Grand Canal

67.

700 miles is said to be the length of the Great Canal in China.

Certain it is that, when this canal was formed, no allowance was made for curvature, yet the canal is a fact without it.

This is a Chinese proof that the earth is not a globe.

The land tax that made up four-fifths of imperial revenue had been gutted by rebellion, both the Taiping and others.

The Grand Canal had been cut, the state salt monopoly disrupted, and its mines lost.

There was, in the whole broken fiscal machine, just one revenue stream left capable of even servicing this new debt.

and it was the Customs Duties on Foreign Trade at Shanghai and Canton, collected by, that's right, the foreign-run inspectorates.

At one time they built a tower two hundred and fifty-six feet high entirely of porcelain.

Ages ago they dug the longest and in some respects the greatest canal ever dug on earth, the Grand Canal of China, which was a thousand miles long, and some of which is in use to this day.

They built the Great Wall of China, which was fifteen hundred miles in length and which was a greater undertaking than the building of the pyramids of Egypt.

The Chinese were the first people to coin money in a mint, the first to have a standard of weights and measures, the first to have a system of marking time.

So the Yongle emperor, as well as these voyages, he had decided to move the entire imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing and to build a whole new imperial city.

He wants to reinstate the Grand Canal, which rebuilds the economy of China, which is a huge, huge, huge civil engineering project.

There is the whole issue of kind of ongoing war with the Mongols.

The Mongols may have been driven out of China, but they certainly haven't gone away.

sent out ships, men and money.

She seized port after port, bombarded and took Canton, swept victoriously up the Yangtze, and by blocking the Grand Canal at Qingjiang, interrupted the procession of tribute junks sailing up the Peking, and thus cut off an important source of the Chinese imperial revenue.

This resulted in the Treaty of Nanking in 1843, which was negotiated by the British government by Sir Henry Pottinger.

Sir Henry, like commission, and Lin, had his orders.

China and the great Christian nations.

The influence of the Shanghai example on Shanghai is real and positive.

Geographically, Shanghai commands the trade of the Middle Coast, the immense Yangtze River and the Grand Canal.

Every night, a big river steamer leaves for Hankou and the intermediate river ports.

the ministers who govern for the boy now have a reason to keep the fleet.

The ministry's half of the pepper is paying salaries in Beijing and repairs on the Grand Canal, the 1,100-mile waterway that carries grain from the south up to the capital.

The officials who would have broken up the ships are now the ones spending the money.

So the fleet sails again every three years.

Then starting in 1291, Guo Shoujing returned to hydraulic engineering.

He proposed and then built the Grand Canal leading into Beijing, helping to bring grain into the capital in the less than agriculturally productive north.

In 1303, the Yuan emperor issued a decree saying that 70 would henceforth be the retirement age for all officials in the dynasty, with one exception.

Guo Shoujing, though 72 by now, was too important to retire.