If Changle isn't Luo City, other researchable possibilities are Luopu, Luoshan, Baoluo, Tongluodong, all of which include a syllable homophonic with "luo" (although the character is written differently), and all of which I have a passing acquaintance with. Even now, glimpses of ancient walls and stone steps, and of the furtive watchfulness that flashed momentarily in the eyes of their men and women, float up out of my recollections of these places.

The Luo people have close ties with the Ba people (an ancient people who inhabited the area now known as Sichuan). "Songs of the Ba people" is a phrase often used to refer to ancient folk songs. The terminus of the Luo River, appropriately, is "Baling," in what is present day Yueyang. The 493rd chapter of the Song History speaks of the third year of Zhezong Yuanyou (1088 A.D.), when the "Savages of the Luo Clan" went in for a period of rebellion. Amnesty was not declared until the ancestral chieftain of the Tujia (a nationality found in Hunan and Hubei provinces) took steps to control the revolt. It appears thus that there was some degree of cooperation between the Luo and the Tujia peoples; the Tujia have moreover been widely acknowledged by historians to be descended from the Ba people. Another piece of evidence worthy of note is that Tujia legends contain many stories relating to "Luo brothers and sisters," proving that "Luo" forms an immutable link within Tujia ancestry.

The strange thing is that on neither bank of the Luo River have I ever found a village or town that contains this very same character luo, or heard of someone with this character in their surname, apart from an old village leader from my village, originally a hired farm laborer, an outsider through-and-through. I could only suppose that following a cruel wave of persecution, a reign of terror that eludes both our knowledge and imagination, this word luo became taboo here, and the Luo people simply had to change their surname, obliterate their own history, or flee to distant parts, as is related by certain historians: gathered in groups, eating and sleeping in the wilds, they departed for Xiangxi, Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan, and the towering mountain ranges and lofty ridges of Southeast Asia, never to return. From this time on, the Luo River was so-called in name only. All that remained was an empty name, a mouth that would never again utter forth sounds, from which sprang only boundless silence. Even if we unearth this mouth from its open grave, we have no way of knowing what it once said.

In fact, their country is already lost forever, beyond all hope of recovery. All that remains is a few green bronze vessels, already corroded to powder, ready to disintegrate at the slightest touch. When digging wasteland in the area, I would often dig up vast numbers of arrowheads and spearheads, but they were very small, much smaller than the ones you see in books; this shows what a premium there was then on metal, that it had to be used so sparingly. The local people were so used to these relics that they weren't in the least surprised by them, in fact ignored them totally, simply threw them onto the ground by the side of the road; kids would heap baskets with them and take them away to fight or play with-nothing more. Later on, whenever I saw closely guarded bronze vessels displayed in a museum, I always felt nonplussed. What did these things count for? In Maqiao, anywhere I stepped took me into pre-Han history as I trampled into smithereens who knows how many precious cultural relics.

*Third of the Third

: Every year, on the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar, Maqiao people all ate rice dyed black with the juice from a type of wild grass, until every mouth was tar black. On this same day everyone sharpened knives. The earth trembled as every single family and household roared in unison and the leaves on the trees that lined the mountains shuddered and quivered uncontrollably. As well as axes, sickles, and hay cutters, each family also had to have a dagger which they polished until it shone snowy white, the icy gleam of the knife edge rippling, pulsating, scintillating, arousing a certain savagery in people. These knives, once sunk in deep, rusty sleep, now returned to glinting consciousness and exploded into life in the hands of the savages, the Savages of the Luo Clan, sowing subliminal tensions. If they weren't gripped tightly by the handle, it seemed they'd take on a life of their own, whizzing through doors, each making for their own targets, scaring the life out of people-sooner or later this was bound to happen.

This custom could be seen as a new-year ritual linked to farming preparations, empty of all aggressive implications. But while sharpened hoes and ploughs were obviously needed for farming, it was never quite made clear why they sharpened daggers.

Once the knives gleamed, then spring would come.

On the third of the third, the air quivered on knife-edge.

*Maqiao Bow

: The full name for Maqiao is "Maqiao Bow." Bow means village, including the land covered by a village: it's obviously a traditional unit of area, one "bow" representing the stretch of land covered by the trajectory of an arrow. Maqiao Bow had forty-odd households, about ten head of cattle, and pigs, dogs, chickens and ducks, with two long narrow paddy fields hugging its perimeters. The eastern boundary lay where the village met the fields of Shuanglong Bow with a view of the Luo River in the distance; the northern edge was marked by the ridge that carried water from the top of Tianzi Peak to Chazi Valley, which you could see if you looked up toward the undulating skylines of the Tianzi mountain range. To the west, the village was bordered by Zhangjia District, and its southern reaches extended right up to Longjia Sands, where a narrow road linked up with the Chang Qin highway, built in the 1960s; anyone taking the bus to the county seat would have to travel by this road. It took a good hour to walk from the top to the bottom of the bow. The strength of the ancients is a source of perpetual wonder: what mighty warriors they must have been, to be able to shoot an arrow over such an expanse of land.

Could it be that people are shrinking, generation by generation?

It's said that Maqiao (literally "Horsebridge") Bow was originally spelled differently, with the characters meaning "Motherbridge" Bow, but the only evidence is an old title deed. Maybe this is just a spelling mistake left over from the past. Thanks to the establishment of a fairly clear system of record-taking in the modern era, the changes to its name can be roughly summarized as follows:

– before 1956, called Maqiao Village, part of Tianzi Township;

– from 1956 to 1958, called Maqiao Group, part of Dongfeng Cooperative;

– in 1958, called 22nd production team, part of Changle People's Commune (Large Commune);

– from 1959 to 1979, called Maqiao Production Team, part of Tianzi People's Commune (Small Commune);

– since 1979, when the People's Communes were disbanded, up to the present day, Maqiao Village, along with a section of Tianzi Township, has become part of Shuanglong Township.

Most people in Maqiao were surnamed Ma, and it was roughly divided into an upper and a lower village, or an upper and a lower Bow. Previously, wealthy people, and those surnamed Ma, were concentrated in the upper part of the village. The prevalence of this surname in the village was far from normal for the area. The inhabitants of Zhangjia District (literally Zhang Family District) were in fact surnamed Li, and the inhabitants of Longjia Sands (literally Long Family Sands) were surnamed Peng. Though it struck me as rather strange that the name of the village and the clan surname were different, I'd estimate that this was the case in more than half the county.