Canoe on Canal

A family’s commitment to the Grand Canal By Yuan Yuan

The house is made up of two renovated shipping containers—one smaller than the other. Lying only about 20 meters from the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, the only house for miles around has been home to a family for over 10 years.

When the door opens, normally at daybreak,Wang Daliang, a 44-year-old man, walks out,picks up his scoop net, puts on a life vest and a pair of gumboots and then gets into his boat. A 10-km section of the canal is his “territory” and he patrols it for at least six hours each day.

“I took up the baton of canal patrolling from my father,” Wang told. The family has been living on the riverbank for 42 years.When he was a teenager, his father began the voluntary patrolling of the canal. “He made a scoop net by hand to clear garbage and made a wooden canoe to paddle around in, making sure everything went smoothly on the water,” he said.

A lifelong commitment

Peixian County in Jiangsu Province, where the family lives, is one of the many places that the Grand Canal passes through. Dug over 2,500 years ago, the canal runs nearly 3,200 km from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, making it the world’s longest artificial waterway. Connecting several key rivers in China, including the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, the canal has been serving as a transportation artery in China since it went into operation.

Wang’s family used to fish and dig sand at the canal bank for a living in the early years. In the 1990s, the government started to regulate these digging activities along the canal bank, and all the other sand diggers gradually moved away. Wang’s father insisted on staying as, in his eyes, the canal is more like a hometown than a goldmine. The family is the only one to have stayed put.

“My father said we live by the canal and used to make a living on the canal,” Wang said. “It’s more like a family member that we should not moveaway from.”

A bird’s-eye view of the section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, on May 17

This is also the reason the father became a volunteer patrolman along the river. The booming industry alongside the canal has loaded it with heavier burdens and also increased his father’s workload. “There was obviously more garbage in the water,” Wang said. “He went out very early in the morning and came back late in the afternoon.”

Wang’s mother thus became the major breadwinner in the family by working on the farmland nearby.

A portable SD-card music player became his father’s only company while patrolling. It contains all his father’s favorite songs. “Before my father passed away in 2009, he put the music player in my hand and I knew he wanted me to follow his‘patrolling career’,” Wang said.

A generational relay

It was not an easy decision. By then, Wang had become a married man with two sons. As the breadwinner in the family, it might be more realistic for him to go to earn money in a city, as many other men of his age would do. But he decided to stay and continue to do the “job” with no pay.

He has become the new owner of the music player. What he also inherited from his father is a sense of attachment to the Grand Canal. He upgraded the wooden canoe to an iron boat with an electric engine. He makes the scoop nets by hand too and can’t remember how many he’s used over the years as they wear out easily. Over the past 13 years, he has collected over 1 million tons of waste from the river.

He sets off when the sun rises and spends almost the whole day outside. The heavily tanned man is a tough figure when dealing with those who wanted to sneakily dump dirty water or poisonous chemicals in the river. “Some offered to pay me to turn a blind eye and some even came to my home to threaten me,” Wang said. “But those things never worked on me. I try to persuade them not to do it. If they refuse, I call the police.”

For those who need help, he is generous and considerate. He wrote his phone number on a white board that says “free support for any emergencies” and hung it on the bank.

One day in November 2019, he got a call from five men on two small boats, who became trapped by strong winds on Weishan Lake, through which the canal passes. Wang set out immediately to find them. After an hour’s hard work, he finally managed to help them out of the lake. During his time as a full-time patrolman on the canal, he has saved 17 lives.

In April 2019, he established a rescue team with several other locals. The team acts swiftly in the face of any emergency. When Zhengzhou,capital of Henan Province, was hit by heavy floods last year, the team traveled there to join in the rescue efforts.

He has seen increased endeavors in recent years from the government at different levels to launch policies and measures to protect the ecology and culture of the canal. There has also been a growing number of people nationwide joining the volunteer work.

“The canal water is much cleaner now,” he said. His wife and two sons are very supportive of his work and join his patrolling whenever they have time. “I will be doing this until I am too old to do so,” he said. BR