IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijgenv/v14y2015i3-4p187-199.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The ancient urban water system construction of China: the lessons from history for a sustainable future

Author

Listed:
  • Xiao Yun Zheng

Abstract

China is an agricultural-based country, but the documented urban history was dated back to more than 4,000 years. The early civilisations of China began in the mid and lower basin of Yellow River and Yangtze River. Being situated near the rivers, water supply was advantageous to the cities, but at the same time, they also faced flooding risk from the rivers. Accordingly, an urban water cycling system which includes water supply use and rainwater management, waste water management, river flood control, drainage and river transportation etc, in a city was achieved in ancient China. More especially, a perfect model of urban water system was formed at ancient Chang'an City, the capital of Han Dynasty (202 B.C.∼220 A.D.). Thereafter, it influenced the urban construction of water system in many ancient cities of China. Unfortunately, this water system has changed widely in China due to the current urbanisation, which brought obvious problems to the cities, for example, frequent rainstorm flood in many cities due to lack of complete drainage facilities. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the urban water system construction in ancient China, and study the wisdom and lessons from history to ensure a sustainable future.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiao Yun Zheng, 2015. "The ancient urban water system construction of China: the lessons from history for a sustainable future," International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 14(3/4), pages 187-199.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijgenv:v:14:y:2015:i:3/4:p:187-199
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=71864
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ning DongGe & Jinbiao Yan & Peilin Liu & Martin van den Toorn & Albert Fekete, 2022. "Historical Water Management Strategies—Case Study of Traditional Villages in Southern China, Hunan Province," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(12), pages 1-13, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijgenv:v:14:y:2015:i:3/4:p:187-199. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=14 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.