The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  These fantasies were certainly boosted by the resurgence of the activist approach toward the Yellow River hydraulics. By 1114, the head of the Water Conservancy, Meng Changling 孟昌齡, came up with a new hydraulic plan that Huizong's court “was pleased with and approved.” Instead of trying to fix the river's banks, block up its overflows, or shift the river's course toward an eastern direction, Meng instead planned to appropriate the river's upper reaches farther to the west. He eyed the Dapi 大伾 Mountain at the southernmost tip of the Taihang Mountains in southwestern Hebei. He suggested cutting through this mountain to create a channel that the Yellow River could wind through before reaching southern Hebei. With this new course, the river would avoid flowing along its existing flood-prone courses in southern Hebei.36 In this way, the river would be rerouted northward into western Hebei, most closely in accord with the legendary river courses Yu the Great created in antiquity.

  This idea may sound familiar to us: to revive the hydraulic achievement and physical landscape of the ancient sage king. This is precisely what Emperor Taizu conceptualized in 972. It is also very close to the hydraulic proposal Li Chui advocated in 1015, as well as to the idea that frustrated Emperor Shenzong resorted to in 1080. None of these earlier figures were able to put the idea forth in open political debates and develop systematic hydraulic actions for it. Ten years before the downfall of the Song state, Emperor Huizong and his court not only found this idea appealing, but also trusted their capability to execute it. Huizong heralded the new hydraulic project in 1115: “To gouge the mountains to smooth out channels is to follow the tracks of the Nine Rivers [produced by Yu the Great]. To construct bridges to rest upon the toes [of the mountains] is to achieve work that ten thousand generations will rely upon.”37 It was Huizong's belief that he would revive the legendary landscape of north China, and tame the unruly river permanently.

  The hydraulic work began immediately with very little planning. It was the middle of summer, at the height of the rainy season when the Yellow River was rising. The torrents smashed through the mountains and valleys, as well as the gullies that hydraulic workers tried to dig, provoking tremendous floods and killing numerous laborers. Southwestern Hebei turned into a landscape of vast lakes and swamps. Yet, none of this made it to the ears of the emperor. What Huizong heard by the end of 1115 was all about success and glory:

  The tracks of Yu the Great disappeared thousands of years ago. It is only Your Majority who has exerted divine wisdom to restore Yu's tracks and channel the Yellow River through the three mountains. The lengthy dykes are winding and sturdy, forcefully stopping the giant stream. Building bridges on the river to link up the mountains, this work accords with the design of Heaven and Earth. Your power illuminates both the north and the south [of the river across the empire]; it transcends and exceeds anything in the ancient past.38

  A few months later, there was another piece of cheerful news. In central Hebei, the muddy water of the Yellow River appeared to be running “clear,” for the first time in the Song history. By 1119, the river was reported to flow through the “midway”; meaning, it was contained within its channel rather than overflowing its banks. This desirable situation was ascribed to the eminence of the emperor's “sagely virtues” and the assistance of “the divine.”39 In 1120, the court approved a project to open a divergent channel, but just as the Hebei hydrocrats were about to start work, “suddenly a divergent channel came into being automatically. The river flowed smoothly toward the Cunjin Pond. Everybody at the site of the project gathered and sighed [in wonder].” Ministers and officials at the court urged the emperor to have this miraculous event recorded for history, as they competed with each other to usher in their congratulations.40

  Living amidst this frenzy of hydraulic achievements and adulations, Emperor Huizong dreamt that he would surpass his ancestors and be memorialized with legendary sage kings like Yu the Great. Envisioning a thorough transformation of the landscape of north China, he anticipated a coming of a celestial world in which he would ascend to become an immortal. As the emperor was less and less concerned with earthly problems, not much was written about the actual situation of the Yellow River and Hebei during his later years. Scant materials provide glimpses of a rather tragic story. The river continued to shatter banks, submerge cities and towns, and kill men and women there. The hydrocrats found no rest. They still ran from one location to another, busy fixing ruptures and opening straight jacketing channels. What they had promised the emperor and the emperor had believed – that the Yellow River would be pacified once and for ever – had not been actualized.

  The Song state had tried everything it could to pacify the river and handle the environmental problems in Hebei, but nothing had succeeded. In 1125, news came from the north that a group of semi-nomads from northeast Asia, called the Jurchen 女真, had overthrown the Liao Dynasty. Months later, the Jurchen army crossed the Juma River and the frontier ponds in northern Hebei, as if the frontier defense system the state had painstakingly maintained for more than a hundred years did not exist at all. Neither the vagrant body of the Yellow River nor the extensive stretch of the frontier ponds seemed to have bothered them.

  Startled and panicked, Emperor Huizong hastened to hand over the throne to his son, Emperor Qinzong 欽宗 (1100–1156), thereby releasing himself from any responsibility. Qinzong, though responsible and courageous, had few options to save the empire. Exiling corrupt officials was not enough to pacify the rage of morally upright officials or to reestablish a functioning government. Demoting hydrocrats like Meng Changling and downsizing the hydraulic works in Hebei could neither bring back the tens of thousands of lives that were lost, nor recover the immense wealth that had been wasted and embezzled. The court made efforts to relieve famine and help war refugees, especially those in Hebei, hoping they would side with the government in fighting against the Jurchen. But the state's treasuries were so drained by the self-indulgent Huizong and corrupt officials that not much was left behind to use either for the people or for the state's military actions.

  In 1127, after the capital had been besieged by the Jurchen for six months, the young emperor and empress surrendered. Huizong joined them shortly after, captured by the Jurchen on his way escaping the capital. With the royal family being whisked away into Jurchen territory in northeast Asia and the dynasty imperiled, the Yellow River became the state's last bid for survival. The governor of the capital, Du Chong 杜充 (died in 1141), ordered his soldiers to breach the river's banks in order to create a massive flood to halt the southward advancement of the Jurchan army. Bursting through the ruptures in the banks, the entire Yellow River poured toward the south, turning the eastern half of Henan into a swamp, resembling what had happened in 989, 1015, 1019, and 1077. But the Jurchen were undaunted. This last strike saw the Northern Song Dynasty coming to a dramatic end.

  With the fall of the Northern Song state, the Yellow River turned to its southerly course. Up to the present day, the river has never shifted back to Hebei. The landscape of the Yellow River delta inside Hebei that the state had created in 1048, and that the state had doubted, tried to modify in various ways, and invested in heavily until 1127, had dissolved within days and was gone forever. The eighty years of the river's northern flows were a mere blip in the river's many thousands of years of history. Even historians have generally overlooked it, despite its profound import in the political drama of the Song Dynasty.

  5.2 Ponds and the Northern “Watery Land”41

  The formation of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex brought the Yellow River and Hebei's indigenous environmental entities into direct connection and even conflicts, something we shall examine fully in Chapter 8. These new environmental phenomena – seen through the eyes of the imperial state – caused the entwinement and complication of two originally separate political agendas, the river's pacification and Hebei's strategic and military stability. Before 1048, the state handled these agendas individually in two distant geographical zone
s. It was the idealistic belief of Li Chui and many others that a northerly flowing Yellow River would serve as a natural defensive barrier inside Hebei; meaning, the river would supplement and enrich Hebei's existing strategic apparatus. After 1048, whether or not the river served such purpose remained untested. What appeared absolute was that the river's meandering courses and floods destroyed much of Hebei's strategic apparatus that the state took great pain to construct in the previous decades. Unavoidably, the state's hydraulic activities to tame the river had to intervene in and, often, compete with the maintenance of Hebei's strategic apparatus. Hence, a significant dilemma the state faced throughout the second half of its rule was whether to prioritize the river hydraulics or prioritize the maintenance of Hebei's strategic apparatus; or how the state could treat both with equal attention. To understand the state's management of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex is to investigate the Yellow River hydraulics on the one hand and the state's management of Hebei's strategic apparatus in the new circumstances on the other hand. Lying at the heart of the latter was the situation of Hebei's frontier ponds after 1048.

  The ponds formed before the 1040s did not remain intact through the rest of the eleventh century. As noted earlier, the climate turned drier in the second half of the eleventh century, and north China was increasingly susceptible to drought. This led to inadequate water supplies in Hebei, so some of the ponds began to shrink or even dry up completely. Meanwhile, due to the long-standing peace between the Song and the Liao, the ponds and other defense systems were never actually tested, so their significance began to be overlooked. Growing negligence and corruption among frontier officials and military leaders led to poor care of this strategic entity. Most importantly, the waters of the Yellow River tore apart the existing structure of Hebei's land, depositing silt in the ponds and exacerbating both the siltage and shrinkage problems that the ponds had already been experiencing.42 In the 1070s, some ponds were reported to have shrunk so much that local peasants could farm on their exposed shores and bottoms.43 The defense system that the Song government took such pain to build had begun to collapse.

  The situation presented the government with a serious dilemma: whether or not to maintain the ponds against both the forces of nature and the state's political calculation, such as keeping the Yellow River inside Hebei. The maintenance incurred high costs in terms of labor, capital, and materials. As discussed, there was always a faction in the court who suggested letting the river flow where it wanted, even at the expense of the ponds; to statesmen like Sima Guang, the ponds did not seem capable of defending the empire against the Khitan army, and might even offer the Khitan easy, open access to the entire north China when their water froze in the winter.44 Other officials stressed the economic harm the ponds had caused to Hebei when they overflowed and damaged large stretches of farmland. The resulting decrease in agricultural production not only jeopardized the well-being of the Hebei people, but it also endangered the state's revenue income. These anti-pond officials equated the costly maintenance of the ponds with “giving up arable fields,” which was not economically viable.45 With or without the negative impact from the Yellow River, these officials did not favor the maintenance of the ponds.

  More people in the government, however, advocated for the crucial role that Hebei's ponds could play in defending the state. For local commanders in Hebei, their careers were closely tied with the existence of the ponds, since the financial subsidies and resources assigned for pond maintenance, which came down from the central and provincial governments, would translate into political and economic power in the hands of these local leaders. In the words of pro-pond officials and officers, the ponds were “not deep enough for boats to float on and not shallow enough for people to walk through. So even with a mighty army, [the Khitan] are unable to pass through [the ponds].”46 They used the potentiality rather than a tested outcome to define the significance of the ponds.

  Occasional military tensions between the Song and its northern neighbor reinforced such rhetoric, demonstrating that the Liao was a continuing threat. For instance, in the early 1040s when the Song was dragged into war with the Xixia Tanguts, the Liao saw it as a good opportunity to harass the Song. The tension did not escalate into war, but it made many in the Song government and in Hebei's military distrust the Liao and believe in the necessity of maintaining an effective defense system in Hebei. Hence, rather than withdrawing its efforts, the state decided to increase its investments in the ponds in the mid-1040s. It approved proposals from Hebei's military commanders, who suggested not only refilling dried-up ponds with water, but also creating new ponds in northwest Hebei, where the high terrain had previously discouraged construction. Yang Huaimin 楊懷敏, who was in charge of frontier security and military colonies in several northwestern Hebei districts, was said to have been “particularly keen on preparing the dykes [for the ponds] in the frontier area.”47

  Two decades later, Wang Anshi and his fellow reformists came to power, and enthusiastically pursued the policy of “strengthening the military.” They hoped to change the image and reality of the Song as a military dwarf in front of its nomadic neighbors. Such zeal turned into actual military action, as along the empire's northwestern border in the 1070s, Song troops provoked a war to recover the disputed territory occupied by the Xixia Tanguts. No war broke out in Hebei, but a call to reclaim the historically Chinese territory north of the Juma River from the Khitan's occupation was in the air. Meanwhile, the state was concerned that while it was engaged in a war with the Xixia, the Liao might take advantage of the situation and threaten a war against Hebei, as it did in the 1040s. The combination of enthusiasm and anxiety revitalized interest in Hebei's ponds within the reformist government and among the military leaders in Hebei.48 In the 1070s and 1080s, various projects were carried out to fix the old ponds and produce a more complex “watery” landscape.

  There were two major challenges to the maintenance of the ponds. First, there was the rapid depositing of silt from the Yellow River, and in order to prevent that, local commanders and their corvée laborers spent much energy to reroute the river's course and channel away its water. The second challenge was the shortage of water in the generally dry Hebei plain. To deal with the issue, the commanders and laborers channeled clean water from springs in the western mountainous area, and also directed rather muddy water from some local rivers such as the Hutuo River and the Juma River.49 Cheng Fang, a major technocrat in the reformist faction, made enormous efforts in this regard. He commanded soldiers to “open and repair” the Zhang 漳 River in southwestern Hebei, to “open up” the Hutuo River in northwestern Hebei, to “open up” the Pipa Bay 琵琶灣, and to divert the course of the Yellow River. By taking up these projects nearly simultaneously, Cheng sought to increase water supplies and produce more ponds. He also breached the Hulu 葫蘆 River and channeled its water into the Sha 沙 River, and by doing so, their streams were eventually connected to the ponds.50

  The famous scholar and scientist Shen Gua 沈括 (1031–1095) also actively promoted the maintenance and expansion of the ponds. When he served as Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner in the mid-1070s, he toured around northwestern Hebei and found that “there was no longer any trace of the ponds and marshes.” Deeply concerned about the frontier security, he petitioned the court to restore the old ponds by infusing them with water channeled down from the western mountainous areas.51 With his support, local officials spent “government funds” to purchase low-lying fields from private land owners, and turned them into new ponds.52 Just north of the northwestern city of Dingzhou, Shen supervised the dredging of a pond that eventually expanded to a perimeter of several li.53 To make the best use of this new landscape and its abundant water resources, Shen followed in the steps of He Chengju of the late tenth century and encouraged locals to farm paddy rice around the pond.54

  The efforts that took place at the local level and were sponsored by civil and military leaders in northern Hebei went hand-in-ha
nd with the financial, administrative, and legal support from the central government. No historical figure is available as to indicate exactly how much it cost to fix the old ponds, create new ponds, introduce various water resources, and support the laborers working on those projects. But it is certain that without the approval of the central government, none of these projects could be easily carried out, and certainly not at the same time. Much of the materials used for construction and the funds used to purchase them was not generated locally, but was arranged and sent down by the provincial financial institutions like the Fiscal Commission. These institutions had to obtain a great portion of the resources from outside of Hebei, because Hebei's own production and tax incomes were too modest to fulfill its expenses. It was the central government that determined and coordinated how much resources were assigned to Hebei and how in general they should be used.

  In 1083, the state issued new regulations on pond maintenance. It ordered the water levels of the ponds to be measured regularly and the results to be reported to the imperial court every season.55 In 1098 the court reaffirmed the regulation, and specified more details on how it should be carried out. It ordered Hebei's frontier officers and pond-managing organizations to measure the scale of any expansion or shrinkage of the ponds, and to submit reports to the Military Colonies Commission in the first month of every season, that is, in the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth lunar months.56 The government also employed a considerable number of soldiers to undertake daily surveillance and dyke repair.57 These steps, reinforcing the old regulations set earlier in the century and gathering the local efforts by individual officers and officials, installed a systematic management of the ponds.