According to the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, at the start of the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong (1736-96), Maqiao Bow enjoyed a period of prosperity. At that time it was called Maqiao Prefecture, a settlement encircled by walls, with a population of more than a thousand. There were four blockhouses, and its defences were strongly fortified; there was no way vagrant bandits could break in. In the 58th year of Qianlong's reign, a certain Ma Sanbao, a resident of Maqiao Prefecture, suddenly went insane at a banquet in a relative's house and started proclaiming himself the offspring of a union between his mother and a spirit dog, saying he was the reincarnation of an ordained son of heaven, the Great Lord of the Lotus Flower, destined to found the Lotus Flower Kingdom. Three members of his clan, MaYouli, Ma Laoyan, and Ma Laogua, also promptly accompanied him into insanity: hair standing on end, shouting to whomever might listen, they thronged around Ma Sanbao and acclaimed him as king. They produced an imperial edict conferring the title of empress on his wife, who was of the Wu clan, and conferred the title of concubine on a niece of Ma Sanbao and on another girl surnamed Li. They spread notices everywhere, drumming up soldiers and rebellion, and managed to assemble unruly elements from areas up to eighteen bows away, seizing the goods of traveling salesmen, raiding government grain barges, and killing uncounted numbers of people. On the eighteenth day of the first month of the 59th year, the leader of the Zhen'gan forces, Ming Antu (a Mongol), with his deputy general Yi Sana (a Manchu), led a force of eight hundred men, divided into two columns, to suppress the rebellion. The left-hand column attacked Qingyu Embankment, charging directly at the stockade, taking guns and cannon along with them. They fired cannon at the robbers' stockade, which caught fire, forcing the robbers to flee to the river, where countless of them died. After the assault, the right-hand column crossed the river by laying down trees at Hengzipu and made a night-time raid on the bandits' lair, Maqiao Prefecture. At dawn, more than two hundred robbers broke out of the stockade and fled chaotically to the east, where they were headed off by the left-hand column of government soldiers, who surrounded them and killed every one, down to the last man; the heads of Ma Youli and his five phoney ministers were soon cut off and hung up as an example to all. Every single bandit stockade surrounding Maqiao that had joined the rebellion and helped the robbers was razed to the ground. Only those with a spotless record in helping quell the disorder could avoid persecution by government troops. They stuck in their threshold a red government-issued flag, on which were written the words "good people."

The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion left me rather melancholy. The Ma Sanbao that the New County Annals included in its roll of "Peasant Rebellion Leaders"-the Ma Sanbao who in Maqiao legend was a Son of Heaven of bona fide dragon origin- made an extremely poor showing in this version edited by the Qing authorities. In his brief three months of rebellion, he never contemplated any bold vision for establishing government, founding a dynasty, resisting his enemies, and saving the world-all he did was appoint five imperial concubines. From the historical materials available, it appears he lacked a talent for rebellion: apparently, when the government troops arrived, his only strategy for warding off the metal guns and cannon of the government troops was to ask shamans to consecrate an altar and plead with the spirits, make paper cuts, and sprinkle beans (the idea being that generous use of paper and beans would produce generals and soldiers in similar quantities). He lacked also the morals of rebellion: once captured, he didn't have the integrity to lay down his own life, but wrote out a fulsome confession more than forty pages long, filling the sheets with groveling self-deprecations, "humble this," "humble that," obtaining only pity from his vanquishers. The lack of any coherence to his confession clearly demonstrated his insanity. In the rise and fall of the "Lotus Flower Kingdom" (according to official statistics), the death toll of peasants in Maqiao and its environs exceeded seven hundred, and even women who had left up to ten years earlier to be married in faraway places determinedly returned from all directions in order to join their kinsmen and fellow villagers in a life and death struggle. Drenched in blood, they battled through fire and through water, only to put their own destinies in the hands of such a madman.

Was it a false confession? I truly hope so-that these confessions are part of a history fabricated by the Qing dynasty. I also hope that Ma Sanbao met his end soaked in paraffin, tied to a large tree and lit up like a magic lantern, not as he was described in the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, and that the fates of the seven-hundred-odd dead souls who followed him were not demeaned by such a madman.

Is there perhaps more than one version of history?

The disorder wrought by the "Lotus Bandits" is the most significant event in the history of Maqiao, as well as the main cause of Maqiao's decline. Henceforth, Maqiao people gradually began migrating in greater numbers to other areas, leaving fewer and fewer people behind. By the start of the century, the whole village had fallen into a state of dereliction. When the authorities were making arrangements for resettling Educated Youth, they normally looked for fairly poor villages, whose fields were sparsely populated; Maqiao was one of the villages that the authorities selected.

*Old Chum

: The end of the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] witnessed even greater upheaval than the disorder caused by the "Lotus Bandits": when the rebel Zhang Xianzhong took up arms in Shaanxi, he clashed repeatedly with the Hunanese hatchets, the "Rake troops" in the government army. The heavy casualties Zhang suffered generated in him a deep hatred of all Hunanese, and on several later occasions he led an army into Hunan, leaving countless dead. He was dubbed "No Questions Zhang," meaning that he killed without asking name or reason. There were always human heads hanging from his soldiers' saddles, with strings of ears at their waists, to back up their demands for rewards.

Hunan was overrun with Jiangxi people as a result of this bloodbath. It's said that because of this historical episode, Hunanese started calling all Jiangxi people "old chum" and grew to be on very close terms with them.

There are no major geographical barriers between Hunan and Jiangxi, so the population can move back and forth with little difficulty. There was at least one surge in migration from Hunan into Jiangxi, occurring at the start of the 1960s. When I had just arrived in Maqiao to start working the land, the favorite topic of conversation among the men, apart from women, was eating. When they uttered the word "eat" (chi), they pronounced it with the greatest intensity, using the ancient pronunciation qia, rather than the medieval qi, or modern chi. Qia was pronounced in a falling tone: the bold "a" sound of the syllable in combination with a light, crisply percussive falling tone displayed to the maximum the speaker's intensity of feeling. Qia chicken duck beef mutton fish dog, and meat-this last was the abbreviation for pork. Qia stuffed buns steamed buns fried dough cakes fried crispy cakes noodles rice-noodles glutinous rice cakes and, of course, rice (that would be boiled rice). We talked with great gusto, never bored with the topic, never bored with its minutiae, never bored with its repetitiousness. It was a source of constant talk, constant novelty, constant delight, and we talked compellingly, unstoppably, our hearts dancing, faces glowing, every word drenched in a deluge of saliva, then catapulted violently out of the mouth off the tongue, the reverberation of the explosion lingering in the sunlight.