Driving all the way southward from Beijing, about 5 hours we had already left behind us Hebei and set feet on the land of Anyang City, Central China's Henan Province.

　　To the northwest of Anyang lies a city called Linzhou, which sounds a stranger to most people. However, if one starts to talk about the Red-Flag Canal of Linxian County, the album of old days will unfold itself in surges. In 1960s when the PRC was suffering its most terrible economic nightmares, the heroic people from Linxian County raised money on their own and began to cut tunnels through mountains and build bridges across gullies with hands, hammers, drills and the tiny bit of self-made explosive. A decade passed. The undulating Taihang Mountain witnessed the birth of a Milky Way on the earth, the Red-Flag Canal. The canal, being composed of trunk, lateral and branch sections, extends 1,500 kilometers along the Taihang Range. Along it the turbulent Zhuozhang River roars all the way to Linzhou City and rewrites the generationshistory of the county as a place in shortage of water. While Du Dyke River Project is the pearl in the south, Red-Flag Canal stands as the landmark in the north. Forty years was gone, today the Zhuozhang River is stilling running tamely along the mountain and nourishing the beautiful city of Linzhou. We, as admirers of miracle, came to the city in early November to pay our due respect to the Red-Flag Canal.

　　Our tour guide was Miss Feng Min who served as assistant general manager of Linzhou Travel Agency. As a matter of fact, she was honored as one of ten best guides of Henan Province. While showing us around she began to sing us a well-known theme song from the TV documentary The Red-Flag Canal:

　　Taihang Mountain being cut open, Zhang River makes a breakthrough.

　　How courageous people of Linxian County are! They endeavor to transform the mountain and river.

　　The red sun is shinning in our heart and we are the mighty force who has defeated Mountain Taihang.

　　Maozedong Thought is leading us as our command and we will have the country to take on a new look.

　　Building up our revolutionary cause by hammer and drill, we are like the legendary Old Fool Man who moved the mountain with steel will.

　　...... ......

　　The song of the girl took us back to the spectacular view of construction in Taihang Mountain in 1960s.

　　No water to wash face in the years of drought

　　Linzhou City, formerly known as Linxian County, locates in the northwest of Henan Province. Lying at the eastern foot of southern part of Taihang Mountain, it is the placeswheresHenan, Shanxi and Hebei provinces meet. The mountainous and rocky county has a very thin layer of soil and is dotted with hills and peaks. The eastern part is about 300-400 meters in elevation. In the west the Linlu Mountain at the eastern foot of Taihang Mountain is about 1,500 meters high above sea level. This piece of land used to be in the sea 2,500 million years ago. Later volcano explosion and orogenic movement combined turned the seasintosancient land of gneiss. Year in and year out the land sanksintosthe water and became coastal region. Around 1,100 million years ago the continental shelf rose again and grewsintossteep terrace hills of quartzite.

　　That was not the end of story. About 500 million years ago a new round tectonic movement finally formed the top layer of limestone on the mountain. Ups and downs of the land left the Linlu Mountain with three distinctive layers, recording the history of ancient Linzhou. When one looking up in Linzhou, the towering Linlu Mountain will just jumpsintosthe eyes. Its cliffs soar upsintosthe sky and set a sharp contrast with Linzhou Basin. Half way up the mountain is the famous Red-Flag Canal, wandering through the green mountains like a flying belt.

　　Linzhou's history was a history of floods and droughts.

　　With high mountains and deep valleys geographical conditions of the place were very complicated. As a result the rainfall was unbalanced in the area. As the folk rhyme said, an droughty days we pray for rain. Comes the heavy rain and gone is our soil. Our land stays rocky.Insgroupsto survive, local people struggled unyieldingly against natural calamity. They tried every possible means, digging water-retention wells and holes in courtyards, storing rain and snow, and drawing water from springs and rivers. All came to nothing. Whenever a drought occurred, there was no water for people and animals to drink, let alone water for irrigation. They had to cross mountains and fetch water from afar.

　　Before the PRC was founded, time and again Linxian County suffered famines because of water shortage. In Tazhushan of Tazituo Village, Heshun Township, there was an account on a stone tablet saying: During the Qing Dynasty the third year of Emperor Guangxu's reign (1877) saw a rainy spring. The crops grew very well. Later the drought came and farmers had a poor harvest in autumn, no matter it was rice, beans or wheat. Robbery became rampant. Next year the price of grain soared. Farmers were forced to sell their land, yet nobody would like to buy at all. People started to eat grass. Children were sold at very low price. Some people even killed others and ate human flesh. The society was in such a chaotic state that the emperor had to step in and allocated disaster-relief resources. Thousands of people died that year and this account was to pass on the story to generations to come.

　　There was a sad household story in Linxian to tell how precious water could be.

　　It took place in early years of the Republic of China, when the 300 households in Sang-er-zhuang Village of Ren-cun District lived on the water of Huang-ya-quan Spring, over 2 miles away from the village. Three people died and other three got injured on their way to carry water. In a severely droughty year, hundreds of people lined up in front of the spring, whose water was as thin as a thread. One morning an old poor peasant called Sang Linmao got up very early and came to the spring for water, for the next day would be Chinese New Year. How could the family enjoy the holiday without a drop of water However there were so many people waiting for the water that Sang did not fill up his buckets until night. His newly married daughter-in-law kindly came to meet him in the dark and volunteered to carry the water home. It was a dark and steep road. Soon she stumbled over a rock and fell down. The water was gone. The daughter-in-law felt so shameful and guilty that she hanged herself that night. Together with his son the sad Sang buried the dead and left home on the New Year Day.

　　There were many families like Sang's in Linxian, who abandoned home because of water shortage. There is a village called Linyi in the south of Changzhi City of Shanxi Province. Literally the word Linyi means move from Lin because all the villagers were originally from Linxian County.

　　Water was as precious as oil in Linxian and local people treated it as their own life. Usually farmers in the mountain did not wash face unless it was some important occasion like holidays, visiting relatives and going to a fair. When they did wash, the whole house would share together. For the same basin and the same tiny bit of water, adults would wash first and children would use it afterwards. After the used water settled, the family would use it to wash cookeries and dishes for several times. When it became too muddy to wash anything, it would serve as drinking water for domestic animals.

　　Ten years of sweat and blood piled up the canal

　　The disaster-ridden people did not give in. In 1960's local government worked out the plan to draw water from Zhang River, making up mind to transform it. After careful research and consideration, the CPC Secretary Yang Gui and his staff identified Zhang River in Pingshun County of Shanxi Province as the potential source of hope. Working together with parties concerned, the courageous people from Linxian County started their fight against nature just after the Spring Festival of 1960. In the course of ten yearshard work, with the simple tools as hammers and drills, they cut tunnels through mountains and built bridges across gullies. 1250 peaks were leveled off, 211 tunnels were completed, 152 aqueducts were built up, and the irrigation project of 1500-kilometer Red-Flag Canal was established. The earth and stone involved could build a 3-meter-high and 2-meter-wide Great Wall leading from the Southern Guangzhou to Northern Harbin. Over 100 young people devoted their lives to the mountain. The canal is not only a canal of water but also the embodiment of a self-reliant and hardworking nation.

　　To its credit, the Red-Flag Canal was named as the Milky Way on the Earth, the Great Wall of Water in China, and the Eighth Wonders in the World and so on.While standing by the canal, we seemed to see in our mind the vivid pictures of last century's endeavors.

　　Insgroupsto build a dam across the torrential Zhanghe River, hundreds of men from Taihang jumped in the water and laid out 3 walls against the current with their own bodies. It was snowing and they stood still just in the icy water. In no time their lips turned purple.shavingslittle to eat, they sipped liquor to keep warm.

　　To the east of Niulingshan Mountain was a cliff called Ghost Face. A task force made up by 300 young men and women climbed up the cliff to build a tunnel through the Ghost Face. If they could drill through the tunnel, the canal would push forward 616 meters. One meter ahead cost 133 bits. The young people lived and worked in the cave. While others celebrated Spring Festival with fireworks, they were fighting with the mountain with self-made explosive. 500 days and nights went by, they evacuated 15,400 cubic meters of rock from the Taihang.

　　Today the rhyme is still going among local children, stone-remover Ren Yangcheng enrolled his name with the king of hell.Ren, together with 11 other stone removers, was of special significance for the project. It was them who were held responsible for the project's safety and removing dangerous rocks from cliffs. With a rope around the waist and a drill in hand, they dangled back and forth in the air like an eagle, sometimes as far as 30 meters. Even if an iron man bumpingsintosthe cliff would be smashed to pieces. Once a falling stone hit Ren on his teeth and he drilled off three loosened teeth. He commented, a wish my teeth could help to solid the stone canal. How wonderful it could be if the canal would not leak!

　　This was the Red Flag Canal and the spirit of the canal, optimistic and unyielding.

　　The Youth Cave materialized the national spirit

　　Today the Red Flag Canal is still lying quietly in the mountain and stretching out on the land of Linzhou. A memoriam was erected to commemorate those devotees.

　　There are mainly three tourist sights in the area, Watershed, Youth Cave and Luosi Pool.

　　The source of the canal locates on the slope of Houbi Cliff, Shicheng Town of Pingshun County in Shanxi Province. The trunk canal, being built in the hilly slope of Taihang, is 70.6 kilometers long, 8 meters wide at the bottom and 4.3 meters high with a slope of 1/8000 degree. The designed flow capacity is 25 cubic meters per second. The sluice gate lets out two flows, the left one meeting Hero Canal in Hejian Town with a slope degree of 1/5000, capacity of 14 cubic meters per second and irrigation coverage of 57,990 acres, the second one running eastward to Madian Village of Hengshui Town with a length of 46.7 kilometers, width of 3.5 meters at the bottom, height of 2.5 meters, flow capacity of 7.7 cubic meters per second, 1/2000 degree of slope, and irrigation coverage of 19,110 acres. When the river reaches the 500-meter point, the third canal shows up and goes all the way eastward with a length of 10.9 kilometers, width of 2.5 meters at the bottom, height of 2.2 meters, flow capacity of 3.3 cubic meters per second, 1/3000 degree of slope, and irrigation coverage of 11,862 acres. The crisscross network of trunk, lateral and branch canals provides irrigation for the 88,962- acre farming land in Linxian County

　　The Watershed plays an important role in this regard. It is not only a water control for the three trunk canals but also a water divide geographically. Water in the south runssintosHenghe River and water in the north runssintosZhanghe River. It took great pains for the decision-makers and designers to work it out properly. If the water of the Canal could not cross over the Watershed, the irrigation area would be limited to the nearby two towns, reaching only about 12000 acres of arable land. The bottom of upper locker-gate is 464.75 meters above sea level and the bottom of the lower gate is 454.44 meters, making a difference of 10.31 meters and a slope degree of 1/8000. It was impossible for the Canal water to surpass the Watershed without accurate calculation, which meant that all the hardship gone through was just a waste of time. Once the CPC Secretary Yang Gui told Duan Yubo, head of Water Bureau, only by jumping off from Taihang could we fully demonstrate our sorrow and regret if the Canal water could not pass the Watershed.Thank God that they did succeed.

　　The Watershed is a vivid reflection of the local people's persistence and diligence. The Youth Cave is another example to show how resolute they were. The Youth Cave is a very high tunnel in Linlu Mountain. Standing at the ominous position one could not help trembling with the wind. There are a lot of calligraphic works painted by famous artists around. The natural landscape can be described as dramatic, magnificent, perilous and overwhelming. It is at the positionswheresone could fully interpret the proverb, people, and people alone, are the driving force of world history.

　　In the most difficult days 300 young people gathered here to build the 300-meter-long and 8-meter-wide tunnel. Though ration per person per day was less than 0.7 pounds, the strenuous labor did not frighten them away. The young people fed themselves with herbs and algae, as a result of which, many turned dropsically from malnutrition. Out of concerns for their health the local authority asked these young people to quit for the time being, yet they became rebellious and continued with the work stealthily.

　　They even put a guard outside the cave lest others might find out. When inspectors came, they would hide away. When the inspectors left, they would return and renew the work. Day in and day out, they stuck to the task and gnawed away the mountain. They invented different ways to use explosive and speeded up the project from moving 0.3 meters ahead per day to 2 meters a day. July 15, 1961 marked the end of 17 monthshardship and saw the completion of the tunnel. The tunnel was named Youth Cave to honor the commitment of the 300 young men and women. Mr. Guo Moruo, the famous scholar and Vice Chairman of NPC Standing Committee, wrote an inscription for the Cave in 1973. Forty years later found me standing on the Linlu Mountain and recalling the picture of yesterday, when people hammered and drilled a faith. It suddenly struck me that it was the national spirit of insubordination, self-reliance and endurance that has been keeping our red flag flying high. Even nature cannot dominate or dwarf such a spirit. High up on the cliff are two bright characters, Mountain Monument written by former President Li Xiannian. Tourists are used to taking pictures here. The Red-Flag Canal is the very spiritual monument deeply rooted in our Chinese blood.

　　Historical stories tell you an old Linzhou

　　Linzhou is a land with countless legends and stories.

　　In history, China had 24 legends with filial duty as the main theme. Two of the stories originated from Linzhou, that is, Wang Xiang Lying in the Snow from the south and Guo Ju Burying Son from the north. The village in northern Linzhou called Three Filial-pieties today is the hometown of Guo Ju, who lived in Han Dynasty (206 B.C.--A.D.220). It was said that Guo got an 80-year-old mother and a 3-year-old son. The family was so poor that food was not available to feed them all. Being an extraordinarily dutiful son, Guo would rather starve the younger generations than keep the mother hungry. However the grandma loved her grandson so dearly that she managed to give her portion away to the child in secret.

　　The old woman grew more and more haggard. When Guo found out the truth, he discussed the situation with his wife. As he said, the family was too poor to support both the mother and the son. Everybody had but one mother and could give birth to more than one son. He persuaded his wife to bury the son insgroupsto save food for his mother.

　　The wife agreed. The couple took the son to the river in the west of the village and started to dig a hole. When the hole was about one meter deep, the sad couple found a jar of gold. The jar read, This jar of gold is a gift from God. Nobody could take it away from Guo Ju.As it turned out, God was moved and saved the family from a disaster. People today still talk about the story and sing highly of Guo Ju as a dutiful son.

　　There was another story.

　　Once upon a time there was an emperor who tried to find his youngest daughter a good husband. He had some special standard because of regretful experiences with the other two daughters in the past. Both of them married fragile nobles who died young. He determined to find a strong and tough guy for the third daughter. The princess wisely picked out a hefty and robust man.

　　The emperor looked closely at the man and asked himswhereshe was from. The man said he was from Linzhou. The emperor guessed that the man must live an affluent life since he was so healthy and wanted to know what his daily diet was.

　　The man said he had Golden Corn, Monkey Holding Umbrella, Moon Reflection and Turning around Every Other Day. The emperor was puzzled. What kind of delicacies could these be The man explained that Golden Corn was millet gruel, Monkey Holding Umbrella was steamed corn bread, Moon Reflection was thin porridge (that could reflect the moon shadow), and Turning around Every Other Day was sweet potato vine. The emperor understood.

　　There are a lot of legends like this in Linxian County. Nonetheless, the times that suffered poverty and natural disasters were gone forever. Take the year 2000 as an example, the GDP of the city reached 4.29 billion RMB, the average net income of farmers was 2530 RMB per year, deposit of banks hit 8.01 billion RMB, ranking the top one among all counties and cities in Henan Province. Actuarially this year farmers net income for the first 6 months already reached 1388 RMB. Today's Linzhou is rich both in natural and human resources. The former Ministry of Forest designated it as the production base of economic forest. Its quality produces like walnut, dried persimmon, haw, chestnut and Chinese prickly ash are the most famous ones. Its Chinese prickly ash even gets the name of 10-mile-fragrance. The City is prosperous and the people are enjoying a comfortable life.

　　The new Linzhou is a natural Oxygen bar

　　The Red-Flag Canal has withstood forty years of wind and rain and remains intact. While walking around, I noticed that in the ground there were names of people and villages every few steps. Our local guide explained that this was the evidence of contributions of different families. Every family was assigned a particular section and was held accountable for the related part. They must honor their names engraved and pass on the credit from generation to generation. Local people said around 100,000 people in Linzhou were engaged in construction industry. The outstanding Red-Flag Canal trained a contingent of skilful craftsmen. In 1960s 100,000 people worked on the Canal and in 1970s and 1980s 100,000 surged out of Taihang to develop construction industry. This served as the initial stage of capital accumulation for Linzhou. Early 1990s with the development of township industries and city-owned enterprises, the old city of Linzhou takes on a new life.

　　Linzhou is an old city with a long history. It used to be environs of the capital of Shang Dynasty (B.C.16-11 Century) and the origin of Chinese civilization. The well-known cultural relics, inscriptions on bones and Si-mu-wu Pot, were discovered in nearby village, Xiaotun of Anyang County. Linzhou is a young city with a short history. It was not until January of 1994 that Lin County became Lin City.

　　The first line: Linxian County changedsintosLinzhou City.

　　The second line: Farmers turnedsintoscitizens.

　　Horizontal scroll: It is also a promotion.

　　This humorous couplet reflected the excitement of the 1 million people at that time.

　　In Linzhou, the blue sky, green mountains, tidy houses and fresh air will spread out a scroll before the tourists from home and abroad. The city is a natural oxygen-bar. Believe it or not, 100 meters deepersintosthe city means 1 million more anions around you. In a cityswheresthe local government attaches equal important to economic development and environmental preservation, one can smell the crisp nature everywhere.

　　Insgroupsto seize the opportunity, CPC Committee and City Government of Linzhou have worked out a strategic guideline that to highlight development, improve business environment, implement 4 strategies and to forward the city to a new high. To put it more clearly, the primary objective is economic growth. Industrial development is the key to prosperity. The strategic goal is to make Linzhou a well-planned and environmentally sound tourist city. Rapid industrial development, improved scientific and technological conditions, upgraded industry structures and diversified industries are high on the agenda. The city and surrounding towns will be developedsintosecological tourist destinations with a view to promote local tourism and service industries. Agriculture will be restructured. Construction industry will be strengthened. Infrastructures will be improved as the base of economic growth. Civil servants will further improve working styles and business environment so as to boost the local economy.

　　感谢林州市委宣传部、林州市旅游局提供图片资料。

　　Courtesy of the Propaganda Department of Linzhou Party Committee for the photos.The reporter of Chinaweek, Liu Jianhui also offered some photos.