The Pinglu Canal, a 134-kilometre waterway in China's Guangxi region, will open to navigation on Sept 16, 2026, according to the Economic Observer. The project, with a total investment of 72.7 billion yuan (about $10.2 billion), is designed to handle 5,000-tonne vessels, making it the highest-grade river-sea connecting canal in China to date.
The canal's design service life is set at no less than 130 years. Beyond its engineering significance, the waterway aims to resolve Guangxi's historical problem of being coastal but lacking direct sea access, open a westward export route for western China, and support the development of cross-border industrial and supply chains with ASEAN countries, the report said.
Design decisions and economic rationale
Wu Peng, the overall design technical lead for the Pinglu Canal, told the Economic Observer that the project's planning was complex. One key debate was whether to build the canal to a 3,000-tonne or 5,000-tonne standard. Wu noted that unlike natural rivers, the canal's watershed section has artificially controlled water levels maintained by a system of dams and locks, meaning the water depth is relatively fixed with no seasonal gains from high water periods. This makes the canal's grade a rigid upper limit on actual navigational capacity.
Considering the trend toward larger vessels on the Xijiang shipping route, where 5,000-tonne ships have grown rapidly in share since 2021, the team ultimately chose the 5,000-tonne standard. The two options differ by about 1.5 metres in water depth, with an investment gap of roughly 2 billion yuan (about $282 million), around 3 percent of the total project cost. Wu said that even under conservative assumptions, a 5,000-tonne vessel operating half-loaded for part of the year still outperforms a 3,000-tonne ship running fully loaded year-round. At an annual freight volume of 100 million tonnes, the higher standard could save 300 million to 400 million yuan (about $42 million to $56 million) in logistics costs each year, recouping the extra investment within several years.
The design also reserves conditions for 10,000-tonne vessels to pass through the ship locks, although the recommended vessel size is 8,000 tonnes. Wu explained that locks are permanent structures that are nearly impossible to modify once built, whereas waterways can be deepened later through dredging. The lock chamber, with a net width of 34 metres, can accommodate two 8,000-tonne vessels side by side, but a 10,000-tonne ship would be too wide for efficient double-file passage.
Engineering challenges and monitoring
Construction began in August 2022 and took about four years. The project required cutting through 22 mountain ridges, with total earthwork excavation of 315 million cubic metres, a record for a single transport project in China. The most challenging section is the watershed crossing at the Madao hub, where the team had to relocate the site twice after initial geological surveys proved inadequate.
The Madao hub's No. 2 slope, at 188 metres high, is the tallest canal slope built in China. Composed mainly of mudstone and sandstone that softens when wet, the slope also has a fault fracture zone running along its base. To manage the risk, the design team installed 73 monitoring devices on the slope, using Beidou satellite positioning and AI algorithms to transmit data on displacement, seepage pressure and rainfall in real time to a digital twin platform, capable of detecting millimetre-level movements.
Since the watershed section has no natural runoff, water supply relies on transfers from the Xijiang and Yujiang rivers, with limits on available volumes. The design team adopted water-saving lock technology to control water consumption during navigation. The opening of the canal has already shown early effects: from Sept 16 to 24, 2026, the Nanning port handled over 100,000 tonnes of river-sea intermodal freight, and throughput at the Liujing operation area grew about 2.7 times week-on-week, according to Beibu Gulf Port Group data cited by the Economic Observer.
