Page "Grand Canal (China)" Paragraph 52

The Grand Canal is currently being upgraded to serve as the Eastern Route of the South-North Water Transfer Project.

Additional amounts of water from the Yangtze will be drawn into the canal in Jiangdu City, where a giant pumping station was already built in the 1980s, and is then fed uphill by pumping stations along the route and through a tunnel under the Yellow River, from where it can flow downhill to reservoirs near Tianjin.

Construction on the Eastern Route officially began on December 27, 2002, and water is supposed to reach Tianjin by 2012.

However, water pollution has affected the viability of this project.