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The Water Mill and Northern Song imperial patronage of art, commerce, and science - China
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2002 by Heping Liu
The Emperor and the Water Mill
To maintain a population of more than one million in the capital city with an imperial army of two hundred thousand soldiers permanently stationed in the vicinity, a national market economy was established, with Kaifeng at its center, to raise the necessary revenue. (39) The early Song emperors, as the greatest patrons of the economy and the greatest consumers of its revenue, actively engaged themselves in this enterprise. By the late tenth century water mills had been in use in China for more than a thousand years, (40) but never had they been owned by the state before the Northern Song. To understand why and how the Northern Song government began to acquire water mills, it will help to look into the commissioning of several water mill agencies (shuimowu) by the Northern Song founder Taizu. The Song huiyao, a collection of Song state administrative documents, gives a lucid account of these events in Kaifeng:
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These water mill agencies each operated a mill, making flour for the Food Services Bureau of the imperial palaces as well as for other residents of the capital city. There were two agencies of the East and West [Water Mills]. The East Agency was located in the ward of Yongshun and the West Agency in the ward of Jiaqing. Both were set up in 970, each managed by two supervisory officials selected from the eunuchs (neishi) of the Court of Palace Attendants and manned by a total of 205 workers. (41)
That two officials can be seen inside the thatched pavilion in The Water Mill may be a coincidence, but these two figures could be the eunuch supervisors dressed in the attire of their official appointment, for the coded dress served as an insignia to inform the viewer of a particular rank. (42) In 990 a third water mill agency, the Datongmen Agency, was set up with one supervisory official and twenty-nine workers. In the following years three more water mill agencies were established some forty miles west of Kaifeng in the city of Zhengzhou to provide further services to the court. (43)
Four rivers flowing into the capital city provided rich resources for milling (Fig. 8). The Bian, as the northern section of the Grand Canal, connected Kaifeng with the Jiangnan region in the southeast and with the secondary capital Luoyang (via the Yellow River) in the west; it was the dynastic artery of commerce and economy. (44) The availability of abundant water and the advancement of hydraulic engineering made milling an increasingly profitable industry toward the late tenth century, and the state was determined to take the lion's share of the revenue. The commissioning of the water mill agencies reveals an intense competition between the state and private mill owners for control of the available water. Thus, the water mill agency as a state institution had a threefold purpose: to operate commercial water mills; to exhibit the imperial patronage of science and technology; and to exert bureaucratic control over the growing and profitable industry.
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