CHAPTER 4 Water, Connoisseurship, and Curiosity

Water as Space-Time

Li Shizhen identified waters from a particular place as taking on properties of the environment, and the Ming and Qing dynasties were rapidly expanding to encompass new regions and new ecosystems. Moderns may see this as akin to the twenty different brands of bottled water at the local bodega, each claiming to come from a remote, pure, place, but Li saw them as categorically different types of water.

He tells the story of Doctor Ma Zhiji, who once visited an official who had a copper water clock that measured time by the dripping of water. While he was there, the official called a technician and told him that the water in the instrument, having circulated three times, was no longer good and should be changed. When water is used for a period, it becomes slippery. When it is slippery, it will leak at a slightly faster pace than normal and make the instrument tell the wrong time, and so it should be changed:

After learning this, I began to realize that the waters under heaven are the same only when they are used to put out fire or irrigate crops. Their quality may change in different locations and because of different uses. That is why in dying silk fabric, if water from a Sichuan river is used, the color will be bright. In paper making, when water from the Jiyuan River is used in processing paper mulberry leaf, the product will be white and lustrous. In the area of Nanyang, ponds are close to chrysanthemum farms, and the local people live longer lives, as they drink water which is close to chrysanthemums.²⁴

Water was liquid time and space. It needed to be gathered at certain times for maximal effectiveness, and it also needed to be from a certain place or to have flowed a certain distance. Mountain water was desirable to help treat illnesses not just because mountain water was pure but because it took on the properties of mountains. In a similar manner, water that has accumulated in an ox’s footprint can be substituted for water that has accumulated in the rut of a cart on a road.²⁵ This was not because there was some mineral or material on the road that dissolved into water that lay on it but rather that the water absorbed some of the qualities of roads, helping illnesses move out of the body as oxen and carts help move goods down the road. Mid-sky river water, (bantian he shui), water gathered when flowing out of a bamboo gutter, was efficacious against madness and demonic infestation, malign qi, and noxious poisons, but water gathered from a leaky roof (wulou shui) was highly poisonous, causing noxious diseases if imbibed. Presumably, the primary difference is that water that stays out of your house, running down the gutters, is obedient and useful, while that which leaks through the roof is obstinate and inappropriate for healing.

The distinct methods of fetching and storing water also mattered. Water fetched from a well and then poured into a container is water running adversely (daoliu shui), but if it is used right after being drawn from a well, it is rootless water (wugen shui). The first bucket of water fetched from a well, no matter the time of day, is newly fetched water (xinji shui), while if the first bucket is fetched early in the morning it is first-fetched water (jinghua shui), “therefore, water from the same well may have different names and functions when it is obtained in different ways.”²⁶ Water that was used to sharpen a knife, water in which a red dragon has bathed, water used to dye clothes or wash dishes, and water from an ancient tomb all have their own properties, taking on characteristics of their source or environment via contact magic or figurative logic.

Li explains why there are different waters and why each takes on the properties of its environment:

When water flows, comes to a standstill, and becomes cold or warm, the quality pertaining to it changes accordingly.… Therefore, people of former times differentiated between waters and earths of the nine geographical regions of the earliest dynasties and could thereby distinguish between people [living in different areas] by their beauty, ugliness, longevity, or meager years. This is because water is the source of the myriad transformations and earth the mother of the myriad things.²⁷

Water is the source of all transformations, to include human transformations, and in this way, it is predictive of fate, even causative of it. How a person looks, grows, and dies is all dependent on the transformations of water according to its time and place.

Because it took on the properties of time and place, water could counteract bodies that were adversely affected by timing or place. This goes beyond metonymic logic—water was the conduit of local properties. Li Shizhen enumerates forty-three kinds of water, but there are really many more. Consider his discussion of “water endowed with seasonal qi” (jieqi shui). He begins by reminding readers that one year is comprised of twenty-four seasonal periods, each of which lasts half of a month. The qi and flavors of water change in accordance with the seasonal qi. Li encourages his readers to fill a bottle with water on each of the first twelve days of the first month. Each day stands for a different month in the year, and each bottle will have a different weight, the heavy ones indicating more rain in that month and the lighter ones less. Li points out that even among the days, the qi of water is not identical—how much more this applies to the qi of water from month to month.²⁸ Because water took on the properties of its place and time, it could cure human bodies that were adversely affected by space or time—unseasonable events in nature, statutory illnesses, miasmas, and so on—showing just how much space and time affected human bodies.

Water, Demons, and Spit

Water was an instrument of healing but also of deception. Records of mendicant healers explain how to perform magic tricks with water and pass them off as evidence of miraculous efficacy. One account explains a trick called “water makes black characters appear.”²⁹ It describes dissolving wubeizi (sumac gallnut) in water and then writing characters with the decoction on white paper. Once the liquid dries, the writing is invisible. When the paper is moistened again with water, the characters become visible. This creates the illusion of demonic activity. The same source details a similar practice: boiling wubeizi in water and then adding white lime and using the liquid to write a talisman on a white wall. Once the lime has dried, the writing is illegible. The mendicant salesman then dissolves zaofan (melanterite) in hot water, invites a crowd to watch him write a talisman on the surface of the water, and then splashes the water on the wall, where the same talisman then appears. Presumably the fraudster could then claim that a spirit had written the talisman or that a demon was expelled by it.³⁰ Such sleights were in the repertoire of some itinerant healers as well. Two other healers’ manuscripts (a small sample of the over eight hundred manuscripts in the Berlin collection) feature similar methods of making invisible writing appear or of writing on the surface of water.³¹ How widespread these practices really were is impossible to discern and is complicated by their mention in manuscripts that contained apotropaic methods and talismans that were widespread in other books and manuscripts.

Zhang Yingyu’s late-Ming collection A New Book for Foiling Swindlers, Based on Worldly Experience (Jianghu lilan dupian xinshu) includes an account of Buddhists enchanting people by casting a spell on water. When the person looks in the water, the form of the thing they desire will appear before them. A rich man with no aspirations to political power is convinced by sorcery and trickery that he should rebel against the throne, to disastrous results. Zhang Yingyu depicts these practices as fact, not fantasy. To Zhang, these techniques can indeed be efficacious (though they can also be faked), and, as scholars Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea note in the introduction to their translation of Zhang’s Book of Swindles, “his main concern is to alert the unwary to their potential use for evil.… Deaths can be foretold, and the netherworld does exist. The charlatan is cribbing from the true clairvoyant, and Zhang merely mocks the implausibility of the fraudster’s ruse. Discernment is a type of competence, and competence is vital for the man of the world.”³² To be swindled by what one sees written on or reflected in water is not just a story warning about charlatans. It is a story warning about stories, about reading itself, and about the discernment required to avoid being deceived by desires and illusions.

That water can be used to reveal invisible spirit writing suggests water’s connection to the unseen realm, at least in the minds of those whom the charlatan seeks to swindle. Accounts of anomalies invoke water of one kind or another as a weapon to battle demons or a conduit between seen and unseen realms. Water’s metaphorical purity and its ability to cleanse and combat dirt also made it a weapon against unseen, malicious forces. Death was a contaminant, a pollutant, and ghosts were thought to be dirty and smelly. Strange Stories from Liaozhai comments that ghosts do not see dirt, just as fish do not see water.³³ Sorcery, demonic magic, and black arts (yaofu xieshu) are practices that cross the boundary between life and death, legitimate and illegal, needed and dangerous, seen and unseen. Water is a part of these practices, being both tangible and insubstantial, seen and unseen. Apotropaic measures were often attempts to thwart being soiled by the impurity of death or contaminated by ghosts and demons.³⁴ Yuan Mei’s anomaly accounts describe methods to combat ghosts that involve ingesting water, spitting it, writing on it, or throwing it. In one instance, a monk writes some spells and chants incantations, in addition to tossing a cup of magical water in the direction of the ghost’s head.³⁵ Water was also key to combating bugs and other pollutants in the body, in turn a key to achieving Daoist enlightenment. In one account, a Daoist adept teaches a scholar the “method of drinking water” (yinshui zhi fa):

By eating too much, our bodies become heavy and littered with filthy bugs that grow in the stomach.… A person who wants to learn the Dao must first cleanse his mouth and purify his intestines. Without food, all the bugs inside the stomach will starve to death and be flushed out of the body. Water is the first essential life force. At the birth of the universe, water was the first of the five elements to appear. So, drinking water is the secret to becoming immortal. However, the water from the towns and cities is dirty and polluted—drinking such water will harm your spirit, so one must obtain the purest water from the mountains and swallow it slowly, so that a gurgling sound is produced in your throat.³⁶

In contrast to the purity of mountain water and long life, bugs and ghosts have the stink of death.³⁷

Ghosts smelled bad.³⁸ “Each type of ghost has its own odor,” Yuan Mei writes, and “a ghost has a strong fishy smell.”³⁹ It makes perfect sense, then, that ghosts “fear the qi of water,” a phrase that recurs in medical manuscripts used by healers in the late twentieth century.⁴⁰ One manuscript, for instance, discusses the exorcistic practice “method to spill water,” (qishui fa), in which one utters specific words and says the names of large numbers of spirits and dragons. After that, one sprinkles water with one’s hands and shouts, “Spirit water is spilled!,” driving out the demons.⁴¹

Expelling ghosts and demons with spit does not figure prominently in very many texts, but it does figure in a wide variety of them.⁴² Spit was liquid life that could repel demons and revive the recently deceased. Li Shizhen repeatedly records a method to revive someone who has recently died from “corpse [-like condition] due to recession” (shijue, a kind of reversal of qi) or from nightmares. Several drugs may be rubbed on the eyes or blown into the nostrils, but in every case, it is recommended to bite the patient’s big toe and spit on their face.⁴³ An account from Liaozhai, in a similar gesture, records a monk spitting water on the face of a wicked woman, who then becomes able to recall past incarnations and reforms her ways.⁴⁴ To moderns, this may just seem like expedient means to startle the patient out of an unconscious or selfish state, but there is medical logic behind the practice. Saliva (koujintou) also known as “divine water” (shenshui), “numinous liquid” (lingye), “golden serum” (jinjiang), and “sweet spring” (liquan), was effective in reviving the recently deceased for the same reason that it was effective in repelling ghosts, namely, that it was liquid qi—liquid life.⁴⁵ By extension, the spit of a demon is liquid death. In addition to nourishing vital organs and making eyes bright and clear, saliva is good, according to Li, for exorcising evil spirits and ghosts. He recounts a story about Zong Dingbo of the Jin dynasty, who, meeting a newly dead ghost one night, asked it what it was afraid of. It said it was averse to saliva. Zong grabbed it and it turned into a sheep. Fearing its further transformations, he spat on it repeatedly, after which it stopped transforming. He then sold it for one thousand cash. “From this,” Li says, “we know that ghosts really are afraid of saliva.”⁴⁶

Spit could reveal whether a patient was suffering from gu poison, a kind of poisoning- bewitchment (see chapter 5). Li recommended having the patient spit into a basin of water, and “if the saliva sinks to the bottom, it is a case of gudu. If it floats, it is not.”⁴⁷ The polluting, demon aspect of the poison tainted the body and made saliva heavier than normal. Because saliva was a transformation of human essence and qi, it was assumed to be useful in combating demons and death, but as liquid life, it was also not to be spat out casually or often.

Rainbows

Like water, rainbows were visible yet transparent and mysterious. Like water, bugs, thunder, and prophecy, rainbows in China were tied to time; The Book of Rites (Liji) says simply that rainbows begin to be seen in the last month of spring, and in the first month of winter they are seen no more.⁴⁸ This is not a description of meteorological phenomena, however, but a record of animal behavior. Rainbows were animals, and like other bug-like creatures, rainbows hibernated in winter.⁴⁹ The earliest depictions of rainbows conflated them with a two-headed creature, a kind of dragon, that came down from the sky and drank from rivers. A royal divination inscribed on a Shang dynasty (seventeenth–eleventh century BCE) ox scapula reads, “There were great clouds from the east; in the afternoon a rainbow came out of the north and drank from the Yellow River.”⁵⁰ Another ominous divination reads, “The king prognosticated, saying, ‘There shall be misfortune.’ On the eighth day, clouds in the form of a face covered the sun; a rainbow appeared and drank from the Yellow River.”⁵¹

Dragons were long classed with aquatic animals, or animals that have scales, and those in turn were classed with bugs and snakes. That rainbows were animals that came down from the sky to drink from rivers with their two heads is reflected in the character for rainbow, hong 虹 , which contains the radical (classificatory portion of Chinese characters) for bug/worm, chong 虫 (or animal) on the left and the phonetic hong (or gong) 工 on the right.

The early geography Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing) reads, “Rainbows are located north of the Land of Gentlemen. Each one has two heads.”⁵² Guo Pu (276–324) explains in his commentary on the text, as does the early dictionary Explaining and Analyzing Characters (Shuowen jiezi, first or second century CE) “hong are didong.” Didong is an archaic word for rainbow, but in works such as the eleventh-century dictionary Lei pian, di is a kind of bug. The late-Ming illustrations of Jiang Yinghao depict the rainbow as a very long, two-headed, snake-like creature. Some of the earliest texts also discuss other kinds of rainbows (di and ni), which are classed lexicographically as being in the “bug” family and medically/phenomenologically as snake-like, dragon-like creatures.⁵³

There was still debate about the animal nature of rainbows right up to the modern period. Although there were several discussions that focused on rainbows being made of a combination of sun and water in the Tang and Song period; just as often they implied or explicitly discussed rainbows as living things.⁵⁴ Shen Gua (1031–95) discusses the nature of rainbows in an inquiry into common knowledge.⁵⁵ He writes that it is generally known that rainbows dive into and drink from rivers, which he finds believable. He then recounts his own inquiry. On a diplomatic mission to the Liao, one day, after rain stopped and the sky cleared, a rainbow descended into the mountain stream in front of his tent. Shen and his fellow emissaries went to examine it closely and saw that both of its heads were submerged in the stream. He sent colleagues to the other side of the stream to repeat the observation. Looking east, the rainbow was visible, but those on the other side of the bank, looking west into the setting sun, could see nothing. After a long while, the rainbow moved east and disappeared. The next day, after walking a while, they saw the rainbow again. Shen takes the movement of the rainbow—descending, moving, reappearing—and its two heads as evidence that the rainbow is indeed alive, although transparent. At the end of the account, Shen quotes Sun Yan-xian as saying, “The rainbow is the shadow of the sun in the rain; when the sun shines on the rain, it appears.”⁵⁶ The rainbow animal was a being created by the interaction of sun and rain, in a generative process akin to previous writers’ descriptions of heaven giving birth to rainbows.

That a rainbow could be both an animal and a phenomenon did not trouble Zhu Xi (1130–1200). Zhu Xi classed rainbows with spirits, ghosts, and thunder as being both material and immaterial. In a conversation about Xie Shilong’s household having seen a ghost, Zhu writes, “What the Xies had seen was real, but they did not realize it was just a special type of rainbow.” A student, Bida, then asked, “Is a rainbow simply qi or does it have form and substance?” Zhu Xi replied, “being able to drink water they must have intestines and stomach; only when it disperses does it become nonexistent. It’s like thunder and spirits—these are similar things.”⁵⁷ That immaterial thunder can produce material objects (chapter 2), that spirits can appear, have physical bodies, and then disappear, that the world is constantly transforming, explains how some creatures, such as rainbows, can be born from sun and rain, have internal organs, be transparent, and then disappear.

Some remarks suggest that tolerance of multivalent phenomenological reality of rainbows and other such things was waning by the Ming.⁵⁸ You Yi (1614?–84?), a scholar influenced by Western learning, asks, “Are rainbows really a kind of creature [chong]? If so, how could such a huge creature appear or disappear suddenly? Supposing that it is only a natural phenomenon, why can it suck water or drink?”⁵⁹ But this comment is an aside, indicating suspicion but stopping short of rebuking Zhu Xi, the preeminent neo-Confucian (daoxue) master of the Southern Song (1126–1271), and the long tradition of accepting that some creatures can be physical and intangible simultaneously.⁶⁰ Other Ming scholars were similarly ambivalent about the nature of rainbows. Few were willing to repudiate the millennia-old notion that rainbows were worm/dragon-like creatures that drank from rivers and streams, despite the evidence of their own eyes. Xie Zhaozhe discussed the history of rainbows in major texts and concluded that “although they have form, they do not have substance, yet they eat and drink, so this is quite curious [ke qi]. Today, in mountain valleys, rainbows drink [from] creeks and streams; people often encounter them, and they also drink from ponds. There are both male and female rainbows, and they can eat and drink, which is why the ancient form of the characters all used ‘chong’ 蟲 to indicate that they were animals.”⁶¹

The animal nature of rainbows seemed obvious based on their behavior. The anecdotes collected in Taiping guangji (Extensive Records of the Taiping [976–83] era) typify those found in florilegia before and after it, depicting hong, though especially ni, the second of a double rainbow, and white hong as often entering bedrooms, living in temples, and crashing banquets.⁶² Like dragons, rainbows were also omens, and like dragons, the meaning of those omens was a topic of debate. Most often, they were considered baleful omens, even perverse or licentious omens.⁶³ Fang Yizhi (1611–71) mentions that “in ancient times, rainbows were thought to indicate licentious qi. Daoist adepts by the eastern sea dug into the ground at the location of a rainbow and found red worms that can be used as aphrodisiacs, also based on this principle.”⁶⁴ Their licentiousness must have reminded readers that rainbows were, or were like, dragons. Daoist ritual manuals include talismans to ward off rainbows, presumably guarding against the bad luck they were believed to augur, rather than the destructive power the animal was thought to have.

Rainbows had form but were insubstantial. They were made of water and drank water from rivers. As for animal and phenomena, they were born from the yang of the sun and the yin of rain. Yet like dragons, the nature of rainbows was numinous, mysterious, licentious, and scary—cause for trepidation.

There was more clarity about the meaning of baihong, “white rainbows” or possibly “transparent rainbows,” a decidedly ominous portent, often of assassination. “A white rainbow pierced [guan] the sun” is a phrase that occurs in Qin and Han texts and dynastic histories and other texts ever since.⁶⁵ White rainbows inevitably appear as evil omens in retellings of Jing Ke trying to assassinate the King of Qin and Nie Zheng assassinating Han Gui in differing texts.⁶⁶ It is not clear what a “white rainbow” correlates to in modern meteorology, be it an aurora, solar halo, “fogbow,” or other phenomenon.⁶⁷ That they were evil omens, though, was rarely in doubt in premodern China. Wang Chong argued that human actions and intentions could not influence the machinations of heaven when he claimed that it was “not Jing Ke’s essence that made the white rainbow pierce the sun.”⁶⁸ This statement seems to have been a rebuke to the philosopher/politician Dong Zhongshu’s (179–104 BCE) assertion that the origin of anomalies and portents was malice and injustice on earth, which disturbed the delicate cosmological balance with heaven, not an argument about the nature of white rainbows and their connection to the attempted assassination of the king of Qin (who later became the first emperor of China).⁶⁹ White rainbows most frequently were recorded as “passing though” (guan) or possibly “encircling” the sun, but they also descended into cities and military camps, and wreaked chaos.⁷⁰ In the Taiping yulan (Imperial overview from the Taiping [xingguo] reign-period [976–83]), the first large encyclopedia of ancient China, white rainbows are omens of drought, chaos, and execution.⁷¹ That rainbows and white rainbows portended unpleasantness would have been clear to a desultory reader from the way that Taiping yulan classified them in a chapter on “provoking calamity.” In the Ming histories, they are omens of the same, classed with baleful stars, just as they are in the second century BCE collection of philosophical treatises Huainanzi.⁷²

Late-Ming encyclopedias follow each other, or some lost ur-text, in depicting white rainbows piercing the sun rather than encircling it. This suggests that white rainbows are denser than the sun and that the sun was quite low in the sky, appearing to be the same distance from the earth as a cloud and perhaps made of similar stuff. Encyclopedias are also consistent in saying that white rainbows are baleful omens, but consistent with their intended readership, the marginally literate and upwardly mobile, omens are represented as having less to do with the intrigues at court and more with omens of concern to regular people, such as earthquakes and plague.

Novels preserved these ancient notions about rainbows as baleful omens, especially for the court. For instance, Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins with the fall of the Han dynasty and the omens that presaged it—an earthquake, tidal waves, hens transformed into roosters, and a rainbow appearing in the chamber of the consorts: “All these evil portents, and more, appeared—too many to be dismissed as isolated signs. Emperor Ling called on his officials to explain these disasters and omens. A court counselor, Cai Yong, argued bluntly that the rainbow and the transformation of the hens were the result of interference in government by empresses and eunuchs.”⁷³ The xiaoshuo version of the Three Kingdoms story omits many other omens recorded in histories for the year 178.⁷⁴ The selections possibly were made based on their literary merits; the commentator Mao Zonggang remarks about the omens, “Eunuchs represent male turned into female. Eunuch interference in government represents female turned into male [like hens turning into roosters].” Double rainbows, believed to occur in male/female pairs (hong and ni), seem to serve as similar tropes.⁷⁵

Like the popular belief that thunder issues from the ground, Three Kingdoms discusses white rainbows rising out of the ground and soaring up into the sky. On the eve of his invasion of the heartland, General Zhuge Ke noticed a white trail of vapor emanating from the ground, obscuring the road his armies were to take. An adviser, Jiang Yan said, “This qi is a white rainbow, and it signifies the loss of troops.” Zhuge Ke dismissed it, wanting to have Jiang Yan executed for speaking of ill omens and lowering the fighting spirit of the troops, but the next day, he noticed a white rainbow before the carriage, like a white ribbon reaching from the ground into the sky, an omen that troops would be lost, and he turned back.⁷⁶ The meaning of white rainbows, likely reflective of associations of the color white with death, was less ambiguous than that of rainbows generally, but ideas about their phenomenological natures were varied. Most who discussed them seemed to agree that colorful rainbows came down from the sky to touch the earth and white rainbows rose from the ground up to the sky. That a white rainbow could rise from the earth to pass through or pierce the sun points to the shallowness of the premodern sky. The sun, clouds, moon, and stars all were of approximately equal distance from earth.

Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624) was skeptical of the animalistic aspects of rainbows, and he focused on their relationship to sun and water. He wrote that the sun is the essence of yang and thunder, lightning, and rainbows all belong to the yang category. The moon is the essence of yin, and clouds travel between yin and yang, since they are all born in the earth and rise to the sky.⁷⁷

If the belief was widespread that clouds emanated from the earth, as Xie Zhaozhe and Li Shizhen state, then it was not a stretch to think of white rainbows and clouds in all five colors as coming out of the earth and ascending into the sky as well.⁷⁸ The evolution of hong toward clouds and away from animals still carried an association with dragons and with water though. An example of this is the entry on earthworms (qiuyin) in the Systematic Compendium: “The experts in the arts of longevity claim that earthworms can make clouds rise, and that they know whether the skies are covered or clear. Hence, they were given names such as earth dragon tulong.”⁷⁹

In the last days of the eighteenth century, Ji Yun was still struggling to grasp the nature of rainbows and what they meant for the shape of the sky:

It is common knowledge [shiyan] that when a rainbow appears, it will stop raining, but it is the opposite. It is when it stops raining that a rainbow appears. When the clouds break and the sun shines, the light reflects and refracts on the other side of the clouds. The shape of the sky is perfectly round, and on top [it is] covered like [a person’s head wearing] a bamboo rain hat.… [The rainbow’s] form droops down according to the shape of the sky. The ends curve like a bow.… [rainbows] are layer upon layer of clouds and qi, appearing to have clear borders and limits. [They are] piles, layer upon layer, of green and red color, and not physical objects like a belt extending halfway across the sky. As for coming down to streams to drink water or having heads that look like those of donkeys (see Zhu Xi’s yulei), or seducing women (see Taiping Guangji), [those things] are actually demon qi that look similar to a rainbow or some other demon thing that can change its shape into a rainbow.⁸⁰

Ji Yun disambiguates between rainbows and their animalistic doppelgangers, making clear that rainbows are meteorological phenomena. His world had not entirely shed its magical aspects, though. It was still one in which demons could take the shape of rainbows and one in which textual authority was not easily contradicted. The sky held sun, moon, stars, and clouds, all contained within an upper limit, and rainbows, like dragons and rain, were a key to understanding their relationships and resonances.

Water Methods, Water Magic

Between heaven and earth was humanity, for whom water was essential, not just for life but to restore health. Some apotropaic remedies recorded in the Berlin medical manuscripts direct the patient to burn a talisman and then eat the ashes with particular kinds of water. Others specify writing the talisman directly on water and drinking it.⁸¹ A prescription to be applied in cases of difficult birth recommends taking hair from the head of the woman and boiling it in river water, which would then help her baby pass through the birth canal as easily as a river flows.⁸²

One mysterious entry in multiple medical manuscripts is “Hua Tuo xiansheng shuifa” (Mr. Hua Tuo’s water method).⁸³ This was recorded in the last decades of the nineteenth century but was likely much older. It is not entirely clear what the method (or magic) was exactly, but it was some kind of apotropaic healing that drew on daily-life taboos, the combination of medicine with talismans and spells, and the apotheosis of an ancient healer to the status of god-like figure.⁸⁴ Hua Tuo morphed into something mythological, beginning with his biographies in History of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi) and Dynastic History of the Later Han (Hou Hanshu), where he is depicted as an immortal, expert in moxabustion, acupuncture, and notably, surgery. They record that Hua Tuo could recognize immediately if a sickness was concentrated internally where acupuncture needles and medicines could not reach, and in such cases, he recommend surgery. He would have patients drink a solution of a drug called mafeisan, whereupon they would immediately become as though dead from intoxication and completely insensate.⁸⁵ Then he could make an incision and remove the diseased tissues. If the disease were in the intestines, he would sever them and wash them in water, after which he would replace them, stitch the abdomen together, and rub on an ointment. After a period of about four or five days, there would be no more pain. The patient would awaken, and within a month, he would return to normal.⁸⁶ The Song dynasty scholar Ye Mengde (1077–1148) criticized these biographical accounts of Hua Tuo as myth. His essay “Physicians Cannot Raise the Dead” repeated the descriptions of Hua Tuo using anesthesia to perform internal surgery, and reasoned:

Qi enlivens the physical form.… Once the abdomen, back, intestines, or stomach have been cut open and dissected, how can they again be infused with vital breath? Being in such a condition, how could they be brought back to life again? If Hua Tuo could do this, then whoever was subjected to the punishment of dismemberment could be brought back to life again and there would no longer be any reason for carrying out royal punishments [involving physical mutilation].⁸⁷

This criticism did not seem to tarnish Hua Tuo’s reputation for miraculous cures, however. His abilities were intertwined with recognizing and curing worm disorders, in which patients suffered from feelings of vexation and oppression and were prescribed a decoction. Worms could also be drawn out of the body with other enticements. Hua Tuo would hang such worms from his medical cart. The healing practices for which Hua Tuo was most famous, moxa and acupuncture, and especially surgery and worm disorders, existed outside of mainstream medicine’s focus on pulses, prescriptions, and systematic correspondences.⁸⁸ It is not surprising that certain practices, prescriptions, and titles of medical texts invoke Hua Tuo, especially if they were products in the marketplace trading on Hua Tuo’s reputation as a “divine physician,” medical god, or Daoist immortal. He was invoked as an honorific given to talented doctors—“Hua Tuo reincarnated.” A set of acupuncture points along the spine is named after him, and one Berlin medical manuscript that focuses mostly on bone setting and traumatology takes as its title Secret Transmission from the Immortal Teacher Hua Tuo (Hua Tuo xianshi michuan).⁸⁹

Hua Tuo’s water method is unusual. In printed apotropaic texts it is common to see one talisman accompanied by one written invocation, and the text of the spell is usually quite simple.⁹⁰ It may be one or two mnemonic rhymes written in seven-character verse. The incantation for Hua Tuo’s water magic, found in a late nineteenth-century medical manuscript titled The Five Stars Consulted Jointly (Wuxing hecan) is quite long and melds claims from history and fiction, inventing new Hua Tuo episodes (or recording episodes now lost to us), and associating his surgical talent with water:⁹¹

I address this request to old Mr. Hua Tuo.

The military commander at the time of the Three Kingdoms, You took the knife and set the bone, that is for sure.

Liu Bei, Guan ye [sic], and Zhang Fei⁹²

I ask to place this bowl of water in front of the oven.

To raise this dead [person] and return him to life, only he [can do so]. In the camps of the Three Kingdoms, he saved the sacred ruler.

To this very day, in the world of mortals help all who live! Use your obvious power and authority to pacify the world.

Employ iron scalpel and silver needle to save the life of the people.

These statements refer to popular tales, specifically Romance of the Three Kingdoms stories, adding to Hua Tuo’s miraculous powers in a manner similar to Zhuge Liang’s apotheosis based on his achievements in entertainment literature rather than histories (chapter 1). The use of water in this and other incantations calling on Hua Tuo may simply reflect the status of those to whom it appealed—it was cheap and available. It may be related to surgery and cleaning the wound or washing away wrongs and achieving justice for the dead; it may be its physical properties and attendant metaphors life-giving, and potentially life-restoring; or it may be the association of water control with control of bodily fluids that brought the fictionalized and deified Hua Tuo together with water in these apotropaic healing methods.

The author of this medical manuscript does not mention rhetorical strategies for deceiving patients and selling healing services, as some do, and thus seems to have believed that the water method was efficacious. Zhao Xuemin, decidedly, did not. Zhao, author of Supplementing the Systematic Materia Medica, also wrote Strings of Refined Therapies, the first book published concerning the therapeutic skills of itinerant physicians. Zhao’s informant was a relative, Zhao Boyun, whose own medical manuscript testified to the secret transmission of healers’ knowledge. Zhao selected the contents he thought might not immediately draw harsh criticism by regular physicians and excised what he thought controversial, spurious, or intentionally deceptive.⁹³ Zhao writes, “Much of what is said in this [manuscript] is not found in the classics. It may lead later people to make a profit with illegal practices and had to be erased.” Among these were water methods: “Of the secret methods, none is more widespread than the ‘water method.’ Next is the ‘invocation of the origin.’⁹⁴ … All that bordered on shamanism and wizardry was discarded without exception.”⁹⁵ It is unknown if the water methods Zhao excised and excoriated were like those that invoke Hua Tuo’s name. Water methods, like water itself, were liminal, crossing between boundaries and disciplines, having tangible and figurative aspects, seen and unseen.

In the Qing, perhaps due to expanding imperial borders, some water methods were regarded as exotic, foreign, or mysterious. There was Taixi’s (“Far West”) water methods, hydrology using Western technology of the late Ming, aptly given names like “dragon’s tail” for Archimedes’s screw, a hydraulic device for moving water uphill, since dragons were thought to draw water from rivers and lakes up into the sky, as the screw could make water flow uphill. Water methods also included distillation techniques to make medicines and alcohol.⁹⁶ Painters wrote about “water methods” for viewing and representing water in paint from the perspective of foreigners.⁹⁷ Feng shui masters had secret water methods of their own, detailed in manuals such as Geographical Assistant to the Mysterious Mechanism: Collection of the Immortal Woman (Dili canzan xuanji xianpo ji). There were water methods to divine the future and determine auspicious days found in books published in the fourteenth century by Dong Dezhang and used into the twentieth century.

Journey to the West records water methods that appear more fully magical but are also found in the manuscripts of practicing healers. A tricky dragon uses the “forcing water method” (bishuifa) or to pour wine half an inch higher than the top of the cup, and the same trick is recorded in the medical manuscripts that record making invisible writing appear.⁹⁸ Journey to the West seems to reflect the real magic and argot of hucksters in the marketplace as often as it invents them.⁹⁹ Sun Wukong later employs a water method with this same name to open up a pathway for himself in the Eastern Ocean to visit the dragon king and request rain.¹⁰⁰ Controlling water, though one of the oldest technical endeavors in China, became even more magical and diffuse in the vernacular literature and common knowledge of the Ming and Qing. Perhaps it was the diffusion of water methods in popular literature that made them seem magical through an imperfect trickling-down of information from court to interested readers. If the dissemination of information about water methods was decentralized, as was much information about the natural world, or if it lacked detail, it may have provided lacunae for the imagination to fill.

Zhao Xuemin excised water methods from one book while expounding on twenty-two new kinds of water and twenty kinds of dew unknown to the Bencao gangmu. Some of these were newly discovered; some introduced by Westerners. Zhao writes that he does not know much about the Western waters, as in the case of “knife wound water,” which “comes from across the Western Ocean.¹⁰¹ I don’t know what kind of things it is composed of, but it is brought from other countries by boat. They have it in Guangdong and Macao.”¹⁰² “Westerners also use a method to make strong water” (Xiren zao qiangshui zhi fa), which can bore through rock and metal and that only glass can hold. Strong water (presumably acid of some kind) was useful for etching copper and was not to be ingested, though it was also good for removing carbuncles and necrotic flesh (e’rou). The properties, origins, and methods of water were becoming more diverse.

The most common water methods mentioned in materia medica overlap with those in the Daoist canon—methods for liquifying solids. The Systematic Compendium makes frequent reference to those texts—like the Huinanzi and Thirty-Six Water Methods (Sanshiliu shuifa)—for liquifying gold and jade so they can more easily be used in medical prescriptions.¹⁰³ Li often quotes the Northern Song Daoist Ma Zhi, who repeatedly discusses the “water” produced as a side-effect of liquifying precious solids, particularly jade, as something good for prolonging life.¹⁰⁴ Certain waters could also be used to produce valuable metals.¹⁰⁵ These waters and water methods were drugs and techniques for making medical drugs, though they were believed to be less potent than the naturally occurring liquid versions of precious minerals and metals. Water methods in Supplement to the Systematic Compendium frequently also are ways to “waterify” cinnabar (dansha shuifa, turn cinnabar into mercury) or gold. These methods produce medicinal “water” from an otherwise inedible solid, and do so without using water as an ingredient, suggesting that it is not just liquifying a solid, but releasing the healing water within.¹⁰⁶

Stories such as “Plague Ghost” (Wengui; literally, “Warmth-epidemic ghost”) in Yuan Mei’s What the Master Did Not Discuss (Zibuyu) suggest that water methods were a common way of making pills. In 1756, a man discovers a ghost in his home because it has a terrible, fishy smell. The ghost had trapped itself in an urn, hiding from punishment by thunder, and asks to be released. The man engages it and discovers that the ghost has been causing the plague (dawen) raging in Suzhou. The ghost gives the man the recipe for medicine to treat people with the plague in exchange for its release. The man deceives the ghost and throws the urn into Tai Lake. At the end of the story, the reader is told the details of that prescription: “Five ounces of thunder pills [leiwan], thirty pieces of ‘flying gold,’ a tenth of an ounce of cinnabar [zhusha], one ounce of alum [mingfan], and five ounces of rhubarb [dahuang]. Using the water method, make pills. A dose is four-tenths of an ounce.”¹⁰⁷ The prescription was given to Zhao Wenshan, the prefect of Suzhou, and indeed, the patients all survived.¹⁰⁸ The water method here must allude to making mercury (lit: “watery silver” shuiyin) out of cinnabar and then using it to create pills with other powders. It required no explanation in the story, which suggests it must have been common knowledge.

Yuan Mei repeated a contemporary prescription from Supplement to Systematic Compendium (but not the parent text) that reflected the practices of itinerant healers and practical Daoist alchemy. The prescription, given not just by a ghost but by the one who had caused the epidemic, was real. Zhao Xuemin claims that water from cinnabar can “prolong life, kill ‘essence demons,’ repel evil ghosts, nurture vitality, and calm the hun and po souls.” Among the many uses of cinnabar, expelling epidemics is one. The origin story of this medicine may seem dubious to moderns, but it holds to a traditional logic—that ghosts know what is dangerous to them. If the water method can unleash a kind of water that can repel ghosts and kill demons, they would likely know it. Like many anomalous accounts, this one is also given an additional layer of veracity by citing real historical officials who attest to the effectiveness of the medicine and the logic of its origins and mechanisms. The great epidemic of 1756 that ravaged the Jiangnan (Lower Yangzi) region (and those of 1748 and 1786) would have been fresh in Yuan Mei’s memory and in the memories of his readers.¹⁰⁹ Suzhou was the center for the study of epidemics of “warm disease” (wenbing) in the late eighteenth century, with many texts devoted to its discussion and treatment.¹¹⁰

Definitions and perceptions of water were malleable, as was its behavior. Water was transformation—all things and nothing. But it also materialized intangibles—space and time. Water methods repelled demons, moved water uphill, cured illness, and liquified stone. Water connected the world of demons and the world of technology, the magical and the mundane. It was everywhere but also precious, an object of connoisseurship, something to be cherished. Water was also an illusion, and water methods were widespread tricks to deceive and delude ordinary people.

The proliferation of printed texts, along with and intersecting with an already flourishing manuscript culture, increasingly presented water to curious readers as a site of contestation. The primary questions where not about what water was but how to obtain, store, and use it. Different waters, either different within a tradition like medicine or across traditions, reflect particular kinds of inquiries. Water’s properties divulged its origins, where and when it came from, and these properties defined its uses. How water was used said much about the user, and in this way, classifying water said more about those classifying it than it did about water’s material reality. Similarly, inquiries into water show ways in which different modes of inquiry intersected, whether cultural, medical, demonological, divinatory, artistic, technological, or hydrological. Water reflected more about the early modern world, its people and practices, than it revealed about itself.