Being one of the largest rivers in northern China, the Liaohe River is called the Mother River by people in Liaoning Province. Originated in Qilaotu Mountain in Heibei Province, it flows 1,394 kilometers through Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces, and at last empties into the Bohai Sea, with a drainage area of 201,600 square kilometers.

The upper reaches of the river stretch 882 kilometers, running through loess hills; the middle reaches stretch 210 kilometers, to the Stone Buddha Temple; and the lower reaches have 302 kilometers.   

The river abounds in precipitation rainfall especially in summer, which often causes serious floods in the lower reaches. Besides, the most challenging engineering aspect of taming the Liaohe River is the control of the exceptionally high sediment load that the river carries in its lower reaches, with 20.98 million tons of sediment on the average entering the river channel annually, only next to the Yellow River and the Haihe River.

In recent years, the water quality of Liaohe River is quite bad on the whole and the river system is heavily polluted. The major pollution indicators are ammonia nitrogen, total mercury, volatile phenols and permanganate index. After several years of treatment since 1993, the monitoring data showed some progress. In the eight local cities of the river valley, six sewage treatment plants with a total daily treatment capacity of 1.07 million tons were established. Industrial pollution sources of the river valley basically reached the emission standard.