Foreward
With strong support from the Silk Road Cities Alliance, the Network of International Culturalink Entities and Tourism Departments of the eight provinces and cities along the Grand Canal, including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, China Cultural Centre and China National Tourist Office in Sydney are proudly to present the “Nihao！China” – 2024 Grand Canal Oversea Tourism Promotion Season.
The Grand Canal is the longest and oldest canal in the world. It runs across China’s main river basins from the south to the north, linking the Yellow River, the Huaihe River and the Yangtze River. With more than 2,000 years of development and evolution, the Grand Canal has played a significant role as the main transport artery between south and north China. On June 22th 2014, the Grand Canal was inscribed on the World Heritage List in the 38th annual session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and became the 46th China’s World Heritage Site. In July 2017, China issued a plan to establish the Grand Canal as a national culture park covering the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, the Sui-Tang Grand Canal and the Eastern Zhejiang Canal. By the end of April 2022, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal had water flowing through its entire 1,789-kilometre channel for the first time in about a century, marking a new chapter in its 2500 years of history. The full recovery of the canal shows that it will continue to play an essential role in water supply, transportation and shipping and become a veritable “golden waterway”.
Join us on this remarkable journey with the theme of “The Millennia – Old Canal Takes On A New Look”, and enjoy the beautiful cultural and tourism resources along the Grand Canal.
Photo Exhibition
Video Exhibition
Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal flows through the southwest of Shandong, and Nanwang area of Wenshang County is a commanding high point, which is commonly known as the water ridge. The canal water volume of Nanwang water ridge in the north is less than that in the south. In order to achieve the goal of diverting water from Wenhe river to the canal in Nanwang and replenishing water sources. In the early Ming Dynasty, Song Li and Bai Ying presided over the design and construction of the Nanwang Water Diversion Hub Project, the throat of the north-south water diversion for the canal of thousands of miles, and it is also the most technological project along the entire Grand Canal, allowing the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal to flow smoothly for over 500 years.
This video showcases the stunning scenery along the banks of the Grand Canal in Yangzhou through exquisite editing and a seamlessly integrated approach of “audio-visual harmony”.
The Grand Canal runs through the city with new scenic spots along the way. Nowadays, the Grand Canal has become a brilliant ecological calling card with great charm, the cultural symbol and commercial center of Yangzhou. The short video One Day on the Grand Canal combines the scenery along the Yangzhou canal with traditional intangible cultural heritage, presenting a panoramic view of the beautiful scenery and cultural heritage of the “12 scenes of the Grand Canal” in Yangzhou. The “one-day Grand Canal tour” integrates the intangible cultural heritage of Yangzhou with the 12 scenes, vividly presenting a panoramic view of the canal from the perspectives of “scenery, people and art”. Through the artistic forms of Yangzhou Pinghua (storytelling in local dialect) and Yangzhou Tanci (storytelling to the accompaniment of stringed instruments), the 12 scenes of the Grand Canal depict a new scroll of the Grand Canal Cultural Belt under high-quality construction with the “most traditional, essential, representative and dynamic” cultural spirit.
Liu Yingshun, the head of the Linqing Canal Culture Promotion Team in Liaocheng City, Shandong Province, has spent the last 16 years actively promoting the Grand Canal culture by creating the “Linqing Alley Tour” program and never wavered from his original beliefs. He organized more than 150 special “alley tours”, received over 200,000 domestic and international tourists, and held over 60 lectures on the Grand Canal culture. The book “Linqing Alley Culture” compiled by him, has become an important reference book for research on Chinese canal history, commercial circulation history in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the history of canal transport.
