Chapter 37 Section Five Three Districts and Ten Canals

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the farmland water conservancy in the Ningxia Plain had new developments. In the Ming Dynasty, Ningxia was also an important place for border defense.At that time, from Liaodong in the east to Longxi in the west, a large army was stationed along the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty, and nine military towns were set up.There are two towns in Ningxia, Ningxia Town and Guyuan Town. The former is located in Yinchuan City, and the latter is located in Guyuan County. .In order to meet the needs of farmland, they developed farmland water conservancy in the Ningxia Plain.

The Yinchuan Plain has a large area and a lot of farmland, so it was still the focus of farmland and water conservancy construction in the Ming Dynasty.It has organized forces many times, both repairing old canals and digging new canals.Sometimes the scale of the project is relatively large. For example, in the seventh year of Hongzhi (AD 1494), more than 300 miles of canals to the west of Tanglai Canal were dug.Therefore, there are more irrigated fields in the Yinchuan Plain. According to statistics, during the Jiajing period (1522-1567 A.D.), the Hanyan and Tanglai irrigation districts in the Hexi irrigation area and the Qin and Han canals in the Hedong irrigation area alone irrigated more than 13,000 hectares of land.

Opening up new irrigation areas was a feature of the Ming Dynasty's water conservancy construction in Ningxia.Before the Ming Dynasty, the water conservancy construction of the Ningxia Plain by various generations was mainly concentrated in the Yinchuan Plain with a large area and more cultivated land. Two irrigation areas were built here, that is, the Hedong Irrigation Area with the Qin Canal and the Han Canal as the main irrigation canals. , and the Hexi irrigation area with Hanyan and Tanglai as the main irrigation canals.Although there are also constructions in the Weining Plain, the scale is relatively small.In addition to paying attention to the construction of the two irrigated areas of Hedong and Hexi, the Ming Dynasty also built a number of irrigation systems with a certain scale on the smaller Weining Plain.In the Ming Dynasty, there were 12 irrigation channels in this irrigation area, including Zhizhi, Liuqing, Shengshui, Shikong and Qixing, which were recorded in the records.Among them, except for the existing canals such as spiders in the Yuan Dynasty, most of the others were newly built in the Ming Dynasty.Each of the large canals can irrigate three to four hundred hectares of fields, and the small ones can irrigate about 100 hectares, with a total irrigated area of ​​more than 2,000 hectares.

In the Qing Dynasty, there were also many achievements in water conservancy construction in the Ningxia Plain. In particular, the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong dynasties successively drilled a number of important channels such as Daqing, Huinong, and Changrun.The Daqing Canal was dug in the forty-seventh year of Kangxi (1708 A.D.). The mouth of the canal is 25 miles away from the mouth of the Tanglai Canal, and the bottom is five miles away from the mouth of the Hanyan Canal. The canal is 75 miles long. The canal is located between the Tanglai Canal and the Hanyan Canal , to irrigate more than 1,200 hectares of highland between the two canals, and the tail water is injected into Tanglai Canal.Huinong Canal was dug in the fourth year of Yongzheng (AD 1726). The canal mouth is below the Hanyan Canal mouth. The canal is 370 miles long.Changrun Canal was also opened in the fourth year of Yongzheng, and was repaired twice during the Qianlong period. It is located in the east of the lower reaches of Huinong Canal, with a length of 136 miles and 1,700 hectares of irrigated fields.

Since the Qing Dynasty built a batch of new canals in addition to repairing the old canals, there were more than 30 old and new canals on the plain at that time, plus branch canals, which were shaped like spider webs.Among them, 10 are more important, known as "Ten Canals in Ningxia".Three of these ten canals are located in the Hedong irrigation area, namely the Qin Canal, the Han Canal and the Tianshui Canal.Five are located in the Hexi irrigation area, namely Hanyan Canal, Tanglai Canal, Daqing Canal, Huinong Canal and Changrun Canal.Two are in the Weining Irrigation District, that is, the Meili Canal and the Qixing Canal, which evolved from the Spider Canal.During the period of the Republic of China, Ningxia's water conservancy was also slightly constructed, and a large-scale Yunting Canal was opened. The canal is more than 100 miles long and can irrigate more than 2,000 hectares of farmland.Among the top ten canals, Tianshui Canal is actually smaller, far inferior to Yunting Canal (Figure 11).

During the Ming and Qing dynasties and the Republic of China, the area of ​​irrigated fields in Ningxia's irrigation districts was generally around 20,000 hectares. As mentioned above, through continuous water conservancy construction, for more than 2,000 years, this place has been an important grain producing area in Northwest my country, known as "the south of the Yangtze River".However, in ancient times, it was not possible to build a dam on a river as large as the Yellow River to raise the water level to a very high level. Instead, we had to draw water without a dam and use a simple dam that splits about 1/4 of the river surface. Shixie dam guides water into the canal.As a result, because the water level was not raised much, it was difficult to arrange the channels at a higher position, and the controlled irrigation area was severely limited. The irrigated field hovered around 10,000 to 20,000 hectares for a long time, and no major breakthrough could be made.At the same time, Ningxia's water conservancy in history also lacked the necessary drainage facilities.Land salinization is increasing.For example, the origin of the place name of Yinchuan reflects this situation. It is not Pingchuan, which is rich in silver, but because it is full of saline and alkali, and the surface is as white as silver.After the founding of the People's Republic of China, things started to improve.The construction of the Qingtongxia high dam and the adjustment of the location of the canal quickly increased the area of ​​irrigated fields to more than 40,000 hectares; the construction of the drainage network also reduced the degree of salinization of the land.

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