> The impassioned searching for the source of the great rivers throughout Chinese history seems almost to betray a hope that it will reveal the occult wellspring of China itself, the fount of the country’s spirit (qi)...
> The source of the Yangtze is disputed even now. An expedition in the 1970s identified it as the Tuotuo, the “tearful” river in Qinghai, but several years later it was assigned to the Damqu instead. There’s ultimately something arbitrary in conferring primacy on one of a river’s several headwater sources, but for the Yangtze the symbolic significance of this choice is too strongly felt for the protagonists to brook any compromise.
I think this is the most salient point in the entire piece. It seems like we, as people, spend a lot of time trying to classify things that don't matter. Debating what the true source of a river seems like it could be mildly important, but it's not much more important than determining whether height or weight is the more important criteria for determining the worlds largest ball of twine.
Someone told me that the many of the confounding and illogical human behaviors can basically be understood as tribalism being expressed in a modern context. Ever since then I've seen tribalism everywhere. And not only are there tribes, but those tribes have sub-tribes.
One of the things I really like about the internet is that it can allow us to concentrate on things that we actually care about, rather than getting caught up on stupid things like where somebody lives, or what they look like. We still have our prejudices and tribes (VIM vs EMACS, Apple vs PC), happens, but when it comes down to it, he have an unprecedented ability to connect with other people and form positive communities that advance the world as a whole.
The article's title is a sly joke, the 'water margin' is the land of outlaws (popular in martial arts novels and films), harking back to Shui Hu Zhuan[1] which is fairly well known in English from Pearl S. Buck's translation, _All Men Are Brothers_
Buck's translation is garbled, from what I've heard, but there's a thoroughly readable scholarly translation that came out relatively recently. I think it's by the same author who did the two-volume _Romance of the Three Kingdoms_ -- it certainly has the same cover style, and is hard to miss on Amazon.
TLDR: Tibet via Yunnan, though the author is really just a guy trying to sell his new book, which is a history of China through the somewhat forced lens of water related trivia.
> The source of the Yangtze is disputed even now. An expedition in the 1970s identified it as the Tuotuo, the “tearful” river in Qinghai, but several years later it was assigned to the Damqu instead. There’s ultimately something arbitrary in conferring primacy on one of a river’s several headwater sources, but for the Yangtze the symbolic significance of this choice is too strongly felt for the protagonists to brook any compromise.
I think this is the most salient point in the entire piece. It seems like we, as people, spend a lot of time trying to classify things that don't matter. Debating what the true source of a river seems like it could be mildly important, but it's not much more important than determining whether height or weight is the more important criteria for determining the worlds largest ball of twine.
Someone told me that the many of the confounding and illogical human behaviors can basically be understood as tribalism being expressed in a modern context. Ever since then I've seen tribalism everywhere. And not only are there tribes, but those tribes have sub-tribes.
One of the things I really like about the internet is that it can allow us to concentrate on things that we actually care about, rather than getting caught up on stupid things like where somebody lives, or what they look like. We still have our prejudices and tribes (VIM vs EMACS, Apple vs PC), happens, but when it comes down to it, he have an unprecedented ability to connect with other people and form positive communities that advance the world as a whole.