Under Heaven

The jacket was hi-vis, unnatural yellow,
The shoes were trainers, her trousers I forget,
But the broom with which she swept the country road
Was made of twigs tied to a branch for a handle
And so looked like the tree from which it was made.
But the cone of her hat, woven from bamboo,
Was an unchanged three-thousand-year-old model
Perfect in its matching of form to function,
Shielding her from rain and, on this molten day,
The sun that turned the asphalt to treacle.

And in the not-yet-stiffened willow of her back
The crane’s gaze of her eyes upon the unswept road
And the martial art with which she wielded the tree
That drew back into its branches the fallen leaves
I saw, or thought I recognised
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXfrom behind my Western eyes
The story of the peasant
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXdrawn like leaves into the city
By the winds of change, the wheel of revolution,
Who brought this stolen land back into her arms,
Under her hard feet, between her calloused hands,
With the patience of a rice terrace
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXcarved into a hillside
The determination of a tunnel
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXbored through a mountain range
The strength of a bridge suspended
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXover a river valley
The destiny of a people building
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXa country under heaven.

— Yangshuo, June 2024

• • • • •

Tiānxià (下天), meaning ‘Under heaven’, was the ancient and imperial name for the land divinely appointed to the Emperor of China. In 2002, the Chinese wuxia film, Hero, became the focus of controversy when the director, Zhang Yimou, used the phrase in his script, and US censors, who took it for an expression of Chinese imperialism, translated it as ‘our land’ for the film’s release in US cinemas. This is typical of the paranoia and propaganda with which every aspect of China is misrepresented in the West, which, unlike China, regards the rest of the world as a lost or future colony. The poem was inspired by the sight of Chinese women in bamboo hats or douli (斗笠) in the town of Yángshuò, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China.