Dujiangyan Irrigation System
Two-thousand-two-hundred-year-old dam-free river-splitting system still irrigating farmland without gates or concrete.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Dujiangyan Irrigation System near Chengdu opens at a stone statue of Li Bing, the third-century governor said to have made a deadly bargain with the river god that flooded the Chengdu plain every summer. It traces the human sacrifices once offered to appease that river, and the elaborate ceremony Li Bing staged instead to try to end them. Listen for what he built here afterward, still shaping how the Min River is split and controlled today, more than two thousand years later.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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