By Evan
Yesterday as we made a rough 90 km cold, rainy push from the charming — if dilapidated — old town of Chayang (茶陽鎮) south through some amply steep mountains, the last we ought to see for probably a month, something I’ve read recently popped into my head. For background, I believe I mentioned in a post some months ago the importance of geography to politics and culture after we had crossed the desolate wasteland of the North China Plain (華北平原，古稱中原). The great flatland surrounding the Yellow River, the “cradle of Chinese civilization (中華文化的搖籃),” has apparently always been extremely susceptible to sweeping political or cultural changes since the entire area is flat enough to allow for rapid horseback transit within its boundaries. As such, the language, ethnic makeup, and culture of the areas within the plain are largely identical. While that makes trade and communication vastly more expedient, it also allows for easy conquest by armies of whatever marauding warlord happens to be strong at the time and subsequent assimilation into whatever said warlord’s imperial imagination can conjure.
I can’t speak to what China looked like a hundred years ago, but I do know that the North Plain now has been the victim of several quite overwhelming imperial edicts (詔) over the previous decades, the Great Leap Forward and Scientific Development to name the two that come most to mind most quickly. Since there’s literally nowhere to hide from such movements on an open plain close to imperial power (China’s capitals have by and large been in the plain for the last two thousand plus years), the whole place is, as we found it, a dusty, polluted Mad Max-like dystopia (with Chinese characteristics, of course). It was thus with great relief that we arrived at the northern boundary of South China’s sprawling mountain ranges (take a look at this map) after our stay in Shanghai, even if it meant slower progress. (more…)
