A palace full of wells — and every cup of water carted in from outside | Shenzhou 05
《神州大地》第 6 集 · 語言：English · 時長：15:29
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There are wells inside the Forbidden City.

In the records of the Ming and

the Qing, the palace wells were written

down one by one: some are noted

as "sweet and fit to drink";

others are written off as "ruined wells. "

The city is not short of water

either — just outside the wall runs a

moat. Yet the water used every day

by the imperial kitchens was carted in

from outside the city.

Why?

Start with the wells.

In the Ming, Liu Ruoyu wrote a

book called Zhuo Zhong Zhi, a record

of how the palace was run.

It mentions several wells: one east of

the Small Stone Bridge, "sweet and fit

to drink"; one opened late in the

Wanli reign, "extremely sweet. "

Wells also had different jobs.

Zhou Qian, a research curator at the

Palace Museum, has described wells as the

palace's "main source of domestic water, "

serving both drinking and firefighting.

On firefighting, though, Liu Ruoyu adds a

line in the same book: the Inner

Golden Water River was kept for fire,

because "if we relied only on water

drawn from the wells, how much could

be saved? " Sweeping, watering and washing in

the palace drew on those wells as

well.

One well stood apart from the others:

the Great Kitchen Well in the Hall

of Heart Cultivation. In the eighth year

of Shunzhi — 1651 — a rule was laid

down: every year, in the tenth month,

the Well God was sacrificed to in

front of the Great Kitchen Well.

The Palace Museum's own website describes the

water of this well as "clear,

sweet and cold. " Was anyone looking after

the wells? What can be verified is

repair, not annual dredging.

The octagonal well west of the right

gate of the Jiade Hall was cleaned

out once, in 1626. Afterwards the taste had

not changed, and Zhuo Zhong Zhi simply

writes: "a truly ruined well. "

There was one yearly routine: on the

fourth day of the third month the

palace channels were cleared, the brass vats

scoured and refilled with freshly drawn water.

That every well was dredged every year

for that we could not find a

clear rule in the Ming records.

So the palace wells were not all

unusable. Some could be drunk from;

some were finished. On this point the

records do not agree with one another.

Why go outside the city for water?

Because the people of the time wrote

down what the city's water was like.

Xu Chong, in the Ming, in Nuan

Shu You Bi: " The wells of the

capital are mostly brackish and bitter,

undrinkable. " Li Shizhen, in the Compendium of

Materia Medica, gave the cause: where the

city's wells stand close to ditches and

sewage, the waste seeps in and the

water turns alkaline. In the Qing,

an anonymous writer in Yanjing Zaji:

" The water of the capital is the

least agreeable to the mouth. "

Wang Yun, writing earlier, in the Yuan:

" In densely settled places the water is

mostly brackish; of wells that yield a

fine spring, not one or two in

a hundred. " These accounts describe the whole

city of Beijing, not the wells inside

the Forbidden City. The modern explanation for

the brackish taste comes from groundwater chemistry

that is present-day research, not a record

of the time.

The water line outside the wall was

not a Qing invention.

In the twenty-eighth year of Zhiyuan,

in the Yuan, Guo Shoujing proposed diverting

the Baifu Spring in Changping: the water

was to swing west around the north

of the capital, then turn south and

enter the city at the West Water

Gate. The Yuan History, in its chapter

on canals, records this route.

The Yuan also cut a Golden Water

River, bringing water from Jade Spring Mountain

into the capital and on to the

palace. There was a rule at the

time: no washing hands in the Golden

Water River. An edict of 1322 notes

that "in the time of the founding

emperor, washing hands in the Golden Water

River was forbidden" — by then, people had

been watering horses in it.

The Baifu line later broke.

After the Ming built the imperial tombs

at Changping, the court discussed dredging it

again and concluded that "the water flows

west against the current, past the ancestral

tombs, and this is likely unsuitable, "

so it was not repaired.

In 1471 a party was sent to look

once more, with the same conclusion.

Once Baifu stopped, the water of Jade

Spring Mountain became the capital's main source.

The Qing court drew its drinking water from there

too.

How did Jade Spring Mountain's water come

to be famous? In the sixteenth year

of Qianlong — 1751 — the emperor wrote an

essay: Record of the Finest Spring Under

Heaven at Jade Spring Mountain.

An edict of the same year carries

the line, "having tasted the famous springs,

I judge this one the finest under

heaven. " What he judged was not the

taste. It was the weight.

The method is in the essay:

"compared by means of a silver measure"

the same measure filled with different waters,

weighed, the lighter ranked first.

Water from Jade Spring Mountain: one dou

weighed one liang. Pearl Spring in Jinan:

one liang and two li.

The Golden Mountain Spring on the Yangzi:

one liang and three li.

Hui Spring and Tiger Run Spring:

one liang and four li each.

Waters from Qingliang Mountain, Baisha, Tiger Hill

and the Green Cloud Temple in the

Western Hills: one liang and one fen

each. The essay adds one further line:

snow water is three li lighter than

Jade Spring's, but "cannot be had year-round. "

This was the list Qianlong drew up

himself. To judge water today, we use

chemical analysis, not weight.

How did the water get into the

palace? By land. The carts loaded water

at Jade Spring Mountain, came in through

Xizhimen Gate, then entered the palace by

the Gate of Divine Might.

One record says that after Puyi abdicated,

the carts bringing Jade Spring water still

came through the Gate of Divine Might

every evening. Xizhimen has a nickname:

the Water Gate. The name does not

come from a sluice for diversion

it comes from the water carts all

using that gate. In the old barbican,

the archway carried a white marble carving

of water ripples, called "the Xizhimen water

pattern. " It is gone today.

Diversion took a different route: the Inner

Golden Water River entered the palace by

the sluice west of the Gate of

Divine Might and left by the sluice

south of the East Glorious Gate.

That comes from a public statement in 2016

by Shan Jixiang, then director of the

Palace Museum. One cart, one sluice.

Two entirely different routes.

Who ran it? In the Qing,

the Imperial Household Department.

The office in charge was the Neiguangling

Office, also called the Zhangguanfang Office.

In the twenty-second year of Kangxi a

cart depot was set up under it,

managed by four officials.

How many people? Here there are two

accounts. One says the Zhangguanfang Office had

four thousand nine hundred and fifty subordinate

attendants — but that is the whole office,

not water carriers only.

The other says water carrying fell to

the Imperial Kitchen, with one hundred and

three men on the duty.

Both accounts are cited.

For the number of men whose sole

duty was carrying water, we found no

primary record. How much water came in

each day, or each year — likewise not

found.

There is one more thing we could

not find. In the Qing there was

a work called the Palace History.

Two of its chapters record daily expenses,

allowances and offerings in the palace.

Milk, tea, vessels, ice chests — each listed

item by item. Water is not there.

Another work, the Collected Regulations of the

Palace, sets out the daily allowances from

empress dowager down to the lowest-ranked consorts.

It has no entry for water either.

On the Palace Museum's own website,

the emperor's daily allowance is said to

include "twelve jars of Jade Spring water. "

That figure carries no archival citation.

Another set of numbers circulating online

fifty jars for the emperor, twenty-five for

the empress dowager, twenty for the empress,

two for a maid — we could not

trace, and it does not match the

twelve. How the water was divided up

after it reached the palace, we found

no primary record for either.

Water had another form in the palace:

ice. Ice was cut in more than

one place. The archives and the Collected

Statutes of the Great Qing record the

waters used: the Tongzi River around the

Forbidden City, the Jingshui or Imperial River,

and the Lotus Pond at Longwangtang.

In the early Qing, ice was cut

as far away as the Tongzhou channel;

after 1754 Tongzhou was dropped and more ice

was cut on the Imperial River each

year. The ice was stored in icehouses

outside the Longzong Gate.

The Collected Statutes record: "within the Forbidden

City, five icehouses, storing twenty-five thousand blocks"

each block a foot and a half

square. Four icehouses still stand in the

palace today. Ice was not only for

the palace. In the ninth year of

Shunzhi a rule was set: every year

from midsummer until the start of autumn,

the princes, the ministers and the censors

all received ice.

Ice was collected on a ticket.

The Board of Works issued ice tickets,

and the holder came to collect.

Not only people inside the palace either.

Outside the ten city gates, and at

the four memorial arches east and west,

fourteen official summer-broth stations were set up

for soldiers and civilians.

The system was interrupted in the middle:

suspended in 1674, restored in the Qianlong reign.

So "the Qing issued ice throughout" is

not accurate. It stopped once.

That spring, the one Qianlong weighed at

one liang — what of it today?

The springs of Jade Spring Mountain stopped

flowing completely in 1975. Beijing's plan for treating

groundwater overdraft, covering 2023 to 2025, still lists "accelerating

ecological restoration of the Jade Spring Mountain

and Baifu Spring areas" as a task

that is, as of that plan,

it has not recovered.

The water Beijing drinks has changed source.

Guanting Reservoir began supplying water in 1954,

and stopped supplying Beijing's domestic water in 1977

as quality declined. Miyun Reservoir was completed

in 1960; from 1982 it stopped supplying Hebei and

Tianjin and went to Beijing alone.

In December 2014, the middle route of the

South-to-North Water Diversion began delivering water to

the city. The " Finest Spring Under Heaven"

stele still stands beside the spring at

the southern foot of Jade Spring Mountain.

Jade Spring Mountain is used today by

a state institution and is not open

to the public.

What became of the stored ice?

Of the four icehouses still standing in

the palace, three have become restaurants and

one a storeroom. The area is a

visitor service zone now.

When did the water carts stop?

The Beijing water company was approved in 1908

and began supplying in 1910; its stated range

ran "inward as far as the Forbidden

City. " Whether it ever actually supplied the

palace has two accounts.

One says it did.

The other, from the recollection of an

old employee of the works, says the

pipe into the palace served firefighting only:

it entered from the East Glorious Gate,

ran about three hundred metres, and ended

at the Wenchang Pavilion — and the palace

still drank water delivered by cart.

The exact year the carts stopped,

we could not find.

The latest marker is 5 November 1924, when Puyi

left the palace. Jade Spring's water was

still there then: a survey in 1928 still

recorded eight springs. What stopped was the

system, not the source.

Back to the question at the start.

There are wells in the palace.

Some of their water could be drunk,

some could not; the wells were sacrificed

to, and repaired. That the city's water

was unpleasant is written down by the

people of the time.

Qianlong used a silver measure to place

Jade Spring's water first on a list

he drew up himself.

So every day water carts came into

the city: from Jade Spring Mountain,

in through Xizhimen, in through the Gate

of Divine Might. Who managed it,

how many men, how much came in

each day — the offices can be traced;

the figures mostly cannot.

Once the water reached the palace,

part of it became ice, stored outside

the Longzong Gate and handed out on

tickets in summer. This way of moving

water ran from the Yuan, when Jade

Spring was diverted into the capital,

all the way to 1924.

And the water of Jade Spring Mountain

where did that come from?

Shenzhou: China's Living Heritage.

The transcript and bibliography are at sylogs.com.

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Source: sylogs.com