The Search for a Permanent Channel: Environmental Transformation of the Dagu Bar,1897-1928

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Haihe Conservancy Commission conducted a series of Western-style engineering projects to create a permanent bar channel in the Chinese city of Tianjin. Driven by modernist and imperialist conceptualizations of environment, these Western-style water projects transformed the Dagu sandbar with a wide scale of human intervention. This article traces historical trajectories of the Dagu Bar and argues that modern imaginations and practices of environmental transformation departed from Chinese imperial mode of water conservancy. Two twentieth-century engineering schemes, with successes and failures, transformed the coastal environment and played a pivotal role in creating a modern city port.