Over the next eight years China was criss-crossed by armies, the land plundered and ravaged. The disruption and loss of life was huge. Movement in the countryside was disrupted as marauding armies tramped to and fro, farmers’ carts commandeered to transport the living and the dead. River and canal travel was also curtailed, attacks from bandits an ever-present fear. Half the nation, it seemed, was on the road, coping with the breakdown of the state, caught up in the swirling vortices of violence.
