Chapter 88: The Six-Vein Canals

There was a simple solution: use a map of Guangzhou from another time and space as a blueprint, compare it with the map of Guangzhou drawn by the Urban Engineering Department, and for any unnamed streets or alleys, name them one by one using the modern names of places in roughly the same location. In this way, many unnamed small roads and alleys were given names. However, when Lin Biguang, who was in charge of comprehensive management, gave specific instructions, he still emphasized the need to “accommodate the host as much as possible.” If the surrounding residents had a commonly accepted name, it could also be used.

Lin Biguang and his team were busy for several days and finally settled all the street and alley names. The street signs and house number plates were made of tinplate, all with blue characters on a white background. His plan was to nail up the street signs and house numbers while conducting the household survey and creating the household registration books. Before he could arrange this matter, Liu Xiang called him in again.

“Old Lin, the situation with illegal constructions in Guangzhou is not optimistic…”

“Just say it. What new plan do you have now? Don’t be polite,” Lin Biguang said.

“The illegal structures on Chengxuan Avenue have been cleared, but there are still many similar places throughout the city. It’s easy to carry out a campaign-style demolition, but we need to consider long-term management,” Liu Xiang began with some official-sounding words. “So, I’m considering using this opportunity of the household census and registration to conduct a real estate registration.”

“Real estate registration?” Lin Biguang thought for a moment. “That is indeed necessary. The problem is that real estate property rights are quite complex; we need original documents…”

“We have the original documents,” Liu Xiang said. “The archives of the Guangzhou Prefecture and County yamen have the original house and land deeds. I’ve reviewed a few, and the records are quite clear. According to the retained clerks from the household department, theoretically, anyone who owns a house should have their own house and land deeds. We can use these to re-register the property rights.”

“But this isn’t an urgent matter, is it?” Lin Biguang felt that while demolishing illegal structures was a good thing, it wasn’t particularly urgent. “The demolition work on our main roads has already begun, and there isn’t much resistance. We can clean up the main roads in the city, sort out the traffic, and deal with the illegal structures of ordinary residential houses and shops slowly. There’s no need to rush and bite off more than we can chew.”

“Old Lin, I’m also forced into this,” Liu Xiang sighed heavily. “You know, in our plan, besides demolition, there’s also the task of cleaning the city’s sewers. And you know, the ‘Huinan Tian’ (a period of damp, warm weather) is coming soon.”

Before Guangzhou’s sewer system was comprehensively renovated and the East Lake was excavated in the 1950s, the city suffered greatly from urban flooding due to its geographical environment. Moreover, every year after March, the so-called “Huinan Tian” would arrive, bringing with it frequent light rain or heavy fog. This was the first test for the city’s drainage system before the flood season began.

Having been in Guangzhou for several years, Lin Biguang naturally knew how severe the Huinan Tian could be. He nodded.

“I’ve long heard that Guangzhou has a drainage system called the Six-Vein Canals. But in the past few days, I’ve gathered the retained clerks and yamen runners and personally visited some places, and the results are not optimistic.” Liu Xiang pulled over a map. “No one can clearly tell me the course of the Six-Vein Canals!”

The Six-Vein Canals, as the name suggests, was a drainage system composed of six canals. It originated from six natural and artificial river channels within Guangzhou city during the Song Dynasty, forming a river-style drainage system that utilized the city’s natural topography, which is high in the north and low in the south. It served not only for drainage but also for transportation, and some channels were even used for water supply. However, this system had undergone significant changes by the Ming Dynasty.

During the Ming Dynasty, Guangzhou underwent several large-scale expansions and reconstructions. The unification of the three cities and the construction of the southern city wall caused great damage to the original natural water systems within the city. Natural rivers and lakes, including Wenxi and the ancient West Lake, gradually silted up and evolved into purely drainage channels. As the transportation function within the city was basically lost, residents began to gradually encroach on the river channels, and open canals slowly became culverts. If the Six-Vein Canals still maintained their “river channel” appearance in the early Ming Dynasty, capable of both drainage and navigation, then by the late Ming Dynasty, most of them had become culverts. The fact that a large number of Guangzhou citizens hid in the Six-Vein Canals to escape the Qing army’s massacre at the end of the Ming Dynasty and were drowned by floods shows that the former river channels had already become culverts by that time.

Open canals became culverts, and houses were built on top of the culverts. The result was that by the time they entered the city, the specific locations and courses of the open and covered canals within the city were mostly buried under large swaths of houses, becoming a mystery for the Senate members in Guangzhou.

The most typical example was the location of the sixth vein of the Six-Vein Canals, which had been a mystery since the Ming Dynasty. In several dredging efforts, whether at the end of the Ming Dynasty or before the mid-Qing Dynasty, there was no trace of the sixth vein. Tan Qinghai, a native of Dongguan from the early Wanli era, not long before the tranmigrators’s time, wrote “A Description of the Six Veins,” which only recorded five veins.

Liu Xiang’s understanding of the Six-Vein Canals was largely based on the records of this predecessor. As for the hundreds of research papers and monographs on the Six-Vein Canals in the Grand Library, they were all fundamentally based on this source.

“I’ve walked around the city these past few days. I’ve seen many open canals and a few culverts. But when I asked the clerks and yamen runners, not a single one of them knew the detailed distribution of the city’s drainage channels,” Liu Xiang shook his head. “Although I didn’t study water supply and drainage, from what I’ve seen, it’s probably quite common for people to build houses on top of open canals, just like on Chengxuan Avenue.”

“So…” Lin Biguang finally understood his intention. He knew that even in the Ming Dynasty, encroaching on river channels to build houses and building on top of culverts was forbidden. The government could not issue land or house deeds for such constructions, making them “illegal structures” by definition.

To figure out the location and course of the city’s canals and to clean them, it was impossible without demolishing the illegal structures built on top of them.

“Yes, that’s my idea,” Liu Xiang said. “It’s not too difficult to figure out the location and course of the Six-Vein Canals—we have historical data left by our ancestors, and clerks and workers who have handled dredging before. But the entire drainage system of Guangzhou is not just the Six-Vein Canals; it also has many open and covered ditches. This system is not recorded in detail in historical records. We have to find it ourselves—and not just find it, but find it quickly.”

Liu Xiang’s worries were not unfounded. Liu San, who was in charge of health and medical affairs for Guangdong, had entered the city a few days ago. After a brief look around, he warned that if large-scale sanitation campaigns were not launched soon, a major epidemic outbreak in the city was inevitable once the Huinan Tian arrived.

“Alright, I’ll do my best!” Lin Biguang nodded. “My current thinking is that we take a two-pronged approach. First, you issue a notice, informing the whole city about the ‘deadline for self-demolition’ of illegal structures. Given our current momentum, many families will probably do it themselves. Second, we use the household registration to conduct a survey and get a clear picture of the illegal structures.”

After sending Lin Biguang off, Liu Xiang had Xiao Zhang send a telegram to Lin’gao, asking when the chief of the Guangzhou Police Department could be in place. Then he sent for Jia Jue.

When Jia Jue came in, he was still yawning. These old yamen clerks, who had been on the job for a long time, had never experienced such high-intensity, round-the-clock work. They had to report for duty in the morning and couldn’t leave until late at night. And that was just them. The “fake Kun” brought by the Chief from Qiongzhou were still busy when they left. According to the retained cleaning staff, it was common for them to work all night.

In ancient local yamen, since the government bore little responsibility for social management, affairs were quite leisurely. The key to a clerk’s job was to “follow the rules,” meaning that official business mainly depended on the clerk’s familiarity with various old regulations and “departmental precedents.” A clerk like Jia Jue, though not as prestigious as a chief clerk who could skip the morning roll call and direct his underlings from a teahouse or home, still had very short office hours. Most of the time, he just came to sign in. Even if there was work to be done, he would be gone by noon.

The Australians’ style of work, where they inquired into every detail, big or small, was something Jia Jue and his fellow old clerks found hard to bear.

However, hard to bear or not, they had to endure it. The atmosphere outside was getting increasingly tense. Those who used to live off the yamen were now all on edge, afraid of being reported and ending up in prison to be “interrogated” by their former colleagues. He had heard that Zhen Haoren, the chief clerk of the household department of this prefecture, had “died in prison from illness”—he secretly heard from the bailiffs that he was “tortured to death.” It was said that based on his confession, nearly one hundred thousand taels of silver were confiscated. This figure made him gasp; he never thought Zhen Haoren was so rich! He didn’t dare to think too much now. His only hope for his family’s safety was to work desperately to please his new masters.

For the past few days, Magistrate Liu had been investigating the city’s drainage channels. Jia Jue had been busy running around: finding workers, searching for archives, and guiding them to inspect the situation along several main channels. However, he couldn’t be of much help in this matter.

Like many specialized jobs in the old yamen, the “canal map” of Guangzhou was also in private hands. Just as a fish-scale register became a money-making tree for the household department clerks, the canal map was also a secret not to be passed on. This “canal map” was in the hands of a hereditary chief of the workmen. Every year, when it was time to clean and repair the canals—according to the old rules, cleaning was done annually and repairs every three years—they had to pay him to take out the canal map for positioning. He would take out the pages for the section to be cleaned and immediately take them back when the work was done. It was like a hereditary patent, so although this chief of workmen was nominally a workman, he didn’t actually work. He lived a life of comfort and ease. In recent years, although the government rarely cleaned the canals, when private citizens needed to clear blockages, they still had to seek his help—and naturally, pay for it.

The fact that a map made by the government had ended up as a private “family secret” was one of the many strange things Liu Xiang had encountered in this time and space.

Finding the canal map wasn’t supposed to be difficult. The even more valuable fish-scale registers had been found by the Australians—once in prison, under the pressure of the three-stick clamp, even the toughest man would talk. But the chief of the workmen had disappeared. Jia Jue had taken people to look for him, but the house was already empty.