The first tunnel under the Yangtze River was completed Saturday near the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province.

The 1,992-meter tunnel will house a gas pipeline running from China's natural gas-rich western regions to the Yangtze River Delta.

With a diameter of 3.8 meters, the tunnel was started Nov. 26, 2001 as part of a 4,000-kilometer pipeline taking gas to Shanghai, China's biggest industrial center.

The pipeline's construction, which will take about six years to complete, began in 2001. In the first stage of the project, the pipeline will wind its way through eight autonomous regions and provinces before reaching Shanghai.

It is designed to pipe more than 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually for industrial and domestic use to Shanghai and other Yangtze River Delta areas.

It is being delivered from gas fields in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, home to one of China's largest oil and natural gas basins with more than 200 billion cubic meters of proven natural gas reserves.

(Xinhua News Agency July 27, 2003)