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Water started flowing into Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province on July 16 from a major water diversion project that took more than a decade to complete. The Hanjiang-to-Weihe River water diversion project, the largest water conservancy project in Shaanxi, cost 51.6 billion yuan (about $7.2 billion) to build. It supplies water from the Hanjiang, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, through a 98.3-km-long tunnel, to four densely populated urban areas located on both sides of the Weihe in central Shaanxi, a tributary of the Yellow River, in an effort to ease water supply strains there.