Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  The historical parallels between Rome and China endured into the sixth century AD with native efforts to reconstitute the fallen empires in each region. The initiative of Constantinople’s Byzantine Roman emperor, Justinian, to reunify the Latin West ultimately failed, leaving Rome itself as a shrunken ruin of its former glory until the Renaissance. In China, by contrast, reunification succeeded. Restoration under the Sui from 589 to 617 AD and the successor T’ang dynasty until AD 906 paved the way for China’s medieval economic revolution and its golden age when Chinese society soared to the zenith among world civilizations.

  Why did China’s reunification succeed, yet Rome’s fail? One outstanding distinction was China’s building of the imperial Grand Canal linking the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers. Completed at a breakneck pace in only six years in 610 by the Sui—who, like the Ch’in, were prodigious and ruthless infrastructure builders—using some 5 million conscripted male and female laborers, the nearly 1,100-mile-long, elongated S-shaped Grand Canal linked up local canal segments that had been built episodically since the fifth century BC and added new segments. In all, it created a stupendous 30,000-mile-long national inland waterway system that enabled a united China to ship vital rice supplies grown on the terraced hillside paddies of south China to the large population centers and army troops located on the Yellow River to defend against the continuing threat from bellicose nomadic horsemen from the Asian steppe.

  Not only did the Grand Canal overcome the vulnerability that had vanquished the Han. By bridging China’s north-south hydrological fault line, it synergized the natural and human resources of the two diverse geographical zones to help launch China’s brilliant, medieval golden age. All China was invigorated with fresh economic and cultural energy. In contrast to the Han, the Sui and T’ang dynasties presided over a more robust double base, one in the traditional Yellow River valley in the north and an even more productive southerly one that had been steadily growing for centuries around the Yangtze.

  The old Roman Empire and Europe, by contrast, lacked the unifying impetus of any such inland waterway. Its major arterial river system, the Danube-Rhine, was ill-suited to that purpose because it flowed away from the early hubs of Mediterranean European civilization, through difficult, rain-fed agricultural soils, and along an unstable frontier boundary besieged by warlike tribes. The open waters of the Mediterranean were far less effectively controlled and thus less conducive to playing a uniting role than large irrigation rivers. From this point on, the histories of China and Europe diverged widely. While the European territory of the old Roman Empire remained a fragmented jigsaw of competing states and endured the stagnation of the long dark ages, the Grand Canal served as the electrifying fulcrum of China’s medieval economic revolutions in transport, agriculture, and industry.

  China’s Grand Canal was one of mankind’s stellar engineering achievements. It was the largest artificial transport waterway ever built and required a larger labor force than the one that erected the Great Wall, most working with their bare hands and shovels and uncounted hundreds of thousands giving their life to the project. It ultimately spanned eastern China for 1,100 miles from the port city of Hangzhou south of Shanghai to Beijing on the northern frontier with a gigantic channel 10 to 30 feet deep and up to 100 feet wide. It featured 60 bridges and 24 locks to manage elevation variations and summit level water flows. Its waters teemed with commercial vessels of all shapes and sizes, powered by sail, oars, and paddle wheels, transforming the world’s most densely populated trading area into a single national economic market. Rice-laden barges came and went from huge granaries that the government maintained at key junctures along its route to furnish the food lifeline for China’s national security. The easy movement facilitated centralized governance by grain tax collectors, bureaucrats, and soldiers en route to army garrisons. Due to its surpassing importance, the Grand Canal became a key political barometer, and driver, of Chinese history. Whenever the canal was threatened, cut, or left in a state of disrepair, China was generally in the throes of a crisis or immersed in prolonged decline or political lassitude. A robust Grand Canal system, on the other hand, spurred internal growth and security, rendered superfluous the pirate-harassed sea transport links between the southern food supply and the northern defensive garrisons, and generally encouraged China’s inward-looking, autarkic impulses.

  As a result of the canal, water transport became many times less costly, at least one-third less than shipping by land. Government policymakers made ongoing improvements a top priority. One key advancement was the world’s first double canal pound lock at an opening onto central China’s Huai River. It was built in AD 984 at the order of Ch’ia Wei-yo, a Sung government assistant transport commissioner, who was seeking ways to minimize theft and damage to ships and cargo caused by existing methods for moving vessels between differing water levels. At the time, cargo ships were manually hoisted out of the water with ropes by large labor crews, dragged up a slipway ramp cut into the bank, and then relaunched from a second slipway into the water at the level of the second waterway. Pound locks, which came into widespread use on the Grand Canal network during the eleventh century, impounded water between two lock gates; vessels were either lifted or lowered simply by adding or withdrawing water within the impounded portions. Boats could easily be lifted up to five feet in a pound lock. A graduated series of pound locks enabled canals to lift boats to unprecedented elevations—the summit level on the Grand Canal, for instance, was 138 feet above sea level. Moreover, the pound lock conserved precious water, allowing canals that often went dry in summer to operate more days of the year. One double lock built where a branch of the Grand Canal joined the Yangtze enabled the passage of ships five times larger than possible under the double slipway system.

  River cargo volumes soared from early T’ang times. In the eighth century, combined tonnage of the government’s 2,000 ship Yangtze salt and iron fleet alone reached a third of the total transported on all British commercial vessels in the mid-eighteenth century. During the Sung dynasty from 960 to 1275 government officials improved their communication by using the waterway to distribute the world’s first national newspaper, an official government gazette. As shipping traffic increased, private shipping brokers became increasingly active, matching and administering contracts between buyers and sellers, storing goods at their warehouses and serving as clearinghouses of market prices and conditions. Where the commerce of inland waterways merged with the sea, great port cities with market activity arose to trade in spices, silk, and other luxuries with the rest of the world through shipping networks that extended across the Far East, India, Arabia, and the Mediterranean.

  During the T’ang era, the Chinese were content to sail the seacoasts with the two-way monsoons, south in winter and north when the winds reversed in summer, and to rely upon Arab, Persian, and other foreign shippers for long-distance sea trading. By the Sung dynasty, Chinese nautical mastery was world class, featuring massive ships built with iron nails from its foundries, watertight compartments unknown in the rest of the world, a huge sternpost rudder for steering, buoyancy chambers, and distinctive, narrow fanlike sections of canvas sails stretched between bamboo masts that looked much like a Venetian blind. Navigation was facilitated by the invention in 1119 of the mariners’ compass, one of many important Chinese innovations to migrate westward. As a result, Chinese seafaring gradually grew more ambitious. Yet seafaring in China’s golden age never approached the awesome scale of its inland river shipping, which so impressed Marco Polo, native of Europe’s greatest seaport, Venice, then with a comparatively tiny 50,000 inhabitants. Describing the Yangtze at the smallish port city of I-ching, he related that “the amount of shipping it carries and the total volume and value of its traffic…exceeds all the rivers of the Christians put together and their seas into the bargain…I have seen in this city fully five thousand ships at once…and there are on (the Yangtze’s) banks more than two hundred cities, all having more ships than this.”


  The national Grand Canal waterway transport network also gave powerful impetus to China’s rice-farming revolution (eighth to twelfth centuries), one of the decisive events in Far Eastern history. Originally a dry crop, wet rice had been extensively cultivated in naturally flooded fields alongside the monsoonal rivers of Southeast Asia by small communities since the third millennium BC. It first arrived in China from India around 2000 BC. After about 500 BC more intensive new irrigation methods that allowed cultivation on a larger scale and over a wider range of landscapes began to spread.

  Rice irrigation demanded solving formidable water challenges. First, there was the problem of converting nature’s hydrological excess of rainfall and floods from an insuperable obstacle into a productive irrigation resource. The transplanted young roots had to be kept submerged in shallow water for several months, after which the water was drained off. Farmers had to prepare, level, and wall the terraced paddies of south China’s hillsides, drain and refill paddies at timely moments, and keep the entire system constantly flowing with muddy water in order to provide sufficient oxygen to the rice plants and to suppress infestations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. A technical array of dams, sluice gates, water-lifting norias, simple treadle pumps, and a network of bamboo pipes enabled the process. The labor was immensely intensive. But so were the rewards. Inundation transformed poor, quickly depleted soils into perennial rice paddies that never had to lay fallow so that yields could sustain population densities far higher than those that could be fed by achievable yields of wheat or maize—thus providing the demographic profile that distinguished Asia’s history. In China, it completed a population and dietary transformation that had been evolving gradually over many centuries as many Chinese farmers moved south away from the millet and wheat fields of the Yellow River basin.

  China’s rice farming revolution reached its apogee in the early eleventh century with the government’s importation from Champa in central Vietnam of a variety of rice that matured in only sixty days. The fast-growing Champa rice also required less water than domestic varieties, so it could be grown on drier hillside paddies that soon were irrigated for the first time. In 1012, on the orders of Sung emperor Chen-tseung, samples of the seeds of Champa rice were distributed to farmers in a conscious effort to expand food production. The effects were astonishing. Suddenly, two and three crops could be grown on an expanded area of irrigated land. Rice production soared. China’s population promptly followed. By the end of the twelfth century it reached 120 million—double the peak achieved by the Han in AD 2 and the early T’ang in the 700s. Some 75 million lived in the south, inverting the historical population balance favoring the north, and transforming China permanently into a densely populated nation primarily of rice eaters—a profile that defined its economic and social structure until the twenty-first century. Abundant food shipments along the Grand Canal drove the rise of Earth’s largest urban centers of the times, cities such as Hangzhou, Kaifeng, Louyang, and Beijing, that also pulsed with resurgent private market commerce and industry. During the Sung dynasty, China’s greatest age, these urban centers became hubs of a remarkable scientific renaissance, entrepreneurship, and a protoindustrial revolution six to seven centuries before Europe’s. Many great inventions were developed, some which later migrated westward through the Indian Ocean and Silk Road trade routes to stimulate Islamic civilization and later still Europe’s rise.

  By 1100, China was by far the world’s indisputable technological leader. Techniques were being used in smelting iron with coke, canal transportation, bridge design, water-powered textile manufacturing, and producing iron farm tools that were not paralleled in Europe for some 600 years. In addition, China was the first civilization to discover that mixing saltpeter (potassium nitrate) with carbon and sulfur produced a volatile substance that exploded when heated—gunpowder. It also pioneered firearms, scientific instruments for measuring the heavens and navigation, hydraulic clockwork, printed books, moveable type, paper money, and the first toilet paper.

  One of the great northern Sung cities, and probably the most important place in the world at the time, was the capital, Kaifeng. In 1100, it was larger than ancient Rome with a registered population plus army of about 1.4 million. Its strategic location near the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River not only put it within easy supply of the rice barges from the south, but also along the water transport routes that brought abundant coal and iron from north China’s mines. Kaifeng rose as an important industrial center. Spurred by deforestation which overtook the region by about 1000, Chinese iron smelters had made the breakthrough discovery of how to use coal in place of charcoal to cast iron from coke-burning blast furnaces. They also invented a decarbonization method to produce large quantities of hard steel from cast iron. Iron production soared. By 1078, China was producing 114,000 tons of pig iron, double England’s total output 700 years later.

  The story was similar in textile manufacturing. Before 1300, China’s precocious textile artisans were operating water-powered spinning machines that could draw several silk filaments simultaneously from boiling water-immersed cocoons—some 400 years before England’s first water-powered spinners began producing silk stockings in Derby to help launch the industrial factory system. Mechanical clocks, which China invented at least two centuries before Europeans, with sophisticated gearing, precision, and self-regulatory mechanisms, helped government administrators accurately keep the all-important official calendar. The famous 30-foot-tall noria-type water clock, with quarter-hourly gongs and bells, erected in 1090 in a Kaifeng pagoda was even used to calculate favorable heavenly synchronizations of the Chinese emperor’s procreation schedule among his 121 wives and concubines.

  Yet China’s technological leadership did not make it invulnerable to its age-old menace of nomadic invasions from the north. In 1126 the barbarian Ch’in Tartars, armed with iron-weapon-making know-how imported from China and with its traditional, potent cavalry, overran Kaifeng and northern China. They, in turn, were expelled by the Mongols in 1234. The surviving Southern Song dynasty established a new capital at Hangzhou. Utilizing the natural protection afforded by the wide Yangtze River, it built its primary defense around a naval fleet of hundreds of newly designed, armored river- and canal-fighting vessels propelled by paddle wheels and treadmills and armed with onboard projectile-throwing machines, crossbowmen, and pikemen. Behind the Yangtze lay the second line of defense—the muddy rice paddies in which the Mongols’ fearsome mounted cavalry bogged down. These defenses helped them survive the onslaught of Genghis Khan’s heirs until 1279.

  The ferocious Mongol conquests from 1206 led by Genghis Khan created the largest land empire in world history. The trademark of this tribal confederation of nomadic, mounted archers from the arid steppe was the merciless slaughter of defeated populations and their domesticated animals, wholesale pilfering, and razing of cities, irrigation works, and other vital infrastructures of civilized life. When Genghis died, undefeated, in 1227 the Mongol empire spanned the entire central Asia steppe from the Volga River in the west to the Amur River in the east. His successors expanded into eastern Europe as far as Poland and Hungary by 1241. Much of the Islamic Middle East capitulated to Mongol warriors, who in 1258 savagely destroyed Baghdad and its caliphate. Mongol armies reached the Adriatic by 1258 and the edge of Africa by 1260. By 1279 all of China was in Mongol hands, the first time in history that China was ruled completely by foreigners. The zenith of the Mongol empire was reached under Genghis’s able grandson, Khubilai Khan, who ruled from 1260 to 1294. He set up China’s Yuan dynasty, which had its seat of government in Beijing. It was Khubilai’s Mongol-led China that Marco Polo served and famously described to the transcriber of his Travels, Rustichello of Pisa, while the two languished in a Genoa prison after the Venetian galley on which Marco had been traveling was captured during a September 1298 battle between Mediterranean trade rivals Venice and Genoa.

  The Mongol conquests were to be world history’s last gr
eat wave of invasions by nomadic, pastoralist warriors that had disrupted and challenged the settled, civilized lifestyle since the Bronze Age. Before the Mongols, the water-fragile central Asian steppes had produced invasions from bellicose confederations of Hsiung-nu, Juan-juan, and the Mongol’s close cousins, Turkmen; the latter allied with China in defeating the Juan-juan in the mid-sixth century, and subsequently divided into two groups and eventually infiltrated and rose to political prominence in Islamic society. The nomads’ ignorance of civilization’s complex technologies, including sophisticated water management, proved to be one of their grave weaknesses in trying to govern the societies they conquered. The rule of the Mongol’s Tartar predecessors, for example, had been undermined by a decline in canal traffic capacity and related diminution of iron and agricultural production, resulting from their failure to undertake timely restorations when the flooding Yellow River burst its restraining dikes in 1194 and cut a new path to the sea.

  Well into the thirteenth century the Mongols themselves still crossed rivers using primitive, inflated skins and rafts. Their conquest of southern China succeeded after forty-five years only when a former Sung commander, Liu Cheng, defected to Khubilai and built a river naval fleet capable of challenging Sung dominance of the Yangtze River. The decisive confrontation was a five-year river-and-land siege of Hsiang-yang, a key river fortress that controlled the main access route to the Yangtze heartland. When success came in 1273, south China finally lay open to the Mongols. With its cavalry bogged down in muddy rice fields, its infantry unfamiliarly led the invasion. The final remnants of Sung resistance were extinguished in early 1279 following their large naval defeat off the coast of Canton, when a loyal minister jumped in the ocean, drowning himself along with the last imperial prince.