The chapter describes a society and it is the only sustained description of one in the book. Let the state be small and the people few. Let there be tools for tens and hundreds of people and no use made of them. Let the people take death seriously and not move far away.
The details that follow are all of things present and unused. There are boats and carriages and no occasion to ride in them. There are armour and weapons and no occasion to show them. Neighbouring states are within sight, their cocks and dogs can be heard, and the people grow old and die without ever going back and forth.
The construction is important. Nothing has been destroyed and nothing is forbidden. The technology exists, the labour-saving tools exist, the transport and the arms exist, and what is absent is the occasion, which means the society described is not primitive but unmobilised.
The positive content is four short clauses about ordinary satisfaction: the people find their food sweet, their clothes fine, their dwellings restful and their customs a pleasure. Each is a claim about how a thing is experienced rather than about what it is, and none requires anything to be improved.
The one instruction that is not about restraint concerns writing. Let the people go back to knotting cords and using them, which names a method of record keeping said to have preceded characters, and it is the chapter's clearest signal that what is being described is a return rather than a reform.