Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

The two millers in the village were Lian and Quan. They ran their two separate mills at two sites where the creek could be harnessed. Interestingly enough, they were not related to the Wangs in any way.

Their mills dated back several generations. Some farmers, who lived a long way away from our village, came to the mills to get their grains ground and later processed through a sieve into flour or cornmeal, there being no other water mill within a 10-kilometre radius. Both the grinding stones and the sieve were hydraulically driven. My village is sited in a vale with a stream flowing all year round. Water from the stream, which was channelled into the mills, powered the huge wooden turbine, which in turn drove the grinding stones and the sieve through some wooden mechanisms. The water wheels, which worked in tandem with the grinding stones and the sieve, creaked along in the channel while, up in the mill, the grinders were rotating and the sieve was moving back and forth.

A surreal image was still in my mind. Some girls, who returned from the county town to the village to visit their parents, the Sunns, during the Chinese New Year, came to the water wheel and chanted songs that I had never heard before. I remember that the lassies, whose voices were drifting over to my unsophisticated ears, were veiled in the mist. At the time I imagined they were fairies from heaven.

Of course, before electricity was available, the mill was an only facility that catered to the needs of the surrounding farming communities to have their wheat processed into flour. As you might know, mills powered by water were really slow. It might take half a day to process a family’s wheat or corn, so actually the mill had to run non-stop, even at night, because there was a long queue waiting there.

Rivalry arose between the two millers. Miller Lian attracted more customers, which stirred up the resentment of Miller Quan’s wife. The woman did something that hit the headlines in the rural community. One snowy night, she carried firewood to Miller Lian’s mill and set the workshop ablaze. When the constable came to investigate, he found a trail of footprints in the snow, which led him to Miller Quan’s cottage. And the footprints were evidently those of a pair of bound female feet. (Bound female feet were a custom before the Qing Dynasty gave way to the republic at the beginning of the twentieth century.) Miller Quan’s woman was bound-footed. The case was quickly solved and the perpetrator was incarcerated. This all had happened before I was born. When I was a kid, Mrs Quan had been released and I saw her often around the village. But the whole hamlet knew about her offence.

After a little power plant was built on the creek and electricity became a reality, more and more families turned to electric mills. Yet the water mills kept running for years side by side with the newcomers. By 1982, however, they had become as extinct as a dodo.