Min River

The Min River comes down fast out of the mountains into the Sichuan basin, and in the third century BCE the local governor Li Bing and his son built the Dujiangyan works to manage it: a bank splitting the river into an inner and an outer stream, a spillway that returns excess water and silt to the outer channel, and a channel cut through a ridge to carry irrigation water onto the plain.

The system works without a dam, has been maintained continuously for over two thousand years, and made the Chengdu plain agriculturally secure enough to be called a land of abundance. Li Bing was subsequently worshipped as a god, and the Erwang temple, the temple of the two kings, stands above the works and honours him and his son. An annual water-releasing ceremony marks the reopening of the channels after the winter maintenance.

This is a clear example of a pattern common in Chinese religion and rare elsewhere: a historical official, remembered for a specific public work, enters the pantheon by popular acclamation and later imperial confirmation, receives temples and a title, and is petitioned about the thing he was good at. The same logic produced city gods, and the deification of Guan Yu and of many local worthies.

Whether Li Bing's son existed is doubted by historians, which does not affect the cult in the slightest, since the temple has honoured them together for many centuries.

Two more religious institutions stand on this river, and both are tied to the water.

Mount Qingcheng rises immediately above the Dujiangyan works and is one of Daoism's principal mountains. Tradition places there the revelation to Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, in which the deified Laozi appointed him Celestial Master, and the movement that followed, the Way of the Celestial Masters, is the beginning of organised Daoism as an institution with priests, registers, parishes and a liturgy rather than a body of philosophical texts. The mountain still carries working temples, and the tradition traces its priestly lineage from that event.

Downstream at Leshan, where the Min meets two other rivers in turbulent water that wrecked boats, a monk named Haitong began in 713 to cut a seated Maitreya out of the cliff face, on the reasoning that the Buddha's presence would calm the confluence. The figure was completed in 803, stands seventy one metres high, and remains the largest stone buddha in the world. The spoil from the carving was tipped into the river below and did in fact alter the currents, so the project may have worked for reasons other than the ones given.

Both sites are on the World Heritage list, and the river that runs between them is still doing the work Li Bing set it.