On Sept. 11, 1983, Tianjin Municipal Governmentpresented 50-gram tea leaves as a gift toeach household in Tianjin in celebration of thecompletion of a diversion project. Till then, theresidents had been jokingly commenting onthe local salty drinking water by saying: “Thetap water could be used to make pickles”.

This project is called Luanhe-River-to-TianjinDiversion Project, which consists of comprehensivewater resource exploitation includingacross-basin diversion, water delivery, waterstorage, water purification and water distributionand urban water supply system. The waterdivertingchannel is 234 kilometers in lengthfrom its intake under the dam of DaheitingReservoir in Hebei Province to the destinationof Tianjin, with a designed annual diverted watercapacity of 1 billion cubic meters.

“Luanhe-River-to-Tianjin Across-basin DiversionProject has become the lifeline of Tianjin,”said an officer from Tianjin Administration ofWater Resources. In the past 25 years, the projecthas safely delivered 18.192 billion cubic metersof water to the city, bringing along significantsocial, economic and ecological benefits.

This project has promoted the developmentof industry, improved investment environmentand effectively controlled the risk of land subsidence.It is estimated that the project hasdelivered up to 1 billion cubic meters of waterfor urban environment improvement. The percentageof urban greenery coverage rose fromthe previous 8 percent to 37.5 percent in 2007.

“More importantly, the quality of the residents’drinking water has improved significantly,reaching up to State Standard Category III.Tianjin is now one of the cities in China thathas quality drinking water,” said the officer.

As the biggest water diversion project carriedout at the beginning of China’s Reform andOpening-up Campaign, it encountered difficultiesbeyond expectation. Its construction reliedmore on voluntary work and manual excavation.The project started on May 11, 1982 with50,000 workers participating in the constructionand it was completed and brought intooperation on September 11, 1983.

Upon the completion of the project, in totalthere had been 27.3 million cubic meters ofearthwork, 1.4 million cubic meters of stone,800,000 cubic meters of concrete finished, over3,000 pieces of equipment installed, 70,000square meters of buildings constructed. All projectquality indexes won gold medals of NationalTop Quality Project Award. A number of newtechnologies were adopted in areas of design,construction and capital construction management,which brought along the honor of fiveState Science and Technology Awards in 1987.

Importance was also attached to the projectsupervision. In order to supervise and safeguardthe “lifeline”, more than 1,000 staff from sevensupervision divisions were assigned alongside tomaintain the 234-kilometer-long water deliverychannel day and night.

The government also put in huge amount ofmoney to protect water resources. In 2002, Tianjinlaunched the Luanhe-River-to-Tianjin DiversionWater Resources Protection Project, with atotal investment of RMB 2.3994 billion yuan.