The problem the canal solved
By 219 BC the first Qin emperor had taken most of China and was stuck at the southern frontier, because an army of that size cannot be supplied over mountains by porters. The two river systems it needed were almost touching and facing the wrong way. The Xiang flows north to the Yangtze; the Li, forty kilometres away at this point, flows south to the Pearl River delta. The emperor ordered a canal cut between them, and his commissioner Lu - Shi Lu in the histories - finished it in 214 BC. The same year, the south came under Qin control.
The result was a navigable route from the Yangtze basin into the Pearl River basin, and it stayed the main artery between central China and the far south for more than a thousand years. In the Han it became the earliest hub linking China's maritime silk route to the interior.
Morning - the splitter
The engineering is all at the head of the canal, and it is worth a slow hour. A spur wall shaped like a ploughshare - the Hua Zui - points upstream into the Xiang and splits the current. Behind it two low dykes, a long one on the north side and a shorter one on the south, run diagonally away from it to form a shallow inverted V. Three parts of the flow are led south into the canal and seven parts are led north back into the old channel of the Xiang. Because the dykes are lower than the river banks, the arrangement is self-regulating in both directions: in the dry season all the water goes into the channels, and in flood the river simply spills over the dykes into its own old bed, which protects the canal from being destroyed.
The canal itself is shallow, narrow, twisting and fast, so the builders could not rely on depth to float a boat through it. Instead they put in weirs with wooden gates, one after another, and worked the boat up or down between them - the same principle as a modern pound lock, and the earliest such structures known anywhere. This is why the Lingqu is described as the world's first lock canal and its gates as the world's earliest ship locks; the city likes to call it the father of the ship lock. It is also the first canal anywhere built over a mountain watershed.
Lunch
Lunch in Xing'an, near the canal head.
Afternoon - down the south canal
We walk and drive the first stretch of the southern canal, where the Qin embankment runs between the water and the fields, and where the old stones, the small bridges, the pavilions and the inscriptions that grew up around the canal over two thousand years are still in place. The canal is 36.4 kilometres long in total, and it is still doing its job: it irrigates more than sixty thousand mu of farmland on both banks and puts more than a hundred million cubic metres a year into the Li through the south channel, which is why it is described as a living heritage rather than a monument. About an hour of the afternoon is given to the Four Sages' Hall and the inscriptions, and about an hour to the water itself.
The designation, and what is still to come
The Lingqu was listed as a national key cultural relic in 1988, as a national 4A scenic area in 2006, as a national water park in 2017, and in August 2018 - at the 69th international executive council of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage - it was inscribed on the World Heritage Irrigation Structures list, the first such site in Guangxi. It has twice been on China's tentative list for world cultural heritage. In October 2023, Guilin was awarded the hosting of the 2026 World Canal Conference.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
