Shun Ploughs Mount Li

Virtue Gathers the People

Where the future emperor Shun farmed, fished and made pottery, settlements grew around him.

Shun plowed at Mount Li, and the farmers there gave up their quarrels over boundary lines; he fished at Thunder Marsh, and the fishers yielded the best grounds; he made pottery by the river, and no vessel came out cracked. Within a year a settlement gathered around him, within two a town, within three a capital. Virtue, the story says, builds cities more surely than walls.