累歲乾荒 Three Years of Dry Famine
榜上寫著：榜上写着：
逐句解 Line by line
On the notice was written:
著 is neutral zhe, the marker of a state that goes on — written and still standing written. This character is the busiest polyphone in the chapter, turning up sixteen times across three different readings, and this is the commonest of them.
Shangguan, Prefect of Fengxian Prefecture in the great country of India, issues this notice to engage an enlightened master and seek a great service of the Law. Whereas this prefecture is broad in its lands and its soldiers and people were once prosperous; and whereas we have suffered scorching drought year upon year and dry famine season upon season, so that the people's fields are blighted and the garrison lands worn thin, the watercourses shallow and the ditches empty.
This is not really verse but a document, and it is written in the stiff matched style that Chinese officialdom used for public notices, every clause set against another of the same shape. 乾 is gān, dry, in 乾荒, dry famine. 菑 is a difficult character read zāi here, standing for the ordinary word for disaster: the fields are not merely fallow but ruined. You can tell which sense is meant from the company — blighted, thin, shallow, empty, four words of deficiency in a row.
The proclamation is the chapter's first real evidence, and the novel presents it as a physical object being read rather than as narration. That is a deliberate choice: the reader learns what has happened to Fengxian at the same moment and by the same means as Pilgrim does.
The style matters as much as the content. Every clause is balanced against a matching one, formal and airless, the voice of a government still filing paperwork while its people starve. The prefect's name arrives inside it the way a name arrives on a form.
And notice the sequence of the complaint: broad lands, prosperous people, then drought, then blighted fields and empty ditches. It reads as an accounting of assets written down to nothing.