Dave's Book Blog: "The Water Kingdom" by Philip Ball

Saturday, 4 March 2023

"The Water Kingdom" by Philip Ball

This is a history of China seen through the lens of water management. China is a vast land area with a relatively small coast which is irrigated principally by two huge rivers that flow west to east: the Yellow river, so called because of the vast amounts of silt it carries downstream, and the Yangtze. Both of these rivers periodically flood and the floods can devastate whole regions, killings millions of people: "Life on the Yellow river floodplain was not so much precarious as predictably disastrous" (Ch 1). They have therefore been subject to water management schemes since the earliest dynasties. When you add in the importance of water for irrigation and for transport, it becomes easy to see why the empires in China rose and fell as a result of the ability of the imperial administration to control the water.

My biggest problem with this book is that the size of the subject, Chinese history over the past 3000 or more years, is vast. This, added to my utter ignorance of China, meant that a lot of what was being said went straight over my head. Ball tries to provide a soft introduction but this sometimes only served to make things more difficult. For example, he explains how to pronounce Chinese words under the pinyin system ... but q is pronounced like ch and x like sch and z like dds and c like ts ....so that I ended up thoroughly confused and resentful that the words weren't being written so that I could pronounce the,. Why not write Qin as Chin if that is how it is pronounced? When you add this first difficulty with that of understanding how the writing works, remembering the multiple dynasties, some of which had multiple emperors, and understanding where the states and provinces are, it is a testament to the skill of this writer that I understood as much as I did. If one thing was made very clear to me it was that my ignorance of such a vast and important culture is inexcusable.

I learned inter alia that:

soy salt was created to eke out costly salt, an essential for Chinese peasants who had little meat in their diet (Ch 1)
that Chinese shamans made prophecies from the pattern of cracking in heated animal bones and tortoise shells (Ch 3)
that Lao Tzu explicitly associated the tao, the way, with a water channel and that the old sign for the tao (I hadn't considered the possibility that Chinese characters have evolved) was a man at a crossroads (Ch 3)
that qi (chi, the energy that flows through the landscape in feng shui) is something similar to the Greek idea of pneuma, being wind, breath and spirit (Ch 3)
that Confucius believed in a meritocracy and that if a ruler deviated from the dao, the way, it was incumbent upon his officials to speak truth to power (Ch 3)
that there was a Ministry of Rites (shades of Titus Groan whose author, Mervyn Peake, was brought up in China) (Ch 5)
that when the eunuch admiral voyaged to Calicut he heard about a prophet called Mouxie ... or Moses (Ch 5)
that the leader of the Taiping rebellion (the worst civil war in history) Hong Xiuquan was inspired by the story of Noah's flood (Hong means flood) which had destroyed and then renewed the world; the Hongmen (Floodgate) is a Mason-like secret society today in Taiwan and Hong Kong ("where they are illegal because of their association with the criminal underworld organization the Triads") (Ch 6)
that Feng shui means 'wind and water'; the magnetic compass was probably first design ed for feng shui geomancy, to find locations where chi energy flows; flowing water is good for flowing chi which is why buildings are often sited close to fast-flowing rivers; buildings with sinuous walls channel chi rather than block it (Ch 9)
that Confucianism's emphasis on balance and harmony recommends practices that preserve ecosystems (Ch 10)
that during the Great Leap Forward, desiring more steel production meant encouraging home smelting. "Entire forests were sacrificed in a single season in order to feed the backyard furnaces that smelted valuable tools and kitchenware into millions of tons of useless scrap metal." (Ch 10)
that Shanghai has sunk by more than two metres in fifteen years due to the depletion of underground water reserves (Ch 10)

Selected quotes:

"The Chinese word for 'landscape' is ... shanshui, mountains (shan) and water (shui)." (Introduction)
"'Coolies': the anglicized word for any labourers who bore heavy loads, derived from ku li, 'bitter strength'." (Ch 1)
"Fish forget about themselves in water, men forget about themselves in the dao." (Ch 3; quoting the Zhuangzi)
"In Europe, empires were built by acquiring land; ib China that benefited you little unless you had a means of making it productive." (Ch 4)
"There are two big problems with water in China today. There is not enough of it to go round, and it is often o foul that no one can use it anyway." (Ch 10)
"Every year it is estimates that water pollution in China produces 190 million casualties and around 60,000 fatalities." (Ch 10)