Lao Tzu's utopia, sketched in one chapter — and it is startlingly small. Let the country be small and the people few. Labour-saving tools exist but go unused; boats and carriages have no occasion to be ridden; weapons and armour no occasion to be deployed. Let the people take death seriously and not travel far, keeping records by knotted cord — a deliberate step back from even writing, toward a life too immediate to need archives.
The centre of the vision is contentment rendered in four clauses: let them find their food sweet, their clothing beautiful, their homes peaceful, their customs joyful. Not better food — food found sweet; the transformation is in the finding, not the goods. And then the image that has haunted readers for two millennia: neighbouring countries within sight of each other, the sounds of roosters and dogs heard across the border — yet the people grow old and die without ever visiting one another. Not from prohibition, but because nothing is missing at home. It is the book's final measure of wealth: needing nowhere else to be.
Key verses
Let the country be small and the population few. Even if there are labour-saving tools, let them not be used. Let the people take death seriously and not travel far. Even if there are boats and carriages, let there be no occasion to ride in them; even if there are weapons and armour, let there be no occasion to deploy them. Let the people return to keeping records by knotting cord. Let them find their food sweet, their clothing beautiful, their homes peaceful, their customs joyful. Neighbouring countries may be within sight of each other, and the sounds of roosters and dogs may be heard across the border — yet the people will grow old and die without ever having visited one another.
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