The Grand Canal is the world's longest artificial waterway, and in Shandong, near Yanggu, you can still see why it was a fiendish piece of engineering. The Huitong Canal was dug in the Yuan dynasty, at the end of the thirteenth century, to link the Yellow River region with the Wei River and carry grain north to the capital at Beijing, and it crossed ground that rises and falls, so that boats had to be lifted by locks over a high ridge. The Ming dynasty reopened and improved it in the early fifteenth century, after the canal silted up, with the engineer Song Li often credited with the repair.
What survives here is a stretch of the old channel, with earth embankments, remnants of locks and the sites of landing places where boats loaded and unloaded. The canal formed part of the UNESCO listing of the Grand Canal in 2014. It is not a showy monument: you will see a long ditch, now partly dry, among fields of wheat and maize, with village roads running alongside. The interest lies in imagining the traffic of grain barges, official boats and merchants that once passed this way, and the labourers who kept the channel clear.
Riding here means flat, straight roads across the North China Plain, where the horizon is wide and the skies are often hazy. The roads are generally paved and busy with trucks and farm vehicles, and the villages are modest. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons, with summer hot, humid and stormy, and winter cold and dry. Early mornings are the best time for clear light. Foreigners riding motorcycles in mainland China need to check licensing and permit rules carefully before travel.
Yanggu is a county town of about seventy-five thousand people, twenty-odd kilometres away, and has fuel stations, restaurants and simple hotels. Try the local wheat-based foods, such as steamed buns, noodles and flatbreads, which are staples of Shandong cooking. Carry water, and expect little signposting in English at the site, so a map or translation app helps.