The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Suffering and resentful, many refugees banded together and became unpredictable players who could cause potential social and political problems. Fearing subversion, the government encouraged the refugees to disperse or to go back to Hebei. Over time, some indeed chose to return home, hoping that the disasters had receded and they could go back to their old lives. We have no idea how many made their way back home successfully. The return journey was treacherous; according to Ouyang Xiu, only “a few survived.”15 For those who made it back, it was uncertain what would await them. Some returned to find either their land overtaken by the Yellow River's waters, or their property occupied by wealthy and powerful families.16

  Not all refugees had faith in the restoration of safety in Hebei. To many, the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex no longer provided a desirable living space. The family of a prominent official, Li Qingchen 李清臣 (1032–1102), is one example. Li's family had for generations lived in Daming, the district adjacent to the Yellow River. Li himself was born there before the Yellow River hit the land, and later died there as Daming's Prefect at the turn of the twelfth century. After his father passed away in 1039, his family decided to leave Hebei to “escape the harm of the Yellow River.” After temporarily relocating to Luoyang 洛陽 in western Henan, both living members of the family and the graves of their ancestors moved to Anyang 安陽 in western Hebei, because divination had suggested that the location was secure and auspicious. Although Li himself later held official positions in Daming and remained there, his family never returned to flood-stricken Daming, but settled in Anyang where the mountainous terrain obstructed any floods.17

  Elite, well-to-do families like Li's were able to choose between different options to counteract the disasters; they had the means to move in and out of Hebei. Ordinary and poorer people were not so lucky. They could not risk returning to Hebei only to find it devastated. Many chose to establish new homes and settle down outside of Hebei. Tangzhou 唐州 in Henan, for instance, was an attractive place to stay. Thinly populated, with a large area of unclaimed, uncultivated land, Tangzhou also had some diligent local officials who issued low taxes to attract colonizers. Both environmental conditions and government policies made places like this attractive to Hebei refugees, where they could find not only a temporary haven, but a secure, permanent home.18

  It is not unreasonable to say that in the middle of the eleventh century at least a million of Hebei's five million people were disturbed in some way by the environmental changes and uprooted from their normal livelihood or even killed. If not killed or displaced, they lost property and freedom, and fell into lesser socio-economic status like tenants, servants, or outlaws. Given enough time for stability to return to Hebei, the damage inflicted on the people of Hebei could eventually be compensated and repaired. But Hebei's environmental situation seemed to fight against a recovery. Seven years later, in 1056, just as the Yellow River was about to settle in its course through central Hebei, and the refugees had gained enough strength and faith to return home, a state-sponsored hydraulic project provoked a catastrophic flood in southern Hebei. Following it, the river exploded into a new course in 1060 and swept through the eastern part of Hebei. The restored population, thanks both to natural births and the return of refugees, was again subjected to a heavy loss.

  Eight years later, in 1068, a severe drought from the previous year extended through the summer, along with a deadly earthquake and a series of bank ruptures and floods from the Yellow River. At that time, the elderly Zhang Cun 張存 (986–1071) and his extensive, wealthy family lived in Jizhou in central Hebei. Zhang used to be Hebei's Fiscal Commissioner and had retired from prestigious positions; his sons held various official positions in Jizhou and other places. Composed of hundreds of members, Zhang's lineage was one of the most prominent lineages in Jizhou. When the earthquake occurred, Zhang was eating a meal in the living room. Suddenly, the whole house shook, and in the ensuing chaos, his family members and servants urged him to leave the city. They said that Jizhou's residents had already packed up to escape the earthquakes. Rumors were also in the air that the Yellow River was pressing upon the city and would soon crush the city walls. Many of the citizens were heading toward Xingzhou 邢州, a mountainous region in western Hebei.19 Still, Zhang refused to move his family, maintaining moral commitment to his city and his people. Yet, several tomb epitaphs of the Zhang family suggest that the family relocated the graves of ancestors, including those of Zhang's father's generation and later Zhang Cun himself and his sons, to highland Xingzhou, evidence of their relocation and their urge for self-preservation against the damaging environmental forces.

  The 1068 disasters followed a drought that lingered on through 1070. Then another drought plus an explosion of locusts during 1073–1074 afflicted the region. The river flooded almost every year at different locations in central Hebei. In the early fall of 1075, for instance, one bank rupture in the realm of Daming was said to have resulted in the inundation of sixty villages and their 17,000 households.20 Meanwhile, the large-scale “returning the river” project that Emperor Shenzong and Wang Anshi sponsored also caused disturbance to the already-disasterravaged people. All of this sparked off another round of high mortality and emigration.

  The demographic components and pattern of emigration during the 1060s–1070s were different from those after 1048. Not only did disaster refugees – in particular people in central Hebei like Zhang Cun's fellow citizens – uproot their families and flee their hometowns, but those who lived on the western highland and who were not directly affected by the disasters also panicked, frightened by the influx of large numbers of refugees (like those fleeing Jizhou to Xingzhou in the summer of 1068). The locals in western Hebei felt that the refugees would become beggars, robbers, and thieves, consuming local resources while destabilizing the social order. In addition to fearing the migrants, local people at of the bottom level of the society, such as low-ranking landowning households and tenants who made a living by farming for landlords, were also hit hard by extensive droughts. They were not much better off than the incoming refugees. So in the 1070s, they began to join the mass emigration to leave western Hebei, although the Yellow River did not affect western Hebei directly.21

  Losing their tenants, servants, and the local poor, the upper levels of the society felt insecure as well. The loosely defined social groups – the rich and the poor – were used to co-existing in a deeply entangled moral economy, with the rich offering charity and the poor providing the foundation for labor and security. As this foundation fell apart, the higher-ranking households found that they could not survive without the social bonds and protection. They also resented the increasing socio-economic responsibilities. They had to provide relief for refugees, come up with extra labor and resources to cultivate land, and maintain social security. They also had to carry more institutional responsibilities. As their tenants and the poor left the area, the government expected the rich to pay more taxes and provide more corvée services, including participating in hydraulic works to tame the Yellow River and manage local streams.

  It was in those circumstances that Wang Anshi issued his major reform policy, the Guards and Tithings (baojia 保甲) system. This policy further upset the well-off. The baojia was forcefully carried out in Hebei in the 1070s in order to stabilize social bonds within the society and to strengthen the society's service to the state. Local elites were installed as the heads of “bao” units and required to both control and look after poorer households in their units. Unfortunately, since Hebei's rural economy and society had already declined, and the poor continued to become unmoored from the socio-economic bonds, the rich could not stop the dissolution of their “bao” units and the broader society. They resisted the state's demands that local elites should make extra contributions in difficult times and take responsibility for the poor who left home.22 Hence, the activist approaches of state control promoted by Wang Anshi's government encountered not only fierce environmental challenges, b
ut also spontaneous or deliberate resistance from different social groups. It is understandable that the well-off felt the urge to leave Hebei as well. Traveling in style, they packed up their belongings, prepared travel supplies, designed itineraries, and traveled by carriage. When crossing bridges on the Yellow River into Henan and questioned by officials at check points, they stated that Hebei was no longer livable because “they were afraid of raids.”23 Like the families of Li Qingchen and Zhang Cun, those people had means to migrate and, if they wished, could leave Hebei forever.

  In 1074, 46,000 Hebei migrants were reported to have crossed the Yellow River to enter Henan, and nearly 30,000 of them crowded into the metropolitan area of Kaifeng.24 By the mid-1070s, refugees from central, western, and eastern Hebei filled major transportation routes and urban areas in Shandong, eastern Henan, western Henan, and Kaifeng. The central government tried to block them from entering Henan, but when that effort failed, it was forced to use different relief strategies to stabilize the situation and restrain the refugees from going farther south. Such strategies included opening up government granaries, selling official titles and certificates of religious clergy to buy extra grain, encouraging wealthy families to share resources, and recruiting male refugees – potential troublemakers to the state rule – into the military.

  When the river suddenly shifted southward into Henan in 1077 and was forced back into Hebei by the government's hydraulic works in 1078, the death toll in north China skyrocketed. The poet-official Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105) described the situation:

  The earth split and the river boiled. Eight or nine out of ten households drowned and turned into fish. Recently I heard that each day tens of thousands of people cross the Yellow River from Chanyuan [the seat of Chanzhou on the Yellow River linking Hebei and Henan] to move southward. There is no way to know how many Hebei prefectures have thus become desolate.25

  In Henan, a prime destination for Hebei refugees, Gong Dingchen 龔鼎臣 (1010–1086) observed dead bodies lying in piles along the roads.26 The situation was so dreadful, and the demand for relief so tremendous, that any given policy seemed inadequate. The same trend continued through the 1080s and 1090s.27 As the Yellow River continued to flood southern and central Hebei, the government pressed harder to recruit more hydraulic workers from Hebei, hoping to shift the river's northern course clockwise toward the east. Refusing this imposition, more people were forced to flee or chose to leave their homeland. By the mid-1080s, in Daming only, the empire's Northern Capital in southern Hebei, “more than a half of the well-off families have fled.”28

  The most deadly threat to the Hebei population occurred at the turn of the twelfth century. After the Yellow River's torrents swept through most of Hebei between 1099 and 1102, “corpses of the dead fill the gullies and number in the millions.”29 Some said that more than half of the Hebei population was displaced.30 According to Chao Shuozhi 晁說之 (1059–1129), more than a hundred thousand “floating people” gathered in Daming alone; another 30,000–40,000 crowded into the Tongli 通利 Commandery in southwestern Hebei.31 Ranging from several thousand to hundreds of thousands, swarms of flood and famine refugees wandered in various urban areas. As the cities and towns became exhausted and were unable to provide food or shelter, the refugees moved elsewhere. In southeastern Hebei people died from starvation and the severe winter cold. In some literary accounts, which are perhaps exaggerated, “mothers abandon their infants and fathers eat their grown children.”32 In northern Hebei, refugees flowed northward and even crossed the border to enter Liao territory, at the risk of death penalties.33 Along the border, the hungry went so far as to “eat one another.”34

  We could continue with many descriptions of this sort: observers of the time were all drawn to the misery across Hebei and the whole of north China. Yet, we do not need to exhaust such accounts to empathize with Ren Boyu's 任伯雨 (1047–1119) lament: “Throughout history, none of the Yellow River's disasters have been as devastating as what we have now.” It is easy to visualize the image Peng Ruli 彭汝礪 (1040–1094) depicts: “Drifting and migrating, Hebei people streamed endlessly over a thousand li.”35 This environmental-human landscape, a dreamwork that the imperial state created by imitating Yu's legendary landscape and pushing the Yellow River north in 1048, and that over the following eight decades would prevent the river from turning south into Henan, became a hellish world for Hebei's ordinary people.

  The environmental disturbance and damage to the population was so substantial that it forced the state and its administrative system to respond to the heavy human losses. One way to do this was to adjust its administrative governance in Hebei. Qingping 清平 County, for instance, was located at the center of Daming Prefecture. After the Yellow River arrived in this area in 1048, the county suffered repeated floods. From 1048 to 1067, the county seat had to relocate twice to escape floods.36 Similar situations happened to both Zongcheng 宗城 County in Daming and the prefectural capital of Shenzhou.37 These towns – including their residents, government offices, granaries, schools, and temples – had to relocate several times to avoid the Yellow River. Every relocation meant breaking apart the old society and communities, abandoning property and wealth, and rebuilding a new social structure from the ground up. It also meant that the local government had to remake itself as a new administrative institution: to reconnect with its subjects, to map out new geographical relations within its domain, and to communicate with and serve the state in new ways. Such relocation and post-disaster reconstruction created chaos. Zongcheng, for instance, used to be an affluent town; it sat on the Yuhe Canal and profited from water transportation. After the mid-eleventh century, repeated floods ravaged the area, and the damage to the canal meant that ships no longer stopped there and goods no longer flowed through the town. As its county seat moved to less advantageous places, the town appeared shabby; its various supplies ran short, so its residents had to rely on neighboring districts to fulfill their daily needs.

  In many other places, the population loss was so severe that remaining residents did not even warrant relocation. The Song state had to accept the tragic reality that some districts now held so few people that they could no longer fulfill the state's taxation and corvée requirements. It had become unavoidable that the state cut local offices and bureaucrats in order to reduce administrative costs. In 1070, the household number in Liyang 黎陽 Commandery in southwestern Hebei was said to be “only one tenth of the number in the past,” so the state degraded Liyang's status from a commandery-level district to a mere county.38 Worse was Yiguo 倚郭 County after 1048 and Linming 臨洺 County in 1068. They were hit so hard by floods and their societies so depleted that the state could no longer extract wealth and labor from these areas; it became meaningless for the state to keep offices there. The state stripped these places of their jurisdictory status, and ordered their land and remaining populations to merge into neighboring districts.39 For the same reason, in Emperor Shenzong and Wang Anshi's government in the 1070s, there was intense discussion about eliminating jurisdictions like Qianning, Baoding 保定, and Shun'an commanderies in northern Hebei.40

  At the beginning of the twelfth century, Hebei appeared desolate. According to Ren Boyu, in the area north of the Yongjing Commandery, only 30–40 percent of the original population remained; in northern Cangzhou only 10–20 percent survived. Over central and northern Hebei, “there was almost no sign of human habitation within a thousand li.”41 Indeed, these descriptive accounts do not help us reach even a rough approximation of Hebei's population toward the end of the Northern Song Dynasty. Did the demographic baseline of five million registered people before 1048 drop precipitously during the following eight decades, down to three million or even less? I have no answer to the question.42 The disaster narrative, nevertheless, leads me to suggest that at the very least, Hebei's population did not grow after 1048. At best, the population might have remained stagnant, if its heavy losses were compensated by an exceptionally high birt
h rate that was caused by increased marriage opportunities and fertility among the people. But there is no evidence for any high natality, and it seems to me very unlikely. As the entire Song empire enjoyed a stunning population explosion, as seen in the 200 percent increase in the number of households from 980s to 1102 (Table 3), Hebei's population failed to share in that growth.

  The stagnation, or more likely a phenomenal decline, of Hebei's population was not caused by a single environmental catastrophe, and certainly not by the Yellow River's course shift in 1048 alone. It was the continuous unfolding of the eighty-year environmental drama and the imperial state's unstoppable Hebei-sacrificing hydraulic management that repeatedly devastated the population. The short intervals between individual disasters meant that the society was unable to bounce back to its demographic baseline before it was hit by another terrible event. After the 1040s, there was not a single decade that was peaceful and uneventful to allow the people of Hebei to resettle, to rebuild a stable livelihood, and to replenish the population.

  Instead of fixing our sights on the fluctuations of the overall size of the population – a daunting effort due to the shortage of historical sources for medieval China – we may find it more meaningful to attend to the state of disturbance and unsettledness that characterized the Hebei people at the time. Such disturbance certainly brought inconvenience to people's daily life. For instance, poet He Zhu 賀鑄 was supposed to travel from Guanshi 冠氏 County in southern Hebei west to the Handan area in western Hebei to visit his friend. The trip had to be cancelled before the Yellow River flooded and damaged roads.43 Such inconvenience to daily life seemed insignificant. But looking at the big picture of the whole of Hebei, we should question how the overarching unsettling situation paralyzed disaster refugees and communities, made them unproductive, broke down previous social mechanisms that held together social relationships, and thereby impeded the functioning of the society and its economy. We may at least contemplate the emergence of human conditions in which a substantial portion of people in Hebei endured constant lack and malnutrition that seriously affected the public health and overall capacity of the population. They suffered not only instant violence from those dramatic disasters but also the kind of banal, less visible, and low-intense “violence of everyday life.”44 It was not the catastrophic attacks, high mortality, and massive emigrations alone that brought the society to a veritable standstill.45