Every schoolchild here learns the legend of "the great Yu," whose prodigious feats of canal building and drainage ditch digging 4,000 years ago put an end to killer floods on the Yellow River.

Every schoolchild here learns the legend of "the great Yu," whose prodigious feats of canal building and drainage ditch digging 4, 000 years ago put an end to killer floods on the Yellow River.

It also resurrects a proposal that's been controversial for 30 years-a giant, ten-billion-dollar ditch known as the Peripheral Canal that would bypass the delta altogether.