Although China's best known engineering marvel is the Great Wall (萬里長城), equally impressive and perhaps even more important is the Grand Canal (大運河):
Stretching some 1,776 km (1,104 mi), the Grand Canal is the longest manmade waterway in the world. The impetus for construction was that since China’s main rivers (the Yellow and the Yangtze) run west to east, the Sui Dynasty wanted a quicker and easier way to move foodstuffs from the fertile region around the Yangtze to troops on the northern border defending against nomadic tribes.
Their audacious answer was to combine and extend existing canals to create a new canal running from Hangzhou in the south to Beijing in the north. In the process, the Grand Canal interconnected the Yangtze, Yellow, Huaihe, Haihe, and Qiantang Rivers, vastly improving China's transportation network.
As you might expect, the manpower required to build the Grand Canal was enormous: over six years, the government press-ganged five million people, mainly farmers, into service. In addition, the human cost was equally massive: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people died during that period, not only from the actual labor but also from famine when there weren’t enough people left to harvest the crops.
This forced labor to build the Grand Canal, renovate the Great Wall, and for other public works projects, as well as costly and disastrous military campaigns against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, led to the overthrow of the Sui Dynasty.
Nevertheless, the Grand Canal was a stunning engineering achievement that has had an important impact and that has helped to bring vastly distant parts of China together for more than a millennia.
Later dynasties would improve the Grand Canal, such as adding water-level-adjusting pound locks after they were invented in the 10th century AD:
Their audacious answer was to combine and extend existing canals to create a new canal running from Hangzhou in the south to Beijing in the north. In the process, the Grand Canal interconnected the Yangtze, Yellow, Huaihe, Haihe, and Qiantang Rivers, vastly improving China's transportation network.
As you might expect, the manpower required to build the Grand Canal was enormous: over six years, the government press-ganged five million people, mainly farmers, into service. In addition, the human cost was equally massive: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people died during that period, not only from the actual labor but also from famine when there weren’t enough people left to harvest the crops.
This forced labor to build the Grand Canal, renovate the Great Wall, and for other public works projects, as well as costly and disastrous military campaigns against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, led to the overthrow of the Sui Dynasty.
Nevertheless, the Grand Canal was a stunning engineering achievement that has had an important impact and that has helped to bring vastly distant parts of China together for more than a millennia.
Later dynasties would improve the Grand Canal, such as adding water-level-adjusting pound locks after they were invented in the 10th century AD:
Even until the present, parts of the Grand Canal are still in use, mainly as a water-diversion conduit, and the main commercial artery now spans the 325 miles from Jining to the Yangtze.
Still, if you had to pick the one engineering project that has affected the most people for the longest period of time, the Grand Canal has no rival, touching the lives of billions of people for more than 1400 years.
加油！
Still, if you had to pick the one engineering project that has affected the most people for the longest period of time, the Grand Canal has no rival, touching the lives of billions of people for more than 1400 years.
加油！
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