Zoumatang: A River of Two Dynasties

In one sentence

One of Zhabei's six main waterways; two dynasties are hidden in its name — Qian Liu of the Five Dynasties dug it, and Han Shizhong of the Southern Song rode a horse along its bank.

Where it is

The Zoumatang lies in the north of Shanghai. It is an east–west trunk river:

Anyone who takes the bus to Pengpu Xincun may have an indirect impression of this river: as the bus nears the Gonghexin Road / Jiangchang Road stop, the conductor calls out, "Zoumatang, we're here."

"Zoumatang" is both the name of the river and what people call this stretch of country.

1. The first name: Qian Creek

At first this river was not called the Zoumatang.

It is said to have been dug by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Qian Liu put real effort into managing water — he organised labour to dig ponds and cut channels around the mouth of the Wusong River, in order "to gather the profit of fish and salt", and along the way to beat back the floods that "the Overlord tide" brought so often to this stretch.

When the river was cut, the people called it Qian Creek, and also Qianjiabang.

A river named after the surname of the man who dug it — that is very common in the history of Chinese waterworks: the river was dug by a person, and the name follows the person.

2. The second name: Zoumatang

Two hundred years later, the river changed hands.

In the Southern Song the troops of Han Shizhong, the famous general who fought the Jin, were stationed for a time around Jiangwan and Dachang. The Qing Continued Gazetteer of Dachang records the matter in a single sentence, but it sets out the whole sequence clearly:

"The Zoumatang is also called Qian Creek; it was opened by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue, to gather the profit of fish and salt. In the Song the famous general Han Shizhong stationed troops around Jiangwan and Dachang, and rode to and fro on horseback along the bank, and so people called it the Zoumatang."

Han Shizhong often took his soldiers riding and drilling on the river bank. The people grew used to the sight, and came to call the river the "Zoumatang" — named for an event, not for a person.

This time the name did not follow a particular person; it followed something that happened again and again.

The three characters "Zoumatang" appear earliest in the Jiading County Gazetteer of the Wanli reign of the Ming. In the four hundred years and more since, the name has not changed again.

A local man, Zhou Zhaoyu, wrote a poem, and it is about this river:

Walking by the Zoumatang, cold clouds thin and the sky clears. A thousand plots steam with water, ten thousand leaves clash in the sound of autumn. Who understands the woodland birds' speech, the bank's flowers open unnamed. The bamboo bridge is half sunk by the tide, the path over the bank hard to find.

"A thousand plots steam with water, ten thousand leaves clash in the sound of autumn" — this is a river of farming: paddy fields on both banks, and in autumn the sound of wind.

3. "Zouma" is not horse racing

Here a very easy misunderstanding has to be put right, and it is a fairly widespread one.

The three characters "Zoumatang" contain "zouma", riding a horse, and it is easy to suppose that this area was once a racecourse. It was not.

"Zouma" was military training — Han Shizhong's soldiers exercising on horseback on the bank; not betting on horses, and not racing them.

Both things did happen in this area, but not in the same era, and they are not the same thing:

One is the origin of a name; the other is something that happened seven hundred years later. Between them lie the whole Yuan, Ming and Qing.

4. Han bottles: the evidence on the bank

Is the "zouma" of the Zoumatang legend or fact? — there is something on the bank that can testify.

"Han bottles" — a kind of pottery bottle about 19 centimetres high, about 10 centimetres across at its widest, with a mouth about 6.3 centimetres wide. Tall, lean and pointed at both ends, easy to carry about, it was the vessel soldiers of the Southern Song and Yuan used to draw water, the equivalent in function of today's army canteen.

Since the founding of the People's Republic, at Putuo, Jiading, Zhabei and other places along the Zoumatang, Han bottles have been dug up in heaps. Where there were many, the heaps grew into small hills, which people called "Bottle Hills".

One account has it that Han Shizhong's soldiers were mostly northerners and could hold their drink; that before a campaign and after a triumph they drank deep, and threw the empty bottles down, and that over the years the pile became a hill.

That sounds like a story, but the bottles are real, and so are the heaps. A 19-centimetre piece of pottery, buried for eight hundred years, still coming out of the ground in piles — that says more than any legend: an army really was stationed in that area.

5. Where horses really were kept: the stables by the Xiaoji Creek

If the "horse" of the Zoumatang was a horse for drill, then this area did also have horses for racing — only not beside the Zoumatang, but at Jiangwan, on the Xiaoji Creek that carries on from its eastern end.

Shanghai once had four or five racecourses. The most famous was the "Shanghai Racecourse" on People's Square (1862, the third racecourse), but that one belonged to the foreigners, and Chinese were not allowed in.

In 1908 Ye Yiquan, fourth son of the Jiangnan magnate Ye Chengzhong, went to the racecourse to watch the racing, and was several times mocked and turned away by foreigners. He would not swallow it, and resolved to build one of his own in the Chinese-administered area.

In 1909 he bought 1,200 mu of farmland at Jiangwan, centred on the crossing of today's Wuchuan Road and Wudong Road, and began work on a racecourse. When the land was taken over he paid ten silver dollars a mu above the current price, and asked the Shanghai county magistrate to come in a blue-felt sedan chair and oversee the staking out, paying the farmers on the spot.

And the place where the horses were kept was built on the bank of the Xiaoji Creek, west of the racecourse:

It opened on 6 May 1911. Ye Yiquan invited political figures, rich merchants and notables, and the envoys of the various countries posted in Shanghai. Town and country people from Hongkou, Zhabei and Jiangwan came too, and the cars, carriages and rickshaws on the three roads stood nose to tail.

At the opening there was one more entertainment: the Frenchman Vallon flew a Sannes monoplane, circling over the racecourse — the first time the Chinese had seen an aeroplane fly.

The racecourse later invited foreigners to take shares and changed its name to the "International Recreation Club", but people still called it the "Jiangwan Racecourse". In 1935 it closed as war drew near, and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance on 13 August it was shelled, part of its buildings destroyed, and the ground left waste.

Today that place is a residential area. Of the stables and the horses, not a trace is left.

6. How a river becomes a place name

The Zoumatang means one more thing to people today: it is a place name.

Ride the bus to Pengpu Xincun, and as it nears Gonghexin Road / Jiangchang Road, the announcement says "Zoumatang". Get off and walk a little north, and there is the river — flowing slowly past, not wide, not conspicuous.

A place name survives, often, not because the event behind it was so important, but because the river is still there, the stop is still there, and so the words are still being said.

Han Shizhong's soldiers are long gone, and Han bottles have long since stopped being made, but so long as the bus still announces the three characters "Zoumatang", the name is still alive.

7. How a river's position shaped this land

One last point, about geography.

The Zoumatang runs along the northernmost edge of Zhabei. Together with waterways such as Dongjiao Creek and Beichangbang (now buried), it roughly draws the boundary between Zhabei and Baoshan and Dachang.

When Pengpu Xincun was built, the land chosen was south of the Zoumatang — a river became a natural dividing line: on this side the workers' village, on that side still farmland and a town.

This pattern of "the river as boundary" is very common in northern Shanghai: water is a road and also a wall; an irrigation channel and also an administrative line.

The Zoumatang has flowed for more than a thousand years, and has watched soldiers camp, farmers plant, workmen build a new village, and commuters run for the bus. It is not a scenic spot, and few people make a trip just to see it.

But it has always been there.

Connections

• See also：Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict, Pengpu Junior Middle School, Joy City, Appendix 1 · Historical Codes in Street Names

Sources: that the Zoumatang starts at Fengbang in the west, flows north-east past Nanxiang and Dachang, joins Xiaoji Creek at Jiangwan by the Songhu Railway, and is about 20.8 kilometres long; that the name "Zoumatang" appears earliest in the Jiading County Gazetteer of the Wanli reign of the Ming; that it is said to have been dug by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue, and was therefore once called Qian Creek and Qianjiabang; the Qing Continued Gazetteer of Dachang's record that "in the Song the famous general Han Shizhong stationed troops around Jiangwan and Dachang, and rode to and fro on horseback along the bank, and so people called it the Zoumatang"; the poem Zoumatang by the local man Zhou Zhaoyu; the "Han bottles" (about 19 centimetres high) and "Bottle Hills" of the Southern Song and Yuan dug up at Putuo, Jiading, Zhabei and elsewhere along the river; and the popular name "Zoumatang" for the Gonghexin Road / Jiangchang Road bus stop follow China National Radio's "The Zoumatang, the Qiujiang, the Taopu … how Shanghai's waterways got their names!", Shanghai Fabu's "How Shanghai's waterways got their names!", Shangguan News's "Traces of Wuyue Culture in Shanghai" and Jiefang Daily's "Tracing Shanghai's History with a Pot of Qibao Old Wine" (Grade B; the statements that "a Han bottle is an army canteen" and that "Bottle Hills were formed by soldiers throwing down bottles" are folk explanations and are marked Grade C); that the Jiangwan Racecourse was built in 1909 by Ye Yiquan on 1,200 mu of farmland bought around today's Wuchuan Road and Wudong Road, that its stables stood on the bank of the Xiaoji Creek west of the racecourse and could keep close to a hundred horses, that most of the racehorses were fine Mongolian stock boarded there by skilled horsemen, that it opened on 6 May 1911 with the Frenchman Vallon flying a monoplane in circuits overhead, that it was later renamed the International Recreation Club, and that it closed in 1935 and was damaged by shellfire after 13 August follow Yangpu Times's "The Most Flourishing Racecourse in Shanghai", Sohu's "The Jiangwan Racecourse: the most flourishing racecourse in Shanghai" and Phoenix Culture's "Racecourses of the Ten-Mile Foreign Concession" (Grade B). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.