more trenching and dredging, and done it better. So the canal was now broad and deep and permanent, its banks neatly beveled and faced with stone, with locks and hoisting engines provided wherever it had to vault intervening highlands. It enabled vessels of every size, from san-pan scows to seagoing chuan ships, to sail or row or be towed all the way from Khanbalik to the southern border of Kithai, where the delta of the other great river, the Yang-tze, fanned out into the Sea of Kithai. And now that Kubilai’s realm extended south of the Yang-tze, the Great Canal was being pushed clear to Manzi’s capital city of Hang-zho. It was a modern-day accomplishment nearly as grand and sightly and awesome as the ancient Great Wall—and far more useful to mankind.
When our little karwan train was ferried across the Yang-tze, the Tremendous River, it was like crossing a dun-colored sea, so broad that we could barely distinguish the darker dun line on the far side that was the shore of Manzi. I had some difficulty in reminding myself that this was the water I had been able to throw a stone across, away to the west and upriver in Yun-nan and To-Bhot where it was called the Jin-sha.
Until now, we had been traversing a country inhabited mostly by Han, but a country that had been for many years under Mongol domination. Now here, in what had until very recently been the Sung Empire, we were among Han peoples whose ways of life had not yet been in the least impressed or overlaid by the more robust and vigorous Mongol society. To be sure, Mongol patrols roamed hither and yon, to preserve order, and every community had a new headman who, though usually a Han, had been imported from Kithai and installed by the Mongols. But those had not had time to make any changes in what the country had been. Also, because Sung had surrendered to become Manzi without any struggle, the land had not been fought over or ravaged or blighted in any way. It was peaceful and prosperous and pleasing to the eye. So, from the moment of our landing on the Manzi shore, I began to take an even keener interest in our surroundings, eager to see what the Han were like in their natural state, so to speak.
The most noticeable aspect of them was their incredible ingenuity. I had been inclined in the past to denigrate that much-vaunted quality of theirs, having so often found their inventions and discoveries to be as impractical as, for instance, their circle divided into three hundred sixty-five and a quarter segments. But I was more taken with the cleverness of the Han in Manzi, and it was never better demonstrated than by a prosperous landowner who took me on a tour of his holdings, just outside the city of Su-zho. I was accompanied by my scribe, who translated for me.
“A vast estate,” said our host, waving at it expansively.
Perhaps it was, in a country where the average farmer owned a miserable mou or two of land. But it would have been accounted ridiculously tiny anywhere else—say, in the Veneto, where the properties are measured in sweeps of zonte. All I could see here was a plot of ground just barely big enough to contain the owner’s one-room shack—his “country house”; he had a substantial mansion in Su-zho—and a cramped truck garden beside the shack, a single trellis thickly grown with grapevine, some rickety pig sties, a pond no bigger than the smallest in a Khanbalik palace garden, and a sparse grove of trees which, from their gnarled fistlike limbs, I took to be mere mulberries.
“Kan-kan! Behold! My orchard, my piggery, my vineyard and my fishery!” he boasted, as if he were describing an entire and fertile and thriving prefecture. “I harvest silk and pork and zu-jin fish and grape wine, four staples of gracious living.”
That they were, I agreed, but remarked that there seemed little room here to harvest any profitable quantity of any of them, and that they struck me, besides, as a strangely assorted quartet of crops.
“Why, they all support and increase one another,” he said, with some surprise. “So they do not require much space to produce a bountiful harvest. You have seen my abode in the city, Kuan Polo, so you know I am wealthy. My wealth came all from this estate.”
I could not gainsay him, so I asked politely if he would explain his farming methods, for they must be masterful. He began by telling me that in the skimpy garden plot he grew radishes.
That sounded so trifling that I murmured, “You failed to mention that staple of gracious living.”
“No, no, not for the table, Kuan, nor for marketing. The radishes are only for the grapes. If you bury your grapes among a bin of radish roots, the grapes will stay fresh and sweet and delicious for months, if necessary.”
He continued. The radish tops, the greens, he fed to the pigs in the sties. The sties were uphill of the mulberry grove, and tiled channels were laid between, so the pigs’ offal sluiced downhill to fertilize the trees. The trees’ green summer leaves nourished the silkworms, and, in autumn when the leaves turned brown, they too were fodder for the pigs. Meanwhile, the excreta of the silkworms was the favorite food of the zu-jin fish, and the fishes’ excrement enriched the pond bottom, the silt of which was dredged up at intervals to nourish the grape arbor. And so-kan-kan! ecco! behold!—in this miniature universe, every living thing was interdependent, and flourished by being so, and made him wealthy.
“Ingenious!” I exclaimed, and sincerely meant it.
The Han of Manzi were clever in other, less striking ways, too, and not just the upper classes, but the least of them. A Han farmer, when he judged the time of day by glancing at the altitude of the sun, was of course doing nothing that any Veneto peasant could not. However,
I was much impressed by the ambition and perseverance of one farm boy I met. The majority of the Han country folk were illiterate and content to remain so, but this one lad had somehow learned to read, and was determined to rise above his poverty, and had borrowed books to study. Since he could not neglect his farm work— being the only stay of aged parents—he would tie a book to the horns of his ox and read while he led the beast about in tilling the field. And at night, because the household could not afford even a grease wick-lamp, he would read by the light of glowworms which he plucked from the farm furrows during the day.
I do not mean to assert that every Han in Manzi was the embodiment of virtues and talents and no less worthy attributes. I saw also some egregious evidences of fatuity and even lunacy. One night we came to a village where a religious festa of some sort was going on. There was music and song and dance and merry fires burning all about, and every so often the night was rent by the thunder and flash of the fiery trees and sparkling flowers. The center of all the celebration was a table set up in the village square. It was piled with offerings to the gods: samples of the finest local farm produce, flasks of pu-tao and mao-tai, slaughtered piglet and lamb carcasses, fine cooked viands, beautifully arranged vases of flowers. There was a gap among all that bounty, where a hole was cut in the middle of the table, and one villager after another would crawl under the table, put his head up through the hole, pose that way for a time, then remove himself to make way for another. When I inquired in amazement what that was meant to signify, my scribe asked about and then reported:
“The gods look down and see the sacrifices heaped up for them. Among the offerings, the heads. So each villager goes away confident that the gods, having seen him already dead, will take his name off their list of local mortals to be afflicted with ills and sorrows and death.”
I might have laughed. But it occurred to me that, however simple-mindedly those people were behaving, at least they were being ingeniously simpleminded. After some time in Manzi, and after admiring innumerable instances of the Han’s intelligence, and after deploring as many instances of witlessness, I eventually came to a conclusion. The Han possessed prodigious intellect and industry and imagination. They were mainly flawed in this respect: they too often wasted their gifts in fanatic observance of their religious beliefs, which were flagrantly fatuous. If the Han had not been so preoccupied with their notions of godliness, and so bent on seeking “wisdom instead of knowledge” (as one of them had once expressed it to me), I think those people, as a people, could have done great things. If they had not forever lain worshipfully prostrate—a position which invited their being trodden on by one oppressive dynasty after another—they might themselves by now be rulers of the whole world.
That farm boy I earlier spoke of, whose initiative and assiduity I found admirable, forfeited some of my regard as we talked further and he told me, by way of my scribe:
“My passion for reading and my yearning for learning might distress my aged parents. They might decry my ambition as an overweening arrogance, but—”
“Why on earth should they?”
“We follow the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze, and one of his teachings was that a low-born person should not
