'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

摘要

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.