THE Grand Canal carried riches from the southern "land of fish and rice" to the strategically and politically important north. Railroads made it obsolete. Yao Minji visits puddles and preserved relics.

A dirt road gets narrower and twists as we follow two small waterways in suburban Tianjin Municipality. The winding road runs between the two waterways until the right stream makes a big U-turn and merges with the left one.

This remote spot in Wuqing District doesn't have a name. It's more than 10 minutes' drive from the closest village. There's almost no traces of modern life - no houses, no structures, no paved roads, no planted greenery.

The road is just wide enough for one passenger car. Wild grasses, bushes and flowers grow along the earthen banks.

This is a remnant of the Grand Canal of China, which once covered 3,200 kilometers in a vast network. It included the best-known section, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal from Beijing via Tianjin to Hangzhou.

It took food, mainly rice, from water-rich southern China to the strategically and militarily - but parched - north and the capital of Beijing. The northern part of the canal uses spring water from the Baifu Mountains in suburban Beijing and a genius of engineering channeled all the springs, ponds, rivers and streams into the Tonghui River that feeds Beijing.

Brilliant engineering and hydrology made the northern canals possible, and they were worshipped by farmers in parched areas, but the greatest enemy was silt, which eventually won - with the help of railroads.

Here in suburban Tianjin, a 20-minute train ride from Beijing (it once took at least half a month by canal), we are traveling along a small section of two shallow, parallel canals, only 5-10 meters wide at the narrowest, and around 15 meters at the widest.

The dirt road follows the central banked-earth divider, where once horses, oxen and sometimes men towed the barges. And rice was spread out to dry. The canals themselves were made of packed earth. They still flow with fresh water.

"The ancient canal back then probably looked just like this, except that there were loaded barges, and today this is no longer in use," says Chen Xiaozhong, urban planner from Tianjin University's Research Institute of Architectural Design and Urban Planning.

Chen and his colleagues are in charge of planning and designing the canal's Tianjin waterways in the context of a bid next February for UNESCO World Heritage Site recognition. Tianjin and 34 other cities are making the complicated proposal.

As Chen points out elements of the primitive canal, and we try to imagine the bustling traffic long ago, an elevated track in the background catches our attention. It's the only indiction of modern life in this desolate spot.

"Is that a railway?" I asks.

The rushing, clacking sound of a train answers. As it approaches, I see a freight train, first 10 tanker cars, then at least 40 open box cars, mostly carrying coal.

"The train is a major reason why cities like Tianjin in the north, unlike canal cities in the south, did not feel a major impact when the canal gradually stopped carrying barges," Chen explains. Many smaller canal towns died, starved of commerce, as the railway moved in.

"The railway is a big difference and key feature of canal cities in this area, mainly Tianjin and Beijing municipalities and Hebei Province," he says.

Jinpu Railway, which runs from Tianjin to Nanjing's Pukou, opened in 1912. It was one of the first railways in China. Many railway lines were built around the same time, mainly with English and German financing, to transport Chinese products and resources to the treaty ports and former concession areas. Many were then shipped on to Europe.

"Gradually, people transported products by rail and ocean shipping much more than by canal. That didn't influence local economic development too much. After all, products were still being transported, only by different methods," Chen adds.

People's lives didn't change much either, at least not in Lao Mi Dian Village, closest to the place where the two canals converge. Villagers here, mostly farmers, have lived the same way as their parents and grandparents.

"My parents were farmers. My grandparents were farmers too and now I'm a farmer," says 79-year-old Yang Lianhui. "You probably can't find anyone in the village who can remember when the canal was busy and prosperous. It hasn't been used for so long."

He remembers boats on the canal when he was a boy, but they carried villagers, rather than barges that passed more than 100 years ago.

"Some of the villagers' ancestors came by the canal - they may have been sailers on ships and barges from the south. They stayed on and their descendants became farmers," Yang says.

The village of Lao Mi Dian grew up along the canal, or rather between the two parallel canals. The village itself is narrow, consisting only of two rows of identical red-brick houses.

"It's been said that we used to have three rice shops in ancient times," villager and farmer Yang says.

This stretch of the canal is difficult to navigate since it makes a lot of turns and barges not infrequently crashed into the banks, spilling their cargo. Most barges carried rice, which had to be dug out from the river and dried along the banks.

The rice then had to be sold locally because it was no longer prime-quality rice wanted in Beijing, the capital. That was how the town originated and why it once had three rice shops. The name Lao Mi Dian means "shops selling old rice."

Just 40 minutes' drive from the village to Tianjin, we see abundant evidence of the canal. There's still a large downtown section of the inoperative canal, which is used only for sightseeing. Along the banks are old buildings from former European concessions.

"In the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, traders and workers from all over the country gathered here in Tianjin, because this was their last stop before heading to Beijing, the capital," says Zhu Yang, deputy head of Tianjin University's Architectural Design and Urban Planning Institute.

From Tianjin, the water level gets lower and the course gets narrower, so they had to change to smaller vessels.

The local Tianjin accent is not much like those of nearby northern cities, it's more like the accent from the northern part of Anhui Province, famous for its merchants in the Qing Dynasty. "The logical speculation is that many Anhui merchants went to Tianjin to do business and relocated. Their descendants stayed on," Zhu says.

Old architectural styles from Anhui and other southern cities can be found in Tianjin, where the northern style predominated. Some streets near the downtown canal area still bear the original names, such as Guyi Jie, meaning a street where clothes are sold, Guogai Jie, a street where pots are sold, and Zhugan Xiang, a lane where bamboo products are made and sold.

Now they are ordinary streets with residential neighborhoods and shops. In the past, they were the places where clothing, utensils and other supplies were sold to bargemen and sailor on the canal. "And such a southern product as bamboo must also have come through the canal to northern cities like Tianjin," Zhu says.

There are similar streets in many canal cities and towns in the area.

Today's canal

The streams in many suburban areas in Tianjin, Cangzhou and Beijing are similar to those at Lao Mi Dian.

In Tianjin, the canal banks have been cleared and landscaped, the channels have been dredged of silt and the water has been treated for pollution since the late 1990s. Now water from Shandong Province flows through the canals.

Other than that, most suburban canal streams are untouched, as in other cities in the area. The streams are shallow, narrow and some have even dried up. Before I left on my northern canal tour, I had heard that much of the canal territory was desolate.

The canal to the north of Jining city in Shandong Province is no longer in use. In some places it has been deserted for as long as 100 years, since the first railways were built.

But the situation is entirely different in downtown Cangzhou, around an hour's train ride from Tianjin.

In the evening, water rushes down from a modern cement bridge into the canal and sparkles in different colors as it is caught by neon lights on the bridge. Lighting is installed along the banks, stone walkways have been built and benches, have been installed so visitors can watch the water and changing lights. Trees and greenery have been planted.

A few five-story residential buildings rise near the canal bank. They are decorated with colored lights in the shape of Chinese junks.

This is far from the dry, deserted water course that I had expected.

"The canal has become an important part of urban planning. Gates at the border of the city are closed to maintain the water level in the channel flowing through the city," Zheng Zhili, an archeologist and canal expert from Cangzhou Bureau of Cultural Heritage, tells Shanghai Daily.

It is the same in Tianjin and Beijing, where the local government has closed sluice gates to maintain the canal as a sightseeing downtown attraction. Unlike the busy southern canals, the northern ones are for tourism only.

Of late, experts have been debating whether these canals should be fully restored and put back into cargo operation. This would involve massive renovation and a huge engineering task. No decision has been reached. Some experts say it's necessary to bring back the past glory of the canal and help people appreciate its historical, cultural and archeological value. Others disagree.

"Times have changed. We are not in the past when the canal was the most affordable and efficient and sometimes, in some places, the only transport method. So its function ought to be transformed as well," says one archeologist and canal expert in the north, speaking on condition of anonymity because he isn't involved in the decision.

Human wisdom

"It is a very long canal, so it doesn't have to be the same everywhere," he tells Shanghai Daily. "In the south, they have the demand and they have sufficient water, so they can still use it as in the past. In dry places like ours, putting it into use again is simply not meaningful. Changing its function to sightseeing doesn't make it less valuable as a national treasure, as long as the renovation is not overdone."

The canal that flows past Lao Mi Dian and stretches all the way to the uninhabited spot where the two canals merge is typical of northern canals - shallower, narrower and more twisting. In the old times, journeying north on the canal, sailors had to change barges and vessels in Tianjin. The big barges and ships with a deep draft that began their journey in southern China could proceed no further in the dry north.

In other areas, the water has dried up and in places even the original canal banks and bed, usually packed earth and sometimes stone, are buried and buildings rise where barges once traveled.

The Tongxian County in suburban Beijing was once the last stop where grain carried all the way from south to feed the capital was unloaded in five categories of wharfs, one for the imperial family. Zhou Liang, a local county canal expert, guides the way to an old stone bridge, dating back at least 500 years. Only a few carvings on the bridge are original, the others were made to look old.

The canal itself is no longer visible, there are only small ponds of water here and there. The arches of the bridge are so close to the bottom of the water course that it seems unlikely that small cargo vessels could ever have passed under the bridge.

"The bottom used to be much lower, but now it's all built up by silt. That's a major problem of the canals in the north and a major reason behind dried-up rivers," Zhou says.

According to him, plans to recreate an old-time canal town in Tongxian are being considered.

Not long ago Zhou told people that there was probably a ship under all that silt. He inquired about protecting the area so that archeologists could excavate. There were no protection funds but word about buried treasure got out, and local residents got to work, digging up the whole area and retrieving pottery, porcelain and relics. When I was there, a large area had been dug up.

"The geographical and hydraulic difficulties in the north made it very difficult and different from the southern places since the very beginning. The history of the canal in this region is the history of human wisdom, of how ancient engineers and officials solved geographical and hydraulic difficulties," Zhou says.

The comprehensive water system from Shandong Province to Beijing was first completed in the Yuan Dynasty (1270-1368), when the city first became the capital.

Before that, numerous smaller regional canals had been built from as early as the late Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220), when famous warlord Cao Cao (AD 155-220) ordered construction of two regional canals to facilitate his attack on rival tribes in the area.

Redesigned

Over the next few centuries rulers built more canals. When Emperor Yang (AD 569-618) of the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618) committed a great portion of the empire's labor and money into building supply lines to his capital Luoyang (in today's Henan Province), slightly to the west and in the canal's middle, he extended both the southern and northern water systems.

When Yuan Dynasty emperors established Beijing as the capital, it was no longer necessary to go westward to Luoyang before heading north to Beijing and the northern part of the canal became very important. Officials and hydraulic engineers redesigned the canal dramatically make it shorter and save time. That basic system and route hadn't changed much since then, except for regional expansions here and there.

Since then, all succeeding dynasties invested heavily in the canal system to ensure the food lifeline for the capital.

The major problems, which still exist today, include complex geographic formations, lack of water sources, and the Yellow River that's laden with silt, hence the name Yellow River.

Overall, water flows east to west in China, but emperors demanded the south-north transport from the affluent and fertile south to the politically and militarily important - but much drier - north. In some places, engineers had to invent and construct locks and canals so that vessels could travel from low elevation to higher elevation.

Over the centuries, silt was a major and costly problem since its build-up impeded river traffic. Keeping the canal clear, filtering and removing silt were huge tasks.

"The canal in this area is not in use today, and it was rarely in full use back then, not even in the Ming or Qing Dynasty, when the capacity and importance of the grand canal as a whole reached its peak," Zhao Fusheng, a canal expert from the Beijing Cultural Heritage Research Institute, points out.

"All the grain was carried by the grand canal from the south, but by the time it got to northern areas (past Shandong Province), half the time it was transported by road because canal travel was so difficult to manage," he says.

When rail transport became possible, the government gradually stopped maintaining the northern canals. And when foreign troops forced late Qing emperors to wave the edict barring private seagoing vessels, the canal in this region was soon left behind.

"But in the old times, it was not only used for transport but also for irrigation, so the engineers who brought canal water to the dry north were worshipped by locals," Zhao adds.

Guo Shoujing (1231-1316), an ancient engineer and astronomer, is best known for creating an accurate calendar as early as 1280. But the temple commemorating him in Beijing depicts him as the hero who found the source of water for the whole city.

Guo designed the route to channel spring water from the Baifu Mountains in Beijing's Changping District and to connect all surrounding springs and streams at different levels into one Tonghui River, flowing from Beijing's Tong County into the city, to ensure water and transport for the capital.