Pān Jìxùn 潘季馴 (1521–1595), zì Shíliáng 時良, hào Yìnchuān 印川, was the foremost Yellow-River and Grand-Canal hydraulic engineer of the late Míng — and one of the most consequential water-management officials in all Chinese imperial history. From Wūchéng 烏程 (modern Húzhōu, Zhèjiāng), he passed the jìnshì in Jiājìng gēngxū 嘉靖庚戌 (1550) and rose through Xúnàn Guǎngdōng (1559) and Dūfǔ Jiāngxī (1576) to Zǒngdū Hédào 總督河道 (Yellow River Commissioner) — a position he held in four separate tenures spanning some thirty years. He served his last term as Nánjīng gōngbù shàngshū 南京工部尚書 concurrent Yòu dū yùshǐ 右都御史 in 1581.
Pān’s hydraulic theory was the shùshuǐ gōngshā 束水攻沙 (“constrain the water to scour the silt”) doctrine: instead of dispersing the Yellow River’s flow into multiple channels (the standard pre-Pān approach), tightly confine it to a single deep channel between high embankments, raising the in-channel velocity high enough to scour the silt out to sea. This principle — set out in his 1590 Héfáng yīlǎn 河防一覽 (Survey of River Defence) — governed Yellow River management for the next 250 years and is the conceptual foundation of all subsequent Chinese hydrological practice.
His memorials and policy writings on water management are the documentary monument of late-Míng infrastructure. The KR2f0030 Pān Sīkōng zòushū 潘司空奏疏 in 7 juàn preserves three sub-collections: 1 juàn of his Xúnàn Guǎngdōng memorials of 1559 (with appended note by his son Pān Dàfù 潘大復 noting that the original draft of nearly three cùn thickness had been mostly lost, only this much being recovered from the yèyuán); 4 juàn of his Dūfǔ Jiāngxī memorials of Wànlì 4 (1576) with prefaces by Lǐ Qiān 李遷 and Wàn Gōng 萬恭; and 2 juàn of his Bīngbù memorials. The catalog also includes the KR2f0031 Liǎng Hé jīnglüè 兩河經略 (4 juàn, his comprehensive Yellow-River-and-Grand-Canal strategy memorial). Míng shǐ j. 223 has his biography. CBDB id 125185 (1521–1595).