Chapter 1743: Six Veins Canal

A simple solution presented itself: use the Guangzhou map from another timeline as a template. By comparing it with the map drawn by the City Operations Department, any streets lacking proper names could be christened after their modern equivalents from roughly corresponding locations. In this way, countless nameless alleys and back roads gradually acquired designations. However, when Lin Baiguang from the Comprehensive Governance Office began implementing the scheme, he proposed trying to "follow local customs" wherever possible. If surrounding residents already used customary names for their lanes and passages, there was no reason not to adopt them.

Lin Baiguang and his team labored for several days before finally settling the matter of street and alley names. The road signs and house number plates would be stamped from tinplate, all bearing blue characters on white backgrounds. His plan was to nail up the signs and assign house numbers while simultaneously conducting household surveys and building the registry. But before he could even begin proper arrangements, Liu Xiang summoned him again.

"Old Lin, the situation with illegal structure demolition in Guangzhou is... not encouraging."

"Just say it plainly. What new scheme are you cooking up?" Lin Baiguang said. "No need to be diplomatic with me."

"The demolition on Chengxuan Street is complete, but similar situations exist throughout the city. A campaign-style demolition would be easy enough, but we need to think about long-term management." Liu Xiang first laid out his diplomatic preamble. "So I'm considering whether we should conduct a comprehensive real estate registration, taking advantage of the household census."

"Real estate registration?" Lin Baiguang considered this. "That would certainly be useful. The problem is that property rights are enormously complex—you need original documents..."

"The original documents exist," Liu Xiang replied. "The archive repositories at both the prefectural and county levels contain original house deeds and land deeds. I retrieved and examined several copies; the records are reasonably clear. According to the retained household clerks, in theory every property-owning family keeps their own copies of these documents. We can use those to conduct a fresh registration of real estate rights."

"But this isn't exactly urgent, is it?" Lin Baiguang felt that while demolishing illegal structures was commendable, it might not warrant such priority. "Our demolition work along the main roads is already proceeding smoothly, and we're meeting little resistance. Clean up the major thoroughfares, ease the traffic flow. As for demolishing ordinary residences and shops, we can take our time. No need to try to become fat in a single bite."

"Old Lin, I'm being driven by necessity." Liu Xiang released a heavy sigh. "You know our plan includes not only demolition, but also cleaning the city's sewers. And you know the 'Return South Days' are almost upon us."

The humid season—Guangzhou wouldn't see a comprehensive sewer renovation until the 1950s in the other timeline. Before the excavation of East Lake, the city's geographical situation made it perpetually vulnerable to urban flooding. Each year, once March passed, the so-called Return South Days arrived: weeks of constant drizzle and thick fog. It was the first annual test of any urban drainage system before the true flood season began.

Having spent several years in Guangzhou, Lin Baiguang understood the severity of those days intimately. He nodded.

"I've long heard people speak of Guangzhou's Six Veins Canal drainage system. But these past few days I've gathered the retained clerks and runners, conducted personal inspections—and the results are deeply discouraging." Liu Xiang pulled a map toward himself. "No one can explain the actual course of the Six Veins Canal!"

The Six Veins Canal, as its name suggested, was a drainage system composed of six river channels. It had originated from six natural and artificial waterways within Guangzhou City during the Song Dynasty, utilizing the natural terrain—high in the north, sloping south toward the sea—to create an integrated river-channel drainage network. Beyond drainage, it had once served transportation needs; some channels even supplied fresh water. But this system had undergone drastic changes during the Ming Dynasty.

After several major expansions and reconstructions throughout the Ming period, the unification of the three city districts and the construction of the southern city had inflicted severe damage on the original natural water system. Natural rivers and lakes—including Winxi Stream and the ancient West Lake—had gradually silted up, devolving into nothing more than drainage channels. As their navigational function within the city essentially vanished, residents began encroaching on the waterways. Open channels gradually became hidden channels—covered culverts. If the Six Veins Canal had still resembled actual "river creeks" in the early Ming, capable of bearing boat traffic alongside drainage, by the late Ming they had mostly become buried conduits. The historical fact that vast numbers of Guangzhou citizens hid in the Six Veins Canal during the Qing army's massacre at the dynasty's end—and drowned when floodwaters swept through—demonstrated that by that era, the old river channels were already sealed underground.

Open channels became hidden channels, and houses were built atop the hidden channels. The result was a mystery: by the time the Australians entered the city, the specific locations and routes of most ditches and culverts lay buried beneath swaths of buildings, their secrets lost.

The most notorious puzzle was the sixth vein itself—its exact location had been an unsolved mystery since the Ming Dynasty. Neither the dredging projects of the late Ming nor those before the mid-Qing ever found any trace of it. Tan Qinghai, a Dongguan native writing in the early Wanli era—not far removed from the transmigrators' current time—had authored "Explanation of the Six Veins," which recorded only five.

Liu Xiang's understanding of the system derived largely from this predecessor's records. As for the hundreds of research papers and monographs on the Six Veins Canal stored in the Great Library, they all fundamentally relied on the same source.

"I've walked all over the city these past few days," Liu Xiang said, shaking his head. "I've seen quite a few open channels and glimpsed several covered ones. But when I ask the clerks and runners, not a single person knows the detailed distribution of drainage channels in the city. Although I never studied water supply and drainage, looking at the current situation, I can reasonably conclude that building houses over open channels—as happened on Chengxuan Street—is extremely common throughout Guangzhou."

"So..." Lin Baiguang finally grasped his intent. He knew that even under Great Ming law, encroaching on river channels to build houses—or constructing buildings atop covered culverts—was prohibited. The government couldn't possibly have issued legitimate land and house deeds for such structures. They were illegal by definition.

To determine the locations and routes of the city's channels, and to clean the ditches and canals, there was simply no way forward without first tearing down the illegal structures covering them.

"Exactly my thinking," Liu Xiang confirmed. "It isn't terribly difficult to trace the Six Veins Canal—we have historical materials from the ancients and clerks who've handled past dredging operations. But Guangzhou's drainage system isn't limited to the Six Veins Canal. There are countless other open ditches and hidden conduits. This network isn't recorded in any detail in the historical records. We have to map it ourselves—and we need to do it soon."

Liu Xiang's urgency was well-founded. Liu San, appointed head of health and medical affairs for Guangdong, had entered the city a few days prior. After a cursory inspection, he had delivered a stark warning: unless a large-scale sanitation campaign was launched immediately, once the Return South Days arrived, a major outbreak of infectious disease in the city would be inevitable.

"Understood. I'll do my best," Lin Baiguang said with a nod. "My current thinking is to proceed on two parallel tracks. First, you issue a public notice throughout the city mandating 'self-demolition within a fixed deadline' for illegal structures—given the current momentum, many families will probably comply voluntarily. Second, we use the household registration survey as an opportunity to investigate illegal structures house by house."

Liu Xiang saw Lin Baiguang out, then instructed Little Zhang to send a telegram to Lingao inquiring when the Director of the Guangzhou Police Bureau would arrive at his post. He followed this by having someone summon Jia Jue.

Jia Jue was still yawning when he entered—old yamen clerks like him had never experienced such relentless work, day and night without respite. Checking in at the yamen at dawn to handle business, not leaving until the night watch began. And they were the fortunate ones. Those "Fake Kun"—naturalized citizens the Chief had brought from Qiongzhou Prefecture—were often still laboring when the clerks departed. According to the retained cleaning laborers, all-night shifts were commonplace.

In traditional local yamens, since the government basically assumed few social management functions, affairs moved at a leisurely pace. The key skill for clerks was "conforming to precedent"—public business depended primarily on their familiarity with old rules and established procedures. A clerk of Jia Jue's standing, while nowhere near as exalted as the imperious Division Scribes who never bothered coming to the yamen and simply commanded their disciples from teahouses or private residences, spent very little time at the office each day. Mostly he just signed in; even when there was actual work, everyone dispersed by noon.

The Australian work style—investigating every matter large or small, demanding answers for everything—was utterly exhausting for old clerks like Jia Jue.

Yet exhausted or not, they had to endure. The winds outside were growing fiercer by the day. Everyone who had once "eaten the yamen's rice" now walked on eggshells, terrified of being reported and thrown into prison to be "interrogated" by their former colleagues. He had heard that Zhen Haoren, the Household Division Scribe of this very prefecture, had "died of illness in prison"—though whispers among the bailiffs hinted he had actually been "tortured to death." According to his confession, they had confiscated nearly one hundred thousand taels of silver from him. The figure made Jia Jue suck in his breath. Who knew Zhen Haoren had been that wealthy! He didn't dare think too deeply now. Only by working himself to the bone to please the new masters could he hope to keep his family safe.

These past days, Prefect Liu had been investigating the city's drainage channels. Jia Jue had run himself ragged: finding laborers, searching archives, leading inspection tours along the major channel routes. But there was little he could actually contribute.

Like many specialized functions in traditional yamens, the "Canal Map" of Guangzhou was privately held. Just as the Fish Scale cadastral books had become the cash cows of household division clerks, the Canal Map was a secret passed down through a bloodline. This map rested in the hands of a hereditary laborer chief. Whenever the time came for ditch clearing or canal repairs—by old custom, ditches were cleared annually, canals repaired every three years—money had to be paid to make him produce the Canal Map for reference. Whichever section needed clearing, he would bring out only those pages, then take them back immediately upon completion. It amounted to a hereditary patent. So although this laborer chief bore the title of "laborer," he performed no actual labor. He lived quite comfortably. In recent years, though the government rarely bothered with canal maintenance, whenever local folk needed to clear a silted ditch, they still had to consult him—and pay for the privilege.

A map book originally compiled by the government had ultimately devolved into a private "family secret." This was but one of many absurdities Liu Xiang had encountered since arriving in this time and place.

Finding the Canal Map shouldn't have been difficult. Even the more valuable Fish Scale Books had been recovered by the Australians—once a man was thrown into the great prison and squeezed with the three wooden torture instruments, any hero would talk. But the laborer chief had vanished. When Jia Jue took men to search for him, they found only an empty house.

(End of this chapter)