Stages of History | Rent Collection Courtyard
The following text and images are taken from: Rent Collection Courtyard - Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1968).
EXPLANATORY NOTES ON THE SIX PARTS OF THE CLAY SCULPTURE GROUP
Part IV. Reckoning the Accounts
|
Liu’s hand tells beads but his heart remains as venomous as a viper. How many peasants have become bankrupt as his steward calculates on the abacus? —Rent Collection Courtyard (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1968) |
|
Now the accounts are reckoned and the peasants are made to pay. The landlord's bookkeeper runs his fingers over the beads of the abacus. Land rent, house rent, extortionate taxes and levies and the many-times multiplied interest are added up into a debt that costs more than one's life to pay. Liu Wen-tsai, landlord and despot, with prayer beads in his hand but a heart more cruel than a wolf 's, orders an old man's son to be seized on the pretext that the family has not paid all they owed. Ready to burst with anger under this dark,, sunless system, the peasants swear: "There will be a day when we will settle all the accounts of wrongs and hatred with you! We will smash this system to pieces!"