The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Child of mine coming into this world Be careful where you take yourself. So many ways for things to go wrong; Sometimes I grow afraid. If only we lived in the Age of Great Peace I could be happy to see your innocent face Watching the geese fly south in the fall.

  Once Kang was helping Ibrahim clean up the clutter of books and paper, inkstones and brushes in his study, and she stopped to read one of his pages.

  'History can be seen as a series of collisions of civilizations, and it is these collisions that create progress and new things. It may not happen at the actual point of contact, which is often racked by disruption and war, but behind the lines of conflict, where the two cultures are most trying to define themselves and prevail, great progress is often made very swiftly, with works of permanent distinction in arts and technique. Ideas flourish as people try to cope, and over time the competition yields to the stronger ideas, the more flexible, more generous ideas. Thus Fulan, India and Yingzhou are prospering in their disarray, while China grows weak from its monolithic nature, despite the enormous infusion of gold from across the Dahai. No single civilization could ever progress; it is always a matter of two or more colliding. Thus the waves on the shore never rise higher than when the backwash of some earlier wave falls back into the next one incoming, and a white line of water jets up to a startling height. History may not resemble so much the seasons of a year, as waves in the sea, running this way and that, crossing, making patterns, sometimes a triple peak, a very Diamond Mountain of cultural energy, for a time.'

  Kang put the sheet down, looked at her husband fondly. 'If only it were true,' she said to herself.

  'What?' He looked up.

  'You are a good man, husband. But it may be you have taken on an impossible task, out of your goodness.'

  Then, in the forty sixth year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, rain fell for all of the third month. Everywhere the land was flooded, just at the time when Kang Tongbi was nearing her confinement. Whether general rebellion across the west broke out because of the misery caused by the floods, or was calculatedly initiated to take advantage of the disaster's confusion, no one could say. But Muslim insurgents attacked town after town, and while Shiite and Wahhabi and Jahriya and Khafiya factions murdered each other in mosque and alleyway, Qing banners too went down before the furious attacks of the rebels. It became so serious that the bulk of the imperial army was rumoured to be heading west; but meanwhile the devastation was widespread, and in Gansu the food began to run out.

  Lanzhou was again besieged, this time by a coalition of immigrant Muslim rebels of all sects and national origins. Ibrahim's household did everything it could to protect the mistress of the house in her late pregnancy. But even this high in its watershed, the Yellow River had risen dangerously with the rains, and being located at the confluence of the Yellow and the Tao made things worse for their compound. The town's high bluff began to look not so high. It was a frightening sight to see the rivers risen so startlingly, brown and foaming at the very tops of their banks. Finally, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when an imperial army was a day's march downstream, and relief of the siege therefore almost in sight, the rain fell harder than ever, and the rivers rose and spilled over their banks.

  Someone, rebels everyone assumed, chose this worst of all moments to break the dam upstream on the Tao River, sending an immense muddy flow of water ripping down the watershed, over the Tao's already overtopped banks, rushing into the Yellow River and even backing up the larger stream, so that all was brown water, spreading up into the hills on each side of the narrow river valley. By the time the imperial army arrived the whole of Lanzhou was covered with a sheet of dirty brown water, to knee height, and rising still.

  Ibrahim had already gone out to meet the imperial army, taken there by the governor of Lanzhou to consult with the new command, and to help them find rebel authorities to negotiate with. So as the water rose inexorably around the walls of Ibrahim's compound, there were only the women of the household and a few servants to deal with the flood.

  The compound wall and sandbags at the gates appeared to be adequate to protect them, but then word of the broken dam and its surge of water was shouted into the compound by people departing for higher ground.

  'Come quickly,' Zunli cried. 'We must get to higher ground too. We must leave now!'

  Kang Tongbi ignored him. She was busy stuffing trunks with her papers and with Ibrahim's. There were rooms and rooms full of books and papers, as Zunli exclaimed when he saw what she was doing. There wasn't time to save them all.

  'Then help me,' Kang grated, working at a furious clip.

  'How will we move it all?'

  'Put the boxes in the sedan chair, quickly.'

  'But how will you go?'

  'I will walk! Go! Go! Go!'

  They stuffed boxes. 'This isn't right,' Zunli protested, looking at Kang's rounded form. 'Ibrahim would want you to leave. He wouldn't worry about these books!'

  'Yes he would!' she shouted. 'Pack! Get the rest in here and pack!'

  Zunli did what he could. A wild hour of racing around in a pure panic had him and the other servants exhausted, but Kang Tongbi was just getting started.

  Finally she relented, and they hurried out the front gate of the compound, sloshing immediately into knee high brown water that poured into the compound until they closed the gate against it. It was a strange sight indeed to see the whole town become a shallow foamy brown lake. The sedan chair was piled so full with books and papers that it took all the servants jammed together under the hoist bars to lift and move it. A low, hair raising boom of moving water shook the air. The foaming brown lake that covered both rivers and the town extended into the hills on all sides, and Lanzhou itself was completely awash. The servant girls were crying, filling the air with shrieks, shouts, screams. Pao was nowhere to be seen. Thus it was that only a mother's ears heard a single boy crying out.

  Kang realized: she had forgotten her own son. She turned and hopped back inside the gate that had been pushed open by water, unnoticed by the servants staggering under the loaded sedan chair.

  She splashed through rushing water to Shih's room: the compound itself was already floored by the opaque brown flood.

  Shih had apparently been hiding under his bed, and the water had flushed him out and onto it, where he curled tip terrified. 'Help! Mother, help me!'

  'Come quickly then!'

  'I can't! I can't!'

  'I can't carry you, Shih. Come on! The servants are all gone, it's just you and me now!'

  'I can't!' And he began to wail, balled up on his bed like a threeyear old.

  Kang stared at him. Her right hand even jerked towards the gate, as if leaving ahead of the rest of her. She snarled then, grabbed the boy by the ear and jerked him howling to his feet.

  'Walk or I'll tear your ear off, you hui!'

  'I'm not the hui! Ibrahim is the hui! Everyone out here is hui! Ow!' And he howled as she twisted his ear almost off his head. She dragged him like that through the flooding household to the gate.

  As they passed out the gate a surge of water, a low wave, washed into them waist high on her, chest high on him. When it passed the level of the flood stayed higher. They were now thigh deep in water. The roar was much greater than before. They couldn't hear each other. No servants were in sight.

  Higher ground stood at the end of the lane leading south, and the city wall was there as well, so Kang sloshed that way, looking for ber servants. She stumbled and cursed; one of her butterfly shoes had been sucked away in the tow of water. She kicked the other one off, proceeded barefoot. Shih seemed to have fainted, or gone catatonic, and she had to put an arm under his knees, and lift him up and carry him, resting him on the top shelf of her pregnant belly. She shouted angrily for her servants, but could not even hear herself. She slipped once and cried out to Guanyin, She Who Hears Cries.

  Then she saw Xinwu, swimming towards her like an otter with arms, serious and determined. Behind him Pao was wading tow
ards her, and Zunli. Xinwu pulled Shih away from Kang and whacked him on his reddened car. 'That way!' Xinwu shouted loudly at Shih, pointing out the city wall. Kang was surprised to see Shih almost run towards it, leaping out of the water time after time. Xinwu stood at her side and helped her slosh up the lane. She was like a canal barge being towed upstream, bow waves lapping at her distended waist. Pao and Zunli joined them and helped her, Pao crying and shouting 'I went ahead to check the depth, I came back and thought you were in the chair!' while Zunli was saying something to the effect that they thought she had gone ahead with Pao. The usual confusion.

  On the city wall the other servants were urging them on, staring upstream white-eyed with fright. Hurry! their mouths mouthed. Hurry!

  At the foot of the wall the brown water was streaming hard by. Kang struggled against the flow awkwardly, slipping on her little feet. People lowered a wooden ladder from the top of the city wall, and Shih scampered up it. Kang started to climb. She had never climbed a ladder before, and Xinwu and Pao and Zunli pushing her from below did not really help. It was hard getting her feet to curl over the submerged rungs; indeed her feet were not as long as the rungs were wide. She could get no purchase. Now she could see out of the corner of her eye a big brown wave, filled with things, smashing along the wall, sweeping it clean of ladders and everything else that had been leaned against it. She pulled herself up by the arms and pegged her foot down onto a dry rung.

  Pao and Zunli shoved her up from below, and she was lifted bodily onto the top of the city wall. Pao and Zunli and Xinwu shot up beside her. The ladder was pulled up after them just as the big wave swept by.

  Many people had taken refuge up on the wall, as it now formed a sort of long island in the flood. People on a pagoda rooftop nearby waved to them. Everyone on the wall was staring at Kang, who rearranged her gown and pulled her hair out of her face with her fingers, checking to see that everyone from her compound was there. Briefly she smiled. It was the first time any of them had ever seen her smile.

  By the time they were reunited with Ibrahim, late that same day, having been rowed to a hill to the south and above the flooded town, Kang was done with smiling. She pulled Ibrahim down next to her, and they sat there in the chaos of people. 'Listen to me,' she said, hand on her belly, 'if this is a daughter we have here 'I know,' Ibrahim said.

  ' If this is a daughter we have been given – there will be no more footbinding.'

  Four. The Afterlife

  Many years later, an age later, two old people sat on their verandah watching the river flow. In their time together they had discussed all things, they had even written a history of the world together, but now they seldom spoke, except to note some feature of the waning day. Very rarely did they talk about the past, and they never spoke at all of that time they had sat together in a dark room, diving into the light of the candle, and seeing there strange glimpses of former lives. It was too disturbing to recall the awe and terror of those hours. And besides the point had been made, the knowledge gained. That they had known each other ten thousand years: of course. They were an old married couple. They knew, and that was enough. There was no need to delve deeper into it.

  This too is the bardo; or nirvana itself. This is the touch of the eternal.

  One day, then, before going out to the verandah to enjoy the sunset hour with his partner, the old man sat before his blank page all the long afternoon, thinking, looking at the stacks of books and manuscripts that walled his study. Finally he took up his brush and wrote, performing the strokes very slowly.

  This is what his wife had taught him to see.

  'Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities'

  The scattered records and broken ruins of the Old World tell us that the earliest civilizations arose in China, India, Persia, Egypt, the Middle West, and Anatolia. The first farmers in these fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly soldiers, supported by priests, took power in each region, and their own numbers grew, gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of taxes and direct seizures. Labour divided into the groups described by Confucius and the Hindu caste system, the warriors, priests, artisans and farmers. With this division of labour the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has never ended. This was the first inequality.

  In this division of civilized labor, if it had not happened earlier, men established a general domination over women. It may have happened during the earlier ages of bare subsistence, but there is no way to tell; what we can see with our own eyes, is that in farming cultures women labour both at home and in the fields. In truth the farming life requires work from all. But from early on, women did as men required. And in each family, the control of legal power resembled the situation at large: the king and his heir dominated the rest. These were the second and the third inequalities, of men over women and children.

  The next small age saw the beginning of trade between the first civilizations, and the silk roads connecting China, Bactria, India, Persia, the Middle West, Rome and Africa moved the surplus harvests around the Old World. Agriculture responded to the new chances to trade, and there was a great rise in the production of bulk cereals and meats, and specialized crops like olives, wine and mulberry trees. The artisans also made new tools, and with them more powerful farming implements, and ships. Trading groups and peoples began to undermine the monopoly on power of the first military priest empires, and money began to replace land as the source of ultimate power. All this happened much earlier than Ibn Khaldun and the Maghribi historians recognized. By the time of the classical period, around 1200 bH, the changes brought by trade had unsettled the old ways and spread and deepened the first three inequalities, raising many questions about human nature. The great classical religions came into being precisely to attempt to answer these questions Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and the rationalist philosophers in Greece. But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs – in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.

  From the classical period to the discovery of the New World (say 1200 bH to 1000 aH), trade therefore made the Middle West the focal point of the Old World, and much wealth ended up there. At about the midpoint of this period, as the dates indicate, Islam appeared, and very quickly it came to dominate the world. Very likely there were some underlying economic reasons for this phenomenon; Islam, perhaps by chance but perhaps not, appeared in the 'centre of the world', the area sometimes called the Isthmus Region, bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. All the trade routes necessarily knotted here, like dragon arteries in a feng shui analysis. So it is not particularly surprising that for a time Islam provided the world with a general currency, the dinar, and a generally used language, Arabic. But it was also a religion, indeed it became almost the universal religion, and we must understand that its appeal as a religion arose partly from the fact that in a world of growing inequalities, Islam spoke of a realm in which all were equal – all equal before God no matter their age, gender, occupation, race or nationality. Islam's appeal lay in this, that inequality could be neutralized and done away with in the most important realm, the eternal realm of the spirit.

  Meanwhile, however, trade in food and in luxury goods continued all across the Old World, from al Andalus to China, in animals, timber and metals, cloth, glass, writing materials, opium, medicines and, more and more as the centuries passed, in slaves. The slaves came chiefly from Africa; and they became more important because there was more labour to be done, while at the same time the mechanical improvements allowing for more powerful tools had not yet been made, so that all this new work had to be accomplished by animal and human effort alone. So, added
to the subjugation of farmers, women, and the family, was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

  The discovery of the New World has only accelerated these processes, providing both more wealth and more slaves. The trade routes themselves have moved substantially from land to sea, and Islam no longer controls the crossroads as it did for a thousand years. The main centre of accumulation has shifted to China; indeed, China may have been the centre all along. It has always had the most people; and from ancient times people everywhere else have traded for Chinese goods. Rome's trade balance with China was so poor that it lost a million ounces of silver a year to China. Silk, porcelain, sandalwood, pepper – Rome and all the rest of the world sent their gold to China for these products, and China grew rich. And now that China has taken control of the west coasts of the New World, it has also begun to enjoy a direct infusion of huge amounts of gold and silver, and slaves. This doubled gathering of wealth, both by trade of manufactured goods and by direct extraction, is something new, a kind of cumulation of accumulations.

  So it seems apparent that the Chinese are the rising dominant power in the world, in competition with the previous dominant power, Dar al Islam, which still exerts a powerful attraction to people hoping for justice before God, if no longer much expecting it on Earth. India then exists as a third culture between the other two, a go between and influence on both, while also of course influenced by both. Meanwhile the primitive New World cultures, newly connected to the bulk of humanity, immediately subjugated by them, struggle to survive.

  So. To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.