Tone following his past!!

Tuesday 28th May afternoon

 

When we were researching for this trip there were two things that did not appear in any tourist guide books but that Tone read about is other books or knew about from somewhere

 

The first was the mummies that we read about many years ago that had been discovered in central China and which were buried in cloth like Tartan.  Not the coloured stuff from Scotland but more like the muted colours of the tartan we sometimes see when we are in Cornwall.

 

Apparently these are lying in the back room of a museum somewhere and are not open to public or probably even private view.. Where they came from and how they got there is a difficult question for the Government, they were found by an American explorer and archaeologist on the silk road and are of Caucasian origin pre-dating the Chinese occupation of the area!  So that was a No from Chris Moore from Audleys who have organised most of this trip for us.

 

The second was the Dujiangyan Irrigation project which is in Sichuan province.  Tone was interested because in 1981 he had helped to complete a project in Kurdistan which he thought looked exactly like this one here.  The difference was that Tone thought the one he had some involvement in was a clever new idea and the one here is 250 BC!!

 

Chris Moore found out about it and added it to our itinerary and this was where we went this afternoon.

 

Actually it very interesting.  The designers had a problem with flooding but still wanted water for irrigation so they dug out a huge channel in a mountain, like you do in 250 BC by hand, diverted the water in two ways and voila! 

 

They diverted the water in two ways by using a natural curve in the river and a series of 3 weirs, the first allowing a constant volume over for irrigation, the second was similar and would take away the pebbles and silt coming down the main river and the third as balancing point combined with a bottleneck to ensure any flooding at that point went back into the main river and not down the irrigation channel. Very clever.  We reflected on the thought that this system which was modernised in the year 800AD by capping the weirs with newly discovered concrete (! )to reduce erosion would still be working well long after the Three Gorges Dam has silted up and stopped working and it needed no dam!.  Not sure if I can say that but as it is apparently an issue for all dams I suppose it is obvious

 

So although this visit was entirely for Tones interest I found it fascinating and Karen who had had to do quite a lot of research including visiting with her boyfriend last weekend and buying a book on the project in English said they also found it interesting.  We were incidentally yet again the only Western visitors so cause the curious stares and beaming smiles from all around.