World records set by South-to-North Water Diversion Project

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project is a key strategic infrastructure project for China to alleviate severe water shortage in its northern provinces. With its eastern, central and western routes, the project links China's four main rivers — the Yellow River, the Huaihe River, the Haihe River, and the Yangtze River. The project has set multiple new world records, including its construction scale, water diversion distance, population benefited, population resettlement, and complexity of engineering. As the world's largest project of its kind ever undertaken, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is bound to exert a far-reaching impact.

I. World's largest scale of construction

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project is the world's largest water diversion project, crossing the drainage basins of the Yangtze River, the Huaihe River, the Yellow River, and the Haihe River, involving more than 10 provinces. The ambitious project is consisted of countless hydraulic engineering sub-projects including reservoirs, lakes, canals, river ways, dams, pump stations, tunnels, aqueducts, buried culverts, inverted siphons, PCCP pipes, ditches, etc. Its complexity, scale, and difficulty are unprecedented at home and abroad. In total, 1.78 billion cubic meters of earth and stone was excavated, 620 million cubic meters was filled, and 65 million cubic meters of concrete was used, just in the first phase of the project's eastern and central routes.