Most of the way southward through Kithai, we were either riding close beside the Great Canal, or within sight of it, and it teemed with water traffic, so, whenever we were any distance from it, we had the odd view of boats and ships apparently sailing seas of grain fields and navigating among orchard trees. That canal was inspired, or made necessary, by the fact that the Huang or Yellow River had so often changed its channel. Within recorded history, the eastern length of the river had whipped back and forth across the land like a snapped rope—though of course not so rapidly. In one century or another, it had emptied into the Sea of Kithai way up north of the Shan-dong Peninsula, just a couple of hundred li south of Khanbalik. Some centuries later, its immense and serpentine length had wriggled down the map to flow into the sea far south of the Shan-dong Peninsula, fully a thousand li distant from its earlier outlet. To envision that, try to imagine a river flowing through France and at one time spilling into the Bay of Biscay at the English port of Bordeaux, then squirming across that whole breadth of Europe to empty into the Mediterranean at the Republic of Marseilles. And the Yellow River, at other times in history, had pushed out to the Sea of Kithai at various shore points intermediate between those northernmost and southernmost reaches.
The river’s inconstancy had left many lesser streams and isolated lakes and ponds all across the lands where it used to run. Some of the earlier ruling dynasties cunningly took advantage of that, to dig a canal interconnecting and incorporating the existent waters and make a navigable waterway running roughly north and south, inland of the sea. I believe it was, until recently, only a desultory and fragmentary canal, connecting just two or three towns in each stretch. But Kubilai, or rather his Chief of Digging the Great Canal, with armies of conscript labor, had done 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 Vèneto, 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-kàn! 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-kàn! 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 Vèneto peasant could not. However, indoors, that farmer’s wife at home in their hut could tell precisely when it was time to start making her man’s evening meal—merely by glancing at the eyes of the family cat and judging how much its pupils had dilated in the waning light. The commonfolk were diligent, too, and thrifty and unbelievably patient. No farmer ever bought a pitchfork, for example. He would find a tree limb terminating in three pliable twigs, tie those twigs parallel, wait years until they grew into sturdy branches, saw off the limb, and he would have a tool that would serve him and probably his grandsons as well.