Grand Canal
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Senses: examples: text: The Buildings are generally lofty and beautiful eſpecially on the Grand Canal, over which the Bridge called Rialto exceeds all the reſt, is built of white Marble, and conſiſts of one Arch 95 foot long and 24 high.
ref: 1721, John Senex, A New General Atlas, Containing A Geographical And Historical Account Of All The Empires, Kingdoms And Other Dominions Of The World, London, →OCLC, page 164:
text: Until the early 1990s, crews on barges and boats chugging down China’s 2,400-year-old Grand Canal did not need familiar landmarks to tell them they were approaching the scenic city of Hangzhou.
They could smell it.
“The water was black,” said Zhu Jianbai, assistant director of the city government’s Grand Canal Restoration and Development Group. “There was no life in it. If you lived beside it, you had to live with the stink.”[…]
The Duke of Wu began work on what became the Grand Canal in 486 B.C., but it was not until the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan moved the capital to Beijing and straightened the canal that it became a direct north-south waterway.[…]
The wood used in building the Ming tombs on the outskirts of Beijing was transported down the Yangtze River from Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and then up the Grand Canal to the capital.
ref: 2007 July 24, David Lague, “On an Ancient Canal, Grunge Gives Way to Grandeur”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 27 May 2015, Hangzhou Journal:
glosses: A channel (in Italianː Canal Grande) in Venice, Italy. It forms one of the major water-traffic corridors in the city.
examples: text: The Grand Canal, in Chinese Yun-ho, or ‘the Transit river,’ is of much more importance to the inland trade than either of the two great rivers of China.
ref: 1832 June, “Ta-tsing Wan-neen Yih-tung King-wei Yu-too,—"A general geographical map, with degrees of latitude and longitude, of the Empire of the Ta-tsing Dynasty—may it last for ever." By Le Ming-che Tsing-lae.”, in The Chinese Repository, volume I, number 2, Canton, →OCLC, pages 38–39:
text: Now the group of forty graduates were put to work as a partial solution to the shortage,¹³ and he went ahead with the establishment of a surveying bureau at Ch’ing-chiang-p’u, where the Grand Canal crosses the former course of the Yellow River.
ref: 1965, Samuel C. Chu, Reformer in Modern China, Chang Chien, 1853-1926, Columbia University Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 150:
text: Couriers rode on donkeys or mules and usually covered part of the distance—between Yangchow and Chinkiang, and when the wind was favorable also between Yangchow and Ch’ing-chiang-p’u—by boat on the Grand Canal.
ref: 1970, Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and its Modernization, 1860-1896, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 65:
text: The Grand Canal was completed in 608 A.D. during the reign of Sui Emperor Yangdi to connect the fertile rice paddies south of the Yangtze with the capital 1,800 km (1,100 miles) to the north.
ref: 2007 August 9, “China worries about how to protect Grand Canal”, in Reuters, archived from the original on 25 May 2024:
text: A Jiangsu chemical plant has been fined 20 million yuan (US$2.88 million) for dumping almost 2,700 tonnes of liquid acid waste into the Grand Canal, causing environmental damage “beyond measure”, according to a local court verdict that was published recently.
ref: 2017 January 4, Sidney Leng, “Dumping of untreated acid in Chinese canal highlights nation’s water pollution woes”, in South China Morning Post, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2017, China:
text: Jining is the most important transit hub between China’s northern and southern cultures as it sits in the middle of the significant Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.
ref: 2022 January 16 [2022 January 14], “Cultural and creative industries shine in Jining, a city rich in culture and history”, in Prodigy News, AP News, archived from the original on 30 May 2022:
glosses: Grand Canal (China)