The Grand Canal of China

For more than a thousand years, the rice that fed China's capital came up a river built by hand. The Grand Canal runs about 1,800 kilometers from Beijing to Hangzhou, the longest artificial waterway on Earth and among the oldest still in use. China's great rivers flow west to east, and the canal stitched them together on a north–south line, joining the farmland of the Yangtze delta to the political north. Emperors moved grain, troops, and tribute along it, and cities such as Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Huai'an grew wealthy on its banks. Its southern half still carries heavy barge traffic, and UNESCO lists it as a World Heritage Site.

The Beijing–Hangzhou canal runs across the North China Plain through Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, crossing the Hai, Yellow, Huai, Yangtze, and Qiantang river basins. In Shandong it climbs over a low watershed, which engineers of the Yuan and Ming dynasties fed with reservoirs and a sequence of locks. South of the Yangtze it threads the lake country around Suzhou and Wuxi, where stone bridges and waterfront towns line the banks. The UNESCO listing also covers the older Sui–Tang canal sections centered on Luoyang and the Eastern Zhejiang Canal to Ningbo, spread across eight provinces and municipalities. Today strings of barges carrying coal, sand, and building materials work the stretch from Jining south to Hangzhou.

The first section, the Han Gou, was dug in 486 BCE by the state of Wu. Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty linked earlier canals into a single system between about 605 and 610, at enormous human cost, and the Yuan rerouted it straight north to their new capital at Beijing by 1293. Grain barges sailed it for centuries, and the Qing emperors toured the south along it. Its decline came after the Yellow River shifted course in 1855, wrecking the northern sections, and as coastal steamers and railways took the grain trade. UNESCO inscribed the canal in 2014. Water now flows south to north along its eastern route as part of China's South-to-North Water Diversion Project, and in 2022 the whole Beijing–Hangzhou canal carried water end to end for the first time in about a century.

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• Yangtze
  Asia's longest river, the spine of China crosses
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• Beijing
  China's capital and imperial seat for eight centuries northern terminus