The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  The military expansion and the depression of Hebei's civilian society affected the state in negative ways. The military demands skyrocketed. Although the government expected militiamen to provide their own supplies, in reality the Strong Valiants brought along horses and armor only under the condition that the government released their households from paying duties for corvée services.29 Some well-to-do Righteous and Brave militiamen prepared their own crossbows, for which the government rewarded their households with a tax deduction worth two thousand copper coins. The government still had to provide food and make weapons for men from poor families.30 When assigning men duties rather than regular military training, the government even paid wages. The Righteous and Brave were paid according to the scale for the professional District Armies, that is, a monthly salary of 500 copper coins, 167.5 liters of grain, and a certain amount of silk and hemp products.31 The expansion of Hebei's militia did not save the government money, as its advocates believed it would. In fact, the government's expenditure on Hebei soared. By the mid-1040s, the government's annual military expenses for Hebei rose to 24,450,000 (of various units) of coins, grain, and fabrics. Beyond this number, as Ouyang Xiu pointed out, the government had various “irregular expenses,” such as issuing grants to soldiers at special events as well as awards to those with excellent performance in training.32

  As expenditures rose, Hebei's agricultural revenues decreased, putting pressure on state coffers.33 In Jizhou prefecture in central Hebei, for instance, the annual military expenditure in the late 1040s included 380,000 dan (1 dan ≈ 67 liters) of grain and forage, 103,000 lengths of plain silk, 16,500 lengths of hemp fabrics, 135,000 liang 兩 (1 liang ≈ 40 grams) of silk floss, and 110,000 strings of coins. But the prefecture's tax income provided only 43,000 dan of grain (11 percent of the demand), 5,400 lengths of silk and hemp fabrics (5 percent of the demand), and 27,000 liang of silk floss (20 percent of the demand).34 The majority of its expenditure had to be covered by income from somewhere else. While the districts in southern Hebei might have been able to produce more goods for the armies, the heavily militarized frontier districts must have been in an even worse economic and financial situation than Jizhou. Balancing out the regional differences throughout Hebei, we may use Jizhou's situation as the indicator of Hebei's average. Thus, let us make a rough estimate: Hebei's own revenues might have contributed 15–20 percent of its military expenditure, leaving 80–85 percent to the importation from outside of Hebei.

  The massive importation of goods was reliant not only upon the coordination but also on the coffers of the central government. By 1047, it cost the government approximately 10,000,000 strings of copper coins every year to purchase grain and forage to feed its soldiers in the three frontier provinces of Hebei, Hedong, and Shanxi. We may roughly assume that at least one third of this was for Hebei.35 Indeed, the economic boom across the empire over the previous few decades had filled state treasuries. Yet the war in Shaanxi and rapid militarization in Hebei consumed more than what the state had gathered and quickly depleted imperial coffers.

  Let's look at one particular measure the government employed to gather supplies and how it affected state finances. The government had a hard time collecting military supplies with its bureaucratic team, so it collaborated with private merchants and encouraged them to trade and transport supplies. Along the Yuhe Canal and the Bianhe Canal, long-distance trade for military consumption to regions like Hebei flourished. A peculiar kind of commerce blossomed between the state as buyer and merchants as seller and broker. In this relationship, the state rendered enormous economic power to merchants, upon whom the state and its military apparatus became heavily reliant. The merchants, often deemed greedy, engaged in speculation, controlled the market by buying up goods, manipulated market prices, and suppressed the government's purchasing power. Hence, wealth, which was levied on the general populace and used to fill up the state treasuries, flowed into a small number of private hands and deepened the society's economic disparity. Unfortunately, these merchants did not actually provide the state with sufficient military provisions. The particular commercial model that the state had developed to fulfill its military demands turned out to worsen its financial burden.36

  We observe an increasingly negative spiral in the state's relationship with Hebei: the more the state demanded Hebei be militarized, the less self-sufficient both Hebei's military and civilian society became, the higher the state's costs went up, the more deregulated commercial activities became, and the less market activities remained under the state's control. As a result, even with its immense financial stake, the state found it more and more difficult to obtain food and other supplies. The swollen military in Hebei suffered constant scarcity. In the early 1040s, the troops located in the northern frontier required three to four million dan of grain each year. Despite the state's efforts, these troops obtained merely 850,000 dan in 1041, 450,000 dan in 1042, and 1,040,000 dan in 1043.37 The situation was exacerbated when Hebei's annual demand climbed to seven million dan in the late 1040s.38 In the worst scenarios, as when natural disasters happened, even relatively rich prefectures in southern Hebei had very little food to feed its officials and military.

  In the mid-1040s, dealing with the unsustainable growth of Hebei's military and the state's corrupt financial system became two significant and interrelated concerns that were constantly debated at the imperial court. Prominent statesmen like Ouyang Xiu, Han Qi 韓琦 (1008–1075), Fu Bi, and Bao Zheng 包拯 (999–1062) all presented their commentaries and proposals to Emperor Renzong. They were worried about the military's unlimited consumption of the state revenue and, conversely, about the obstacle that the fiscal deficit imposed on the military system's effectiveness. The conflict between the two would eventually lead to a breakdown in either the military system or the state finances, or in the worst case, both.

  In Hebei, signs of an impending crisis burgeoned in the military. A mutiny broke out in Baozhou in northern Hebei in 1042. The frontier soldiers protested against corruption among their commanders, who had cut the soldiers’ stipends and provoked tremendous resentment.39 The insurrection was put down by the military. Yet, five years later, soldiers in Beizhou 貝州 (known as Enzhou 恩州 after 1048) in central Hebei organized another mutiny, took control of the walled city, and killed local officials and military commanders.40 They even secretly communicated with troops in other Hebei garrisons and in southern provinces across the Yellow River to plan for a large-scale, interregional rebellion. The Song court was caught offguard and terrified. It quickly sent officials from the imperial court to Hebei to replace the local leadership and maneuvered in troops from other places that were better paid and more trustworthy. After two months of fierce battles and serious defeats at the hand of the rebels, the government troops besieged the city of Enzhou, cut off food supplies, and lured some rebels to surrender. Soon after the rebels surrendered, officials ordered their execution. More than a thousand rebels were beheaded or buried alive. A purge swept through the Hebei military to identify disloyal individuals and ferret out connections between soldiers and the rebels, leading to the death and punishment of many.

  It is clear that during Emperor Renzong's Festive Era reign, the Song state's security crisis caused both by its nomadic enemies and by its own responses to the crisis led to the drastic militarization of Hebei, the region's economic downturn, the government's financial stress, and the military instability. External, interstate problems were internalized and triggered hidden domestic issues, which shook the Song's political, social, and economic stability from within. All this did not only happen to Hebei. Throughout the Song empire, civilian-led rebellions, often joined by low-ranking military, became more and more common. Wang Lun 王倫 and his fellow rebels, for instance, who began in the Shandong area and went on to establish alliances with Hebei soldiers, swept through the eastern part of north China and the lower Yangzi valley in 1043. As various social problems exploded, natural disasters caused by large-scale en
vironmental changes, which we shall discuss shortly, also began to mushroom. As the 1040s went on, more problems revealed themselves and combined to challenge the state's rule from various directions. Hebei, apparently, lay at the center of the crisis.

  In contrast to the rosy image of a stable state and a prosperous society that historians have portrayed in hindsight, the ruling classes in the 1040s saw a rather disconcerting reality in Song China. In their eyes, the state was burdened by a gigantic military, a redundant bureaucracy, various kinds of corruption, and exhausted state finances.41 To save the state from these afflictions, a group of moralist and idealist young officials cried for changes in the government. Led by Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, Fu Bi, and Han Qi, this new generation of officials persuaded Emperor Renzong to side with them and to launch an institutional reform in 1045.42

  Unfortunately, the reform did not go very far. As far as senior conservative politicians were concerned, the reformists adopted radical measures to shake up the existing power structure that had overseen and balanced different interest groups; they challenged the status quo that had maintained the old generation of officials in power for decades. Worse yet, the reformists rose very quickly as a political power, which could potentially unite various forces to dominate the court and overrule the emperor's monarchal authority. The accusations that anti-reform officials unleashed toward the reformists portrayed the latter as ill-natured and profiteering. The factional rivalry that featured Song politics had reached its first peak. The flurry of accusations agitated the nerves of the anxious emperor: he wanted some changes that would save his state from dwindling, but he also feared that radical changes would destroy the fragile stability and cause the state to collapse. Within barely two years, suspicious Emperor Renzong called off the reform and dismissed its leading members from his court.

  Underpinning its abolition was the reform's failure to tackle the crisis mentality permeating the state and its ruling members. The reform identified many manifestations of the state's mid-dynasty crisis and confronted them with individual policies. Yet, it was unable to disentangle the anxiety deeply embedded in the way in which the Song state perceived the world and its position in it. The state's crisis mentality was not new: it had evolved from the state's tremendous concerns about its survival as a vulnerable regime in an extremely challenging political, socio-economic, and environmental world, which began with the state's birth in the late tenth century.

  Environmental Crisis

  We must note, the state's sense of crisis also came from its experience of escalating environmental disasters in the 1040s. The frequent occurrence of disasters made this decade incredibly ominous, despite its designation as a “Festive Era.” To begin with, there were several years in which north China reported extensive rain; in Hebei, the rains damaged roads and fields and caused many of the frontier ponds to overflow into nearby villages.43 Yet, most of the 1040s were very dry. The severe droughts and locust attacks that north China suffered in the early 1030s had returned. In the early 1040s, China “had no rain in subsequent years,” due to the remarkable heat. The situation was particularly alarming in 1043. A serious shortage of rainfall destroyed spring, fall, and winter crops, essentially laying waste to the entire agricultural efforts of that year.44 Then the winter of 1045 in north China was reported as extraordinarily cold. Freezing rain, sleet, and the icicle on plants were seen everywhere. Hebei even saw a very unusual “red snow.”45 The red color may suggest heavy dust and chemical particles in the lower atmosphere, which very likely came from emissions caused by frequent earthquakes during this period.

  Between 1044 and 1049, an extensive drought caused many wells and streams to dry up in the lower Yangtze valley and led to widespread epidemics and deaths among livestock. A large number of residents were found dead of thirst due to the severe shortage of water in the capital Kaifeng.46 Drought and locusts also ravaged the central and southern plain of Hebei. Observing the dreadful situation, an official lamented that “The raging barren land extends over thousands of li, putting an end to the livelihood of the commoners.”47 In 1049, Hebei was so severely attacked by drought that Ouyang Xiu claimed, perhaps with exaggeration caused by despair, that 80–90 percent of its population had died and been displaced.48

  What truly distinguished the 1040s from other decades in terms of disasters was the frequent occurrence of earthquakes. It seems that the subcontinent of China entered a geologically active time. Starting from the mid-1030s, Shanxi, the highland region west to Hebei, experienced a series of earthquakes over five days, causing the deaths of 22,391 people (another report said 60 percent of the local population), injuring 5,655 people, and killing more than 50,000 livestock.49 In 1037, the earthquakes extended to the metropolitan area of Kaifeng in Henan. Over the next ten years, these places experienced frequent earthquakes. Larger earthquakes caused serious ground ruptures and eruptions of underground water, dust, and other substances.50

  If the earthquakes in the 1030s were merely regional disruptions, what followed in the 1040s were empire-wide calamities. In 1045 and 1046 in particular, multiple earthquakes broke out simultaneously or closely followed each other in the frontier region and eastern part of Hebei. Roaring tides came from the Bohai Gulf, which indicate earthquakes at the bottom of the ocean. In the Shandong peninsula southeast of Hebei, an earthquake caused a coastal hill to collapse into the ocean. From Shanxi to the west, to Shaanxi where the Song and the Xixia shared borders, and to Henan at the core of the empire, various regions continued to report earthquakes. The southern half of the empire was not quiet either. From the Sichuan basin in the southwest to Hunan and Hubei, and all the way along the middle reaches of the Yangzi valley, earthquakes occurred one after another. As far south as in Guangdong, reports came back to the court about earthquakes both on land and in the ocean. Earthquakes continued in the highland areas of Shanxi and Shaanxi after 1046, and in early 1048, they returned to central Hebei, shortly before the Yellow River shifted its course.51 In 1048, the land north to Hebei within the Liao's territory was also reported for earthquake.

  Illustration 9. Earthquakes in the 1040s

  There are no detailed descriptions of the severity of each of these earthquakes.52 However, by simply pinning down the rough locations of their occurrences over a map of China, the sheer spatial breadth is astonishing. The simultaneous occurrence of multiple earthquakes in various parts of China over several consecutive years was rarely seen in Chinese history. It has not happened in the recent history of China, although modern seismic technology is capable of detecting and measuring earthquakes. Chinese experiences with modern earthquakes like the famous Tangshan 唐山 earthquake in 1973 and the Wenchuan 汶川 earthquake in 2008 do not help us understand the scale of the disasters in the 1040s. However devastating they were, these modern earthquakes were singular events that took place in limited areas, had a limited duration, and did not trigger a series of earthquakes in ensuing years. It is hard for us to conceptualize what it was like for the ground all over China to be shaking at the same time. Therefore, I believe it is not a stretch to claim that the 1040s was an exceptional geological period with extraordinary tectonic movement.

  These exceptional geological activities released tremendous energy and emitted enormous substances from the depth of the earth into the air to tint the snow in Hebei in 1045 with a red color. Most likely, such geological turbulence forcefully reshaped the macroclimate over China, which may explain the heat and the climatic dryness in that decade, and perhaps in the previous decade as well. Despite the lack of direct evidence, let me make a bold conjecture: this climatic dryness may have contributed to the reduction in the Yellow River's water volume and thereby its floods for a few years before 1048 – a phenomenon to be mentioned in the next chapter. Meanwhile, the frequent movement of the earth's crust itself, especially in north China, might have shaken and destabilized the old course of the Yellow River and contributed to its dramatic course shift in 1048. Unfortunately, we have no extant evid
ence to either support or contradict this hypothesis. As I will analyze in greater detail in the next chapter, without knowing to what extent the forces of nature made the river shift its course, we are at least able to appreciate the substantial efforts that humans – in this particular case, the Song state and its institutions – made to push the river northward.

  The variety of environmental disasters must have caused tremendous harm to the Song society. Harvests failed because of the prevailing droughts and sudden coldness and floods. Since Hebei witnessed red snow, we also have reason to believe that the emission of chemical substances might have changed the microclimate in this part of China and affected – vert likely polluted – its soil and water to some extent. The dryness and shortage of water might have reduced the water volume in various rivers and made Hebei's water transportation less reliable. All this contributed to a general economic downturn and compounded the hardship that was already caused by various military, political, and socio-economic problems, a situation we examined earlier in the chapter. The hardship was particularly serious in regions like Hebei and Shanxi that were most heavily plagued by the environmental disasters.

  The impact of the environmental disasters on the state was multi-dimensional. There was certainly a material impact, which put additional stress on the state revenue and its financial arrangements. But from a non-material perspective, the disasters disturbed the state and its ruling members psychologically. Between the late 1030s and 1048, statesmen and officials hastened to inform Emperor Renzong about what happened outside his imperial court. They fearfully warned him of the menacing signs from the Heaven: the state had never experienced so many disasters in previous decades; the disasters indicated the state's cosmological and moral crisis, for “the will of the Heaven signals change.”53 The kind of “moral meteorology” that Mark Elvin observes for late imperial China, which held the ruling members of the state responsible for climatic-environmental changes, prevailed in Song China too.54 The state should be frightened; it should reflect upon its morals and conducts and correct its faults. Alarmed, the emperor issued multiple edicts to blame himself for his poor leadership and moral inadequacy. Claiming responsibility, his Grand Councilors ushered in memorials to accuse themselves of faults and begged for resignation and punishment.