The Grand Canal in Hangzhou: Gongchen Bridge and the Southern End

How the canal reached Hangzhou

Waterways across the Taihu plain are older than the empire: the state of Wu dug canals around its capital at Suzhou in the first millennium BC, and the Qin built a water route on to Qiantang, as Hangzhou was then called. The decisive work came in the winter of 610, when the Sui emperor ordered the Jiangnan Canal cut and widened from Jingkou, today's Zhenjiang on the Yangtze, to Hangzhou — according to the chronicles more than 800 li long and over ten zhang wide, so that dragon boats could pass, with relay palaces along the way.

Today the Jiangnan Canal runs about 330 km from Zhenjiang through Changzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou and Jiaxing to Hangzhou; south of Pingwang it splits into three routes, one of them a direct cut to Hangzhou dug at the end of the Yuan dynasty. Local people long called it the guantang, the "official canal". The whole Grand Canal nominally runs about 1,794 km between Beijing and Hangzhou, although only the stretch from Hangzhou north to Liangshan in Shandong is still navigable.

At Hangzhou the Grand Canal met the Qiantang River and, across it, the Eastern Zhejiang Canal to Shaoxing and Ningbo, whose western end, the Xixing Canal, was dug around 300. In 2014 the Grand Canal, with the Eastern Zhejiang Canal as part of it, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site.

Gongchen Bridge

Gongchen Bridge in Gongshu district is the largest surviving stone arch bridge in urban Hangzhou and the landmark of the canal's southern end. It was first built in 1631, late in the Ming dynasty, and rebuilt in 1885. Its three arches on thin piers carry a deck 92.1 m long and 5.9 m wide, with the central arch 9.2 m high; plain stone balustrades with lotus-topped posts line both sides. Chen means the imperial palace, and the name — "arching towards the palace" — salutes the emperors who came south along the canal.

The bridge was named a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level in 2013. Cargo barges and tour boats still pass under it; the nearest metro station is Gongchen Bridge East.

Treaty port and mill district

When Hangzhou opened to foreign trade in 1896 under the treaty that ended the First Sino-Japanese War, its trading area and a Japanese concession were laid out by Gongchen Bridge. The same years brought a large cotton mill and a silk-reeling factory to the northern suburbs, and from the late 1950s Gongchen Bridge became one of the city's light-industry and textile districts.

That working past is why several of Hangzhou's declared historic buildings by the canal are warehouses: National Warehouse of Silk, Architecture of Qiaoxi Warehouse of Hangzhou Specialties Co, Ltd, Architectural complex of Xiaohe Oil Warehouse of Hangzhou Petroleum Company, Zhejiang.

Xixing: where cargo crossed the river

Across the Qiantang, Xixing in today's Binjiang district sits at the western end of the Eastern Zhejiang Canal, where goods and travellers crossed between the river and the canal. From the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty (1573–1620), transfer firms called guotanghang grew up there to handle the crossing. The old streets there keep a row of late-Qing buildings on the historic buildings list, among them Building at 112, Guanhe Road, Buildings at 102,103, and 104, Guanhe Road, Buildings at 105, 106 and 107, Guanhe Road on Guanhe Road — the "official river" road.