Reborn Shanghu mirrors tragic history of China

If West Lake is a poem, then Shanghu is an epic — a sad one, perhaps. It is an epic of the lake’s vicissitudes over the past three millennia. Shanghu has seen heroes and sages, as well as villains and tyrants; it has seen dynasties come and go, and fortunes wax and wane.

Shanghu was named after Jiang Shang (姜尚 1128-1015 B.C.), known more popularly as Jiang Taigong (姜太公), a legendary man of great wisdom who once fished by this lake when he was fleeing the tyranny of the Shang dynasty. Jiang Shang helped Zhou Wenwang found the Zhou dynasty (1101-221 B.C.), the longest-reigning dynasty in not only China but also the world. Today, Jiang’s stone statue adorns the shimmering Shanghu, holding a fishing pole without a hook and bait. The metaphor of “Jiang Taigong fishing” has been an inspiration for Chinese over the centuries.

Shanghu, embraced by verdant hills called Yushan (虞山), is about twice the size of Hangzhou’s West Lake. Local residents are proud of the “gem” that makes their city shine. More importantly, they take great pride in their efforts to revive the lake which was all but dead and disappeared during the Cultural Revolution four decades ago.

A city official, Pan Gongliang, told me woefully that at the height of the Great Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Shanghu was the victim of a nationwide campaign to “dry up the lake for farmland” (围湖造田). Mao Zedong’s call for waging a relentless struggle against Mother Nature was answered with zeal and frenzy by mesmerized masses and Red Guards who toiled with bare hands to fill the lake with rocks and stones removed from Yushan, which was left with an ugly scar.

It was not until 1985, almost a decade after the end of the “10-year turmoil,” the codeword for the Cultural Revolution, that the people realized the enormity of the mistakes they had committed. The farmland thus created turned out to be inappropriate for farming, and the ecosystem was irrevocably destroyed. It was a disaster of unprecedented proportions, Pan said.

Before long, Changshu’s leadership made an over-arching decision to revive the dead lake by flooding it with water from the Yangtze River. After a couple of years, Shanghu was reborn to become, once again, a tourist attraction. It has also become a favorite resort for multinationals in nearby Shanghai.

Shanghu, however, was not alone in its suffering. At the whim of Mao, hundreds of lakes all over the country disappeared into thin air, or were reduced to ponds. Now, Mother Nature is back with a vengeance, forcing those who defied the law of nature to pay a dear price for their ignorance.

It seems that Changshu has learned a lesson from its past mistakes. Nowadays everybody talks about environment protection and ecology preservation. Not long ago, the city decided to tear down buildings, public and private, that had been erected in recent years on picturesque Yushan, to restore the beauty of the green hills.

While Shanghu is a bright spot in Changshu’s booming tourism, the city’s cultural heritage is more alluring. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) toured Changshu with his disciples when the city was a feudal state of Wu (吴) during the period of warring states. Over the dynasties, Changshu had been famous for its high level of culture, as reflected in the number of people who aced the imperial examinations for government service.

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