The Art Newspaper
March 19, 2002

As with the Three Gorges dam, where a lack of funding and co-ordination led to a hasty archeological rescue, many cultural experts fear the government’s response has also been too little, too late with the south-north water diversion project.

(excerpt)

London: China is mounting a massive operation to rescue cultural relics from hundreds of archaeological sites threatened by the South-North Water Diversion project, a hugely ambitious 100 billion yuan ($12.4 billion) scheme to divert 44 billion cubic metres of water from the Yangtze River every year to the arid northern provinces along three canals running through the eastern, central, and western parts of the country. Each of the canals is over 750 miles in length. So great is the urgency of the rescue mission that almost all other archaeological activities in China have been suspended so that archaeologists from across the country can concentrate on the sites in the path of the canals. The project was first proposed in the late 1950s, when construction began on the Danjiangkou Reservoir on the Haijiang river, a tributary of the Yangtze in Hubei province. Finally filled in 1974, this caused considerable damage to many cultural heritage sites, little publicised at the time. The scheme was revived in 2002, and it is now expected that the eastern canal will start carrying water to the Shandong Province in 2007, while the central canal running from Danjiangkou to Beijing, is set to open in 2010.