Stemming the Flow with Characters: Person-and-World Mooring in Jiashan as the Grand Canal’s Anchor in an Age of Upheaval

Existing scholarship on the Grand Canal takes “circulation” (tong) as its sole measure of value, ranking riverside localities into core, close, and radiating tiers by their distance from the trunk line and treating off-trunk regions as a graded diminution of relevance and resource concentration. This article argues that in the Ming and Qing the Canal was the material form of the current of the times: grain barges went north, boats bearing prisoners under escort went north, and after the dynastic collapse the flotillas of the captured went north as well—what they carried shifted from grain to persons to life itself, yet the waterway remained one and the same. From the Yuan to the early Qing, the single locality of Weitang in Jiashan met upheaval three times without being moved, and three times answered it with one and the same form: an object that cannot move, and a text moored beside it. In the Yuan, Wu Zhen, his path to office foreclosed, painted the Fisherman handscroll and moored a lyric beside each of its fourteen boats; in the Tianqi eunuch persecution the Wei household was destroyed, yet the carved-stone boat by Wang Yi and the thirty-four characters preserved in Wei Xueyi’s Record of the Carved Boat alone survived; in the late Wanli era a woman of Kuaiji inscribed poems on the earthen wall of Xinjia post-station, and though the wall’s characters were gone within forty years, the poems survived through matching verses, notebooks, and prefectural anthologies—recontextualized, in the dynastic-transition exchanges of verse, from one woman’s private grievance into a public text of Jiangnan women borne north never to return. In all three the flow severed is the current of the age, and what is brought to rest is person and world; the object of the operation moves outward from the self to the household to the passing stranger, yet across three dynasties the method does not change. Drawing on Bakhtin’s chronotope, Blumenberg’s metaphorology of shipwreck, de Certeau’s concept of the tactic, and Derrida’s theory of iterability, read together with the Zhuangzi’s doctrine of still water, this article contends that in the Canal’s division of labor the riverside counties bear the grain tribute while Jiashan bears the record: reclusive Jiashan is in truth the anchor of the Canal, of the age, and of the individual.