Inventions & Discoveries · Building and engineering

Pound lock

984 · 10th century

A pound lock is a chamber with gates at both ends in which the water level is raised or lowered to move boats between levels of a waterway, first built in Song dynasty China by Qiao Weiyue in 984. He placed two sluice gates 250 feet apart under a roof, replacing double slipways, at one of which soldiers had plotted with bandits to wreck grain barges. On the Grand Canal such locks raised the water level by 138 feet. The first true European pound lock was built at Damme near Bruges in 1396.

Pound lock
Image: George Mahoney · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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First known
984
Where
Huai’an, Jiangsu, China
Credited to
Qiao Weiyue · Song Dynasty

NoteDiodorus Siculus credits engineers of Ptolemy II with a lock in Egypt about 274 BCE, but not a pound lock.

Built onGrand Canal486 BCE–609 CE

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See also

Cite this entry
APA
The Epoch Institute. (2026). Pound lock. In The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/pound-lock
MLA
“Pound lock.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/pound-lock. Accessed .
Chicago
The Epoch Institute. “Pound lock.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/pound-lock.
Harvard
The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘Pound lock’, The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/pound-lock (Accessed: ).

Last reviewed October 2026Random entry ↻