In Manchuria (48 page)

But Manchuria long predates the Japanese invasion
Elliott 2, p. 635. The Party’s organization was crushed in 1937, but Elliott notes that even future premier Zhou Enlai and president Liu Shaoqi used
manzhou
(Manchuria) in their correspondence, suggesting that “the name did not grossly violate everyone’s nationalistic sentiments of the time.”

Tartary, as Peter Fleming wrote, “is not strictly a geographical term, any more than Christendom is” (p.
14
). It referred to peoples from the Caspian to Korea and was used in English for the first time by Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales
. Perhaps it was born from Tarturus, Latin for the bowels of Hades, and the fiery destruction unleashed by Mongolians in eastern Europe (Elliott
2
, pp.
625
–
26
). On English maps, the Manchu domain around Beijing’s palace was commonly marked as the Tartar City.

In eighteenth-century Jesuit-drawn map of China included ethnographic information and singled out the Northeast as “
ancien pays des Mantcheou qui ont conquit la Chine
.” Japanese editions changed that to Mansh
û
, from which London editions used the Manchew. By the early nineteenth century Manchuria (and Mandshuria and Mantchooria) appeared in American atlases, entering common and often romanticized usage (Elliott 2, pp. 626–32).

In
1993
, the U.S. Census stopped counting American farmers
From the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s “Ag101” page:
http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html
. Of the 2 percent of the American population who live on farms, only half actually farm for a living. Thus, less than 1 percent of Americans farm full-time. (A farm is defined as an operation that sells more than $1,000 in goods annually.) There are 2.2 million farms in the U.S., down from 6.8 million in 1935. Conglomeration and mechanization sees 188,000 farms (9 percent of the total) producing two-thirds of America’s agricultural output. Size matters: viable crop/livestock operation in the Corn Belt would need between two and three thousand acres of row crops and six hundred sows to be economically viable for the long term.

That number was plummeting
Boehler 1. The total number of villages declined from 368,000 to 269,000 in 2012.

The variety is commonly used in sushi
Wasteland plants the rice variety named
japonica
. Chinese botanists have long been unhappy with the nomenclature for the two subspecies of Asian domesticated rice—
Oryza sativa
—grown in the country:
indica
and
japonica
. The names obscure the process of subspeciation, making the grains sound like imports from India and Japan. While rice most likely originated in India, China domesticated the varieties of
indica
and
japonica
that it grows, which it instead calls
xian
and
geng
, respectively.

The company provided rice seed
The guaranteed payment was double China’s average annual rural per capita income of 7,000 yuan
($1,100; one-third that of urban residents).

Chapter 3: Lineages

In
1976
a nationwide campaign had begun
The so-called one child policy, officially called the “family planning policy,” was introduced in 1979 and is credited with reducing China’s population growth but also creating a gender imbalance—through infanticide and selective abortions—as couples favored having a boy instead of a girl. Rural residents, members of ethnic minorities, and parents who themselves are single children are allowed to have two children, and the birth of twins to urban residents is permitted, as is the payment of a large fine to have more than one child.

In the
1947
book
From the Soil
The book, by sociologist Fei Xiaotong, is subtitled
The Foundations of Chinese Society
. His teacher scolded him for writing “The same as above,” but Fei thought,
Every day my life was the same. Get up in the morning, go to school, play and go to sleep at night. What else could I write?
“When the teacher forbade all the students to write the same as above, we had to make up lies” (pp. 57–58).

Indeed, the best “memoir” I have read of a Chinese farm
University of Texas history professor Li Huaiyin’s thick academic study
Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History,
1948
–
2008
. It depicts the hamlet of Dongtai, in eastern coastal Jiangsu province.

Chapter 4: Ruins and Remains

The large-scale cemeteries included foundations of solid houses
Nelson, pp. 213–18.

The finds evinced that the people who resided here
Ibid., p. 252.

Some archaeological sites even suggested habitation
Ibid., p. 252.

His handlers brought Shaw to a room
Condon, p. 20.

When Manchu cavalry
Elliott 1, on pp. 1–2, has a great description of the battle, which he calls “China’s Hastings.”

The Great Wall was, in fact, a series of shifting fortifications
For three centuries Ming rule ebbed and flowed in the Northeast but its dominion included the present-day Liaodong Peninsula, today’s Liaoning province, demarcated by a wall that was shifted several times. (Thanks to Great Wall scholar David Spindler.)

In
1754
the Manchu emperor Qianlong described the barrier
Edmonds, p. 599. The poem is titled “The Qianlong Emperor’s Authoritative Poem on the Willow Palisade.” The translation is reproduced from Edmonds’ article.

A team of British explorers crossing Manchuria in
1886
James, p. 6.

The boy was orphaned
Crossley 1, p. 48.

He also ordered that Jurchen women
Han Chinese traditionally did not cut their hair, seeing it as a legacy inherited from their parents. Under Manchu dominion, however, those who refused to shave their temples faced execution. For nearly three centuries Chinese knew the slogan: “Keep your hair and lose your head; lose your hair and keep your head.” Only monks were exempt.

His name was Nurhaci
I first heard of him as a child, via another story. In the opening scene of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, our hero swaps a jade urn containing Nurhaci’s ashes with a Manchurian gangster named Lao Che (a play on the name of the famous Manchu novelist Lao She).

His son would establish the Qing dynasty and in 1635 decreed
Crossley 1, p. 15. The name change contrasted the erstwhile Jurchen from the Mongol and Chinese-martial (
hanjun
) groups that together formed its military administrative organization named the Eight Banners (
??
ba qi
). The hereditary manorial system, a martial caste akin to Russia’s Cossacks, divided territory into plain or bordered red, blue, yellow, and white banners.

The contemporary Chinese term
??
(
manzu
) means not “Manchu” but “the Man ethnicity.”

The son, named Hong Taiji, called the dynasty the Qing (“clarity”), a character associated with water, which subdued the fire-associated Ming. The character for
Qing
has a connotation with Manjusri’s enlightened state as well. The previous Jurchen dynasty, the Jin, built shrines to the bodhisattva, including one from 1137 still standing at Foguang Temple, on central China’s Wutai Mountain.

The renaming proclamation took place in November 1635 and read: “Originally, the name of our people was Manju, Hada, Ula, Yehe, and Hoifa. Ignorant people call these ‘Jurchens.’ [But] the Jurchens are those of the same clan of Coo Mergen Sibe. What relation are they to us? Henceforth, everyone shall call [us] by our people’s original name, Manju. Uttering ‘Jurchen’ will be a crime” (Elliott 1, p. 71).

Ten days later, the emperor ordered: “The name of the country is called ‘Manchu’” (Ibid., p. 401).

Many live in clusters such as the Manchu Autonomous County
Despite being one of China’s largest ethnic minority groups, the Manchu were the last to be granted an area with a modicum of self-governance, in 1983. By then, fourteen of the largest fifteen groups had their own autonomous regions and prefectures. The delay could have stemmed from spite. Or it evinced that the Manchu had—unlike Tibetans and Muslim Hui people—melted into Han Chinese society and didn’t warrant an autonomous zone (Shao, pp. 210–11).

A Jesuit priest who accompanied the emperor
Verbiest, p. 75.

Chapter 5: The Waking of Insects

An English traveler passing through in
1903
found
Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale), p. 431.

The old walled city was made of wood
Fogel, p. 255. The poet was Omachi Keigetsu. Fogel notes that it was one of a number of recurring expressions aimed at familiarizing a foreign place by nativizing it (like “the Paris of the Orient,” “the New York of Asia,” etc.). But there was no suggestion here of an imperialistic tone: “since Kyoto, especially in winter, was revered by Japanese as the quintessence of beauty, this was extremely high (perhaps exaggerated) praise for Jilin.”

In the late nineteenth century, an English explorer
Younghusband, p. 43. I loved his account, which felt like a portal directly to the past—in part because, at the New York Public Library, I was the first person since 1918 to check the book out. It looked, felt, and smelled of its age. He writes “to many another kindred spirit, who shares with me that love for adventure and seeking out the unknown which has grown up within me. The great pleasure in writing is to feel that it is possible, by this means, to reach such men; to . . . pass on to others about to start on careers of adventure, the same keen love of travel and of Nature which I have received from those who have gone before.”

Chapter 6: Grain Rain

In
2010
,
65
percent of China’s “mass incidents”
Landesa. Its seventeen-province survey, published in 2012, visited 1,791 villages and found that 43 percent had experienced forced appropriations of arable land for commercial use since 1990, when China began allowing developers to operate. It estimated that the land of four million rural residents was taken annually.

Dr. Liu suggested they be among the first
China observes international standards for organic certification, requiring third-party verification that the food was grown genetically unmodified—without artificial fertilizer, herbicides, or insecticide—in soil tested for residue heavy metals.

In
2010
the results of a countrywide soil survery
Ministry of Environmental Protection, quoted from Wong. In early 2013 the Ministry’s book
Soil Pollution and Physical Health
said that “more than 13 million tons of crops harvested each year were contaminated with heavy metals, and that 22 million acres of farmland were affected by pesticides.” It estimated that one-sixth of arable land was polluted.

The official who announced eight million acres were unfit for farming was Wang Shiyuan, vice minister of land resources.

In early
2014
the government
“China Alerted by Serious Soil Pollution, Vows Better Protection,” Xinhua, April 17, 2014. The report was issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land Resources, based on a study done from April 2005 to December 2013.

Chapter 7: The Pilgrims’ Progress

Its cities’ new skylines notwithstanding
In 2013 the World Bank commended China for being the first developing country to lift half its population out of poverty. Estimates of the number of impoverished vary. China’s news agency reported State Council statistics that said the figure fell from 166 million at the end of 2010 to “98.99 million now” (“UN Official Praises China’s Poverty Reduction,” Xinhua, October 17, 2013).

I have not words to express to you the multitude of mosquitoes
James, quoted in Lee, p. 5.

To combat the bloodsuckers
Uttered by Father de La Brunière, quoted in Simpson (Putnam Weale). James quote in Lee, p. 5.

On his 1886 expedition
Younghusband, p. 12.

If any one is missing
Du Halde, p. 98.

Travelers disappeared into the region’s forests
Ibid., p. 96.

Considering the sights on this leg one hundred years later,
Younghusband
p. 12.

An English consul traveling to Jilin city
Hosie, p. 23.

A Chinese miner who struck it rich
Lee, p. 92.

One brigand, named Ma the Crazy
Ibid., p. 94.

In the nineteenth century, the late-summer rainy season
Reardon-Anderson, p. 112.