Zhenjiang

The Grand Canal became critical to the domestic trade between North China and the increasingly prosperous central and Jiangnan regions in the south.

The city of Yangzhou, with Nanjing to the southwest and Huai'an to the north, located on the north bank of the Yangtze, with Zhenjiang on the south bank, was perhaps the most important city in all of China.

It was one of the, if not the, greatest hub of domestic commerce.

In 616, Yang Di will abandon his costly and magnificent capital in Luoyang and spend the rest of his life in Yangzhou, or Jiangdu as he named it.

Two of the other six were already gone.

The copies at Zhenjiang and at Yangzhou had burned in 1853, as part of the Taiping Rebellion, in the year Hong Xiuquan's forces took Nanjing.

A third, at Hangzhou, still had a year left before the fires found it.

What was to become of the copy in the Oneyuan Ge happened that October 18th.

Elgin pressed on to Hanko and the middle Yangtze, and what the crews actually taught him was not any sense of commercial promise, but the sheer scale of the ruin.

At Zhenjiang, retaken from the rebels a year before, he found a city of what had once been 300,000 reduced to just a few hundred people scratching through the rubble, and noted grimly that with simple differences of degree, that was effectively the condition of every city he visited up and down the river.

A devastation, he reported, far beyond anything Shanghai had led him to believe.

He also confessed, in dispatches, what the whole voyage implied.