Dujiangyan
— — the river an engineer divided two thousand years ago.
Not only on a wall.
“Dujiangyan is the irrigation works on the Min River where it leaves the mountains for the Chengdu Plain. The Qin governor Li Bing laid out the system around 256 BC, with no dam and no gates: a bamboo-lattice headland that splits the river by water level alone. The works still irrigate roughly 5,300 square kilometres of farmland. Mount Qingcheng rises just upstream.
Dujiangyan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Dujiangyan sits on the Min River about fifty kilometres northwest of Chengdu, where the river drops out of the Min Mountains onto the Chengdu Plain. Construction began around 256 BC under Li Bing, the Qin governor of the region, and was carried on by his son Erlang. The headworks have three parts: the Yuzui or fish-mouth levee, the Feishayan overflow weir, and the Baopingkou bottle-neck channel cut through Mount Yulei. The system irrigates roughly 5,300 square kilometres of farmland and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, together with Mount Qingcheng.
The genius of Dujiangyan is that it works without a dam. The fish-mouth levee divides the Min into an outer and inner channel by the curvature of the bed alone. At low water, the inner channel carries roughly six tenths of the flow into the farmland, while the outer channel carries the rest downstream. At flood, the proportion reverses, and the Feishayan weir spills the excess back over a low sill. Sediment that would silt a reservoir is flushed downstream every season. The works have run continuously for more than 2,200 years.
The site sits inside Dujiangyan Scenic Area and is reached by high-speed rail from Chengdu in about thirty minutes. A general ticket admits visitors to the headworks, Erwang Temple on the bluff above, and the long Anlan suspension footbridge across the Min. Most visitors walk the loop in roughly two hours. Mount Qingcheng, the Taoist mountain inscribed with the site, lies fifteen kilometres south and is a separate ticket. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake damaged Erwang Temple, which was rebuilt and reopened in 2009; the headworks themselves were undamaged.