Myths of Southern Timber
Once again I find myself with material that’s not going to make it into the book.
I have argued here (and more concisely and correctly in a forthcoming article) that forestry emerged by the third century BCE as growing states faced the threat of wood and timber shortages. The best evidence is that this was essentially northern phenomenon. The best evidence for state forestry in the Warring States comes from Qi in modern Shandong and Qin in modern Shaanxi. Even with the consolidation of empire under the Qin and Han, state forests, parks, and preserves were largely confined to the north.
Even as the northern sylvan environment was tamed, the woods of the south were still described as verdant and wild. Mozi (circa 4th century BCE) is perhaps the earliest text to describe this contrast. Writing at a time when states in north China were building up their forestry regulations, he compared the densely wooded state of Chu in modern Hunan with the nearly treeless state of Song in the North China Plain:
Jing (another name for Chu) possesses [the forest of] Yunmeng, which is full of rhinoceroses and deer. The fish, tortoises and crocodiles in the Yangzi and Han Rivers are the richest under heaven, while Song is said to lack even pheasants, rabbits or foxes…In Jing there are tall pines, wenzi 文梓, piannan 楩柟, and yuzhang 豫章 trees, while Song has no tall trees at all.
Mozi cites the bounties of Chu to convince its ruler that there is no need to invade Song, part of his broader argument against warfare. But his was just the first of many arguments to cite the wealth of southern forests:
Jia Yi, an early Han statesman, cites the same southern trees to argue that the circulation of goods is the basis of value. “Piannan and yuzhang are the most famous woods under heaven,” he writes, describing how they grow in the deep mountains of the south and are floated out of southern gorges and along the river system to reach the capital. After praising the many uses and qualities of these timbers, Jia arrives at his argument: as valuable as they are in the capital “when pian and zi stay in the ground, they are worth less than a withered willow.” The great Han historian Sima Qian also noted that merchants also grew rich from the trade in timber from the areas of modern Sichuan and Gansu.
Yet another Han text, the Discourses on Salt and Iron, describe the circulation of nan and zi from the south to make the opposite point — that trade detracts from the fundamental occupation of agriculture. This argument was echoed by the Eastern Han scholar Wang Fu, who cited the importation of southern ru, zi ,yuzhang and piannan timber as evidence of the excesses of the age. By the late Warring States and the Han the natural bounties of southern forests were taken as so axiomatic, especially compared to the scarcity of large timber in the north, that the south’s diverse and mysterious tree species became a trope against which early writers made their arguments.
From these aphorisms we can derive details on the shipment of timber from the south and the role of merchants and officials, features that can be confirmed from more sober, historical accounts. It is clear that the growing states of the third and fourth centuries were involved in the felling of great timbers in the south and west. Maps depicting early third century BCE logging colonies in modern Gansu were excavated from an official’s grave, confirming that Qin was felling timber in the dense forests of the west. Indeed, access to these forests may have given Qin a strategic advantage that allowed it conquer the other Warring States. In the Han, “timber officials” (muguan) were also posted to Sichuan, although their specific responsibilities are not clear from remaining accounts. Private trade was also key to the circulation of southern timbers in the north, as suggested by both the celebratory accounts by Jia Yi and Sima Qian and the critical accounts by later court Confucians.
But just as significant as the details of the circulation of these timbers was the fact that the sylvan riches of the south were almost mythical, especially in comparison to the relative poverty and domesticity of woodlands in the north.Indeed it is an imposition of modern rationalism to attempt to extract the “real” from the “imaginary” in depictions of southern forests. Historians and translators have attempted to find equivalents to the mythical southern trees in Linnaean classificatory schemes. But while wenzi 文梓 may refer to Catalpa, piannan 楩柟 to Pheobe zhennan, and yuzhang 豫章to camphor, this belies the way these terms are used in the sources. Piannan and yuzhang almost always occur together; it is not even clear whether these four characters should be parsed into two, three, or four distinct varieties of tree.
These trees occur in fantastical tales as often as more sober-minded histories and political discourses. Zhuangzi describes how a monkey is at ease among the nan 柟, zi 梓 and yuzhang 豫章, but struggles to climb the zhe 柘, ji 棘, zhi 枳, and ju 枸. This leads to his argument for the importance of living under a proper ruler, but the metaphorical context is so dominant that we cannot understand the former trees as anything other than inviting and beautiful specimens, or the latter as anything other than thornier varieties of tree and bush.
The Wuyue Annals describes how the King of Yue received divine intervention to obtain giant timbers: a pair of spirit trees (shenmu 神木), one piannan and one wenzi, appeared before his logging team already carved into wonderful patterns and painted and inlaid with gold. Other trees with strange names are listed throughout the Classic of Oceans and Seas, a fantastical geography with little bearing on real-world locations. To authors writing primarily in the north, elements of fantasy were integral to the understanding of southern forests, which they received only indirectly through secondhand accounts or by observing the wondrously large, beautiful timbers that reached the northern courts.
“Timber Guests” and other Forest Spirits
The south became more densely settled by Sinitic peoples in several waves of migration following the collapse of the Han, but the depth, darkness, and diversity of its forests remained axiomatic to the landscape, and retained a deep sense of mystery. Here is how southern Jiangxi native Deng Deming 鄧德明 (fl. 445) depicted the lush and magical environment of the region:
There are many pines and shan 杉 in all directions, making for an impressive view, like the abode of fairies. After the wind and rains, the landscape is clear and silent. But among the hills there are the sounds of drumming. This is the season that the “timber guests” (muke 木客) of the mountain districts sing and dance.
Again, we might speculate as to the precise species of wood described by shan — perhaps Cunninghamia lanceolata or Cryptomeria japonica — but this is a fundamental misreading of the genre, which describes them principally as giant and exotic timbers without specific details as to their morphology or patterns of growth. The key feature of shan in Deng’s telling is the enormous size and remoteness of the trees. Many of were on high peaks that humans could not reach without the help of the mysterious “timber guests,” whom Deng describes as follows:
The faces and language of “timber guests” are not entirely unlike humans, but the nails of their hands and feet are sharp like hooks. They find high cliffs that are hard to reach and live there. They can cut timber and drag them to assemble above the trees. In the past, when people wanted to buy timber from them, they first placed goods below the trees according to how much [timber] they wanted. If this accorded with [the timber guests’] wishes, the deal would go forward, and there would be no violations [of appropriate exchange]. But they never exchanged words face-to-face or built markets.
While described as somewhat distinct in appearance, the primary mark of these “timber guests” was their superhuman abilities to navigate the craggy peaks and deep forests, and their preternatural skill at cutting and transporting timber. Another text from the mid-to-late sixth century gives another description of “timber guests,” similar to Deng’s, yet distinct enough that it was not a simple copy of his account:
They are spirits that look like men and have voices like men. You can see them clearly from afar, but when you get close they hide. They can cut shan from the high mountains and will trade it with men, exchanging timber for knives and axes. Goods are piled up at the place of exchange, below the trees, once [the Han traders] leave, the timber guests will come and take the goods and bring an amount of timber appropriate [to the amount of goods]. They are extremely honest and never cheat.
Both accounts go on to describe mourning and other ritual practices that mark the “timber guests” as unfamiliar but remarkably human. Indeed, aside from their remarkable abilities to navigate the woods, cut, and transport timber, and their avoidance of direct contact, these “timber guests” appear almost exactly human, albeit humans with unfamiliar languages and cultural practices.
Given the long-term persistence of timber trade in the southwest — principally between Han Chinese and Hmong-Miao groups — it is tempting to read these as second-hand accounts of non-Sinitic peoples. Yet the element of the supernatural in these stories is too strong to ignore. Our historical informants found there something almost superhuman about the “timber guests” abilities to be at home in the woods, and to cut and transport timber. The denizens of the southern forests, like the trees themselves, retained an aspect of the supernatural.
Routinization of the Timber Trade
The timber trade was increasingly normalized in the Tang and thereafter. In 735, a canal was cut to connect Sichuan to the Tang capital at Chang’an for the specific purpose of shipping timber and bamboo. Regional specializations in timber, paper, lacquer, and other goods emerged by the mid-eighth century. When the Tang lost access to much of the tax base in the north, controlled by military satraps after the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), officials turned to a tax on forest products. In 780 they instituted “a ten-percent tax on all bamboo, timber, tea and lacquer in the empire, to be paid in normalized copper cash.” Given the realities of diminished control in the north, and its focus on sylvan products produced primarily in the south, the tax was probably levied only on southern timber, tea, and lacquer, probably collected at commercial tax depots in the cities rather than from the woods themselves.
In the tenth century, when the Tang empire fragmented the governments of the smaller southern states were highly dependent on commerce, both for revenues and to maintain relations with their more militarily powerful neighbors. It is evident that trade in tea, timber, and other wood products flourished, both within state borders and across boundaries. For example Chu (907–951), the state that controlled modern Hunan, taxed their subjects in timber, much of which was doubtless intended for export to the powerful but wood-poor states of the north.
When the Song reunited much of the former Tang empire between 960 and 980, it simply joined the northern and southern timber routes under the control of a single polity. For a Daoist temple constructed in Kaifeng in the 960s the building materials included pine (song 松) from Gansu and Shaanxi; cedar (bo 柏) from southern Shanxi; shan 杉, pine, tung and paper-mulberry (zhu 楮) from Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi; camphor (yuzhang 豫章, also zhang 樟) from western and southern Zhejiang; and pine and shan from northeastern Zhejiang. Shiba Yoshinobu provides a similar list of wood supplies for an early eleventh-century temple construction, including pine from Shaanxi and Gansu; cedar from Shanxi; catalpa wood (zi 梓), zelkova (ju 榉), shan, nanmu 楠 and oak from Hunan, Jiangxi and Zhejiang; and pagoda-tree wood (huai 槐) from Hubei and southern Shanxi. As monumental buildings these temples were doubtless exceptional in both the range and quality of timber demanded for their construction. Indeed, palace and temple building in the early Song led to extraordinary demands and the opening of virgin woods in Zhejiang (and certainly other regions) to extraction. These anecdotes nonetheless give us an approximate survey of Kaifeng‘s timber imports: pine and cedar from the northwest were rafted down the Yellow River, while sub-tropical hardwoods, shanmu, and nanmu from the riverine south were shipped down the Yangzi and Qiantang Rivers and then up the Grand Canal.
Despite the regularization of the wood trade under the Tang and its successors, elements of mystery continued to appear in stories about obtaining timber. One strange tale from the early tenth century tells of Xu Yancheng, a merchant who went to the timber yards at Xinzhou (northeastern Jiangxi), but found no timber to buy. After waiting several days, he encountered a mysterious young man. They ate and drank together, first at Xu’s boat, and then at the youth’s villa. Hearing that Xu was unable to find timber, the youth said that he had wood in his forests selling Xu an enormous timber at a good price, and bringing him some shanmu boards, which the youth asked Xu to sell in Wu (the state that then controlled Jiangnan). Upon arriving at the urban markets Xu discovered that the lord of Wu had just died. He presented the shanmu boards to make the lord’s coffin, making several thousand strings of cash. After three such trips, making large profits each time, Xu returned to the boy’s villa and found no trace of habitation. Asking nearby he found that no one had ever heard of the boy.
The mysterious or superhuman elements to these stories suggest a reliance on non-human forces to produce the trees. The fact that these trees only grew in the wild meant that they grew increasingly scarce. The removal of the most outstanding and ancient specimens only rendered the remaining trees more rare, valuable, and mysterious. Even the expertise of cutting timber from the deep gorges and dark woods of the south was portrayed as something outside the realm of human experience, or at least outside the comprehension of the Han merchants who purchased the timber. The persistence of a fantastical imagination of southern woodlands through at least the tenth century stood in stark contrast to the use and regulation of northern forests, which was by that point largely banal. Even as southern woodlands remained the abodes of fairies, immortals, and “timber guests,” northern woodlots were closely regulated and the cultivation of fuel, fruit, and bamboo became aspects of the rational management of estates in the north and in Jiangan.
The contrast between cultivated northern woodlots and wild southern forests changed markedly during the Song. By the end of the eleventh century, expertise had developed in planting the main southern timber species, pine and shanmu. Pine was grown from seeds, shanmu principally from cuttings. In the twelfth century, landlords were described as planting large plots with pine and shan with twenty-to-thirty year plans to harvest them for timber. In the 1140s forests were enclosed as private property following the first surveys to include non-agrarian land. By the thirteenth century, planation forestry was widespread in the Hinterlands of Hangzhou in western Zhejiang and Huizhou. But that is a story for another time.
