Water and the History of China

(Abstract)

Bozhong Li

Water is so important in the history of China that dragon, the God of Water in Chinese culture, has been worshipped by the people living in China for millennia and symbolized the nation.
Historically, China experienced three other miracles. The first one is the country. For most of two millennia, China was under one administration. This long-time union is unique in world history. The second one is the people. China has been the largest country in the world in terms of population at least since 1300 AD. The overwhelming majority of the residents living on this land have seen themselves as a single people, who share a common language, culture and writing system. The third one is Chinese civilization. It is the world's longest continuous civilization in the world and the guiding spirit to a very large proportion of humanity. All these miracles make the history of China different from those of other parts of the world.
There is a very close link between water and the three Chinese miracles. It is this link that partly explains why people in China have worshipped water to such a degree and why they have made more efforts in water management than any others elsewhere. Over two millennia, engineers in China developed three types of large scale water works, including the largest water control projects, the largest irrigation systems, and the largest water transportation networks.
Several "great walls" were built along China's major rivers and coasts to the homeland from water, which are comparable with the Great Wall in size. Thanks to its irrigation systems, a great part of China's cultivated land was being irrigated. Compared with the proportions in other large regions, the proportion of irrigated land in China was extremely high. Chinese engineers excavated the Grand Canal, the largest artificial transport waterway even built in world history. The Grand Canal and other smaller canals connect the China's major rivers. As a result, a water transportation network was formed well before the nineteenth century.
The efforts made toward water management in China were rewarded generously. The high productivity of cropland in China which accounts for only a small part of the world's total acreage feeds the world's largest population, thanks to China's efficient irrigation systems. The waterway system created in China a far more united polity and society than existed over comparably large and rich spaces elsewhere in the world.
In sum, none of the three "Chinese miracles" mentioned above could have occurred without successful water management efforts on this scale. In this sense, water is really a key to understanding Chinese history.
China has changed greatly in the last three decades. But China's history still clearly illuminates its present. A review of the relationship between water and the history in China will provide us with an opportunity to learn how crucial water is to social development over long periods of time.