By Hui-Lin Hsu
Reviewed by Robin L. Visser
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)
Hui-Lin Hsu, When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2024, X + 163 pp. ISBN: 978-988-8842-77-3 (Hardback).
When the Yellow River Floods comprehensively analyzes polymath author Liu E’s (刘鹗, 1857-1909) popular late Qing novel, The Travels of Lao Can (老残游记, 1907), by engaging hydraulics, medicine, occult knowledge, and literary, social, and political history. Published in 2024 by Hong Kong University Press, the hardcover edition of 163 pages is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief conclusion. In his analysis, Hui-Lin Hsu challenges conventional understandings of late Qing literary history by connecting water management principles to literary nation-building, demonstrating how river engineering techniques inform the novel’s landscape descriptions and its medical, political, and national sentiment discourses. Though Liu E died in infamy after being exiled to Xinjiang on trumped-up charges, Travels was first serialized in 1903 to popular acclaim and retains scholarly relevance into the twenty-first century.[1]
The introduction pairs the frequent flooding of the Yellow River during Liu E’s lifetime to his work as a river engineer from 1888 to 1893 after a catastrophic dike breach in Zhengzhou killed over 930,000 people. Based on his surveys and mapping of the Yellow River in Henan, Zhili, and Shandong, Liu wrote Chart of the Course of the Yellow River (豫,直,鲁三省黄河图) and Five Essays on River Management (治河五说), key sources for Hsu’s analysis of The Travels of Lao Can. In them, Liu proposes a new embankment system of oblique dikes (斜提) that “defend water with water” (以水敌水), inspired by flood control methods attributed to the mythical Da Yu (大禹). Hsu argues that this pliant water management technique directly informs Liu E’s understanding of late Qing politics.
In chapter 1, Hydraulics and Medicine, Hsu suggests that Liu E, who was also a practicing physician, introduced traditional Chinese medicine concepts into Travels’ narrative of national salvation by associating it with techniques of water control. Hsu applies this “hydraulics-medicine” analogy to the novel’s discourses on treating blood dampness, on revolutionaries that trigger floods, and on the Boxers’ loss of control, concluding that Liu E diagnoses China as suffering from a loss of control over the body and, by analogy, over water. In chapter 2, Governance, Hydraulics, and the Vice of the Incorruptible, Hsu investigates Liu E’s challenge to the historical separation of government affairs (公) from private ones (私) by presenting a new concept of the former that fuses government and civilian affairs, adopting a more fluid, hydraulics-informed approach to political crisis and biological nationalism.
Hsu addresses flood trauma and national sentiment in chapter 3, From Sediment to Sentiment, arguing that Liu E draws on knowledge of disaster relief to build an affective structure where traumatic emotions of flood survivors become productive for nation-building, not unlike the operative forces in oblique dikes. In chapter 4, Water, Landscape, and the Appearance of a New National Literature, Hsu contends that Liu E’s acclaimed descriptions of landscapes, and his awareness of the limitations of vision, are based on his experience as a professional river engineer. Liu’s materialist knowledge of optics, in turn, formed his literary imagination of the modern Chinese nation. Arguments in Hsu’s preceding chapters culminate in his intriguing chapter 5, Toward China’s Rejuvenation, which traces the Taigu School (太谷学派) and Liu E’s propagation of its philosophy in Travels. A lifelong adherent of this folk religious society (or secret society) that combines Confucian, Buddhist, and religious Daoism, Liu E unsuccessfully sought to lead the Taigu revival after “the most brutal religious persecution in Chinese history” (116). In his detailed close reading of chapters at the structural center of the first volume, Hsu shows how Taigu thought and Yellow River governance mutually inform each other in the novel.
When the Yellow River Floods is impressive in its disciplinary breadth and analytical depth. Hsu succinctly explains principles in engineering, medicine, and Taigu philosophy, references relevant literary antecedents for water control, engages generic conventions in landscape writing, and provides late Qing environmental, historical, political and biographical details that illuminate Travels. His erudite footnotes add substantive (and often fascinating) points. While Hsu engages relevant Chinese, English, and Japanese scholarship on Travels, there is considerably less comparative analysis of the novel relative to other late Qing literary works, to environmental histories of Yellow River governance, and to literature and science studies more broadly.[2] Further, the novel’s discourse on the national sentiments of “the Chinese race” (68) in the late Qing context is neither theorized nor historicized.
Overall, When the Yellow River Floods is a significant intervention into late Qing literary studies. Hsu’s materially-grounded analysis of The Travels of Lao Can via theories of water flow, environmental catastrophe, and flood control convincingly elucidates otherwise seemingly disparate themes and episodes within the novel. Hsu’s interpretation is further enhanced by deep knowledge of late Qing politics, the author’s biography and writings, and the diverse philosophical, religious, and literary allusions in the novel. When the Yellow River Floods has relevance to readers interested in literature and technology studies, environmental studies, and late Qing political culture.
Robin L. Visser
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
NOTES:
[1] Dozens of articles published in recent years address topics such as the novel’s occult knowledge, medicinal knowledge, Buddhism, historicity, lyricism, dialects, technology, status as crime fiction, as a book of prophesy, etc.
[2] See, for example, water governance theories in Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Louise Noble, “A Mythography of Water: Hydraulic Engineering and the Imagination,” in Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 445–465.