South of the Yangtze

by Bill Porter

  The Yangtze was only a kilometer away, but we didn’t feel like walking that far with our bags and stashed them at a dry goods store before heading off. We walked about twenty minutes along a dirt road until it ended at an embankment that overlooked the waters of the river the Chinese call the Long River. During the summer, the Yangtze carries more water than any other river in the world. But we were there in fall, and the river had shrunk to less than a kilometer across. After standing there watching boats of every size chug past, we continued along a dirt path that followed the embankment to a promontory that jutted into the river. A few minutes later, we were standing on the cliff that was the scene of the most famous battle ever fought in China. The name of the place was Chihpi, or Red Cliff, a name it shared with the village where we stashed our bags and the city where we spent the night.

  The battle was fought here in 208 AD. The Han dynasty had come to an end a few years earlier, and the empire had split into two competing powers. Their forces faced each other where we were standing. The northern forces were commanded by Ts’ao Ts’ao, one of the most famous political and military figures in Chinese history. But the chief advisor of the southern forces was the most famous Chinese military strategist who ever lived. His name was Chu-ko Liang. Once, in broad daylight, he drove off a force of 200,000 with fewer than 2,000 soldiers. On another occasion, he repelled an entire army by playing his zither atop a city wall. This time he was outnumbered again, and once more he rose to the occasion.

  Not only was Chu-ko Liang a great strategist, he was also conversant with the Ways of Heaven. There may have been more momentous battles in Chinese history, but this was and remains the most famous. The reason for its fame derives largely from its portrayal in a Ming dynasty historical novel known as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Writing about his childhood, Mao Tse-tung remembered, “Among my classmates, this was our favorite book. We knew its stories by heart.”

  The novel described in wonderful detail how Chu-ko Liang built a tower above Red Cliff and asked Heaven for wind. He needed the wind to carry light boats full of straw, sulfur, saltpeter, and fish oil across the Yangtze into the anchored ships of the northern forces. The wind came on cue, the straw was ignited, and the forces of the north were destroyed. As we stood there at the edge of Red Cliff looking out on the river where these events took place, we thought back to two years earlier when we visited the Chu-ko Liang shrine at the foot of the Chungnan Mountains west of Sian where he died. In the shrine’s courtyard, we ran our hands across a meteorite that fell nearby the day he died. It felt as smooth as a tear.

  After lingering at Red Cliff for an hour, we walked back to the village where we got off the bus earlier and collected our bags. There weren’t many buses that plied that route, but an hour later the same bus came back through on its way back to Puchi. Once the bus reached the end of the line, we got out and began walking to the town’s other bus station. Lots of towns in China have several stations, and Puchi had two. The bus driver said the last bus of the day to our next destination was due to leave from the other station in thirty minutes, and it was a ten-minute walk. That should have posed no problem, but halfway there I discovered my journal was missing. Apparently I dropped it on the bus that brought us back from the river. We ran back to the terminal, and I found the bus in the parking lot, but my journal was nowhere in sight. My journal contained my notes, my insights, my witticisms—in a word, my job.

  While I was standing there wondering what to do, a lady selling popsicles to the people boarding other buses came up to me and asked if I had lost something. I sighed and told her I had lost my journal. She said she saw someone pick something up off the floor of the bus. My heart jumped at the thought of getting my journal back, but I was running out of time. I had another bus to catch. I told her if she could find the person, I would gladly pay her for her effort. Then the strangest thing happened. She asked me how much I would be willing to pay, then opened the lid of her ice chest just enough so that I could see my journal inside. After a brief negotiation, I ransomed my journal, and my job, for 15RMB, or $3. Finn and Steve and I then ran as fast as we could and caught the last bus of the day to Wuhan, just as it was pulling out of the station. We spent the next three hours trying to catch our breaths.

  Red Cliff

  Just as the sun was setting, we arrived in Wuchang, the oldest and largest of three cities that make up Wuhan. The wu in Wuhan came from Wuchang, on the south shore of the Yangtze. The han came from the two cities of Hankou and Hanyang on the north shore. Their han in turn came from the Han River, which flows between the two before entering the Yangtze.

  Until a hundred years ago, Hankou was hardly more than a ferry crossing and Hanyang barely a town. Wuchang was the center of government administration and commerce in this part of China and had been for over two thousand years. Ironically, Wuchang was also where traditional China ended and modern China began. In 1911, a garrison of army engineers stationed here staged the revolt that sparked the revolution that led to the end of 5,000 years of imperial rule and the founding of the Republic.

  Although Wuchang is the center of what was happening in Wuhan, we had other plans. We wanted to stay on the other side of the Yangtze. Also, we had this image of going to sleep next to the river. We piled into a taxi and asked the driver to recommend a hotel that fit our imagination. Unfortunately, he shared the opinion of most taxi drivers in China that foreigners are wealthy. He drove us to the towering Chingchuan Hotel in Hanyang. We were too tired to argue with his choice, but we couldn’t help feeling out of place walking into the marble-lined lobby. We felt even more out of place when the desk clerk told us rooms cost 170RMB, or $35. Normally we avoided such hotels. But every once in a while we liked to indulge ourselves with a little opulence. Besides, we figured we had been saving money by staying in government reception centers and guesthouses and it was time to splurge. And that was what we did. From our room on the fourteenth floor, we had an incredible view of the Yangtze and the bridge across it that Mao helped build. We felt wealthy.

  Once we took in the luxury to which we had committed ourselves, we went back down to the ground floor and had an equally luxurious dinner in a restaurant across the street. We felt like we were on vacation. We even had a bottle of wine with our meal. In fact, we not only had a bottle with our meal, we bought four more bottles in the hotel convenience store and took them up to our room. We pulled all three chairs in the room up to the window and took in the view of Wuchang’s twinkling lights and the black ribbon of the river. We watched the show until the wine was gone, all four bottles. It was three o’clock when we finally went to bed. We were definitely on vacation.

  The next morning didn’t happen, at least not for us. We tried to get up early but gave up. We slept until eleven. Even then, it was a struggle. But it was time to check out, and we had no choice. Still, we didn’t go far. We took a taxi to Hanyang’s Ancient Zither Terrace and were there in five minutes. After leaving our bags at the entrance, we walked up the steps to the top of the terrace where Yu Po-ya met Chung Tzu-ch’i.

  Yu Po-ya was one of ancient China’s most famous musicians, but he never felt his music was truly appreciated until the day he met Chung Tzu-ch’i. One day around 1000 BC, when Po-ya was playing his zither on this very terrace overlooking the place where the Han River joins the Yangtze, a wood collector stopped to listen. The wood collector’s name was Chung Tzu-ch’i. When Po-ya was done playing, Tzu-ch’i described to Po-ya what the musician had been thinking about while he played. Po-ya was so impressed the two became fast friends despite belonging to very different social classes. Years later, when Chung Tzu-ch’i died, Yu Po-ya smashed his zither and never played again. Why play when no one understands? Ever since then, the Chinese have used their example to refer to a friend who truly understands the other. They call such a person a chih-yin, someone who “knows your tune.”

  We sat there in the shade of some ancient gingkos. We, too, knew what the other was thinking: that we had too mu
ch to drink the night before, that we should have gone to sleep earlier, but that at least we didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. It wasn’t much, but it was good enough for us. After sitting in the shade watching the wind blow a few thousand leaves from the gingkos surrounding the terrace, we decided it was time to get on with the day.

  We returned to the park entrance, collected our bags, and took a taxi across the Han River to the Hankou pier. Hankou was where boats departed that traveled along the Yangtze, and our next destination was downriver. We bought three tickets for the evening boat to Chiuchiang. There was only one boat a day, and it didn’t leave until eight o’clock that night, which left us with six hours to kill. We decided to keep moving. We left our bags in the luggage depository at the pier and took the ferry that operated between Hankou and Wuchang. On the other side, there were buses waiting for passengers exiting the ferry, and one of them took us to the Hupei Provincial Museum.

  Like Changsha’s Mawangtui Museum, it was the beneficiary of recent archaeological excavations, in particular the excavation of a tomb belonging to a marquis who lived slightly earlier than his fellow marquis buried at Mawangtui. This particular tomb was discovered 150 kilometers northwest of Wuhan in 1978 near the town of Suichou. Altogether some 15,000 objects were unearthed, and more than a thousand of those were on exhibit in the museum. They were the personal belongings of Marquis Yi of Tseng, or Tseng Hou-yi, who died in 430 BC. I had heard about the collection, but I had no idea it was so awesome. The artistry was truly beyond compare. I had never seen anything like it. These weren’t simply objects found in the ground. Each and every object was a museum piece, a piece worthy of a pedestal. I could list dozens, but my favorite was a life-size bronze animal that combined the body of a crane and the antlers of a deer, two recurring symbols of immortality. Any sculptor alive would be envious.

  The marquis’s inner and outer coffins were also impressive. Weighing an incredible nine tons, they were constructed with frameworks of bronze and inlaid with rare woods that were then lacquered and painted with artistic motifs. But the marquis didn’t limit himself to taking his belongings with him into the Great Beyond, he took his women too, over twenty of them. After examining their remains, scientists determined that the women ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-six and that they all were poisoned.

  Aside from its more heartbreaking contents, the tomb also contained the single most important collection of bronzes ever found in China. In ancient China the production of bronze was primarily intended for ritual communication with the spiritual realm and only secondarily for warfare. The importance of the collection uncovered in the marquis’s tomb was that it spanned the whole gamut of ritual usage and also revealed a consistent artistic vision of one cultural area at one point in time. It was its own museum.

  While we were viewing this incredible collection, we heard music coming down one of the corridors and went to investigate. In one of the halls, a woman was playing a set of several dozen bronze bells found inside the tomb. The sound was so deep and so resonant we felt our heads reverberating, as each bell kept ringing long after the next one was struck. When the woman was done, she said that Chinese art historians considered the set of bells unearthed in the tomb the finest part of the entire collection, which was saying a lot.

  There was so much to see, but our attention span was fading. After an hour, we called it quits and walked back out onto the road and caught another bus. We got off short of the Yangtze River Bridge at Huangholou, or Yellow Crane Tower. This was the second of China’s three ancient towers. Unlike its counterpart in Yuehyang, it had been rebuilt out of cement instead of wood. Somehow the cement seemed more appropriate. Standing fifty meters high, the tower was the symbol of one of China’s major industrial centers, and its upper balconies provided a good view of the Yangtze as it flowed past a horizon of smokestacks. The tower’s name came from the crane that carried a Taoist immortal to paradise from that very spot two thousand years ago. We settled for a taxi back to the ship we hoped would carry us to dreamland and a good night’s sleep.

  We weren’t immortals, and the River Spirit #5 wasn’t a yellow crane, but it left Hankou at eight o’clock with us on it. We even had beds, albeit in adjacent cabins. The passenger ships that ply the Yangtze have four classes of accommodation: fifth-class amounts to one large room with fifty bunks, fourth-class cabins have a dozen bunks, third-class has six bunks and second-class has two bunks and a wash basin. On our boat there was no first-class. We decided to splurge and bought second-class tickets at a cost of 90RMB, or about $18, per person for the 270-kilometer voyage to Chiuchiang.

  Yellow Crane Tower

  After eating dinner near the pier, we boarded thirty minutes before sailing. We should have boarded earlier. We were too late to get cabins along the outside railing and had to settle for two on the inside corridor. Passengers, we discovered later, were allowed to board one hour before sailing, and the choice of cabins was on a first-come, first-served basis. That could have been important if we had been traveling on a hot summer night. It was late fall. Still, it was boring sitting inside our cabins looking at the walls. As soon as the ship’s staff retired for the night, we grabbed our blankets and pillows and lay down on the foredeck with a dozen bottles of beer. There was a good breeze, and the River Spirit was flying down the Yangtze.

  About halfway through our beer supply, we wondered how fast we were going and decided to ask. We wandered up to the top deck and knocked on a door. There wasn’t a sign, but Steve had worked on enough boats to know the door led to the wheelhouse. We opened it and entered a room that could have held a hundred bunks, but it was completely empty. And it was completely dark, except for the glow of a compass and a radar screen and their reflection in the faces of the captain and the first mate.

  The wheelhouse was like the cockpit of an airplane, and visitors were not usually welcome. But the captain waved for us to join him. The question that prompted our excursion was the ship’s speed, and that turned out to be a respectable thirty kilometers an hour. Except for the occasional running light from a passing coal barge or container ship, the river was dark. So was the sky. It had clouded over. The first mate took out his flashlight and showed us where we were on the map. As soon as he said the name, we thanked him and hurried back to our beer supply. We didn’t want to pass by the place without toasting one of China’s most famous poets.

  The name of the place we were passing was Chihpi, or Red Cliff. There were two places on the Yangtze with that name. We had already visited one of them two hundred kilometers upriver from Wuhan, where China’s most famous battle was fought in 208 AD. One hundred kilometers downriver from Wuhan, there was another Red Cliff. This one was where a poet rowed out into the Yangtze with several friends and a jug of wine one night in 1082. The poet’s name was Su Tung-p’o, and he wrote two of his most famous poems there: his “Red Cliff Odes.” In the first poem, he lamented the impermanence of the ever-flowing river and the ever-changing moon, then laughed in praise of their inexhaustible presence. In the second, he fell asleep drunk only to wake and look in vain for the crane that had flown above him in his dream, then transformed itself into a Taoist immortal. After toasting Su, we, too, fell asleep. But we remained in the land of mortals. Sometime after midnight, the rain woke us up and forced us back into our cabins. We went back to sleep, but not for long.

  7. Lushan

  A blast from the ship’s horn woke us up at 4:30. We had arrived in Chiuchiang. Still half-asleep, we staggered off the ship with our rucksacks. Suddenly, we woke up. It was pouring. Fortunately, there were dozens of taxis and minivans waiting to meet passengers. While we stood there getting soaked listening to drivers listing options and fares, we saw some of our fellow passengers filing into a tour bus. It was the all-day tour of nearby Lushan. We didn’t really have a plan and couldn’t think of anything better, so we decided to join them.

  Lushan’s eastern flank on a rare clear day

  Lushan is one of China’s most
scenic mountains. It is especially famous for its fog-shrouded peaks and waterfalls. Tourists have been coming to Lushan for more than 1,500 years, but the road to the long, flat top of the mountain wasn’t completed until 1953. Since then, Lushan has become one of the country’s most popular destinations, and I suppose we should have been thankful for the rain. Except for our fellow passengers on the tour bus, we found ourselves alone on the mountain. Of course, there was a reason why we were alone. Every time the bus stopped, and the guide led us to some spot to see another fog-shrouded pinnacle or waterfall, we were drenched by the rain. When it became obvious that the rain wasn’t going to stop, we left the bus when it stopped to let people use a public toilet. Looming in the fog ahead, we saw the Lulin Hotel and hurried there as fast as we could.

  The Lulin was an old hotel, with stone walls and wooden floors, and we were its only guests. It wasn’t cheap at 150RMB, or thirty bucks. But to us it seemed like an oasis. It wasn’t even noon when we checked in, but we were thankful to put an early end to our day. We spent the rest of the day in bed recovering from the previous two nights and catching up on our journals. We also washed our clothes and tried to dry them on the room’s radiators. The radiators were so hot we had to keep moving our clothes around to keep them from getting singed. Still, we were happy to have dry clothes to wear again—singed or not. The only time we left our room was for lunch and dinner in the hotel restaurant, where we were the only customers. By the time we went to sleep that night we agreed it was a perfect day and we hoped for more just like it.

  The next morning was unexpected. We woke to a glorious blue sky and as much sunlight as our eyes could stand. When we went outside for a stroll, we had to squint. We looked for some shade and thankfully found it along a path that led through a pine forest. The path ended a few minutes later at the Lushan Museum. We arrived just as someone inside unlocked the door. We were just taking a stroll, but we couldn’t turn down the chance to see what was inside. Of course, there were exhibits of the mountain’s plants and animals and insects, but more interesting was the exhibit of Chairman Mao’s bedroom and office as they looked during the famous Lushan Plenary, the one held in 1959 when P’eng Te-huai criticized the Great Helmsman for his Great Leap Backward. Two decades earlier, Chiang Kai-shek also frequented the mountain. There wasn’t a road then, and he had to be carried up in a sedan chair. The museum recreated his bedroom, including his Western-style toilet customized so that he could squat with his shoes on the rim.