Sichuan Province, located in Southwest China, is now known as a land of abundance, but originally it was a land plagued by floods and droughts. Around 245 B.C., the Sichuanese took action to change this, building the Dujiangyan Project – a complex irrigation system that heralded a more prosperous relationship with nature. Two thousand years later, in 1998, a 24,000-square-meter living water garden was built by the Jinjiang River in Chengdu, the provincial capital, fundamentally altering contemporary Chinese beliefs about nature, specifically water treatment. Utilizing diverse processes including oxido-reduction and microbial decomposition in a natural vegetation purification system, 300 cubic meters of polluted water can be transformed into drinkable water every day. Recently, a Shanghai version of the park was launched, located inside the World Expo’s Urban Best Practices Area (UBPA).

The Expo Version

With “living water makes life better” as its theme, the Chengdu garden is the world’s first ecological park to feature a manmade wetland water purification system, which won it the UN Habitat Scroll of Honor Award in 1998. Betsy Damon, an environmental art pioneer and one of the lead designers for the park, created the space to resemble the shape of a fish, a symbol of regeneration in Chinese culture. It was also designed this way to suggest the close relationships between humans, water, and nature.

Inside the Expo’s UBPA, Chengdu has put a scaled-down “living water park” on display. This 2,680-square-meter park boasts the same eco-technology to absorb pollution and harmful organisms from dirty water, making it clean. The mini version also contains an environmental-protection education center, as well as plants unique to Sichuan, and Sichuan style structures.

Anyone who has ever been to orthodox water treatment plants will generally remember them as ugly complexes, emitting foul smells and a great deal of noise. But visitors to the water garden at the Expo will be in for a pleasant surprise — when they are greeted with abundant flowers, gurgling streams, and water plants.

The Expo version maintains the fish design of the original, and visitors will first encounter Sun Bird Square which is located at the head. An octagonal pond in the center of the square stores the sewage water and rainwater collected from nearby locales. Dirty water undergoes pre-treatment in this pond. After six to eight hours of sedimentation, it then passes through to stone-carved ponds for oxygen exposure. Next, the water flows to the body of the fish — a manmade wetland.