The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan D Spence.pdf

Jonathan D. Spence

THE

DEATH

WOMAN

WANG

PENGUIN BOOKS

One

THE

OBSERVERS

THE EARTHQUAKE struck Tan-eh'eng on July 25, 1668. It was

evening, the moon just rising. There was no warning, save for

a frightening roar that seemed to come from somewhere to the

northwest. The buildings in the city began to shake ;:mu the

trees took up a rhythmical swaying, tossing ever more wildlv

back and forth until their tips almost touched the ground.

Then came one sharp violent jolt that brought down, stretches

of the citv walls and battlements, officials' varnens, temples,

and thousands of private homes. Broad fissures opened up

across the streets and underneath the houses, jets oi water

spurted up into the air to a height of twenty feet or more, and

streams of water poured down the roads and flooded the irriga-

tion ditches. Those people who tried to remain standing felt as

if their feet were round stones spinning out of control, and

were brought crashing to the ground.

Some, like Li Hsien-yii, fell into the fissures but were

buoyed up on underground streams and able to cling to the

edge; others had their houses sheared in half and survived in

2 © The Death of Woman Wang

the living quarters as the storage rooms slid into the earth.

Some watched helplessly as their families fell away from

them: Kao Te-mou had lived in a household of twenty-nine

with his consorts, children, relatives, and servants, but only

he, one son, and one daughter survived.

As suddenly as it had come the earthquake departed. The

ground was still. The water seeped away, leaving the open

fissures edged with mud and fine sand. The ruins rested in

layers where they had fallen, like giant sets of steps.

It was, wrote Feng K'o-ts'an, who in 1673 compiled the

Local History of T'an-ch'eng, as if fate were "throwing rocks

upon a man who had already fallen in a well." And Feng

repeated two general observations that had been made about

T'an-ch'eng by a local historian nearly a century before: first,

that although one might expect an equal balance between

"Catastrophes" and "Blessings" in the chapter of the chronicle

devoted to local events, in T'an-ch'eng nine out of ten events

fell in the catastrophe category; second, that while nature

generally manifested itself in the form of a twelve-year cycle,

with six years of abundance and six years of dearth, once in

each of those twelve years in T'an-ch'eng there would be a

serious famine as well.

Feng lived in T'an-ch'eng county for five years, and life

was not kind to him. He came there as magistrate in 1668,

but was dismissed after two years for incompetence in han-

dling the finances and horses of the imperial post stations in

the county. He stayed on in T'an-ch'eng in deep poverty-

ashamed, perhaps, to return to his home in Shao-wu, Fukien,

because of his disgrace—and lived on handouts from the local

gentry and the money he could get from writing. He was,

after all, a chin-shih, a holder of the highest literary degree,

which he had won in 1651, and there was no one else still

alive in T'an-ch'eng with such a degree; there was not even

any living native of the county who had gained the lower

The Ohservers O 3

degree of chii-jen. So Feng was honored there and able to

make some money by teaching and from occasional jobs, such

as being the chief editor for the Local History, that came his

way. He finished the history by late 1673 and returned to

Fukien, but the return brought him only more sorrow. His

arrival coincided with the beginning of the Rebellion of the

Three Feudatories, and Feng was among the many literati and

former officials ordered to take up bureaucratic "office" with

the rebel forces. He refused. (In his youth he had refused to

read any more of his favorite T'ang poet, Li Po, after he

learned that Li Po had written poetry in the entourage of the

rebel prince Lin of Yung.) Rather than face reprisals from the

rebels, Feng retreated to the Fukien mountains, where the

constant exposure in bitter weather led to his death.

Perhaps it was because of his melancholy experiences in

T'an-ch'eng that in the brief essays with which he introduced

several of the economic sections in the Local History Feng

wrote so frankly about the miseries of the area, the poverty of

its people, and the general inability of the local gentry to help

alleviate that misery. He was fascinated by the statistics of

disaster in the county, and returned to them again and again:

the population of T'an-ch'eng in the early 1670s, he esti-

mated, was only one-quarter of what it had been in the later

Ming dynasty fifty years before; where once there had been

well over 200,000 people in the county, there now were

about 60,000. And the area of cultivated land registered for

taxation had dropped by almost two-thirds, from 3.75 million

acres to under 1.5 million. His figures grew even more precise

as he contemplated the earthquake of 1668, which hit T'an-

ch'eng only a few months after he had taken up office there as

magistrate, and to emphasize his point he contrasted T'an-

ch'eng with its larger northern neighbor I-chou: I-chou

county had 108 townships, T'an-ch'eng 45; yet 12,000 people

died in I-chou in the earthquake while in T'an-ch'eng (with

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