China's Grand Canal polluted

Officials in China say about four-hundred-thousand people in the eastern city of Xuzhou may be without water supplies for the next three weeks because of a chemical spillage in the Grand Canal.

They say that industrial waste from two paper mills was tipped into the canal earlier this month, polluting a stretch of about forty kilometres.

The Grand Canal, which has been described as the world's longest man-made waterway, was completed in 605 A.D. and stretched from Beijing in the north to the eastern coastal city of Hangzhou.

Today, it's mostly silted up.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service