Volume IV:Floods and the Nine Provinces

What Does “Following Mountains, Cutting Timber and Dredging Rivers” Mean?

ConceptHISFOL

Following mountains, cutting timber and dredging rivers joins surveying terrain, waterways and paths.

Story Context

After the waters are ordered, narrative names lands, defines directions and arranges tribute. The Nine Provinces are both spatial imagination and a way of organizing landscapes, resources and political order.

Textual and Material Clues

The passage explains an imagined sequence of work but is not a recoverable engineering blueprint.

How to Read the Evidence

For “What Does “Following Mountains, Cutting Timber and Dredging Rivers” Mean?,” date each witness before asking whether it describes a disaster, explains a technique, shapes a person or argues for political order. Similar wording becomes corroboration only when chronology, place and meaning can be connected.

Why It Matters

“What Does “Following Mountains, Cutting Timber and Dredging Rivers” Mean?” matters because it shows how landscape, direction, resources and tribute enter one spatial framework, while warning against invented precision on modern maps.

Further Reading

  • Yu Gong in Shangshu
  • Zhouli: Zhifang Shi
  • Erya: Shidi

Continue the Chronicle

Is the Tribute of Yu a Map or Political Geography? · Why Do Lists of the Nine Provinces Differ?