In ancient time, about 2000 years ago ,Ling Canal is for irrigation canal. The canal was once also an important means of transports before railways and bus roads . Now this canal still serves for the purposes by irrigating about 2700 hectare of agricultural lands. According to the construction of the canal ,we marvel at the ancient people's wisdom in the engineering fields employed in the construction of dam and water shipmentt. Dams were mainly made of woods and stones.

Pundits have revealed that logs were first piled and stacked up in the water to stabilize the ground, slabs of stone were placed against the logs to form an embankment. Each stone slab has a groove cut into it by an iron bar ,which slotted through the groove to join each slab together,and formed a continuous embankment, which stretches about five hundred meters in length.

  The most interesting section of the canal is the Doumen (Steep Gates) section, which is just like the boatlift in the Gezhouba Dam. Tourists were usually taken to see this section of the channel, which stretches from the Canal Mouth Village at the north to the river mouth in the south,which has a seven-meter water passage lift.

Thirty-six steep gates built , boats can pass through from one section of the canal to another . Earliest records on the building of these gates dated back to the Tang Dynasty. Gates at that time were made of woods , later stones slab were introduced to fortify during the Ming Dynasty. But during the Tang Dynasty, only 18 gates were built ,it increased to 36 among the periods of Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.