Chinese major rivers, such as Yellow River and Yangtze River, all flow from west to east into the ocean. But there is a river which joins up the north and the south. It is man-dug waterway. know as the famous Grand Canal.

From 605 to 610, in order to strengthen his control of the country and to transport the materials more accessibly from the area south of Yangtze River to the north, Emperor Yangdi of Sui Dynasty gathered several million workers to construct this Grand Canal. It took them abou six years to complete. Some sections were the former canals which workers only repaired, broadened and deepened them, and some natural rivers and lakes were also included in the project.

Grand Canal went throughtout the country and took Luoyang as its center. It was originally some 2,000 km long, and the width of the canal surface was from 30 to 70 m. The canal reached Zhuojun county (in today's Beijing) in the north, and extended to Yuhang (today's Hangzhou) in the south. It was connected to big rivers like Haihe River, Yellow River, Huaihe River, Yangtze River and Qiantang River. The canal flows through today's Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang province. Therefore, it is one of the greatest projects in Chinese history.

The opening of Grand Canal helped to transport grains and materials from south to north continuously and thus played a very important role in promoting the economic and cultural development of the whole country and in maintaining political unity.

In Yuan Dynasty, on the model of the old Grand Canal, people dug Shandong Canal and Tonghui River, which extended from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south and became the main north-south communication waterway in China.

Today, China is planning to restore Grand Canal, not only for the convenience of transportation between the north and the south, but also to transfer water from the south to the north to solve the problem of water shortage in the north.