It was midsummer in the twenty-second year of Yongle.
In Kunshan County, Suzhou Prefecture, a heavy rain washed away the back wall of the county school, and also broke out the site of a Song Dynasty bookshop that had been buried for hundreds of years. Shen Tuo, the most inconspicuous copywriter in the county school, found a torn volume of "Water Control Collection" while clearing the mud - the long-lost second volume of a remarkable book on water conservancy written by Shan E, a man from the Song Dynasty.
The news reached the Nanjing Imperial College, and Shen Tuo was called into the prison to help sort out these ancient books from the Song and Yuan Dynasties. The imperial minister marveled at his sensitivity to water veins: "How can you, a copyist, understand the hydrology of the Yellow River?" Shen Tuo replied: "In the three generations of my ancestors, seven people died on the Yellow River."
In the first year of Hongxi, the new emperor ascended the throne, granted amnesty to the world, and also overhauled the canal. The Huitong River has been silted up for a long time, water transportation has been cut off, grain from the south cannot be transported north, and the granary in the capital can only last for three months. Zhou Chen, the minister of the Ministry of Industry, was ordered to dredge the canal and look for talents who knew water. The Imperial Academy presented a list of names, and the first name was: Shen Tuo.
