Five thousand years ago, a society on the Yangtze delta built dams. The Liangzhu culture, which flourished around 3300 to 2300 BC in what is now Zhejiang province, built a huge water management system in the hills and plain northwest of modern Hangzhou, and UNESCO listed it in 2019 together with the ruins of the Liangzhu city. The system included high dams in the mountains, low dams on the plain and a network of canals and reservoirs, and it is among the oldest large-scale hydraulic engineering works known.
The low dams on the plain were made of layers of clay and grass bundles, and some are still visible as low ridges in the fields. They controlled floods, stored water and provided transport routes for boats. The scale is hard to grasp, because the system covers a wide area of paddy fields and low hills, but archaeologists have mapped it in detail. It came to light not long ago, in the early 2000s, and the dating shows that the engineering predates the first known Chinese dynasties by many centuries.
The landscape is gentle and green, a patchwork of rice fields, bamboo groves, tea terraces and small canals. The air is humid, and the climate is subtropical, with hot, wet summers and a rainy spring. The best time to ride is autumn, when the air is clear and the temperature mild. Roads are well surfaced, and traffic is heavy near Hangzhou, a city of more than six million people that sits about twenty kilometres away and has everything a traveller needs, including fuel.
Deqing, a smaller town to the north, is famous for Moganshan, a mountain resort with bamboo forests. As elsewhere in China, foreign riders face restrictions on riding a motorcycle, so check the rules in advance. If you are visiting, bring a hat and water, and give yourself time to walk the fields. The landscape is subtle, and you need to look carefully to see the humps and ridges that mark the old dams.