The snake catcher

Liu Zongyuan met a man whose family had caught the deadly snakes of Yongzhou for three generations. The snakes were extremely venomous. One bite killed you. But their dried meat was a medicine the imperial household demanded, and the emperor had decreed that anyone who paid this tribute was exempt from the other taxes.

The man's grandfather had died doing it. His father had died doing it. He'd been at it twelve years and had nearly died several times, and when asked why he didn't stop, he wept and said: it's worse without it.

The rest of the man's account is the part that matters. Everyone else in the village, he said, had been ground down by the taxes: people who got to the edge of starvation, moved house, sold property, and gradually disappeared from the village. He named the number of households that used to be on the street and the number now.

Liu Zongyuan said, in the essay's most famous line, that he'd never have believed taxes could be more venomous than the snakes, and that this should be reported to the court so reform could happen.

The essay ends with the man's own bitter response. The snakes will kill me, but not this year. The taxes would have killed me long ago.

I find this hard to read past. The mechanism it describes is old and exact: two dangers, and the person picks the one that is not the room they live in.

Look at what you've been tolerating because the alternative is administered by someone with more power to slow you down. That's not a guess. The snake catcher wrote it down for us.

MOJOWAY's client file names the snakes a person has chosen, and asks what the alternative would cost.