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The 1,747-km Grand Canal from Beijing in north China to Hangzhou in east China, the longest and the oldest man-made canal in the world, will be the main channel serving the South-to-North Water Diversion Project in the country.

The massive water diversion project, whose construction started Friday (Dec.27) and will last 50 years, aims at diverting water from the watery south to the thirsty north of China to ensure a water supply for agricultural and industrial production and people's daily use.

With a total investment of about 486 billion yuan (about 59 billion US dollars), the project will divert water from three places respectively on the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, China's longest river, to destinations in the north.

The Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal will be the main channel for the eastern line of the project.


Once the project is completed, a total of 44.8 billion cubic meters of water will be annually channeled from the Yangtze to thenorth of China. Then, the Beijing-Hangzhou canal will be navigable for 1,000-ton ships.

Built 2,500 years ago, the Grand Canal connects Beijing and Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, and runs through the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and the municipality of Tianjin.

The canal began diverting water from the south to the north in the 1960s. The Jiangdu water pumping station, built where the canal meets the Yangtze River, is the largest water pumping station in Asia. It diverts 473 cubic meters of water a second from the river into the canal.

The ancient canal has played an important role in transport between the south and the north. The volume of freight transported through the canal in northern Jiangsu Province alone is nearly 100 million tons a year.