Small scale water control works in Early Imperial China.

China has arguably the longest continuous tradition of writing on water control, but many of the oldest texts were produced by the central government and discuss only the largest water control projects. In recent decades, archaeologists have excavated several caches of documents written on wood and bamboo that contain important new evidence on the management of water systems that were not mentioned in traditional historical texts, including river dikes and irrigation reservoirs. Legal texts make clear that managing local water systems was a regular government responsibility across the Qin and Han empires. Two groups of documents have been discovered that were produced by officials surveying ruined water infrastructure to evaluate the labor that would be needed to repair them. Overall these documents make clear that the early Chinese empires had a sophisticated administrative system to maintain a highly anthropogenic network of waterways for the benefit of agricultural society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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