A Flood Breaches the Polders, 1595

The record

二十三年乙未，正月上旬，儒学桂树华。六月，蛟出溃诸圩，独凤贤圩无患。知县喻言兴仿许旧书，劝民筑之，周计三十余里。

Translated: In the twenty-third year, yiwei, in the first ten days of the first month the cassia trees at the county school flowered. In the sixth month a jiao flood breached the polders, and Fengxian Polder alone was unharmed. The magistrate Yu Yanxing, following the old documents of Xu, urged the people to build it up, measuring more than thirty li in all.

Time and place

The events belong to 1595, the twenty-third year of the Wanli era. The gazetteer first notes cassia trees flowering at the county school in the first month, then the flood that breached the polders in the sixth month. It does not list the names or positions of the polders breached.

What happened

The breach affected the county's polders generally, but Fengxian Polder alone was unharmed; that polder had been built with treasury silver during the great famine of 1588, the sixteenth year of the Wanli era (see the entry for that year). The magistrate Yu Yanxing then urged the people to repair it. The gazetteer says he followed "the old documents of Xu", a phrase whose reference is not explained: it may mean the standing arrangements of the assistant prefect surnamed Xu in 1588, or something else, and this entry does not decide. The work measured more than thirty li in all.

On the jiao flood

A jiao flood is the gazetteer's usual way of recording a sudden, violent flood. The jiao is a legendary dragon-like creature believed to cause floods, not a real animal. This entry repeats the original wording while noting that it belongs to the gazetteer's idiom of natural anomalies and should not be read as a hydrological record. The cassia trees flowering in the first month, recorded in the same entry, belongs to the same class of anomaly.

Fengxian Polder was already an old polder

Fengxian Polder was not newly built in the Wanli period. The Southern Song Jingding Jiankang Zhi, juan 17, "Mountains" (Hills and Mounds), records that Fengqi Mountain in Lishui County "belongs to Yifeng township, and to its north lies Fengxian Polder", showing the polder already existed in the Southern Song; in 1588 it was only the banks of Fengxian Polder that were built with treasury silver (see the entry for that year), not the polder itself. The survival of this one polder when many were breached in 1595 is to be understood of this older polder.

Uncertainties

First, the reference of "the old documents of Xu" is unexplained. Second, the names of the polders breached and the order in which they failed are not recorded. Third, the line of the more than thirty li of bank, and how it was divided, are not recorded.

Fourth, a search across all seven source layers found that the Jingding Jiankang Zhi, juan 17, already records the name Fengxian Polder, showing the polder was old; but the jiao flood of the sixth month of 1595, the survival of Fengxian Polder alone, and Yu Yanxing's extension of the banks appear only within the Lishui gazetteer line, with no independent record outside it, so confidence remains medium.