The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  He looked a little more, asked me to show him the level to where the water would rise, and then, in tones slightly more serious, said: ‘Probably the biggest bloody disaster, too.’

  Six months later, when I went again by ship, the site was more organized, more recognizable as the working of a dam. There were the twin towers of a new bridge, for example, rising a few hundred yards below the dam wall site. And along the left bank, where the bulldozers had been dumping the rocks, a wall of concrete half a mile long: the approach canal for the ship locks, according to the map.

  The greatest activity was on the right bank, however. The previous November there had been the island a few score yards off that bank – Zhongbao, the charts had named it, a quarter-mile-long lozenge of an island, rising perhaps twenty feet above the level of the river at high water. Now the island had quite vanished behind a huge coffer dam of rock and gravel and hardcore: it was surrounded by dry riverbed, and crane and drilling rigs were festooned all over it, pouring and pumping cement onto and into it so that before long it would rise as a giant anchor point for the main dam itself. Zhongbao Island was the lynchpin of the entire construction: in a year or so it would be revealed once more, the coffer dams torn down, and construction of the dam proper would begin from its newly reconstituted crown.

  Getting permission to visit the dam site was not easy. Lily and I went to the project office and were ushered by a soldier to a quiet and friendly man named Liu Rong Bo, who after the initial cup of tea and thin smile of welcome, wanted to know only one thing: Was I a writer?

  I said nothing specific in reply, but reacted with a dramatic expression of distaste. I was a teacher, a historian and researcher, and I had long been interested in the history of the Yangtze River. I had so far travelled all of its length from the Woosung Bar: I planned to travel the rest of its length to the headwaters of Gelandandong on the Tibetan frontier. A visit to this most celebrated dam construction site would be both a privilege and a natural progression for me: I had seen the buoy at the river's mouth, I had seen where the Treaty of Nanking had been signed and where the pagoda at Anqing stood and where Mao had swum between Wuchang and Hankou – could not a visit be arranged? Please.

  There was much harrumphing and sucking of teeth, and whispered conversation with an ever impressive, ever persuasive Lily before, at last, a flimsy scrap of paper was written with lines of calligraphy and impressed with a huge scarlet seal of the Three Gorges Project Corporation. A secretary whispered some instructions to Mr Liu and he began to screw the paper into a ball, before Lily, screeching at the secretary for evidently offering some wrongheaded information, snatched the still unscathed sheet away from him and demanded that he sign it. This he did: a slow and painful Liu, a Rong and a Bo – and then, as a gift, another copy of the newly published booklet which Mr Liu had edited, and which was called An Epic Undertaking. (The hotel manager in Wuhan had given me the first copy a few days before.) Thus armed – book, paper and signed seal of approval – we set out for the site, twelve miles away by road.

  The journey took four hours. The road vanished after five miles, to be replaced by a track clogged with every kind of construction vehicle, van, bus, taxi, tractor, crane, backhoe, bulldozer, motorcycle and ricksha imaginable. A giant expressway was being built halfway up the mountainside, and a dozen new bridges soared, half-made, across the deep ravines. But meanwhile this single track of mud and crumbling cliff had to do, regulated at its most congested sections by bored policemen who tried to impose a one-way traffic scheme, but broke it all the time for bribes offered by their friends.

  More than once we sat in traffic jams caused by broken-down cars. I went up to one: the driver was sitting beside the vehicle, fast asleep. I asked him what was wrong with the car – he had no idea. I opened the bonnet to find that the distributor cap had been knocked off by the bumping and the potholes. I clipped it back on, the car started, the driver got in without a thank-you, and all those waiting around laughed, before climbing back into their own cars.

  Bloody cadres!’ exclaimed Lily. ‘No one here cares if they work or not. They just sit around waiting for help, and don't move until they get it. I'm sure it's not like this in New York, is it?’ By way of an answer I repeated the old line about the shortest measurable period of time in Manhattan being that between the moment of getting a green light and the blare of a horn from the taxi driver behind. She got the picture.

  The flimsy paper, with its impressive scarlet chop, did us little good. Police and soldiers stopped us for an hour at the entrance gate, and then we were escorted to a headquarters building about a mile beyond. Finally – and once again due largely to Lily's ability to combine a display of well-directed anger, her formidable height and bearing and her highly seductive feminine charm – we were allowed in, unrestricted. No one escorted us, no one followed us. For three hours we were able to walk among the giant bulldozers and excavators, to talk to workers and try to discern something of the plan.

  There were 15,500 men at work that day. Half were from the army, and they were all engaged in digging the ship canal, which was being gouged from the left bank, around the northern edge of the dam wall itself. Drilling rigs would buck and screech as they scored countless holes in the rock for the dynamite charges. Every few minutes there would be a soft crump of an explosive charge, and the air would fill with dust, and those fortunate enough to have hard hats would hear the ping of gravel from above. The rest of us knew when to put hands over heads, or when to duck.

  The speed with which things were changing was quite literally a subject of awe. I had never been much of an admirer of the Chinese worker: he seemed always to work at half-speed, sleeping whenever he seemed not to be needed. And yet look away – and where he once was, a bridge has risen! a trench has been dug! a building has advanced a floor! The Chinese worker is in this respect just like a snail: you rarely see him in the actual act of moving – but look away for a second, and then look back, and he is somewhere else from where you last remember him, a small trail shows where it was that he went.

  From a small knoll of unexcavated rock I could see the entire project, and here, unlike my preconceived idea, there were workers scurrying, antlike and excited, on every part of it. Here I felt that if I stood still for half an hour I would see construction happen before my eyes, like watching the results of time-lapse photography or a slow-motion film. On the far bank they were building the Zhongbao Island coffer dams. On this side there was the ship canal, and down below, close to the river, the footwalls for the main dam itself. Upstream and down were the foundations for the main dam coffers, and in the distance, upstream and down, lights pierced the gloom where concrete-laying machines were lining the entrances and exits of the huge river diversion tunnels.

  In a little more than two years the flow of this river – 90,000 cubic yards of water each second – would be halted, for the second time in her long history. China would be told that this was a moment of which to be proud – a precursor to the building of a second great wall, a monument to man's ingenuity. But there are those who remember that the real Great Wall of China was held together by a mortar made of the crushed skeletons of those thousands who died making it. That the Great Wall was built by slaves; there was no choice: it had to be built, or the Empire would lose face.

  This new great wall had to be built too. Thousands might die in its building, thousands might die in its aftermath. Animals and plants and peoples would be affected in a myriad of strange and appalling ways. An immense section of China would be affected, and for the worse, by what was going up here. And yet there was no choice here today either. It had to be built, or the new red empire would lose face too. Two thousand two hundred years separated the building of the two walls – two millennia during which the essential nature of China, by this single standard, seemed not to have changed at all.

  Lily and I turned back to Yichang, and sought out a small boat master who would take us past the dam site – and this time, into the Gorges t
hemselves. Here I would see at close quarters what was about to be ruined or drowned deep under the soon-to-be-stilled and soon-to-be fouled waters of China's greatest river.

  10

  The Shipmasters' Guide

  On the banks of the Yangtze there has been only one public memorial raised to a foreigner – or at least, only one that still survives. There is not even a single one for any Chinese, Mongol or Manchu – if one can discount, though not quite forget, the dreadful barbarisms of the dams.

  The Yangtze is a river strangely short of heroes. There is no single explorer known for performing heroic deeds in the process of conquering or discovering the river, nor does any merchant or grandee spring to mind who can be said to have tamed or dominated it. The Yangtze, it seems, has ever been a river so great and important that it was always known, was never conquered and was invariably treated with diffident respect.

  For the Chinese, the Hsia dynasty's founding emperor, Yü (or Da Yü, Yü the Great), who lived more than 4000 years ago, perhaps comes closest to achieving heroic status. But then he was a mythic figure, heroic because he made sure the Long River flowed into China and not Vietnam, and also because he swept the Gorges of their more trying rockfalls. But if he lived at all he did not do so just for the Yangtze: he lived to manage all of the waterways of the Celestial Empire, and not just the single greatest of them. No statue was raised to him, though temples celebrate his memory. The great Cloud Mountain near the river's Great Bend at Shigu is said to have been placed there by him: it can perhaps be called some kind of memorial, writ large in Carboniferous geology and Miocene tectonics.

  For outsiders there is a scattering of men and women who are remembered for what might be called their association with the river, and who have left thick volumes of their adventures to moulder on the shelves of well-stocked libraries. There was Thomas Blakiston, for instance, who was one of the first to go through the Gorges, in the 1850s, and who wrote scrupulously and elegantly of the birds and the plants of Sichuan. Then there was William Gill, who travelled along the headwater streams of the Yangtze fifteen years later and chronicled the puzzling doings of the minority peoples of Sichuan and Yunnan. There was Archibald Little, who pioneered steam navigation on the river. There was Augustus Margery, who was murdered horribly after entering China from Upper Burma. And as always, and inevitably, there was Isabella Bird, the redoubtable, imperturbable, amazing, thick-tweed-skirted and courageous matron ven-turer, the chronicles of whose voyages through the Yangtze Gorges return to print perennially today, and whose exploits on the Yangtze and elsewhere unfailingly manage to hoodwink us Britons into believing in our still special singularity.

  All these we think of as heroes – yet they are really small-beer heroes when ranged against the likes of Speke and Livingstone and Burton and Alexander von Humboldt (and even Marco Polo) and those others whose names are linked more closely with the great rivers in the world beyond China.

  But there was, for me, one man who truly did rank as a Yangtze hero. I do not mean the Royal Navy captain who took HMS Amethyst downstream under the withering fire of Communist guns back in the summer of 1949. That was heroism, to be sure, and it was heroics of a kind that kept young Britons like me riveted to our cinema seats. But it was also a heroism of the moment, a brief few hours of glory; the captain's achievement differs in kind from that of the man whom I think of as a true Yangtze hero, and that was at least in part because my man devoted the greater part of his life to the river, which he came to love.

  He was named Cornell Plant. He was an Englishman, born in a village by the North Sea halfway through the last century. His principal fascination, born perhaps from his upbringing near the wide river estuaries – of the Humber, the Thames, the Tyne, the Forth – that saw small merchant ships come and go to and from the North European ports, had always been with river travel and river navigation. He began his overseas career in Mesopotamia, a captain of ships that navigated the slow majesties of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. He would have stayed in these comfortable parts for years, perhaps, had it not been for a chance encounter in London, while he was home on leave.

  It came late in the nineteenth century, when Cornell Plant was dining in the Oriental Club in London. Here, also dining at a table of shipbuilders and marine architects, was the vastly more celebrated figure of Archibald Little. He was telling his companions stories of his own frustrated attempt to steam up the Three Gorges on the faraway river in China. Plant, perhaps wearying of the sunshine and sands of Iraq and Syria, was captivated by the tales, and by the thought of – China! When Little spotted his keen interest and ventured that he might actually come east and command a ship for him for the first major boat assault on the Gorges' rapids, the thirty-three-year-old Plant readily agreed.

  He went out east at a time when the Chinese were laughing behind their silken sleeves at the ill-guided madness of the British river sailors. The court authorities had long since assumed it would be impossible for any powered vessel to ascend through the whirlpools and rapids of the Georges, and yet the British – in the person of men like Little – were busily, insanely in the Chinese view, trying to do so.

  The conventional wisdom was that only junks might pass between Yichang and Chongqing, and then only with great effort, with the boats having to be hauled up by hundreds of human trackers. Steam vessels, with their deep draught and their thrashing propellers, had to navigate out in the more perilous centre section of the stream, where the Cassandras said they would be simply and swiftly overwhelmed. Even Yangtze explorers like Thomas Blakiston were then advising merchants not to be so foolhardy as to try to match pistons and propellers against the terrific waters of the Yangtze in the Gorges.

  The Manchu government had been clever and cynical when it had signed the Convention of Chefoo in 1876. Its mandarins had seemed to be in a generous mood. They had appeared to give in to the foreigners' demand that they be allowed to appoint trade representatives in Chongqing, in the heart of the grain-rich, mineral-rich, coal-rich Red Basin. But closer scrutiny showed that their official stipulation was subtly phrased: trade could get fully under way only when steam navigation was in full swing. Since the Court believed this to be impossible, and since the mandarinate had put forward all kinds of objections,* it turned out that they had managed to offer the foreigners an apparent concession – and yet withhold it at one and the same time. It was a classic piece of Chinese trickery, whereby the Orientals seemed to outfox the barbarians, and not for the last time either.

  The traders who accepted the early arrangement floundered financially: while it was easy and cheap to send goods downstream, it cost a small fortune to send them up against the raging water. Indeed, someone commented in 1880 that it cost quite as much to send a cargo the five hundred miles from Wuhan to Chongqing as it did to send it the twelve thousand miles from Wuhan to London!

  Archibald Little, however, was determined to change all that. He was an unforgettable figure, though not the nicest of men. His travels in China were always done in as much comfort as possible. Little was ill named: he was large and imperious, he liked to eat and drink well (‘dinner washed down with a Lafite from the Café Voisin in Paris, hospitably broached in my honour,’ he noted after one feast) and he took pride in feeding his dog, Nigger, at the local hotels (where one night's stay for himself ‘and coolie' cost 132 copper cash, or sixpence in the English money of the day).

  By the time he met Cornell Plant in London, he had already built himself a small teak steam launch named the Leechuan and, with his wife, as well as a Ningbo engineer and two stokers, he had managed, comically and slowly, to puff and snort and clank aboard it all the way through the Gorges. A Chinese gunboat – a sailing junk, heavily armed – a gang of extra trackers, and a bright red lifeboat went along too, in case of catastrophe.. One of his pilots managed to collide with another vessel, a second jumped ship, terrified. But Little was a sticker, and brooked no excuses for failure; and made it, slowly and frighteningly, to his destination.<
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  The eventual arrival of this launch at Chongqing on 8 April 1898 turned out to be one of the greatest events in the city's history, or so the local newspaper said at the time. The entire foreign community of about sixty turned out, and the Chinese, far from being hostile, set off firecrackers by the thousand. But reality soon cooled the enthusiasm. It had taken the craft three weeks to get just 360 miles upstream, and at one time no fewer than three hundred trackers had to haul the fragile craft across one of the scarier rapids. It was clear that, with the marine technology of the time, regular steam-based commerce was not quite ready.

  But it was a start. The following year the Royal Navy ordered two of its gunboats, HMS Woodlark and HMS Woodcock, all the way up to Chongqing. These boats, of shallow draught and with strengthened hulls, had been specially made in sections in Britain, and bolted together in Shanghai. When they received their signal they were on patrol on the central Yangtze station, protecting British trade downriver from Wuhan. Their captain turned them about and sped them past Yichang and into the tortured waters of the Xiling Gorge.

  Some four hundred trackers were then involved in getting the vessels over the tans, the rapids, and many hours were spent warping the boats with steel hawsers through the whirlpools and boils. The Woodlark very nearly foundered: she trembled on the lip of one of the worst rapids with her stern tipped halfway down it – but the ratings were all ordered to run to the bow at the double, the ship tilted under their weight, shook herself free of the sucking waters, and moved on.