Ma Shumou and the Grand Canal

The greatest achievement of ancient engineering was China's Grand Canal. The canal stretches 1100 miles (1800 km) from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south, uniting the basins of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers.

Today the southern two-thirds are still in use, much modified and enlarged, carrying coal, oil, scrap iron, building materials, and all the other heavy goods of the Chinese economy. It carries more freight than all of Britain's railroads. In recent years it has been in the news, because the Chinese government has been trying to refurbish it in both an economic and a cultural sense. Key sections are being deepened and straightened, efforts are being made to reduce the pollution, and parks and museums are being built along its banks. It has become a focus of national pride, another reminder that China once led the world in technology and government power.

Parts of the canal were dug as early as the fifth century BCE, but it was not drawn together until 609 CE, during the Sui Dynasty. The canal defies superlatives. Millions of tons of earth were moved to build it, by millions of workers using shovels and wheelbarrows; thousands of boats moved along it, carrying enough grain to feed millions.  In the early 1800s, the bureau that administered the canal had 47,000 employees.

The canal made the later Chinese empires possible. From the Tang Dynasty to the twentieth century, China's economic heart was in the south, but its safety depended on defense in the north. The government was usually in the north as well, with the armies. The food and other supplies that sustained the imperium traveled north on the canal; without it, it would have been much harder for China to defend its vast northern frontier.

In Chinese folklore, though, the canal appears in a different light.

For centuries, Chinese parents frightened naughty children with tales of Barbarous Ma, a mandarin who was said to feast on children's flesh. Ma was no mythical ogre, though. He was a real person, Ma Shumou, and he entered history as the man responsible for building the grand canal. The connection of China's various canals into a single great network was ordered by emperor Wen of Sui, who himself has a horrible reputation as one of China's worst tyrants. In legend, Wen ordered the canal dug so he could sail his pleasure barge around China rather than having to ride in an uncomfortable palanquin. When he demanded that every family in central China contribute a man to work on the canal, he decreed that if anyone tried to evade this duty, he would be torn to pieces, and his family would be exterminated to the third generation.

According to Wen's own proclamation, 3.4 million laborers were conscripted for the canal. So many died, the stories say, that only widows were left in many villages near the canal. The stories about Ma say that he treated his various ailments by eating the fat from human children, boiled with sugar and almonds. Almost as bad, he insisted on digging through many cemeteries, disturbing ancient tombs despite repeated warnings from angry ghosts. "Tell Ma that he is doomed," one says to a worker. In the end Ma's crimes came to the emperor's attention, and he ordered that Ma be torn apart. Because of his great work on the canal, though, his family was spared.

I love this story because it gives a peasant's eye view of the great works of empire. To most ordinary Chinese, the canal was not a wonder, but a horror: it was decreed by a tyrant out of his own vanity, it consumed men like a monster, and its overseer was an atrocious cannibal so bad that even the tyrant turned against him in the end.