Fushougou Museum 福寿沟博物馆

About Fushougou Museum

Ganzhou's old city was founded in 349 on a triangle of land where the Zhang and Gong rivers meet to form the Gan, and is therefore water on three sides. The drainage network beneath it consists of two systems, the Fu drain taking water from the south-east and the Shou drain from the north-west; their courses are said to trace the seal-script forms of the characters fu and shou, which gave the whole its name. It runs to a combined length of 12.6 kilometres in arched brick and stone channels, the largest opening about 1.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres high and the smallest 0.8 metres in each dimension. The layout was established in the Xining reign of the Northern Song by Liu Yi, prefect of Qianzhou, who fitted twelve water windows opened and closed with the river level. Those windows work as automatic valves: when the river is lower than the outfall the flow pushes them open, and when it rises the pressure holds them shut against backflow. In 1867 the drains were repaired under an arrangement by which each household maintained the section within its own boundary and public funds covered the rest. The network still serves nearly 100,000 residents of the old city.

The museum came out of a protection project that Ganzhou made a key cultural-tourism undertaking in 2017, with Zhanggong District responsible for delivery. The site was fixed at 22 Houde Road and work began in November 2017; during construction a rare, well-preserved pair of parallel drains with inscribed bricks was uncovered below ground, and the design was changed so the building would stand over the find. Construction ran from early 2018 and the museum opened in 2020, alongside a Gannan Hakka Culture Museum that reproduces the courtyard layout of the Wei family compound from the family genealogy. In October 2019 Fushougou itself was listed in the eighth batch of national key cultural heritage protection units, and the museum was named a municipal science-popularisation base in 2021 and a provincial model base for social-science popularisation in 2022. Its displays use multimedia to set out how the drains were built and how they work; the district describes it as the only museum of an underground drainage system in the country.

What to look for

• The exposed stretch of parallel Song drains with inscribed bricks that the museum was built over, still carrying water.
• The arched brick and stone drain sections, whose openings range from about 1.5 by 1.6 metres down to 0.8 metres square.
• The explanation of the water windows, the fluid-pressure valves that keep river water from backing up into the city.
• The Dulong Bridge stretch, 2.5 metres high and 4 metres wide, narrowing to 1.65 by 1.15 metres to increase pressure and scour the channel.
• The adjoining Gannan Hakka Culture Museum, which recreates the courtyard plan of the Wei family compound.

Location & getting there

Getting to Fushougou Museum

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