The Country Where Your Soul Showed Beneath Your Feet / 大人国：脚下的五彩云、黑云与红绫官员

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 7

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 14 · 第十四回 · 谈寿夭道经聂耳 论穷通路出无肠

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

A coastal country whose inhabitants are barely a head taller than ordinary people, but who never quite touch the ground. Every citizen of Dàrén Guó (大人国, "the Country of Great People") walks half a foot above the earth on a small private cloud. The cloud follows the person. The cloud stops when the person stops. And — this is the part the travelers cannot stop thinking about, long after they have returned to the ship — the cloud is colored. Five-color rainbow for the morally luminous. Plain yellow for the merely decent. Black for the secretly rotten. The cloud cannot be faked. The cloud cannot be argued with. And one of the first things Tang Ao sees, when he reaches the marketplace, is a wealthy official walking past with his feet wrapped in red silk.

The Story

The boat has been at sea another five days since [Country of Refined Scholars]^{[1]For an earlier stop, see Cathay Tales, Tale 044: The Country Where Even the Tavern Boys Spoke Classical Chinese — Shūshì Guó, where the entire population dresses as scholars and the wine tastes like vinegar.} (淑士国). The Black Teeth Country quarrel ([Tale 36]^{[2]For an earlier stop in the journey, see Cathay Tales, Tale 036: The Country Where Two Schoolgirls Made the Old Scholar Sweat — the chapter where Duo Jiugong and Tang Ao are quietly out-talked in classical Chinese by two teenage girls from Black Teeth Country.}) is now several stops behind them and Duo Jiugong (多九公), the seventy-year-old retired naval helmsman, has settled into a quieter form of expertise — saying less, listening more, sometimes letting Tang Ao (唐敖, the former third-place imperial-examination laureate, demoted to private citizen after his sworn brother joined the Xu Jingye uprising against Empress Wu, now a wandering merchant-companion at sea) work out the meaning of each new coast for himself. The merchant brother-in-law Lin Zhiyang (林之洋, who runs the ship and the trading and has not yet recovered from his weeks-long imprisonment as the prospective Queen-Consort of [the Country Where Men Bound Their Feet]^{[3]For Lin Zhiyang's most personally catastrophic stop, see Cathay Tales, Tale 027: The Country Where Men Bound Their Feet — Nǚ'ér Guó, where Lin Zhiyang is "honored" by being selected as the prospective Queen-Consort and forced through every traditional female ordeal of the late Qing world, including foot-binding.}) is more cautious about going ashore than he used to be.

A new coast appears. Low green hills. A range of mountains immediately inland. From the deck, the country looks ordinary.

The chart calls it Dàrén Guó (大人国, "the Country of Great People").

Lin Zhiyang, hearing the name, assumes it means physically large. The travelers' tales he has heard since childhood describe the people of Dàrén Guó as several zhàng tall — tall as ship-masts, tall as temple gates. He is not eager to meet a country of giants.

Duo Jiugong corrects him, with the slight pleasure of an old scholar correcting a sailor on a piece of Shanhai Jing lore: No. That is Cháng-rén Guó (长人国, "Country of Tall People"), which is a different country, much further south, and which we will reach much later. The people of Dàrén Guó are not much larger than ordinary people. Their distinguishing feature is something else.

Lin Zhiyang asks what.

Their feet, Duo Jiugong says, do not touch the ground.

They go ashore.

The countryside between the harbor and the city is rough — a tall ridge cuts across the plain, and the road winds through it on narrow switchbacks. Within an hour the three of them are quite lost, walking and re-walking the same forked paths, surrounded by tall thickets of bamboo and pine.

A small thatched hermitage appears on a side path. They knock. The door does not open immediately. Instead, an old man comes hurrying up the path behind them — carrying, in his right hand, a small earthen jug of wine and, in his left hand, a freshly butchered pig's head.

Tang Ao, who has spent his entire life in Confucian-and-Buddhist coastal China, freezes for a moment at the sight. The old man steps past him with a polite Excuse me, sets the pig's head and the wine jug down inside the door, and comes back out, courteous and slightly out of breath.

This hermitage, the old man tells them, is consecrated to Guanyin Bodhisattva (观音大士, the Bodhisattva of Compassion). I am the resident clergyman.

Lin Zhiyang stares at the pig's head on the doorsill. Lin Zhiyang stares at the wine jug. Lin Zhiyang stares at the old man's long, undyed, manifestly unshaven hair. Elder brother, he says, slowly, you are the resident clergyman of a Guanyin temple, and you keep your hair long, and you bring home wine and pork, and presumably therefore you also keep — a nun?

Inside, the old man answers cheerfully, is my wife. She is the nun. There is no one else here. The two of us have looked after this hermitage since we were both children.

He sees the travelers' expressions. He explains. We have no tradition in this country of clergymen shaving their heads. I am told that in your Celestial Kingdom, anyone who lives inside a temple must shave the head, eat no meat, drink no wine, and take no spouse — and that the men are called sēng (僧) and the women nī (尼). Some generations ago our country adopted these terms. So we call ourselves sēng and nī. But we are not required to give up the things ordinary people do. As long as we manage the temple incense, we may marry, drink wine, and eat what we please.

Lin Zhiyang opens his mouth to ask the obvious next question. Tang Ao steps on his foot. The conversation moves on.

Tang Ao asks, instead, the question he has been waiting to ask since the moment he saw the old man come up the path: Sir — your countrymen all walk on a small cloud. Forgive my curiosity. Is this cloud something you are born with? Or does it appear later?

The old man smiles. It is born with us. It cannot be forced or imitated. The five-color rainbow cloud is the most honored. Plain yellow is the next-most honored. The other colors are roughly equivalent. The lowest, and the only one that brings shame, is black.

He says this in the matter-of-fact way of a man describing the weather. Then, observing the lateness of the afternoon, he gives them directions through the ridge to the city.

They go.

The city, when they reach it, is not unlike [the Country Where Politeness Killed Business]^{[4]For the opening stop in the voyage, see Cathay Tales, Tale 010: The Country Where Politeness Killed Business — Jūnzǐ Guó (君子国), the first imaginary kingdom the travelers visit, where merchants insist on paying more than the asking price and buyers refuse to be undercharged.} — busy, neat, decently dressed, decently mannered. Tang Ao finds the ordinary atmosphere reassuring after the strangeness of the hermitage.

It is the feet that take getting used to.

Every single person in the street stands half a foot above the ground on a small private cloud. The cloud is roughly the size and shape of a footstool. It moves when the person moves. It stops when the person stops. It does not seem to be felt — the citizens of Dàrén Guó pay no attention to their clouds, the way Tang Ao pays no attention to his own shoes. But the cloud is there, and the cloud — and this is the part that begins to unsettle Tang Ao — the cloud is differently colored on different people.

Most clouds are some shade of yellow or pale rose. Some are bright five-color rainbow. A few are gray. Tang Ao spends his first ten minutes in the city quietly counting, with the trained statistical eye of a former examination candidate. The yellow-cloud citizens make up the majority. The rainbow-cloud citizens are perhaps one in fifteen. The gray-cloud citizens are perhaps one in fifty. He does not, in his first ten minutes, see anyone walking on a pure black cloud at all.

Then he sees the beggar.

The beggar is exactly what one expects a beggar to be — thin, very dirty, in a single layer of patched gray robe, holding out a small empty bowl to passing pedestrians. He moves through the crowd slowly. Most people drop a coin into his bowl as they pass. He bows each time, with the careful courtesy of a man who has been begging long enough to do it without resentment.

His cloud is the most luminous, fully-saturated five-color rainbow Tang Ao has yet seen in the city.

Tang Ao stops in the middle of the street.

Old uncle, he says quietly to Duo Jiugong, the temple-keeper told us that rainbow is the highest-ranking cloud and black the lowest. But a beggar — a man with no station, no wealth, no rank in this country at all — walks past us now on the brightest rainbow in this market.

Lin Zhiyang, who has been watching the same beggar, adds: And the old monk back at the hermitage — the one with the pig's head and the wife — his cloud was rainbow too. A drunk pork-eating monk. A starving beggar. Both of them rainbow. Is there some kind of special — discount?

Duo Jiugong, who has known this answer since they docked but who has been waiting for the right moment, gives it now.

The color of the cloud, he says, has nothing to do with rank, wealth, or station. The cloud reads only one thing. It reads the state of the heart. If a person's heart is open, generous, and free of secret malice, his cloud, by itself, becomes rainbow. If a person's heart is full of hidden calculation and concealed cruelty, his cloud, by itself, becomes black. The cloud is not earned by birth. It is not awarded by the magistrate. It is not bought. It is generated, directly and continuously, by the* moral state of the man standing on it**. And the color shifts as the moral state shifts. A genuine change of heart will lighten the cloud within a single day.*

He continues:

This is why the beggar walks on rainbow. The beggar is poor, but he is at peace with the people who pass him, and he resents no one, and he steals nothing, and he tells himself no comforting lies. His cloud reflects that. And this is why the wealthy of this country often walk on darker clouds than the poor. They have more secret calculations to make, more concealed cruelties to perform, and more small private lies to tell themselves. The cloud does not know they are wealthy. The cloud only knows what they are doing in the back of the room when no one is watching.

He adds, almost as an afterthought:

Although — to be fair to this country — black-cloud citizens are extremely rare. Maybe one in a hundred. The locals consider a black cloud the worst possible public humiliation. A black cloud follows you to the market. A black cloud follows you to the temple. A black cloud follows you home, and your neighbors see it, and your children see it. So the people of this country, even when they are tempted to do something cruel or dishonest, very often choose not to — not from any deep moral conviction, but simply to* keep their cloud the right color in front of the neighbors.** That is the reason this country is called* Dàrén Guó, the Country of Great People — not because the people are physically large, but because the public visibility of moral state has forced a population of ordinary men and women into the daily habit of behaving well.

Tang Ao spends some time thinking about this.

A small disturbance opens in the marketplace ahead of them. The crowd parts. People step aside, lowering their heads.

An official passes through.

He wears the black gauze cap of a senior civil servant, the round-collar court robe of a high-rank functionary, and an enormous red parasol carried above his head by two attendants. A small retinue of guards walks in front. A small retinue of clerks walks behind. The official has the upright posture, the slow dignified pace, and the slightly downturned mouth of a man very accustomed to being deferred to.

His feet, Tang Ao notices, cannot be seen.

His feet are wrapped, just above the ankles, in a wide loose band of bright red silk (红绫, hóng-líng) that hangs down past the level where his cloud should be visible. The wrapping is decorative enough that, at first glance, it looks like an article of court attire. But it is, very specifically, low enough to cover the area where the cloud lives. The cloud beneath the official's feet is, simply, not visible to anyone in the marketplace.

Tang Ao turns to Duo Jiugong.

Uncle. The wrapping. What is the wrapping for?

Duo Jiugong looks at him without any particular expression. He has seen these wrappings before.

Sometimes, Duo Jiugong says, a man in this country generates a cloud that is not quite black — somewhere between gray and charcoal, a color the locals call "the bad-luck shade" (晦气色, huì-qì sè). This happens to men who are not yet criminals, but who are quietly carrying out small persistent cruelties in private — taking bribes in the back rooms, signing dishonest documents in the office, mistreating a wife or a junior officer or a poor petitioner who has no one to complain to. These men know what their cloud is doing. They cannot fix it without changing their conduct, and they do not wish to change their conduct. So they buy a length of red silk and they wrap it around their lower legs, low enough to cover the cloud entirely.

He pauses.

The locals have a name for this practice, he says. They call it yǎn-ěr dào líng (掩耳盗铃) — "covering your own ears while stealing a bell." The man wearing the red wrapping believes he has fooled the city. The city sees the red wrapping and knows exactly why it is there. The official is, in a way, walking past us right now wearing the most expensive public confession of guilt that money can buy.

Tang Ao watches the official pass.

The official's face is calm and dignified. The two attendants hold the red parasol carefully above him. The guards in front clear the road. The clerks behind carry the inkstones and the official seal. The crowd lowers their heads as he passes.

The wrapping is, in fact, extremely visible. It is the most visible single object in the procession after the parasol itself. Every person in the marketplace can see exactly where the cloud should be and exactly that it is not.

The official walks away.

Lin Zhiyang, who has been quiet through all of this, finally speaks.

Old Heaven, he says — half-grumbling, half-marveling — did not arrange this fairly. He gave this cloud-business to Dàrén Guó alone and to no other country. If every country had this cloud, if every official in our Celestial Kingdom were forced to walk around in his court robes with a small honest black cloud trailing under each foot, advertising to the magistrate and the magistrate's wife and the magistrate's neighbors exactly what kind of dishonest person he was — wouldn't that be magnificent? Wouldn't the whole world be cleaner the day after?

Duo Jiugong shakes his head. He has heard this complaint before. He has, by his own admission, made this complaint himself, fifty years ago, on his first voyage.

The men in our own country who are morally unclean, he tells Lin Zhiyang, do not generate a black cloud under their feet. But they generate a black vapor above their heads. A column of dark qì that rises from the crown of the head straight up into the sky. It is more obvious, in some ways, than the cloud here in Dàrén Guó. It is also more violent. The black-cloud man in this country is merely shamed; the black-qì man in our own country is, eventually, struck down — by misfortune, by illness, by reversal of fortune, by ten thousand small returns of his own action. The mechanism is slower. It is not always visible to us. But it is exact.

Lin Zhiyang frowns. I have never seen this black vapor over anyone's head.

You cannot see it, Duo Jiugong says. Heaven can. Heaven sees it very clearly. Heaven distinguishes the good and the wicked at a single glance, and assigns each one to a different path. The good are placed on a road of good outcomes. The wicked are placed on a road of bad outcomes. The rule is unfailing. The visibility is what differs.

Lin Zhiyang considers this for a long time. Then he says, slowly:

If that's how it works — then I suppose I don't blame Old Heaven any more.

The three of them turn back toward the harbor before sunset.

Translator's Reflection

Flowers in the Mirror is full of imaginary countries, but Dàrén Guó is the one I find myself thinking about when I walk through Beijing.

Li Ruzhen's central conceit in this chapter is so devastatingly simple that, once you have read it, you cannot stop applying it. What if your moral state were physically visible at all times? — visible to your colleagues, to your children, to the woman selling vegetables outside your gate, to the policeman at the corner. What if there were a small public organ attached to your body whose only job was to broadcast, continuously, the current ethical color of your inner life?

The whole Karma & Retribution tradition in Chinese fiction — the tradition that produces stories like The Old Man Who Slept in His Own Coffin and The Fifteen Strings of Cash — is built on a single conviction: that there is some mechanism, somewhere in the universe, by which moral state and outer fate are coupled. Different stories propose different mechanisms. The Buddhist stories propose rebirth: you carry the karma forward into the next life. The Daoist stories propose the celestial ledger: a clerk in the heavenly bureau writes down each of your acts, and the consequences arrive on a schedule you do not control. The folk-magistrate stories propose Judge Bao: there is a wise, incorruptible official, sooner or later, who will see through the deception and assign the right punishment.

Li Ruzhen's Dàrén Guó is, structurally, a thought experiment about all of these traditions at once. Suppose, the chapter says, we made the karmic mechanism immediate. Suppose we removed the delay. Suppose every small private cruelty caused an instant, public, visible darkening of a small object that everyone could see. What would such a country look like?

The answer Li Ruzhen gives is striking, and it is the part I keep returning to.

He does not say that such a country would become a paradise of saints. He does not say that the immediate visibility of moral state would purify human nature. He says, very carefully, that most people, faced with the immediate public visibility of their moral state, would simply choose not to do the visibly cruel thing. Not because they had become saints. Not because they had achieved any kind of inner transformation. Simply because the cost of a black cloud — the daily humiliation of being seen on it by the neighbors — would be slightly higher than the satisfaction of the cruel act they had been about to perform. A small change in the cost-benefit calculation, applied to millions of small decisions, would produce a society in which "behaving well" became the default — not from virtue, but from the visibility of vice.

This is one of the sharpest observations in Qing-dynasty fiction, and it has held up remarkably well in the two hundred and eight years since 1818. We have learned, in our own time, the same thing about transparency and accountability. The journalists, the public registers, the corruption-investigation bureaus, the social-media accounts that name and shame — these are, in their various ways, all attempts to give modern societies the small visible cloud that Li Ruzhen invented in 1818 for Dàrén Guó. We have not produced a country of saints. We have, however, produced a society in which a great deal of cruelty that used to be performed openly is now performed slightly more carefully, in slightly more concealed rooms. Some of it is wrapped, very visibly, in red silk.

The image I keep returning to, in this story, is the official with the wrapping.

The wrapping does not work. Everyone in the marketplace knows exactly why it is there. The official has not concealed his cloud; he has only paid for an extremely expensive public sign that announces — in red silk visible at a hundred paces — this man has something to hide. The crowd lowers their heads as he passes not from deference but from the particular ritual politeness of a population that has agreed not to mention out loud what everyone can see.

This is, I think, Li Ruzhen's deepest joke, and his most painful one. The wrapping is the modern condition. It is the press release, the legal disclaimer, the carefully managed reputation, the strategic philanthropy, the laundered biography. None of it conceals the cloud. All of it announces, with great expense and great care, that there is a cloud. And the crowd — who can see the cloud perfectly well without the wrapping — has agreed to look at the wrapping instead, and call it courtesy.

The beggar with the rainbow cloud is not in the story by accident.

Notes & Further Reading

Next tale: The Body the Coroner Read by Smoke — a Song dynasty inquest test for distinguishing a man who was burned alive from a man who was already dead when the fire started. From Song Ci's Washing Away of Wrongs, the world's first forensic-medicine handbook. → [Coming soon]