In the early days of civilization, humans lived where they could find water. More than 2,000 years ago, people devised a way to control this resource, diverting it to places where it was needed. A hydrology expert gave me a vivid analogy: “Think of a car on an expressway. The car can go where the road is, but building a road is not always a simple affair. Sometime you need to tunnel through a mountain; other times you need to build a bridge across a river.” Replace the car with water and the road with a canal, and the “tunnels and bridges” refer to these engineering marvels known as aqueducts.

Aqueducts are elevated channels that carry water across a wide range of terrain: rivers, roads, plains and valleys. On top of transporting water, they are also used to mitigate floods, drain sediment, facilitate navigation and divert river flow. When examined against mthe historical backdrop of the 1960s and 1970s, the aqueducts in China are far more than irrigation structures—these “man-made rivers in the sky” also exert an important influence on engineering, culture and society.

A Hydrological Icon
Since the Great Leap Forward, aqueducts of all shapes and sizes have been built all across China. In the 1960s the famous Hongqi (“Red Flag”) Canal was built in Lin county (now Linzhou) in Henan province; this irrigation canal saw the building of as many as 152 aqueducts. Fast forward 50 years to 2009, and a much larger project had just broken ground in Henan’s Lushan county: the ambitious South-North Water Transfer Project of China that would see the construction of dozens of aqueducts.