Dragon Boats on Grand Canal: The Rule of Water

In the first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’re going to discuss how an inland waterway was the key to toppling one strong dynasty while underpinning the prosperity of the next in ancient China.

Transcript

Dragon Boats on Grand Canal: The Rule of Water

In the first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’re going to discuss how an inland waterway was the key to toppling one strong dynasty while underpinning the prosperity of the next in ancient China.

On November 13, the opening ceremony and main forum of the 2023 Beijing-Hangzhou Dialogue on the Grand Canal Cultural Belt and the Beijing Canal Culture Festival were held in Beijing. The event brought together guests from various sectors, including government, industry, academia, and research, both domestically and internationally. 

The event, themed “Inheriting Canal Culture, Empowering a Better Life,” was jointly organized by five parities including government agencies, China News Service and the World Historic and Cultural Canal Cities Cooperation Organization, the WCCO. It extended invitations to Tianjin and Hebei to collaboratively promote the co-construction and sharing of the Grand Canal Cultural Belt, aiming to create a joint initiative for the protection, inheritance, and utilization of the Grand Canal. 

Beijing Municipality regards the Grand Canal Cultural Belt as one of the iconic projects for the construction of the national cultural center. It is actively promoting the construction of a national cultural park, implementing 229 projects for the protection of cultural relics, restoring the flow of Baifu Spring, ensuring navigation in the Beijing-Hebei section, and exploring new experiences in the protection of linear heritage.

Currently, the Grand Canal is opening up a whole new way of life. People are jogging along the riverbank in the morning, having meals in ancient towns at noon, taking boat trips for night cruises in the evening, and camping in the Grand Canal Park on weekends.

Actually, since June 27, 2021, tourists have been able to take dragon-shaped boats to sail along the 40 kilometers of the waterway of the Beijing section of the Grand Canal in the city’s southeastern district of Tongzhou. And water transportation on the Grand Canal between Beijing and neighboring Hebei Province has been restored since 2022. 

We say “restored” because water transportation on the Grand Canal linking eight provinces and five major rivers lasted thousands of years before it was stopped by China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1901, some 120 years ago. The Qing planned to shift water transportation routes to the sea. 

Over the past decade, there have been rising voices and some action calling for the restoration of the whole Canal. In April, 2021, vessels loaded with coal transported from China’s northern coal mining regions bound for the south sailed from a Canal port in Jining along the east coast of Shandong Province. It turned out, the cost was 25 percent lower than the sea route. And in June of that year, the China Grand Canal Museum opened in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Also, the Grand Canal Museum in Tongzhou – one of Beijing’s 15 districts – will open at the end of this year presenting around 6000 antiques to the public. As you may recall, Beijing is the northern terminus of the Canal.

In ancient times, the Grand Canal played a much bigger role in providing tourism attractions and commodity transportation than today. More importantly, the Grand Canal witnessed and even underwrote the rise and fall of power and wealth of dynasties, cities and people in ancient China.  

The Grand Canal was the brain child of Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty about 1,400 years ago, but ironically, it was also in a city on the Grand Canal and largely because of the Canal that he lost his empire and his life.   

Yangzhou, in today’s Jiangsu Province, was called Jiangdu during the reign of Emperor Yang. In 616, the 12th year of his rule, Emperor Yang began his third trip along the Grand Canal to Jiangdu from the capital Luoyang in today’s Henan Province in Central China. He had governed the Yangzhou area for 10 years before he was appointed crown prince of the Sui. The beautiful and prosperous area had impressed him for a long time, but its political significance was more important. 

When the Sui was founded in the late 6th century, areas to the south of the Yangtze River had begun to outshine the north economically. In addition, Confucianism and Buddhism had very strong influence in the south. By contrast, the north had been dominated by ethnic regimes for hundreds of years, which allowed divisions and chaos to run rampant until the Sui once again united China. Scholars and former officials of the kingdoms in the conquered southern regions despised the Sui, who were from the north. As you might imagine, there was a great deal of resistance against the Sui in the south, but Emperor Yang intended to win the hearts of the public with his frequent visits there and by showing them that the Sui followed orthodox Confucianism, respected Buddhism, and truly valued the region.

But it was not a good time to embark on his third trip. The Sui Dynasty was in crisis. Rebellions among the population and even between his generals flared up one after another. Some of the emperor’s more savvy advisors strongly opposed the trip and advised him to stay in the capital to deal with the ongoing crisis. 

But the emperor wouldn’t hear of it, and as he had done twice before, he turned the 1,000-kilometer voyage into a spectacle of pomp and ceremony. A fleet of several thousand ships carried his officials, concubines, and servants. The biggest was his dragon-shaped ship with 120 rooms. It was described as a dragon boat that looked and functioned like a palace on the water. 

Now, keep in mind, that in ancient times, barges were usually hauled by people as the wind was not strong enough on canals to deploy sails. And in this case, more than 80,000 people hauled Emperor Yang’s giant fleet with at least 100,000 passengers on board. The emperor ordered that wherever his ships docked, people had to supply food for his fleet. And reportedly, tons of food were wasted. 

The reason Emperor Yang made the trip when his dynasty was in crisis is still subject to debate, but the result was clear. He never returned to the capital Luoyang, which is located in today’s Henan Province. One year later, his cousin Li Yuan declared his support for the emperor’s 13-year-old grandson to be installed as the new emperor. In 618, the emperor himself was hanged by order of one of his senior generals, Yuwen Huaji, in a palace coup in Jiangdu city. When Li Yuan heard about the emperor’s death, he forced the child emperor to abdicate the throne to him. The Sui only lasted 36 years, after which it gave way to the Tang.  

Emperor Yang is notorious for the cruelty of his rule. He is regarded as one of the two most brutal monarchs in ancient China. The other is Emperor Shihuang of the Qin, China’s first imperial dynasty. Both the Qin and Sui only lasted for two generations of emperors. Yang was the regal title given to Emperor Yang by his cousin Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang. It was a tradition that a new emperor gave a regal title to his predecessor, and the name Yang has since been applied to brutal, immoral rulers. 

But a fairer comment on Emperor Yang comes from a poem written by Pi Rixiu, a Tang poet in the 9th century. The poem says that while the fall of the Sui had long been attributed to the construction of the Grand Canal, the waterway still provided the most important transportation means for the new dynasty. If Emperor Yang had not abused his power and wealth during and after building the Canal – around 2,000 kilometers of which existed at that time – his achievement would have been recognized as much as Yu the Great. If you recall, Yu the Great is a legendary leader from prehistoric times said to have controlled the floods sweeping through China and founded China’s first kingdom the Xia more than 4,000 years ago. Pi’s poem recognized the contribution of the Grand Canal as a lifeline for the country.

Just eight months after he took power, Emperor Yang ordered the Grand Canal built. His father and predecessor Emperor Wen had united China, ending nearly 400 years of division and social unrest. He achieved this with the support of powerful political families in the northwest and set up the capital in Chang’an, which is today’s Xi’an in Shaanxi Province. Those families continued their influence in the new dynasty and Emperor Yang wanted to build another political center far away from them. So, he ordered the building of a new capital in Luoyang, located in the center of the empire and which had served as the capital many times before. He officially adopted the imperial examination system, started by his father, which selected civil servants from ordinary people to reduce the power of the entrenched political forces in the old capital Chang’an. The system lasted for more than 1,000 years. 

While the political center was still in the north, the economic and cultural power were more in the south. Emperor Yang saw the necessity of linking the north and south to complete the economic and cultural unity of the empire. Water transportation was the most efficient way of connecting regions in ancient times. And as China’s major rivers flow from west to east, a waterway connecting the north and the south was needed. 

But Emperor Yang used a very cruel policy to do this. It took only six years to build a canal of more than 2,000 kilometers linking the two major cradles of China’s civilization, the Yellow River in the north and the Yangtze River in the south. Nearly 5.5 million people, including nearly 1.8 million women, children, and old people, were forced to work on the project amid very poor conditions. About half of them fled or died by the time it was completed. On top of the tremendous hardship, his extravagant canal trips engendered deep grievances among the general population. He also ordered the Great Wall rebuilt and waged wars against Korea. Each of his ambitious projects took a toll of hundreds of thousands of lives. Plus, numerous lives were lost in the wars among different factions competing to replace the Sui in the last years of his rule.  

Li Shimin, the second emperor of the Tang who founded a golden age in China’s history, repeatedly reminded himself of the lessons he learned from the fall of the Sui. He liked to cite Confucius who compared water to the people and boats to sovereigns: “The same water can either support or overturn a boat floating on it,” as the saying goes.  

The history of the Grand Canal started much earlier and lasted much longer than the rule of Emperor Yang. But what happened to it before and after him? To find out, catch our next podcast when we’ll present part two of our feature celebrating the Grand Canal. 

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Song Yimin, translator Li Jia, and copy editor Kathleen Naday. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.