The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  It was this sense of an environmental–cosmological crisis, together with other human crises that the state experienced in military, political, and socio-economic realms, that caused the ruling members to reevaluate their governance and prompted many to call for a reform. This sense of crisis also convinced Emperor Renzong to side with the reformists in the early 1040s, because if he chose not to, not only his personal rule but also the imperial state established by his forebearers to which he had dedicated his life would soon meet its demise. Hence, the heightening disasters in the 1040s served as an environmental–cosmological drive to facilitate political changes and sponsor the rise of reformist politicians like Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, Fu Bi, and Han Qi. However, the environmental disasters read as portentous signs were open toward various, and even conflicting, interpretations. Conservative, anti-reform officials referred to the disasters – in particular the instability of the earth – as an expression of Heaven's rage toward the radical reformists. They used the earthquakes as evidence for their claim that reform policies destabilized the originally tranquil, harmonious state of the world. These accusations appeared more convincing than the reformists’ criticism of the old-fashioned, inefficient, and sluggish system of the state governance. The conservatives’ accusations reversed the tide of opinion at the court and changed the emperor's mind; they eventually led to the ouster of reform leaders in 1045.55

  As the institutional efforts to change the status quo were abolished, the Song's mid-dynasty crises continued to mount and disturb the imperial state and the society. In the previous chapter, we examined some of the state building process that featured the centralization of power and the formation of a core-periphery political structure, which turned Hebei into a political, military, socio-economic, and environmental periphery of the empire. By the 1040s, it had become clear that such power concentration encountered various challenges and the core-periphery structure did not seem very stable. The burgeoning problems in different realms and at different locales – many associated with Hebei – threatened the state's sense of security and stability. The existential crisis and the survivor's mentality the young Song state experienced in the late tenth century did not disappear due to the state's achievements in its early decades. Rather, they transformed into a new set of crisis and anxiety in the middle of the dynasty.

  Into this context, suddenly, there came the catastrophic flood and course shift of the Yellow River in the summer of 1048. The environmental drama that this book opens with in the Prologue, after a lengthy prelude, would finally deliver its most ferocious blow. So far we have focused the discussion on the changing relationship between the imperial state and Hebei and suggested that a politically and socio-economically peripheralized Hebei would pave the way for the abrupt surge of the river's course into its land. How had Hebei, an environmental entity marginally related to the Yellow River during the previous thousand years, gradually encountered the river, emerged as a potential flooding ground to bear the river's turbulent body, and eventually suffered the river's intrusion? The next chapter will target these questions by investigating how the state, in order to permanently pacify the disastrous Yellow River, interacted with both the river and Hebei, and brought these two entities together.

  1 Liang (1980: 122).

  2 Perdue (1987), von Glahn (1987), Smith (1991), and Marks (1998). For an environmental survey of the Han Chinese expansion toward its peripheries, see Marks (2012).

  3 Chi (1936).

  4 Ho (1956), Shiba (1988), and Elvin (1973).

  5 Elvin (1973). We should note some recent challenges to Elvin's generalization and optimism, such as McDermott and Shiba's chapter in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015: 321–436).

  6 XCB, 104: 2408.

  7 The scholarship on the market economy and urban development in the Tang–Song period is gigantic. See a recent survey by McDermott and Shiba in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015: 379–384).

  8 von Glahn (1996: 43–56). For a detailed study of Song's monetary history, see Gao (2000).

  9 For the development of canals, see Ch'uan (1946), Aoyama (1963), Shi (1988b), and Zou (1993).

  10 For urban development of Kaifeng, see Zhou (1992).

  11 On books, printing, and reading, see various chapters in Chia and de Weerdt (2011), and Robert Hymes in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015: 542–568).

  12 To paraphrase Chaffee's (1995) book title.

  13 To paraphrase Bol's (1992) book title.

  14 For more about Ouyang Xiu, see Liu (1967).

  15 For a recent, comprehensive survey of Song's economic, social, and intellectual history, see Chaffee and Twitchett (2015).

  16 See Liang (1980: 288).

  17 For the administrative, military, and fiscal problems the Song state faced in the mid-eleventh century (not explicitly for the 1040s or for the region of Hebei), see Twitchett and Smith (2009: 289–327; 347–362), and various chapters in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015).

  18 For these military tensions and territorial disputes, see Twitchett and Smith (2009).

  19 Wang Gongchen's proposal in 1040 and Jia Changchao's comment in 1042, in XCB, 127: 3007 and 138: 3317–3318.

  20 XCB, 127: 3007; 47: 1036; 127: 3020; and 138: 3317–3318. For more about Song's military system, see Wang (1983) and Wang and Wright in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015).

  21 XCB, 138: 3312.

  22 This number is a combination of Hebei's Strong Valiants (293,000 heads) and the total of Hebei's Imperial, District, and Righteous and Braves (477,000 heads). See Ouyang Xiu, “Lun Hebei caichan shang shixiang shu,” OYXQJ, 118: 1825–1828.

  23 In 1064 Hebei had more than 150,000 Righteous and Braves militia (XCB, 203: 4915). In 1066 Hebei had more than 301,000 “battle soldiers,” excluding the militia (XCB, 208: 5053). In 1069, the registered Righteous and Braves numbered 186,400 (XCB, 6: 275). Assuming the scale of Hebei's battle soldiers remained stable, as did Hebei's militia, the sum of these types of troops would have amounted between 450,000 and 500,000 in the 1060s.

  24 According to the conscription policy for Hebei's Strong Valiants militia in 1000, if a household had two or three male adults, one of them would serve the militia. For larger households, two persons from a household with four or five male adults, three from six or seven, and four from eight or more than eight would serve the militia (XCB, 47: 1036). In 1064, a court decree ordered to “conscript one out of three, two out of six, and three out of nine male adults of the landowning households” to form the Righteous and Braves militia in Shaanxi, following the example in Hebei (XCB, 203: 4915).

  25 Household numbers are based on Liang (1980: 141–149).

  26 We must clarify that not all of Hebei's military were subject to full-time training and military duties. Militiamen divided into groups and rotated to participate in training and other duties. Also, theoretically, most of their military training took place in the winter when they were supposed to be released from economic activities. No historical sources survive to help us understand how exactly military training affected economic activities, especially on the basis of individual activities. In general, the increase in the burden of military services on the society must have to some extent caused disturbance to the society's regular economic life.

  27 “Shang Renzong lun yibing kunmin [Memorial to Emperor Renzong about the increasing military and its burdens on the people],” SMCZY, 120: 18a–21a. XCB, 179: 4335.

  28 Sima Guang's comment in 1064, XCB, 203: 4918.

  29 XCB, 47: 1036.

  30 XCB, 138: 3312.

  31 XCB, 138: 3312 and 161: 3895.

  32 “Lun Hebei caichan shang shixiang shu,” OYXQJ, 118: 1825–1828.

  33 For a survey on Song's fiscal administration (not specifically for Hebei), see Peter Golas in Chaffee and Twitchett (2015: 139–213).

  34 Bao Zheng, “Qing yi Jizhou jiuliang bingshi gui benzhou [Pleading to return the Jizhou troops that accessed grain supplies in other prefectures],” XSBGZY, 8: 105–109.

  35 XCB, 161: 3895. Bao Z
heng, “Zai qing yinuo Hebei bingma ji ba gongyong huiyi [Second pleading to relocate Hebei's troops and eliminate corresponding costs for governmental purposes],” XSBGZY, 9: 119–120.

  36 For the transactions between merchants and the state and the state's fiscal challenges, see Wang Shengduo (1995), Bao (2001), and Jiang (2002: 220–283). For Hebei's military strategies and supplies, see Cheng (2012).

  37 XCB, 161: 3895. Bao Zheng, “Zai qing yinuo Hebei bingma ji ba gongyong huiyi,” XSBGZY, 9: 119–120. Ouyang Xiu, “Qi zhan biandihudou xian [Pleading to extend the deadline of grain purchases],” OYXQJ, 117: 1800–1801.

  38 Bao Zheng, “Qing zhibo Bianhe lianggang wang Hebei [Pleading to distribute some grain supplies shipped through the Bian Canal to Hebei],” XSBGZY, 10: 123–124.

  39 QSW, 1023: 274.

  40 XCB, 161: 3890.

  41 Many Song statesmen and officials expressed their concerns and proposed their prescriptions; most famous was Song Qi's “Shang sanrong sanfei shu [To discuss “three redundancies” and “three wastes”],” QSW, 489: 224–226.

  42 For more about the Qingli Reform, see Liu (1957, 1967). For the intellectual underpinning of the reform, see Bol (1992: 176–211).

  43 XCB, 132: 3153; 135: 3227; and 136: 3269.

  44 XCB, 141: 3377; 143: 3463; and 145: 3520.

  45 XCB, 145: 3518.

  46 XCB, 147: 3554 and 158: 3831.

  47 Qian Yanyuan, “Shang Renzong dazhao lun hanzai [To respond to Emperor Renzong's edict on discussing the drought],” SMCZY, 40: 1a–6b.

  48 OYXQJ, 126: 1914.

  49 XCB, 120: 2840 and 2844.

  50 XCB, 120: 2840 and 145: 3518.

  51 XCB, 155: 3766; 156: 3792; 157: 3798; 158: 3821, 3823, 3826; and 159: 3844, 3846, 3849.

  52 Some seismologists and historical geographers used textual materials to reconstruct the scale and severity of some of the earthquakes. See Institute of Geophysics et al. (1990).

  53 Bao Zheng's comment, QSW, 539: 318.

  54 Elvin (1998: 213–237).

  55 For factional struggles during the Qingli reform, see Liu (1957, 1967), Bol (1992: 176–211), and Levine (2008: 9–10; 47–56).

  4

  Creating a Delta Landscape

  Imagine you are living in central Hebei on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month in 1048. You may still be experiencing or trying to recover from hardship due to droughts, earthquakes, and harvest failures in the previous few years. You have never seen the Yellow River before; it has always been far away. Family elders may have told you stories about the river, but you have never felt any real connection to it. Whether a peasant or town-dweller, the river has had nothing to do with your daily life. All of a sudden, on that day, you hear a roaring in the distance. It grows louder and louder, screams rising out of its dull thundering. Before you have time to figure out what is happening, the water comes upon you in gigantic torrents. People, livestock, and buildings are all swallowed by the violent waves. Stunned, you are swept away. There is nothing but water all around you. Gasping for air and close to drowning, you begin to paddle as the old, weak, and unlucky are sucked under all around you. You and the other lucky ones grab onto a tree or make it to high ground.

  The tremendous flood comes without warning; no one even knows which river has flooded. No one in central Hebei is prepared for a disaster like this one. Over the next several hours, you watch the torrents dismantling villages and sweeping away your neighbors, and even your own children and parents. Only after days pass do the high waters begin to ebb. Dead bodies of people and animals bob in the currents. As you and your fellow survivors desperately wait for rescue and relief, which may never arrive at all, you look into each other's eyes, already drained of hope. Perhaps the only thing left are the questions, “Why did this happen?” and “Why did this happen to us?”

  In the summer of 1048, the question of why must have haunted most of Hebei's flood refugees. This question is equally intriguing to us, modern readers of history. Chapter 1 has informed us that for nearly a thousand years, the river and the plain had maintained a geographically, environmentally marginal relationship. How did this long-term status quo come to an abrupt end? Also, we know in retrospect that, after occupying the Hebei Plain for eighty years, the river shifted out this land in 1128; since then it stayed away from Hebei and restored a marginal relationship with it for almost 900 years. Was this unique, brief episode of history – the eighty-year-long entanglement between the river and the plain – a random incident? If we follow modern hydrologists’ explanation of the river's mechanism as “prone to siltation, prone to overflow, and prone to course shifts,” and the long-term environmental transformation on the Loess Plateau that I sketched in Chapter 1, it seems that what happened in 1048 was an inevitable, natural outcome of the long-term environmental tendency. It appeared simply as a tragic but “natural” catastrophe brought about by the unfathomable forces of the river itself, or as a dramatic but unforeseeable climax to the Song's mid-dynasty crisis in the 1040s.1

  Those living in the eleventh century who had experienced the dramatic event reached similar answers. For educated men and officials inside and outside Hebei, and perhaps for Emperor Renzong as well, their search for the answer went beyond the welfare of individuals. Taught to believe in Heaven's Mandate as well as a cosmological view of the resonance between natural phenomena and human behaviors, they might have wondered whether or not this disastrous event was another heavenly punishment for human misconduct or the state's ill governance, following on a series of portentous signs from the previous years, such as earthquakes, red snow, and plagues of locusts.

  Among the more scientifically and technologically minded men of the age, there were those who refused to attribute everything to the will of an abstract Heaven or to interpret disasters in purely moral terms. These men observed the pattern of the river's floods and came up with answers that are fairly close to modern hydrological explanations. To Ouyang Xiu, the Yellow River carried such a heavy silt load that it would inevitably build up in the riverbed and clog the river course. Given enough time, this hydrological characteristic would invariably lead to an overflow of the river.2 Even without knowledge of gravity, people in the Song were convinced by empirical observations that water would flow downward toward the lowland. “It was the form/circumstances of the earth,” Liu Chang 劉敞 (1019–1068) explained, which caused the river to breach the dykes.3 As Hebei was considered low-lying, it was understandable that the river, once free of the constraints of its dykes, would flow northward into Hebei. To these men, the river was subjected to what we might term “natural” forces. It was these forces, rather than cosmological and moral principles, that precipitated the disaster.

  However different they appear, these explanations of the 1048 event seem to agree on one point: people were not directly involved in the physical movement of the river; they remained passive before cosmological or natural forces. Similar to our modern assumption, these medieval views also suggested that people, especially those living along the river's lower reaches, were powerless to stop the river from flooding. A catastrophe as gigantic as the 1048 event was merely a hydrological issue. It would occur sooner or later if not precisely in the summer of 1048, and slightly upstream or downstream if not precisely at the site of Shanghu. The river hydrology, similar to the large-scaled geological forces that we discussed in Chapter 1, determined when the river flooded and toward what direction it shifted course. There was not much that manpower could do to cause, intervene in, or avoid the situation.

  The present chapter turns from hydrology to hydraulics by bringing the Song state into the long-term marginal environmental relationship between the river and the Hebei Plain, and questioning how the arrival of the state in 960 changed this relationship. By investigating the pattern of the river's movements and imperial states’ hydraulic works during the hundred years prior to 1048, the chapter reveals that the river's course shift into Hebei was not an “act of God,” as the hydro-geologist Gi
lbert White once famously termed floods.4 Rather, it was a consequence of trialectic struggles among the river, the Hebei Plain, and the imperial state. In the trialectic relationship, the state's deliberate choices and subtle manipulations pushed the river a little by a little toward the empire's northeastern periphery. To put it plainly, the peripheralized Hebei was chosen by the state to serve as the river's flooding ground, and to bear the immense suffering from the river's overwhelming power. For the crisis-ridden Song state, this peculiar way of dealing with the river bolstered the state's constant efforts to subdue and appropriate Hebei – making this political and socio-economic periphery into an environmental periphery. In this sense, the state's management of the turbulent environment, just like its appropriation of traditionally decentralizing regions like Hebei, contributed to the state building process. Given the state's forceful environmental management, the life of the river, the plain of Hebei, and the imperial state became inextricably entangled.