We Are All Daoguang Now
Don't blame the Qing Emperor for failing to fix the Grand Canal. Some problems don't have a solution.
November 11-12, 1824.
The rain began to fall in torrents, and the lake, dangerously swollen from the autumn floods of the Huai River and seepage from the Yellow River, inched up the rock-faced wall of the Gaojia Great Dike that lay along the lake’s eastern perimeter. As the storm grew in violence, the wind and waves pounded the great dike and, as if the frantic efforts of dike workers were nothing, tore two huge breaches in the dike wall that sent flood waters cascading down into the Gao-Bao lakes to the east, into the Grand Canal itself, and beyond the canal into the flood-prone, low-lying Xiahe region between the canal and the sea.
--- Jane Kate Leonard “Controlling From Afar: The Daoguang Emperor’s Management of the Grand Canal Crisis, 1824-1826.”
“With the exception of the [Opium] war with England in 1840,” writes the historian James Polachek, “the greatest crisis encountered by Daoguang during his thirty years on the throne was the breakdown of the inland waterway system.”
The crisis was both practical and symbolic. On the logistics side, the destruction of the Gaojia Great Dike rendered China’s magnificent Grand Canal impassable, stranding thousands of junks that annually transported millions of tons of “tribute grain” from southern China north to Beijing. Without the grain, Beijing -- including the imperial court, the bannermen armed forces, and the Confucian bureaucracy – would starve.
The symbolism was equally potent. The Grand Canal was one of the greatest works of hydraulic engineering ever devised by humanity: Two thousand kilometers of artificial waterways whose initial construction dated all the way back to the 7th century. By stitching northern and southern China together, the canal embodied imperial unification.
“Indeed, the canal became a metaphor for the imperial state and its imperial leadership,” writes Leonard, “and its successful operation was regarded as a test of the viability of both. It was an issue on which the future of the dynasty seemed to hang.”
The Qing emperors recognized the Grand Canal’s significance from the outset of their dynasty and devoted considerable personal administrative attention to ensuring its proper upkeep. After the Gaojia Great Dike collapse, the Daoguang emperor, grandson of the great Qianlong, and doomed to confront spiraling financial, demographic, and military challenges throughout his reign, took personal charge of the repair mission. But this was no simple task; in fact, Leonard argues that the fundamental hydraulic realities of Yellow River-driven silt accumulation made long-term management effectively impossible. By Daoguang’s time, the best he could do was stave off the inevitable total collapse for a few more years.
After a few minutes spent contemplating the mind-boggling complexity of the Grand Canal-Yellow River interchange in northern Jiangsu province, it is easy to see how the entire apparatus, with its myriad sluice gates and drainage canals and dikes and locks could symbolize the entire Qing imperial project in the 19th century; inspiring and awesome in its size and intricacy and ingenuity, but at the same time fatally threatened by forces beyond the control of any single emperor. Only a great civilization could create something like the Grand Canal; but in sharp contrast to one of China’s other ancient hydraulic projects, the Dujiangyan irrigation system that guaranteed Sichuan’s status for millennia as “the land of plenty,” the Grand Canal was not what one would call a resilient system. Its points of potential failure were many, its maintenance costs absurd, and the ever-increasing likelihood that the Yellow River – “China’s Sorrow” -- would disastrously change its course and break the whole system (a catastrophe that finally transpired in 1855, five years after Daoguang’s death) was well-appreciated by all concerned.
Which is why, in the aftermath of the dike collapse, some state policy experts argued that there was no point in trying to repair the Canal. There was, they said, another way to move the tribute grain from the Yangzi delta breadbasket to the northern plains. In 1825, a low-level official named Bao Shichen republished an essay he had written years earlier, “Proposal in Favor of the Sea Route for Southern Grain Tribute.” Bao believed that instead of going to the huge expense of fixing the Grand Canal, the imperial court should instead authorize transporting the grain via “sea lanes” off the east coast.
Critics of the sea lane approach had previously argued that the menace of piracy and the cost of building new junks to transport huge quantities of grain made the sea lane proposal a non-starter. But as William Rowe details in his biography of Bao, Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in 19th Century China, Bao dismissed such arguments as the “unfounded ramblings of scholars with book-learning only.” There was already a well-established and successfully operating maritime trade route, wrote Bao, as witnessed by the thousands of junks that transported “ten million dan of bean-cake fertilizer” from Manchuria to southern China every year. (One dan equals about 185 pounds.)
Bean-cake, a byproduct left over after soybeans have been processed for their oil, is an early example of commodified fertilizer. Chinese peasants had understood for eons that planting soybeans magically reinvigorated soil fertility. The rise of a commercial market for bean-cakes, beginning in the Ming era (1368-1644), testified that this ancestral farming knowledge had become economically meaningful in a proto-capitalist sense. By the early 19th century, immigrant Chinese who had settled in the Manchurian homeland were raising soybeans and exporting bean-cakes to the south, where they were predominantly used to fertilize commercial sugar and cotton farms.
Ten million dan, or roughly a million tons, is a lot of fertilizer. Setting aside, for the moment, the relative merits of inland canal versus sea lane transport, Bao’s single sentence about bean-cake fertilizer is of critical interest because modern historians have seized upon it as a key statistic that illuminates the complexity of China’s 19th century economy.
One of those historians is Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. The Great Divergence makes a dramatic and controversial argument that the rise to world supremacy of the West in the 19th century had less to do with any intrinsic technological or institutional or racial superiority, and more to do with contingency – in particular, Western Europe’s fortuitous ability to escape Malthusian population pressures by exploiting enslaved labor and colonial resources, most obviously in the New World.
One of the pillars of Pomeranz’s argument is his contention that the “divergence” between China and Western Europe only really got started after countries like England had the chance to fully digest the benefits brought to them by their colonies. A critical part of his argument is the contention that China was just as prosperous as England until fairly late in the game. Pomeranz argues that the richest part of China at the beginning of the 19th century – the Yangzi delta – was roughly equivalent to the richest part of England. And one of the lines of evidence he presents to demonstrate how advanced the Yangzi delta economy was during this period is the size of the commercial market for beancake fertilizer. Bao’s essay is the source for Pomeranz’s assertions.
But can we trust Bao’s figures? In an article published in Late Imperial China, “A ‘Fertilizer Revolution’?: A Critical Response to Pomeranz’s Theory of ‘Geographic Luck,’” the historian Yong Xue says no, we should not. In the service of his campaign to make the most compelling case possible for his sea lane proposal, asserts Yong, Bao fudged the numbers. Specifically, he “exaggerated the carrying capacity of fleets of oceangoing junks.”
Bao had generated his figures for bean-cake fertilizer by multiplying the number of ocean-going junks against a specified volume of cargo capacity, but in doing so, writes Yong Xue, he misrepresented the actual storage area of the junks. Conclusion: bean-cake fertilizer consumption in southern China was much smaller than Pomeranz claimed, thus undermining his argument about the comparative prosperity of China and England.
In my ongoing quest to explain the role of the soybean in the globalization of everything, I stumbled upon Yong Xue’s accusation while in the process of seeking out solid dates for the beginning of the bean-cake fertilizer trade. At that point, I had never heard of Bao Shichen, and was not in the least bit privy to the details of the canal versus sea lanes policy debate that raged during Daoguang’s reign. I wasn’t even all that well educated about how critical the Grand Canal was to the functioning of the Chinese imperial state, and I knew next to nothing about the internecine politics of the literati class that so stifled China’s efforts to adequately respond to the multiple challenges afflicting the Qing state in the first half of the 19th century.
But The Great Diversion made a huge impact on me when I read it a few years ago, for reasons that are entirely understandable, according to another of Pomeranz’ critics, Philip Huang:
“[Pomeranz’s] surprising idea, going radically against received wisdom…has considerable appeal. It appears to be based on a very sound question: to ask not only the Eurocentric query of why China did not develop as Europe did, but also why Europe did not go down the path of intensification-involution as China did. It has, for many, the neat appeal of de-centering Europe, not only of its Enlightenment modernity, but also of what might be called its Enlightenment economy. For China specialists, it has the added appeal of placing premodern China in a position of equivalence with Europe. There is something that might even appeal to the nationalistic sentiments of some Chinese scholars: European success and Chinese failure in modern development can after all be attributed to some degree to European expansion (imperialism?) rather than some intrinsic European propensity.”
Let the record show that I am fully in support of de-centering Europe. But when soybeans are involved, I also care about the precise details regarding getting the cargo capacity for ocean-going junks.
And so I must point out that Bao’s biographer, Rowe, calls Bao’s approach to numbers, “to say the least, cavalier.” Philip Huang’s dissection of Pomeranz’s handling of empirical data also leads one to wonder whether Pomeranz has a pattern of playing a little fast and loose with basic data for comfort. I also remain confused about how Pomeranz’s overall argument accounts for the clear divergence in scientific progress between Europe and China that indisputably got under way well before the 19th century rolled along.
But all this doesn’t mean that Bao was wrong about the feasibility of the maritime route for tribute grain or that there isn’t still some powerful explanatory power in Pomeranz’s broader insights. It is inarguable that the New World and India offered Great Britain a means of both offloading population pressure via settler emigration and building economic wealth through enslaved labor and colonial resource exploitation. The crucial point is that China had no equivalent escape valves.
Which, in a roundabout way, gets at why I was originally interested in finding out when the commercial market for bean-cake fertilizer got started in China. Because even if we don’t know exactly how big that market ended up, we do have a pretty good idea why it emerged in the first place.
The words “demographic expansion” are inseparable from any exploration of the problems faced by the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. Exact figures are hard to come by, but the consensus appears to be that China’s population expanded from around 100 million at the end of the sixteenth century to over 400 million by middle of the 19th – a growth rate of 300 percent in just 150 years! This surge is regarded as the fastest example of population growth anywhere in the world in the pre-modern era. But during the same period the area of cultivated land increased by only about 25 percent.
For as long as we have good records, Chinese peasants did as well or better than anyone on the planet in maintaining consistent soil fertility century after century but by the 19th century the surging population appears to have pushed the ancien regime to its sustainability limits. Additional inputs were required. Bean-cake to the rescue.
This is one of the deepest, and as yet unresolved, stories of globalization. If we accept the theory that the post-Columbian Exchange spread of New World corn and potatoes to both Asia and Europe was a key factor in the global population boom that preceded the Industrial Revolution, then one of the most enormously influential developments in the making of the modern world was the rise of a commercial market for fertilizer that could keep agricultural output growing in the face of rapidly expanding populations. There is no Industrial Revolution without commercial fertilizer.
The necessity of obtaining sufficient amounts of fertilizer to keep pace with population growth scraped South Pacific islands clean of guano, sparked wars across the world, and ultimately resulted in the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture so-called “chemical fertilizer.” Even soybeans, so remarkable for their ability to create their own fertilizer, are now farmed as massive monocrops that require additional inputs of hydro-carbon derived fertilizer.
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“I was born in the Qianlong reign, and by the time I was a young student everything was falling apart. Bribery was pervasive and open, the administration was contaminated and vile, and the people’s energy was taut like a string, as if there might be a rebellion. I thought then of how to prevent violence and ward off chaos, so I studied the works of the military strategists.
When I observed that the people’s livelihood had grown so precarious that with a single drought they were reduced to starving on the roadsides, I wondered how to restore our economy and enrich their lives, and I turned to the writings of the agronomists.
Then I noticed that, while most people trod innocently through life, villains preyed on them as if they were ducks, and came away with immense profits. Wondering how to punish wrongdoing and eliminate crime, I turned to study the Legalists.”
From a letter written by Bao Shichen, in William Rowe’s Speaking of Profit.
According to Rowe, an earlier biography of Bao reported that “all of the great officials of the southeast, when faced with great policy decisions regarding warfare, famine, river conservancy, grain tribute, or salt administration, never failed to come to him humbly for advice, and he would expound his views with vigor.” Rowe also writes that “Bao was one of the earliest literati to recognize that the empire had now become heavily immersed in an emerging world economy.”
Bao’s existence is testimony that the Qing dynasty did not lack for policy experts who understood the threat the British posed, who saw the peril in the draining away of the empire’s silver currency, and who pointed out the pressure that population growth was exerting on food production. Bao could see it: “everything was falling apart.” But by the time Daoguang became emperor, the truly pressing question was whether the state had the resources and capacity to solve the problems it faced. Putting down a series of rebellions had emptied the imperial treasury. Tax receipts were falling even as government expenses rose. Infrastructural decay exacerbated the inequities caused by demographic growth. One of the most insurmountable issues facing Daoguang in his efforts to refurbish the Grand Canal was that he simply couldn’t afford to pay for all the necessary repairs. With his hands forced, the emperor eventually did become an advocate for the maritime transport of tribute grain, but in the context of the larger economic problems besetting his reign, this amounted to little more than making the best out of a bad situation. The Grand Canal would never return to its former glory. Nor would the Qing dynasty.
Metaphor piles upon metaphor, like great waves hurling themselves at a dike. We are reckoning today with intractable challenges of climate change and environmental despoliation that are the direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution that first enabled Europe and then the rest of the world to escape the consequences of its own pell-mell development. Fossil fuels turned out to be the ultimate escape valve. I am starting to wonder if, in the same sense that the failure to fix the Grand Canal was seen as a metaphor for Qing impotency, the Qing quagmire is offering itself up as a metaphor for the contemporary world’s inability to fix its own infrastructural problems.
I used to think of the Daoguang emperor as fickle and irresolute, a man incapable of dealing appropriately with tough challenges. But now I feel like we are all Daoguang, all too aware of the problems that afflict us, but incapable of mustering the resources necessary to cope.
We can see the dikes beginning to crumble, and there are no New Worlds left to conquer.
Whoa. Unusually dark. But fascinating
Scary.