TIANJIN, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A granary complex for waterway grain transportation dating back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) has been discovered in north China's Tianjin Municipality, the city's cultural heritage conservation center said on Thursday.

The ruins, located in Hexiwu Township, Wuqing District, are believed to be the remains of an imperial granary complex along the Grand Canal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ruins are the first of their kind of the Yuan Dynasty discovered in China, said the center.

Excavation work at the site started in September, following months of preliminary joint investigations by the center and the Wuqing museum.

Yin Chenglong, a researcher from the center who leads the excavation, said the granary they found was a cluster of 12 building foundations that form a storage courtyard.

As the latest find in the archaeology of ancient China's Grand Canal, the imperial granary could provide new physical evidence on the formation and development of a unified, multi-ethnic China in ancient times, said experts.

The ruins belong to the Shisicang site, which literally means "Fourteen Granaries" in Chinese. The site primarily served as a storage and distribution hub for the transportation of grain from the south to the north at that time, and later developed into an important logistics hub for both the southern and northern regions of China.

The find suggests that the Yuan Dynasty was able to allocate the transportation of grain throughout the country via the canal transport system, according to Chen Yong, an archaeologist and former director of the center.

The Grand Canal, connecting Beijing and the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, with a history of over 2,500 years, is the world's longest artificial waterway. It served as a significant transportation artery in ancient China and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in China in 2014. ■