by Han Shaogong
This term "savage of the three clans" clearly referred to a single person, but it brought with it the mark of the "three clans," as if the individual had to carry out the mission of the "three clans"; I've never managed to discover whether this was a tradition from Chu ancestry. I once had a thought: if a person's bloodline comes from his two parents, but the parents' bloodline comes from their set of four grandparents, the grandparents' bloodline also comes from their set of eight great-grand-parents. By this sequencing system, within a few dozen counts all mankind in its vast totality would be traced back to a single forebear, a universal common ancestor. Through this simple operation of arithmetic, the hope expressed in the Chinese saying that "over ocean and sea, all are brothers" ceases to be a beautiful but empty platitude; it is borne out by biological proof. In theory, everyone is descended from all mankind, all people carry within them the accumulated, concentrated inheritance of all mankind, passed down along a few dozens of generations. If so, is an individual still only an individual? As I've commented in an article elsewhere, the concept of the "individual" is incomplete in itself; everyone is at the same time a "group person." I hope that the "three" in Maqiao's "savages of the three clans" is a traditional synonym for "many." So if "savages of the three clans" is another name for "group person," thus emphasizing the group background of the individual, it corroborates my strange hypothesis.
The word "savage" is popular in the south, and for a long time it served as a general term for southerners. Historical records state that in the Spring and Autumn Period (c. 700 b.c.) there existed a Luo Kingdom, also known as the "Savages of the Luo Clan." The Chronicles ofZuo tell us that "in the twelfth year of Lu Huangong's reign, the Chu army divided and reached the Peng. The Luo people wanted to attack them." This is the earliest mention of them. The Luo people settled in southwest Yinan county (modern Hubei), adjacent to the southwestern Ba kingdom. They subsequently named it Luochuan City, which gets a mention in the 28th chapter of The Waterway Records. The Savages of the Luo Clan were also known as the Kingdom of Luozi, and they made use of the Peng River as a natural frontier against fearsome northern invaders. After the Chu army had been seen fording down south, they were forced to put up a fight and won an unexpected victory. But their kingdom was far smaller than the Kingdom of Chu, and in the end peace was made. We know from The Chronicles ofZuo that the Luo people twice fled for their lives. The first time, they fled to Zhijiang County, none other than the historical birth-place of the "Ba people"; the second time was about twenty years later, in the time of King Wen of Chu, when they once again fled to Xiangbei, the area composed of present-day Yueyang, Pingjiang, and Xiangyin county.
The river took on the name of the people-that was how the Luo River got its name.
It's hard to imagine the scene as children and old people were helped along that long trek across the river. From the records available, it appears that after arriving, the Luo people rebuilt the city of Luo, but there is no trace left of it today. I suspect the town of Changle on the bank of the River Luo is the Luo City of old (the two are linked by the similarity in sound between le and luo). It's a small town, positioned between mountains and a river, which I had to cross on my way carrying bamboo from the mountains. A cobblestone street, over whose stones floated the scent of sweet rice wine and the clop of wooden clogs, traversed the entire town, linking it to a damp, bustling wharf. The town's windows and doors were jammed so tightly shut it seemed a human face would never poke out. The local people said that there were iron pillars below the wharf, visible only at low tide, on top of which were written many blurred ancient inscriptions. I had no great interest in archaeology then, and so never went to look. Every time I passed through, I was dazed with exhaustion, and after drinking down a bowl of sweet wine, I'd topple over at the side of the street and fall asleep with my clothes on, before preparing to continue my journey. Plenty of times I was woken in deep winter by a glacial blast of wind. As I opened my eyes, only the distant stars hung above me, swaying as if about to fall.
If Changle isn't Luo City, other researchable possibilities are Luopu, Luoshan, Baoluo, Tongluodong, all of which include a syllable homophonic with "luo" (although the character is written differently), and all of which I have a passing acquaintance with. Even now, glimpses of ancient walls and stone steps, and of the furtive watchfulness that flashed momentarily in the eyes of their men and women, float up out of my recollections of these places.
The Luo people have close ties with the Ba people (an ancient people who inhabited the area now known as Sichuan). "Songs of the Ba people" is a phrase often used to refer to ancient folk songs. The terminus of the Luo River, appropriately, is "Baling," in what is present day Yueyang. The 493rd chapter of the Song History speaks of the third year of Zhezong Yuanyou (1088 A.D.), when the "Savages of the Luo Clan" went in for a period of rebellion. Amnesty was not declared until the ancestral chieftain of the Tujia (a nationality found in Hunan and Hubei provinces) took steps to control the revolt. It appears thus that there was some degree of cooperation between the Luo and the Tujia peoples; the Tujia have moreover been widely acknowledged by historians to be descended from the Ba people. Another piece of evidence worthy of note is that Tujia legends contain many stories relating to "Luo brothers and sisters," proving that "Luo" forms an immutable link within Tujia ancestry.
The strange thing is that on neither bank of the Luo River have I ever found a village or town that contains this very same character luo, or heard of someone with this character in their surname, apart from an old village leader from my village, originally a hired farm laborer, an outsider through-and-through. I could only suppose that following a cruel wave of persecution, a reign of terror that eludes both our knowledge and imagination, this word luo became taboo here, and the Luo people simply had to change their surname, obliterate their own history, or flee to distant parts, as is related by certain historians: gathered in groups, eating and sleeping in the wilds, they departed for Xiangxi, Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan, and the towering mountain ranges and lofty ridges of Southeast Asia, never to return. From this time on, the Luo River was so-called in name only. All that remained was an empty name, a mouth that would never again utter forth sounds, from which sprang only boundless silence. Even if we unearth this mouth from its open grave, we have no way of knowing what it once said.
In fact, their country is already lost forever, beyond all hope of recovery. All that remains is a few green bronze vessels, already corroded to powder, ready to disintegrate at the slightest touch. When digging wasteland in the area, I would often dig up vast numbers of arrowheads and spearheads, but they were very small, much smaller than the ones you see in books; this shows what a premium there was then on metal, that it had to be used so sparingly. The local people were so used to these relics that they weren't in the least surprised by them, in fact ignored them totally, simply threw them onto the ground by the side of the road; kids would heap baskets with them and take them away to fight or play with-nothing more. Later on, whenever I saw closely guarded bronze vessels displayed in a museum, I always felt nonplussed. What did these things count for? In Maqiao, anywhere I stepped took me into pre-Han history as I trampled into smithereens who knows how many precious cultural relics.
*Third of the Third
: Every year, on the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar, Maqiao people all ate rice dyed black with the juice from a type of wild grass, until every mouth was tar black. On this same day everyone sharpened knives. The earth trembled as every single family and household roared in unison and the leaves on the trees that lined the mountains shuddered and quivered uncontrollably. As well as axes, sickles, and hay cutters, each family also had to have a dagger which they polished until it shone snowy white, the icy gleam of the knife edge rippling, pulsating, scintillating, arousing a certain savagery in people. These knives, once sunk in deep, rusty sleep, now returned to glinting consciousness and exploded into life in the hands of the savages, the Savages of the
Luo Clan, sowing subliminal tensions. If they weren't gripped tightly by the handle, it seemed they'd take on a life of their own, whizzing through doors, each making for their own targets, scaring the life out of people-sooner or later this was bound to happen.
This custom could be seen as a new-year ritual linked to farming preparations, empty of all aggressive implications. But while sharpened hoes and ploughs were obviously needed for farming, it was never quite made clear why they sharpened daggers.
Once the knives gleamed, then spring would come.
On the third of the third, the air quivered on knife-edge.
*Maqiao Bow
: The full name for Maqiao is "Maqiao Bow." Bow means village, including the land covered by a village: it's obviously a traditional unit of area, one "bow" representing the stretch of land covered by the trajectory of an arrow. Maqiao Bow had forty-odd households, about ten head of cattle, and pigs, dogs, chickens and ducks, with two long narrow paddy fields hugging its perimeters. The eastern boundary lay where the village met the fields of Shuanglong Bow with a view of the Luo River in the distance; the northern edge was marked by the ridge that carried water from the top of Tianzi Peak to Chazi Valley, which you could see if you looked up toward the undulating skylines of the Tianzi mountain range. To the west, the village was bordered by Zhangjia District, and its southern reaches extended right up to Longjia Sands, where a narrow road linked up with the Chang Qin highway, built in the 1960s; anyone taking the bus to the county seat would have to travel by this road. It took a good hour to walk from the top to the bottom of the bow. The strength of the ancients is a source of perpetual wonder: what mighty warriors they must have been, to be able to shoot an arrow over such an expanse of land.
Could it be that people are shrinking, generation by generation?
It's said that Maqiao (literally "Horsebridge") Bow was originally spelled differently, with the characters meaning "Motherbridge" Bow, but the only evidence is an old title deed. Maybe this is just a spelling mistake left over from the past. Thanks to the establishment of a fairly clear system of record-taking in the modern era, the changes to its name can be roughly summarized as follows:
– before 1956, called Maqiao Village, part of Tianzi Township;
– from 1956 to 1958, called Maqiao Group, part of Dongfeng Cooperative;
– in 1958, called 22nd production team, part of Changle People's Commune (Large Commune);
– from 1959 to 1979, called Maqiao Production Team, part of Tianzi People's Commune (Small Commune);
– since 1979, when the People's Communes were disbanded, up to the present day, Maqiao Village, along with a section of Tianzi Township, has become part of Shuanglong Township.
Most people in Maqiao were surnamed Ma, and it was roughly divided into an upper and a lower village, or an upper and a lower Bow. Previously, wealthy people, and those surnamed Ma, were concentrated in the upper part of the village. The prevalence of this surname in the village was far from normal for the area. The inhabitants of Zhangjia District (literally Zhang Family District) were in fact surnamed Li, and the inhabitants of Longjia Sands (literally Long Family Sands) were surnamed Peng. Though it struck me as rather strange that the name of the village and the clan surname were different, I'd estimate that this was the case in more than half the county.
According to the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, at the start of the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong (1736-96), Maqiao Bow enjoyed a period of prosperity. At that time it was called Maqiao Prefecture, a settlement encircled by walls, with a population of more than a thousand. There were four blockhouses, and its defences were strongly fortified; there was no way vagrant bandits could break in. In the 58th year of Qianlong's reign, a certain Ma Sanbao, a resident of Maqiao Prefecture, suddenly went insane at a banquet in a relative's house and started proclaiming himself the offspring of a union between his mother and a spirit dog, saying he was the reincarnation of an ordained son of heaven, the Great Lord of the Lotus Flower, destined to found the Lotus Flower Kingdom. Three members of his clan, MaYouli, Ma Laoyan, and Ma Laogua, also promptly accompanied him into insanity: hair standing on end, shouting to whomever might listen, they thronged around Ma Sanbao and acclaimed him as king. They produced an imperial edict conferring the title of empress on his wife, who was of the Wu clan, and conferred the title of concubine on a niece of Ma Sanbao and on another girl surnamed Li. They spread notices everywhere, drumming up soldiers and rebellion, and managed to assemble unruly elements from areas up to eighteen bows away, seizing the goods of traveling salesmen, raiding government grain barges, and killing uncounted numbers of people. On the eighteenth day of the first month of the 59th year, the leader of the Zhen'gan forces, Ming Antu (a Mongol), with his deputy general Yi Sana (a Manchu), led a force of eight hundred men, divided into two columns, to suppress the rebellion. The left-hand column attacked Qingyu Embankment, charging directly at the stockade, taking guns and cannon along with them. They fired cannon at the robbers' stockade, which caught fire, forcing the robbers to flee to the river, where countless of them died. After the assault, the right-hand column crossed the river by laying down trees at Hengzipu and made a night-time raid on the bandits' lair, Maqiao Prefecture. At dawn, more than two hundred robbers broke out of the stockade and fled chaotically to the east, where they were headed off by the left-hand column of government soldiers, who surrounded them and killed every one, down to the last man; the heads of Ma Youli and his five phoney ministers were soon cut off and hung up as an example to all. Every single bandit stockade surrounding Maqiao that had joined the rebellion and helped the robbers was razed to the ground. Only those with a spotless record in helping quell the disorder could avoid persecution by government troops. They stuck in their threshold a red government-issued flag, on which were written the words "good people."
The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion left me rather melancholy. The Ma Sanbao that the New County Annals included in its roll of "Peasant Rebellion Leaders"-the Ma Sanbao who in Maqiao legend was a Son of Heaven of bona fide dragon origin- made an extremely poor showing in this version edited by the Qing authorities. In his brief three months of rebellion, he never contemplated any bold vision for establishing government, founding a dynasty, resisting his enemies, and saving the world-all he did was appoint five imperial concubines. From the historical materials available, it appears he lacked a talent for rebellion: apparently, when the government troops arrived, his only strategy for warding off the metal guns and cannon of the government troops was to ask shamans to consecrate an altar and plead with the spirits, make paper cuts, and sprinkle beans (the idea being that generous use of paper and beans would produce generals and soldiers in similar quantities). He lacked also the morals of rebellion: once captured, he didn't have the integrity to lay down his own life, but wrote out a fulsome confession more than forty pages long, filling the sheets with groveling self-deprecations, "humble this," "humble that," obtaining only pity from his vanquishers. The lack of any coherence to his confession clearly demonstrated his insanity. In the rise and fall of the "Lotus Flower Kingdom" (according to official statistics), the death toll of peasants in Maqiao and its environs exceeded seven hundred, and even women who had left up to ten years earlier to be married in faraway places determinedly returned from all directions in order to join their kinsmen and fellow villagers in a life and death struggle. Drenched in blood, they battled through fire and through water, only to put their own destinies in the hands of such a madman.
Was it a false confession? I truly hope so-that these confessions are part of a history fabricated by the Qing dynasty. I also hope that Ma Sanbao met his end soaked in paraffin, tied to a large tree and lit up like a magic lantern, not as he was described in the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, and that the fates of the seven-hundred-odd dead souls who followed him were not demeaned by such a madman.
Is there perhaps more than one version of hist
ory?
The disorder wrought by the "Lotus Bandits" is the most significant event in the history of Maqiao, as well as the main cause of Maqiao's decline. Henceforth, Maqiao people gradually began migrating in greater numbers to other areas, leaving fewer and fewer people behind. By the start of the century, the whole village had fallen into a state of dereliction. When the authorities were making arrangements for resettling Educated Youth, they normally looked for fairly poor villages, whose fields were sparsely populated; Maqiao was one of the villages that the authorities selected.
*Old Chum
: The end of the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] witnessed even greater upheaval than the disorder caused by the "Lotus Bandits": when the rebel Zhang Xianzhong took up arms in Shaanxi, he clashed repeatedly with the Hunanese hatchets, the "Rake troops" in the government army. The heavy casualties Zhang suffered generated in him a deep hatred of all Hunanese, and on several later occasions he led an army into Hunan, leaving countless dead. He was dubbed "No Questions Zhang," meaning that he killed without asking name or reason. There were always human heads hanging from his soldiers' saddles, with strings of ears at their waists, to back up their demands for rewards.
Hunan was overrun with Jiangxi people as a result of this bloodbath. It's said that because of this historical episode, Hunanese started calling all Jiangxi people "old chum" and grew to be on very close terms with them.
There are no major geographical barriers between Hunan and Jiangxi, so the population can move back and forth with little difficulty. There was at least one surge in migration from Hunan into Jiangxi, occurring at the start of the 1960s. When I had just arrived in Maqiao to start working the land, the favorite topic of conversation among the men, apart from women, was eating. When they uttered the word "eat" (chi), they pronounced it with the greatest intensity, using the ancient pronunciation qia, rather than the medieval qi, or modern chi. Qia was pronounced in a falling tone: the bold "a" sound of the syllable in combination with a light, crisply percussive falling tone displayed to the maximum the speaker's intensity of feeling. Qia chicken duck beef mutton fish dog, and meat-this last was the abbreviation for pork. Qia stuffed buns steamed buns fried dough cakes fried crispy cakes noodles rice-noodles glutinous rice cakes and, of course, rice (that would be boiled rice). We talked with great gusto, never bored with the topic, never bored with its minutiae, never bored with its repetitiousness. It was a source of constant talk, constant novelty, constant delight, and we talked compellingly, unstoppably, our hearts dancing, faces glowing, every word drenched in a deluge of saliva, then catapulted violently out of the mouth off the tongue, the reverberation of the explosion lingering in the sunlight.