Makers › Engineer / Architect
Jia Rang
Western Han hydraulic thinker who answered Emperor Ai's call for river engineers with the Three Strategies for Controlling the River: divert it north, cut canals to divide the flow, or merely raise the dikes; recorded in the Hanshu's treatise on waterways.
A stone arch bridge is being built across a river gorge, with wooden centering under the arch and bamboo scaffolding around the piers; many small workers haul stone blocks up a ramp with ropes and pulleys, and blocks and logs lie in the foreground below a distant city wall.
Also known as Jia Rang the Attendant-in-waiting
Jia Rang was a hydraulic thinker of the Western Han; his dates and birthplace are unknown, and the Hanshu calls him an Attendant-in-waiting. In 7 BCE, with the Yellow River bursting its banks again and again, Emperor Ai summoned anyone able to dredge and open the river, and Jia Rang submitted his Three Strategies. The best was to let the river leave its channel at Liyang and flow north to the sea, moving the people along its banks; the middle course was to dig canals in Jizhou for irrigation and to dissipate the flood; the worst was only to strengthen and raise the old dikes. The text is preserved in the Hanshu's Treatise on Ditches and Waterways, and later hydraulic engineers such as Pan Jixun studied it.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; submitted his three-point river plan in response to the imperial call in 7 BCE