Liangshan: A Hill of 197 Metres and a Marsh of a Thousand Heroes

Liangshan county lies between 35 degrees 36 minutes and 35 degrees 58 minutes north, where Tai'an, Jining, Heze and Puyang meet, on the alluvial plain of the Yellow River. It is mostly flat: 66,556 hectares under the plough, 11,187 hectares of water, 2,427 hectares of woodland and 510 hectares of residual hill. Six hills stand on it, of which Liangshan is the highest at 197.9 metres above sea level, while the lowest ground in the county is 35.9 metres. Lu Xun, reading the evidence behind the novel, concluded that there had been a large marshland on the hill since the Song dynasty which served as the inspiration for the bandits' base. That water is no longer there in that form. What remains at Liangshanpo today is a wetland site, and beside it a reservoir built on the plain.

The novel was assembled rather than written at once. Its original title was Water Margin for Loyalty and Justice, and the evidence names Shi Nai'an, Luo Guanzhong, or both of them, as the compiler responsible for the original compilation; the printed revision that became the ancestor of most circulating versions was published under the Ming emperor who reigned from 1522 to 1566. Underneath it lies older material. A thirteenth-century book of miscellaneous observations by Zhou Mi is the first source to name thirty-six of Song Jiang's companions. A folk compilation called the Old Affairs of the Xuanhe Period devotes its entire fourth section to Song Jiang and the thirty-six heavenly spirits reincarnated as outlaws on Mount Liang. And the Song history itself records an outlaw Song Jiang of Huainan whose band was finally defeated by the general Zhang Shuye. That record is the seed the whole book grew around.

In the book the hill is a sky. The 108 figures are 36 Heavenly Spirits and 72 Earthly Fiends, demonic overlords banished by the deity Shangdi and released after repentance into human form, and the first chapter is their release from beneath an ancient stele-bearing tortoise. Their slogan, to accomplish the Way for Heaven, is a claim about government rather than about robbery. The hill outlived every politics built on it. Kuniyoshi's woodblock series of the 108 heroes, commissioned in 1827, carried the figures out of China and started a fashion for full-body pictorial tattoos, and a five-volume English translation called The Marshes of Mount Liang appeared between 1994 and 2002. In the county a Water Margin festival was held in 1993, 1994 and 2007 and then fixed to take place every second year.