Visit the Yangzhou China Grand Canal Museum, a popular internet-famous museum

After visiting the Yangzhou Ge Garden in the morning, I went to visit the Grand Canal Museum. Admission requires advance reservation, so I didn't enter the museum until after 12:00 p.m. The museum has a total of 13 exhibition halls, and it might take several days to see everything in detail. Therefore, this time I only visited halls 1-3, as well as the Potala Palace cultural relics exhibition that is currently in halls 11-12, which was an eye-opening experience. The museum has a restaurant on the basement level where you can solve the lunch problem. Due to the large number of visitors, you still need to take a number and queue up for dining, which is also rare in museums. The Grand Canal—China's World Cultural Heritage, the Grand Canal, is not a birth mother, it is a wet nurse. The China Grand Canal was first dug during the Spring and Autumn period, became navigable in the Sui Dynasty, and flourished in the Tang and Song Dynasties. During the Yuan Dynasty, it was straightened for direct navigation from north to south; in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it maintained the lifeline of the nation and reached its zenith. It includes the Sui-Tang Grand Canal, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and the East Zhejiang Canal, with a total length of more than 2,700 kilometers. Spanning over 2,500 years, it crosses eight provincial-level administrative regions including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, connecting the Haihe, Yellow, Huai, Yangtze, and Qiantang rivers, serving as the ancient transportation artery that linked east and west, north and south of China. It also extended westward to connect with the Eurasian Silk Road and eastward to the maritime trade routes. The China Grand Canal is a great water conservancy project created by the ancient laboring people. It connected the political and economic centers of successive dynasties, playing an important role in China's political unity, economic development, and cultural prosperity. The people along the coast thrived, interacted, and integrated because of it. The exhibition is divided into four parts, comprehensively reflecting the spatiotemporal changes of the China Grand Canal, the wisdom of hydraulic engineering, state management, and the beautiful life it has brought to the people. As an important symbol of Chinese civilization, the 'Grand Canal' was announced by the State Council in March 2013 as the seventh batch of national key cultural relics protection units, and the 'China Grand Canal' was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June 2014. This giant linear, living cultural heritage belt represents the great creativity, cohesion, and vitality of the Chinese nation, and will continue to shine brightly in the magnificent journey of creation in the new era of China.