The Buildings are generally lofty and beautiful eſpecially on the Grand Canal, over which the Bridge called Rialto exceeds all the reſt, is built of white Marble, and conſiſts of one Arch 95 foot long and 24 high.

Until the early 1990s, crews on barges and boats chugging down China’s 2,400-year-old Grand Canal did not need familiar landmarks to tell them they were approaching the scenic city of Hangzhou.
They could smell it.
“The water was black,” said Zhu Jianbai, assistant director of the city government’s Grand Canal Restoration and Development Group. “There was no life in it. If you lived beside it, you had to live with the stink.”[…]
The Duke of Wu began work on what became the Grand Canal in 486 B.C., but it was not until the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan moved the capital to Beijing and straightened the canal that it became a direct north-south waterway.[…]
The wood used in building the Ming tombs on the outskirts of Beijing was transported down the Yangtze River from Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and then up the Grand Canal to the capital.

The Grand Canal, in Chinese Yun-ho, or ‘the Transit river,’ is of much more importance to the inland trade than either of the two great rivers of China.

Now the group of forty graduates were put to work as a partial solution to the shortage,¹³ and he went ahead with the establishment of a surveying bureau at Ch’ing-chiang-p’u, where the Grand Canal crosses the former course of the Yellow River.

Couriers rode on donkeys or mules and usually covered part of the distance—between Yangchow and Chinkiang, and when the wind was favorable also between Yangchow and Ch’ing-chiang-p’u—by boat on the Grand Canal.

Jining is the most important transit hub between China’s northern and southern cultures as it sits in the middle of the significant Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.

Grand canal

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