1 00:00:09,698 --> 00:00:14,624 Two thousand three hundred years ago, the two characters "China" did not name a country. 2 00:00:15,029 --> 00:00:17,321 By the account of one man from the state of Qi, 3 00:00:17,811 --> 00:00:19,772 it was one eighty-first of the world. 4 00:00:20,151 --> 00:00:24,379 This is not somebody's guess — it is written in the Records of the Grand Historian. 5 00:00:25,454 --> 00:00:28,114 The passage comes from the Records of the Grand Historian, 6 00:00:28,506 --> 00:00:31,582 in the "Biographies of Mencius and Xun Qing." 7 00:00:31,974 --> 00:00:35,797 Sima Qian is recording here a set of claims made by Zou Yan, 8 00:00:36,239 --> 00:00:38,604 a man of Qi in the Warring States period. 9 00:00:39,008 --> 00:00:44,498 The original reads like this — "The Confucians speak of a China that is one part in 10 00:00:44,633 --> 00:00:48,604 eighty-one of the world. China's name is the Red County of Shenzhou. 11 00:00:49,008 --> 00:00:52,145 Within the Red County of Shenzhou there are nine provinces, 12 00:00:52,366 --> 00:00:55,883 which is what Yu set in order; these do not count as provinces. 13 00:00:56,275 --> 00:01:00,013 Outside China there are nine places like the Red County of Shenzhou, 14 00:01:00,454 --> 00:01:02,917 and these are what are called the nine provinces." 15 00:01:03,297 --> 00:01:09,670 In today's words: the "China" the Confucians described is only one eighty-first of the world. 16 00:01:10,050 --> 00:01:13,788 This "China" has a name: the Red County of Shenzhou. 17 00:01:14,180 --> 00:01:17,305 Inside the Red County of Shenzhou there are nine provinces 18 00:01:17,538 --> 00:01:20,234 the nine Yu divided in the Book of Documents, the Yu Gong. 19 00:01:20,650 --> 00:01:23,604 But those nine do not yet count as true provinces. 20 00:01:23,996 --> 00:01:28,628 And beyond the Red County of Shenzhou there are eight more places the same size. 21 00:01:28,996 --> 00:01:33,824 Nine times nine, eighty-one parts in all — that is the whole of "the world." 22 00:01:34,327 --> 00:01:37,513 This is where the word we use today, Shenzhou, comes from. 23 00:01:37,905 --> 00:01:42,489 One thing to make clear. The nine provinces Zou Yan described are not the same set 24 00:01:42,856 --> 00:01:46,557 as the Yu Gong nine. This film uses the Yu Gong set throughout 25 00:01:46,815 --> 00:01:51,410 Ji, Yan, Qing, Xu, Yang, Jing, Yu, Liang, Yong. 26 00:01:51,815 --> 00:01:55,687 The reason is simple: the passage above says "what Yu set in order," 27 00:01:56,153 --> 00:01:58,702 and only the Yu Gong names are the ones that match Yu. 28 00:01:59,106 --> 00:02:03,763 That is a textual decision, not a doctrinal one, and it is the only set used 29 00:02:03,886 --> 00:02:06,324 anywhere in this film.Notice the framing. 30 00:02:06,717 --> 00:02:11,520 Sima Qian is not asserting this himself; he is recording what Zou Yan asserted. 31 00:02:11,913 --> 00:02:14,646 That is the only reason the number survives at all 32 00:02:15,185 --> 00:02:19,437 a historian in a later age wrote one man's claim about scale into the record, 33 00:02:19,829 --> 00:02:21,962 and the claim outlived the man who made it. 34 00:02:22,354 --> 00:02:26,606 The "one eighty-first" is not a measurement anyone could check in his lifetime; 35 00:02:27,084 --> 00:02:32,403 it is a sentence someone else chose to preserve, and preservation is what turned a private 36 00:02:32,403 --> 00:02:34,462 speculation into a shared fact. 37 00:02:35,474 --> 00:02:37,043 Zou Yan was a man of Qi. 38 00:02:37,410 --> 00:02:40,143 His birth and death are not recorded in the histories; 39 00:02:40,535 --> 00:02:45,278 the more common account places him roughly between 324 and 250 BC. 40 00:02:45,682 --> 00:02:48,268 He held the doctrine of the Five Powers in succession, 41 00:02:48,722 --> 00:02:55,486 using the rotation of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth to explain why dynasties replace one 42 00:02:55,486 --> 00:03:00,572 another. The mechanism is plain to state: each element carries a virtue, 43 00:03:00,976 --> 00:03:05,217 and when one virtue is spent the next element in the cycle supplies the one after 44 00:03:05,217 --> 00:03:08,231 it, so a dynasty that has lost its virtue is, 45 00:03:08,256 --> 00:03:13,427 by that logic, already finished and the next ruler's authority comes from the element that follows. 46 00:03:13,832 --> 00:03:16,258 He also proposed the Great Nine Provinces. 47 00:03:16,675 --> 00:03:20,339 The people of Qi gave him a nickname — Tan Tian Yan, 48 00:03:20,646 --> 00:03:22,153 "Zou Yan who talks about heaven." 49 00:03:22,631 --> 00:03:26,148 The nickname is recorded in the Records of the Grand Historian. 50 00:03:26,552 --> 00:03:29,677 The people of Qi sang it like this: Tan Tian Yan, 51 00:03:29,935 --> 00:03:32,349 Diao Long Shi, Zhi Gu Guo Kun. 52 00:03:32,827 --> 00:03:36,577 Three men, three traits. Zou Yan could talk about heaven; 53 00:03:37,055 --> 00:03:42,496 Zou Shi could carve dragons; Chunyu Kun spoke as smoothly as oil on an axle. 54 00:03:42,876 --> 00:03:48,133 The verdict is half admiration — for a man willing to redraw the whole world 55 00:03:48,636 --> 00:03:52,104 and half mockery, for talking about things too far away to check. 56 00:03:52,496 --> 00:03:54,530 Both halves are in the same six characters. 57 00:03:54,935 --> 00:03:58,072 The people of Qi were not sure whether to be proud of him or to laugh 58 00:03:58,072 --> 00:04:01,516 at him. There is one detail that is easy to pass over. 59 00:04:01,920 --> 00:04:03,660 Zou Yan was a man of Qi. 60 00:04:04,052 --> 00:04:08,158 Qi is on today's Shandong peninsula, with sea on three sides. 61 00:04:09,158 --> 00:04:14,832 In Warring States Qi, seafaring was nothing new — people of that time had crossed from the 62 00:04:14,844 --> 00:04:21,192 peninsula to the Korean peninsula. Someone who sees the sea every day will naturally ask one 63 00:04:21,192 --> 00:04:23,226 question: what is on the other side? 64 00:04:23,619 --> 00:04:28,533 The idea that there are nine more places the size of China did not necessarily come 65 00:04:28,545 --> 00:04:30,297 from anything he saw at sea. 66 00:04:30,677 --> 00:04:33,092 But the place it was born is right on the coast. 67 00:04:33,484 --> 00:04:36,119 That is our reading, not something the histories record. 68 00:04:36,511 --> 00:04:41,560 It does, though, explain one thing: why this doctrine came out of the eastern seaboard and 69 00:04:41,572 --> 00:04:45,947 not the Central Plains. The sea is the only edge of the world you can stand 70 00:04:45,947 --> 00:04:49,366 at and see. Every land border has a neighbour beyond the hill; 71 00:04:49,771 --> 00:04:54,721 the ocean has only a horizon, and a horizon is a question with no answer in 72 00:04:54,734 --> 00:04:58,594 view — which is exactly the question this doctrine was built to answer. 73 00:04:59,606 --> 00:05:05,133 A word that survived from the Warring States to today has changed purpose several times in 74 00:05:05,145 --> 00:05:09,924 two thousand three hundred years. The earliest use kept four characters joined: 75 00:05:10,353 --> 00:05:14,103 the Red County of Shenzhou. Later, people began to take it apart 76 00:05:14,520 --> 00:05:17,216 saying either "Red County" or "Shenzhou." 77 00:05:17,706 --> 00:05:21,799 That is not our inference; that is how the later literature actually uses it. 78 00:05:22,192 --> 00:05:26,885 The best-known use of "Red County" is a poem Mao Zedong wrote in 1950, 79 00:05:27,143 --> 00:05:31,015 "Huanxisha: Reply to Mr. Liu Yazi": "Long is the night, 80 00:05:31,444 --> 00:05:35,647 no dawn on Red County's sky; a hundred years of monsters dancing." 81 00:05:36,052 --> 00:05:40,513 The use of "Shenzhou" comes from a poem the same author wrote in 1958, 82 00:05:40,770 --> 00:05:45,733 "Seven-Character Regulated Verse, Two Poems: Sending Off the God of Plague." 83 00:05:46,113 --> 00:05:50,684 Note that the full title is "Two Poems," not simply "Regulated Verse" 84 00:05:50,966 --> 00:05:51,897 it is a set of two. 85 00:05:52,302 --> 00:05:56,910 The second contains this line: "Willow branches by the thousand in the spring wind; 86 00:05:57,339 --> 00:06:01,370 six hundred million of Shenzhou, all like Shun and Yao." 87 00:06:01,763 --> 00:06:10,464 That year, Yujiang County in Jiangxi eliminated schistosomiasis; the People's Daily reported it on 30 June 1958, 88 00:06:10,746 --> 00:06:13,429 and Mao Zedong wrote the two poems the next day. 89 00:06:13,834 --> 00:06:17,878 Put the two examples side by side and something interesting shows. 90 00:06:18,282 --> 00:06:24,103 The same person, writing on the same word, chose "Red County" once and "Shenzhou" once. 91 00:06:24,508 --> 00:06:30,268 By the mid-twentieth century, then, "Red County" and "Shenzhou" were two interchangeable terms 92 00:06:30,537 --> 00:06:32,412 both ancient names for this land. 93 00:06:32,792 --> 00:06:34,986 Eight years separate the two poems. 94 00:06:35,390 --> 00:06:39,741 Nothing else does. What changed between them is not the word but its register. 95 00:06:40,108 --> 00:06:44,569 A name fixed inside a geography treatise stays a proposition you can argue with; 96 00:06:45,010 --> 00:06:49,630 the same name echoing through poems, and then pinned to a spacecraft, 97 00:06:49,851 --> 00:06:52,584 becomes something a person feels before they parse it. 98 00:06:52,964 --> 00:06:59,005 Repetition in verse does this — it wears a word smooth until it reads as if it 99 00:06:59,018 --> 00:07:01,187 had always belonged to the speaker. 100 00:07:01,591 --> 00:07:07,400 A spacecraft borrows that settled warmth: it takes an ancient name not because the name describes 101 00:07:07,400 --> 00:07:12,008 the machine, but because the name already carries the feeling of reaching upward. 102 00:07:12,400 --> 00:07:14,912 But Shenzhou moved one layer further after that. 103 00:07:15,304 --> 00:07:18,944 It went from a name in a geography text to a word carrying feeling: 104 00:07:19,471 --> 00:07:21,701 used in poems, used in names. 105 00:07:22,094 --> 00:07:26,015 The spacecraft that goes up today is called Shenzhou — 「神舟 106 00:07:26,469 --> 00:07:30,390 the same sound. It is no longer a geographical proposition. 107 00:07:30,782 --> 00:07:33,895 It has gradually become a kind of self-designation. 108 00:07:34,299 --> 00:07:37,155 That is a very long journey for two characters. 109 00:07:37,559 --> 00:07:41,260 A claim about scale, written down by one man in the state of Qi, 110 00:07:41,787 --> 00:07:44,275 ends up as a name people use for themselves. 111 00:07:45,278 --> 00:07:49,028 Back to Zou Yan. Once this doctrine of the Great Nine Provinces was out, 112 00:07:49,040 --> 00:07:52,864 what happened? The Records of the Grand Historian gives two lines 113 00:07:53,256 --> 00:07:54,922 one a verdict, one an outcome. 114 00:07:55,327 --> 00:07:59,959 The verdict is four characters: "his words are vast and irregular" 115 00:08:00,437 --> 00:08:04,322 he said things of enormous scale, contrary to ordinary sense. 116 00:08:04,726 --> 00:08:09,212 The outcome is this: "when princes and great men first met his doctrine, 117 00:08:09,616 --> 00:08:14,395 they were shaken and turned toward it; afterwards it could not be put into practice." 118 00:08:14,800 --> 00:08:18,611 The feudal lords and nobles, hearing his teaching for the first time, 119 00:08:19,016 --> 00:08:21,650 were stunned by it and even wanted to follow it. 120 00:08:22,042 --> 00:08:24,150 In the end, no one actually carried it out. 121 00:08:24,555 --> 00:08:29,040 Why would a doctrine that magnifies the world eighty-one times fail to spread? 122 00:08:29,444 --> 00:08:32,239 Because it was useless. To a ruler of that time, 123 00:08:32,606 --> 00:08:36,773 where the boundary of the world lay made no difference to how he collected tax that 124 00:08:36,773 --> 00:08:39,702 day, raised troops, or fought his neighbours. 125 00:08:40,106 --> 00:08:44,751 The map Zou Yan drew was too large — so large that it had nothing to do 126 00:08:44,751 --> 00:08:45,817 with the age he lived in. 127 00:08:46,209 --> 00:08:47,177 He could not even prove it. 128 00:08:47,569 --> 00:08:51,246 There was no way, then, to test a claim like "one eighty-first." 129 00:08:51,650 --> 00:08:55,866 A doctrine that cannot change what a ruler does on any given day is a doctrine 130 00:08:55,866 --> 00:08:58,109 a ruler has no reason to fund. 131 00:08:58,513 --> 00:09:04,591 So the nickname "talking about heaven" slowly shifted from admiration into a way of saying "unbounded." 132 00:09:04,971 --> 00:09:10,670 In later ages the Great Nine Provinces doctrine was filed under the "strange and far-fetched," 133 00:09:10,927 --> 00:09:15,241 alongside yin-yang portents. A ruler's attention is a budget. 134 00:09:15,621 --> 00:09:19,628 Every teaching he funds is one he is not funding something else 135 00:09:20,020 --> 00:09:23,746 a canal, a wall, a campaign closer to hand. 136 00:09:24,138 --> 00:09:28,158 A doctrine about the shape of the whole world asks for the same attention as a 137 00:09:28,158 --> 00:09:32,631 teaching about this year's harvest, yet gives nothing a harvest gives. 138 00:09:33,035 --> 00:09:36,283 That is the quiet meaning of "could not be put into practice": 139 00:09:36,552 --> 00:09:40,768 the doctrine was not forbidden, only never given a reason to be paid for. 140 00:09:41,172 --> 00:09:45,560 But the story turns here. In the nineteenth century, world maps reached China. 141 00:09:45,964 --> 00:09:50,437 People suddenly found that beyond China there really were other civilizations, 142 00:09:50,645 --> 00:09:54,469 other landmasses, other oceans. "What lies beyond China?" 143 00:09:54,935 --> 00:09:56,908 the question Zou Yan asked was right. 144 00:09:57,324 --> 00:09:58,391 He only got the answer wrong. 145 00:09:58,807 --> 00:10:04,310 He answered nine places the size of China; the real answer is seven continents and four 146 00:10:04,310 --> 00:10:08,844 oceans. But in his own time, the number of people who could even ask the question 147 00:10:08,844 --> 00:10:10,008 was already very small. 148 00:10:11,018 --> 00:10:13,653 Today Shenzhou is still one of the names for China. 149 00:10:14,057 --> 00:10:18,236 Several others stand alongside it: Red County, the Nine Provinces, 150 00:10:18,457 --> 00:10:21,471 Huaxia, Zhonghua. Each has its own origin. 151 00:10:21,864 --> 00:10:25,038 The one this film is about is the most unusual of them 152 00:10:25,246 --> 00:10:28,849 because when Shenzhou was born, it was not a self-designation. 153 00:10:29,241 --> 00:10:30,491 It was a unit of measurement. 154 00:10:30,896 --> 00:10:33,898 It answers "how large are we," not "who are we." 155 00:10:34,302 --> 00:10:37,574 And those Nine Provinces of the Yu Gong — Ji, Yan, 156 00:10:37,648 --> 00:10:42,746 Qing, Xu, Yang, Jing, Yu, Liang, Yong — are not abstract ideas. 157 00:10:43,163 --> 00:10:47,391 They correspond to specific ground. Ji is roughly today's Hebei; 158 00:10:47,954 --> 00:10:53,567 Yan is western Shandong; Qing is eastern Shandong; Xu is northern Jiangsu; 159 00:10:54,180 --> 00:10:57,881 Yang is the lower Yangtze; Jing is the two lakes region; 160 00:10:58,383 --> 00:11:04,743 Yu is the Central Plains; Liang is Sichuan; Yong is the Shaanxi and Gansu area. 161 00:11:05,136 --> 00:11:08,922 Two thousand years on, some of these names became the name of a province, 162 00:11:09,131 --> 00:11:13,273 some the name of a city, and some the place where the food we eat every 163 00:11:13,273 --> 00:11:16,496 day is grown. This is what the series sets out to do. 164 00:11:16,888 --> 00:11:22,219 Shenzhou: China's Living Heritage is not a travel film, and not a history film. 165 00:11:22,611 --> 00:11:27,476 What it sets out to do is put the two characters Shenzhou back onto specific ground 166 00:11:28,016 --> 00:11:32,096 walking it stop by stop, looking at where each place's name came from, 167 00:11:32,280 --> 00:11:34,976 what it produces, what business it does, who it has produced, 168 00:11:34,989 --> 00:11:36,153 and what it has left behind. 169 00:11:36,545 --> 00:11:40,442 These names did not survive because anyone preserved them on purpose. 170 00:11:40,846 --> 00:11:46,557 They survived because administration keeps its own memory: a province takes the name of the region 171 00:11:46,557 --> 00:11:50,663 it governs, a city keeps the name of the capital it replaced. 172 00:11:51,079 --> 00:11:54,658 The ground holds the word long after the word's first meaning is gone. 173 00:11:55,050 --> 00:11:58,395 We start from Beijing, then follow the canal to Yangzhou, 174 00:11:58,653 --> 00:12:04,168 to Quanzhou, to Guangzhou. The people who sailed out from Guangzhou built watchtowers in Kaiping, 175 00:12:04,646 --> 00:12:09,278 earthen buildings in Fujian, and in Shanxi drew up China's first draft note; 176 00:12:09,780 --> 00:12:12,146 in Huizhou they raised memorial arches. 177 00:12:12,587 --> 00:12:16,006 Further on are the gardens of Suzhou, the West Lake in Hangzhou, 178 00:12:16,484 --> 00:12:20,736 the porcelain of Jingdezhen; the cave temples at Yungang, Longmen, 179 00:12:20,969 --> 00:12:23,812 and Dunhuang; Mount Tai and Qufu. 180 00:12:24,204 --> 00:12:27,844 Each of those places is one entry in the nine provinces. 181 00:12:28,248 --> 00:12:29,474 Each of them can be walked. 182 00:12:29,878 --> 00:12:35,320 That is the whole method: no summary, no overview — just one piece of ground at a 183 00:12:35,332 --> 00:12:38,494 time, until the word is standing on solid earth again. 184 00:12:38,922 --> 00:12:42,525 Follow this line to its end and it comes back to Beijing 185 00:12:42,820 --> 00:12:46,104 because the place we set out from and the place we return to are the same 186 00:12:46,104 --> 00:12:46,619 city. 187 00:12:47,618 --> 00:12:51,270 Last, back to Zou Yan. He travelled widely in his life, 188 00:12:51,515 --> 00:12:54,407 but he stayed longest in one state — Yan. 189 00:12:54,812 --> 00:12:58,010 King Zhao of Yan built him a palace called the Jieshi Palace, 190 00:12:58,378 --> 00:13:00,069 and took him as his teacher. 191 00:13:00,461 --> 00:13:03,108 The Records of the Grand Historian puts it this way: 192 00:13:03,635 --> 00:13:08,353 "King Zhao swept the road before him, and asked to take a seat among the disciples 193 00:13:08,500 --> 00:13:12,875 and receive instruction" — the king holding a broom to clear the way for him, 194 00:13:13,390 --> 00:13:16,552 asking to sit in a pupil's place and hear him teach. 195 00:13:16,944 --> 00:13:19,542 A ruler, treating a scholar in that posture. 196 00:13:19,946 --> 00:13:24,946 Where was Yan? Its capital was called Ji — and that is where Beijing stands today. 197 00:13:25,339 --> 00:13:26,601 Next time, we begin from here. 198 00:13:27,638 --> 00:13:30,652 Everything mentioned in this film is still where it was. 199 00:13:31,057 --> 00:13:36,412 A word, a river, a city — what kept them alive this long is nothing else: 200 00:13:36,878 --> 00:13:41,412 in every generation, someone remembered. The word is still in the dictionary. 201 00:13:41,804 --> 00:13:44,856 The river still runs. The city still has people in it, 202 00:13:45,138 --> 00:13:46,817 going to work and coming home. 203 00:13:47,209 --> 00:13:48,532 None of that is a monument. 204 00:13:48,937 --> 00:13:50,959 All of it is what the word was pointing at. 205 00:13:51,351 --> 00:13:56,866 The full transcript, the bibliography, and further reading for this film are at sylogs.com. 206 00:13:57,270 --> 00:14:00,444 Subscribe to this channel — and we will see you at the next stop.