When it comes to the greatest projects in ancient China, the Great Wall, the Mausoleum of The First Emperor of Qin, dujiangyan, the Forbidden City, the Karez, the Yuanmingyuan, the Leshan Giant Buddha... There are countless of them, their grandeur and subtlety make every Chinese proud, and today we are going to talk about a project that began in the Spring and Autumn Period and is still being built today - the Grand Canal.
First of all, we must understand that the Grand Canal includes 3 parts, namely: Sui and Tang Grand Canal, Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal and Zhejiang East Grand Canal, do not mistakenly call them "Grand Canal" alone, causing others to misunderstand.
"Grand Canal", founded in 486 BC, the whole length of more than 2700 kilometers, spanning more than 10 latitudes of the earth, spanning Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and other 8 provinces and municipalities directly under the central government, running through the North China Great Plain, is the "main artery" of ancient Chinese north-south traffic, has a history of more than 2500 years, is the world's longest, earliest excavated, the largest canal!
Speaking of the Grand Canal, I have to mention the Sui Dynasty Emperor Yang Guang, who presided over the excavation of the Sui Dynasty Grand Canal, the opening of the Grand Canal promoted the development of cities on both sides of the canal, for a time "merchant ships travel back and forth, boats ride endlessly", after all, compared with the rich south, the northern resources were very poor at that time, and with the canal, the grain problem in the north was solved, and economic and cultural exchanges were also developed, and the centralized system was strengthened.
However, we all know that everything must be done according to our ability, under the productivity and labor force of ancient times at that time, to build such a large-scale Grand Canal is absolutely laborious and financial, so some people say that the reason why the Sui Dynasty perished was because of the construction of the Grand Canal, of course, this is a bit exaggerated, but it is not wrong.
For the grand canal, the Sui Emperor gathered more than 1 million people in Henan and Huaibei to build it together, and also requisitioned more than 100,000 migrant workers in Huainan to repair the Hangou straight road opened by Chen Deng in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and on the other side, he also built more than 40 palaces and tens of thousands of ships.
In fact, the Grand Canal was not built by the Sui Dynasty Emperor Yang Guang, he just used the canal left by the previous generation to dredge the old river channel, dating back to the late Spring and Autumn Period (476 BC), the State of Wu excavated the Xuxi, Hangou and Huanggou 3 canals, Wu Wang Fucha can be said to have dug down the "first shovel" of the Grand Canal.
With the development of the times, almost every monarch of every dynasty is expanding the river, and gradually the Grand Canal has been produced, but due to improper war and maintenance, many places have been destroyed, so after the founding of the People's Republic of China, China has maintained and repaired them.
After 1959, combined with the "South-to-North Water Diversion Project", the canal section of more than 400 kilometers from Xuzhou to the Yangtze River was expanded, and the irrigation area and drainage area along the coast were expanded at the same time to ensure the safety of 15 million mu of farmland and 8 million people's lives and property in the Xiahe area.
After thousands of years of ups and downs, the Grand Canal is an important passage for Water Transport in China, and now its functions have developed more and more with the times, such as becoming a tourist route, and the Grand Canal of China was inscribed on the World Heritage List at the "38th World Heritage" Conference on June 22, 2014. To this day, many of the blocked areas we are still unblocking.
References: History of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, Canals and Canals in the Sui and Tang Dynasties