Tue Chinese have been celebrated as canal builders for many centuries, and the Grand Canal has had a place in the imagination of Europe alongside that of the Great Wall. 'I'he enormous plains of Eastern China offered a good opportunity for the early Chinese engineers to put in practice the art of canal building derived by them from central and western Asia. Those canals have generally perished, and the land they once served to irrigate has become a desert, as have wide districts in Central America, once as well irrigated as the great plain of China. In Japan, a country of hills and valleys, nowhere of any great width, there has been less use for canals, and land carriage has been more generally employed. The completion therefore of the canal from Lake Biwa to the Bay of Osaka is worth notice, more so as the construction is the result of the western education of the engineers employed. We noticed a little while since the ceremonious opening of the canal; there has now been published the official report on it by Mr. S. Tanabe, M.E., Engineer-in-chief of the Kioto-Fu Canal Works.
Mr. Tanabe begins by telling us that there are records going farther back than the twelfth century of proposals to constructacanal for navigation from Lake Biwa to the Bay of Osaka, Kioto being then and up to 1868 the chief seat of the central government of the Empire. Lake Biwa, which every visitor to Japan goes to admire, is the largest lake in Japan, its area being five hundred square miles. It is 280 feet above sea level, and 35 miles from Osaka Bay, but there already existed water communication, known as the Lamogawa, for 28 miles of this distance. What was wanted was a waterway over the 7 miles between Lake Biwa and the head of the Lamogawa. It is not the length, then, of this new canal that makes it worth notice, but rather the engineering skill that has been demanded in its construction, Mr. K. Kitagaki; Governor of Kioto, had four ends in view in promoting the construction. First, the providing of the city with water-power, that it might as a manufacturing centre regain the prosperity it had lost when the seat of government was removed to ''ohio in 1868. Secondly, the connection of Lake Biwa with the sea for purposes of navigation. birdly, the irrigation of the rice fields along the line of the canal. Fourthly, the provision of a supply of water to Kioto for sanitary purposes. The work was begun in March, 1885, and the opening cere-many took place in the month that has just ended; it has thus taken five years to construct, and all those who have made the journey from Kioto to the lake will feel no surprise at the length of time so small a work, in point of actual length, has occupied.
At the lake end, or intake, the approach to the canal proper is being formed by reclamation stretching about 'a thousand feet into the lake, bordering the water-way or approach, and is to be protected by a breakwater designed to ensure still water within. The material for these works is debris from the canal and tunnel. There aroonly 600 yards from this start before we come to the first tunnel. The canal is 29 feet wide and 5 feet deep, and the flow of water is regulated by a gate s0 as to allow 300 cubic feet to pass per second. The tunnel (No. 1), the making of which was not without accidents, as our reports from time to time have shown, is the longest in Japan, 2,680 yards, or a little over a mile and a half. It is of horseshoe form, 16 feet wide and 14 feet high, of which 6 feet is the depth of the waterway. There is no tow-path, as it is intended to propel the boats using the tunnel by a chain laid on the floor. From the end of this tunnel there are about three miles of open canal, sometimes in cutting and embankment, but mostly in the form of a trough along the hill-side, the outer side in many places being protected by an embankment. The canal then passes through the hills encircling Kioto by two tunnels, one the same construction as the Tong tunnel. At a distance of 5} miles from the intake, the canal is divided into two branches, the navigation branch descending to the level of the tity of Kioto by a fall of 1 in 15, the boats being transferred by an inclined plane, ona cradle worked by o wire hawser, operated by water power from the canal above. Another mile and a quarter of level canal, 60 feet wide and 6 feet deep, connects with the Lamogawa, with a lock between, and so with Osaka bay.
The other branch goes north from the bifurcation by a short tunnel, winds along the face of the hills, crossing the valley of the Imperial tomb by an aqueduct of 14 series of arches, crosses two rivers, and ends at the north extremity of the city of Kioto, The fall in this branch varies from 1 in 100 to 1 in 2,500. The mill power given by it is equal to 250 cubic feet per second with a fall of 120 feet, and it is intended to transmit the power, derived from a water-wheel, electrically, distributing it throughout the manufacturing parts of the city.
The cost of the whole work is $1,250,000, of which about one-third is an Imperial contribution, a quarter was a grant from the central government, and the remaining sum, amounting to five hundred thousand dollars, was raised partly in the form of a tax imposed rectly or indirectly on certain houses, partly in the form of trade and land tuxes imposed on the inhabitants of Kioto, who number 250,000. The work has been most successfully done, and reflects great credit on the native engineering talent employed, and the only enemy the caval has to fear, is that too constant, but not less dreaded because familiar, visitant to Japan, earthquake.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.