Book completed

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The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, by Philip Ball. The author is a British science writer who chooses quirky and interesting topics – I’ve read his biography of Paracelsus – and this one is no exception. It’s basically a history of how important and relevant water has been for the Chinese people. He starts with an explanation of how greatly China has been influenced by the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which sometimes flood massively and sometimes change course radically. Even in the mid-1800s they had a flood that killed at least a million people. The whole bureaucratic system in China evolved, in large part, because of the importance of attempting to control these two rivers – which have also been used in warfare, when China wasn’t unified. It’s pretty easy to breach a dam and put an entire city under two meters of water, apparently. He discusses the relevance of Confucian and Daoist philosophy, and the important role of water in Chinese aesthetics and art, and the brief period when China’s navy was the largest in the world, but it’s mostly about the impact of those rivers on the history of China. I was also horrified at the way they’ve treated their environment – so much pollution! Of course, their population is much larger than ours, too, and their landscape, as noted, has been challenging. It’s a good book, but I was glad that I was already familiar with the general timing of the various dynasties so I could keep track of what was going on.