This chapter places Thomas Hardy’s writings in the context of the heated arguments that arose between Charles Darwin and his most outspoken adversary, the philologist Max Müller, regarding the relationship between language and thought. While Müller insisted on a close, coeval relationship between the ability to frame ideas and the ability to express those ideas in words, Darwin throughout his writing demonstrates a lively fascination with the diverse and dynamic kinds of thinking that human beings and other animals appear able to perform ‘manifestly without the aid of language’ (Descent of Man, 1871). This chapter argues that Hardy’s writing is centrally concerned with the tragi-comic consequences of a world in which there is both language without thought and thought without language. It begins by exploring Hardy’s responses to these larger concerns in his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891-2) and concludes by examining his return to this theme in his poetry. The chapter discusses a wide range of Hardy’s poems, from canonical pieces such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) to lesser-known works, including the series of short poems that Hardy is believed to have contributed to his second wife Florence Emily Dugdale’s volume for children, The Book of Baby Birds (1912).

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s approach to renderings of birdsong in poems. It addresses recent studies which have emphasised the dangers of anthropomorphism and the poet’s consequent propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale | Of his own sorrow’ (‘The Nightingale’, 1796). As the ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has argued, however, this scholarly obsession with anthropomorphism all too frequently slides into a form of what he terms ‘anthropodenial’: ‘the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals’ which ‘denotes wilful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves’ and ‘reflects a pre-Darwinian antipathy to the profound similarities between human and animal behaviour (e.g. maternal care, sexual behaviour, power seeking) noticed by anyone with an open mind’ (‘Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial’, 2009). While de Waal has called for a more open-minded approach to the study of our nearest relatives, the primates, this book sketches out a long history of ‘wilful blindness’ towards birdsong as an everyday example of the agency, skill and artfulness possessed by other creatures.

When the Humanitarian League wrote to Hardy requesting permission to publish three of his poems (‘The Blinded Bird’, ‘The Puzzled Game-Birds’ and ‘Wagtail and Baby’), the author sent the request swiftly on to Macmillan (Collected Letters, V, p. 240). As its title suggests, Bertram Lloyd’s The Great Kinship: An Anthology of Humanitarian Poetry (1921) is based on a similar principle to that which Hardy expressed in his letter to the League. The expressed intention of Lloyd’s introduction and the poems selected in his anthology is to provide a general history of the representation of animals in Western literature.

Chapter three explores how Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings responded to and engaged with larger questions surrounding birdsong, speech and poetry. While Coleridge throughout his life brooded over metaphysical arguments regarding ‘the one life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’, 1795), Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are filled with close, detailed descriptions of birds and their songs that are neither assimilated to nor inhibited by any overarching theory regarding the sentience of other creatures and our human relation to them. As he responded to his sister’s lively observations and the philosophical arguments in which he found his friend so deeply embroiled, William Wordsworth was led into larger discussions about what may be going on inside the heads of various human and non-human others. Drawing on his own experiences of composing and ‘muttering’ over his poems in daily walks with his sister, Wordsworth hints at a subvocal language of thought that is patterned and shaped, though not always or exactly worded. Out of a deep personal recognition of a grave disjuncture between thinking and saying, Wordsworth throughout his writing explores the inner lives of others in ways that would prove crucial to Clare, Hardy and other poets writing in the following centuries.

Since birds have been trained to sing for centuries, the scientific studies of birdsong examined in chapter one drew from an old and deep well of popular knowledge and experience. Naturalists relied on a mass of supporting evidence from an ancient and evidently lucrative trade in singing birds. The chapter examines records of bird-catching from eighteenth-century training manuals to Henry Mayhew’s extended discussion of the metropolitan ‘bird-trade’ in London Labour and The London Poor (1851) and the eventual decline of the London chaffinch-fanciers as recounted in W. H. Hudson’s Birds in London (1898). It then assesses the importance of this popular and highly competitive sport to an emerging scientific method based on practical experience, direct observation and controlled experiment. While Daines Barrington and Gilbert White observed apposite similarities between birdsong and human speech, the chapter observes an irregularity in how their studies were received: Barrington’s findings were relegated to the footnotes and appendices of natural history throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes by showing how this wealth of material was excavated from the footnotes and explicitly used to identify birdsong as ‘the nearest analogy’ to human speech in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871).

Many eons ago, long before the consolidation of the modern nation-state we call China, the southeastern quadrant of the Eurasian landmass that is China today was a complex world composed of myriad cultures of diverse origins. In the northern reaches of this region, across the vast alluvial plain formed by the eons of flooding by the Yellow River, known in Chinese texts as the Central Plain and to geographers as the North China Plain, a cluster of localized cultures had formed by the fourth to third millennia BCE. These cultures were complex and technologically sophisticated. By the early to middle second millennium a written language had evolved that enabled a narrow stratum of literate elites to share ideas and to nurture the development of a classical culture that is identified with figures such as Confucius. This culture was widely shared across the divergent cultures of the Plain, providing thereby a common bond. This is the nascent civilization that in this book we shall call Sinitic, so as not to confuse it with Chinese, which, as we shall argue, only emerged many centuries later. Concurrently, in the vast regions that lay south of the Plain and the Yellow River basin, an array of importantly and pronouncedly distinct but equally complex cultures had formed in the basin of the Yangtze River and its tributaries and along the coast south of the river's mouth. Traditionally, History has not recognized the contributions of these cultures to Chinese civilization. That is in part what this book intends to address.

Through the second millennium BCE the cultures of the Central Plain, one of the largest alluvial plains in the world, began to consolidate into a loosely homogenized whole in an era that historians know as the Shang, or Yin, dynasty. Regional differences across the Plain remained, but enough was shared that historians can realistically refer to this as the root from which Sinitic and then mature Chinese culture emerged. This consolidation, however, was limited to the Plain and the Yellow River drainage basin, including some tributary basins to the west. Even as patterns of interaction developed, especially along the lines of encounter, the cultures of the Yangtze basin and the adjacent coast largely remained both diverse and distinct.

Our data on the local population between Wu Xing's project and the later tenth century are spotty. Soon after the mid-eighth century census that is referenced in Chapter 4 provided the first somewhat credible count of registered households in greater Quanzhou, however, the northern core of the empire was wracked by the rebellion associated with An Lushan. This prompted a major wave of migration toward the comparative safety of the South, which remained largely unaffected and relatively stable. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that Wu Xing was prompted to undertake construction of the Distributed Blessings Retention Dam and drainage of the coastal salt marsh partially if not primarily in response to pressure for land that was a result of a growing presence of the agriculturally oriented Sinitic immigrants.

That presence is attested by the next trove of census data compiled in the latter half of the tenth century. By the turn of the tenth century, faced with a growing pattern of rebellion that culminated with an uprising in the 870s and 880s from which the dynasty was unable to recover, the Tang court had unraveled. In the power vacuum that followed a congeries of autonomous and mutually hostile regional warlords competed for power. When all had shaken out and the Tang court had been formally deposed early in the tenth century, the Tang realm was a divided world. From a base on the Central Plain, the old heartland of Sinitic power and cultural authority, one leader claimed to have inherited the mantle of the Tang mandate and proclaimed a new dynasty called Liang. Along the length of the Yangtze River basin and across the deeper South, however, the struggle to fill the vacuum led to seven autonomous courts, each claiming their own share of the imperial mandate. The narrative of the interregnum decades that followed is complex and largely not relevant to our discussion. After several decades of division, however, a new order began to emerge from the Central Plain. This was the Song dynasty.

The Song court, which claimed the imperial mandate in 960, inherited from the Latter Zhou, the last of the interregnum northern dynasties, a policy of imperial reintegration.

To this point, our discussion has focused on social and cultural changes, but what of changes to the land? In the deep historical past, before China's landscape was radically altered by the hand of man, the North presented the flat but forested horizons of the Central Plain. Beyond the Taihang Mountains that mark the western edge of the Plain lay the broken landscape of the river basins that cut the friable soils called loess. Rainfall across the North is irregular, although in ancient times evidence suggests it was more plentiful than today. Nevertheless, although the soils are fertile and easy to till, the rivers and other water sources could dry up, as they do today. Without irrigation, agriculture is unreliable for crops are likely to wither and die.

In contrast, the South was a land of mountains and forests, riven by valleys marked by free-flowing rivers. Rainfall is abundant, the rivers are broad and the landscape is dotted with lakes, large and small. There was a wide and abundant diversity of plant and animal life: snakes and fish, deer, birds and mammals big and small, even tigers, rhinoceros and elephants. Liu Zongyuan wrote from his exile in the deepest South that the world around him was filled with unfamiliar noises and scents. It was a world that Liu and his colleagues feared. To many, however, the South was both exotic and seductive, so much so that phlegmatic northerners worried that it could captivate and corrupt the unwary, turn them away from the stern moral values on which northern culture was based, and convert them into hedonistic barbarians. As the late eighth-century poet Bao He wrote to a friend about going South as an official:

For those willing to bear its challenges, this was a land filled with opportunity. The verdant bottomlands and coastal plains had rich soils that beckoned to be tilled. Its exotic products: fruits such as oranges, bananas, lychee and longyan, medicinals such as rhino horn and elephant tusk, and exotic meats and herbs, found ready markets in the cities of the North. But it was also filled with dangers, both real and imaginary.

Recall a point from the opening chapter: The land we call China was not always Chinese. In fact, in a very real sense for many eons, when the world of Sinitic culture was defined by the Central Plain, no one was Chinese, a term I shall argue that only gains real meaning in the last millennium. Through most of the first millennium BCE, the people of the Central Plain, the Yellow River flood plain where classical Sinitic culture emerged, called their land “the courts (or kingdoms, i.e., guo) in the center,” or Zhongguo. As explained in Chapter 1, this was both a political and cultural term, referencing a large and diverse realm across the Plain that shared several defining attributes, most notably a parallel, if not entirely identical, orthography through which the literate elite shared a common body of classical texts. What it did not mean then, as it has come to mean only in recent times, is China. A range of terms were used instead by the people of the Sinitic world to refer to their homeland; as the Sinitic world gained definition, Zhongguo instead defined the geophysical realm of Sinitic culture, and Sinitic culture defined civilization.

These several “courts in the center” shared an academic culture that fostered a degree of commonality even as they remained politically and linguistically disunited. This was much like the diverse courts and cultures of late medieval Europe, where a common cultural discourse built on Latin, the shared language of the literate elite, and the broadly shared premises of Christianity provided a common identity even as they simultaneously maintained regionalized and localized political and colloquial identity. Like medi-eval Europe, the Central Plain through the first millennium BCE remained a fractious and restricted realm. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the cultural transformation from Sinitic toward one that was to become China, from a world that was both geographically and culturally constrained to one that was geographically vast and culturally diverse. That is, how did Sinitic China become holistic China?

As a coherent and shared Sinitic culture emerged out of the ancient regional cultures of the Central Plain, beyond the “courts in the center” was a complex world of many divergent and often very local peoples and cultures.

The previous chapter lays out a wide-ranging background through a narrative that broadly illustrates the distinct history of the South, but the event through which our narrative is framed is defined narrowly and by a specific place. To understand the implications of that narrative, we need the story. Late in what we now call the eighth century CE, during the first year of the Restoration of Balance reign period of the Tang dynasty (the Restoration of Balance reign period was 780–84; the Tang dynasty was 618–906), Wu Xing, whose identity we will consider below, organized a project centered on the Distributed Blessings Retention Dam to drain a coastal marsh. Located on the Plain of Emerging Transformation in Putian District on China's central coast in the area that in the years ahead came to be known as Fujian province (see Map 2.1), this was a complex project involving the damming of the Distributed Blessings Creek, the drainage of coastal salt marshes and distribution of fresh water through a network of canals into the now dry marshland (see Map 2.2). Wu's project was essential to the transformation of the Plain from a lightly settled wetland primarily utilized by non-Sinitic indigenous peoples into one of the most densely settled and economically productive areas of the empire. It is that transformation, a microcosm of transformation that was occurring across southern China through the first millennium CE, on which we are going to focus.

In his New History of the Tang Dynasty, compiled in the mid-eleventh century and regarded as one of the most authoritative accounts of the Tang, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) provided the earliest surviving reference to the project, although without reference to Wu Xing. Ouyang recorded that the dam provided irrigation to “over 400 qing” (1 qing = 100 mu = ca. 150 acres; i.e., a total of ca. 6,000 acres), a sizable area itself, but later sources record that “over 2000 qing,” or roughly 30,000 acres, were irrigated, the result of later additions to the network of canals.

There is very little we can say definitively about Wu Xing. There is no evidence that he held any official position, although at some point, perhaps posthumously and probably by local custom only, he was granted the honorary title Commander (chang guan).

It has been about forty years since I first encountered the tale of Wu Xing and his battle with the jiao as I was researching my doctoral dissertation. As I shall discuss, Wu was directing a major project to drain a coastal salt marsh on the central Fujian coast. Having completed his project, so the narrative goes, the dikes that channeled fresh water through the newly reclaimed land were attacked by a jiao. Wu swore he would rescue his project by killing the beast—and beast it was. Wu grabbed his sword and plunged into the water to battle. After three days the jiao and Wu were both dead. The drainage project, however, was saved and to this day remains the core of one of China's most productive rice regions.

I have long found the story intrinsically interesting for its own sake at several levels. Who, for example, was Wu Xing, and why did he undertake such a massive project? What was its impact on the regional ecology and economy? What became of the people who had lived with the marsh before Wu drained it? These are all questions that link to wider themes, as I shall explain. Ultimately, however, there is a question that lies at the center of Wu Xing's tale: What is a jiao? It is at the core of the story, as I shall explain, yet no such creature exists in the natural world. Why does the story depend on such a mythological creature? Or could it in fact be something real?

Even if readers share my sense that these are interesting questions, none would be of much significance if there were not those broader themes, if there were not a broader insight to extract. Wu Xing's project, I will suggest, is a micro-event that provides insight into the much larger process whereby the vast reaches of southern China, the land that is drained by the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin as well as the adjacent littoral regions that frame that basin, were folded into the larger framework that today is China. Long ago the South, as I shall call that vast area, was home to a wide array of local and regional cultures.