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| ISBN-13: | 9780226369204 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2017 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
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The Water Kingdom
A Secret History of China
By Philip Ball
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Philip BallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-36920-4
CHAPTER 1
The Great Rivers
Yangtze and Yellow: The Axes of China's Geography
The wide, wide Yangtze, dragons in deep pools; Wave blossoms, purest white, leap to the sky.
Lu You (1125 – 1209), 'The Merchant's Joy'
The sun goes down behind the mountains; The Yellow River flows seaward. You can enjoy a grander sight By climbing up one floor.
Wang Zhihuan (688 – 742), 'At Heron Lodge'
When Confucius described water as 'twisting around ten thousand times but always going eastward', he seemed to imply that the eastbound flow of rivers was tantamount to a law of nature, almost a moral precept. There is no clearer illustration of how a culture's geography may affect its world view. Why would anyone who had never stepped foot outside China have any reason to doubt that this was how the world was made?
In China the symmetry of east and west is broken by tectonic forces. Westwards lie the mountains, the great Tibetan plateau at the roof of the world, pushed upwards where the Indo-Australian plate crashes into and plunges beneath the Eurasian. Eastward lies the ocean: only Taiwan and Japan block the way to the Pacific's expanse, which might as well be endless. The flow, the pull, the tilt of the world, is from mountains to water, from shan to shui.
This is the direction of the mighty waterways that have dominated the country's topographic consciousness. 'A great man', wrote the Ming scholar and explorer Xu Xiake, 'should in the morning be at the blue sea, and in the evening at Mount Cangwu' (a sacred peak in southern Hunan province). To the perplexity of Western observers (not least when confronted with Chinese maps), the innate mental compass of the Chinese points not north – south, but east – west. The Chinese people articulate and imagine space differently from Westerners – and no wonder.
All of China's great rivers respect this axis. But two in particular are symbols of the nation and the keys to its fate: the Yangtze and the Yellow River. These great waterways orient China's efforts to comprehend itself, and they explain a great deal about the social, economic and geographical organization of its culture and trade. The rivers are where Confucius and Lao Tzu went to think, where poets like Li Bai and Du Fu went to find words to fit their melancholy, where painters discerned in the many moods of water a language of political commentary, where China's pivotal battles were fought, where rulers from the first Qin Emperor to Mao and his successors demonstrated their authority. They are where life happens, and there is really nothing much to be said about China that does not start with a river.
Search for the source
The great rivers drove some of the earliest stirrings of an impulse to explore and understand the world. The Yü Ji Tu ('Tracks of Yü' Map), carved in stone sometime before the twelfth century, shows how Chinese cartography was far ahead of anything in Christendom or classical Greece. In medieval maps of Europe the rivers are schematic ribbons, serpents' tails encroaching from the coast in rather random wiggles. But the Yü Ji Tu could almost be the work of a Victorian surveyor, depicting the known extent of the kingdom with extraordinary fidelity and measured on a very modern-looking grid. It is dominated by the traceries of river networks, with the Yellow River and the Yangtze given bold prominence. These are the 'tracks' defined by China's first great water hero, the legendary emperor Yü who conquered the Great Flood (Chapter 2).
China has always been interested in – one might fairly say obsessed with – its rivers. The Shui jing (Classic of the Waterways) was the canonical text of hydrological geography, traditionally credited to Sang Qin of the Han dynasty, although later scholars have placed it in the third and fourth centuries AD (the Jin dynasty). We don't know quite what it contained, since it has been lost, but a commentary on the work, known as the Shui jing zhu by the scholar Li Daoyuan (427–527), ran to forty volumes and listed more than 1,200 rivers.
The impassioned searching for the source of the great rivers throughout Chinese history seems almost to betray a hope that it will reveal the occult wellspring of China itself, the fount of the country's spirit (qi). The source of the Yellow River was debated at least since the Tang dynasty of the seventh to the tenth century ad, and the Yuan emperor Khubilai Khan dispatched an expedition in 1280 that was supposed to clarify the matter. Yet the point was still being argued seven centuries later, when the China Exploration and Research Society declared that the Yellow River springs from the icy, crystal-clear waters of lakes Gyaring and Ngoring in the Bayan Har Mountains of remote Qinghai.
The source of the Yangtze is disputed even now. An expedition in the 1970s identified it as the Tuotuo, the 'tearful' river in Qinghai, but several years later it was assigned to the Damqu instead. There's ultimately something arbitrary in conferring primacy on one of a river's several headwater sources, but for the Yangtze the symbolic significance of this choice is too strongly felt for the protagonists to brook any compromise. The classical answer, given in the Yu gong manuscript from the Warring States period of the fifth to the third centuryBC, was that the Yangtze begins as the Min River in Sichuan. But during the Ming era, iconoclastic Xu Xiake (1586 – 1641) argued otherwise. He found that the Jinsha River, which joins the Min in Sichuan, goes back much further than the Min: a full 2,000 kilometres, deep into the wilds of the Qinghai plateau. The Jinsha ('Golden Sand', referring to the alluvial gold that may be found in the river's sediment) itself stems from the Dangtian, whose tributaries in Qinghai vie as the ultimate source of the Yangtze, flowing from the glacier lakes of that high and inhospitable land.
No one better personifies the Chinese devotion to its great rivers than Xu Xiake, who wandered for thirty years into remote places, suffering robberies, sickness, hunger and all manner of hazards. 'He would travel', one contemporary account relates,
with a servant, or sometimes with a monk and just a staff and cloth bundle, not worrying about carrying a travelling bag or supplies of food. He could endure hunger for several days, eating his fill when he found some food. He could keep walking for several hundred li,* ascending sheer cliffs, braving bamboo thickets, scrambling up and down, hanging over precipices on a rope, as nimble as an ape and as sturdy as an ox. He used towering crags for his bed, streams and gullies for refreshment, and found companionship among fairies, trolls, apes and baboons, with the result that he became unable to think logically and could not speak. However, as soon as we discussed mountain paths, investigated water sources or sought out superior geographical terrain, his mind suddenly became clear again.
From shui to shan: what more nourishment could the mind need? And to get there, Xu believed, one should not march like a soldier but wander like a poet.
In the person of Xu Xiake, Confucian rectitude meets Daoist instinctiveness and reverie. He was born in the city of Jiangyin, northwest of Shanghai on the Yangtze delta. For much of his travels Xu was attended by a long-suffering servant named Gu Xing. The pair often had to rely on the benevolence of local monasteries for food and shelter, where Xu might offer payment in kind by writing down the history of the institution. On one occasion they were attacked and robbed by bandits on the banks of the Xiang River in Hunan, left destitute but lucky to be alive. Perhaps we can forgive Gu for finally robbing and deserting his master.
Xu journeyed into snowy Sichuan and harsh, perilous Tibet, where rivers could freeze so fast that wandering cattle could get trapped and perish in the ice. He went deep into the steamy Yunnan jungle, then still a region alien, foreign and wild, to determine that the Mekong (called the Lancang in China), Salween (Nu) and Red (Lishe) rivers were separate entities along their entire courses. But although he diligently recorded the local geology and mineralogy, there is little that is systematic in his itinerary: he was wandering more or less without plan or destination.
Still he deserves to be called a geographer. His methods of surveying were crude, but they rejected the local superstitions that until then supplied the usual rationale for natural phenomena. His notes, according to the great scholar of Chinese science and technology Joseph Needham, 'read more like those of a twentieth-century field surveyor than of a seventeenth-century scholar'. And like his contemporaries in Europe, he was prepared to risk censure by preferring the testimony of experience over that of classical authorities. There had been whispers ever since the Han era that the true headwaters of the Yangtze were not, as the classics insisted, the Min, but instead the Jinsha flowing from the Kunlun Mountains of Qinghai. Xu, however, was the first to dare make the claim openly. For this he was denounced as despicable.
Ancient scholarly study of China's rivers and waters reveals how far ahead of the West Chinese theory and practice were, not only in cartography but in an understanding of natural phenomena. While the Shan hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas, probably written in the Warring States period) was content to ascribe the tides to the comings and goings of a massive leviathan-like creature in the oceans, the Han scholar Wang Chong argued in the first century AD that tides are related to the moon. 'The rise of the wave follows the waxing and waning moon,' he wrote, 'smaller and larger, fuller or lesser, never the same.' Wang Chong championed a rationalistic explanation of the world over the rather superstitious Daoism and formulaic Confucianism of his time, and his meteorological and astronomical observations were particularly astute. He described the essence of the hydrological cycle (even if his belief in the link between the moon and water extended to a lunar influence on rainfall): 'Clouds and rain are really the same thing. Water evaporating upwards becomes clouds, which condense into rain, or still further into dew.' Wang Chong perceived the same correspondences between the movements and forms of river water and of blood circulation that were noted by Leonardo da Vinci a millennium and a half later. He wrote:
Now the rivers in the earth are like the pulsating blood vessels of a man. As the blood flows through them they throb or are still in accordance with their own times and measures. So it is with the rivers. Their rise and fall, their going and coming are like human respiration, like breath coming in and out.
The value of such beliefs, as many historians of science have noted, is not so much a matter of whether or not they are true, as of their capacity to stimulate further observation and to explain the world in naturalistic terms. The importance of the waterways created an imperative for such speculations, just as it drove the development of technologies and systems for making careful measurements and records, for example so that water levels could be determined during dredging operations. Cartography was so far advanced in China from the Han to the Ming eras partly because water management was accorded such priority.
China's Sorrow
What a strange journey the Yellow River, China's 'mother river' (muqin he), makes from mountain lake to Yellow Sea. Pouring down from the western highlands, around the city of Lanzhou in Gansu province it departs from its eastwards flow and travels north towards Inner Mongolia, then executes another bend to turn south along the border of Sha'anxi and Shanxi provinces. Finally, sluggish with silt and descending the shallowest of gradients, it turns abruptly east when joined by the Wei River near the border of Sha'anxi and Henan. It cuts north-east across the North China Plain, through Henan and Shandong, before emptying at the coast. The 4,632-kilometre journey makes the Yellow River the fourth longest in the world. The flow is not so massive compared with the Amazon or the Mississippi, but it varies hugely between the dry and wet (June – September) seasons. That is partly what makes the Yellow River so hard to manage – but the key problem is the silt.
It is in the denuded and rugged landscapes of Ningxia, Sha'anxi and Shanxi that the river gets it hue. This region is a vast plateau of loose sandy soil called loess, hundreds of metres thick, blown there from the Gobi desert just to the north in Mongolia. The soil is powdery and virtually free from grit, so that it crumbles to an ochre smear under your fingers. This is China's famous 'yellow earth' (huangtu). Loess is easily eroded, and winds blow it in blinding clouds as far east as Beijing. While the capital's now infamous dust storms have been aggravated by desertification in the north-west, they have been apt for centuries to descend and leave everything – houses, trees, animals, people – coated a dirty yellow.
The great river fills with sediment as it carves its course through this landscape, loading the waters with a higher density of solids than is found in almost any other river in the world. From each kilogram of Yellow River water you can extract as much as 300 grams of sediment, making it tantamount to liquid mud. By the time the river turns eastwards again at the threefold meeting of Sha'anxi, Shanxi and Henan, it is a reddish-golden colour.
This sediment gives the Yellow River the Janus nature in which it both nourishes and devastates the nation. The loess-rich water deposits fertile soils in the middle and lower reaches – the North China Plain – where there are great fields of wheat and sorghum, millet, maize and sweet potato, the latter two imported from the New World. Half of China's wheat is grown here, and a third of its maize and cotton. A quarter of the country's population live on these plains, and one estimate maintains that over time more than a trillion people have lived and died here, fed by the rich alluvium. The archaeological remains of agricultural villages have been found from around the eighth millennium BC, which is when millet was first domesticated in China.
The river has been engineered for over two millennia so that it might swell the bounty from farmland. Irrigation here dates back at least to the Warring States period from the fifth century BC, when the feudal system emerged. While anthropologist Jared Diamond's suggestion that agriculture was 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race' shoulders all the burdens of counterfactual histories, there is hardly a better example than the Yellow River to advance his argument. The story of the river basin has been one of interactions between human civilization and nature that constantly raised the stakes while at the same time creating an artificial ecosystem of vast scale and perilous fragility: a landscape almost wholly shaped by human agency, yet nonetheless still massively vulnerable to nature's whims.
For, although most major rivers are prone to flood, the Yellow River valley has suffered from it in a manner both extreme in extent and seemingly intractable in cause. As the river flows east, some of the sediment settles onto the bed, raising it higher. The waters then become increasingly likely to overrun the banks when the flood season arrives with the rains and the melting of snow at the headwaters in summer. To combat flooding, for millennia the Chinese built dykes along the river: huge ramparts of mud, reinforced with sacks of rocks, woven reed mats and clumps of vegetation. But this method of flood control is unsustainable. As the riverbed rose, so did the dykes, until the river itself flowed as if along a semi-natural aqueduct up to fifteen metres above the level of the surrounding floodplain. When a breach in the dykes occurred – and it always did eventually – the result was all the more catastrophic. Kilometres of dykes, having been laboriously built and maintained for years, might be swept away in a matter of hours, and the river water pooled into immense lakes and inland seas. As the flow was diverted, it slowed down and silt was deposited at a greater rate, choking up the old bed and making it extremely hard to return the river to its course.
Yet it was precisely because of the river's fertile sediments that the floodplain was so attractive to farmers, accumulating a rural population at constant hazard of disaster. At the same time, intensive agriculture exacerbated the danger. The demand for cultivable land, as well as for timber to use as fuel and in construction, led to clearance of the forests that once covered the loess plains. The bleak, barren badlands of today, riven by chasms and gorges, are largely a human construct, for the forest cover on the loess plateau is thought to have declined over the past four millennia from more than 50% of the land area to just 8%. Lacking the protection of forest canopy and root systems, the exposed soil is more readily eroded by rain, which not only destroys farmland but also boosts the sediment load in the river, making the problem of silt deposition still more grave.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Water Kingdom by Philip Ball. Copyright © 2017 Philip Ball. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Rain on the Summer Palace 1
1 The Great Rivers: Yangtze and Yellow: The Axes of China's Geography 12
2 Out of the Water: The Myths and Origins of Ancient China 44
3 Finding the Way: Water as Source and Metaphor in Daoism and Confucianism 68
4 Channels of Power: How China's Waterways Shaped its Political Landscape 96
5 Voyages of the Eunuch Admiral: How China Explored the World 131
6 Rise and Fall of the Hydraulic State: Taming the Waters try Bureaucracy 159
7 War on the Waters: Rivers and Lakes as Sites and Instruments of Conflict 183
8 Mao's Dams: The Technocratic Vision of a New China 218
9 The Fluid Art of Expression: How Water Infuses Chinese Painting and Literature 254
10 Water and China's Future: Threats, Promises and & New Dialogue 291
Acknowledgements 315
Picture Credits 316
Notes 317
Bibliography 327
Index 333