Where the river is divided

One gate, and the canals it names

At Qingtongxia the Yellow River leaves a gorge and is divided for the western plain of Wuzhong. The heads of the trunk canals gather here. Among nine intakes that meet at this place are the Qin Canal, the Han Canal, and the Tanglai Canal. Today’s Qin and Han heads stand at the Yujiaqiao divider, built in 1969. There the Qin Canal, the Han Canal, and the Malian Canal split the East Main Canal and leave by one gate. Near the gorge, an older temporary divider still sits in the weeds, a remnant from the last of the dam-less arrangements.

Tangzheng Sluice is the Tanglai gate still in use in 2017—the Tanglai work this article follows. Qingtongxia is called the head of the nine canals. Local history credits the sluice’s first direction to Guo Shoujing in the Yuan dynasty. The Tanglai Canal’s long course runs beyond Wuzhong; here the sluice and the intake are what the city can show.

When the old names enter the record

The Qin Canal’s name has a paper date. The earliest appearance cited for it is the seventh year of the Dade reign in the Yuan, 1303. The Ming gazetteer of the Jiajing reign calls Qinjia Canal an old canal name. The Han Canal is also called the Hanbo Canal, and later histories connect it with the Han Guanglu Canal. Those links come from the later books.

In 2017, at its 68th executive meeting in Mexico City, the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage recognized the Ningxia Ancient Yellow River Irrigation System. That is ICID recognition, not UNESCO. The commission’s note places Yellow River diversion in the reign of Emperor Wu of Han, in the second century BC, and counts 25 trunk canals in the system today, 14 of them ancient. For most of its history the headworks were without dams. The Han-period notice belongs to diversion on the Ningxia plain. The name Qin, as cited, belongs to 1303. The commission’s count describes the Ningxia system, not a length measured inside Wuzhong alone.

The dam, and a divider of 1969

The hydro project at Qingtongxia is dated to a 1958 start, and with it the end of more than two thousand years in which Ningxia took Yellow River water without a dam. ICID’s note dates completion of the Qingtongxia Water Control Project to 1968. Dam-less diversion is also dated to an end in 1960, with the Qin and Han canals then drawing from the power station’s No. 8 tailrace. 1958 is the start; 1960 and 1968 stand side by side as completion years in print.

The dam sits in the gorge. Tangzheng Sluice is the Tanglai gate still in use in 2017. The divider at Yujiaqiao, built in 1969, is where one river becomes the Qin, Han, and Malian canals. Litong, where the municipal government sits, is the irrigated plain those canals serve. The water goes on from the headworks. The names travel with it.