The previous chapter lays out a wide-ranging background through a narrative that broadly illustrates the distinct history of the South, but the event through which our narrative is framed is defined narrowly and by a specific place. To understand the implications of that narrative, we need the story. Late in what we now call the eighth century CE, during the first year of the Restoration of Balance reign period of the Tang dynasty (the Restoration of Balance reign period was 780–84; the Tang dynasty was 618–906), Wu Xing, whose identity we will consider below, organized a project centered on the Distributed Blessings Retention Dam to drain a coastal marsh. Located on the Plain of Emerging Transformation in Putian District on China's central coast in the area that in the years ahead came to be known as Fujian province (see Map 2.1), this was a complex project involving the damming of the Distributed Blessings Creek, the drainage of coastal salt marshes and distribution of fresh water through a network of canals into the now dry marshland (see Map 2.2). Wu's project was essential to the transformation of the Plain from a lightly settled wetland primarily utilized by non-Sinitic indigenous peoples into one of the most densely settled and economically productive areas of the empire. It is that transformation, a microcosm of transformation that was occurring across southern China through the first millennium CE, on which we are going to focus.

In his New History of the Tang Dynasty, compiled in the mid-eleventh century and regarded as one of the most authoritative accounts of the Tang, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) provided the earliest surviving reference to the project, although without reference to Wu Xing. Ouyang recorded that the dam provided irrigation to “over 400 qing” (1 qing = 100 mu = ca. 150 acres; i.e., a total of ca. 6,000 acres), a sizable area itself, but later sources record that “over 2000 qing,” or roughly 30,000 acres, were irrigated, the result of later additions to the network of canals.

There is very little we can say definitively about Wu Xing. There is no evidence that he held any official position, although at some point, perhaps posthumously and probably by local custom only, he was granted the honorary title Commander (chang guan).