The Canal City That Keeps Its Water Inside

Liaocheng stands in the west of Shandong, where the province meets Hebei and Henan, on the flat silt the Yellow River has laid down. Two waterways cross here, and the town's history is the history of what moved along them. The Zuo Zhuan calls Liao and She the two cities that were the western frontier of Qi, and the modern name comes from that older town. A county was set up in the Qin and kept through the Han, and in 992, under the Northern Song, the county seat was moved to the site the city still occupies. In 1267 the Yuan made the town the seat of Bozhou Circuit, renamed Dongchang Circuit in 1276; under the Ming the circuit became Dongchang Prefecture, and the Qing kept it.

The Grand Canal flows through the centre of Liaocheng, and Dongchang Lake lies in the city, so that water is not at the edge of the town but inside it. The prefecture has more than four hundred protected monuments and ancient sites, and six heritage points and two stretches of waterway are on the Grand Canal World Heritage list, a large share for one city. In 2001 Liaocheng changed its development plans and began to build its tourism around the lake, marketing itself as China's water city north of the Yangtze. In 2007 a Chinese cities report named it one of the country's ten most livable cities. The 2020 census counted 5,952,128 people in the prefecture.

Four buildings carry the old town's reputation. The Guangyue Tower stands in the middle of it, the Iron Tower is a narrow Buddhist pagoda of cast iron, and the Assembly Hall of Shanxi and Shaanxi records in its name the two provinces whose merchants traded here. The fourth is the Lion Building, which tradition connects with the Water Margin: it is said to be where Wu Song fought and killed Ximen Qing. The city also keeps the mosque in Linqing, in the north of the prefecture, and Liaocheng University. Together these describe a working town of nearly six million people that has kept the shape of a canal port.