The Sui welded earlier waterways into a single inland navigation of roughly 1,800 kilometres linking the rice-rich Yangtze delta to the northern capitals, later carried through to Beijing under the Yuan. It moved grain tribute, troops and goods, and its junctions and termini grew into great commercial cities such as Hangzhou, Suzhou and Yangzhou. It remains the longest and oldest artificial waterway in the world and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014. As a piece of world infrastructure it shows a continental state organising its urban network around an engineered waterway rather than a coast.
The canal bound an empire into one economy and seeded a chain of inland trading cities, a model of infrastructure-led urban networking on a scale unmatched in the pre-modern world.