The Heart of Heaven

The emperor’s tour to the south in the autumn of 1684 was the first time he or any Qing monarch had set foot south of the Yellow River. The trip had multiple purposes. Michael G. Chang has traced a conflict in the Kangxi court between seeing the journey “as an exercise in benevolent civil government, or as a martially inflected rite of conquest” celebrating the Qing victory in the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories in 1683. In fact, as Chang argues, the emperor pursued both ends, conspicuously engaging in administrative tasks even as he also staged battue hunts with military officials and Manchu notables. Chang also makes the important point that while on tour, imperial benevolence was conspicuously, even ritually, enacted. It was ideologically crucial that, however much the conquest had come about through military actions, the emperor appear on tour as a generous and benevolent sovereign, displaying concern and dispensing relief to any of his subjects who were suffering.¹

By his effort, the emperor announced a significant change in the Chinese social base of the dynasty. In its early years, the Qing allied with northern Chinese and fought against the southeastern Chinese, whose resistance to Manchu rule was fierce, if ineffectual. In the 1680s, the southeastern Chinese came into their own as social and intellectual leaders of elite life under the Qing. There were several reasons for this. The Chinese education of the Kangxi emperor and other Manchus of his generation alerted them to the long-standing leadership of the southeast in Chinese affairs. The economic importance of the southeast was demonstrated when grain from the region fed the armies during the war years. Never again would the Qing central government ignore the southeastern elite.

River affairs were an important concern of southern landholders. Another purpose of the tour was to acquaint the emperor with the work Jin Fu had done in its geographical context.² The emperor spent time at Suqian, Jin Fu’s base, and spoke with Jin both on his way south to Hangzhou and again on his return trip north. After the southern tour the emperor would have in his mind a mental image of the world Jin lived in and the problems he faced. On November 25, after visiting seven communities along the north bank of the river, the emperor said:

I have long been interested in river affairs. In the palace, I frequently have looked into the details of various books about river defense. On river maps you have submitted through the years, I have researched the points where levees have broken. Although I knew the difficulty of riparian maintenance, I have never, until now, personally inspected the river. I could not imagine the surging waters of the river, the distances and heights of the levees. Now as I carefully examine the terrain and understand the circumstances, and see personally [here the monarch named seven riverbank communities], each like lips embracing the current, I perceive the dangers.³

In the long speech that followed, the emperor related what he had learned during what seemed to have been an extended traveling tutorial. Many of his comments echoed Jin Fu’s positions, and it appeared that the bannerman had made good use of the emperor’s time on his trip to the south. Another benefit of the emperor’s first trip to the south for Jin was that he was able to introduce the emperor to Chen Huang and to secure the emperor’s approval for a special official appointment for his secretary. On his return trip up the Grand Canal, the emperor met Jin Fu again and parted from him with an encouraging comment: “Your river work these past few years has met with success. I know that you have exerted your full effort. If you continue to exert yourself fully, the work may be finished soon. It will be possible for the populace to return to their traditional labors, and you will have fulfilled my charge.” The emperor also presented Jin with an imperial poem written to celebrate his accomplishments and one of the boats the monarch had used on his travels.⁴

As willing as he was to praise Jin Fu’s feats of hydraulic engineering, the monarch also made clear that he had another concern. The emperor was particularly moved by the poverty and misery of peasants whose lands had been flooded. He remarked to the Jiangnan governor-general who accompanied him: “I have traveled in Zhili, Shandong, and Jiangnan, but the people of Gaoyou [District] are the most pitiful I have ever seen. Now, although the waters have dried up and they have chosen higher places for their dwellings, their fields have been ruined by the floods. They cannot make a living, and my heart cannot bear [their misery].” The emperor asked the governor-general what could be done to alleviate their situation and why it hadn’t been done. The governor-general responded, “This is the imperial heart of heaven, father and mother to the people, speaking. In fact, the people of Gaoyou are fairly fortunate.”⁵ The governor-general had a point. Although their lands were flood prone, those who lived in the delta resided on some of the richest agricultural lands in China. If the emperor had traveled farther around his empire, he certainly would have encountered peasants whose lives were more miserable. Concern for popular livelihood was, however, baked into the emperorship in Chinese political thought, and manifesting it was one of the central purposes of the tour. Moreover, the reality of flooded lands and destroyed livelihoods could not be denied and remained an imperial preoccupation.

When the Kangxi emperor asked residents of Gaoyou District how their fields could be made more secure against flooding, they responded that the essential work was not building higher levees in the west of the province, as Jin Fu had proposed, but dredging the coastal mouths of the rivers that flowed east to the sea. Elders argued that in earlier times, east-flowing streams had carried away floodwaters, but the mouths of these streams had silted up, trapping the water in delta fields. If the mouths of these rivers were dredged, future flooding could be relieved.⁶ The emperor was taken with this idea and sent the Manchu presidents of the ministries of personnel and works to the coast to inspect the river mouths to see if they were indeed closed. When they reported back that this was the case, the emperor ordered that the dredging be undertaken.⁷

The purpose of this dredging was to relieve flood danger in a region that was referred to as the “seven downriver districts.” Extending from the east side of the Grand Canal to the sea and from the south bank of the Yellow River to Taizhou, the region included Yancheng and Shanyang Districts in Huaian Prefecture, as well as Gaoyou, Baoying, Jiangdu, Taizhou, and Xinghua Districts in Yangzhou Prefecture. Because the districts were spread between two prefectures, there was no single official who spoke for all the downriver districts, and the emperor’s recognition of their situation was regarded as particularly appropriate.

Chinese scholarship is in agreement that 1684 saw a major change of direction in river policy and that the change came from the emperor, but the causes of the imperial change of mind have been variously explained. Was the emperor naive and ill informed in his judgment of the situation of the southeastern landowners?⁸ Was he bent on asserting central power over local affairs?⁹ In the absence of more evidence of the imperial thought, it is impossible to say. Seen in the larger context, however, the emperor’s actions readily conformed to the new emphasis on the southeast apparent throughout post-rebellion Kangxi politics. The emperor came to the riverbank and made a decisive and rather theatrical statement that no one could dispute. Policy direction was set.

Yu Chenglong

Recognizing that Jin Fu would be occupied with maintenance of the upriver levees, the emperor called for the appointment of another official to supervise the downriver dredging. After deliberation, the emperor approved the appointment of Yu Chenglong (1638–1700) to oversee downriver activities.¹⁰ A Hanjun bannerman and almost an exact contemporary of Jin Fu, Yu Chenglong had situated himself differently in the corps of imperial servitors. Hanjun bannermen occupied a curious space in early Qing, halfway between Manchus and Chinese. As campaigns of conquest came to an end, roles and responsibilities were sorted out, and Chinese civilians emerged who were willing to take on the task of serving the new dynasty, there was less need in the Qing order for hybrid officials. Bannermen responded to the declining rationale for their existence in different ways. A generation after the 1680s, Pamela Crossley has shown, a prominent Hanjun banner family “chose” to become Manchus, adopting the naming practices and clothing of their overlords.¹¹ Yu Chenglong made a different choice. From a Zhili family that had joined the Qing armies, Yu was appointed as district magistrate in Zhili; he prided himself on honesty in administration and modeled himself on the then Zhili governor-general, whose honesty and transparency had earned him the nickname Clear-skies Yu (Yu Qingtian). Having the same surname as the governor-general, Yu took the same given name as his patron.¹² When Yu Qingtian was transferred to the governor-generalship of Jiangnan, he especially requested that Yu Chenglong be transferred with him, and the younger man became prefect of the capital district of Jiangnan. While on his southern tour in 1684, the emperor met Yu Qingtian and Yu Chenglong and, remarking on the reputation for honest administration Chenglong had acquired, promoted him to provincial judge of Anhui province. The responsibility for dredging the lower river was added to his responsibilities as provincial judge.

The emperor not only promoted Yu Chenglong but praised him lavishly. On his return to Beijing, Kangxi summoned Yu Chenglong’s adoptive father and presented him with a fur robe to recognize his achievement in raising such a son. The emperor wrote that the Qing had treated Chinese and Manchu bannermen equally, but he worried about the behavior of Chinese bannermen. Contrasting Yu Chenglong with bannermen who moved through the provinces surrounded by entourages of retainers, sought only luxury, and competed for wealth, the emperor wrote:

Yu Chenglong is honest and loves the people. My heart delights in him, so it was that I rewarded him by promoting him to be Anhui provincial judge. I have also especially ordered that his father, a member of the banner army, be given a robe.… All who are in the eight banners ought to henceforth scour their hearts and eliminate evil habits, so that their children can serve in appointments outside the capital. It is appropriate that each of you in the banners should write letters to your children, urging them to be honest and emulate Yu Chenglong.¹³

How Jin Fu regarded all this praise for Yu Chenglong cannot be known, but he took a very dim view of Yu’s assignment to dredge the lower rivers. In his memorial acknowledging receipt of the order to cooperate with Yu, Jin reacted. The argument he offered was not ad hominem. Jin praised the emperor for his interest in river affairs but urged him to remember that river work must be carried out by those who “grasp the whole situation” (yi wo yaoling shen quanju). Jin and Chen’s approach to river control rested on the notion of using the river’s current to scour the riverbed; given such a strategy, large pools of stagnant water in the lower river areas would work against such a policy. Such pools would form, Jin believed, because northern Jiangsu formed a natural basin, so that the land in the delta was in fact lower than sea level. Encouraging the flow of seawater into this lower delta area would only lead to more flooding of the lower delta and not achieve the emperor’s purpose. It would be like trying “to pour ten gallons of water into five-gallon container; inevitably water would flow over the edges of the container, and move in all directions.”¹⁴

Was Jin also jealous of the attention and authority the emperor bestowed on Yu Chenglong? This is entirely possible. Yu represented a different approach to the Hanjun bannerman’s role in government, in which administration was a civilian enterprise, as opposed to the semi-military enterprise of Jin Fu. There may well have been agitation in the Jiangnan delta for Jin’s removal at the time Yu was appointed, and some may have seen the other bannerman’s appointment as a step toward this end.¹⁵ Even Guo Xiu saw the purpose of Yu Chenglong’s appointment as restraining Jin Fu. This was highly unlikely in view of the ranks involved—Yu was a provincial judge (rank 4b) recently promoted from prefect, while Jin Fu held the rank of governor-general (2a)—but it may have been the hope of many in the southeast.

Contemporaries and historians agree that Yu’s appointment was the root cause of the clash that dominated river affairs for the next five years. The decision was the emperor’s alone; most at court expected that Jin would manage both the upstream and downstream projects. In “Kangqian shiqi,” Wang Yinghua argues that the emperor had lost confidence in Jin Fu and that he trusted Yu Chenglong’s reputation for honesty more than Jin Fu’s technical expertise.¹⁶ This was unlikely in view of the confidence in Jin the emperor had expressed in 1688. Another possibility was that the emperor deliberately meant to set the two officials in competition to see which would be most successful, a possibility made likely by the monarch’s repeated musing about how the abilities of a potential river director could be tested before he was appointed. The emperor’s own rationale was that Jin Fu was very busy, the two projects were far apart, and the lower river dredging would be too much of a burden for the director. However the decision was made, it set upstream and downstream efforts in opposition to one another and provoked a fairly spectacular response from Jin Fu.

1685: Counterproposal

To a degree that the monarch may not have realized, the downriver project posed a direct challenge to Jin Fu and Chen Huang, who prided themselves on their specialized knowledge of the geology and hydrography of northern Jiangsu and firmly believed that dredging the lower rivers would not work. As much as they feared the emperor’s new project, they could not dismiss the emperor’s concern for northern Jiangsu landowners. Their challenge was, therefore, to develop a scheme to achieve the imperial goals in northern Jiangsu, a counterproposal that could be substituted for dredging the river. They did this in 1684–85, and their plan was gigantic.

In the autumn of 1685, Jin Fu conveyed to the emperor four large proposals for new construction that, in his view, would obviate the need for Yü’s dredging of the river mouths. The first of these projects involved three revisions to infrastructure along the Grand Canal and Lake Hongze. It became one of Jin Fu’s cardinal principles that the potential for flooding should be controlled at its upriver origins rather than downriver. Flooding in the seven downriver counties began with water overtopping and then breaking down the levees along the east side of the Grand Canal. To control this danger, he proposed to strengthen the Gao Family Dike, which restrained Lake Hongze.¹⁷ Second, he recommended that shallow spots in the Grand Canal be dredged to allow water to flow smoothly north to the Yellow River. The third of Jin’s upriver projects was an effort to shore up the levee on the east side of the Grand Canal to alleviate flood danger. Jin projected that these three projects would cost 532,800 liang.¹⁸

Jin’s fourth proposal was his largest and represented his final response to the imperial initiative Yu Chenglong supervised. To alleviate the danger of flooding in the downriver districts, he proposed building a system of canals and locks that would guide excess water from the Grand Canal across northern Jiangsu to the sea. If such infrastructure were built, Jin was prepared to guarantee that “when the work is completed, there will be no further worries” (gong wan zhi hou, bixu yong wu tao huan).¹⁹ This solution would, however, be very expensive. Calculating the cost of building the three new canals and the necessary locks, Jin estimated that the effort would cost 2,780,000 liang.²⁰ To build the new canals, Jin put aside his preference for local officials as overseers in the face of the enormous amount of work his proposed project entailed. He proposed to appoint fifty-four supervisors and two hundred assistants, and commandeer the services of nineteen sub-magisterial personnel in the downriver counties. The proposal reflected Jin Fu’s taste for large infrastructural solutions and his confidence—almost hubris—that he understood the hydrology of north Jiangsu better than anyone else of his generation.

What made the proposal controversial was the way Jin recommended funding it. Declaring that he could not, in good conscience, request such a large amount of money from the central government, he outlined means by which it could be repaid. Some of the costs could be borne by the districts through which the new canals would pass; salt merchants, who would be provided with cheaper water transportation from the coastal salt marshes where they produced their product to the inland markets where they sold it, could pay more. But the largest portion of the reimbursement would come from renting out lands that became cultivable as they were dried out. Jin estimated that as much as 450,000–600,000 acres could be made available. He envisioned that the tenants for these “newly created lands” would be landless peasants brought from areas of misery and dearth. Landless peasants often failed when they were resettled, Jin argued, because they were given only marginal lands and a mule. To guarantee success, Jin proposed that new tenants of northern Jiangsu should be given food and clothing, and rent should not be collected for the first three years while they settled in. Once rent collection began, a stream of revenue would be created that would pay for the proposed project, underwrite further repairs to the river infrastructure, and even produce extra income that could be returned to the central treasury.²¹

Jin referred to the lands he would provide to peasants as “military agricultural colonies” (tuntian). Military agricultural colonies were first created during the Tang Dynasty (618–908), when they were used to support the standing army; peasant tenants farmed lands owned by the state, and the rents they paid went to support soldiers. In the Qing, about 23,000 acres of land were set aside as colonies to support the 60,000–70,000 men who pulled barges loaded with tribute grain along the Grand Canal.²² The Qing also set aside lands throughout northern China to support the Manchu bannermen who served in garrisons in the capital and other cities. In principle, such colonies could be created, and Jin Fu’s notion that land in Jiangnan could be set aside for poor peasants from other regions had precedents.

The problem was with Jin’s estimate of the land available for such colonies, which he produced by comparing an estimate of the total area of southern districts with the amount of land that was taxed. Had tax registers been an accurate measure of the land owned, this might have been an appropriate procedure, but tax registers in the delta were notoriously inaccurate. There had not been a recent cadastral survey, and tax obligations represented more a negotiation between landowners and officials than an accurate statement of land tenure. Commenting on Jin Fu’s proposal, the Baoying County Gazetteer noted that in some of the downriver counties, four qing was counted as one qing for tax purposes, and in others, ten qing was counted as one.²³ In his memorial, Jin Fu specifically cited the case of Taizhou District, which he estimated contained 40,000 qing of land, of which only 9,300 was taxed. The Baoying Gazetteer noted that in Taizhou, four qing counted as one for tax purposes, so that in fact the 9,300 qing that were taxed constituted all of the land in the county. Despite Jin’s observation, landowners would claim that there was no empty land in Taizhou, and any effort to create agricultural colonies there would involve seizing land that Taizhou residents regarded as their own. From the standpoint of the Baoying Gazetteer, Jin’s scheme was a land grab, an expropriation.²⁴

This proposal, which would be contested at court and in Jiangnan for the next three years, involved a measure of time warp. There was a moment in the very early Qing when Manchu forces were allied with landless peasants from north China against the landholders of the southeastern delta. At that moment, which was also the time when the Qing administration was most dependent on Chinese martial bannermen, it would have made sense to resettle landless peasants from north China in the delta. However, by the 1680s, the prospect of dispossessing delta landholders and planting substantial numbers of alien landless peasants on their lands was no longer attractive. Thirty years earlier, Jin Fu’s proposal might well have been welcome in Beijing; in 1680, it was anachronistic.

Jin Fu’s recommendations may have been anachronistic in another respect. As the requests made their way up the chain of review, it developed that the cost of the work was not quite the obstacle that Jin imagined it would be. The Ministry of Works recommended approval, and the full court discussed the proposal on November 18. The emperor addressed the three requests separately. He seemed most intrigued by the third one and asked the Chinese minister of works whether it would in fact prevent flooding in the downriver counties. When the minister allowed that it would, the emperor remarked, “The purpose of river defense is to protect the people’s livelihood. Moreover, the state treasury is somewhat fuller at present than in the past [guoji jiao qian shao yu]. If this really would save people’s livelihood and allow more grain to be raised, then perhaps 2,780,000 liang would not be too much [to spend].” It remains a remarkable testimony to the growth of the post-rebellion economy that the emperor could contemplate making an expenditure of this size from the central treasury. The proposal that military colonies be established to support the river commissioner’s treasury particularly troubled the emperor, who commented on this aspect of Jin’s proposal: “If we dry out the land but demand rent in return, it will be a burden to the people. My thought is that drying out the land and then returning it to the people to cultivate would be the best.”²⁵

Dueling Officials

On the same day that Jin Fu’s project was discussed at court, summonses were issued for Jin and Yu Chenglong to come to the capital for an imperial audience. No rationale was provided for this either in the edict record or in the diary, but as the two officials directed projects that had the same end but approached it by opposing means, it seems likely the officials were meant to reach some sort of agreement. Jin Fu started for the capital on December 3.²⁶ When Yu and Jin met, both clung stoutly to their points of view. Courtiers reported that no compromise was possible (yi bu hua yi). The decision was left to the emperor, who sought further input: “Now we have two people, each convinced of his own view, and both views are logical [you li]. It seems that both could be accomplished. But we don’t know which would benefit and not harm the people. You should ask officials at court from the seven downriver districts which of the two projects they support. They can gather together their fellow landsmen.”²⁷

Within a few days one of the diarists of action and repose, Qiao Lai (1642–1694) from Baoying District, emerged to give testimony.²⁸ Qiao concurred with the opinions the emperor had heard on his trip to the south and testified, “The work Yu proposes will be easy to accomplish and will benefit the people. The work Jin proposes will be hard to accomplish and will harm the people.” In particular, building levees along the east-flowing rivers would damage fields, homes, and ancestral graves. After Qiao testified, the emperor asked whether he was representing only his own views or those of the district elites. Qiao answered that the landowners of the district were in agreement.²⁹

A note in the Baoying Gazetteer detailed how this agreement had been reached. The Gazetteer claimed that before Qiao’s appearance at court, Chen Huang had offered Qiao a bribe of 100,000 liang to testify in favor of Jin’s proposal, which Qiao rejected. Also, before Qiao’s testimony, officials from the Huaiyang downriver districts had drafted a thousand-word memorial that one of their number, a censor, was to present opposing Jin Fu’s plan.³⁰ To prepare the memorial they had gathered at Qiao’s Beijing residence one evening to vent their opposition. The labor and money needed to build the canals, they argued, would bankrupt the districts: “The rich would become poor and the poor would flee.” To secure land for his canal, Jin would seize farmlands and gravesites, which would cease to be the people’s land and become property of the state. The canal Jin proposed to build would not be high enough or wide enough to prevent flooding when autumn storms came. The hundreds of new officials set to supervise the work would distort selection procedures. All in all, the officials decided, Jin’s proposal was one that their generation should “fight to the death” (wo bei dang yi si zheng zhi).³¹

Such were the views of the elite, the emperor reasoned, but what about the ordinary people? The emperor’s query raised an interesting issue: How did a conquest regime solicit public opinion when memories of armed resistance were still fresh and there were financial interests at stake? The figure to whom the emperor turned to handle the inquiries and reconcile this increasingly complex case was Samha (d. 1704), a Manchu of the Plain Yellow Banner. Samha’s position as Manchu minister of works made him a logical choice, although there was also a Chinese minister of works who might have been better suited to interview local people. However, Samha, who earned the jinshi degree in 1655, was so well versed in Chinese that he had made a career of high-level errands on behalf of the court. His most famous errand came shortly after the emperor had accepted Wu Sangui’s resignation, the act that would trigger the rebellion. Samha was sent to Guizhou to quietly investigate the situation and discovered that the Guizhou governor and others had turned coat, allying themselves with Wu. Samha raced back to the capital and informed the emperor that the war had begun.³²

When Samha and his team reached Jiangnan, they found that the situation was hardly black and white. After consulting with local officials, Jiangsu governor Tang Bin (1627–1687) and the director-general of grain transport, Samha had a meeting with ten residents selected by the local officials to assess attitudes toward the projects of building levees upriver and dredging the lower rivers. There were a variety of opinions; in fact, there were so many objections to both projects that Samha returned to Beijing to recommend that neither be undertaken.³³ When the report was discussed at a court conference with Yu Chenglong present, courtiers raised the issue of cost. If neither project was obviously superior, should both be undertaken? How much would Yu’s dredging project cost? Yu answered that it would cost about 100,000 liang. In the matter of cost estimates, Yu was nowhere near as prepared as Jin Fu, whose memorials carefully spelled out the nature of the work to be done and the costs of materials and labor.³⁴ Since the courtiers had several times recommended Jin Fu’s projects, they came to regard Yu’s coastal dredging project as an expensive and unnecessary add-on.³⁵ Reluctantly, the emperor went along with this advice, with the caveat that further choices might be made when flood season came. It seemed that Yu Chenglong had lost the battle, but he had not lost the emperor’s confidence. A week later he was promoted to governor of Zhili.³⁶

So matters remained through the winter of 1686, which, because it was the dry season, was when most of the repair work was accomplished. In June, however, a chance meeting at court cast the situation in the south in a different light. In April 1686, the emperor decided that since Tang Bin, then governor of Jiangsu, was such a towering talent, he deserved to serve in a more important position, and so appointed him minister of rites.³⁷ Tang Bin moved to the capital and had an audience with the emperor on taking up his new position. The conversation turned to conditions in Jiangsu, specifically to flood prevention. Some of what Tang told the emperor reinforced what Samha had reported: there was opposition to both the upriver and downriver projects. Jin Fu’s dredging project was opposed because it would destroy ancestral graves along the river; moreover, it would be very expensive and difficult to accomplish since moving muddy earth was not easy. The coastal project was resisted because drought conditions in Jiangsu were not ideal for large infrastructure projects. If, however, the emperor truly wanted to embark on a river project in the delta, Tang ventured to observe that the coastal dredging project made more sense than the upriver project. “If we can open up the river one foot, that will bring one foot’s benefit; if we can open up the river by one inch that will bring one inch’s benefit. After the excess water is drained away and the lakes and rivers of central Jiangsu are returned to normal, then dredging and levee building can be undertaken, and projects will have been carried out in proper sequence.” Tang Bin also suggested that the expense of dredging the lower rivers could be borne by the districts along the riverbanks and the labor carried out by local people, particularly if taxes were remitted for several years in these selected districts. Why hadn’t this view been expressed in Samha’s report, the emperor asked. Tang Bin responded that because the report had to be first drafted in Manchu, then translated into Chinese, he had not wanted to complicate the process; moreover, Samha’s main mission had been to contact local residents.³⁸

The emperor summoned Samha the next day. Had he heard Tang Bin’s view when he was in Jiangnan? Why hadn’t he reported on it? Samha conceded that while he was in the south, Tang Bin had mentioned that dredging the high places in the lower rivers might have some benefit for the people. But, Samha said, Tang had presented the idea only in conversation; he had not publicly presented the view with evidence (bing fei gongtong shang que). Samha’s distinction between views presented with evidence and those offered in conversation seemed overly legalistic for what had been a fact-finding mission. The emperor pressed further. Did Samha believe that dredging the rivers would be beneficial? Samha responded that he feared the upriver levees could not be built, and if this were the case, the lower river dredging would be beneficial.³⁹ Had Samha in fact suppressed Tang’s view? In retrospect and without evidence, conclusions can hardly be definite.

On July 25, a little more than a month after interviewing Tang, the emperor asked his court to review the lower-river dredging project yet again. In response, they raised several issues: For dredging at the coasts to succeed, it would be necessary to close upriver floodgates to reduce the flow of water downriver. Could this be done? Or would closing the upriver floodgates so significantly increase the risk of flooding that the effort would be counterproductive? Moreover, could the lower river counties support the dredging operations out of their own funds, or would money have to be allocated from the central treasury? On the first issue, the court concluded that the former governor’s views “must be correct” (bique), that closing the water gates and dredging would be possible and productive. It was decided, however, that in view of the drought, the central government should allocate revenues for the coastal project.⁴⁰ They concluded that Samha had been too willing to listen to the testimony of Gao Chengmei, the Yangzhou prefect, who was likely a protégé of Jin Fu.⁴¹ It was also claimed that the review committee had visited the coast at a moment when the seas were particularly high, and therefore reached their conclusion in error. Despite these mitigating circumstances, Samha was cashiered from his post as minister of works on August 4.

Having set two officials in competition, the emperor found himself unable to effect a compromise, or even to secure the necessary information to choose between them. The longer the competition persisted, the more officials took sides, and the more likely it became that partisanship and even corruption would surround the decision. As much as the emperor professed to despise partisanship, he created it through his own policies in the late 1680s. He would also be surprised by Jin Fu’s dogged persistence.

River Redux

Confronted with evidence that there was support in Jiangnan for dredging the lower rivers, the emperor resolved to continue the interrupted project. Yu Chenglong being otherwise employed, the emperor sought another official to supervise the project. He settled on Sun Zaifeng (d. 1689). Unlike Jin and Yu, Sun was not a bannerman, but he was nonetheless well known to the emperor. From Zhejiang, Sun had received his jinshi degree in 1670, ranking second in the competition; he was appointed Hanlin compiler and served as an imperial diarist. He had also delivered several Classics Mat lectures.⁴² Sun had accompanied the Kangxi emperor on his first southern tour and may well have been present when the seven county landholders proposed dredging at the mouths of the rivers.⁴³

With Sun’s appointment came a call for Jin Fu’s removal from office. Arguing that during his nine years in office, Jin Fu had been unable to accomplish his goal, the Chinese minister of works recommended his dismissal. As was his habit in important matters, the emperor referred the matter to his courtiers for deliberation, observing that “if at given moment when there appeared to be no accomplishment, one applied administrative punishments and appointed a new person, there could easily be mistakes.” Moving too fast in such an important matter could lead to disastrous consequences. The emperor reflected that it would be better to wait for a year or two before taking action. Following the emperor’s suggestion, the courtiers recommended that Jin Fu be, once again, formally dismissed from office but allowed to remain at his post. Accepting the recommendation, the emperor declared that the issue of Jin Fu’s service appeared to have become a matter of factional dispute. Courtiers did not realize, the emperor said, that whether Jin stayed or left, the real issue was how secure the river works were. Courtiers once again pointed to the need in the near future to close the floodgates and argued that unless a knowledgeable person were in charge, the danger could be high.⁴⁴

The issue of closing the floodgates dominated the next few months of discussion. In late August 1686, Sun Zaifeng set off to the seacoast, inspected four east-flowing rivers, and established priorities among them based on the amount of water they channeled. He reported his findings to the court on November 29, requesting approval of his plans.⁴⁵ Sun also asked that several flood prevention embankments be changed to floodgates, so that the flow of water along the lower rivers could be regulated more precisely. The emperor found these proposals sensible and approved them, then ordered Sun to consult with Jin Fu to coordinate the work. The meeting between Jin and Sun took place in early December, and Sun asked Jin to close the upriver floodgates so that downriver dredging could occur.⁴⁶ Jin Fu refused, or as he subsequently claimed, he agreed to close some of the gates but not all of them. On December 10, the court received Sun Zaifeng’s memorial requesting that the emperor order Jin Fu to close the gates so work on the lower river could proceed. If Sun was requesting such an order, the emperor observed, their meeting could not have gone well. Courtiers suggested that both Jin and Sun be summoned to the capital for a face-to-face meeting with the emperor, but the emperor decided that he really only needed to speak to Jin Fu. The river director was summoned to the capital to explain his refusal to facilitate lower-river dredging.

It was not until March 1687, near the end of the winter work season on the rivers, that Jin Fu appeared at court. Jin underwent two days of interrogation on February 28 and March 1, 1687. He was first interviewed by senior court officials, during which he indicated that he willing to close the floodgates along the canal south of Gaoyou District but steadfastly refused to close all the water gates north of Gaoyou, particularly the six gates he had himself constructed in the Gao Family Dike. His reasoning was that the Gao Family Dike surrounded Lake Hongze, and if that lake became too full and the gates were closed, the excess water would pour down the course of the Yellow River, bringing flooding and interfering with the transport of tribute grain. The interview was then interrupted by the arrival of a Khalka ambassador whom the emperor had to meet.⁴⁷

The court officials reported Jin’s testimony to the emperor, who then met Jin in an audience. The emperor asked if Jin wanted to add anything to his account, and Jin complained that at a moment when his own treasury as governor-general of the Grand Canal was empty, money was being spent on what he termed “useless dredging of river mouths.” He then repeated his argument that if the lower rivers were dredged at the coast as proposed, seawater would flow into the upper Jiangsu basin, an objection that the emperor rejected out of hand.⁴⁸ At this point, Tang Bin pointed out that levees far along the Yellow River had been reinforced several times and water gates installed, and therefore they should be able to withstand increased flow, were that necessary. Jin Fu responded, “River affairs are very difficult to understand. You must have held office for two or three years before you understand them. After your experience, can you really say you understand such matters? When I was first appointed, I made many mistakes, and only then could I say I understood the situation.”⁴⁹ Jin Fu’s claim here—that his special expertise and knowledge of the lower Yellow and Huai Rivers area provided him with the authority to reject the observations of senior officials like Tang Bin and even of the emperor—was a dangerous one at the Qing court. Although the Kangxi emperor was curious and open-minded about scientific truths, the notion that specialized knowledge gave one priority in a court of generalists was problematic.

The next day, the emperor effected a compromise. He suggested that if Jin would close the water gate between the Yellow River and Lake Hongze, then the danger of the lake overfilling would be alleviated, and the gates along the Gao Family Dike could be safely closed. Faced with a direct imperial order, Jin Fu could not refuse, though he asserted that the closure could only occur during the three dry winter months and made clear that the responsibility was the emperor’s. As it was already close to the end of the first lunar month of 1687, this meant there would only be two months for dredging the lower rivers.

The ensuing summer of 1687 would be Jin’s last one as director, as impeachment resulted in his dismissal in January 1688. The problem that ended his tenure was not his stubborn opposition to opening the floodgates, although his position came within a hair’s breadth of ignoring a direct order of the Son of Heaven. Nor was Jin’s downfall the product of his claim that his superior knowledge of the river system should enable him to prevail over several of the most celebrated and accomplished scholar-officials of the day, although certainly this claim put Jin at odds with the dominant attitudes of a Confucian court. What brought down Jin Fu was the attempt he made, beginning in the summer of 1687, to seize lands along the riverbanks with the intent of creating agricultural colonies. This created an uproar in the seven downriver counties.

Effective work on the river infrastructure required a delicate balance among local, central, and bureaucratic interests. On the rare occasions when these interests were in accord, much could be accomplished; when they were not, chaos could ensue.⁵⁰ At one level, the argument in 1687 was over seized lands, flooded property, and ruined gravesites. At another level, the conflict was a deep, long-standing one between the state interest in maintaining the Grand Canal infrastructure and the southeastern grain it carried and landowners’ interest in preventing flooding along the rivers and streams of Jiangsu. Money spent on the canal was money not spent on flood protection, and steps necessary to sustain the canal could increase flood danger. Jin Fu, servant of the Manchu state, had long effectively maintained the canal, but he did not see his role as serving the interests of landowners. This stance was appropriate through the early years of his directorate. Once the landholders had the emperor on their side, Jin became vulnerable. His overreaction—a vast drainage scheme, military agricultural colonies, and a bribe offered to Jiangsu people in the capital—got him in trouble. Hearing of the tumult, a new censor resolved to bring the matter to the attention of the emperor. The conflict moved once again from the riverbanks of Jiangsu to the Forbidden City. Here, according to Guo Xiu, it attracted the attention of the powerful grand secretary Mingju.