ball's excellent book The Water Kingdom: A Secret History Of China. It describes the epic problems of river flow management that China has grappled with over millennia. Enormous floods have always ravaged China. At the site of a large dam at Sanmenxia on the Yellow River is an inscription in honor of the Great Yu ( ~ 2200- 2100 B.C), who as the story goes,  conquered a flood. The inscription says " When the Yellow River is at Peace, the Nation is at Peace". Flood control required enormous civic resources and cooperation and the ability to tame river waters gave political and moral legitimacy to the ruling class.The taming of nature using cooperative people power and as a sign of a strong united society has deep roots in Chinese political thinking.

One particular vexing problem was the very high rates of silt load carried by the Yellow River. A vast area of the Yellow River watershed drains the Loess deposits of north central China. This is a plateau made up of loose friable sand and silt blown in from the Gobi desert of Mongolia. Erosion of Loess fills the river with sediment. There is 300 grams of sediment for every kilogram of Yellow River water giving the river a reddish golden color. Erosion has carved the Loess Plateau in to a landscape of ravines and gorges. The American journalist Edgar Snow in the 1930's described it thus:

" an infinite variety of queer, embattled shapes - hills, like great castles, like ranges torn by some giant hand, leaving  behind the imprint of angry fingers. Fantastic, incredible and sometimes frightening shapes, a world configurated by a mad God - and sometimes a world of strange surrealist beauty. "

High rates of sedimentation meant that the Yellow River bed could aggrade or rise, increasing the risk of the river breaking its banks and flooding the countryside. Dyke building to constraint the river channel began as early as the seventh century B.C. by the state of Qi.

Constant dredging of the Yellow River and the associated tributaries and canal systems ( the Grand Canal) was also required to maintain a channel deep enough for navigation to move armies and grains from south to north.  River channel and canal maintenance acquired a new urgency when Zhu Di known as the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty moved the capital north from Nanjing in the eastern province of Jiansu to Beijing in the early 1400's. The rational was probably to keep the political center closer to the armies amassed on the northern frontier where the Ming faced a threat from the Mongol and Manchurian steppe people. Later in the 1600's, the Manchurians overthrew the Ming and established the Qing Dynasty. Although over time, the Qing assimilated into the larger Han cultural milieu, they felt more at home in the north of the country. That meant the Yellow River and the Grand Canal system had to kept in top navigable order.

Desperation to unclog  the river channel spurred technological innovation. 

An extract:

Removing silt from the Yellow River demanded some impressive technology, not to mention serious organization. The Song government set up a Yellow River Dredging Commission in 1073 which began to deploy boats equipped with dredging tools. The vividly named  "iron dragon-claw silt dispersing machine" was a great rake pulled along the riverbed to agitate the silt and return it to the flow. This principle was extended with the 'river-deepening harrow', a 2.5 metre-long rotating beam fitted with iron spikes, like a thresher for riverine mud. The Ming imperial censor Chen Bangke introduced new techniques in the late sixteenth century, such as wooden machines set rolling and vibrating by the current to constantly stir up the sediment. In the dry season Chen proposed simply digging out the silt manually.

The Ming official Pan Jixun in 1565 or so came up with a solution that has made him one of China's water heroes. He pointed out that if one confines the water flow to a narrow channel, it will have enough strength to scour the sediment off the river bed. There would be minimal need for laborious manual dredging. He may have borrowed the  idea from a Confucian text of the Han era (~200 B.C - 220 A.D) called Zhou li (Rites of Zhou) which stated "A good canal is scoured by its own water". 

Chinese philosophical tradition impacted river management strategies. Daoists argued that the river be given room to spread and build wide floodplains in concert with the principle of wu wei which could be read to mean "do nothing" or "having a yielding attitude".  Confucians on the other hand wanted the river to be managed by human  engineering and recommended the construction of high dykes to keep the river channel narrow and constrained.

Joseph Needham, the noted historian of China writes that 'during twenty centuries the two schools contented'.. 'and neither proved wholly successful'.

Highly Recommended.