Waterwheels that lifted the Yellow River
Lanzhou’s wooden waterwheels used the river current to raise water into irrigation channels. The Waterwheel Expo Park keeps the form visible beside the south-bank promenade.
Yellow River waterwheels
Along Lanzhou's Yellow River, large wooden waterwheels once lined both banks. A 2024 account on the provincial culture site places the Waterwheel Expo Garden on South Binhe Road in Chengguan District, with working wheels beside the river. The same account credits the Ming official Duan Xu with adapting a southern bucket-wheel design to the Yellow River's flow in the thirty-fifth year of the Jiajing reign, 1556, and calls the wheels the oldest lift irrigation on the ancient Yellow River bank.
Stories
Photo credits and rights
-
Lanzhou Yellow River waterwheelAuthor not specified on source page · Rights status not determined Photo source ↗ Orientation normalised, proportionally resized and encoded as WebP; no crop or retouch.