Scoops on the south bank
Shuiche Village lies in Changle Town, Shapotou District, on the south bank of the Yellow River. The place name is the machine: shuiche is a waterwheel. Wooden wheels on this bank once lifted Yellow River water onto the fields. People at the village described wheels that scooped the river. A visit on 21 March 2013 found the Qing-period wheels already dismantled, six of them taken down. The Qing date and the count of six come from the village party secretary, a villager, and a local historian.
They had stood at Shuiche Village and raised Yellow River water, and by that March the wooden machines were already apart. The bank belongs to Shapotou District, inside the Lingyangshou Canal ancient Yellow River irrigation district—the old irrigated ground named in the restoration papers.
Stopped when the channel moved
The village party secretary gave the sequence of the stop. In the late 1980s the river shifted. The wheels lost their irrigation work. Pumps replaced them, and people then took the wheels apart. By the visit in March 2013 there was no standing wheel to watch. The remnant on the bank was a flume about 50 metres long, and the stone bases were missing.
The wheels lifted river water for the fields, then stood idle once the channel no longer served it. Pumps took the irrigation; the wood was dismantled. A visitor walks the same bank and meets the absence: no wheel turning on the river.
An empty bank, two wheels named
Stand on the south bank at Shuiche Village and the wooden wheels are still gone: the long flume from 2013, the stone bases missing, no scoop lifting water onto the fields. In the Lingyangshou Canal ancient irrigation district, a June 2020 decision—Weisha Fagai (Shenpi) Fa [2020] No. 64, dated 3 June 2020—names two waterwheels to restore, with planting and an irrigation system, inside the Yellow River management area and after a flood-impact review. That decision is not a finished rebuild and not proof the wheels turn again or irrigate today. No completion notice follows that date, and nothing in the sources says what stands on the bank now. What a visitor meets is the gap between wheels that once raised river water, a channel that shifted in the late 1980s, pumps, dismantled wood by March 2013, and a paper that calls for two wheels back.