An Artery of Empire
The rise and fall of China's Grand Canal
If you’ve missed the previous installments in this series on rivers, you can read about the Rhine, the Nile, and the Orinoco.
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Avulsion is a rather antiseptic term for a terrifying process. Avulsion happens when a river changes course, leaving its previous bed and finding a new path. But that description, too, undersells what really happens.
When rivers jump their banks to find a more efficient course to the sea, they often do so suddenly and without much warning. The buildup of silt on the bottom of the riverbed or the erosion of the banks that hold the waters back reaches a tipping point, and millions of gallons of water suddenly surge out into formerly dry lands.
Some rivers are more prone to avulsion than others. Among major rivers, few avulse more often and more destructively than China’s Yellow River, which carries 62,500 cubic feet of water into the sea every second.
The reason that the Yellow River jumps its banks so often (almost 1,600 times in recorded Chinese history) is right in the name. The river carries “millions of tons” of silt; at times, the silt in the river weighs more than the water. In some parts of China, the Yellow River deposited so much soil that people looked up at the river — its banks, boosted by centuries of silt deposits (and, in places, by levees built by government engineers), were dozens of feet above the plains that surrounded it.
The river would grow higher for decades or centuries, and then, one day, it would simply break free and scour out a new riverbed. Sometimes, an avulsion would be relatively small, cutting off an oxbow or creating a minor change of course. But a few dozen times in Chinese history, the Yellow River sought a drastically new path.
In 1855, it did just that. After flooding rains, the Yellow River broke through its banks and found a new route. West of the Shandong Peninsula, the river shifted north; its new mouth was 300 miles to the north, on the other side of the peninsula. The flooding was catastrophic. Historian James Carter tells us that entire villages were submerged under cascades of mud. The floods destroyed seven million people’s homes and killed 200,000.
This disaster was also fatal for an artificial waterway that had existed symbiotically with the river for centuries: the Chinese Grand Canal. A Scientific American report on the canal from 1878, two decades after the avulsion, noted that the canal was falling into disrepair, with dire consequences for the Chinese economy:
The Grand Canal was now broken, and it would never fully recover.
Every schoolchild learns that the geography and history of China are oriented around two rivers: the Yellow and the Yangtze. Both flow from the Tibetan Plateau in the west to the sea in the east, providing a platform for agriculture and commerce along the way. But there was no easy way to travel north to south, which is likely why one of China’s main historical divisions has always been between the northern areas, centered on the Yellow River, and the southern ones, centered on the Yangtze. There have long been significant economic, cultural, and geographic differences between the regions.
The 18th-century Kangxi Emperor even thought that people in the two regions were built differently:
The people of the North are strong; they must not copy the fancy diets of the Southerners, who are physically frail, live in a different environment, and have different stomachs and bowels.
For many emperors, especially those who tried to unify China after periods of disunity, bridging the divide between the north and the south was incredibly important (since most political power originated in the north, this often involved northerners finding ways to pacify southerners). This was the problem that faced the emperors of the Sui Dynasty, who unified the two halves of China in the late 500s CE after four centuries of division. They decided to do this by building what nature had not: a waterway connecting the north and the south.
The traditional story of the project, told in various histories of the short-lived Sui period, is that the canal was valuable but costly. The two emperors of the dynasty, Wen and Yang, conscripted millions of laborers to excavate the waterway. It was brutal work, as peasants dug and hauled immense amounts of mud along hundreds of miles of the canal’s route. Many, perhaps millions, of the workers died from landslides, accidents, and simple exhaustion. When they finished, it was finally possible to travel by water — almost always much cheaper and faster than travel on land — between China’s major river systems:
Emperor Yang celebrated the completion of the canal project by traveling on giant dragon boats up and down his new creation. But, according to the sources, Yang and his father had asked too much of the Chinese people; the cruelty of the canal project (and a big war against kingdoms to the north, made possible by the canal spur that stretched north of the Yellow River) led Yang to lose the Mandate of Heaven. The Sui Dynasty crumbled under a barrage of rebellions.
China reunified fairly quickly, and for almost all of its subsequent history it remained a unified empire. It’s easy to conclude that the prosperity that followed in the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing Dynasties owed something to the building, maintenance, and expansion of the Grand Canal, which connected the politically powerful parts of the north with the abundant resources of the south.
The Grand Canal was a lot of things. It was, as its constructors intended, a tool of imperial control. This was the case for more than a millennium, as the emperors of the Qing Dynasty conducted imperial tours down the canal. Qianlong, the last great Chinese emperor, commemorated his tours by commissioning paintings on silk scrolls. Here’s the emperor’s mother being pulled in her barge down the canal:
These scrolls are meant to show China as an orderly, prosperous empire. Some of them center the canal as the organizing principle of cities like Suzhou, a conduit of trade and a placid centerpiece of Chinese life:
The canal’s straightness and predictability allowed cities to build right up to its edge:
Yet it was capacious enough to accommodate big ships:
Part of the purpose of the imperial tours was to allow emperors to survey the canal’s condition. Managing the waterway was one of their top priorities. The flow of food from China’s agricultural land, and therefore the prosperity of the empire and the survival of the regime, depended on keeping the canal flowing.
This meant that the government employed countless engineers to manage the dikes, levees, spillways, and locks on which the canal depended. It also employed mapmakers to visualize the system. This map, dating to Qianlong’s reign in the 1700s, traces the canal from Beijing to the Yangtze River. We begin near the Forbidden City:
We see forts, bridges, towns, and landmarks:
Until, at the end, the canal merges with the river:
The canal also captivated the imagination of foreigners, who, like this German artist, imagined the commerce that took place there:
And emphasized the significance of the canal over the rivers themselves, as in the Dutch map from the 1650s:
Even after the floods of the 19th century damaged the canal and growing chaos in China — from the deadly Taiping Rebellion to colonial incursions to political upheaval — made it difficult for the government to maintain it, there were efforts to map and preserve the canal. This late 19th-century map of the canal’s route through Shandong makes it seem as if everything is still going well:
And there are lots of lovely photos from the early 1900s of fishermen trying their luck near Beijing:
In this case, they’re using trained cormorants — who would catch the fish and then be forced to spit them out! — to catch fish in the canal.
But the canal was no longer the country’s commercial superhighway; there were railroads for that, or seagoing ships. And besides, the country fell apart in the first half of the 20th century. There was often no government capable of maintaining it. It was, as this early 20th-century photo says, effectively the end of the world-famous Grand Canal:
Though parts of the Grand Canal, especially in the south, did become useful again in the Communist era, the waterway no longer held the country together politically and economically as it once did.
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