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[[underlined]] Chapter XVI. [[/underlined]]  335.

one of the mouths of that important northwestern tributary, the Han (navigable by small craft for almost 1000 miles), enter the Yangtze near that town---most likely just below it. Today, of course, the Han flows into the greater river through a single mouth, at Hankow (Han K'ou, lit. "Han Mouth"), farther downstream.
    At all events the present hydrography suggests some such change. For at a point roughly opposite Shasi, toward the northeast, the Han, whose upper course in general parallels that of the Yangtze though at some distance from it, approaches the latter as if seeking to join it. Before it actually does so, however, it today turns abruptly away eastward, to wind through what was once (as in large part of it still is) a half-drowned region of marshes, swamps, reedy fens, and shallow lakes, before it reaches its eventual goal, the Yangtze.
    In this very tortuous lower part of its course the Han, confined between dikes as it is today, has actually raised its bed---by silting---higher than the level of the plain through which it flows. [[superscript]] (299) [[/superscript]] Its current
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[[superscript]] (299) [[/superscript]]  A similar condition has also arisen along the lower course of the better known Yellow River, "China's Sorrow".
    At Kuan [[Chinese character]] Hsien, in Szechuan, where famous and very ancient irrigation-works exist, the motto has been "Keep the dikes low and the bed deep". Failure to observe this sound principle elsewhere in China has often led to terrible flood-disasters, accompanied by vast loss of life.
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overtops the latter, indeed, by 20 feet or more during floodtime, and only the restraining dikes keep it from overflowing a wide expanse of country, just as in primeval times.
    Now this whole shallow and waterlogged basin between Shasi and Hankow, of 150 miles in a direct line and double that figure by the windings of the Yangtze, appears anciently to have been nothing else than the delta through which the Han entered the Yangtze---as indeed it would do today but for the aforementioned dikes that border and confine it. I was told as Shasi, for

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