The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  My only concern on having the maps was that the Chinese (who restrict their own maps with understandable severity) might, if they found these on me, either confiscate them for their own use or regard me with the gravest suspicion for possessing them. ‘Don't worry – they'll think you're a spy whether you have maps or not,’ Lily wrote reassuringly when I mentioned them. ‘Where we're going, any round-eye is thought to be up to no good.’

  After that all was simple. My days were dominated by the delights of rummaging around in camping stores for gear: I made myself popular indeed with the owners of a new and at the time not very successful shop close to the Appalachian Trail in Kent, Connecticut, by buying a new Kelty rucksack, a good sleeping bag guaranteed to give comfort at minus twenty degrees, an inflatable sleeping pad, a new down ski jacket (in the ‘good fresh colour’ of bright red for Lily), two new pairs of Vasquez boots, innumerable pairs of socks, two tiny flashlights, a spare Silva compass, fingerless gloves, two sets of Ex Officio dry-in-an-hour shirts and trousers, a his and hers set of Oakley high-altitude sunglasses and a pair of smart telescopic German walking canes (which proved entirely useless for anything except driving away wild dogs in Tibet).

  To this collection I added my own Leica M6 camera, a Sony microcassette recorder with a remote-control switch, a tiny shortwave radio receiver and my own home-grown first-aid kit with its assortment of hypodermic syringes, morphine, painkillers and broad-spectrum antibiotics – all obtained from friendly doctors who go in for expedition medicine and don't trouble with such niceties as prescriptions. Two bottles of SPF 45 sunblock, some equally strong lip salve (I had been warned that the summer sun in Qinghai province could sear the lips from a camel), insect repellent and a trusted and battered hip flask made up the pack, which, when fully tamped down, weighed a quite acceptable fifty pounds.

  I hoisted it onto my back, whistled down a taxi to Kennedy, and twenty hours later was through customs at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport. Two days later still, having made a series of complicated arrangements by telephone and having received a somewhat dubious series of assurances, having a new six-month multiple-entry ‘F’ class China visa stamped in my passport and a few wads of American dollars tucked into various waterproof pockets around my person, I stepped onto a boat.

  I had a rendezvous arranged at a very precise point in the East China Sea. It was at position 31°03.5' N, 122°23.2' E. What was there, according to the charts, was known to China coast mariners, and now to me, as the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby – the Yangtze Entrance Large Automatic Navigation Buoy. Given fair winds and calm seas I expected to arrive at this point, or thereabouts, in three days' time.

  2

  The Mouth, Open Wide

  The bridge telegraph clanged backward to ‘Stop all engines’, the roar of our cathedral of diesels promptly softened to a low burble, the rusty white ship lost headway and hissed to a halt. The world then fell silent. We rocked listlessly on an invisible swell. The air was heavy, without movement. Stripped of the breeze of our own making, it became quickly very hot and sultry, and with no relief coming through the punkah louvres, the cabins became unbearable. The decks were scalding too, except where we could find shade – but even though the mid-morning sky seemed brassy and bright, the glare was without focus and there was neither sun nor shadows, so dark places were hard to find. We drifted in the current, rocking slightly, waiting for something to happen.

  I stood at the bow and looked for China. But it was as though we had come to rest inside a cloud made of sweltering cotton wool. Everything was a featureless grey glare, stripped of any points of reference. There was no horizon, there were no landmarks or seamarks, and it was difficult even to see the waves, though I could hear them splashing untidily on the scorching iron of our plates below. The East China Sea is not known for frets or haars: but it has days like this of boiling-porridge invisibility, in which haze and dew point and temperature and a warm sea-mist combine to create a non-dimensional world, a place in which a stranded sailor could well go mad.

  We had already passed the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby. It is a sort of cut-down lightship – not long ago there had been a real ship anchored here, bright scarlet, with the words Ch'ang Jiang Light Ship in white on the hull. It had been full of sailors and light keepers and wick trimmers, men who might wave a welcome or a farewell to a vessel that passed and sounded her siren. But China has taken advantage of automation like almost everybody else, and the distant markers of her busiest waterway are now all run automatically, by computers, their performance monitored by men high in darkened and air-conditioned shore-side towers, dozens of miles away.

  Nonetheless, this massive buoy, fifteen feet above water and weighing a thousand tons or more, had a certain shabby romance about it, marking as it did the place where the great inbound ships leave the ocean proper, and begin their entry to China. So as we passed I took due note of its bright red hull, its white light tower, the muffled sound of its bronze bell. At the same time the master was given new orders by radio: we were to make a further five miles west, heave to and await fresh instructions.

  This new spot, a glance at the charts suggested, seemed to be where one is supposed to pick up a Yangtze River pilot. Back in the old days – people who knew the old Shanghai use the phrase frequently – the river pilots used to be swashbuckling fellows, and they had a table permanently reserved for them in the bay window of the Shanghai Club. They alone could take vessels up and down the hazardous waters between here and the docks by the city Bund,* and they commanded prestige and high wages. But these are less dashing times, and the relevant portolanos, the blue volumes of China Sea Pilot – Oxford-dark from the Admiralty, Cambridge-light from the Pentagon – are a little vague as to their haunts today. London gave the right latitude and longitude and said that a boat ‘from which two or three pilots may embark’ was generally to be found within a mile or so of it. Washington's navigation instructions said the pilots would lurk in perhaps two places, one of them about four miles north of the closest lighthouse, the other three miles south. But where we were now bobbing and rolling there was no pilot boat, no buoy, no lighthouse: nothing. And so we waited, the static from the bridge radio dull and irritating, like frying fat.

  Then with sudden urgency this static was interrupted. A voice in Chinese greeted our ship by name. It broke into English. ‘Our Inspection Cruiser Number Two is now coming to your starboard quarter. Kindly board your passenger to our port bow. We will arrive in three minutes. Please get ready. Please attend.’

  It was time to say farewell. I said my thanks to the captain who had given me the ride this far – he was bound for other ports far away – and I ran to the poop, where a gang of sailors were uncoiling a rope ladder. On the horizon was a small black-and-white boat, its bows rearing up as it headed towards us at speed. It came closer and closer, then its prow dropped as it cut back power and it sidled slowly in and up to the dangling rope. From the foremast the boat was flying the blue-and-white burgee of the Yangtze Harbour Superintendency, and from the stern, the red, five-starred flag of the People's Republic. Two young Chinese sailors were standing on the foredeck and with them, waving up at me, was Lily.

  ‘They're certain you're a spy!’ was the first thing she shouted. ‘All very irregular, us meeting out here.’ She grinned wickedly as she helped me down from the swinging ladder and watched me lug my rucksack onto the bridge. ‘You'll never know what I had to do to persuade them to allow you on board.’ She said no more, but stowed my bags under a table. All was Bristol-fashion within a minute: the sailors then let go fore and aft, and the two boats parted company.

  Our siren gave a yelp, and the rusty white transport that had brought me here replied with three blasts on her horn. Her screws began to thresh up the green water, and with her rudder set hard to starboard, she started to push sedately away to the northeast. The Inspection Cruiser Number Two – the Shu-in Lo – then set her own course due west, right into the mouth of the Long River. She was making for the point tha
t is customarily regarded as marking the Yangtze River's outward end – the proper starting point for the long upstream journey.

  There was still no sign of land. The bridge radar showed a fuzzy image ahead on either side, but though I squinted hard, I could see nothing except the brown-grey blur where sea met sky. We chugged inward, twisting this way and that to avoid shallows. After a while we slowed again, and ahead of us, alone in the emptiness, was another very large buoy.

  It was smaller than the Gateway Buoy, but if the satellite navigator's readout was correct, then it had an importance all its own. The cruiser captain started pointing at it, jabbing his finger and shouting, ‘Zhong Sha! Zhong Sha!’ It was just as I thought, confirmed by the list of lights on the chart table: this was what the world's mariners agreed was the position of the mouth of the Yangtze River, the place where estuary encounters ocean. It is marked by twenty tons of floating and barnacle-crusted metal, a white flashing lamp, a bell and a somewhat prosaic name: Zhong Sha, or Middle Sand Light.

  It was swiftly evident, too, that this structure did lie more in a river than on the sea. The tide was slack – we had organized our rendezvous with the inspection cruiser while the waters were as quiet as possible, just in case. But the waters here, only a little farther west, were not quiet at all – they were streaming hard against the great buoy, their force tilting her a good five degrees from the vertical. A rich coffee-coloured wake, murkier than the colour of the ocean behind, stretched fifty feet from the buoy's downstream side. Up close I could hear the bubbling and chuckling of the water rushing past, doing two knots at the very least. For a moment I thought the buoy itself was moving at two knots, towed by some underwater force, perhaps a shark. But then I realized what it was: even out here, where there was no land visible and no evidence that land was anywhere near, the river, the River, was running.

  And running with waters that had flowed a very long way indeed. The generally accepted length is 3964 miles (6378 kilometres, and nearly ten thousand Chinese li): the waters have seeped and trickled and gurgled and foamed and roared and slowed and sidled and lumbered all the way here from Tibet – almost from China's faraway frontier with India. This urgent brown stream, heavy with silt particles that even now were drifting down to the seabed and making fresh land below us, was bringing soil all the way from the Himalayas, and leaving it here on the floor of the East China Sea.

  Blue ice had thickened and shattered the granites of summits, ice-milk streams had emerged from distant glaciers, crystals of mica had glinted in salmon-rich headwaters, and all had merged with other sands and muds and gravels, and had flowed down from the plateaux for hundreds upon hundreds of miles before casting itself down here, fifty feet below on a dark ocean floor in the upper tropics, beneath the shadowless iron of a rusting light buo.

  There was nothing languid in the transfer, nothing casual about the way that these waters flowed and slowed and deposited their long-hauled baggage. Like China herself, the river here seemed to be surging along, forging robustly out into the ocean, making new Chinese territory with deliberate purpose, even so far from shore. Hydrologists suggest she journeys outward on a prodigious scale: 1.2 million cubic feet of water gush from the Yangtze's mouth every second, and more than twice that amount each August and September, when the snowfields have melted back and the summer rains have dumped still more water into her seven hundred or so furious tributaries. Each year a total of 244 cubic miles of water slide out from what the radar insists is the river mouth: a veritable planet of water, of which each side is as long as the distance from New York to Washington, or from Oxford to Amsterdam.

  The Yangtze journeys hugely, and she travels heavily. The same science that produces the figures for her flow calculates that her waters pick up and carry 500 million tons of assorted alluvium every year, and dump 300 million of those tons onto the seabed. (The rest stays, left inland – a swamp here, a drying patch there, a new cliff or a swelling eyot.) The result is that the Yangtze has a formidable delta, pushing itself out to sea at the quite respectable rate of 25 yards a year. All to be tilled and cropped by the rice farmers of China's easterly province of Jiangsu, of course – fortunate men indeed. The gradual abrasion of faraway mountains keeps on giving them brand-new territory, two and a half inches more of it every single day.

  This steady eastward expansion has over the centuries given eastern China a comfortable, corpulent profile, so that on the map it seems puffed up like a pouter pigeon, or a diner-out – though rather more Pickwick than Falstaff. The place where the Yangtze pushes outward to cause it all is deceptive, however: the great notch that looks as though it should be the Yangtze's embouchure was once fed by three huge branches of the river, with the fourth in its present channel. But silt and sand choked the three southerly streams, and the accelerated flow in the northern branch favoured and deepened that one. In the seventh century the last of the southern delta streams was closed for good, and the Yangtze has been flowing along its present course, as a single, vastly wide river, for the thirteen subsequent centuries. The gaping mouth below provides a coastline for the old ports of Ningbo and Hangzhou; but it is, by the Yangtze's standards, quite dry.

  As we moved hesitantly through the mist, so evidence of land slowly started to appear. Two white butterflies, a dragonfly. Flotsam on the water – fragments of Styrofoam, pieces of lunch containers from some distant city. A carcass, probably pig. I very much hoped it was pig, and turned back quickly to make sure, but it was lost in our wake. Then the riverbanks began to come into view – the mist and hum of coastal China at long last, even if only vaguely in the distance, first on the starboard beam, then off to port.

  A hundred years ago almost every piece of this land had a recognizably English name – the Royal Navy surveyed these coasts well – and so once I might have been able to pick out Saddle Island, Parker Island and House Island, Drinkwater Point and, marking the northern entrance to the river, Cape Nelson.*

  But these names have all now vanished from the charts: the islands are called now what they have in fact been called for thousands of years – Chenqian, Shengsi and Heng Sha. Drinkwater is now simply Dong Jiao, East Point. As for the hero of Trafalgar, his promontory (not visible from here, since the estuary is fifty miles wide) has long since been changed back to its rightful, if more prosaic title: Chang Jiang Kou Bei Jiao – Long River Gateway, North Cape.

  As the islands started to close in, so too, did the ships. A thousand ships pass in and out of the Yangtze estuary every day. In any river entrance their presence would be carefully noted, for safety's sake; in Chinese waters they are noted, and watched, for the security of the State as well. Captain Zhu, master of Inspection Cruiser Number Two, swept the horizon with his glasses. ‘Anyone who looks unusual, we go and see him,’ he said. ‘And if very unusual, we turn to' – and he jabbed his finger off to port, to where a dark grey corvette was speeding past, a ship armed with two obvious guns, one for‘ard, the other aft, and with a forest of radio aerials grouped around her mast – ‘the Chinese Navy. She guards our river. Just in case.’

  Captain Zhu looked about fifty, was slightly overweight and sweated a lot. His face was marked, for me anyway, by a single long hair that extended from a mole on his chin, curving as it did so. It looked like a wire that had been stripped for connection to a plug: I wanted it to be half-sheathed in red plastic. It was considered bad luck to cut it, Lily explained. The captain did not wear a uniform – just a yellowed cotton sleeveless singlet, a pair of ragged blue pants and sneakers. He laughed as he warmed to his theme, that of securing the nation.

  ‘You are a spy? We think all lao wai are wanting to know too many things about China. Why you are so curious? We are not curious about you.’ The bridge clerk, alerted by this exchange, hurriedly wrote my name into the ship's log – an exercise book with a red flag gummed onto the cover.

  The captain swept his glasses along a fairway that was now becoming quite crowded with vessels. Some of the ships passed close enough,
and I could read their names on the stern. There was an ore carrier from Australia, bringing iron from Mount Newman to the steel mills at Baoshan. There were a couple of squat oil tankers, Panama-registered, lying slow and sluggish in the water, their anchor nostrils flaring just above the surface. Three Indian bulk carriers, their plates streaked with rust, new names written over the old, lumbered out to sea.

  A Russian reefer registered in Vladivostok was speeding in more jauntily, probably in ballast. Perhaps, I thought, she was coming to collect a cargo of pork. A wild surmise perhaps – but one that stemmed from a strange journey I had made during a planning trip a few weeks beforehand. I had booked a flight from Canton to Turkestan and was somewhat surprised to find that I was not boarding a Chinese aircraft, but an old Ilyushin dressed in Aeroflot colours, and with an Aeroflot crew. I asked the captain why – what was a Russian plane doing flying a domestic Chinese route?

  He said it was a simple barter deal: Russia had too many planes and China too few, and China had – I asked him to repeat this – too many pigs and Russia not enough. So for every round-trip plane journey between Canton and Urümqi – the Russians providing the plane and the crew, the Chinese the fuel and the food – Moscow charged the Chinese government twenty railway boxcars of pork. Some of the animals went to Moscow by the Trans-Siberian Railway, others, the captain had said, by ship. ‘Down the Yangtze,’ I remembered him saying. ‘They have many pigs in that valley there.’