Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/44

A much more picturesque and in some respects more important sheet of water is the Po-yang Lake, which receives the waters of the Kan River—also flowing into it from the south— and discharges them into the Yangtse at Kiukiang, some 320 miles below the point where the Tung-ting Lake has its exit. About ninety miles long and twenty broad, this sheet of water is studded with beautiful islets thickly peopled, and is celebrated as the chief scene of keramic manufacture in China. Jao-chou, the site of the imperial porcelain factories, lies at the eastern extremity of the lake. There, ever since the tenth century, have been produced the incomparable porcelains of China, wares which, in their own class, have never been approached by the works of any other country.

An interesting series of lakes is that used by the builders of the Grand Canal. This remarkable work, called by the Chinese Chah-ho (river of flood-gates) or Yun-ho (transit river), is generally believed to have been devised by an engineer in the service of Kublai Khan, for the purpose of connecting Peking—the "Cambaluc" of Marco Polo—with Hang-chou, the capital of China under the Sung dynasty which Kublai's ancestor had overthrown. But the fact is that the idea of constructing a water-way between the two great rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtse—was conceived and carried out under the Han dynasty in the second century before Christ, and the