The Brains of Dujiangyan

What makes their brains tick?

Jia Yue’s deaf grandpa seems to understand something about pigeons and their little brains. The birds are his passion—and they fill all kinds of cages on the balcony of his apartment in Dujiangyan in western Sichuan. Most days he lets two of his beloved birds fly away—and usually they return. Where do they go and why do they return? And how do they know where to find his balcony? Once Jia Yue’s grandpa took some of his pigeons to Mongolia and set them free. He returned (by train, I think) to Dujiangyan, arriving a few weeks before the birds. Home they came. 

I don’t know what makes little bird brains tick, and I can’t fathom what made Li Bing’s big brain tick. Li Bing lived in Dujiangyan thousands of years ago, when the plains of Sichuan were ravaged yearly by a raging river. Li Bing literally moved a mountain, or part of one, to establish an irrigation and flood control system that has made Sichuan the rice basket for much of China for millennia. He split a river in two, created a bottleneck and a back area to relieve pressure during high river time and to store water without a dam. Without a dam, vessels could flow up and downstream--fish, too. No worry about clogging up a big structure with silt. The Min river has continued to supply millions of people with its valuable resources for well over two thousand years.

Li Bing pulled off this feat without gunpowder to blast away the mountain to create the second river channel. He designed bridges and other things for the area as well. He had the social and political skills to organize the thousands of laborers who brought his idea to fruition. Who knows what math was in his head--long before Newton developed calculus in the West.  Li Bing may have been a giant standing on others’ shoulders—but whose? Where did his ideas come from? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan_Irrigation_System if interested in more details.

I remember that our Missouri Mark Twain was skeptical about any human’s ability to outsmart big rivers. Twain said, “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” And yet Li Bing struck a bargain with the Min River that still seems to hold. In Dujiangyan, this hydraulic engineering feat continues to serve a huge portion of the Chinese people.

Amazing, all this ingenuity flying—and flowing—in and out of Dujiangyan.

pigeon: http://smashmaterials.com/2011/28-beautiful-pigeon-photos/