Grand Canal
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How it came to be
The Grand Canal began in 486 BC, when King Fuchai of Wu had the Han Canal dug to link the Yangtze and Huai rivers. Between 604 and 609 Emperor Yang of Sui joined existing canals into one network, which UNESCO describes as the first time the canal was conceived as a unified route for the empire.
By the 13th century, under the Yuan, the artificial waterways exceeded 2,000 km. In the 1280s, under Kublai Khan, a summit section across the Shandong foothills shortened the route by as much as 700 km, and in 1289 the engineer Ma Zhizhen completed the lock-filled Huitong Canal in a year. The Yongle Emperor of Ming moved the capital to Beijing, and from 1411 to 1415 some 165,000 labourers dredged the Shandong sections.
In 1855 the Yellow River changed course and cut the canal in Shandong. Eighty-five components running from Beijing to Zhejiang through eight provinces were inscribed in 2014.
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