Qualla: Red Flag Canal

Red Flag Canal: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eregli bob, CC BY-SA 3.0. The people of Linxian had a water problem, and they solved it with hammers. In the arid foothills of the Taihang Mountains, 80 kilometers northwest of Anyang in northern Henan, farmers had endured chronic drought for generations. The Zhang River flowed tantalizingly close, just across the border in Shanxi Province, but the water might as well have been on the moon for all the good it did Linxian's parched fields. So beginning in the early 1960s, tens of thousands of workers carved a canal through cliff faces, bored through 42 tunnels, and diverted the river across the mountains to their waiting farmland. They did it entirely by hand.

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Image: eregli bob | CC BY-SA 3.0

Red Flag Canal: Water from Shanxi

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 《人民画报》, Public domain. The canal begins near the point where three provinces meet: Henan, Shanxi, and Hebei. A dam on the Zhang River, which flows from the Shanxi highlands before becoming the border between Hebei and Henan near Handan, captures water and feeds it into the main channel. From there the ...

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Image: 《人民画报》 | Public domain

Red Flag Canal: Initiated in the Great Leap Forward

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 《人民画报》, Public domain. The Red Flag Canal was conceived during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's disastrous campaign to rapidly industrialize China through mass mobilization. While many Great Leap projects ended in failure and famine, the canal was one of the rare successes, though it was not comple...

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Image: 《人民画报》 | Public domain

Red Flag Canal: Propaganda and Film

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eregli bob, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Red Flag Canal became one of the most celebrated achievements in Chinese state media. It was featured in propaganda campaigns both domestically and internationally as proof of what workers could accomplish through collective effort and local initiative. Several films were mad...

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Image: eregli bob | CC BY-SA 3.0

Red Flag Canal: The Tiger's Mouth Cliff

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit eregli bob, CC BY-SA 3.0. The most dramatic section of the canal is at Tiger's Mouth Cliff, where the channel is built directly onto the face of a sheer rock wall. Photographs of this section, with water flowing calmly through a narrow channel carved into a vertical cliff hundreds of meters above the vall...

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Image: eregli bob | CC BY-SA 3.0