In the north of Shanghai lies the old town of Jiading, which was incorporated into the mega-metropolis in 1994. You can reach this place from the center of Shanghai in about 50 minutes with the metro line 11 to the terminus North Jiading. From there the path leads through a fairly tidy small town until after about 1-2 kilometers you reach the center of the old Jiading.
Old Chinese cities are often designed in a circular manner, but the actual remaining core, in which you can stay as a tourist in Jiading today, is quite small. There are tons of restaurants and shops, a pagoda and the oldest Confucius temple south of the Yangtze from 1219. It houses the Museum of the Chinese Official Examination in Shanghai. There is also the "Garden of Autumn Clouds" nearby.
At every excursion destination in this part of China, there are hawthorn berries coated with sugar icing on wooden skewers. They taste sour and sweet at the same time, every Chinese child knows them and I like them very much too. In Chinese they are called Tang Hu Lu. At the very bottom of the glass case, also coated with sugar, are whitberries, another typical delicacy that is also offered wherever the Chinese like to go on excursions. I have never seen hawthorn berries or whitebeams as edible in Germany.
Bridges and canals shape not only the small historical center of Jiading, but also many of the old towns south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze. Larger than Jiading is the city of Suzhou, about an hour away by train, which is better known and popular with tourists. Felix and I were there three years ago.
Canals in China
Jiading and Suzhou aren't the only cities with these tiny canals and pretty bridges. There are quite a few of them in the entire area south of the Yangtze River Delta. To this day, they shape the perception of ancient China among Europeans. But these villages do not exist in all of China, only in this region, which centuries ago was a flourishing agricultural and economic area. China's silk production is located in Suzhou and its surrounding area and these goods were brought via the canals to the major ports, from where they came to Europe, where they were sold as luxury products and thus made China rich. The town of Wuzhen Xizha, about 120 kilometers southwest of Shanghai between Suzhou and Hangzhou, and the town of Xitang, about 140 kilometers south of Shanghai, which is crossed by nine canals and has 104 bridges, is particularly popular with today's visitors and day trippers. Transportation of goods by water was also common in Europe. In Europe, the cities of Holland and Friesland are comparable to China's small towns in the hinterland of the south-east coast. There, too, many places have developed in the hinterland of the coast that are connected by canals and whose city centers are criss-crossed by canals, which also led to similar bridge shapes.
In Europe, the importance of the canals was replaced by the railroad, while industrialization failed to materialize in China. The canal system was used until the 19th century when China saw its fall through Europe. The Kaiserkanal or "The Great Canal" One canal dominates everything in its importance: The Imperial Canal or "the Great Canal" as the Chinese call it, a waterway that stretches from the city of Hangzhou south of Suzhou to Beijing.
Superlatives are the order of the day in China, making this canal the oldest and longest ever built. It was started 2500 years ago, has a length of 1800 kilometers, sometimes a width of forty meters and a depth of nine meters. It was necessary because a connection from south to north was needed. All of China's natural waterways, the Yangtze and Yellow River, flow from west to east. Similar to the Great Wall of China, the canal was built over a long period of time and has been supplemented again and again. When lock technology was developed in China 1000 years ago, it was possible to climb forty meters in altitude. In the Yuan Dynasty around 800 years ago, Beijing became the capital of China and the Imperial Canal was expanded up to that point. 300 years later, at the time of the Ming Dynasty, the canal was completely restored and partially enlarged. To this day it is a heavily used waterway that has not ended up in the tourist section for houseboat vacationers like its little European colleagues. However, the Imperial Canal ends today at the Yellow River and no longer leads to Beijing, as it was blocked by sediments from the Yellow River. Due to its constant use, it has lost its historical appearance, as old buildings and warehouses were demolished, etc. Nevertheless, it has meanwhile become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because its importance extends far beyond its age and size; rather, it has united China culturally. By the year 221 BC When the script was standardized under the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, each region had its own system of signs. The Qin script was only able to spread through the canal, as it was used for all state and administrative purposes. In addition, the canal was a direct connection between the granary of China, the fertile Yangtze Delta and Beijing, so that the capital could always be supplied in abundance with rice and grain. The entire cultural landscape in East China with these picturesque villages, canals and bridges can be traced back to the importance of the trade routes on the water, which got their boom through the Great Canal over centuries. As a World Heritage Site, the canal is similarly gigantic as the Great Wall of China, but if you take a tour on it, it cannot match the impressive effect of the Great Wall of China. It is also largely unknown in Germany. No tourist would ever think of seeing the Grand Canal.