Huai'an was a city made by water, and the water was money. Where the Grand Canal met the Huai river, and for centuries the Yellow River as well, the city stood at the most delicate junction on the whole waterway, a knot of channels, locks and dykes that controlled the flow of grain from the south to Beijing. The government posted an official here to supervise it, the Governor-General of Grain Transport, and the site of his headquarters, the Caoyun mansion, preserves the remains of that bureaucracy. It lies in the old Qingjiangpu district, and it belongs to the Grand Canal's UNESCO listing, which came in 2014.
What the governor managed was a vast system. Tens of thousands of boatmen, soldiers and clerks worked to move millions of piculs of tribute grain up the canal each year, and the ships waited in queues at the locks at Qingkou, where the canal crossed the river. Repairs were endless, since the Yellow River silted up the channels and flooded the plain, and the court spent huge sums on dykes. The scale of the effort tells you something about the empire: the capital's survival depended on a single, fragile ditch.
The city has produced famous people. The novelist Wu Cheng'en, who wrote Journey to the West, was born here in the sixteenth century, and Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic, was brought up in Huai'an, and his old home is a museum. The local cooking is a branch of the Huaiyang tradition, delicate and sweet, with a reputation for freshwater fish and river eel, served in elaborate banquets of many courses.
The surrounding country is flat, wet farmland, with rice paddies, fish ponds and the huge Hongze Lake to the west. Roads follow the canal and cross it on bridges, with trucks, scooters and agricultural vehicles sharing them, and the air in summer is hot and heavy. Visitors who want to ride in China should check the rules on licences and registration, which are strict. Huai'an is a city of more than half a million people, so fuel, hotels and food are easy, and the canal in the evening, with its lights and its slow barges, is worth a walk. Spring and autumn are the best seasons.