The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  As some eleventh-century contemporaries noticed, farmers who planted wheat on the silt-covered land could “barely obtain one harvest to relieve their poverty.”38 They did not get rich from such peculiar land. I suspect that it might have been a sensible survival strategy for Hebei refugees to produce basic food supplies by exploiting the sediments newly deposited on the land. There, they relied on the sediments’ limited, quickly fading fertility, and conducted a kind of nomadic shifting farming – cultivating a patch of land, producing a harvest, and then abandoning the nutrient-depleted land to move to a new place. Every cycle of this kind of farming left behind a layer of dry, nutrient-deficit sand. Hence, the silt-covered land did not naturally or quickly turn into mature, cultivable soil to foster the sedentary, long-term farming that Wang Anshi and his fellow reformists pursued. In Yingzhou in central Hebei, for instance, after the Yellow River flooded there repeatedly between 1048 and 1128, the land was devastated rather than improved by the heavy silt the river left behind. By the mid-twelfth century, after the river had retreated from that area for a couple of decades, the local soil was judged to still be sterile.39

  The “silting-field measure” that Wang Anshi's government promoted, at least in the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex, did not reverse the salinized, alkalinized conditions of the soil. It failed to improve Hebei's land productivity in general.40 The situation can be contemplated along with James C. Scott's investigation of “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.” To Scott, high-modernist projects that many modern states pursued in recent centuries were founded on “formal, deductive, epistemic knowledge”; they failed because of their leaders’ ignorance and dismissal of practical, local knowledge.41 Similarly, in the case of the eleventh-century Hebei, the state-sponsored land enriching measure was not grounded in an everyday, practical understanding of material environmental conditions. Living with constantly changing conditions, people developed practical knowledge about their land and soil, which led them to give up farming on the briny land and to conduct subsistence, nomadic farming on river sediments. Without such practical knowledge, Wang Anshi and his fellow reformists pursued something theoretically plausible, yet too idealistic to be realized. Not only was the land not enriched by the river silt artificially applied over its surface, but the land-enriching measure might have expedited the soil's deterioration, especially its sandification, as we shall see in the next few pages.

  8.3 Too Much Silt – Soil Sandification

  Wang Anshi and his contemporaries did not expect, and modern historians of the Song period do not expect to find, the expansion of sandy land in Hebei over a centuries-long process triggered by the Yellow River's dominance of Hebei from 1048 to 1128.42

  According to the passage in the Standard History of the Song Dynasty that I quoted in the previous pages, the river's silt ended up as sand after undergoing an annual cycle of physical, and perhaps chemical, changes.43 In his hydraulic treatise, preserved in the Yuan Dynasty “General Discussion on the Yellow River Hydraulics,” Shen Li 沈立, a hydrocrat who personally worked in Hebei to tame the Yellow River shortly after the river shifted into Hebei in 1048, offered a more detailed description of the changes to the silt.44 He described the process of the silt's transformation into different types of soil, which he classified according to their compositions and colors. Among various types was one classified as “sand,” including subcategories like “active sand,” “floating sand,” and “running sand.” “These three kinds,” Shen commented, “are active and movable, so it is hard to succeed [in building flood-control facilities on top of them].” Such sandy land lacked nutrients and could hardly support agricultural activities. In 1060, officials conducting land surveys in Hebei witnessed a cluster of “low-rank” fields, which barely generated any agricultural products and had little taxation value. These fields included “land covered by white salt and containing alkalis,” “land containing salt and alkalis and encroached on by sand,” and the worst of all, “land of dead sand unsuitable for cultivation.”45

  These descriptions of sandy soil have been verified by the results of modern hydrogeological research in southern Hebei. In the area where most of the eleventh-century bank ruptures and floods took place, the Yellow River left behind a stratum of abandoned riverbeds and sediments. These remains, now buried meters underneath the modern land surface, contain an enormous amount of floating and fine sand, rather than solid, muddy earth.46 Although today we do not see much of this sand on the land surface, people in the eleventh century and many centuries afterward had to cope with it in their daily lives.

  There is no way for us to measure the ratio of sandy matter to the entire volume of silt that the river deposited in Hebei. Some Song officials considered it rather high. In 1078, they claimed that silt accumulated on the shores after the river's floods had receded; 80 percent of the silt was sand, and only 20 percent was some kind of solid earth.47 Due to the preponderance of sandy matter, it was difficult for the silted soil to preserve water and fertility as well as to prevent soil erosion. Farming there was virtually impossible.48 In effect, after the water evaporated and the soil was exposed to the air, the land started undergoing serious sandification. By 1088, some fascine embankments in Hebei had been named “sand dykes,” indicating that they were built either on or by sand, instead of on or by solid earth.49 In the late eleventh century, Sima Guang sent a poem to his friends living in Huazhou, trying to envision their lives in southern Hebei by the water of the Yellow River. He wrote: “While sand and dust fly, misery and bleakness fill my eyes.”50

  Sandification was a long-term process. It might not have become evident when much of the Hebei Plain was submerged by the Yellow River's frequent floods. But after the river moved out of Hebei in 1128 and the land was exposed to north China's semi-arid climate and started to dry up, sandification began to manifest in more obvious ways. The sandiness of Hebei became very evident in the twelfth century to people like Lou Yao 樓鑰 (1137–1213), a Southern Song 南宋 official. In 1169, on a journey through northern Henan and southern Hebei, Lou saw extensive sandbars standing beside and within the flow of the Yellow River.51 Place names like “Sandy Inn (shadian 沙店),” which indicated the surrounding landscape, showed up in his writing. The circumstances became particularly striking when Lou arrived in Huazhou, a repeated victim of Yellow River floods beginning in the mid-tenth century, where he found “earthen hills lining up on both sides of the road, where the dust is extremely heavy and the air is so thick that one cannot see things even from a very short distance.” The locals called that place the “Small Dust Cave” (xiaohuidong 小灰洞), a name that makes one suspect the existence of even dustier places down the road. After entering Xiangzhou in southwestern Hebei, Lou journeyed along a tributary of the Zhang River. That small stream was now named the “Little Yellow River,” due to its heavy silt. By 1169, the sediments that the stream deposited had produced such a dry landscape that Lou had the illusion of “traveling in a desert.” Other parts of Hebei underwent a similar land transformation. In Yingzhou in central Hebei, the land was considered sterile in the mid-twelfth century.52 In the early thirteenth century, two-thirds of the 30,000 mu of arable fields in Shenze 深澤 County of central Hebei, which the state of the Jin Dynasty (1125–1234) granted for military colonization, were reported to have suffered from serious waterlogging, sand coverage, and soil salinization.53

  The sandification process does not seem to have stopped in the next few centuries. It certainly struck foreigners who visited this part of China. In the late fifteenth century, a Korean visitor, Chhoe Pu, traveled to Hebei in the third lunar month in early spring.54 In Dezhou in southern Hebei as well as in Tianjin and Beijing in the far north, he saw sand and dust blown about by strong winds; sandstorms were so strong that he could hardly keep his eyes open. Chhoe seems to have encountered the kind of spring sandstorms that modern Chinese often experienced in Hebei in the post-2000 era. Upon his arrival in Tianjin, where He
bei's streams and the Yellow River converged and entered the sea between 1048 and 1128, Chhoe observed a barren land: “White sand extends without an end. In the wild there is no grass, and crops do not grow. Human settlements are sparse.” Curious, he enquired about the land in other parts of Hebei. His Chinese interpreter replied: “In this part of north China, there is an abundance of sandy soil.”

  Half a century later, a Japanese monk named Sakugen traveled from south China to Hebei in the third and fourth lunar months of 1549, as Chhoe Pu did.55 In southwestern Hebei, he came upon strong winds and a dull sky that was darkened by heavy sand and dust. His boat had to stop at various places in central Hebei because “fierce winds whirled up sand” and hindered the boat's movement. Similar descriptions are frequently found in Chinese writings of the following centuries.56 A relatively comprehensive comment on the sandification problem was provided by Lan Dingyuan 藍鼎元 (1680–1733), an official of the Qing Dynasty who once directed the Yellow River hydraulic works. In his “Document on hydraulic benefits in Northern Zhili (central and northern Hebei)” in the 1720s, Lan wrote: “There is no solid earth in north China, and sand is eroded by running waters.” For this reason, “river banks cannot be consolidated” by hydraulic works.57 The banks of the Yellow River, in particular, consisted of floating sand and were unable to support levees.

  The tremendous amount of silt transformed into loose, mobile sand; it became the source of sandstorms that have happened in this region since the eleventh century up to today.58 Take the history of Guantao 館陶 County in southern Hebei. In the eleventh century, Guantao was penetrated by the northern courses of the Yellow River, the Yuhe Canal, and the Zhang River. It was one of several places inside Hebei where various waters converged and overflowed. In 1051, a bank rupture prompted the construction of extensive embankments in this area, but despite this attempt at protection, a flood once again inundated the county seat in 1071.59 For the next ten years, the county seat was encircled by various river courses and their embankments; in 1083, the town had to relocate to a higher ground to “escape the water.”60 Nevertheless, in 1103 the Yellow River's torrents inundated and engulfed the new county seat, inflicting severe damage.61 After the river shifted out of Hebei in 1128, its riverbed and embankments inside Guantao stayed behind. Silted and dry, these heavy sediments have since become a reminder of the county's tragedy during the Song period.

  For centuries, the sandy cover over Guantao's land had not appeared as an eminent issue in any historical records. The situation changed in 1724, when Zhao Zhixi 趙知希, a new county magistrate, arrived and was shocked by the desolate landscape. He reported that extensive stretches of land were under the threat of sandstorms and had become unsuitable for farming.62 The source of the sandstorms was traced back to the dykes built in the eleventh century; within the dykes was an abandoned riverbed of the Song-period Yellow River, now a course not of water but of sand. Asked when the sandstorms had begun, the locals of Guantao said they had no knowledge. Their ignorance of past environmental changes suggests that the sandification dated back to a much earlier origin than the eighteenth century. Year by year, loose sand was blown about by ferocious winds and spread toward neighboring areas to disastrous effects.

  The sites of manors and buildings are buried by sand without a trace. Occasionally, a few buildings have survived to be identified, or their roofs have half emerged from sand. Sand has spread over an area of more than ten li, undulating up and down to form the shapes of hills and gullies.63

  The area affected by annual sandstorms was not small, as “for over seventy or eighty li from Zhangsha in the south to Xuedian in the north the land is in a similar state.”64 The land survey showed that Guantao's sandy land amounted to no less than a thousand qing, approximately 61.4 square kilometers. Defeated by the sand and sandstorms, agricultural efforts often ended in naught. Many local farmers chose to abandon the desolate, sterile land and fled to look for a livelihood elsewhere, hence thinning out the local population.

  Such long-lasting environmental and socio-economic tragedy was not unique to Guantao County; it happened in a fair number of places in Hebei. In Neihuang 內黃 County in southern Hebei, for instance, the sandy cover that came into being in the eleventh century remained strikingly visible to the eye in the twentieth century. Also, let us look at Daming County, the Song's northern capital. In its northeastern corner, shortly after the Yellow River turned south in 1128, the dykes along the abandoned riverbed disappeared, buried deeply under “widely diffuse yellow sand.”65 In the county's southeast corner, the river once burst through its banks and created an eastern course in 1060. Over the next few decades, the river kept depositing silt at the site of the bank rupture, which eventually accumulated to form multiple sand dunes, some standing more than ten meters high. Many of the dunes kept evolving and lasted until the twentieth century. For centuries, some of Daming's silt-turned sandy land was ploughed; farmers exploited the already impoverished earth for minimum harvests. Rather than preserving the sandy land to restore its water and nutrients or to cover it with long-lasting vegetation, agriculture depleted the land and exposed it to the open air, thus furthering its sandification process.

  In the 1960s when the Communist government encouraged land reclamation to expand agriculture, the local government conducted a land survey in Daming, which finally recorded on paper the damage caused by sandification. Rising and falling and drifting in the wind, the giant sand bodies emitted sand and dust to provoke sandstorms. Just as destructive as those in Guantao County, the sandstorms attacked buildings and killed crops, causing the local economy to languish.66 Once a vibrant, wealthy city in medieval China, Daming had become one of the poorest districts in Hebei in centuries. Its glory, together with Hebei's glory, had faded away as the sand continued to accumulate.

  8.4 “The Taihang Mountains Are Denuded!”

  As the environmental drama kept playing out in Hebei, the land was deeply scarred by turbulent streams, lagoons, and gullies. Drifting sand painted it with patches of brown and yellow, while salt and alkalis sparkled on it with a silvery white. These new elements emerged to participate in and complicate the drama of the Yellow River–Hebei environmental complex; altogether, they complicated the environmental circumstances inside Hebei. In the midst of such environmental tumult, we find things disappearing, such as human lives, crops they planted, animals they reared, boats they used to ship goods, and certainly the fertility of the land the human eyes were unable to see. Here, let us now take a look at the loss of another kind of things – the organic lives of trees, bushes, and grass – Hebei's vegetation in a general sense.

  The Northern Song was a period of extraordinary deforestation in Hebei's history.67 The rapid loss of trees and other kinds of plants was partly associated with people's daily consumption of firewood and building materials. It was also a consequence of the rapid growth of a non-agricultural economy in several small pockets in western Hebei; there, iron mining and smelting and ceramic production flourished. Such economic growth arrived with high energy costs; it drove Hebei's firewood consumption and deforestation to skyrocket. There was also another significant, yet less noticeable cause of the disappearance of vegetation: the hydraulic mode of consumption driven both by the Yellow River's repeated flooding and by the imperial state's unstoppable environmental management. To deal with the river disasters, the state-sponsored hydraulic works utilized a massive amount of trees, bushes, and grass. The usage of vegetative materials to build flood-control infrastructure, like embankments, led to the clear-cutting of both natural forests up in mountains and plants people cultivated in their fields and gardens.

  During the tenth to twelfth centuries (and in fact, all the way through the nineteenth century as well), the hydraulic technology that the Chinese state employed for Yellow River flood control was rather simple. Its core technique was to erect embankments along the river. The embankments were constructed with a mixture of pounded earth, rocks, stones, and fascine rolls. This la
st item refers to large bundles of tree trunks, wooden sticks, bamboo strips, grass, reeds, and straw. After 1048, as the Yellow River created multiple courses in Hebei and destructed local waterways, the government and the ordinary people of Hebei had to build embankments to contain the problematic waters simultaneously. This meant the sheer quantity of vegetative materials collected and consumed inside Hebei for the hydraulic purposes had to multiply.

  So how much vegetative material did a single fascine roll demand according to the Song hydraulic technology? Based on a description most likely written by Shen Li, the hydrocrat previously mentioned who supervised the Yellow River hydraulic works shortly after 1048, a fascine roll (juansao 卷埽) consisted of 1,100 bundles of wooden sticks, 2,625 bundles of grass, and 125 pieces of large timber, together amounting to 3,850 total units of raw materials.68 This mass stood 31.2 meters long and 3.12 meters high, and had a volume of about 230 cubic meters. Hydraulic workers piled up multiple such fascine rolls to build a fascine site (sao 埽, a section of embankment) on the river. The size of the fascine site varied; one might stretch over a length from 312 meters to 1,560 meters, and stand at a height of 1–13.48 meters.69 Depending on how long and how tall it was, the fascine site was comprised of tens or even hundreds of fascine rolls. A small embankment might include only ten fascine rolls and used up 38,500 units of wood and grass, altogether 2,300 cubic meters of vegetative materials. A very large embankment might use up to 770,000 units that when piled up formed a mass of 46,000 cubic meters. Given this information, we know that on average, an embankment in eleventh-century Hebei consumed 404,250 units of wood and grass.

  When considering these strikingly large numbers, we must understand that they refer to only the materials found in the final, functioning embankments. Our sources suggest that during the construction process, more than half of the wooden sticks and grass would be washed away. Hence, a tremendous amount of materials was wasted and became invisible costs. In order for the hydraulic teams to construct an average-size embankment, they had to prepare approximately double the amount of materials, or 808,250 units of materials at a giant volume of 48,285 cubic meters.70