The Liugong Canal

The Taipei Basin had rich soil, but for most of the Qing era it could not realize its agricultural potential. The basin's geography was frustrating: the central lowlands accumulated standing water and flooded regularly, while the terraced hillsides were chronically dry, too far above the nearest river to be irrigated by gravity. Farmers who settled here found themselves fighting on two fronts — against inundation in the wet season, against drought in the dry.

Guo Xiliu, a Fujianese settler who arrived in the Taipei area in the 1740s, took on this challenge with the particular combination of vision and stubbornness that characterizes the great private infrastructure builders of history. He had no official backing, no government funding, and no formal engineering training. What he had was a clear analysis of the problem — the Xindian River upstream carried ample water year-round, and the terrain between its gorge and the Taipei plain could, with sufficient effort, be shaped to carry that water across the hills — and a willingness to stake everything on his plan.

The project consumed more than two decades of his life. Working without the resources of the state, Guo mobilized capital through partnerships with other settlers, sold shares in the future canal's water rights to finance excavation, and managed the complex challenge of organizing hundreds of laborers on a construction site that periodically came under attack from indigenous communities displaced by the works. Floods destroyed completed sections; funding dried up; partners withdrew. Several times the project seemed finished.

Guo did not live to see the canal completed. It was his son, Guo Yuanfen, who finally closed the circuit, connecting the upstream intake to the distribution network across the basin. The finished canal — named the Liugong Canal in honor of Guo Xiliu, 'Liugong' being a respectful title meaning 'Master Liu' — stretched more than forty kilometers and irrigated the entire eastern half of the Taipei Basin. The paddy fields it fed supplied the rice that underpinned the commercial growth of Wanhua and Dadaocheng in the nineteenth century. Guo spent a fortune, mortgaged his family's future, and is remembered today in street names across Taipei as the man who gave the city its agricultural foundation.