The Chinese countryside is epitomised in the word for landscape, shanshui, which literally means 'mountains [and] water'. Though many Chinese may pass all their lives without ever seeing a mountain, and many others live great distances from the nearest river, these two features have long dominated the economic and political fortunes of the country, acting both as lines of communication and as barriers to it. They were sources of inspiration for philosophers and poets. Artists and craftsmen spent their lifetime painting them and representing them in jade, wood, and other materials. To borrow a metaphor from the 11th-century landscape theorist Guo Si, the physiognomy of mountains could be gentle and reassuring, but might also be stern and forbidding. Many mountains were regarded as sacred, the mist on their peaks mingling with the incense burned by the faithful after arduous pilgrimages. Most of them attracted local devotees, but nine were revered nationally, five by Daoists and four by Buddhists. The Buddhist Holy Mountains were at Putuo (Zhejiang province, in the east), Jiuhua (Anhui province, south), Emei (Sichuan, west), and Wutai (Shanxi, north). Pilgrims came to them not only from all parts of China, but even from abroad. One of these was the famous Japanese monk Ennin, whose diary describing his stay on Wutai in the 9th century survived and has been translated into English. Putuo, a mountainous island, was dedicated to the most popular bodhisattva Guan Yin , but had previously been a sacred Daoist site, associated with the Mother Queen of the West, Ximuwang.
Closely associated with mountains were caves. Best avoided by travellers because they were lairs for outlaws, robbers and wild animals, they nevertheless had a long history as places of human habitation and religious observance. From caves across China have come innumerable fossils and bones, evidence of dinosaurs and of the subsequent evolution of man. From Longgupo, in Sichuan, came the 800,000-year old first remains of homo erectus, and scientific analysis of bones from the Zhougoudian caves in Hebei indicates that they may have been occupied by homo erectus and homo sapiens for over 250,000 years. In historic times devout Buddhists turned caves into centres of devotion, painting the walls and ceilings with religious images and carving statues of deities out of the stone faces. Best known are the Dunhuang caves (Gansu province), the Yungang caves (Shanxi), and the Longmen caves (Henan), but examples are found in many parts of the country. The last to be so transformed were the Dazu caves in Sichuan, where thousands of superb carvings were completed in the 12th century. In the mid-1930s the Communists built an entire community in the caves of Yenan, Shaanxi, to defend themselves against attack by Guomindang government forces, and only a few years later the people of the Guomindang wartime capital in Chongqing took to the caves themselves to withstand Japanese bombing.
In traditional China the literati, all too often finding themselves confined to city and town by the demands of their jobs, longed to escape into the countryside, where they believed that proximity to Nature (ziran) would assist them to associate with the Dao. They wrote poems longing for the fresh air and peaceful loneliness they remembered or imagined there. Some of them did indeed eventually retire to grow chrysanthemums in the solitude of deep valleys, but those who couldn't, might make do by trying to re-create the features and atmosphere of the countryside in their gardens at home.
Many scholars sought solace in painting. Some preferred landscapes, some depicting examples of trees, flowers, fruit, birds, fish, even insects. Others concentrated on delicate fronds of bamboo. Beautifully observed and precisely coloured masterpieces were not only a form of escapism for those who painted them: to those who admired them, they also acted as a kind of documentary illustration, satisfying the strong scientific interest in topography, flora and fauna felt by many scholars.
The idealised countryside that they dreamed of, and which appears in so many landscape paintings, was by no means a figment of a cliche-bound imagination: the towering peaks, roaring waterfalls, misty riverbanks, lonely footpaths, hump-backed bridges, and peaceful reed-fringed lakes certainly did exist. The countryside offered many a romantic image, and those who painted it traditionally showed man being overshadowed by the power and immensity of Nature. (By contrast, while communist ideology ruled through the mid-twentieth century, he was more often shown taming their resources.)
But townspeople hankering after the joys of nature were only a small minority of the population. To some eighty per cent of the Chinese people the countryside meant home. However greatly they loved it, those who lived there knew that behind the beautiful facade of the landscape lay the reality of unremitting, back-breaking work, most of it connected with the growing and marketing of food.
For those who farmed in fertile areas like the Yangzi valley, crop yields might be good - always provided the rains came but floods did not. They learned how to exploit the resources that nature provided. They had time and opportunity to develop a range of farming implements. Way back in the Han dynasty they knew the benefits of deep ploughing with the cast-iron plough-share. From the use of the vertical water-wheel they harnessed the power of running water, using it to drive machines such as the multiple trip-hammer for pounding grain. Even so, the humble water buffalo remained their most valuable farming asset through countless centuries, and was duly recognised as such by artists and sculptors.
But much of China's surface area was unsuitable for farming and the climate was often inhospitable, so farmers had to make the best possible use of soil, water and drainage. In very early times they learned how to terrace hillsides, and how to grow other crops between the lines of rice in a paddy field . Even so, agricultural output was often balanced on a knife-edge, and when times were bad, many a peasant family was unable to support itself after paying its taxes and rents. An English Terracing correspondent, Jack Philips, was shocked while on a country walk in the 1930s to come across a beautiful lily pond next to which he read the notice 'Girl babies must not be drowned here'. The cycle of life and death in the countryside could be very hard.
*The waterwheel seems to have made its appearance as a source of power in both Europe and China at roughly the same time, late in the first century BCE in the Roman Empire and early in the first century CE in the Han empire. A Greek source of c.30 BCE describes a cereal-grinding machine driven by water. The earliest known remains of a waterwheel in Britain date from the mid-1st century CE and were discovered in Kent in 2002. In China literary references refer to a machine invented in 31 CE which operated a mechanical bellows used in the iron industry, a pictorial example of which appears in a book of 1313. In the West, waterwheels were more commonly mounted horizontally, whereas in China they were usually vertical. A noria was a vertical wheel adapted for lifting water and was a common sight in the Chinese countryside. Buckets attached to the rim of the wheel scooped up water from a ditch or river at the bottom of its revolution and tipped it out into a container or pipe at the top. Some examples reached heights of fifty feet. See Needham, J., 1965. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. IV part 2. Cambridge University Press.Prof. K. Pratt | Sep 2002