Oh What A Time... - #94 Canals (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!Finally, AN EPISODE ON ARTIFICIAL WATERWAYS. Come with us as we dig our way through the jungle to form the Panama Canal, we traipse back to Glastonbury to check out their canal, and we’re off to ancient China to take a look at the world’s oldest canal.And this week we hear all about Alex Brooker’s hot tub boat tour of New York. Plus, more on Donald Trump once doing the Rumbelows League Cup draw. And Margaret Thatcher’s failed stand-up career. So once again, if you’ve got anything to add to the conversation, do drop us an electronic mail: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is part two of Canals. Let's get on with the show. I am excited to be telling you boys about the first canals in Britain. That's what I'm going to talk to you about. It's kind of really interesting. I'm partly delighted about this because I love a canal.

I just love a canal. I went to a little primary school called Bathampton, which was by a canal. So you looked out the classroom window and you could see the boats on the canal. Very small primary school, quite sort of eccentric primary school, I think it's probably a fair way of describing it. One of my classmates, a boy called Francis, would swim home after school every day and his mum would walk along the towpath next to him. I don't know if we've talked about this on the show, but this is the type of school I went to.

But did he not just get terrible stomach trouble? Viles' disease. Yeah, like the water... I've never looked at the water in a canal and thought, yeah, looks pretty good to me. No, he somehow avoided it, but that is true. Viles' disease is a thing that I was constantly reminded about as a child, as a thing, as a reason to not leap in the canal, basically. Yes, I was reminded of it a lot.

He must have had an incredible constitution the canal, basically. Yes, I was reminded of it a lot. E Mestivad, an incredible constitution. Oh, yeah. Iron stomach. But I do, I love a canal. I find a canal peaceful. I think it's something to do with my childhood, but I just find them very calm places to be. I love walking on canals. I just have such a sort of a passion and warmth for them. Now, most of us, I think it's fair to say, would assume, and I would have assumed this as well, that canals, at least in Britain, were kind of like an 18th or early 19th century invention. That's what I'd have assumed. It was basically the precursor to railways, motorways, airline routes of today. But really that's what it

was. Industrialisation, moving of goods, that sort of period is what I would have assumed. Were you similar? Yeah, I assumed it was an industrial revolution thing. To do a trade. Yeah. Well, however, interestingly, Britons have actually used canals since medieval times. And at least one example of imported Roman technology has survived too. This is a place called Fostyke in Lincolnshire which hints at an even older tradition of canal building and the use in the British Isles. But the question is, I suppose, where should we look for these really old examples, these medieval examples of early canals in Britain? Well, Chris, where is the one place that you go to every June without fail and love more than anywhere else in the world?

Yes, the Glastonbury Festival, of course. Exactly, the Glastonbury Festival. Well, a stone's throw away from the Glastonbury Festival in the town is a very good example of a medieval canal. Really? What would be the chances of you leaving the Glastonbury Festival when you're at the height of your excitement to go and see a medieval canal? Could I tempt your way? We're both going this June. Do you reckon I could tempt your way? Yeah, I mean, I've got that little stream at Glastonbury, so it'd have to be more

impressive than that. It is far more impressive, especially the story around it. Now, much of this 1.75 kilometrelong medieval canal has now been obscured by later construction such as the A-road, supermarkets, things like this. But it tells us a great deal about the artificial waterways and water management, which were hundreds of years for the canal mania of the late 18th century. By the way, canal mania is an official term. of the late 18th century. By the way, canal mania is an official term, which really makes it laugh. Canal mania. It was a period of intense canal building in England and Wales between 1790 and 1810

and a speculative frenzy that ensued around that time. I think that's the least cool mania. You've got beetle mania, that's quite cool. Canal mania. Well, you know, there was a mania, I don't know, what it had been, like a century and a half later when we had a mania around building train lines. And then obviously the Beechle report came in, we closed the load. After canal mania, did they have to close up a load of canals because there were too many, we didn't need as many as we did? I don't know anything about that. That would be fascinating. Yes. Actually, a lot of canals proved to be basically they didn't return on

investment, they were too expensive. So a lot of them were closed down and then filled in and all just at least abandoned essentially. That is true. Turned them into swimming pools. During that period, canal mania is a genuine phenomenon of just everywhere everyone was building canals. People loved canals. Tulip mania in Holland. Yes, exactly. We go crazy, don't we?

They're manias. Humanity goes mad for a new thing. What was that thing about two years ago? The fidget spinner? NFTs. NFTs. Good Lord. NFT mania. You don't hear about them anymore. No, those little monkey face NFT things. What was that?

For about six months, people were like, this is going to make us millionaires. I reckon crypto will be, we'll look back on crypto in 10 years time. What were we thinking? And what am I going to do with all these Trump coins? Wasn't there an aspect that people kept screen grabbing or you could basically replicate these things quite easily. I think there was a real problem in the NFT thing. I don't know enough about it, but I think it's proven not to be the financial investment that people thought it would have been at the time. No, no, because you never hear about it anymore. I got hacked by an NF, my Twitter got hacked by an NFT thing. And I was just, it got hacked overnight when I was asleep.

I didn't realise it was happening. And I woke up in the morning to loads of text messages. My Twitter had just been spewing out NFTs for hours. What just pictures of NFTs or promoting NFTs? Yeah, with links to buy them and it looked like I'd completely bought into the NFT mania. Were you minting the Oh What A Coin? Now this canal in Glastonbury was built in the 10th century as a link between Glastonbury

Abbey and the nearby river Brough at Northover Mill, which was widely used for navigation since it connected inland communities with the Bristol Channel at Burnham at Sea. At first the Glastonbury Canal enabled the easy transportation of stone and other building supplies which were being used to reconstruct and redevelop the Abbey under the guidance of a guy called Abbot Dunstan. His initial first canal in Britain was funded by the Abbey but once in place and that building work is completed the canal continued to be used as a highway to carry goods including wine, fish and other foodstuffs from the outlying estates and villages to the

abbey itself. Now would you like to guess why they bothered pumping all this time, all this money into building canals? Why did Glastonbury Abbey centuries ago decide, okay this is what we need, we need a canal, why do they think that was a place to pump their funds? It's quite a simple reason, actually. Is it a mining village? Is it a mining village or something? Well, they make you something and they are being selling it. No, it's to do with transport at the time, basically, because water navigation was much safer than travelling by the poorly maintained mud laden roads. So traveling on road with goods, roads by name alone essentially. So you'd have your horse and cart that would be tipping all everywhere. It would be wet mud,

your wheels would be getting stuck. It was just an absolute horror show going anywhere. Will Barron So they didn't want to get their shoes muddy when they were going on the piss in Bristol. Alistair Duggan Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah. Will Barron Do you know what though? It's a very good point. They're sort of roads by name only. Yes. If a road is poorly maintained, it's so irritating.

Absolutely. And even by today's standards, like roads with lots of potholes are irritating, but medieval roads. Glastonbury Festival, when you get an hour of rain, is an absolute mud bath. Well, it's like when I think of rain, is an absolute mud bath. Well it's like when I think of the early Tour de France races, sort of in the early 1900s. Can you imagine doing the Tour de France on a poorly maintained road on a shit bike? It must have been a fucking nightmare! And the stages were longer.

So the stages were much longer. So you're like, oh, 150 miles? What's the road like? What, potholes? Yeah. What, a bike that doesn't have any gears? I'm all right, actually. And this is also transporting wine, food, things that can break. It's kind of- Like geese.

Exactly, yeah. Increasingly irritated animals. So it's sort of, yeah. The idea behind this, partly, was the fact that, well, not just partly, for a main part was that it was so much easier and safer to travel by water. The idea for Glastonbury Abbey Canal appears to have come from the Abbot Dunstan who'd spent in time in exile on the continent, notably in the Low Countries where cities such as Ghent and Bruges thrived on their use of this technology. The the First Canal was such a success,

it then convinced Dunstan and his successors, together with the Bishops of Wales, to reshape the waterways of Somerset for economic purposes, for transportation, energy generation, and land and water management. So rivers were diverted, they were straightened or embanked to create artificial variances in the natural water course, often to prevent flooding or other problems or disruptions to human activity which took place. For instance, they basically wanted to take precedence over anything nature might have in mind. But let's say if there were a risk of flooding, if there was livestock kept on land, they

would reroute rivers to try and avoid that. The human effort that went into that, if you think about building a canal now with JCBs and all the equipment that would be used to dig something in the modern age, rerouting a river in medieval times. The effort. It's how I always imagined Stonehenge. Yes. I visited Stonehenge over New Year. Absolutely breathtaking. It stops me in my tracks. I think it's absolutely extraordinary. But I just imagine trying to carry those, or transport those, bluestones to Wiltshire. You're like, oh, what are you doing then? I'm just transporting

these bluestones from Pembrokeshire. Oh, is that your job? Yeah, I'll do this until death probably. It's just why I do now. Anyway, see you later. By comparison, Ellis, imagine approaching a river and being told you need to change the way that's flowing. You're looking at a river and your job is to reroute that and all you've got is a shovel. Right, let's get cracking. Incredible. Well, eventually Dunstan and his successors had many more canals built in the area around Glastonbury. They used

them to travel back and forth to the coasts, to visit their estates, to bring in goods and visitors. In fact, the Abbey's canal network around Glastonbury soon became so complex that the Abbey employed a full-time team of boatmen on its staff. Their records still exist today, which hint at the routine they were doing working for the Abbey back in medieval times. One of the boatmen, in fact, the head boatman at the time was a man called Robert Malherb, who appears in records in 1261 charged with carrying wine via the canal from the Abbey's vineyard at Meir, which is three miles away, and Pilton, six miles away, to the Abbey's wine cellars. Now we've talked about nice jobs in history. That sounds nice, doesn't it?

Yeah, I could do that. Transporting wine on a barge along a canal to the Abbey. You could probably have a glass on the way, couldn't you? Oh, lovely. Oh, yeah. Think of the horrific jobs that we looked at in this podcast. That sounds so nice. It's so much better than working in a brewery because you're getting out and about every day. Yeah.

Lovely. That's wonderful. I went on a brewery tour in Astagdou once where we were told about yeast profiles, etc. And I find it very boring. Transporting wine on a barge. You got your feet up, you're having a drink, just wiling the hours away, waving at people who are all happy to see you because you've got a load of wine on your barge. And also your boat can only go slowly. So you're not going to be at the Abbey anytime soon. It's just going to leisurely drift along.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't make me stressful. Oh, I had a nightmare day at work today. Transporting wine on a barge at a gentle pace. Another record tells of how the abbot was carried along on an eight oar canal bar during an inspection tour of his estates. This is the other way it was used. This is quite interesting. Since Glastonbury was a burial place of three kings and had close associations with King Arthur and the legend of it as the Isle of Avalon and the Abbey House National Relics,

it's entirely likely that the canal was also used as a kind of celebratory procession route too, as a way of highlighting just how significant this place was in the national imagination. So they probably used it as well to have flotillas, flotillas, parades, you know, celebrations for big events. They probably used canals for that. And the importance of the Glastonbury Canal network was such that it continued to be used for hundreds of years past there, possibly right up to the dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, at which point the Abbey's fate

kind of followed that of the last abbot, Richard Whiting, who sadly was declared a traitor and subject to execution by hanging, drawing and quartering on the Glastonbury tour in 1539. Okay, that's not ideal. Not ideal. But what about the little fella on the canal boat? Same, but he was so drunk he didn't feel it. And after dissolution, the canal network fell into disuse and disrepair. We discussed this, how canals can just fall away. And by the 19th century, it was rediscovered by antiquarians who actually kind of misunderstood what it was to begin with. Many of them thought it was part of the defenses of some ancient Iron Age village around the

time. That's what people thought it was originally, whereas others were a bit more sensible and attributed it to the productive activities and the significance of the Abbey, basically, as a place of religious pilgrimage and secular tourism. Now, I suppose in the end, what we can learn from all this is that these medieval canal systems, despite being kind of forgotten by the subsequent waves of canal building in the Tudor period, the Industrial Revolution as we discussed, were symbolic of humanity's apparent triumph over nature.

Basically our collective determination to impose on the world what we need from it. And you can see that now really with solar panels, wind turbines, the way that we call these things farms. It's much the same, isn't it really? We're kind of, we're changing the terrain to suit our needs. And that's kind of just been something that's always happened and happened then. I always think that when I see motorway, I think we win.

We win. Humans won. Nature nil. Take that nature. Whispering it to half a fox, which is now on the side of motorway. And people say mother nature's all powerful. Yeah. Exhibit A, the M25. To give you an idea of how much I love a canal, my first night's out when I was 18, I used

to walk along the towpath from where my mum lived, does live actually, near Bathampton. We'd walk along there, me and my friend Sam, along the towpath. There's a great pub at the beginning called The George, which is by the canal in Bathampton. Some of the places may have been, it's beautiful and you can walk all the way into Bath along there. And just writing about this gave me the motivation to immediately text my friend Sam and say, we have to do this walk into town again. We need to go on that pub crawl again. It's such a, for me, such a wonderful feeling. It's so attached to just kind of freedom, fresh air and just kind of the beauty of England. See, you can walk all the way into Bath from Bathampton via the canal and are there pubs dotted along the route?

There are. There's a pub at the beginning and there's a pub as you come off the tow path at the end. There's another pub and then you can go into town from there and it is brilliant. Would recommend. That does sound good All right, here we go part three we're going back to a place we don't often venture on over a time, ancient China. I want to begin my section by saying I've literally remember the day I found out canals were man-made. I had no idea. I thought yesterday when I when Daryl sent over the research for this episode it was mad to me. I just assumed they were there because it's such... the work involved is so incredibly laborious to shift that

much earth and the calculations about how the water flows and I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that canals were man-made. It is still astonishing to me. I do get that. I can see why you'd make that mistake. Yeah, thank you very much. Especially knowing you and just knowing everything about you. I can see why you would make that mistake. Particular. Not Ellis. I couldn't see why Ellis would make that mistake. I could see why you'd make that mistake.

Canals aren't just an English thing. They've occurred all over the world. It's a technology not unique to one civil civilization or another. Many civilizations have come to the conclusion that canals are a good idea. They've done that independently. There are canals in Europe, Africa, South America and in Asia. And in fact, the oldest and longest canal network still in existence, having been built by the Chinese and get this, the fifth century BC, it now forms part of the Grand Canal, which runs for more than 1000 miles from Beijing, south towards the coast and Ningbo. The system was completed in the 7th century AD. Imagine that project plan, imagine that roadmap from

the 5th century BC to the 7th century AD. They're the ones that stagger me the most. Where it's just such an enormous project that you will never live to see the end of. No. Yeah. But you think, well, it's got to be done. I mean, listeners will know. There's surely an argument that this is the longest infrastructure project ever conducted by humanity at those timescales.

Great water China. Yes, good point. And if anyone knows hello at owatertime.com. How far is the Great Water China? Right, China's main river systems, the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Wei, Fen and Huangzhou, run west to east in parallel from the mountains to the sea. Ancient engineers therefore had considerable incentive to come up with solutions that would provide north-south transit, either by road or

by an alternative. And of course, the answer was to build navigatable channels to supplement the rivers. So if you imagine all those rivers going kind of east to west. If you can connect them all up, then you've got one hell of a transport network. Wow. The Great Wall of China is 13,171 miles long. What? That is mad, isn't it? That is mad.

That is unreal. That is crazy. And it took 2,000 years to construct. I had no idea it was that long. Oh, we've got to do, we've got to do, here's one for Donald, you do walls. Hadrian's wall, Great Wall of China and another one. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Berlin Wall. Oh, there you go.

Walls. Very good, Ellis J. Oh, the fly. Nice. Walls. God, I'm a wall guy. The invention of the defensive wall I'm a wall guy. Yeah, yeah. The invention of the defensive wall when covering a free kick. Yeah, the draft excluder.

Where you get a footballer to lie down. 13,000 miles long. The oldest documented canal in China, the Hong Canal, was probably built in the 6th century BC. But of course, it's a long time ago. There's not many blueprints knocking around. A lot of the details have been lost. The oldest surviving canal therefore- Or got wet. The oldest surviving canal therefore, which still forms part of the Grand Canal was the Han Canal, which links the Yangtze with the River Huai and work began in 486 BC. Whoa!

Yeah, a bit after the Hong Canal. It was built on the orders of King Fucai, the ruler of the pre-imperial Kingdom of Wu on China's east coast with the city of Shanghai as a part of the state. Fucai's historic reputation rests, as it happens, on his enthusiasm for canal construction. But he basically had to do it. The Kingdom of Wu was at war with its neighbors and the canals were built to serve as supply lines for the army. Success in those wars proved the value of the canal network. Once again, one of the conclusions I've reached on this podcast is war actually is great for technological innovation.

Like the canals. Depressingly, a lot of good ideas. War, what is it good for? Technological innovation. That's the answer to that question. Next time you hear that song, shout out canals. I'm actually amazed we came up with the iPod in a non-warlike situation actually. I think we can assume during the digging of this 400 BC canal that it's quite a sort of probably chilled work environment, do you think? Where the needs of the worker is really looked at, maybe quite short shifts, what we're thinking. Free childcare with a gig.

Yeah, exactly. Pensions just, you know. Four weeks off a year. Exactly, yeah. Over time. It fell to the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who ruled in the third century BC to significantly add to the network. And again, he did it for, you guessed it, military supply purposes.

During his reign, engineers constructed several major new canals, including the 22.6 mile long Lin Kui Canal, which joins the Shang and Li rivers and was the first canal built anywhere in the world to link two river valleys through artificial means. Wow. We talked about the Panama Canal earlier and how difficult and stressful it would have been cutting through a jungle. But imagine doing this in the third century BC. I mean, what tools are you working with? You're lucky if you've got a shovel. It doesn't sound easy, does it? I think that's the aspect I find most amazing is the requirements of the job, which you can un-mechanised way of

working in something that really requires a JCB. It must be so hard. It sounds backbricking. And backbricking in a pre-osteopath time and a pre-hot bath time and a pre-Tens machine era hot bath time and a pre-Tens machine era and a pre-Parasite-a-mole era and a pre-Hyperprofen era. All of the stuff you need when you've got a bad back doesn't exist yet. Will Barron I remember in the first episode of A What A Time we talked about falling off a shit in the Life at Sea episode and, El, you made the comment, you would think if you're in the sea, someone needs to invent the coast card now. Well, similarly, if I'm digging a canal in the third century BC in China, I'm thinking someone needs to invent the JCB now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. An osteopath. An osteopath. We've talked about on this show a lot of times as well, what you take back. Imagine the reaction if you brought back a JCB and gave it to any of these. Imagine the high fives. The communities that are struggling on a summit. You'd be driving onto the building site to rounds of applause.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I want that to happen one day. Although, talking about bad backs, I had a bad back and I got treated with acupuncture. Yeah. And I think that... With that bit? Are you about to say what that had been knocking about? Acupuncture has been around for about 5,000 years. I reckon it was probably... Yeah, you'd hurt your back. Couple of pins, couple of pins. Wallop, you're back on the site the next day. Your ancient China, bad back, third century BC has just been cured. Is that what you're telling us?

Yeah. Wallop, done. Right. Pick the shovel up, back on the canal. The Lingqiu Canal, so back to that, it was a novelty because it was the first major human waterway that followed the contours of the landscape and that's avoided expensive... Interesting. ...which makes sense. Following its construction, once they'd built it, boats were able to travel 1,200 miles inland from the Pearl River Delta on the South China Sea with Hong Kong and Macau at its mouth all the way to Beijing.

Wow. How good is that? Amazing. Very impressive. Fair play to them. Third century BC. Now this blew my mind. Initially the canal had flash locks.

All right. So these aren't the locks that you get by the 12th century AD, where locks have that complicated, sophisticated pound lock, the double lock thing. If you go way back, they had these things called flash locks, which is a single gate. And basically, you open it and it flash floods the next section of the canal to enable the boats to pass. I mean, you've gone to all that effort. I'm amazed that it took us that long, that many centuries to figure out the double lock

system. Flash flooding, huge single gate, huge chunks of the canal getting flooded. You really need to check there's nobody else in that section, don't you, before flash flooding it. Also, the first time you activate that lock, you've got your fingers crossed, desperately hoping it works. Yeah. You'd be like, awful lot of work could go to waste if this is wrong.

If the boffins have got their maths wrong. So it began its life as a... this canal network began its life as a military supply line, but China's growing canal network morphed in the late sixth and early seventh centuries AD during the Sui dynasty into a project that came to be regarded as a symbol of imperial pride and prowess, a key link between the northern and southern parts of China as well as a vital trade route. Through their control of the canals, China's rulers could maintain income via taxes on salt, iron and grain, all of which were carried by canal barge.

It's so incredible and sophisticated. It's almost like a mini industrial revolution, what's happening about that. It took us in Britain like so much longer to get a network of equivalent sophistication. In the 13th century, a little fella called Kubla Khan determined that the canal network needed a bureaucracy of its own. So we're talking 13th century, Kubla Khan goes, I'm creating the Grain Transport Office, a government department in the 13th century. This body oversaw some 3000 boats responsible for bringing grain into the imperial capital, Dadu, which is today's Beijing. Amazing, isn't it? A government, like, bureaucracy in the 13th century.

Yeah, well that's where the word mandarin is still used in the UK to mean civil servant. This comes from Chinese bureaucracy from thousands of years ago. Oh, interesting. Incredible, isn't it? They are absolute masters of bureaucracy. I've been for thousands of years. Mad. Under the Ming dynasty, which came to power in the 14th century, the canals became the exclusive method for grain transport and the entire network was restored, providing up-to-date navigation routes and the latest technology. Tens of thousands of workers were employed as

maintenance crews and more than 100,000 soldiers and boatmen were employed to manage the 11,000 boats now used for grain transportation. That's 14th century. Incredible. Amazing. What do you think would be the most stressful thing to transport by barge over water? I'm thinking lush bath bombs. They go in. What are you thinking? I'm just thinking of the grain falling in and all that. I mean, there's a stress there. Live animals. Live animals. Especially live animals that don't like the water or can't swim.

Oh yeah, cats. Oh, that's, oh, there you are. There's a nightmare job from history. You run a cat boat. Yeah. I mean, it must have gone on. When you think about, I remember, I think I might have talked about this before, but going to the Tower of London, the experience as a school child learning about the moat and then digging out of it like African lion bones from the moat. These early emperors and kings were obsessed with exotic animals. So that like a lion would have gone up that canal, surely at some point.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Alka-seltzer? Barocka. Barocka, that's one you know what. Mentos? Is that not a problem? If it's not Diet Coke, then it's fine.

I think that's the only one added to Coca-Cola. Yeah, okay. So if they had a Coca-Cola canal, then you've got a problem. Yeah, I mean, the cultural resonance of the Grand Canal during the Ming Dynasty, there was a whole repertoire of folk songs developed around its many elements, including the official individual named courier stations, postal stops established every 25 miles or so. So yeah, there's like a stop every 25 mile.

It's incredible. And I'll leave you with this. There's a song called The Song of the Root Between the Two Capitals, like an ancient Chinese song about the Grand Canal. It follows Tom Lehrer's chemical elegments song with its rendition of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Basically, one of the verses begins to explain all these different stops. I'll give you a little bit.

It's several thousand Li from Nanjing to Beijing. So now one by one, the courier stages I shall sing that you may commit to memory this travel information by journeys end the courier stations number 46 along the winding waters that swirling muddied mix so now you know the names of all the stations gentlemen and will record them well when you take this route again." Obviously all the stations are named within that and the reason that it became such a popular mnemonic version of all the different stations along the route was of course because a lot of the boatmen and canal users, if you go

back to the 13th century, were illiterate. So this rich cultural tradition of forming songs to remember all the stops was partly because a lot of the people using the canal couldn't read. That is so interesting. Yeah. And even now, along these different different stops you can read graffiti scratched into the walls of the different courier stations that go back centuries and paint the picture of the canal's social life and its place in China's cultural landscape over hundreds of years. That is so cool.

You could go along, Tom was here or El was here with a bad back, third century BC. Thanks for the acupuncture. So that is Canals Done and Dusted. What a fun episode. Fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us as always. I can't recommend this enough, but if you want to become an O what a time full-timer for just £4.99 a month, I'd say do it. Yeah, it makes you very attractive. It does, that's the thing. Absolutely. People can just sense it, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're walking through a room and heads will turn. Yeah, exactly. And also, if you're enjoying the show and you want to be cynical about it, you could sign up and try and binge them all in a month. Yep. Yes. Or the bonus episodes.

Yeah. But then we're hoping you forget to unsubscribe. Yeah, that's the dream. That's the dream. And then we get two months out of here. Exactly. And that's that. Then you do remember. There is a ton of subscriber only episodes

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Do you want to say something nice to end, Ellis? Love you, bye! Bye! Bye! nice to end Ellis love you bye The The Music Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. And before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.