The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  The support from the central government was also demonstrated by its defense of pro-pond officials when disputes arose between the pro-pond and the conservative anti-pond faction. A case in point was the dispute about Cheng Fang. Conservatives at the court pictured him as a quintessential figure of local reformists, the executor of Wang Anshi's reform agendas. They charged him with abusing power, wasting government money and other resources, pursuing unnecessary projects that were deemed unhelpful for frontier defense, and disturbing the regular livelihood of locals. When these charges turned into personal and moral attacks against Cheng, as the conservatives demonized the reformists as cruel and greedy, it is clear that such disputes were no longer about the ponds per se, but more about political and ideological struggles between the two factions. Just like the Yellow River, the ponds became a pawn and the embodiment of the conflicts within the Song state; their existence, enlargement, and shrinkage asserted tremendous political power.

  By the end of the 1070s, the manmade ponds spread over “nearly eight hundred li” from the west to the east, one third longer than the size in the 1030s.58 Throughout the rest of the Northern Song Dynasty, the massive construction of artificial ponds seems to have continued, although historical sources do not indicate any obvious enlargement of the ponds. Despite the constant challenges imposed by the muddy Yellow River, the climate, and political upheavals caused by factional competitions, Hebei's ponds maintained its importance in the minds of many people who sought psychological security in the face of potential invasion; they continued to play a key role in the Song's political-environmental life until the fall of the dynasty. This history of the ponds shows that facing the dilemma of prioritizing the river hydraulics or prioritizing Hebei's strategic stability, the Song state could not give up either but had to do both. But the efforts to maintain the geographically overlapped and environmental conflictive agendas were costly. The section on “Hydraulic Politics” in later this chapter will analyze how these agendas politically, financially, and environmentally entrapped the state in an unfortunate “hydraulic mode of consumption.”

  Environmental and Economic Impact of the Ponds

  Despite the century-long costly efforts to construct and maintain the ponds, the strategic value of the ponds was never tested by war during the Song period. Despite the brief tensions between the Song and the Liao in the 1040s and the early 1070s, the Liao never attempted a real attack, although we cannot say whether or not the absence of war was because of the Khitan's awareness and fear of the ponds.

  The real test of the ponds did not come until the end of the dynasty, when the Jurchen marched southward into northern Hebei in 1125. We have no historical record indicating how the Jurchen dealt with Hebei's watery landscape and if the ponds caused them trouble or deterred their expedition, but it appears that the Jurchen encountered few obstacles as they crossed the Juma River and conquered central Hebei rapidly. Not only did the Song troops collapse immediately in front of the Jurchen's strong assault, but the ponds that the troops relied upon soon fell under the Jurchen's occupation. In retrospect, the suspicion of the usefulness of the ponds held by those like Sima Guang turned out to be correct. Still, although not effective as a military defense as the state and Hebei's officials and officers wished, the ponds indeed cast enormous influence on Hebei. Their existence – expansion and shrinkage – led to a set of unexpected changes to Hebei's environmental conditions and the economic life of Hebei natives.

  Imagine a time-lapse bird's-eye view of northern Hebei from the late tenth century through the first quarter of the twelfth century. Skirted by the Juma River, the land first consists of extensive dry farms and patches of disconnected small swamps and lakes. Over time, an increasing number of wet areas begin appearing. This watery surface continues to enlarge, and by the 1030s it appears like a watery belt that covers the eastern half of the Song–Liao border and connects with the vast coastal swamps by the Bohai Gulf. Despite its temporary shrinkage, by the late 1070s, this watery belt has extended westward to cover more than two-thirds of the entire frontier, over four hundred kilometers and only missing from the mountainous terrain in the west. So how did this change in landscape and ponds’ spatial expansion affect the people, flora, and fauna in this area?

  In Xiongzhou, where the pond construction began, the land presented stunningly beautiful scenery. Where the ponds stretched several tens of li, lotus flowers blossomed in the summer and waterfowl gathered on the shores. When He Chengju was the prefect here in the late tenth century, he took pleasure rides on small boats with his fellow officials, drinking wine and reciting poems. “Even the land in the lower Yangtze valley (jiangxiang 江鄉) does not have such scenery,” commented a contemporary.59 Similar appreciation was dedicated to the watery landscape in Dingzhou in the late 1070s, after Shen Gua and his fellow officials transformed the vicinity of the prefecture seat into ponds and streams.

  The visual pleasure, particularly of the elites, was not necessarily universal. For locals who had to deal with excessive water on a daily basis, it was a different story. The new swampy landscape would have modified the microclimate in northern Hebei, and affected local precipitation and temperature. In ecological terms, the new landscape (or waterscape) must have remarkably enriched the aquatic life. Various kinds of water plants emerged, and fish and crabs thrived. Locals benefited from these new food sources and, as lotus roots and waterweeds entered the local cuisine, they developed a more diversified diet. Pickled crab, for instance, became a renowned delicacy and specialty of Hebei. Traditionally associated with humid places like the lower Yangze valley, these foodstuffs were once part of the daily life of people in northern Hebei in the eleventh century.

  The widespread water also became an ideal breeding ground for insects and bacteria. As Shen Gua observed in the 1070s, exceptionally large mosquitoes and horseflies were active in the Cangzhou, Xin'an 信安, and Qianning 乾寧 commanderies.60 In summer, locals had to cover their cattle and horses with layers of mud paste to ward off mosquitoes; otherwise the livestock would be bitten to death. People dared not ride horses in the wild, because once “poisoned” by the insects, the horses would gallop out of control. Passengers in carriages and their drivers had to wrap themselves in thick clothes to fend off bugs. We have no sources to tell us exactly how human health was affected by the changed environment, but I suspect that, given limited medical knowledge and supplies, the locals had a hard time adjusting to the new environment. This perhaps explains why the population was sparse in these wet frontier districts.

  For locals who traditionally made a living from dryland farming, their displacement and loss of the traditional livelihood were evident. In the early 1040s, Zhang Fangping 張方平 (1007–1091), speaking in his capacity as a Minister of Finance, estimated that two-thirds of the land in northern Hebei, much of it formerly arable fields, were occupied by the ponds. Ouyang Xiu put this figure even higher in the late 1050s, claiming that 80 or 90 percent of the arable land was lost to stagnant water from the ponds and the Yellow River.61 When the government sponsored the further extension of the ponds in the 1070s and 1080s, more private land was dug open and turned into ponds, and the decrease in arable land led to a reduction in the scale of agricultural production across that area.

  There was a general decline in locals’ sense of security and well-being. Life next to the ponds was not safe or stable, because the waters overflowed unpredictably. When snow and ice melted in the mountainous areas in spring and early summer, the resultant increase of water caused the rivers and streams to rise, and they discharged into the ponds at high speed to cause floods in the low plain areas. The authorities in charge of pond maintenance usually welcomed such floods, because it was the only way the manmade ponds got natural refills. Not only did these officials wait for natural forces to deliver water each spring, they also deliberately channeled water from afar to fill up the ponds, whenever they observed a drop in the ponds’ water volume. These activities invariably raised the c
hance of flooding in northern Hebei. Theoretically, the introduction of water and the wide spread of ponds should have benefited Hebei's agriculture, as it made irrigation to Hebei's dryland possible. Both He Chengju and Shen Gua encouraged irrigation by using the ponds. Yet, as the next chapter will show, these water resources were used mainly for military colonies, whose actual production was very small in scale. The common people benefited very little from the state-owned, military-driven irrigation schemes.

  When the maintenance of the ponds took priority, the livelihood of common people had to be sacrificed. From the mid-1030s, the government received reports from time to time, stating that fields, buildings, and even graveyards near the ponds were flooded.62 In 1042, in the Shun'an Commandery alone, 6,000 households were affected by floods caused by the ponds nearby.63 When Tang Jie 唐介 (1010–1069) was the magistrate of Renqiu 任丘 County in Mozhou 莫州 in the late 1040s, he had to mobilize local residents to build dykes to encircle the entire county in order to protect its land and people from being submerged.64 In most places of Hebei, where responsible and daring officials like Tang were absent, the locals reacted to the ponds threat by threat instead of pursuing systematic solutions. Sometimes they took illegal steps, such as damaging the ponds, breaching their dykes, or diverting their waters in order to prevent floods.65 Clearly, there emerged a conflict between the pond-maintenance organizations, which had the strategically-minded state at their back, and local communities, who only occasionally gained support from their local civil leaders. The former group had a stake in keeping Hebei flooded and swampy, while the latter group fought for their minimal rights in guarding their small holdings and sustaining farming activities. In eleventh-century Hebei, the former, pro-pond group usually won out in such conflicts.

  The ponds’ impact on locals’ livelihood and their agricultural productivity showed itself in a subtle way, in terms of the deterioration in the quality of the land. With the very low elevation in northern Hebei, excessive water filtered through the ground and brought up the underground water level, worsening the drainage problem that northern Hebei had long suffered. Mineral contents, in particular salinity, were not washed away but concentrated in the earth and, through the vertical movement of water, moved upward to affect the top soil. When the soil became very briny and toxic to most grain crops such as millet, wheat, and beans, local farmers had either to leave their land and search for more arable land elsewhere, or they had to adapt to the new environmental conditions and switch to other means of livelihood.

  As a result, in this part of Hebei, some people started living on the ponds. As observed in the mid-1050s, they “planted lotus and gordon euryale,” and in some cases they fished.66 But reliance on the ponds for food was unstable, since it depended on the government, either at the central level or the local level, to decide whether or not to open the ponds for local economic activities. There was never a certain, consistent policy. Sometimes local military authorities regarded the ponds as state property and monopolized the extraction of resources from the ponds, thus preventing the locals from accessing them. Further, because the ponds existed mainly for strategic purposes, any public access could lead to breaches in security. Zhao Zi 趙滋, for instance, a commander in Xiangzhou 相州 in the 1070s, was very concerned about security issues over the open water of the ponds, and believed that spies from the Liao Dynasty would dress up like local fishermen and sneak into Song territory. Zhao's fleet sailed up and down the Juma River in order to capture and expel the Liao spies. Such policing actions must have scared away ordinary people who were there simply to gather food. It is reasonable to suspect that the state may have issued bans on any public access to the ponds for its security concerns. In any case, we should not overestimate the locals’ access to the ponds and the ponds’ reliability as a new supplier of food resources. In places where the earth was highly salinized, people made their living from small-scale salt production.67 Such “earthen salt” (tuyan 土鹽) was produced across Hebei. With very little investment of capital, with an iron wok and some firewood, a Hebei household could easily set up a stove, collect briny water, and boil the water down to extract salt.

  Recognizing these local adaptations to Hebei's environmental and economic conditions, the Song government was forced to accept the difference of Hebei from other parts of the country as an economic entity, and it modified its economic policies accordingly. Instead of taxing agricultural production as it did in other parts of Hebei and the rest of the empire, the government collected taxes on fishing and the gathering of wild plants.68 It gave up its monopoly on salt production and trade in Hebei, allowing private salt production to provide a subsistence livelihood to those who had lost their land and were mired in poverty.69

  Whatever alternative means the Hebei natives found to sustain their lives, they were only individual, localized measures that were either unreliable or incapable of supporting a large population. By constructing the ponds and significantly transforming the physical landscape in Hebei's frontier, the Song state decided to sacrifice the lives and the livelihood of the locals, and to largely give up agricultural production in the area. Its choice ranked military security over demographic stability and food security of the people. As a consequence, this northern part of Hebei suffered serious socio-economic decline. In a story recorded by twelfth-century writer Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202), there was a Sanya 三鴉 township (lit., three crows) in this part of Hebei. Its land was covered by ponds, and produced nothing but aquatic plants and fish. Only a few people lived there; its market appeared desolate. Even civil officials appointed by the government to manage the town had to suffer poverty, since their salaries could hardly support their family expenditure. Unable to bear such an impoverished, humiliating life, the local officials abandoned their jobs and ran away, one leaving behind this sarcastic poem:

  During two years of miserable life in Sanya,

  With no grain and no money how can I raise a family?

  For two meals a day I eat only lotus roots.

  Look, my mouth spits out lotus flowers.70

  5.3 The Hydraulic Politics and the Hydraulic Mode of Consumption

  The following few pages bring us to some further analysis on the complexity of the Song state's management of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. Before 1048, the Yellow River and the Hebei Plain were two spatially lateral and marginally related entities. The state engaged with them in terms of two separate agendas, overseeing each with an independent leadership. Hebei's regional governments and military authorities took charge of what happened inside Hebei, such as the construction of the frontier ponds. They played minor, supporting roles in the Yellow River hydraulics. The central government and its hydraulic institution, the Water Conservancy, held the exclusive power in dealing with the Yellow River. These two sets of agendas and leaderships proceeded side by side, without much connection or conflict with each other.

  The advent of the environmental drama in 1048 forced the two environmental entities to merge into a Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex. With the disappearance of their geographical division, the two entities now co-inhabited a single space, not only overlapping with each other but geographically intersecting with, clashing with, and merging into each other. This drastic reconfiguration of the environmental reality also brought together the two hydraulic agendas and leaderships into Hebei – they began to interplay with each other and often compete for space and resources, as well as for the state's attention. During the intense reconfiguration of their relationship, these compartmentalized state institutions aggressively quested for more power. Hence, the imperial state was thrown in a serious dilemma: how could it demand the land of Hebei to sacrifice itself and serve as the river's flooding ground, but in the meantime hope its environment and human society would remain strategically effective, economically productive, and socially stable? How could the state balance the two agendas and the competing leaderships behind them? After 1048, the environmental drama staged an
d unfolding inside Hebei provided a perfect arena for intense political contestations between the two sets of state institutions.71

  From 1048, the Water Conservancy turned its eyes toward Hebei. Its institutional extension, the External Executive (dushui waicheng 都水外丞), which followed the physical migration of the river and conducted actual work on the ground, relocated its office, bureaucratic team, and workers into Hebei. It considered its agenda – to tame the Yellow River – the top priority in that land, far more important than Hebei's indigenous environmental issues and various socio-economic issues. With the end justifying its means, the External Executive ignored the heavy socio-economic costs that their hydraulic works inflicted on Hebei. Moreover, since the land should give way to the river and river hydraulics, Hebei's indigenous hydraulic leadership – its civil governments and military authorities – should yield to the Water Conservancy. It is the Water Conservancy and its External Executive that should control human and material resources and determine what hydraulic project should take priority. This pro-Yellow River leadership attracted a wide array of members and sympathizers in the government, such as hydrocrats serving the External Executive inside Hebei; bureaucrats serving the Water Conservancy at the imperial court; and military leaders and statesmen at the court who were concerned about geopolitical and strategic stability of north China. None of these men had strong personal ties with the land of Hebei. Whatever political factions they were identified with (either Wang Anshi and his fellow reformists in the early 1070s or conservatives like Lü Dafang and Wang Yansou in the late 1080s), they shared a common understanding about how to deal with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, namely, to prioritize the river issues at any cost.

  Facing this external, top-down imposition, Hebei's regional authorities voiced a different opinion: Hebei had the right to exist and prosper, and its own environmental issues deserved great attention. By crashing into Hebei, the Yellow River had become a mere component of Hebei's giant environmental entity, rather than something superior to it. Hence, to Hebei's indigenous hydraulic leadership, any treatment of the river should be grounded within a holistic plan for the environmental management of Hebei; by extension, the External Executive of the Water Conservancy must collaborate with, consult, and respect the regional authorities (if not completely merging into the latter). Supporting such regional claims were Hebei's local officials, military officers, and senior officials like the Fiscal Commissioner, who resented that their authorities were challenged by the intrusive power of the Water Conservancy. Siding with them were humanitarian-minded statesmen like Sima Guang and Fan Chunren as well as financial ministers at the court who were cautious about hydraulic expenditures. To this group, whatever approaches the state took to cope with the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, it should always bear in mind the interests of Hebei and its people.