JINJIANG EVENING POST (锦江晚报) — Chengdu — “Readers’ Forum” (读者论坛) December 5, 2029
The Lesson of Dujiangyan
by Qin Bojun (秦伯钧)
The author, 67, taught history for thirty-nine years at a middle school in Pixian and is now retired. The views expressed are those of a retired schoolteacher, which the author regards as the appropriate rank from which to discuss the end of the world.
Recovered press item, English rendering. Predates First Voices (December 12, 2029); the writer has not heard the stones speak, and does not know what March will bring.
Last Sunday I took my granddaughter to Dujiangyan, as my grandfather once took me. We stood above the Fish Mouth in the winter sunlight and watched the Min River arrive from the Tibetan snows and divide itself, obediently, around a wedge of stone laid down twenty-two centuries ago, and I told her what my grandfather told me, which is what every Sichuan grandfather has told every Sichuan grandchild for two thousand years: Li Bing did not fight the river.
He did not dam it. A dam is an argument, and the river always wins the argument eventually, in the last chapter if not the first. Li Bing studied the water until he understood what it insisted upon, yielded to it in everything it insisted upon — and then, within the terms the water itself had set, he divided it, calmed it, and led it out in ten thousand channels to make the Chengdu Plain the granary it has been ever since. The Erwang Temple above the works preserves his doctrine in six characters: dig the bed deep, keep the dikes low. Note what kind of doctrine it is. It is not a doctrine of victory. It is a doctrine of terms.
I thought of Li Bing this autumn, as I suppose the reader knows, because of what happened in September at the back of the stone procession that is now walking toward us all.
A certain great power — I will not belabor which; its own newspapers have belabored it sufficiently — selected a straggler among the 6,561 and struck it with the most terrible weapon the human race has built, the weapon that ended one era of history and stood guard, so we were assured, over the next. The stone broke. And then, over eleven days, while the whole world watched through every instrument it owns, the stone gathered itself and resumed both its shape and its appointment, having lost, the astronomers tell us, nothing but our illusions.
Every commentator on earth has now written about the fear of that fortnight. Permit a history teacher to record instead what he recognized. There is a kind of strength that answers force not with counter-force but by simply resuming its shape. Our ancestors observed this strength for three thousand years, catalogued its habits, built a civilization in negotiation with it, and gave it a name. They called it water. The Old Master said it two and a half millennia ago: nothing under heaven is softer than water, and nothing is better at overcoming the hard, and everyone knows this, and no one acts on it. In September, the whole species was given a laboratory demonstration. I do not claim to know what the stones are. I claim only that when I saw the fragments drift back together, patient as a river closing over a thrown stone, I did not feel that I was seeing something new. I felt that I was seeing something extremely old, at a new address.
Now let me speak of what is genuinely at stake, because I do not think it is what the foreign broadcasts think it is. The foreign broadcasts fear death, which is natural, and defeat, which for some of them would be a novelty. But a Chinese of my generation, hearing that heaven has filled with portents, reaches for an older and more precise fear, and its name is luan — disorder. The breaking of the granary chain. The roads filling with people who have no ration and no register. Our dynastic histories are, among other things, the world’s longest continuous record of exactly how order dies: and in twenty-four histories, it almost never dies by the invader’s hand directly. It dies when the flood or the comet or the famine arrives and the administration is found to have been hollow — when the dikes were paper, the granaries were sold, and the mandate, as our ancestors put it with an accountant’s coldness, had already been withdrawn, the catastrophe serving merely as the audit. Heaven, in our tradition, does not send omens to express its feelings. It sends them to announce an inspection.
Very well: the inspection is scheduled. The astronomers say late March. The question before every government on earth — and I intend the plural — is the oldest examination question in the Chinese curriculum: when the water rises, will the works hold? Not the missiles; we have all seen what the missiles are worth. The works. The grain stores. The rail lines into the interior. The registers that know where the people are and the discipline that can move them without trampling them. I read that a certain foreign capital has named its policy “watchful preparation,” and I confess the phrase made this old teacher laugh aloud, alone in his kitchen, because we also have a four-character phrase, and ours is twenty-six centuries old and means repair the roof before it rains. One of these two phrases is a plan.
I will be accused of national boasting, so let me forestall the accusation by boasting deliberately, once, about the correct thing. I was in Mianzhu in 2008 after the earth broke Wenchuan, as a volunteer with my school. I saw what this society can do when it decides that a thing shall be done: the columns of trucks, the tent cities raised in days, the teachers conducting lessons under canvas while the aftershocks still came. I saw the floods of 1998 fought by a million pairs of hands passing sandbags through the night. I do not romanticize any of it — I saw the costs too, and a history teacher who romanticizes mobilization has not done the reading. But I know, as a plain matter of record, that the organized movement of people and grain on a continental scale is a discipline, that disciplines must be practiced, and that this civilization has been practicing since before Rome had walls. If the examination in March is an examination in endurance, in logistics, in the subordination of the individual mood to the collective necessity — then, speaking as a grader of examinations for thirty-nine years, I know which students have done the homework.
And there is one more piece of homework in our past, one we have spent a century being ashamed of, and I want to suggest, cautiously, that we may be about to reread its grade. Every schoolchild learns the story as tragedy: how the Ming burned the great fleets, turned inward from the sea, and thereby — so the textbooks of my youth insisted — forfeited the future to the small nations of the Atlantic, who came back down that same sea two centuries later with opium and gunboats and a century of humiliation in their holds. The lesson we drew was: never again turn away from the ocean. Perhaps that was the right lesson for that century. But I stood at Dujiangyan on Sunday thinking a thought I would once have been embarrassed to write: we are the only great civilization on earth that has already once walked away from the sea and survived it — survived it for centuries, fed itself, governed itself, remained itself. Withdrawal, it turns out, is not the same as death. It is a skill. It is in the syllabus. I do not know what the stones will demand of mankind, if they demand anything, if they are anything more than the universe’s indifferent gravel. But if the demand should touch the coasts — and a teacher notices that the first thing struck in this whole affair was an ocean, a hidden one, entered by force over the objections of four thousand of the intruder’s own scholars — then let it be recorded that one people on this earth has taken that examination before, and holds, somewhere in the family archive, its old and dishonored notes.
My granddaughter, who is nine and had been listening to all of this with the expression children reserve for grandfathers who have gone on too long, asked me at the Fish Mouth whether the stones in the sky would fall on Chengdu. I gave her the only answer a historian is licensed to give. I said: little treasure, I do not know. But look down there. That wedge of stones has stood in the middle of a furious river for two thousand two hundred years — through the fall of eleven dynasties, through the Mongols, through the warlords, through the Japanese bombs that fell on this very city, through every end of the world so far — and it stands because the men who laid it did not ask the river to be gentle. They asked only to understand its terms, and then they kept them, and dredged the bed deep, and kept the dikes low, and handed the maintenance to their children.
The stones in the sky have not yet stated their terms. When they do — if they do — the nations that survive will not be the ones with the proudest weapons. September settled that. They will be the ones that can hear terms and keep them; the ones with grain in the granary, rail into the mountains, and the patience of water in the blood.
We are an old people. We have outlived our own ends of the world before, and we did not do it with the fist. We did it with the ledger, the granary, the dredge, and the long agreement of the generations. Dig the bed deep. Keep the dikes low. And whatever is coming down the river of heaven — divide it if you can, yield to it where you must, and above all, be found, when it arrives, already at work.