A portion of China’s massive South-to-North Water Diversion Project has started to supply water. Shandong province will get about 1,200 million cubic feet of water in the first use of the project’s east route, officials said, China Daily reported Tuesday. The three-route project, expected to cost $81 billion, is considered the biggest engineering endeavor in Chinese history, and involves a mix of canals, tunnels and aqueducts spanning thousands of miles. It is designed to rely entirely on gravity to transfer 1,582 billion cubic feet of water annually from the country’s water-rich south to the arid north, including Beijing. The east route’s more than $8.2 billion first phase was completed in March, China Daily reported. Water diversion for that phase started last month, bringing water from the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province to Shandong along the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. It is expected to supply as […]