"How Can It Be that a Crow's Tail Can Hold Water?": The Square Pallet Pump in Lou Shu's Pictures of Tilling and Weaving

Around 1145, Lou Shu, a minor magistrate from Mingzhou, present-day Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China, undertook an ambitious project to depict in word and image the production of rice and silk. In a pair of hand scrolls, known as the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, he detailed in step-by-step fashion the cultivation and harvesting of these important commodities. The tilling scroll had twenty-one scenes with accompanying poems to describe the production of rice, from soaking the seeds to placing the grain into storage, while the weaving scroll presented twenty-four steps in the manufacture of silk fabric.

Rice and silk were the currencies in which the vast majority of Chinese farmers during the Song period (960-1279) paid their taxes. Lou Shu alluded to this situation in several of his poems, hinting at the exploitative demands of zealous clerks. Documents from the period record the dire consequences of excessive taxation: starving farmers rising up and marching on the capital to wreak havoc, killing those who had hoarded grain and demanding that rice in imperial storehouses be distributed.

The Pictures of Tilling and Weaving offered a solution to such problems. Those in government were duty-bound to recognize the farmers' hardship and to formulate policy that would ameliorate their suffering. Lou Shu wished to show his fellow officials, and ultimately the emperor, exactly how tax revenue was created, to give expression to the painstaking toil through which the bureaucrats received their salaries. In short, the scrolls were designed to engender respect for farmers and their work.

Lou Shu was not the first official to articulate the need for rulers to understand the difficulties of farming. This concept has a long lineage in Chinese political theory that extends to Mencius (late 4th century B.C.E.) and Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) commentaries on the poems in the Shijing, or Book of Odes, a compilation of slightly more than three hundred songs most probably collected in the period between 1000 to 600 B.C.E. Lou Shu's innovation lies in his perception of technology's role in improving the farmer's lot.

The Pictures of Tilling and Weaving are the first sustained pictorial exploration in Chinese history of the technologies and techniques used to produce rice and silk. The poems rarely refer directly to the scenes they accompany, a disparity between text and image that is striking to the modern eye. The pictures present these agricultural technologies in an objective light, through the use of the jie hua or straight-line style, which rendered objects with great precision. In contrast, the poems tend to focus sympathetically on the plight of the farmers—describing women winding silk through the night to pay the tax collector, for example, or the backbreaking work of the farmer and his ox, feet and hooves sinking deeply in the mud of the flooded rice paddies as they trudge along leveling the fields. Sometimes the poems offer sentimental descriptions of the bucolic charms of rural life: after the workday is done, the farmer and his ox bathe together companionably in a stream. All the poems reinforce the dignity of labor, and the humanity of those who perform it.

But there is an exception to this pattern. The scene illustrating the irrigation step in the tilling scroll, shown here, and its accompanying poem stand out because they relate directly to each other. The scroll, worn thin where the poem was written, has an ample amount of fragmentary Chinese characters that conform to the entire poem as documented in earlier records. Moreover, this poem addresses technology explicitly, praising the increased efficiency of newer farming techniques through a comparison with old ways.

The poem, in my translation, reads:

Disdain the man of...