Chapter 21: The Thirteen-Day Model Village
The foundations, at just over a foot deep, were little more than a formality. In Chen Jian's opinion, these buildings were destined to be warehouses anyway, so there was no need to expend too much effort on them.
For now, the goal was simply to build something that could keep out the wind and rain. That alone would be astonishing enough for a tribe that had never seen a proper house before. After all, wouldn't a man who survives on wild vegetables and bran consider a simple steamed bun to be the finest delicacy in the world?
Their goals shouldn't be too lofty. The tribe needed to see and touch the results of their labor quickly, allowing them to make progress one small step at a time.
But even with such a makeshift approach, Chen Jian worried they might not have enough time.
After a short rest at noon, Chen Jian dispatched Langpi to a forest upstream on the Caohe River. He instructed him to take ten men and ten women to cut wood: the men would fell the trees, and the women would prune the branches.
"Bundle the trimmed logs with ropes and float them down the river. They don't need to be too thick—about the width of an arm is fine. As for length, make them about the height of three men."
Langpi's eyes lit up. Floating the logs downstream was an excellent idea that would save a great deal of effort. The area around their camp was covered in wild grass and short, crooked trees; the only straight timber was far upstream.
"By the way, also bring back some pieces of birch bark—the bigger, the better."
After sending Langpi's group on their way, Chen Jian had the remaining men continue digging the foundation pits. He led the women to cut down some small trees and gather dry firewood, piling it all by the river at the base of the cliff.
Once the fire was burning steadily, Chen Jian left a few people to keep feeding it firewood while he took the rest to cut grass with stone sickles.
They fashioned crude sickles by lashing large stone flakes to wooden handles. With a strong swing, they could cut down swaths of the tall grass, which grew more than half a meter high.
The older women spread ropes on the ground, piled the cut grass on top, pulled the ropes tight to bind the grass into bundles, and carried them back.
When he judged that enough time had passed, Chen Jian led them back to the cliff. The rocks were now searing hot from the fire.
Taking advantage of the high temperature, they all doused the rock face with cold river water.
A loud hissing and cracking sound filled the air as fissures spread across the large rock. The thermal shock weakened it so much that a light tap was enough to make it shatter, scattering pieces all over the ground.
The shattered rock was loaded into wicker baskets, each weighing over 100 catties. Weaker tribe members carried a basket between two people, while the strongest carried one on their own back, hauling the loads several hundred meters away to the construction site.
By the end of the afternoon, they had filled all four one-foot-deep foundations with gravel and covered it with the excavated soil. They compacted the earth first by stamping on it with their feet, adding more soil until their feet no longer left an impression. Then, they used straight logs to tamp it down even further.
As evening fell, shouts echoed from the river—Langpi's group had returned.
The bundled logs came floating down from upstream. As they neared the shore, the tribespeople on the bank worked together to pull the ropes and drag the rafts of timber onto land.
Chen Jian had them untie the ropes and told Yu Qian'er to count the logs, recording the total on a piece of birch bark with a charcoal stick.
Yu Qian'er counted for a long time before reporting to her brother that there were two sets of ninety-nine logs, plus sixty-seven more. She couldn't count all the way to one hundred, so she had to record the number in this cumbersome fashion.
They carried the wood to a spot on the bank farther from the water's edge and stacked it there to dry. Seeing the sun dip toward the horizon, Chen Jian told the tribe they could rest for the day.
Dozens of small boats shuttled across the water in the fading twilight, carrying everyone back to Luodao as the evening birds flew home to their roosts.
Dinner was dried fish and smoked meat. Some of the tribespeople began snoring softly by the fire as soon as they finished eating, utterly exhausted from the past two days of hard labor.
If they wanted to enjoy the comforts of civilization, they first had to endure its labors. And this was only the beginning.
It was a pity there was no wine. After such a tiring day, a drink before bed would have been a great pleasure.
Langpi was so exhausted he fell asleep with a piece of dried fish still in his mouth. He had felled more than forty trees by himself, breaking two stone axes in the process. Even while eating, his arm had not stopped twitching from the strain.
Chen Jian asked Yu Qian'er to cover their sleeping relatives with furs while he gathered the women who still had some energy left to continue weaving wicker baskets.
This time, they wove very small baskets. For each one, they also wove a funnel-shaped cone out of wicker. They placed the funnel inside the basket with its narrow opening pointing in and the wide mouth facing the basket's opening. Inside each basket, Chen Jian put a few pebbles for weight and a piece of slightly spoiled meat for bait. After securing the funnel in place, he tied a rope to each basket, had the women throw them into a reedy part of the river, and tied the other end of the ropes to logs sticking out of the water.
"Tomorrow morning, after the sun is up, go pull in these baskets," he told them. "There will be fish inside."
He made the pronouncement like a shaman predicting a miracle, but he couldn't stay awake any longer. He found a spot for himself and immediately fell asleep, leaving a group of the older women to stare at each other in disbelief. Could fish really just deliver themselves into their hands?
***
Early on the morning of the fourth day, Chen Jian woke to find a sheepskin covering him. Yu Qian'er was sleeping soundly beside him, using his calf as a pillow. No wonder he'd dreamed his leg was trapped under a rock all night.
He gently lifted her head, slipped a folded sheepskin underneath to replace his leg, and got up quietly.
He woke the other men, signaling that they would get to work even before breakfast.
Status had to be earned. If they wanted a secure future, they had to work for it now.
Although the men didn't fully grasp this concept, they accepted that heavy labor was their responsibility. Still, the new home Chen Jian had promised was, for the moment, nothing more than a few holes in the ground, and their motivation was beginning to wane.
After crossing to the opposite bank by boat, they selected sixteen of the thickest logs. Working in pairs, they carried them one by one to the first leveled foundation.
Chen Jian planned to build the first batch of houses using rammed earth. Firing bricks or even making mud bricks would be far too troublesome at this stage.
Rammed-earth houses could be considered a part of traditional Chinese culture. He mused on when the lifestyle of the common folk had been pushed out of the traditional category, leaving only the "high culture" of carved railings and painted buildings to be remembered.
The classic *Mencius* states that the great minister Fu Yue was discovered while working "between the planks and pounding earth." This was precisely the method Chen Jian intended to use. To jump straight to brick houses would be to skip a crucial step. Years from now, he feared, another great story of a man discovered at the brick kilns might never come to pass.
The name of the technique, *bǎnzhù*, described the process itself: first the frame (*bǎn*), then the building (*zhù*). They began by digging holes at the corners of the foundation and setting thick logs into them to serve as posts. Then, they tied thinner pieces of wood horizontally between two posts, forming a sturdy wooden frame.
They built a second, parallel frame on the inner side of the foundation, leaving a gap of about one foot between the two wooden walls.
By the time the frame was securely tied together, the sun was high in the sky. Puffs of cooking smoke rose from Luodao, and the faint sound of laughter occasionally drifted across the water, carried away by the wind before it could be clearly heard.
"Let's go back and eat," Chen Jian announced.
The men were indeed hungry. But Langpi and another man named Song waved to the others. "You all go back first. We'll stay and make sure these ropes are tighter. Just leave a boat for us."
Chen Jian nodded and led the others back.
The island was already buzzing with excitement. Before their boat had even touched the shore, several women ran over, shouting, "Jian! Jian! There are really fish in the baskets! One of the old mothers sent me to ask what we should do with them now!"
"Re-bait them with some minced meat and bones and throw them back in the river!" Chen Jian shouted. He had to shout to be heard across the ten-plus meters of water. A few women yelled back an acknowledgment and hurried off to the river.
Dozens of fresh fish were already roasting over the fire. After so many days of eating dried fish, everyone was craving the taste of fresh-caught. The river was too wide and deep here for their usual method of building stone weirs to trap fish.
This new method of fishing seemed miraculous to the tribe. The fish just swam into the baskets on their own, with no one having to enter the water or move heavy stones? They joked that if things kept on like this, food might one day fly into their cooking pots all by itself.
Yu Qian'er, swinging her two braids, came over to ask, "Brother, I understand that the fish go in to eat the meat, but why can't they get out?"
Chen Jian just shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe they get lost inside?"
"No, there must be a real reason," Yu Qian'er pouted, sensing her brother was teasing her, though she couldn't figure out the puzzle herself.
In truth, that was close to the reason. The inside of the basket was spacious, but the opening of the funnel was very small. The fish easily entered by swimming from the large opening to the small one, but finding that tiny exit from the wide interior was difficult. If a fish were smart enough to figure it out, its intelligence would be remarkable; clearly, they weren't that clever.
Dozens of fish were not nearly enough to feed everyone, so once they saw the traps worked, the more proactive tribe members immediately started weaving more of them.
This success was a much-needed shot in the arm. It made the weary tribespeople feel that Chen Jian's promises were tangible and getting closer, a welcome change from the day before when all they could see was a hole in the ground and endless work.
After breakfast, their strength restored, all the able-bodied men returned to the other side of the river.
Working in pairs, they poured soil from their wicker baskets into the gap between the wooden frames, while other men used thick logs to ram it down firmly.
With more than a dozen people working on each of the four walls, and the excavated soil piled right beside them, they made quick progress.
Soon, however, one of the older men stopped and asked, "Jian, if we surround it on all sides, how will we get in?"
His words brought everyone to a halt.
Chen Jian slapped his forehead. He had been juggling so many tasks that he had completely forgotten about the doors and windows.
"Stop tamping for now. We won't put the door on the side facing the Caohe River. Uncle, you and a few others, come with me."
He picked out a few men, who wiped the sweat from their brows and followed him down to the river.
After selecting a few logs, Chen Jian estimated the dimensions for a door, using a rope to measure the lengths. There was no time to devise a proper measuring scale; they would have to improvise for now.
With no nails available, the door frame had to be built using a mortise and tenon structure. This type of joinery could be incredibly complex—allowing entire buildings to be constructed without a single nail—but a simple version would be more than sufficient for a door frame. At its most basic, a mortise and tenon joint is a convex piece (the tenon) inserted into a concave hole (the mortise). Depending on the technique, the result could look like the character for 'mouth' (口) or, with a horizontal bar, the character for 'sun' (日).
First, they peeled the bark from the logs and used stone axes and knives to flatten the surfaces, measuring the positions with a rope. Using a simple stone chisel, they carved out the mortise hole in what would be the lintel, or upper beam, of the door frame. Into two other logs, they carved tenons on the ends to serve as the side posts. Chen Jian had specifically chosen this uncle for the task because he was the tribe's best stone tool maker, the same man who had drilled the holes in the oracle bones.
Their tools were crude, but thankfully the work didn't require extreme precision. After a good while, they finally finished. Fitting the joint together, Chen Jian asked the uncle, "Do you understand?"
"I understand," the uncle said after a quick glance, offering a perfect analogy. "It's just like drilling a hole in a stone and fitting a stick into it."
"Alright. Uncle, you take these men and finish this. We'll get back to the wall," Chen Jian said.
The uncle grunted in assent. He gave the frame a shake, seemed satisfied with its sturdiness, and asked a few more clarifying questions.
Before Chen Jian could answer, he heard someone calling his name from the top of the wall and hurried back.
The first house was already taking shape. Three of the walls were now more than half a man's height, but this made it difficult to continue filling the frame and tamping the earth.
When they ran into trouble, their first instinct was to call for Chen Jian.
Cursing himself for his carelessness, he hastily lashed together several wobbly ladders from logs and rope. He also built two simple scaffolds that would have been immediately cited for safety violations in his past life. With those in place, the work continued.
With sixty or seventy people working together, the house went up quickly. Soon, the door and window frames the uncle's team had made were brought over, and they officially began work on the front wall.
They fixed the door frame in place and began filling and tamping the earth around it, securing it within the wall. By that afternoon, the main structure of the first house was complete.
The south wall was built a meter higher than the north wall. They laid logs horizontally across the top, packed tightly together, to form a roof that sloped from south to north. They covered this wooden roof with a layer of earth, followed by overlapping sheets of birch bark, sealing the seams with turpentine.
Then, he took a few men up onto the roof. They began spreading the bundles of grass that had been collected the day before, laying it down in dense, overlapping layers.
It was a dual-layer, super-absorbent, leak-proof system. As long as it wasn't a torrential downpour, the rain would run right off the thatch. And even if the grass became saturated, the water would still be stopped by the sloped layer of birch bark underneath.
The sun was beginning to set. Down below, the tribespeople who couldn't fit on the roof shielded their eyes with their hands and stared up at the small group finishing the thatching, an indescribable awe on their faces.
Even the children who had been playing in the distance drew closer, their eyes wide as they looked up at this new thing called a "house."
When the wind blew bits of straw into their eyes, they would rub them away with a grubby hand, unwilling to look away for even a second, as if afraid the magnificent sight might vanish.
On the roof, Chen Jian and the others were bathed in the golden light of the setting sun, their long shadows merging with that of the house itself.
After the last layer of thatch was laid, they pulled up one final log to weigh it down. Chen Jian sat on that log at the high point of the roof, took a deep breath, and let his legs dangle over the side, swinging them slightly.
And so, in the vast wilderness, the first man-made structure to defy nature took its place.
It was far from perfect, but it was humanity's first declaration of independence from the whims of the wild: on this open plain, they would no longer need to fear the wind and rain, nor would they need to rely on natural caves for shelter.