Cai Xiang at First Look

Search for Cai Xiang, and here is roughly what comes back.

He was a Northern Song official, born in 1012 in Xianyou, a county in the hills of Fujian, and he died in 1067 at the age of fifty-five. He came from modest stock — his father worked the land and later served as a clerk in Quanzhou; his mother was the daughter of a man of some local standing in Hui'an, and it was that maternal grandfather who saw to his early schooling. He did well. He sat the examinations young, placed first in the prefectural examination at Kaifeng at eighteen — a farmer's son, his friend Ouyang Xiu would write long afterward, first in Kaifeng, and his name shook the capital — and passed the national degree in 1030. From there he spent nearly four decades in the civil service, moving between the capital and the provinces, and holding in turn a long list of court and regional offices.

Much of that career was spent governing. He was posted to Fuzhou, to Quanzhou, to Kaifeng, and to Hangzhou, and the record remembers him as the kind of administrator who left each place better than he found it — draining and restoring farmland, pressing the throne to cut a heavy local tax, planting shade trees for hundreds of miles along the post-road. He was also, by the accounts that survive, a plain-spoken man at court, willing to say uncomfortable things to power, which cost him at least once and won him a reputation for honesty.

But a competent governor is not, by itself, why the name lasts a thousand years. Cai Xiang lasted because he was several things at once.

He was a scholar and a poet, and above all a calligrapher — one of the "Four Masters" of Song calligraphy, set beside Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, and Mi Fu, his brushwork still copied and studied today. He was a writer of small, careful books. He wrote the Cha lu, a short treatise on tea that became a standard reference, and he had a hand in the famous "small dragon" tribute-tea cakes sent from Fujian to the emperor. He wrote the Li zhi pu, the first book ever devoted to the lychee — a ranked account of the fruit's varieties that Chinese sources routinely call the earliest treatise on fruit cultivation anywhere. He kept good company: his friend Ouyang Xiu, the great writer, sat on the very same examination roster of 1030 — and finished fourteenth, four places behind him — and would one day write Cai's tomb inscription; early in his career Cai wrote a celebrated poem defending Ouyang Xiu, Fan Zhongyan, and others when they were pushed out of court. (He was also, as it happens, an older cousin of Cai Jing, the minister later remembered as one of the Song's great villains — a tidy accident of family that the histories never fail to note.)

And then there is the bridge.

While governing Quanzhou, Cai Xiang oversaw the completion of a great stone crossing over the tidal mouth of the Luoyang River — the Wan'an Bridge, better known as the Luoyang Bridge. It was an enormous work for its day, a low causeway of stone piers running across water where the ferry had drowned people for generations, and it still stands; in 2021 it was named part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Of everything Cai did, this is the deed the wider world remembers, and the one that carried his name furthest.

It carried it, in time, out of history and into legend.

Because the other thing a search for Cai Xiang turns up — sitting oddly beside the tea books and the calligraphy — is that he became a character in a story, and then in many stories. Popular tradition attached a miraculous birth to him: a storm at the ferry crossing, a voice from heaven, a mother's vow that her unborn son would one day bridge the deadly water. It made the bridge itself the stuff of miracle, funded, in the fullest telling, by the goddess Guanyin, who stands in a boat on the estuary and lets suitors throw coins at her, every miss filling the treasury. And it promoted the man himself: on the stage he is very often "Cai the Top Graduate" — Cai zhuangyuan — though the historical Cai Xiang placed only tenth in his examination year, and the actual zhuangyuan of 1030 was a man named Wang Gongchen.

The promotion has proved remarkably durable, and it turns up in unexpected mouths. When Mao Yisheng — modern China's great bridge engineer, the man who built the Qiantang River Bridge — came to praise the Luoyang Bridge, the phrase he reached for was that it is the zhuangyuan of Fujian's bridges. Nine hundred years on, and the word the legend gave Cai Xiang comes back to describe the thing he actually built.

By most accounts the story reached the stage early. There is an anonymous Ming play about the building of the bridge, and a fuller, celebrated version by the early-Qing dramatist Li Yu, of which only scattered scenes now survive. The tale lived on in local and folk theater across several regions, in the street operas and puppet plays of Fujian, and in a Qing-era compendium of Fujian legend that gathered the whole cycle together. It was popular enough that the Empress Dowager Cixi is said to have enjoyed it, and old-Shanghai theaters staged it at New Year. It even reached the screen: in 1928 a silent film was made of it — Cai the Top Graduate Builds the Luoyang Bridge (蔡狀元建造洛陽橋), a costume picture billed frankly as a myth film, starring Ruan Lingyu, the greatest actress of Chinese silent cinema, opposite Gong Jianong. She would be dead by her own hand at twenty-five, seven years later, and two hundred thousand people would follow her coffin. Of the twenty-nine films she made, nine survive. This is not one of them. In our own time the figure keeps returning, in a recent television drama of the Song court and in newly staged regional operas about his life.

So this is Cai Xiang at first look: a real and gifted man — governor, poet, calligrapher, tea-writer, bridge-builder, honest official, friend of Ouyang Xiu — who was also, and increasingly, a legend, a god, and a stock hero of the stage. Both the man and the myth come up in the same breath, tangled together, and the surface account hands them to you without pausing to sort out which is which.

That sorting is the work of the chapters that follow. Here the aim has only been to lay out what is easily found — the received Cai, the one a first search returns. From here we can begin to look underneath: at the coast that made him, at the bridge and the tea and the fruit taken one at a time, and at the slow process by which a tenth-place scholar-official became a top graduate, a bridge-builder became a god, and a man became a story. We will save the hard questions for the end.