Research On The Transport Efficiency Of The Grand Canal In The Ming Dynasty

Beijing-Hangzhou Canal is one of the most important inland waterways in eastern China. In traditional times, especially during the Ming-Qing Dynasties in which the canal transport was highly developed, the Grand Canal played an important role in both maintaining the running of the Imperial China and promoting the material and cultural exchanges. However, built in the purpose of transporting the official supplies, the value of the Grand Canal is worth reviewing in a broader vision. In this article, based on the previous studies, the author attempts to research on the canal focusing on the following three aspects:(1) the environmental and geographical bases of the canal;(2) the navigable situation of the canal in the specific time and space;(3) the navigation efficiency of the canal in the view of cost-benefit analysis.Through the study, we can make following conclusions:In terms of natural endowment, the Grand Canal was born with a large span and complex conditions in environment and geography. It made a negative impact on excavating and maintaining the canal, resulting in frequent failures and heavily restricted navigation capability. In addition, other human factors such as the political power made shipping in the canal inconveniently. As a consequence, the running of the canal is quite costly, mainly reflecting in the following respects:on one hand, the expenditure of excavating and maintaining the canal is really huge, so does the cost of shipping in the canal, which is often higher than the value of goods itself; on the other hand, human factors raise the indirect cost of the running of the canal. These factors mainly include the waste of the manpower and material resources because of the corruption of official, the disruption of rules due to the penetration of the political power, the interest loss of the public and the seriously social and ecological consequences in the process of treating the canal. As for its benefit, the canal was built to transport official supplies such as grains, bricks, woods, and varied daily consumer goods; in addition to its political security function, the canal, in which a large scale of commodities such as grains, silk and other groceries were transported, was of a certain commercial value. It should be pointed out that the circulation of commodities was mainly within the regions respectively.In a word, restricted to the insufficiency of natural endowment and several human factors, the efficiency of the Grand Canal should not be overvalued. All of these factors make the canal a costly beneficial waterway.