Chapter 8b Origins

After consulting his closest advisors just before sunrise each day of the harvest season, the Emperor sends down the decree. Messengers, each bearing a sealed copy, a hundred for each province, set out on foot from the imperial city. Within three months, they must visit every place where civilized men have settled.

They stand in the village centers, just before the sun goes down, when the peasants return from the fields, when the fishermen moor their boats, when mothers gather their children, and when elders wrap robes around themselves to fend off the chill of impending night. In each of these places the messengers read the emperor's words, but never in exactly the same way. In the mountains to the south, the ceiling of the earth, they chant to a beat as slow as the movement of the heavens. In the deltas they sing in the up?tipped tones of the musical dialect used by those who live along the rivers. In the west, they shout and bang their chest at the end of every three sentences. Near the capital they speak in a voice barely above a whisper: obedience is not an issue within a day's ride of the emperor. In those places where the dialects have degenerated into mutual incomprehensibility, the messenger shares the stage with a local magistrate, who translates simultaneously, while the villagers look on in wonder. For these villagers, the emperor barely exists, yet they too listen obediently. In every province, in every village, the messengers deliver the emperor’s proclamation,

"The emperor, holder of heaven's mandate, decrees that a corvee made up of one of every ten adult males in this place be sent at the height of the full moon to that part of your province that is closest to the capital. They will arrive there before the illusion moon, the fullest of full moons. Once at the border, the corvee will be met by an imperial army detachment who will make a count to ensure that you have sent the specified number of men. If you fall short, the army will execute the entire group and you will then be expected send a new corvee. If you exceed your number, the emperor will send extra supplies of grain and live fowl to more than make up for any food production lost.

Once the men are counted , the army will accompany them to make certain that they make it to the project in safety. There they are to help dig a trench, the longest and deepest trench in the history of the world. It will be so long that it will span the western border of the renegade province and it will be deep enough to pry it loose from the edge of the River Empire forever."

Each day, a thousand new men arrive at the digging project. The nomads from the western desert, men who have never before broken the ground appear at the site with waist high pointed sticks. The mean from the plains bring wagons for hauling out the displaced earth. Their digging implements are made from bronze. The delta peasants, prove to be the best, most have spent their lives building levees to control the river floods which determine the prosperity of their farms each year. Their strongest men work in tightly coordinated groups with fat iron- tipped shovels. The hardwood handles of their shovel are so worn that deep grooves in the shape of fingers have worn into them. The smaller quicker workers pass the dirt out of the trench in buckets. Each man knows his task, and they sing as they toil, the same song for hundreds of li. You can walk from one end of the line to the other then back again and hear each man joining in just at the moment when the notes peak.

The northerners are bigger and more individualistic by nature. They tie oxen to deep troughs, and pull out canyonfuls of dirt twice each day once in late morning, again just before nightfall. Each group keeps to itself, paying attention to the others only on the days when the different work crews from each of the emperor's provinces race one another. The evening before, a representative from each province runs from camp to camp placing bets on the outcome. Pottery from the north gets exchanged for a southwestern forest root that has the power to restore a man's vitality. A brace of perfect tender marsh ducklings roasted in purest wild sesame oil is bet against an entire field of silk spun into all the colors of the rainbow.


The emperor appears once a year in his red and purple sedan chair. He has three full militias of guards, forty seven concubines , and a hundred and nineteen eunuch attendants. Like most nine year olds, the emperor loves the unusual. A flock of geese flies overhead. It's a common enough sight in this part of China at this time of year, but these geese are harnessed to a kite the size of a rice field. Thirteen eunuchs hold up a canopy that covers the emperor's sedan chair to keep their master from being bombarded by the offal from the geese. Two full armies of archers patrol the edges of the ditch, one to keep the diggers at their task, and one to keep the other army of archers concentrating on theirs. At the end of each year, the emperor stands inside the trench at a pre-designated spot, kept secret from the workers. In this way, he measures their progress with their digging. Between visits, the workers pray that the emperor does not grow again this year. If the emperor shakes his head at the end of the measuring ritual, new messengers scurry across the provinces.

"More men, bigger corvees, you must send more men or face the consequences."

In the fifteenth year, the quota system begins. As long as a group of villages digs its share of the trench, they need send only as many men as it takes. The emperor's ministers base their standard on the best, the chanting southern work gangs. Some regions attempt to copy, making up their own chants, substituting baskets of dried rushes for the sturdy brown clay vats used by the southerners. Others are stubbornly keep trying to develop their own ways to make the task easier. Each year the northerners appear with a new solution, one year their hollowed redwood tree breaks in half, and it buries thirty seven men. In the twenty seventh autumn of the digging, the men from the northern coast divert a river and flood the trench to soften the dirt. Some say a hundred thousand men drown, but after that the digging does indeed go more easily, and somehow too a hundred twenty five thousand new men appear even before the next rain. Within forty years the trench spans 100 mu wide and thirty five mu deep all around the province. Still, the emperor is not pleased.

"It will never be done in my lifetime."

He closes his eyes and shakes his white haired head. He stands in the window of the tower specially constructed in the imperial city so he can everyday with the aid of a mirrored convex lens monitor the progress of the digging.

Walled cities appear next to the digging sites where mere camps once stood. In the fifty third autumn of the project, the imperial advisors establish a special academy in the northeast where students, men and women, construct models, design new tools, find new ways to organize the task. When for the fifty third time, the emperor's messengers appear in the far provinces, they need no translator. Even in those provinces beyond the western deserts, they have come to understand that they are citizens of the River Empire, the diggers of the trench. Instead of standing in bewilderment, they now approach the messenger with a thousand questions, "Was it true about the flood? What song do these southern men sing that makes them as strong as dragons? What new machines had come from the north this last digging season?"

Even after the emperor dies, his successor understands the real significance of the trench. In turn so does the successor to the successor, as do his successors, until finally, the original reasons for the digging, the reasons for the mandated exile of this one province are as forgotten as the pointed sticks once used by the nomads of the western desert. Only the project matters and only the River emperor, and the people of his River Empire, would dare to dream of reshaping the earth.

Generations pass, and the trench deepens enough to stand at least a dozen emperors on top of one another. In the middle of winter, the men at the bottom of the trench now have to dress as if they were working in the desrt sun, so different are the conditions at the bottom of the trench than the surface. Some even claim to have felt the center of the earth tremble beneath their feet. For twenty five years, a plague spreads among the diggers, hiccoughs so violent they can not work with their hands. Millions of bewildered men, walk the edges, their echoed hiccoughs mock them from the bottom of the trench. More are sent, boys whose voices squeak uncontrollably, men with white hair and curved backs, women just past childbearing, anyone who might be immune, but the hiccoughing will not stop. When one key northern province runs short of laborers, a levee system just beyond the capital fails. Floods, famines, and revolts follow.

The new emperor, watches from his high tower, the mirror lens now improved to the point where he can see to the western edge of the world where the earth seems to curve. He consults his advisors, his shamen, his own special bureau of diggers, now the most powerful ministers in his court.

He listens quietly as one by one they came to him with suggestions.
“Let us abandon the project,” insists the minister of canals. It has outlived its usefulness to the empire.

“We must refill the trench and start over again,” we must regain the spirit of the boy emperor who started this project," pleads the minister of state.

One minister claims that a woman from the southern forests has a magic potion to cure the plague of hiccoughs. Another insists that a wizard from beyond the desert must be consulted.

For a thousand mornings, the emperor hears at least a dozen new suggestions before his noon meal of sweet quail's eggs and blue emerald tea. He tries some of the suggestions. Once an entire year's crop of silk is dropped into the trench. Sheet by sheet the silk floats downwards, great subterranean butterflies. The silk is then set on fire so that the smoke will soothe the worker's throats, but their hiccoughs only smell of silk and smoke. The same year, a million chickens are drowned in enough rice whiskey to fill a lake as a sacrifice to the gods, but only the rat god listens and hordes of rodents fill the trench while the workers still hiccough from above.

For seven straight months, the emperor meditates as he searches for some means to save his empire. Then one evening just before winter, he emerges from his chambers, calls his advisors before him, and sends out new messengers dressed in robes of the Emperor's own purple cotton, the symbol of authority.

"The plague is a message from the heavens that we have dug deep enough. The time has come to pry the banished province loose."

In secret the advisors laugh at this decree. For weeks they have prepared, sending their favorite concubines, their younger sons, the best jewels off to their home provinces safe from what they are certain will be a revolt that won't be put down. They tell one another that the emperor's decree will accomplish nothing, new rebellions will break out as soon as the demand for more corvees is announced and what of the millions of hiccoughing diggers?

But the plague of hiccoughing stops as suddenly as it began. Within years, redwood trees said to be older than the oldest river dialects are floated to the edge of the trench. Crews made up of mixtures of men from every region, the best graduates of the academy, set the trees in special notches. Ropes thicker than a wealthy landlord’s waist made from strands of a rare desert hemp are tied to the trunk of each redwood. Provinces unaffected by the floods begin to share their surpluses, as the empire now feeds on possibility. Their generation will be remembered as the one that completed the task.

But the optimism is short?lived. The ropes break. The trees bend, then snap into a thousand pieces, some large enough to crush the men below, and still the banished province moves less than the width of a man's fingernail.

The emperor himself journeys into the desert. He takes just thirteen camels and seventy three attendants. During his absence, a caravan of traders starts a fire just two li from the walls of the imperial city then loots the marketplace so thoroughly that even the rats abandon it. The rumor spreads that the emperor has fled. Inside the imperial walls, the ministers begin planning their own rebellion. Everyday at noon, they meet in the emperor's own favorite afternoon courtyard to discuss and prepare. With each meeting their plans become bolder. They are arguing over their rightful shares of the remaining empire when the entire imperial city is thrown into darkness deeper than night.

"An eclipse, an eclipse!"

The imperial astrologer shouts. Reassured, most venture back into the courtyard where an old man points to the heavens with a red lit divining stick.

"It's only the moon."

Had it been only the moon, the faithless ministers would not have run the second time, and certainly none would flee benath the walls of the imperial city or take poison when they realize that it is not the moon at all, but instead a horde of dragons each as big as a cloud. When the light returns, they can see the emperor himself perched on the neck of the biggest one.

"I have made a pact with the dragons," he announces as he glides just inches from his best loved observation tower.

"They will pry the banished province loose and in exchange River men will give up hunting for their teeth and bones."

Only the magicians whose most powerful potions depend almost exclusively on ground dragon bones dare to protest.

This time, even before they can announce it in the most isolated provinces, the messengers are overwhelmed with questions about the dragons.

It takes three harvest seasons. The River men devote the first to the design and construction of dragon harnesses. Thousands of men melt copper and zinc together, tan leather with horse urine, sharpen ox bone needles with diamond-edged knives as the idle dragons wait by the trench, exterminating the rats with blasts of their fire breath. After nightfall the beasts play simple gambling games with the workers, betting gold mines against a dozen maiden daughters, spare teeth and bones for a few thousand pounds of baby flesh. Perhaps the games might have turned tragic had the men not quickly discovered that dragons can not count beyond twelve without difficulty (the dragons have just three toes and fingers on each appendage). In a week, half the dragons are toothless.

The second harvest season, the northerners divert yet another river and fill the trench with water. By then the dragons have given up gambling. Instead, they spend their mornings learning from the River men how to sing in unison. In the afternoons, the dragons teach the men, introducing them to paper, showing them how to make their own fire breath from bits of sulfur and saltpeter.

The third harvest season, the dragons harness themselves to the banished province and start to pull. The first day, just the width of a man's hand opens up. Frustrated, the dragons breathe their fire through the banished province, turning the rainforests and grasslands in its center into desert. On the fifth day, the earth shakes. The dragons strain at their harnesses. Two die from the effort, crumpling in mid?air, crashing to the ground, and crushing an entire village, but the banished province breaks loose from the River empire. A tidal wave, as high as a mountain destroys half the coast. The sky turns red and the earth cracks. Salt water fills the widening trench between the banished province and the empire. Dead fish cover the surface of the water. But within a month, only the emperor's special lens, now mounted on the edge of the shore could even see the freshly torn shoreline of the banished province. By the beginning of the harvest season, even the mackerel fishermen in their two?masted junks have lost sight of it.

Most believe that the province simply floated into the ocean off the edge of the earth. But there are rumors. Two thousand years later, a eunuch admiral, first master of the magnetic compass, sets out with a fleet of a hundred ships in search of the lost province. Even the Marinheiros the first explorers from the west, equipped with their lateen sails, and deep water keels, hear the rumors of the floating island. One chart maker even includes this El Dorado on his map, an island, a terra incognita between the great Eastern Empire and the new lands.

Inside the Empire a legend which no one doubts passes from mother to children, from children to father, and back again. A group of monks, they say once set out in small boats and found a warm water current. They landed on the lost province, made contact with its people, only to return in shock.

"They still looked like natives of the empire on the outside, but they had a kind of amnesia. They had forgotten their language, their true identities as people of the Chinese empire."

"The Lost Province Curse", they call it.

The second time the monks return, those from the first discovery party who stayed behind might as well have been natives. They could barely communicate in any dialect. The province, they reported had finally docked, pressed up against a land of which it is clearly not a part.

But the last bit, they only tell in whispers.

"Only the ground remembers," they say.

Only the ground remembers, sometimes it shakes violently with longing, struggling to break free again, to return to its true home.

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