Family and State

Throughout northern China, as Manchu power grew in the early seventeenth century, families had to make choices. Some sided with the Manchus, valuing the order their military occupation brought; others opposed the new rulers; and still others cautiously held their ground until the political future became clear and more informed political commitments could be made. Jin Fu’s family chose the first option, jumping with both feet into the growing Manchu state and becoming its hereditary servants. As a result of this choice, they were guaranteed a place in the new regime. They were also conscious of their Chinese heritage and willing to draw on it in their service to the Qing.³

Service, status, and location defined the Jins’ place in the seventeenth century. The Jin family counted Licheng, a magistracy located next to the Shandong provincial capital of Jinan, as their native place. But by the mid-seventeenth century they had resided in Liaoyang, Manchuria, for several generations and were enrolled in the Hanjun. Although their identity was military, their service to the Qing was civilian. Jin Fu’s father, Jin Yingxuan, served in the Office of Transmission (Tongzheng Shisi), a central government agency responsible for “presenting in (imperial) audience all memorials submitted throughout the empire; to some extent, it had ‘veto’ power to reject memorials considered inappropriate either in form or substance.”⁴ Yingxuan rose to the post of right secretary (you canyi), in which capacity he reviewed state papers for Qing Taizong (r. 1627–44). The post was an important one, giving its holder access to the flow of documents on which the Qing government rested, and this may have been the reason why the Jins were enrolled in the Bordered Yellow Banner, one of the three superior banners controlled by the emperor.

Jin Fu was born in Manchuria in 1633 and accompanied his family and the Qing court to Beijing in 1644. Shortly thereafter, at the age of twelve, he was enrolled in what his biography described as the “officers’ school” (guanxue).⁵ Arrangements for the education of bannermen in the early days of the dynasty were somewhat chaotic, but Jin’s school seems likely to have been the Eight Banner Official’s School, founded in 1644 for the education of sons of officers in the Banner armies.⁶ He was not obliged to take examinations to enter Qing service, but he did have to take a test to earn an administrative post. This he did in 1652 and was appointed to serve as an editor in the History Bureau (Guoshi Yuan) a division of the Grand Secretariat, where he learned the organization and principles of Qing government.⁷ He was subsequently appointed to the junior post of secretary in the Grand Secretariat, and then became a member of the Ministry of War. At the beginning of the Kangxi reign, he was promoted to academician (xueshi) in the Grand Secretariat (Neige), where he worked compiling the Veritable Records of Qing Taizong and organizing edicts issued in response to the memorials his father had processed.

How did this family think of itself?⁸ Although there is a wealth of biographical material about Jin Fu, rather little of it went to the point of self-image. Particularly valuable in this regard is a funerary inscription (muzhiming) prepared by a very accomplished writer and civil servant named Wang Shizhen (1634–1711). Like the Jins, Wang formed a bridge between Manchus and Chinese in the very early years of the dynasty. As a local official in Yangzhou beginning in 1659, he had helped to reconstruct social life in a town devastated by the Qing conquest armies.⁹ He went on from there to posts in the central Qing state. Wang Shizhen and Jin Fu may have met, but if so, their meeting was not recorded. The occasion for the epitaph was a request from Jin Fu’s eldest son that Wang memorialize his father. Internal evidence suggests that Wang had access to Jin family papers as he prepared the biography, and he also was able to listen to the stories the family told of itself.

A tantalizing detail about the Jins in Wang’s epitaph was the claim that when the Ming conquered Shandong in the late fourteenth century, Jin Fu’s ancestors joined the Ming army, membership in which was hereditary, and were assigned to guard Liaoyang in southern Manchuria. As the Manchu order grew in the early seventeenth century, the Jins joined it, forsaking the Ming. If true, it would appear that in the seventeenth century, the Jins traded posts as hereditary military servants of the Ming for positions as hereditary military servants of the Qing.¹⁰ Why the Jins joined the Manchus—whether their army unit was captured or, somewhat more likely in view of the position they held, they voluntarily surrendered—is unclear.

Wang also reported that Jin had four sons and two daughters with his wives, née Yang and Bai. The sons were named Zhiyu, Zhiyong, Zhilu, and Zhiqi. The first character in each of their given names was zhi, “to rule,” followed by the name of one of four ancient north Chinese states of Yu, Yong, Lu, and Qi. With these names, Jin Fu was hoping for a sure position for his sons, safely nestled in a state order. His hopes were in fact realized, as all four sons occupied government positions at the time of his death.¹¹

As Jin became more senior, Wang’s epitaph relates, he established a family temple, carefully comparing accounts of ritual by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and Sima Guang (1019–1086) to determine the appropriate ceremonies for special occasions. Research by Kaiwing Chow and others has suggested that many seventeenth-century Chinese families, particularly ones with complex histories of loyalties like the Jins, began to reflect on the question of what made them Chinese.¹² The most common answer was that the essence of Chineseness lay not in political loyalties but in fealty to a set of rituals, customs inherited from ancestors. But which were the correct rituals? Sorting through extant accounts of ancient Chinese rituals was a major concern of scholars in the late seventeenth century and also of families trying to understand their place in the Sino-Manchu sociopolitical order.

Resilient frontiersmen, Jin and his family had survived the fall of the Ming, the chaos of war in the northeast, and the founding of a new ethnic and political regime and landed on their feet in mid-seventeenth-century Beijing. The choice to side with the Qing proved fortuitous; it provided them shelter in the storm and offered an opportunity to realize an ambition to serve as leaders on a regional and even national scale. Understandably, the Jins’ loyalties were complex: to a political order that sustained them and a civilization that nurtured them. Empowered by the Qing conquest, Jin Fu determined to render effectively the service to which his family had committed itself.

Governor and Director

As he rose in the government, Jin Fu faced the problem of how to translate his family’s commitment to service into support for the new dynasty. In choosing, Jin was guided not by years of study of Confucian classics but by perceived areas of need, and how and how quickly they could be met. In 1671 Jin was appointed as governor of Anhui province. On its surface, this appointment was somewhat surprising: a thirty-eight-year-old who had never served, or likely lived, outside the capital was appointed to a high territorial post, where he became responsible for a hierarchy of officials and all matters of taxation, policing, and personnel. Several characteristics of the moment provide historical context. The earliest biographies of Jin identify his appointment to Anhui as a “special” (te) one, meaning that it was made not through the routine procedures of the Ministry of Personnel but directly by the imperial court.¹³ War had just begun between the Qing and the Three Feudatories, and to control China’s territories, the dynasty preferred Chinese-speaking soldiers, bannermen on whom they could rely to carry out orders. When Jin Fu became governor of Anhui in 1671, thirteen out of eighteen of his colleague governors were Hanjun bannermen.¹⁴

The young Jin Fu arrived in Anhui with cachet but no experience. He remedied this by employing as his personal assistant Chen Huang. Hired private secretaries were ubiquitous in late imperial China, but the close relationship between Chen and Jin Fu, and the salience of Chen’s ideas in Jin Fu’s proposals, made their relationship unique. Most biographers have treated Chen’s life as an adjunct to Jin’s. In the late 1930s, the historical geographer Hou Renzhi (1911–2010), an admirer, produced an independent biography.¹⁵ Chen had no official degree, but he did have extensive knowledge of administrative practice. Hou suggests plausibly, though without evidence, that Chen’s taste in reading ran to the statecraft manuals that circulated in seventeenth-century China rather than the classical texts that had to be mastered for the examinations. Jin reported that during his years in Anhui, he and Chen were constantly together, even at mealtimes, as Chen administered what must have been a crash course in territorial administration.¹⁶

Jin Fu and Chen Huang soon found themselves administering a province that served as a crucial transit point for an empire at war. The highlights of Jin’s Anhui administration noted in biographies are either efforts at reconstruction of the province following the Manchu conquest or contributions to the Qing resistance to the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories.¹⁷ All Jin’s biographies remark on one administrative innovation Jin proposed in response to a concern the Ministry of War expressed about the cost of maintaining wartime postal services in Anhui. The problem, Jin argued, was not with Anhui but with military officials from the southern provinces who were sending too many messages by express post to the capital; as the post riders came through Anhui they demanded lodging and fresh mounts on their journey to the capital. Faced with emergency messages, all Anhui officials could do was try to meet the messengers’ demands. The solution, Jin’s memorial argued, was to limit the number of messages by ordering those in the south to communicate on only the most urgent business. Jin proposed to enforce this proposal by limiting the number of express tallies (huopai), authorizing transmission of a message at high speed, that each official was given. The proposal was implemented, and the Qing saved 129,000 liang.¹⁸ Jin Fu was praised for the initiative and given the honorary rank of minister of war as a reward.¹⁹

Jin Fu’s term in Anhui was counted a success, and when the court needed a vigorous and clear-headed administrator to attack the twin problems of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River, they turned to Jin. The emperor sought a fresh approach to the issues of the lower Yellow River and Grand Canal, one that would be conclusive, a solution that would achieve results with a single effort, leaving no task undone (yilao yongyi). The last major work on the Yellow River levees had taken place in the fifteenth century. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century river commissioners, faced with warfare in north and central China and limited resources, had contented themselves with trying to repair breaks in the levees, particularly along the Grand Canal. The first Qing river commissioner was a bannerman named Yang Fangxing (d. 1664). According to his biography, he had a “taste for alcohol” and was ordered by Qing Taizong to stay away from it. Appointed in 1644, he presided over floods in 1645, 1647, 1650, and 1653 before being granted retirement in 1657.²⁰ Flooding continued under the Qing’s second river commissioner, Zhu Zhixi, in 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1661.²¹ Jin Fu’s predecessor, another bannerman named Wang Guangyu, had not even been able to fill the broken places from one season to the next. Summer was the rainy season, when breaks in the levees were most likely to occur; repair work was done in the dry winter season. Wang was dismissed when the minister of works returned from a trip to the south in early March and reported that Wang hadn’t even begun work to repair the previous year’s breaks.²²

Two weeks after Wang’s dismissal, on March 27, 1677, Jin Fu was appointed as governor-general of the Grand Canal (hedao zongdu).²³ This was a very senior post, one of two functionally defined senior positions in Qing territorial administration. Both positions reported directly to the emperor, though in both cases bureaucratic organs in the capital were responsible for keeping the laws, precedents, and archives associated with the functions. In the case of the director-general of the Grand Canal, the relevant body was the Ministry of Works, which reviewed materials for all public works projects: city walls and altars, palaces, roads, customs stations, harbors, canals, and river works.²⁴

Receiving his orders for transfer and promotion, Jin hastened to set his affairs as Anhui governor in order, proceeding immediately to Qingkou, near the point where the Grand Canal and the Yellow River met (marked on map 1 as the point of the Clear Passage). He took responsibility from Wang Guangyu on May 5 and began to tour the river works in the company of two imperial emissaries from the capital.²⁵ Two months later, he submitted his first report on the situation, in which he described the river administration as “corrupt and decayed in the extreme” (bi huai yi ji). Stressing the need to comprehend the entire situation of the Jiangsu watercourses before taking action, Jin Fu reported that he was interviewing everyone who might have anything to contribute, whether gentry, soldiers, artisans, or workers. Time must be taken for such a review, he asserted, because if one only followed precedent there was danger that “a repair in the east will create a break in the west, a repair in the north will create a break in the south, and time will be spent, and grain and money wasted without positive result.”²⁶

From his initial trip to the riverbank, Jin Fu signaled that he would handle the river differently than his predecessors. When the post of governor-general of the Grand Canal was created, the central government decreed that the seat would be in Jinan, the capital of Shandong. Jin Fu established his base of operations in Suqian District in Jiangsu, near the point where the Grand Canal, the Yellow River, and the Huai River met, and proceeded to define his role as maintaining not simply the Grand Canal but the entire lower Yellow River water system.²⁷ An emphasis on comprehensive planning for the lower course of the Yellow River and the portions of the canal in Jiangsu proved to be one of the hallmarks of Jin Fu’s administration.

The crash course on statecraft that Chen Huang had begun in the Anhui capital continued on the riverbank; in fact, a catechism for the training has been preserved. Titled An Explanation of River Defense (Hefang shuyan), it was a work of one juan that contains twelve essays on various topics associated with hydraulic engineering.²⁸ In each, Jin Fu is represented as asking questions that Master Chen (Chenzi) answers. References to statecraft texts, the authority behind Jin Fu’s proposals, are incorporated in Chen’s responses. The core of Chen Huang’s philosophy of river work, as he informs Jin Fu in an essay titled “Levees” (Difang) is drawn from the great Ming river expert Pan Jixun, whose central idea was that using human agency to manage the river was not as good as using the force of nature to do so.²⁹ His goal was to “guide the river water, using the river [current] to scour the mud” (shu shui yi shui shua sha). Here the idea was to narrow the river and so increase its speed by building high, strong, secure levees along its banks. The faster the river flowed, the more silt it could carry.³⁰ Building such levees became the primary aim for the Jin-Chen river maintenance projects. In an essay titled “Estimating Expenses” (Guji), Jin Fu asks Chen whether, in view of the expense of suppressing the Rebellion of Three Feudatories, a less costly course of repairs might be proposed. Chen responds, no, then likens the repair of river works to a military campaign. Just as a general “who would have his troops march one thousand li must first lay in three months of grain supplies,” so the river maintenance project must be properly supplied before it is begun. Chen writes, “It may be wasteful to spend money that should not be spent, but not spending money that ought to be spent could mean that expenses in the future might be several times as great.”³¹

Jin Fu and Chen Huang offered a powerful combination of cachet and competence. This was rare, particularly in China, where those with influence gravitated to the capital, and those with specialized local competences faced a long ladder to climb to the top. Cachet came from Jin’s status as a bannerman at once loyal to the Manchus and immersed in Chinese traditions of culture and administration. Competence was fostered by Chen Huang’s careful reading of statecraft texts. Throughout their administration of river affairs, Jin and Chen would claim authority based on specialized knowledge of the geology and hydrology of the lower Yellow River basin acquired on their initial and subsequent inspection tours. This was a very different sort of legitimacy than the knowledge of classical precedent claimed by traditional examination graduates.³² Jin and Chen sought to be as close to specialist technicians as possible in an administration of generalists.³³

Proposals

On the basis of their acquired expertise, Jin and Chen made specific plans. These were set forth in eight detailed memorials that he submitted in late August 1677. Five of these memorials proposed specific reconstruction projects; the sixth dealt with appointment of officials to manage the work; the seventh with arrangements for routine inspection of the levees once they were completed; and the eighth with the costs of the work proposed. They were written in clear, simple prose, largely without literary ornamentation, and included elaborate estimates of cost, schedule, and labor requirements.

The first of Jin’s proposals was to reconstruct the channel of the Yellow River by building canals and new steep levees along its banks, from the point where it joined the Grand Canal at Qingjiangpu to the sea. This expansion of the Yellow River was the largest and most expensive project Jin recommended. He proposed to build two canals 2.8 meters wide at the base, 7 meters wide on the surface, and 4.3 meters deep. They were to be located 3 meters from each side of the river. Initially, river water would flow through three channels—the original riverbed and the two newly dug channels. Eventually the channels would merge, in effect widening the river. With the dirt dug out from the new channels, levees would be built along the river edges to supplement the existing levees, which were broken and crumbling in many places. Chinese calculated the work involved in building levees in terms of the number of tufang—cubes of earth approximately four yards on each side, or sixty-four square yards—that had to be moved. Altogether, Jin estimated that over six million tufang would have to be moved to widen the river. Since it took one laborer just under four days to move a tufang of earth, the project would require at least twenty-four million man-days of labor. As Jin proposed to finish the project in two hundred days, he would require a labor force of more than 120,000 men.³⁴

Where could such a labor force be gathered? Following a precedent established by the previous river director in 1669, Jin proposed that prefectures in Jiangsu, Henan, and Shandong that stood to benefit by the project each be required to provide between five thousand and fifteen thousand able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and forty sui (years). Each prefecture would also provide several officials to oversee its men. If the laborers could not do the work or the supervisors were incompetent, there would be punishment for the home prefect calculated according to an elaborate schedule of reprimands and salary fines laid out in the memorial. The required labor was not to be unpaid corvee—the labor that all Chinese taxpayers owed the state. Laborers on Jin’s project were to be paid the legal rate of 0.04 ounces of silver per day. Jin estimated that the work along the Yellow River would be the most expensive of his repairs, costing 989,800 liang, nearly half of the total amount he requested.³⁵

Jin’s second project was to repair and deepen the channels, known as the Clear Passage (Qingkou), which connected the upper end of Lake Hongze with the Yellow River. Water that flowed through this channel was crucial to the process of transferring freight barges from the canal to the Yellow River. Jin reported that when he arrived at his post, the entrance to the Yellow River from Lake Hongze had completely silted over, preventing any flow from the lake to the river. He proposed to dredge two canals on either side of the main channel, through which water from the lake could flow to the river. As in his project to widen the Yellow River, the hope was that eventually the boundaries between the main channel and the two canals would erode, so that the entrance would be widened. Jin estimated that the project would involve moving 114,000 tufang of earth.³⁶

The third project Jin proposed was to repair breaks and secure the levees along the east side of Lake Hongze to prevent lake water from flowing into the Grand Canal.³⁷ The work here reinforced the Gao Family Dike (Gaojiayan), an older structure that had been repaired and renovated by Pan Jixun in 1578.

Fourth, Jin proposed to fill thirty-four breaks in the levees along a twelve-mile stretch of the lower Grand Canal. Fifth, Jin was to dredge the lower Grand Canal for a distance of 230 li, about eighty-two miles, so that the 1677 tribute grain could be shipped. He estimated that this would result in removing 3,477,000 tufang from the canal, which he proposed to add to the levees on either side of the canal.³⁸

Each of Jin’s first five memorials outlined a project. His sixth, seventh, and eighth memorials dealt with expenses and the deployment of civil and military personnel necessary to accommodate his ends. Jin’s sixth memorial dealt with the issue of costs. If a solution to the problems of the river was to be permanent, he argued, it had to have an independent and self-perpetuating source of revenue. Jin acknowledged that his proposals were expensive; the total cost of his proposed work was 2,115,000 liang, and his maintenance plans required a fleet of boats that could cost another two and a half million to build. The cost of 2.1 million liang was almost 10 percent of the taxes remitted to the seventeenth-century Qing central government in a year; with the cost of the boats, Jin’s projects approached 20 percent of the total receipts of the central government’s yearly land tax receipts.³⁹

Jin Fu proposed three sources of revenue. The first two reflected an awareness he shared with others who worked on the rivers, that although traditionally the state paid for riparian maintenance, some subjects benefited more than others. Individuals who owned land that chronically flooded would benefit most from the flood prevention effort and should be expected to pay for the work. Jin reasoned that landowners wishing to avoid flooding should be willing to pay a river maintenance fee, which would vary according to the value of their lands. He also suggested that merchants who shipped private goods along the Grand Canal pay tolls for the privilege of doing so. Jin assured the emperor that he had spoken with landholders and merchants who were willing to pay. A fourth stream of revenue was to come from the sale of low-level official degrees, for which there was an eager market in Jiangnan.⁴⁰ These streams of revenue would take time to establish, as in many cases the merchants and landowners Jin envisioned as paying were dealing in 1676 with flooded lands and a blocked canal. Jin therefore recommended that the provinces of Shandong, Henan, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi be required to pay 10 percent of their tax in advance for the years 1678, 1679, 1680, and 1681. Jin calculated that this would provide him with a kitty of 2,000,000 liang with which he could begin work.⁴¹

This concern with funds, which can be seen in several of Jin’s proposals and underlay them all to some degree, seemed to fly in the face of Chen Huang’s advice that Jin should request all the money he needed for the long campaign rather than limit his ambitions. Jin Fu’s service at court meant that he was far more aware than Chen of the fiscal stringency the Qing government had experienced in its first years and anticipated the resistance his requests would face. But there was likely a second consideration. The Qing routinely allocated a portion of tax revenue from Henan, Jiangsu, and Shandong for river maintenance, but in 1683 this amounted to 183,000 liang, which would hardly suffice for projects of the size Jin was contemplating. Had Jin’s requests been approved, he would have had an adequate stream of revenue to work with, which would allow him to judge the priority of projects independent of the court. So long as Jin had to request funds for each project separately, he would remain hostage to court politics.

In his seventh memorial, Jin outlined changes he recommended in the number and responsibilities of officials appointed to monitor the condition of the infrastructure and supervise those who labored on it. One of the consistent problems of Grand Canal administration was overstaffing. Confronted with hundreds of miles of riverbanks and canals needing inspection and thousands of laborers to supervise, canal directors’ tendency was to recommend the appointment of more and more subordinates. Often poorly paid junior officials, these appointees readily became corrupt, siphoning central government revenues meant to support repair work and demanding supplements to their income from those who used the canal system and those who lived alongside it. In the early nineteenth century, the canal administration had the reputation of being the most bloated and corrupt elements of the Qing imperial state.⁴² At least in the early years of his administration, Jin seemed determined to limit the number of officials assigned to canal administration and distribute the supervisory responsibilities among regularly assigned local officials. Jin recommended that all four assistant canal director positions be abolished and their duties redistributed among regularly appointed local officials, particularly circuit intendants.⁴³

In his eighth memorial, Jin Fu complained that neither officials posted to guard the riverbanks nor the common people who lived along them could be trusted to supervise their maintenance. Jin therefore proposed that the number of Green Standard Army troops stationed along the riverbanks (he bing) be increased to do patrol duty along rivers. They were to be provided with boats, so that on the first, eleventh, and twenty-first day of each lunar month they could travel along the rivers and inspect the levees. Different numbers of troops were required at different points on the river system; altogether he requested 5,870 men.⁴⁴

As he had been directed, Jin Fu produced a plan for a once-and-for-all solution of the dynasty’s river woes. During an extended tour of the riverbanks, he had identified all the areas of weakness where repair was needed. He had carefully and creatively assessed these needs and developed detailed plans for remedying them. In river troops he found the personnel to watch and maintain the infrastructure he created. The sources of revenue he pointed to would be adequate for the tasks he proposed, and he made provision to meet his labor requirements. The accounting he proposed was careful and meticulous, and whenever he quoted a price estimate prepared by a subordinate, he noted that he had reviewed the estimate completely and found that it did not include any frivolous or unnecessary items. He was ready to begin work in the autumn of 1677 and required only the final approval of the court.

Negotiation

This approval was some time in coming. Jin’s proposal was gigantic: not only did he propose to move millions of square yards of earth, but he aimed to do so with an army of laborers and to pay for the project by readjusting the revenue obligations of five central provinces of the Chinese empire. Granted that he enjoyed the court’s confidence and was following an order to solve the problems of the river system once and for all, what he proposed would have significantly changed the existing administrative order. Did he have the clout to effect such a change, and was the court, preoccupied with war in the south, prepared to give assent to the scheme?

The first clue came when the emperor, on receipt of the bannerman’s memorials, did not approve them straight off but referred them to the Chinese officials at the Ministry of Works, the bureaucratic record keepers, for review. There may have been a time early in the dynasty when Manchus trusted their Chinese martial bannermen over Han Chinese officials, but that time had passed by the mid-1670s. Beijing bureaucrats’ initial response to Jin’s memorials was that not all of his proposals could be accomplished at once. Jin was asked to prioritize his projects, so that they could be funded in sequence. Jin’s first reaction was to resist, arguing that everything he had proposed was critical:

Below Qingjiangpu, if we neither build levees nor dredge, the Huai and Yellow Rivers will have no route to the sea. Above Qingkou if we do not dredge, the Huai will not flow easily. If the breaks in the levees along Gao Family Dike are not repaired, then the current of the Huai River will be divided and will not scour the mud; water will not be forced into the Yellow River, and the Clear Passage will be a point of danger. Moreover, if we don’t rebuild the levees on the south bank of the Yellow River, then the Gao Family Dike will be threatened. If the levees on the north bank of the Yellow River are not repaired, then the rivers in Shandong will back up. In the matters of building levees, forcing the water downriver, and repairing breaks there can only be the question of what to do first; there can be no question of which is more urgent. If at present we don’t make a plan to accomplish the work once and for all, then building levees year after year, forcing water upstream year after year, boring and dredging, will not merely be a waste of the people’s resources but will be endless, and the river system will steadily deteriorate.⁴⁵

In view of Jin’s unwillingness to prioritize, reviewers in the capital may have felt they had no choice but to reject all of his proposals and force a rethinking of the entire project. Four of the five proposals Jin made were returned to him with a notation: “On first review [it was recommended] that the proposal should be carried out as proposed, but on subsequent review, it was decided that the proposal should be temporarily halted. There is no need to memorialize further.” No indication was given of the nature of the first and subsequent reviews or what role engineering feasibility or financial considerations played in decisions.

Fortunately, this was not the end of the matter. The rejections were accompanied with a note: “Since the emperor is genuinely concerned about restoring the canal and preserving popular livelihoods, the governor-general appointed by the emperor is ordered to reexamine [the situation] and resubmit proposals.⁴⁶ In late fall 1676, Jin submitted eight new memorials “respectfully amplifying” (zun chen) his earlier positions. The only proposal for which there was evidence of the court’s objections was the first. Jin’s first plan must have been a staggering proposal for the managers of a state at war. But for those at court, it was the most promising of Jin’s four proposals. Elders at court asked Jin to consider two changes. First, the notion of drafting and assembling 120,000 men from five provinces boggled courtly minds: surely there would be abuses in the recruitment and complaints about the draft, not to mention the presence of a likely resentful army of workers not far from provinces that had been recently in rebellion. Second, the cost seemed to the emperor’s advisers simply too great; it had to be reduced. Jin responded to each of these points. To reduce the number of workers on the project, he proposed that the length of time allowed for construction be doubled, from two hundred days to four hundred days. He also proposed that carts be purchased in Henan and Shandong to facilitate moving the mud. Finally, he proposed that the river troops whose deployment he had requested be set to work along the riverbanks. This would achieve a double purpose of speeding the work and familiarizing the troops with the structures they would be responsible for inspecting. With these modifications, Jin proposed to save nearly 600,000 liang.⁴⁷

Final imperial authorization to begin work on Jin’s projects was issued on February 4, 1678, eleven months after his appointment.⁴⁸ The first proposal was approved with the extended time horizon Jin proposed; in addition, the river director was provided with 36,000 mules to assist in moving the earth. The second project was also slightly modified. Instead of two channels linking Lake Hongze with the Yellow River, Jin created only one; he had already completed this single channel by the time the final authorization was received, and he reported that there was no need to begin work on a second channel. The other proposals were approved as made; indeed, it appeared that work had begun on some of these projects, as they were necessary if boats were to carry southeast tribute to the capital in 1678.

Jin’s proposals for making the infrastructure pay for itself were received with more skepticism. The court ordered that the expenses for the project be paid for out of the regular revenues of the dynasty (zheng xiang qian liang). An allocation of 2,500,000 liang from the central treasury was provided to Jin to pay for the repairs.⁴⁹ This was a generous grant, equal to 75 percent of the revenue Jiangsu province was required to submit to the court every year. It was more than Jin had initially requested and sufficiently generous to earn the skepticism of many. But it did not provide Jin with the self-generating stream of funds that he saw as necessary for proper maintenance of the river structures. Jin was not given private access to the revenue provinces rendered to the state.

Jin and Chen had done their homework. When challenged by bureaucratic gatekeepers in the capital, they stood their ground on principles but were willing to modify numbers and requirements. Their proposal was sufficiently convincing that a court stretched for funds was willing to commit substantial resources to the effort. Through the early years of his directorship, Jin’s official life seemed charmed. His appointments were made with imperial powers, and when his proposals met with bureaucratic opposition, the emperor intervened, offering Jin and Chen the chance to rewrite. When he needed money, it was provided, not in the form he wanted but in sufficient amount to meet his request. In view of the many decisions that went his way, it would be logical to conclude that Jin was a personal protégé of the monarch. Yet in the only recorded early meeting between the two men, the emperor seemed to distrust the director and find him arrogant and closed to outside opinion.⁵⁰ The Kangxi emperor likely supported Jin not because of any personal relationship but because of the importance of the work Jin was doing.

Assessments: The Nature and Limits of Jin Fu’s Success

From the year Jin Fu’s proposals were approved until the end of his time as director, the Grand Canal flowed unimpeded to Beijing. The question of how Jin did it has fascinated scholars from the eighteenth century to the present, and the answers given have often reflected the times when they were written. One of the first assessments was by the remarkably productive and knowledgeable historian Li Zutao (1776–1854). Li wrote in the early nineteenth century, when Jin Fu’s system was breaking down, the river bureaucracy was swollen beyond reason, and the whole administration suffered from late eighteenth-century appointees who saw the canal administration as a cash cow to be systematically milked.⁵¹ Li praised Jin and his secretary, Chen Huang, as planners and managers who were able to conceive and execute projects of extraordinary scope and importance and willing to work when many others refused: “At a moment when collapse was imminent, most officials sighed, put their hands in their sleeves, and offered no ideas. Jin concentrated his heart, thought, effort, and ability on a comprehensive plan. Calculating and planning, organizing projects in sequence, he focused his effort on accomplishing ends and saving money.” Li also warned his readers not to be deceived by the occasional frustration expressed in their writings. Rather than focus on Jin’s frustrations, which may have been bitter, he encouraged his readers to pay attention to how they overcame disappointment to accomplish much.⁵²

Twentieth-century scholarship has been inclined to see Jin Fu and Chen Huang as representing modern science, or at least a proto-scientific attitude. Whether Chen and Jin were scientists depended in part on what one means by science. Writing in 1938, Hou Renzhi quoted Chen Huang’s advice to Jin Fu on taking up office as Grand Canal director: “I have observed that in human affairs, some try to push through with clever strategies, others try arrogantly to impose themselves [on a situation], others use elegant words, and still others cover their eyes and ears, seeking an empty reputation in the future. However, the nature of water is established and unchanging.… Following its nature and seeking to use it is the only method.”⁵³ Hou offered here a catalog of the ineffectual behaviors of traditional Chinese officials confronted with intractable problems. He meant to contrast these behaviors with a focus on the realities of river control that an official would have to have if he were to be successful. It was this realistic empiricism that Hou Renzhi deemed to be the “foundation of a scientific attitude” (kexue de jiben taidu).⁵⁴ Jin and Chen rejected traditional approaches; early on they proclaimed they would not be bound by adherence to precedent or respect for past practice: “There are some matters in which it is best to follow precedent and some in which current circumstances must be weighed; there are some matters in which things to be done first must be separated from things to be done later; and some matters in which everything must be done at once.”⁵⁵ Jin and Chen’s language was clear and their focus realistic, and in this sense they could be seen as proto-scientific. However, conceptually they did not advance beyond Pan Jixun. Nonetheless, Hou Renzhi offered them up hopefully as examples of early Chinese empiricism, speaking to an age of scientism, where Chinese faith in science was reinforced by contact with the western world.

Song Deyi offered another argument that Jin and Chen were innovators in February 1985. As the People’s Republic moved into a reform era, Song offered Jin as an example of one who “sought truth from fact,” the ideological desideratum of his day. Song saw the foundation of Jin and Chen’s work as an effort to rethink traditional assumptions, reexamine the entire lower Yellow River and Grand Canal basin, and meticulously catalog work to be done. On this foundation, Song saw Jin and Chen as making technological innovations. He argued that Jin’s willingness to build wider canals, more and more effective water gates, levees with earth drawn from within the stream being restrained, and sloped banks along Hongze Lake represented substantial technical improvements over Pan Jixun’s practice and significant contributions to Chinese hydrology. The novelty of each of these innovations is unclear; what is clear is that Jin’s success seemed to validate the focus on realism characteristic of the 1980s.⁵⁶

One of the most useful assessments is the most recent. Jin Fu’s work represented the Qing dynasty commitment to the regime of river maintenance that Ruth Mostern describes in The Yellow River as a “high revenue, high investment model of early modernity that spanned Eurasia, transforming its ecologies and societies.”⁵⁷ Mostern offers a useful framework for assessing what Jin did, and did not, accomplish. The fundamental problem in Yellow River management, she demonstrates, was erosion of the loess soil of northwest China. The eroded soil entered the river and became the silt that raised the riverbed increased the danger of flooding, and complicated maintenance of the canal. Jin Fu did not address this basic problem. Instead, he endeavored to control the silt-ridden river by creating a gigantic infrastructure. Such an approach, Mostern reasons, prevented catastrophe, particularly along the canal, but at significant cost. It was a cost that she finds to be “staggering” during Pan Jixun’s administration, and there is no reason to suspect that the Qing assessment was any different.

Significantly, this “high revenue, high investment” model did not prevent flooding; rather it sought to prevent damage to infrastructure. Continuing floods made Jin Fu vulnerable throughout his term. In 1680 flooding required new repairs, and Jin was formally cashiered from office but left in place to serve, a punishment known as “bearing his guilt” (daizui).⁵⁸ After floods in 1682 and a negative report on his work by the Manchu minister of finance Isanga (1638–1703), the emperor again reprimanded Jin but resisted a recommendation that he be dismissed.⁵⁹ Isanga added an accusation that surfaced often in regard to Jin: that he had received and spent a vast amount of money without producing a corresponding decrease in flooding:

At a moment of military emergency, the governor-general proposed a major repair that would settle matters once and for all. The emperor specially authorized a payment of 2,500,000 liang, ordering him to carry out the work. All of the repairs he has made were actions that he proposed. Now the deadline for completion of the work has passed, and the money has all been used up.… This year’s tribute boats have already sailed north, but there is cause to worry about the Grand Canal. The repairs Jin Fu has made in the levees are not secure in many places, and there are instances where the work is not up to standard.⁶⁰

By the mid-1680s, Jin Fu was both successful and vulnerable. He had been successful in restoring the Grand Canal, and the grain and revenue that sailed along the canal was important to Qing victory in the Rebellion of Three Feudatories. But he was also vulnerable to charges of profligacy and inefficacy whenever late summer rains brought floods to northern Jiangsu province.

In view of the length of his personal service as director and the longevity of his system of managing the river, many in the three hundred years since Jin Fu’s death have imagined him as making a singular contribution to the work of river maintenance. Conceptually, however, Jin Fu was conservative; his work did not embody conceptual innovation.⁶¹ His uniqueness lay in his ability to mix commitment to the dynasty, a careful reading of the statecraft literature, observation of nature, and detailed planning with robust, militarily inflected management. He should be remembered as an insightful administrator rather than a striking innovator. The emperor resisted calls for his dismissal because Jin got the job—or at least the most important part of it—done, and as the monarch remarked on several occasions, there was no evidence that any other official could do it better. His fall from grace, the subject of the next chapter, was not because of his new techniques, but because the emperor’s expectations for him changed.