fore, that there exists today in the area of Fig. 52 not less than 25,000 miles of canals.
In the next illustration. Fig. 53, an area of northeast China, 600 by 725 miles, is represented. The unshaded land area covers nearly 200,000 square miles of alluvial plain. This plain is so level that at Ichang, nearly a thousand miles up the Yangtse, the elevation is only 130 feet above the sea. The tide is felt on the river to beyond Wuhu, 375 miles from the coast. During the summer the depth of water in the Yangtse is sufficient to permit ocean vessels drawing twenty-five feet of water to ascend six hundred miles to Hankow, and for smaller steamers to go on to Ichang, four hundred miles further.
The location, in this vast low delta and coastal plain, of the system of canals already described, is indicated by the two rectangles in the south-east corner of the sketch map, Fig. 53. The heavy barred black line extending from Hangchow in the south to Tientsin in the north represents the Grand Canal which has a length of more than eight hundred miles. The plain, east of this canal, as far north as the mouth of the Hwang ho in 1852, is canalized much as is the area shown in Fig. 52. So, too, is a large area both sides of the present mouth of the same river in Shantung and Chihli, between the canal and the coast. Westward, up the Yangtse valley, the provinces of Anhwei, Kiangsi, Hunan and Hupeh have very extensive canalized tracts, probably exceeding 28,000 square miles in area, and Figs. 54 and 55 are two views in this more western region. Still further west, in Szechwan province, is the Chengtu plain, thirty by seventy miles, with what has been called “the most remarkable irrigation system in China.”
Westward beyond the limits of the sketch map, up the Hwang ho valley, there is a reach of 125 miles of irrigated lands about Ninghaifu, and others still farther west, at Lanchowfu and at Suchow where the river has attained an elevation of 5,000 feet, in Kansu province; and there is still to be named the great Canton delta region. A conservative estimate would place the miles of canals and leveed rivers
