Commentary on the River Classic: Where water flows through time

This article is part of CGTN's "China in Ink" project, which brings the tremendous world of classic Chinese literature to the fingertips of global audiences.

Nature holds a singular place in Chinese culture. In antiquity, eminent thinkers contended that the order of society, politics and morality should mirror the “will” of nature, as revealed in the turning of the seasons, the blossoming and fading of flowers, or the ebb and flow of waters – though different schools offered divergent interpretations of that “will.” From this perspective, a fine treatise on natural phenomena by an ancient Chinese author was never merely a work of scientific inquiry; it was also a meditation on the relationship between humanity and the natural world, refracted through the prisms of history and literature.

One of the finest surviving works of this kind is the Shuijing Zhu, or Commentary on the River Classic, an encyclopedic survey of China’s waterways.

In the Chinese literary tradition, a “commentary” is a distinct genre: commentators annotate often terse ancient texts, cross-checking facts, and offering interpretations. Some of these treatises came to be regarded as classics in their own right, standing alongside the original works they sought to elucidate.

The River Classic itself is a somewhat enigmatic work. Its author, whose identity is now lost, likely put the final touch on it by the second century AD. Comprising little more than 10,000 characters, it describes just 137 rivers in terse prose, and might not have survived at all were it not for the remarkable Commentary composed some four centuries later.

The commentator who not only preserved the ancient text but also surpassed it with his own annotations was Li Daoyuan.

Li was a court official of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–535 AD). Born in the 460s AD, he lived in an era of political fragmentation, when China was divided along the Yangtze River: the Northern Wei ruled the vast territories to the north from their capital at Luoyang - hence the dynasty’s name – while a succession of states governed the south. Li met his end in 527 AD as the victim of a political intrigue.

In his preface to the Commentary, Li stated that his sole aim was to transmit the River Classic and to elaborate upon it. Yet his elaboration grew into a remarkable encyclopaedia in its own right.

Rooted in the original terse River Classic, Li Daoyuan created a vast commentary of over 300,000 characters, charting more than 1,200 waterways and places around them. For example, Li records more than sixty waterfalls with exacting care - locations fixed, heights measured – allowing scholars centuries later to trace their retreat and the slow advance of rivers toward the sea.

Spanning forty chapters (five of them surviving only in fragments) the Commentary also carries the voices of some four hundred earlier works, many known to us only through the quotations Li preserved.

For Li, rivers and mountains were living stages of human history. He wove into his geography the customs of villages, the deeds of heroes, the echoes of legend. What emerges is a tapestry where water and stone, memory and myth, are forever entwined.

So comprehensive was the Commentary that, centuries after Li’s death, his work had given rise to an entire field of study.

The Commentary is remarkable not only for its scope but also for its style. One of the finest examples is this passage on an idyllic scene along a tributary of the Yangtze:

“Beneath the greenwood boughs, the wind and spring pour forth their song; above the clouds of white, the mountain apes send voices drifting long. The wanderer, though he gaze, finds his sight unequal to the scene, and though his heart rejoice, it fails to drink its beauty to the full.”

Poets and writers of later dynasties hailed the Commentary as both profound and ornate. It is no exaggeration to say that, without this artistic quality, Li’s life’s work might have been lost amid the political upheavals of the sixth century.

Copied by hand and passed among the elite, the Commentary survived the great fire that nearly erased Luoyang years after Li’s death. When the Sui dynasty (581–619 AD) reunified China, the manuscript reappeared intact in the imperial library, as recorded in the Book of Sui. From this lone manuscript came all later editions.

Fourteen centuries on, the Commentary on the River Classic still flows as a wellspring of knowledge on China’s rivers and mountains, and as a testament to the enduring bond between landscape and humanity of the Chinese civilization.