In a key period of intense urbanization and commercialization in Chinese history, what transformations did life in cities undergo as a consequence? What problems did city dwellers in pre-modern China face, and how did those problems affect their perceptions of the city? Since the 1970s, study of the role of historical Chinese cities has been significantly advanced by G. William Skinner's approach of “regional systems analysis,” laid out in the seminal volume The City in Late Imperial China.Footnote 1 Despite his significant contribution, the emphasis on economic factors in his approach has limited the scope of research on historical Chinese cities, and has sometimes obscured the understanding of the subjectivity of urban experiences in pre-modern China. In particular, views on and responses to those experiences at a personal level were sometimes left unaccounted for, even if we have historical sources that allow us to rediscover them.
The focus on economic hierarchies in China's regions and marketing towns does apply to the study of cities from the Song dynasty (960–1279), a unique period when major transformations in all aspects of life occurred. Researchers focusing on cities in Chinese history, following the lead of scholars such as Kato Shigeshi and Mark Elvin, see changes in urban form from the mid-Tang through the Song as an important indicator revealing transformations of society. They have pointed out that the walls of the city wards (fang 坊) were torn down and that regular markets (shi 市) were set up throughout the city along streets and rivers by the late eleventh century; these phenomena of a new urban paradigm were signs of social and economic development or even a “commercial revolution” during the Song, as coined by some scholars.Footnote 2 In the time of economic development, the total urban population rose phenomenally. As Mark Elvin observed, China at that time was the most urbanized society in the world.Footnote 3 Some estimates note that the population of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng reached approximately 1.4 million in the mid-eleventh century.Footnote 4 Many attempts to study Song cities under the Tang–Song transition paradigm measure cities according to their degree of commercial development, in order to use them as an indicator of social transformation during the period. This has undoubtedly led to exciting discoveries in China's urban history, yet many other aspects of the city have not received enough attention, such as transformations in urban lifestyles and their ramifications, and also how urban dwellers perceived these issues.
Before the 1990s the history of everyday life in Song cities had only attracted the attention of a few scholars like Jacques Gernet and his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion.Footnote 5 During the 1990s we observe quite clearly a revival of interest in the “everyday” occurrences of Song life, and more recently there has been an intensified eagerness to deal with this aspect. Studies in Japanese took the “everyday” as a point of entry to explore the history of various cities and localities, further developing the Japanese Sinological tradition of “local society” (chiiki shakai 地域社会) studies.Footnote 6 At the same time, Chinese-language scholarship also broadened their perspective to incorporate geographical, anthropological, and sociological methods and concepts.Footnote 7 For instance, the city as a social space for literati officials became the focus of some studies. The proliferation of markets in cities such as Kaifeng have also received more comprehensive treatment.Footnote 8
Based on these scholarly advances, historians have portrayed the city of Kaifeng (Dongjing 東京) during the Northern Song period as a site of unprecedented commercial activity and a communal space where the activities of its residents were less fettered by state regulation. When writing about this city, historians conventionally make use of descriptions in Record of a Dream of Splendor in the Eastern Capital (Dongjing menghua lu 東京夢華錄)Footnote 9 and the painting scroll Traveling up the River at Qingming Festival (Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖).Footnote 10 However, some scholars paying critical attention to these sources have observed that they have certain limitations that do not allow for a comprehensive study of Kaifeng, or even urban history of Song China as a whole.Footnote 11 The depictions in them are either too nostalgic or idealistic to be taken at face value; they have been informed by the authors’ or painters’ emotional experiences or even imaginings of the subject. Such urban writings and painting scrolls became the basis of ideal representations of Song cities in modern scholarship. Indeed, more awareness about the textuality and limitations of these sources will invite us to think beyond the linear view of commercial development in Song China and its impact (as criticized by Christian de Pee) and also written memories of urban space (as carefully studied by Ari Daniel Levine).Footnote 12 As de Pee suggests, “[w]ithin the extant corpus of texts from the Song period, the textual geography of imperial ideology predominates. Almost all texts extant today were composed by men who participated in the culture of the imperial examinations and officialdom and who … assumed in their writings a civilized, civilizing center that grounded all meaning.”Footnote 13 He usefully alerts us to the hegemonic influence of imperial ideology as reflected by the “textual geographies” of Song Kaifeng. By studying attentively the problems that the majority of residents in the capital city faced and shared, however, I would like to suggest that it is possible to reconstruct the experiential side of the city even when taking texts produced by men in power as a point of departure. We should not let this “textual geography” obscure the ever-present problems of living in Kaifeng, however. Reading those writings and linking them to issues in urban life will help us interrogate pre-modern Chinese urban spaces and the problems that they entail. We already see attempts by historians to duly highlight some of the problems arising from life in Song capital cities, such as urban poverty (as seen in the Qingming scroll, for instance), logistical challenges stemming from urbanization, problems of public hygiene, overcrowding, crime, and fire hazards in Kaifeng and Lin'an.Footnote 14
Building on such attention paid to the darker side of urban life in Song China, in this study I aim to focus on one individual resident's writings about the negative influences of urban development on everyday life, but when doing so I also link them to larger issues about urban life since they are clearly problems that did not only trouble one individual. By combining such writings with corroborating evidence, I endeavor to reach a more thorough understanding of individual accounts of urban life that we have from Song China. My analysis is also informed by the efforts of scholars such as Timothy Brook and Cheng Minsheng to study the social experience of climate and relevant sources in Chinese history.Footnote 15 Specifically, I investigate how the prominent scholar-official Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) reflected on his everyday life in the city, and hence I draw textual sources mainly from his collected works, most of which are underutilized for studying the urban and environmental history of his lifetime.
OUYANG XIU IN THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL
In this study, I aim to explore Kaifeng's history from a different and, I hope, more human perspective—that of its residents’ response to the urban environment—using the case of Ouyang Xiu. As a major figure in the Chinese intellectual community of the eleventh century, and also a famous writer, statesman, and scholar, Ouyang Xiu has been studied by many.Footnote 16 His everyday life, however, did not receive as much attention as his literary achievements, political career, and scholarly views. His extensive collected works equip researchers with a wide array of sources to examine his life in Kaifeng, including poems, memorials, essays, letters, and so on. Moreover, Ouyang Xiu was among the first to shape a new fashion of writing that had a much stronger concern for daily life. The Song writers who adopted this mode of writing
examined their daily lives and found routine details and happenings which had not been noticed by earlier poets, but which deserved to be noticed precisely because their routineness was so universal. Such mundane matters, which had not been taken up as themes in poetry earlier because they were too familiar, the Sung men proceeded with enthusiasm to treat in their poems.Footnote 17
As Stephen Owen put it, the writings Ouyang Xiu composed on these topics “contributed to the formation of a new literature of private life.”Footnote 18 These remarks are true not only when applied to describing Ouyang Xiu's poems, but especially in relation to his epistolary works, such as the 568 extant informal letters by him.Footnote 19 Given the nature of these sources, if we combine Ouyang Xiu's first-hand accounts of his often mundane everyday life in Kaifeng with other records related to the urban setting, we will feel better equipped in investigating how figures like him acted and how they reflected on everyday life in the “lived spaces” that formed the environment of Kaifeng. Such lived spaces acquired their character and meaning while people lived in them, and will inevitably embody the real and imagined experiences, memories, emotions, and interactions of Kaifeng's dwellers including Ouyang Xiu.Footnote 20 This study is thus an attempt to achieve a more holistic understanding of cities in middle period Chinese history, their environment, and their residents, by considering together human activities in the city, perceptions of urban dwellers, and the city's spatial setting.
Ouyang Xiu spent most of his life away from the city of Kaifeng, but his stays in the capital were critical to his political and intellectual life. He was in his twenties when, in 1029, he first visited Kaifeng to take the school examinations.Footnote 21 Among his later stays were four longer ones during which he held posts in the central government that resulted in him staying in the imperial capital during 1034–1036, 1040–42, 1043–44, and 1054–1067.Footnote 22 Ouyang Xiu's last stay in the capital was the longest in his life: he finally had the opportunity to return to the center of power and assumed top positions in the 1060s. His political influence and fame were both at their height during this last stay in Kaifeng, before receiving permission to resign from his court position and to leave the capital in 1067.Footnote 23 Many of his written records are about this part of his life, and I will pay most attention to Ouyang Xiu's subjective and experiential experiences during this period, drawing also on corroborating sources from his contemporaries and also other historical evidence that reflects larger trends relating to urban life. Because he painstakingly compiled and edited his own collection until shortly before his death, and later editors also took the care to collect more of his works, many informal letters and poems by him can be chronologically placed, including the 96 letters that were recently discovered in an edition held in Nara, Japan.Footnote 24 This fortunate fact makes the utilization of these sources in research on Ouyang Xiu's life in Kaifeng much easier and a lot more helpful for establishing the specific temporal and geographical contexts.Footnote 25 Even though most of the responses to Ouyang Xiu's letters are lost, his letters as one-sided sources already reveal a lot about the inconveniences and grievances that bothered him while he was in Kaifeng.
COPING WITH WEATHER HAZARDS
Historians already have a general understanding of the climate of Kaifeng and its environs in the eleventh century. How the weather patterns in specific historical periods affected city residents, and how the latter responded, remains largely unclear however, except in cases where the imperial government dealt with them and left records.Footnote 26 The accounts in which Ouyang Xiu narrated his experiences in such times provide rare perspectives on how bad weather in Kaifeng frustrated its residents, which amounted to 0.9 to 1.2 million people around 1077 based on estimates from commercial taxes.Footnote 27
Torrential rains in the Kaifeng area often caused serious disturbance for Ouyang Xiu, and he reported on many such instances in his letters to acquaintances. In 1056/7, he wrote in a letter:
My [residence] was flooded by water. I moved my family to the Bureau of Tang History in panic, but we were driven out by the Capital Security Office. The whole family was agitated and did not know where to go. We had to return to our residence, stay under the roof during daytime and sleep on rafts in the open at night.
某為水所渰，倉皇中般(搬)家來唐書局，又為皇城司所逐，一家惶惶，不知所之。欲卻且還舊居，白日屋下，夜間上筏子露宿。Footnote 28
He felt it was very unfortunate that he had to experience this. He had been one of the chief editors of the state-sponsored Tang History (Tangshu 唐書) from 1054,Footnote 29 so he must have guessed that he could take his family to stay at the bureau temporarily to escape from the flood. However, he was driven out by the Capital Security Office because the Bureau of Tang History was located in the heavily guarded imperial palace. The Capital Security Office was responsible for intelligence collection and the maintenance of security and order within the capital city. Its agents carried out regular investigative actions on the conduct of officials. It seems that once they discovered trespassers they drove them away, even in times of serious floods. Ouyang Xiu's account confirms scholar Saeki Tomi's observation that the Capital Security Office had considerable influence on the lives of Kaifeng residents, and provides a vivid example of how such an influence can be troublesome to even high officials.Footnote 30
With the help of a variety of other sources it will be possible to reconstruct, at least partially, what the flood in 1056 was like for Ouyang Xiu and others in Kaifeng. According to official court records, the rain was especially heavy, and it brought floods that broke the city gate and destroyed numerous government and civilian buildings. Tens of thousands of houses were wrecked. Kaifeng's residents had to get around by rafts as described by Ouyang Xiu. Even the Gate of the Vermillion Bird (Zhuque men 朱雀門), the busy main entrance to the central Imperial Avenue (yujie 御街) at the south of the inner city, had to be closed urgently to avoid being completely flooded.Footnote 31 Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–86) reported that torrential rains persisted for two months. Countless military wards and residential areas were consequently severely flooded, and every official below the rank of Grand Councilor was called upon to supervise relief work in the capital region.Footnote 32
How did such a serious flood occur? Su Shi 蘇軾 (1036–1011), a young man at that time, was paying Ouyang Xiu a visit in Kaifeng and taking the examination at the Ministry of Rites.Footnote 33 In a poem, he reminisced about the flood:
Memories of the year bingshen Footnote 34 suddenly came to me, 忽憶丙申年
When it rained heavily in the capital city. 京邑大雨滂
The Cai River overflowed at the middle of the night, 蔡河中夜決
Flooding the imperial city's southern side. 橫浸國南方
Carts and horses were no longer to be seen, 車馬無復見
Only men busily controlling their rafts. 紛紛操筏郎
In early autumn, it suddenly became sunny, 新秋忽已晴
But the city streets were still a massive sea. 九陌尚汪洋
Looking at the night markets from the Dragon Ford Bridge,龍津觀夜市
Lanterns were still glaring. 燈火亦煌煌
The new moon as bright as a painting, 新月皎如畫
Scattered stars were fiddling with silver grass. 疏星弄寒芒
[If one] does not notice the noise in the capital city, 不知京國喧
He would say this is the countryside of rivers and lakes.Footnote 35謂是江湖鄉
Although Su Shi wrote this poem three years after the flood, his memory of it remains quite vivid. His description throws light on precisely how the city was flooded so severely: the water flowed from the Cai River and passed through the outer city walls through the Broadening Benefit (Guangli 廣利) water gate.Footnote 36 The southwestern part of the city was then covered with water. Dragon Ford Bridge was on the Cai River and also located just to the south of the grand Vermillion Bird (Zhuque 朱雀) Gate, and hence Su Shi had a spectacular view of the disaster, especially of how the city streets became immersed in water.Footnote 37 Apart from the fluctuating climate, which I shall discuss later in this article, the geography of the city of Kaifeng also increased the possibility of floods. The Cai River flowed in and out through the city walls on the southern part of the city, greatly increasing the danger of floods when there was continuous rain.
In the next year, heavy rain poured down Kaifeng again from 1057/5. Ouyang Xiu wrote letters to his close friend Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 (1002–1060) reporting how he was trapped in his house by the rains. One such letter reports:Footnote 38
Since summer, there have been rumors among our neighbors that the rain this autumn will be as heavy as last year. [We] took it to be a rumor, now we have to believe it is true. These two nights my family has been putting water away … . The streets are flooded and it is impossible to go out. Because this has been going on for some days, we finally tried to find a place to escape to again.
自入夏，閭巷相傳，以謂今秋水當不減去年。初以為訛言，今乃信然。兩夜家人比戽水 … … 街衢浩渺，出入不得。更三數日不止，遂復謀逃避之處。Footnote 39
Fleeing to Ouyang Xiu's office in the Bureau of Tang History was no longer a viable option, so despite the fact that his residence was already “leaking above and flooding below,” he did not know where he could possibly go and was “extremely frustrated.”Footnote 40 Again, many in the city had to rely on rafts to get around.Footnote 41 These troubles ruined Ouyang Xiu's mood because the mud blocked his way to work in the Bureau of Tang History, even after the floods have receded.Footnote 42 In part of a poem also addressed to Mei Yaochen, he described the wonders of this rainstorm and its aftermath:
Evening clouds roll over like a mountain avalanche, 夕雲若頹山
Night rain pours down like a burst pipe. 夜雨如决渠
For a moment, I see the dark blue sky, 俄然見青天
Flaming brightly, the toad-moon rises, 燄燄升蟾蜍
Suddenly, the Spirit of Yin strengthens, 倏忽陰氣生
Winds gaining momentum on all four sides. 四面如吹噓
Wild thunder roars through obscure blackness, 狂雷走昏黑
Startling lightning illuminates fierce monsters. 驚電照夔魖
They roam over, waking dragons from hibernation, 搜尋起龍蟄
Descending, they strike tombstones and graveyards. 下擊墓與墟
Whenever the thunder sounds its rumbling cartwheels, 雷聲每軒轟
The rain adjusts its pace between quick and slow. 雨勢隨疾徐
In the beginning it seems that the downpour will never end, 初若浩莫止
But the storm suddenly retreats into silence and exhaustion. 俄收閴無餘
Only a ten thousand foot rainbow remains suspended, 但掛千丈虹
Violet and azure, stretching across the emptiness. 紫翠橫空虛
In a matter of moments, the aspect changes a hundred times, 頃刻百變態
Who is rolling up and unfolding this darkness and light? 晦明誰卷舒
Do they know of the people below on the Earth, 豈知下土人
The downpour soaking their sleeves and hems? 水潦沒襟裾
Wallowing about in the midst of mud and mire, 擾擾泥淖中
No different from ducks or swine!Footnote 43 無異鴨與豬Footnote 44
The trouble that this rainstorm caused spared no one in Kaifeng, including Ouyang Xiu, whose house was “leaking above and flooding below.” He continues his poem by zooming in on his own situation:
Alas, I have just come to the capital city, 嗟我來京師
With hardly a shabby hut to shelter myself. 庇身無弊廬
In the leisure district I rented an ancient hovel, 閑坊僦古屋
Crude and mean, it is hidden among back alleys. 卑陋雜里閭
The gushing water from our neighbors pours into our ditches and drains, 鄰注湧溝竇
The flow from the street surges over our courtyard. 街流溢庭除
When I go out, I am shocked by the vast floods, 出門愁浩渺
But if I stay indoors, I fear I will be drowned! 閉戶恐爲潴
The walls are full of holes hollowing out in all directions, 墻壁豁四達
How fortunate it is that my household has no valuable possessions.幸家無貯儲
Toads croak beneath the kitchen stove, 蝦蟇鳴竈下
My old wife can only snivel and sob. 老婦但欷歔
At all the nine city gates they have run out of firewood, 九門絕來薪
To light a morning cooking-fire, we will soon have to smash our cart, 朝爨欲毀車
Worrying about my life in such a crushing and drowning disaster, 壓溺委性命
How could I possibly worry about my books? 焉能顧圖書
Now I understand when Yao was alive, 乃知生堯時
People feared that they would turn into fish!Footnote 45 未免憂爲魚Footnote 46
Critics warn that one should not take Ouyang Xiu's description of his shabby residence here too seriously,Footnote 47 but he did not write about his leaking house in just one poem. He also recounted the situation in letters to at least two friends. Although his circumstances in the weather hazard of 1057 must have been better than many of Kaifeng's civilians, Ouyang Xiu's leaking house reminds us of some of the poorly maintained houses and shabby roofs depicted in the Qingming scroll.Footnote 48 Those houses would have been unsafe during severe rainstorms and their residents would have been in a worse situation than that of Ouyang Xiu and his family.
In 1059, Ouyang Xiu experienced similar rainstorms again. The long title of one poem of his suggests how the rainstorms had kept him from going outside:
The day before Qingming, Han Zihua, quoting Jingjie [i.e. Tao Qian's] Xie Stream poem, invited me to visit Plum Garden. After I returned, three days of terrible wind and rain followed and I could not go outside. Desperate, I was sitting at home. My family decanted some leftover wine and took out several cups. The mud was deep, nobody was out and about, and we were far from the market, so they searched in baskets and boxes and found cured fish, dried prawns and the like. [I] forced myself to drink and became extremely drunk, then in a daze went off to sleep.
清明前一日，韓子華以靖節斜川詩見招游李園。既歸，遂苦風雨，三日不能出。窮坐一室。家人輩倒殘壺得酒數杯。泥深道無人行，去市又遠，索於筐筥得枯魚幹蝦數種，強飲疾醉，昏然便寐。Footnote 49
In the summer of 1064, there were hazardous rainstorms that persisted for months. The emperor Yingzong (r. 1063–67) ordered his ministers to pray for the rain to stop. Ouyang Xiu was responsible for praying at the Heavenly Altar on 1064/8/8 and the rain miraculously stopped on the day he did so.Footnote 50 However, once again there were rainstorms in the eighth month of the following year. The rain was so heavy that it caused serious floods, destroying countless houses in the city and killing countless livestock. Most ministers were unable to make their way to the morning ceremony in the palace. To release the flood water the West Flowery (Xihua men 西華門) Gate, the west gate of the imperial palace was opened, and numerous people were drowned. The government helped to bury 1,580 of these casualties.Footnote 51 Even the famous Xiangguo 相國 Temple, which was the largest Buddhist temple in the Northern Song capital, was flooded and damaged. It was located along the bank of the Bian Canal:
In the rain hazard of the yisi year of the Zhiping reign, because there was high tide on the Bian River and the gutters were mismanaged, the four corridors of the Great Xiangguo Temple were all flooded. Nearly all its walls collapsed.
治平乙巳歲雨患，大相國寺以汴河勢高，溝渠失治，寺庭四廊悉遭渰沒，圮塌殆盡。Footnote 52
The Xiangguo Temple was a site of not only worship but also bustling markets that attracted crowds of visitors; therefore the flood that destroyed it must have been disastrous to many residents in the city.Footnote 53 According to Ouyang Xiu, flood water in the city on 1065/8/3 had already reached several chi (“feet”) after a whole night of rain.Footnote 54 Naturally he and his family had to flee from their residence. Although all his family members and property were fine after the ordeal, Ouyang Xiu seized the “opportunity” of this hazard to send resignation requests to the court. Before this he had already expressed several times his willingness to leave office as Vice Grand Councilor for a local post.Footnote 55 In three of the extant resignation memorials, he made it clear that allowing him to resign from his post will be the most appropriate way for the court to respond to the omens indicated by the storms.Footnote 56 Since Kaifeng was regarded as the symbolic center of the empire, any weather disruption or natural hazard can be taken as a result of misdeeds in governance, and in this case used by Ouyang Xiu as an excuse for asking to resign.Footnote 57 The imperial court, however, did not accept his resignation request.
Apart from rain hazards, other weather conditions also caused troubles for Ouyang Xiu. In 1057, he wrote a friend that a disease was spreading in Kaifeng due to a drought, and members in the family were infected.Footnote 58 In 1059, apart from the unusual rains that forced Ouyang Xiu to stay at home and drink, as mentioned earlier, it also snowed extremely heavily in the first and second month of the year. On Kaifeng's streets he saw corpses of people frozen and starved to death.Footnote 59 The livelihoods of many were destroyed because the snowstorm disaster drove up the prices of firewood, charcoal, and food. Some of the commoners were desperate to the point of taking their own lives. This was a time to mourn and to take care of those affected by such conditions, and apparently not an appropriate time to celebrate the upcoming Lantern Festival of the First Prime, so Ouyang Xiu filed a request to the court that the celebrations be cancelled.Footnote 60 Yet the weather of the following summer was still quite extreme: “The burning heat cannot be compared to ordinary times. Even the strong people cannot bear it, just imagine how it is for the aging and sick.” Because of the heat Ouyang Xiu developed a persistent cough and had to be absent from work for about a month. When he thought he could resume work, his health deteriorated again and had to stay in bed. As a result there was “no happiness” in him at all.Footnote 61
From Ouyang Xiu's various descriptions, it is clear that he found these frequent weather hazards quite distressful. Although he did not explicitly relate his experience to the structural problems in the city of Kaifeng, probably an indication that he was not very aware of the relation of his problems to environmental change, we have the benefit of hindsight when we investigate this issue.Footnote 62 Large-scale hazards happening in such a short period of time in a locality is indeed quite uncommon. Researchers on climate change in history shows that climatic anomalies have occurred during the period some refer to as the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 1000–1300); whether it was a global phenomenon, however, is still being debated. As a transition to the Cold Period, the mid- and late-Northern Song showed relatively low temperatures after years of exceptional warmth. Of course there was regional variation in the climate, but short-term fluctuations definitely affected the Kaifeng region in the eleventh century.Footnote 63 During these fluctuations, rainfall levels in Kaifeng and surrounding areas in the Yellow River valley were substantially higher than later historical periods following the eleventh century.Footnote 64 From the 1040s and 1050s, adverse weather conditions and constant fluctuations followed each other—most of them recorded in official histories—hence the unfortunate experiences and complaints from Ouyang Xiu.Footnote 65 This coincides with the period of larger-scale environmental problems coupled with socio-economic and political troubles that Ling Zhang calls the Song's “mid-dynasty crisis.”Footnote 66
Factors other than the climate also account for Ouyang Xiu's hardships in Kaifeng. Being an important center of waterway networks, Kaifeng had very good access to rivers and canals, but this geography posed serious problems especially in a time of climatic fluctuations. The city was built on low ground in Henan in the mid-Yellow River basin, an area where four main rivers and canals flow. From the north to the south, these include: Wuzhang 五丈, Jinshui 金水, Bian 汴, and Cai 蔡. Although the rivers and canals crossing the Kaifeng region provided easy and indispensable access to supplies and supported the capital city as the center for intraregional and interregional trade under the Song, the high density of intersecting water channels raised the risk of floods in seasons of heavy precipitation in spring and summer.Footnote 67 As we can see from the flood in 1056 discussed earlier, the fact that the Cai River flowed through Kaifeng's city walls made the urban area much more vulnerable to flooding. Water and silt flowed from the Yellow River into the Bian Canal and then further into the Cai. Even though the government had built dykes and water gates to manage the water flow of the Cai River, that did not completely prevent it from silting and overflowing. Apart from these rivers, there were also three moats circling the outer city walls, inner city walls, and the imperial palace respectively. Among these, the Dragon Protecting (Hulong 護龍) ditch outside the city walls existed from the beginning of the Northern Song dynasty at the latest, and was 4.5 meters deep, 77 meters wide at the surface, and 61 meters wide at the bottom.Footnote 68 A ditch of this size should be able to hold an extremely high volume of water, but it also posed serious hazards to urban residents once it overflowed. According to engineers studying the archaeological remains of this ditch, Kaifeng's three moats could contain a total of 17.656 million cubic meters of water.Footnote 69 Furthermore, human activity, such as littering and the building of private gardens along the Cai in the outer city raised the risk of floods by choking the river.Footnote 70 According to government regulations, littering and unauthorized discharge of sewage was prohibited but such activity still existed, prompting the authorities to dredge the drainage pipes within the city.Footnote 71 With such environmental risks, Ouyang Xiu met repeated troubles brought by weather hazards.
FRUSTRATIONS ABOUT KAIFENG'S URBAN PROVISIONS
As a consuming city, Kaifeng's service industries catering to the needs of daily life were expanded during the Tang–Song transition. Both state and commercial actors joined forces in this development.Footnote 72 This emphasis on a bourgeoning urban economy in Kaifeng and its supporting infrastructure reveals more when combined with the actual experiences of its residents. Aside from bad weather and natural disasters, Ouyang Xiu also wrote a lot about the provisions and services in Kaifeng in his informal writings. In this section, I discuss the opinions he expressed about services in the metropolis of Kaifeng, and what they reveal about the problems with living there.
Ouyang Xiu's literary writings show considerable attention to the quality of food in the places he was living.Footnote 73 Kaifeng had a rich supply of meats, including mutton, pork, dog meat, horse meat, and various other kinds. They were imported from various circuits throughout the empire, even including from the territories of the Liao and Western Xia regimes. We also know that a wide variety of fish and shellfish was also available in Kaifeng, such as the giant clams Ouyang Xiu appreciated.Footnote 74 Ouyang Xiu had also written to Mei Yaochen about the tea in Kaifeng, and had described how amazed he was by the fact that the tea was coming from distant corners of the empire.Footnote 75 Shortly after leaving Kaifeng in 1067, he wrote to his son Ouyang Fa 歐陽發 (1040–89) about the city's food and compared it to the delicacies of Yingzhou 潁州, a place to which he felt deeply attached and where he had wished to retire since 1049:Footnote 76
The meat of Yingzhou is indeed not as good as those in the capital. When I first came here from the capital, [I felt] it really was not good. After eating for some time, I stopped noticing. But the liquor here is much better than that in the past. The huge fresh fish and varieties of shrimp here cannot be found in other commanderies. Spring water, vegetables, and fruit are all great. Everything is cheap.
潁肉誠不及京師，乍從京師來，誠不好，及食之日久，亦不覺。酒則絕佳於舊日。巨魚鮮美，蝦極多，皆他郡所無。以至水泉、蔬果，皆絕好。諸物皆賤。Footnote 77
In the passage he speaks highly of most of the foodstuffs in Yingzhou; if we compare this with his complaints about food in Kaifeng, the reasons for his disappointment becomes clear. Even though food supply in Kaifeng was plentiful and many choices were available, they were quite expensive compared to elsewhere in the Song territory.Footnote 78 As early as the 1030s he was already complaining about prices in Kaifeng. He wrote to Mei Yaochen telling him how difficult it was to secure the financial means to support both his family and his drinking habit.Footnote 79 No doubt housing prices were rising in the crowded city, adding to Ouyang Xiu's expenditures.Footnote 80 This reminds us of his leaking house in the rainstorm of 1057. He even once wrote Mei Yaochen that he lacked the funds to live in Kaifeng and was considering the possibility of leaving the central government for a local post.Footnote 81
Various historians have reported that wages earned by Song government officials were not high at all, especially if one had to support an extended family in Kaifeng, the city with the highest living standards in the empire. In fact, the lives led by officials in Kaifeng were often far from luxurious.Footnote 82 Even though his financial condition improved after he began to serve in more senior official posts in Kaifeng after 1054, he still encountered other problems about living in the imperial capital. One important problem was that he could not find satisfying medical services in Kaifeng. According to Asaf Goldschmidt's research on epidemics in the Song, the 1040s and 1050s saw a sharp rise in the outbreaks of epidemics.Footnote 83 Ouyang Xiu was often quite willing to write to various correspondents about his own health, making it possible to reconstruct his medical history from those texts, if only partially.Footnote 84 Whenever they mention medical issues, Ouyang Xiu's letters tend to show that it was not easy to obtain good medical care in Kaifeng, even for a metropolitan city of such scale. He once asked Mei Yaochen for help because his mother had been quite ill for some time:
I write: My parent [i.e. mother] is old and has been ill for a long time. Her condition sometimes improves and sometimes deteriorates. Physicians have been of no use, and we are worried and anxious day and night, not knowing what to do. The state physicians in the capital all have official duties, so we cannot ask [for their advice]. They are also arrogant, so they might not come even if asked. Who is nearby and can help? My mother is so ill and there is still no physician to prescribe medicine for her; how could a son set his heart at ease? I do not have that many acquaintances in the capital and I dare not ask them to help. My brother, I tell you this so that you can ask around to see if there are any physicians with no official affiliations or scholars and scholars-at-home who are skilled at medicine. If you know of someone, please tell me so that I can send a messenger, or write to summon him. It will be great if you can look around widely … . If you have someone in mind, please quickly send the messenger back. I do not have time to write about other matters.
某啟。為親老久疾，乍進乍退，醫工不可用，日夕憂迫，不知所為。蓋京師近上醫官皆有職局，不可請他，兼亦傲然，請他不得。近下者又不知誰可用？親疾如此，無醫人下藥，為人子者何以為心！京師相知少，不敢託也。告吾兄與問當看有不繫官醫人，或秀士處士之類善醫者，得一人垂報，待差人齎書帛去請他，幸為博訪之 … … 如有所得，亦速遣此人回。其他不暇忉忉。Footnote 85
The physicians Ouyang Xiu knew were not helpful and the patient's condition was fluctuating; this became very frustrating for him and his family. It was not that there was a lack of medicine or physicians in Kaifeng. Indeed, specialized physicians can be found on both sides of the northern part of Horse Guild Street (Mahang jie 馬行街), as Record of a Dream of Splendor in the Eastern Capital shows.Footnote 86 Even the famous Qingming scroll features a shop selling prescribed medicine from an official physician Zhao. These physicians and those mentioned by Ouyang Xiu all had official affiliations, meaning that apart from private practice they also had duties to the state.Footnote 87 They held posts in the Hanlin Medical Officers’ Bureau (Hanlin yiguan yuan 翰林醫官院), and as Robert Hymes rightly described, they “may be called upon to serve the emperor or members of his family.”Footnote 88 This made it difficult for patients from outside the imperial palace to receive prompt diagnosis they needed.
The professional competence of Kaifeng's physicians’ service was also in question. For Ouyang Xiu, these physicians were arrogant and could not be relied on. He favored physicians with no official affiliation or gentlemen with good medical training.Footnote 89 According to scholar Chen Yuanpeng's analysis of the medical culture of the time, the Northern Song saw the rise of scholar-physicians (ruyi 儒醫, so-called Confucian doctors or literati doctors), the kind of doctors that Ouyang Xiu was looking for.Footnote 90 After all, literati scholars often had contact with such physicians. They have been conducting written exchanges with each other, forging a “professional network” in which medical knowledge was circulated.Footnote 91 Ouyang Xiu had a lot more confidence in such scholar-physicians.
Ouyang Xiu must have had strong feelings about this problem of physicians’ competence when his close friend Mei Yaochen died. In the epitaph he wrote for Mei, he recounted how Mei fell ill after the outbreak of a serious epidemic in Kaifeng in 1060/4. Mei took to bed in the city's eastern quarter in Bianyang Ward and many court officials paid him visits to inquire about his health condition. Nearby residents were surprised by the number of visitors Mei had.Footnote 92 As we know from another epitaphic source, “incompetent doctors” trying to heal Mei “confused the outside and the inside” of his physical condition. Due to this misdiagnosis Mei's situation quickly deteriorated, and he passed away in his fifties.Footnote 93 Finding a helpful physician was not a pleasant task at all, as can be seen. This was why apart from seeking help from friends, Ouyang Xiu also lent help to others. From an extant calligraphic manuscript, it can be seen that he once wrote a friend saying that he was aware of the friend's medical condition. That friend was using moxibustion therapy and Ouyang Xiu offered to recommend some physicians to him, insisting that they were reliable.Footnote 94 Also, in a letter to the minister Wang Gui 王珪 (1019–85), he asked after Wang's mother, who he had learned had suffered from typhoid fever. Ouyang Xiu introduced a physician who was good at healing female patients to Wang Gui.Footnote 95 He also wrote Liu Chang 劉敞 (1019–68) in 1060 to recommend a physician called Zhang Wanhui 張萬回.Footnote 96 If even high officials found it so difficult to get good medical help, the numerous residents in the rapidly urbanizing Kaifeng would have found it much more difficult.
If medical advice was so difficult to obtain in the city, what about medication? Ouyang Xiu not only sought medical treatment for his sick relatives, he also had a number of irritating medical problems himself. His health had been quite poor since the age of fifty.Footnote 97 He had a serious eye disease and other health problems with his teeth and feet. These often caused him distress and sometimes kept him from going to work.Footnote 98 There was one instance when he tried to apply medication bought from a market in Kaifeng to his feet, but it had a pernicious effect and caused pain for several days. The pain was so bad that he had to take leave from work.Footnote 99 Therefore it seemed less risky to get medicine from friends such as Mei Yaochen, such as in an instance in early 1060 that he mentioned in a playful poem addressed to Mei.Footnote 100
The government did not deal effectively with these problems of medicine and health care until the establishment of the Imperial Pharmacy (huimin yaoju 惠民藥局) in the capital city in 1076, shortly after Ouyang Xiu's death.Footnote 101 Charity clinics for the poor began to operate in 1102.Footnote 102 However, even after this, the provision of these services was still quite limited in smaller cities. Fake medicine and confusion about choices in the drug market still existed.Footnote 103
CONCLUDING REMARKS
I have examined how Ouyang Xiu narrated the irregularities in everyday life in Kaifeng and how they are relevant to the more negative dimensions of Song's urban history. These urban living conditions affected not only the activities and interactions of the city's residents, but perhaps more importantly, how they reflected on their lived spaces. Reading the letters and other underutilized sources in collected works of figures like Ouyang Xiu leads us to new conclusions about the urban living environment, which was extremely important to the actions and daily lives of individuals. Kaifeng was the central place for public office and court politics, but that does not imply that it was always a desirable city to live in. For Ouyang Xiu, the retreats in Yingzhou were obviously more attractive, especially in the years when he was constantly talking about his urge to retire. If we measure urban development in middle period China by placing more emphasis on the views and experiences of residents in cities, even though we will likely be less amazed by the advances of Song society, our understanding will become more accurate and nuanced.
What I have presented in this study is one person's experiences in a city where he stayed for less than twenty years. As the highest administrative center of the Song empire, Kaifeng was understandably different from any other city or place. Nevertheless we should not take Ouyang Xiu's experiences as an isolated or insignificant case. When situating his experience in the more structural factors that have shaped social life in the imperial capital, such as weather patterns, geography, and the city's provision of goods and services, it is more than obvious that other residents in Kaifeng also had to face similar problems and inconveniences. Focusing on Ouyang Xiu makes sense because we have more information about his perspective on these problems, but it does not have to limit our vision. His experiences in the most populous city in China and the world at that time should be woven into the common experiences of numerous other contemporaries. Understanding Ouyang Xiu's perspective will help us understand to a certain degree how others experienced the lived spaces of Kaifeng. For instance, when his roof was leaking with water in times of severe rain, other urban dwellers probably had an even more difficult time. Similarly, the strict restrictions imposed by the Capital Security Office not only made it impossible for Ouyang Xiu to avoid trouble whenever floods occurred, but also for other government officials. Also, not only Ouyang Xiu but many found the services and competence of many physicians in Kaifeng frustrating.
None of the writers before Ouyang Xiu “allowed so much personal sentiment into prose.”Footnote 104 Still, his responses to the urban living environment should not be taken too literally, because in the cultural context of his time, scholar-officials often used complaints and nostalgia as subtle devices for expression, including for social and political criticism.Footnote 105 What is important is that many of Ouyang Xiu's responses to urban conditions can be explained by the more structural issues about the city and its living environment. When we read his relevant writings in this light, they demonstrate how cities in Chinese history were experienced and lived at an emotional level. In his discourse on emotions, Ouyang Xiu put forward the theory that any understanding of emotions should be based on the inner realms of human experience and not the external world;Footnote 106 however, even he cannot be completely unaffected by the inconveniences discussed in this study. After all, he was part of a world of mentalities and sentiments that encompassed numerous other urban residents, even if the voices of many others have never been recorded. For us, it is perhaps fortunate that Ouyang Xiu and sometimes his circle in the capital city channeled their frustrations into their writing, allowing us to connect their experiences in urban life to larger issues concerning the city's living environment and other conditions. Beyond the cycles of economic growth and decline of which the imperial capital was seen as the center, these experiences also existed.
