Reading the Dragon's Spine: An Introduction to China's Geographic Grammar

Reading the Dragon's Spine: An Introduction to China's Geographic Grammar

The Shaking

At 17:00 on the first day of June, 2022, Wei Defu was pouring green tea from a glazed Yixing teapot into a porcelain cup when the cup began to walk. It was not a small motion. The cup slid two inches across the rough wooden table, trailing a thin line of pale liquor, and Wei Defu's hand followed it without thinking, the way a mother follows a toddler about to fall. Outside, the geese in the courtyard rose as if thrown, their wings clattering against the bamboo fence. A rooster that had been silent for an hour began to scream. From the foothills above the village came a long, rolling sound that had nothing to do with thunder. Wei Defu set the teapot down, stood up, and counted.

He had been taught to count by his grandfather, who had been taught to count by his father. The reason, he had been told, was simple: an earthquake that lasted ten seconds was something to walk away from. An earthquake that lasted thirty seconds was something to run from. Anything beyond that was something to be carried away from. He counted to fifteen, and the shaking had not stopped. He counted to twenty. Twenty-three. At twenty-five the cups in the cupboard began to explode, one after another, like a string of small bombs. At twenty-eight, the glass in the kitchen window bowed outward and then disintegrated, and a shard cut the back of his hand so cleanly that he did not feel it until later. At thirty he grabbed the door frame with his cut hand and his uncut hand, the blood making his grip good, and he called the name of his wife, who was in the courtyard with the geese.

The shaking stopped at thirty-four seconds.

The Lushan earthquake of 2022 was a magnitude 6.1 event, centered in the mountains about twelve kilometers to the north of Wei Defu's village of Baoxing. It killed four people. It injured more than fifty. It brought down hundreds of old houses, cracked thousands of newer ones, and triggered landslides that temporarily dammed two rivers and then, in some places, broke those dams. By any global measure it was a small disaster. By the standard of the fault it sat on, the Longmenshan, it was an ordinary Tuesday. The Longmenshan Fault had produced the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake of 2008, which killed nearly seventy thousand people and which Wei Defu still thought about, and the magnitude 7.0 Lushan earthquake of 2013, which he had slept through in a field above the village because the wall of the house had been rebuilt only the year before. The 2022 event was a punctuation mark in a sentence that had been running for ten million years, and would run, so far as anyone could tell, for ten million more.

The Chinese state would handle the immediate crisis with the characteristic efficiency that has marked its response to seismic events in the Longmenshan region for two thousand years. Within hours, a tent city would appear in the rice fields below the village. Within a week, water and electrical service would be restored to the parts of the village that still had wires. Within a year, the old houses would be replaced with concrete structures, and the men who had spent their lives farming tea and bamboo would learn to mix mortar and tie rebar for the second or third time in their adult lives. Wei Defu's family, like most families in the area, had a deep personal archive of rebuilding. His grandfather had rebuilt after the 1933 Diexi earthquake. His father had rebuilt after the 1970 Dayi earthquake. He himself had rebuilt after 2008 and 2013. The work was not unusual to him. It was a fact of his place on the earth, and he had a settled opinion, which he did not often express, that anyone who found the work unusual had not yet paid attention to where they were living.

This is the entry point to the book. Not the earthquake as disaster, and not the earthquake as news, but the earthquake as a piece of information. Every Chinese landscape is the surface of a process. The 2022 Lushan earthquake, the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the 1933 Diexi earthquake, the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake that killed eight hundred and thirty thousand people, the approximately twenty thousand tremors that the China Earthquake Administration records every year in the territory it monitors—each of these is a sentence in a much longer text, a text written in the language of tectonic plates, deep mantle, and a continent-sized collision that began around fifty million years ago. To read Chinese history without reading this text is to read a novel and skip every chapter that explains the characters. We will not skip those chapters.

The thesis of this book, in its simplest form, is that a small number of recurring landforms function as a grammar for Chinese history. Not a vocabulary—that is, not a long list of place names to memorize—but a grammar, in the sense that the rules of recurrence are few, the patterns are predictable, and once you learn them you can read almost any Chinese landscape as a kind of sentence. The four fundamental landforms we will return to throughout the book are the high plateau, the loess hill, the alluvial plain, and the tide-mixed delta. Each of these is the surface expression of a particular process. Each of them, throughout Chinese history, has produced a particular kind of human response. Each of them tends to be in a particular place relative to the others, and the relationships among them tend to hold over thousands of kilometers and thousands of years. A second-century farmer settling the Chengdu Plain was responding to the same logic of alluvial accumulation that a twentieth-century engineer responded to when he sited a hydroelectric dam upstream of the same plain. A seventeenth-century merchant on the Pearl River Delta was solving the same problem of trade and tide that a twenty-first-century port authority in Shanghai solves today. The questions change. The geography is a constant.

We will travel, in the chapters that follow, from the highest land in China to the lowest, from the cold dry air of the Tibetan Plateau to the humid alluvial cities of the southeast coast. We will move through loess, through limestone karst, through the great rivers. We will look at cities, walls, battlefields, canals, terraced fields, and tea gardens, and we will try to see each of them as a response to a piece of land that was there before any of them. The whole book is in a sense a single long argument. The argument is that the surface of China is not a stage on which history happens. It is itself a kind of history, written slowly, and any history that ignores it is a history that is missing the floor underneath its feet.

This first chapter is the orientation. Its job is to give you the dictionary and the syntax. We will start with Wei Defu, the farmer from Baoxing, and follow the line of his fault up to the high country. From there we will move outward and downward through the system that the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates has been writing for fifty million years. Along the way we will identify the four landforms, we will name them, and we will look briefly at how each of them has shaped, and continues to shape, the lives of the people who live on them. By the end of the chapter, you should be able to look at almost any piece of Chinese terrain, anywhere on the map, and read in it a recognizable sentence. The next twelve chapters will help you read the longer paragraphs.

Time and the Longmenshan

To stand on the Longmenshan Fault is to stand on a working seam in the earth. The seam runs for about five hundred kilometers along the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, separating the high country to the west from the deep, flat Sichuan Basin to the east. From the village of Baoxing, where Wei Defu lives, the fault climbs from roughly nine hundred meters above sea level at the bottom of the valley to more than five thousand meters at the highest ridge of the Longmenshan range