Chapter 20: Thirteen Days to a Model Village
As the morning sun blushed across the sky, the birds on Luodao Island welcomed new neighbors.
Fortunately, these hairless, flightless newcomers didn't disturb their lives. Except for a few annoying wolf cubs who were always gazing up at the unscalable cliffs, there was little to be wary of. The birds ate when they should eat and slept when they should sleep, occasionally dropping their droppings on the heads of those wolf cubs, scaring them into bowing their heads and scurrying away.
This was the first day that Chen Jian and his tribe had arrived downstream, and they were making their temporary camp on Luodao Island.
Chen Jian told the people not to eat the snails by the river, making up a disgusting and horrifying story that sent the children who had been collecting them scrambling back to the adults.
The snails here looked like edible river snails, but the difference was like that between a husky and a wolf. A mistake could lead to big problems.
People with yellow skin and black eyes had very weak resistance to schistosomiasis. Even in the era Chen Jian had come from, the disease was still rampant in some places south of the Yangtze River. For now, prevention was the only option, and not eating the snails was the only preventive measure they could take.
The terrified children told the story to the adults, and soon the mere mention of snails made people shudder. One aunt, who had creatively styled her hair into a conch shell shape, was so frightened that she quickly undid it and plaited it back into a long braid.
Besides the snails, Chen Jian also forbade his tribe from hunting the birds. He would need their droppings (guano) later, so for now, they had to be silent caretakers.
The children, no longer daring to go near the river, had to content themselves with running around the island with the wolf cubs, dodo birds, and little geese. The sow, however, was kept in a simple pigsty made of branches, right among the people. The women would first use small wooden sticks to gently tickle the sow, getting her accustomed to human presence, before switching to their hands, hoping to get her comfortable enough to eat from their palms.
Of course, Chen Jian had no intention of building the permanent village here. But until their houses were built, the island's natural moat provided effective protection against predators.
***
There were just over thirteen days left before the inter-tribal gathering, an event of extreme importance. There was so much to do, and Chen Jian felt more keenly than ever that their population was too small and stretched thin.
Including Song and his people, the tribe now numbered 113 members. There were 34 able-bodied males and 48 females; the rest were either disabled, elderly, or children.
With so many tasks ahead, they needed a clear plan.
First, they had to fire pottery—a lot more pottery.
Chen Jian planned to give these pots to other tribes at the gathering. To develop the concepts of trade and commodities, one needed sufficient productivity and surplus goods. In their previous state, when finding enough food was a daily struggle, what could they possibly have exchanged? They were so desperate they smashed bones to eat the marrow; what could they offer? Bone dust?
He wanted to show the other tribes that it was better to leave their precarious existence and join them in a settled, agricultural life. Relying on the small number of people currently under his command was not enough for his future plans.
He didn't expect this first batch of pottery to be traded for anything valuable. The goal was to make the other tribes aware of pottery's existence and the possibility of a different way of life.
Only with surplus materials could trade exist. With trade, pottery would become more than just a vessel used by the tribe; it would become a commodity that could be bartered for other things. If other tribes wanted to generate their own surplus, they would have to adopt a new, settled lifestyle, eventually merging into a large, blood-related tribe.
In addition to pottery, he also had to build a number of houses.
Living in the open on Luodao Island was not good for the tribe, and more importantly, he wanted to create a model village—a "Potemkin Village"—to impress the other tribes.
Potemkin, a lover of Catherine the Great, had once built a series of fake model villages along the queen's tour route to please her and show foreign envoys the prosperity of her country. It was a peaceful, idyllic scene of cattle and sheep everywhere, happy villagers, and smoke curling from every kitchen. The only problem was that the people and livestock in each village were the same group, frantically moved ahead of the queen's entourage to the next location.
Chen Jian, however, didn't have to worry about putting on a false show. Their progress was real. Still, creating even the prototype of a village within ten days would not be easy.
They had nothing. No saws, no chisels, no baskets for carrying soil, not even a proper hoe.
Everything had to be started from scratch. The clansmen were full of energy, but they needed to see their new home taking shape to maintain their long-term passion.
The tribesmen had grown accustomed to the new division of labor, which was no longer based on age and gender but on arrangements made by Chen Jian.
He sent Wolfpi to lead a dozen men to hunt and fish. He also instructed Wolfpi to spend time each day digging deep pits and setting traps, hoping to catch some live animals.
The children were also assigned tasks: weeding around the pigsty and catching bugs and grasshoppers, though they were not allowed to stray too far from the adults.
A dozen people were assigned to Acorn's cousin to fire a few new pottery wheels of a slightly modified design. After Chen Jian gestured and drew on the ground what he wanted, Acorn's cousin, only half understanding, followed his instructions to make the necessary components from clay.
The rest of the people were taken by Chen Jian to the north bank of the Grass River, where he had already selected a place for their settlement.
The north bank featured a cliff, with a slope extending northward that connected to a small hill. A small river flowed past the hill. The hill was about 500 meters from the riverbank, and its terrain was high enough to be safe from floods, making it a good place to settle.
The earliest houses had significant regional characteristics. In his previous life, the tribal groups in the Yangtze River Basin built semi-stilt-like buildings by driving wooden stakes into the ground. This served to prevent moisture, keep out snakes, and create a space underneath for a kennel.
However, Chen Jian assessed their current construction capabilities and rejected that plan. Wooden houses might seem simple, but they were far more troublesome than stone buildings, especially the advanced mortise-and-tenon structures that represented the peak of classical structural mechanics. The only downside was... when future civilizations judged their ancestors by what was left behind, wooden buildings would have either burned or decayed, leaving a less impressive legacy than stone.
The only house he could build now would have to use the most basic, primitive method. As for architectural wonders to be passed down through the ages, that would be a task for future generations. He simply didn't have that kind of skill.
***
On the flat hillside, he used a rope to mark out a rectangle roughly six meters long and three meters wide. The first house was going to be built on the north slope of the cliff.
He divided half the people and had them start digging foundation pits with bone plows, telling them it didn't need to be too deep and giving them a one-foot-long stick as a ruler.
The remaining half went to the top of the cliff and began throwing hard rocks like granite and obsidian down to the base. This was the original method of making stone tools. It was all a matter of luck, picking suitable flakes for toolmaking from the shattered stones. In theory, if you smashed enough rock, you could get any shape you wanted. The flakes weren't naturally shaped and had no holes; they would have to be tied to wooden handles with rope and vines.
The *ping-pong-pong* of rocks hitting the ground echoed all morning. In the afternoon, they searched under the cliff for flakes suitable for stone tools. After preparing more than 100 pieces, they switched places with the group digging the foundation.
On the second day, the new pottery wheel was assembled. This time, it used a simple tanned leather strap as a transmission belt, which was much stronger than rope. Compared with the previous potter's wheel, this one looked a little strange. The pottery dish that normally held the clay had no supporting column below it; instead, it was attached to a long vertical axle.
Chen Jian told everyone that this was not for making pottery, but for drilling holes in stones.
After he assembled the wheel and inserted a wooden stick into it, the clansmen grew even more suspicious. Could a stick punch a hole through a stone?
He chose a stone flake shaped like a hoe head and lightly chipped a small depression where he wanted to drill. He fixed the stone to the ground and positioned the wooden stick on the pottery wheel inside the groove. The tribesmen watched curiously as Chen Jian asked someone to turn the driving wheel on the other side of the belt. He found a clay pot filled with fine sand and water and had Yuqian'er carry it, instructing her to continuously add fine sand to the point of contact between the stone and the stick.
The person on the other side spun the wheel quickly, causing the wooden stick to rotate at high speed.
Of course, a wooden stick couldn't grind a hole in a stone, but the sand could. The fine quartz sand was extremely hard; it could wear away not just this broken stone, but even extremely hard jade. How else had the magnificent jade culture of ancient times formed in the absence of alloy drills?
The creaking sound was grating, and the clansmen listening to it grimaced as if they had just eaten a sour apricot.
Whenever the sand was ground down, Yuqian'er would pour water to wash away the powder and replace it with fresh, fine sand.
After two hours of this, the stone flake was finally worn through by the sand and the wooden stick. Chen Jian felt his arms were as sore and limp as noodles; the work had taken as long as it would to boil a large pot of water.
He showed the drilled stone hoe to everyone. The clansmen touched the smooth, threaded groove with their fingers and stared at the round hole, utterly amazed.
Wood... could it really perforate stone?
Chen Jian stretched his sore arms. "Groups of three, take turns spinning the wheel. Each group will grind through one stone before waking up the next group to continue."
After arranging for a night watchman and the rotating stone-drilling teams, he ground one more piece himself before finally falling asleep.
In the early morning of the third day, the creaking sound continued. More than 40 stones with holes were laid out on the ground. Many people woke up early just to look at these new stone tools over and over, unable to put them down. The clansmen had never seen stone tools with holes before, nor had they ever heard of such a thing from other tribes. But even without having seen them, they could immediately imagine how convenient a stone tool that could be securely attached to a handle would be.
Chen Jian was not in the mood for sentiment. He counted the remaining food and told Wolfpi they didn't have to hunt today. He gathered all the men and had them spend the morning cutting branches to use as hoe handles, which they inserted into the round holes and secured with wooden wedges.
The women were not idle either. Except for those cooking, Chen Jian had them all go to the river to cut willow branches, which they transported back in birch-bark boats.
After breakfast, more than a dozen birch-bark boats arrived at the riverbank on the north side of Luodao, bringing a burst of noise to this ancient land. It had never been so lively.
Chen Jian chose a depression near the dug foundation and had the men dig for soil there with their new hoes and bone plows. He told them to dig as deep as they could, until they hit rock, and to pile the excavated soil nearby.
He himself led the women to weave wicker baskets. Dozens of them sat in the sun, sharing techniques with one another. Chen Jian's own craftsmanship was actually very poor, and he could only grope along with everyone else. By the time he found the trick, his fingers couldn't keep up with the speed of the others. He managed to make one basket in the morning, and its shape was horrible. The only thing better than what the aunts and cousins made was that he had added two handles for easy carrying.
By the end of the morning, three stone hoes and one bone plow were broken.
The harvest was piles of dirt, a person-deep pit, more than 60 wicker baskets, and blood blisters on the hands of the men and cuts on the fingertips of the women.
Yet everyone's face was full of excitement. They were creating a new life with their own hands. Some even felt that their tribe now had the power to make the world tremble.
Look, hadn't they dug a huge hole in the once-flat ground? Hadn't useless branches been turned into lovely wicker baskets in the women's hands? A pit as deep as a person, something they thought could only be created by the natural force of a flood, had been created by the tribe with their own hands.
The clansmen were now even more convinced by Chen Jian's stories. They believed that humanity was the true strength of all things, the very soul of Pangu. The wind, soil, thunder, and lightning were merely the body... because those powers that were once envied and could only be looked up to were no longer so difficult to touch.
If they could dig a pit, then with enough people, could they dig a river? Could they even pile up a mountain? If a tree trunk could be made into a bow and branches into baskets, could they one day make animals run right up to them, within easy reach?
The people of the tribe drank warm salt water and dreamed of things they could never have imagined before, yet now felt were not entirely out of reach.
In Chen Jian's view, however, it was just a small pit, not even big enough for the bucket of an excavator from his previous life.