The Yangtze is culturally important to China, dividing it between the northern noodle eaters and the southern rice eaters. So the best lesson of all is simply sitting on deck and watching China, ancient and modern, pass slowly by like a magnificent Chinese scroll painting slowly unrolling. Chongqing’s grubby industrial suburbs gradually give way to scraggy mining areas with blackened figures loading coal onto baskets, then to agricultural China, with vegetable fields, grazing cows and tiny villages of rough stone houses.
We are soon reminded how dangerous the river is.
“My god, look,” a passenger screams, and we run to the side just in time to see a body floating by, turning in the powerful eddies. It is probably a fisherman who fell overboard, or a farmer who slipped into the seething river. The passing corpse doesn’t even attract a glance from the crew.
Everyone gathers on the front deck for Kuimen Pass, the entrance to Qutang, the first gorge. Eight kilometers long, it is the shortest, but narrowest, of the gorges. From the bottom of the chasm, it feels as though we are sailing through an immense crack in the earth’s surface. It is often grey and misty along the river, driving photographers wild with frustration.
Here, the broad, turbulent Yangtze funnels between sheer limestone walls narrowing to 150 meters in places, the muddy water twisting and rushing through the channel at terrifying speeds, churning up dangerous whirlpools and eddies that could suck in small junks. So that explains the shortage of picturesque little wooden sampans on the river, I realize, as our steel-hulled ship delicately navigates the twisting course.
Early Western travelers called this stretch the Wind Box Gorge for the gales raging through the canyon. Now, as a steady blast whips at our clothes, we all zip up our jackets, but no one retreats inside.
The striking setting makes different impressions on the passengers. “How could anyone not want to do this?” shouts an awestruck American who has traveled the world, and is making his third trip down the Yangtze. He looks at the cliff walls pressing in on each side, head turning like someone watching a tennis match.
Yet a middle-aged woman sitting on a deck chair nearby remarks to another, “I love your hair that way.”
“I got it done for 60 yuan in Chongqing.”
“Oh, that’s good. Do you know there is a hairdresser on board?”
At the narrowest part, where long, thin waterfalls slice down sheer cliffs closing in on both sides like a vice, the Gorges remind me of the Grand Canyon. But the ship is more comfortable than the raft I rode there, and we don’t have to sleep on the riverbanks.
Soon, we leave the limestone cliffs overhanging the river for open, steep hillsides where villages cling to the slopes like Inca settlements in the Andes, lonely little places accessible only by river. Later, we pass Wise Grandmother’s Spring in a rock crevice, then Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon Rock.
When we steam into the 40-kilometer Wuxia (Witches Gorge), lofty hills, high, dramatic, almost unnatural, loom out of the perpetual mist that hangs over the river. The effect is unearthly, but I am struck by how familiar it looks. Chinese painters and poets have celebrated the somber, forbidding beauty of these mystical gorges for 20 centuries. Although it is my first visit, I have seen these peaks in so many ancient Chinese brush paintings and countless artistic photographs in coffee table and travel books.
The 12 peaks are partially obscured by cloud and mist, as if seen through a silk screen. Here, the Chinese inclination for seeing things in rocks, and naming them, runs wild. The Climbing Dragon, Sage Spring, Facing Clouds, Fir Tree Cone and Congregated Immortals Peaks line the north side, Assembled Cranes, Misty Screen and Flying Phoenix the south. Goddess, or Observing the Clouds Peak, the most famous, resembles a maiden kneeling in front of an altar. Unimaginative dullards can only see rock. Straight ahead, Congregated Immortals Peak seems to block the channel, but somehow the captain edges the big boat around the narrow corner and we drift on down river.
Here, man’s presence is even more precarious. A hazardous path cut into the rock runs along one side of the sheer canyon, long flights of steps lead to a few landing stages. A lonely temple sits high on a cliffside, and small pagodas perch on the rock faces. In places, with binoculars, we spot the dark mouth of a cave high up the mountainside, and I imagine a hermit monk meditating there, oblivious to this floating palace.
Even here in the middle of the gorge, farmers weed corn patches growing on the cliffside, and terraced slopes reach down to the water’s edge. A series of large, plain pagodas at the tops of the cliffs are observation posts to monitor the water level and, a Chinese staff member explains, to control the dragons that rage along the river.
The Yangtze journey provides a look at life in little-known areas of China. One afternoon, we dock at the grimy, coal-sooted town of Badong, then ride a bus for two hours, lurching along a precipitous dirt road through a picturesque part of backwater Hubei province, which few foreigners can have seen. This mountain area is home of the Tujia minority people, basic farmers who plant their corn patches in rows of twos, live in mud-brick houses and carry their goods on their backs in woven bell-shaped baskets instead of Chinese-style yoke poles.
Our destination, the Shennong Stream, was opened to tourists only a few years ago. In the local version of whitewater rafting, we ride small wooden boats for hours down the clear, peaceful stream running through the forest, the banks rising high and green on both sides. A Tijua boatman steers from in front while two others with long poles keep us away from the rock walls. Sometimes we pass over water so shallow we scrape over smooth river stones. Our Chinese guide calls it “The sport of gliding in water.”
In several places we can make out ancient wood coffins set outside caves high up the cliff, remnants of a mysterious ancient tribe. Along the way, guides point to shapes of the rocks. There is a panda, there an elephant face. Some see them, others only see rocks. It is the most peaceful, satisfying afternoon I have experienced in China. Then, suddenly, the Shennong pours into the Yangtze, the clear water swallowed by the muddy, the division as plain as a line drawn on paper.
Further along, at Zigui, a Sino-Stratford-on-Avon, we make a literary stop at a mountaintop temple to pay homage to Qu Yuan, the country’s most famous patriotic poet. China’s Shakespeare, who lived here during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), wrote 25 poems, which have been translated into 10 languages. All along the river, we run into references to the bard of the Yangtze, although we find none of his works, aside from an ode to an orange.
A garish dragonboat barge is moored on the muddy bank, with two dragon boats tied alongside. These are now used for instant races, tourists splashing ineffectually to the beat of the boat drums. According to legend, the patriotic poet drowned himself in 278 BC to protest government corruption. Local people went out in boats, beating the river with paddles to scare the fish away and throwing rice dumplings to stop them from eating the dead poet. (Other legends have them racing their boats and beating drums in search of tragic Qu Yuan.) So started the Dragon Boat Festivals and races that are now popular worldwide.
High on the cliff, up steep steps and past a gauntlet of souvenir hawkers, sits the Qu Yuan Temple and a towering bronze statue of the poet. In the type of recycling of sacred palaces found all across China, this temple replaces the original, submerged since the massive Gezhou Dam, completed in 1971, raised the river. This incarnation, built in 1972, will also be flooded when the Three Gorges Dam project is completed, so the big brass statue will be moved to version three of the temple, further inland.
Inside the darkened temple, faded black-and-white photographs give a sense of how little this area has changed. The shots of crowds of local men at early Dragon Boat Festivals wearing broad, thatched hats and baggy costumes recall the works of the great Victorian-era photographers in China. But these were taken less than 20 years ago. Behind the temple, the good bard’s tomb and red coffin behind a grilled enclosure overgrown with grass, feels somehow abandoned.
Xiling Gorg
e, the last and longest (76 kilometers), was also the most dangerous for early navigators and is still tricky even for modern ships. It is also the most exciting for sightseers. We slowly cruise past the Ox Liver and Horse Lungs, Yellow Ox, Bright Moon and Lantern Shadow Gorges. Finally, at Southern Crossing Pass, the end of the great Yangtze River Gorges, water rushes out of the narrows onto a broad, calmer river, and to a sudden change of scenery.
This flat, pastoral landscape reminiscent of Holland comes to a sudden end when the river widens more and we reach the start of work on the Three Gorges Dam. Now we drift past an unsightly mega-construction site, with thousands of men and heavy equipment swarming around in a confusion of mountains of dirt and gravel and rock, the dusty scene running for miles along the bank. Enough material to build 44 Great Pyramids will be dumped into the river here, creating a dam more than a kilometer-and-a-half long and 90 meters high. It is an impressive, but depressing, sight.
Later, at the Gezhou Dam, for now China’s largest, we enter a mammoth lock along with several other large cruiseships plus a few cargo boats. The gates close, the water level slowly drops, and the ships descend like plastic models in a bathtub when the plug is pulled. The gates open, and we float into a different world, a populated, flat, cultivated land.
Our short sojourn on the great river ends in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province. Even though we are still 1,125 kilometers from Shanghai and the ocean, this is a deep sea harbor. Once an international treaty port, Wuhan has a great maritime tradition. It was the starting point of the famous 18th-century Hankow Tea Races when sleek clipper ships sailed to London with their precious cargoes. And how could Britain have survived without its morning tea?
Despite the awe-inspiring experience of the Three Gorges, the visions of that massive earth-moving operation ends the cruise on a melancholy note. The great, new dam will provide electricity to build a better China, but the ancient country will lose part of its soul.
HONG KONG
KOWLOON
The Bare-faced Truth
MARCH 1998
“You have a big nose,” Miss Lam announces. True, but I don’t need a physiognomist to tell me that. And she has more bad news: I am actually a year older than I thought. According to Chinese tradition, the smiling soothsayer informs me, age is counted from conception, not birth.
And I am paying to hear all this.
This disconcerting information is being delivered in the boisterous, earthy, aromatic precincts of Hong Kong’s Wong Tai Sin Temple, a conglomeration of Eastern religions located about a 20-minute subway ride from the city’s deluxe hotels.
The business of worship starts right in the Wong Tai Sin Mass Transit Railway station, where a temple entrepreneur sells red packages of joss (incense) sticks to burn as offerings. At the approach to the temple, right at the subway exit, mendicants and mercenaries, who charge HK$10 (about $1.30) for joss sticks and $5 for pieces of red paper with auspicious gold Chinese script saying things such as “luck” or “wealth,” converge on all new arrivals.
Gold-painted plastic amulets dangle from hawker stalls, and a profusion of bright, temple-red paper prayers, cards and packages of joss sticks clutter the shelves. Nearby, the appropriately named Sik Sik Yuen Clinic provides care to parishioners. The rich scent of incense and the smoke from burnt paper offerings hovers in the air along the stone steps lined with a bamboo thicket.
In the temple compound, worshippers gather around taps of blessed water, believed to cure many illnesses, while others light incense sticks, bow and set them in the sand in big brass urns. The rhythmic clickclickclick of people shaking bamboo cups with chim (oracle sticks) comes from the temple. While many worshipers kneel and pray, others gossip or take family snapshots and children run around playing. Wong Tai Sin, by far the busiest, most boisterous of Hong Kong’s 600 temples, illustrates the Asian custom of combining piety with socializing, worship with sightseeing.
The temple and the district are named for Hong Kong’s most popular Taoist deity. Built in 1921 and now dwarfed by high-rise housing estates, the compound is a classic example of traditional Chinese-style architecture with vermilion pillars, two-tiered golden roof, yellow lattice-work and an array of multicolored carvings. Under a green and gold pine ceiling, the deity Wong sits on a raised marble platform surrounded by carved and gilded ornaments, while several wishing ponds and a pagoda are dedicated to Buddha. Buddhist and Taoist gods are worshipped here, while Confucius is revered in the Confucius Hall.
To the left of the temple, the multi-tiered Fortune Telling and Oblation Arcade is probably the largest single collection of fortune tellers in Asia, with about 160 cubicles for freelance soothsayers, chim stick readers and palm and face readers. A woman waiting for customers spots the approaching foreigner, and leads me to another alley of stalls, to one that says “English.” The cheery man behind the desk proffers a card written entirely in Chinese characters, and answers all my questions with a smile, and a price. I walk on.
Along the arcade, locals window-shop for the right oracle: young couples anxious about their love, stockbrokers worrying about their future, gamblers looking for something to give them an edge, housewives and occasional tourists all looking for answers of some kind.
A few stalls away, I find Priscilla Lam, who speaks better English than most of the other seers and tellers. Diagrams of faces and hands written over with Chinese script decorate her cubicle, along with drawings of different types of chins, noses, eyes and lips, and photos of a minor guru in gown and beads, squatting cross-legged before a temple. A can of bamboo chim sticks sits on the counter along with a half-dozen porcelain statues of Tin Hau, the Goddess of the Sea, and a giant Chinese tea thermos.
There are several ways to look into the future in this celestial bazaar. Pay a deposit for a cupful of chim sticks, take them to the altar, kneel and shake the canister. Return with the first one to fall out, and the soothsayer will read and interpret the significance of it for HK $30 (about $4), and negotiable, especially for someone speaking a little Chinese, or on a slow day, to half that. “But that is just story telling,” Lam sniffs, clearly favoring the more detailed (and expensive) palms-and-face package.
It is about $26 each for face and hand reading, or $40 for both, but Lam agrees to do both for $37. (I later hear that these psychics can be bargained down to $13 for just face or palm reading, but at that price, she would probably read stinginess in my character among my other failings.) So, opting for the full face and hands treatment, I squat before her on a little kitchen stool, like those used in the roadside tea shops.
In her gold necklace with a jade pendant, Lam, looking more like a Hong Kong office worker than a Gypsy palmist, has been reading the future for 10 years. She asks me my date of birth and where I was born, translates it into Hong Kong time, and consults a book to transpose the date from the Gregorian to the Chinese calendar.
“Chinese think when you are in the womb that counts as part of your life, so you are almost one when you are born,” she says, writing down the date, and informing me that I am a Snake. In the Chinese zodiac, that is.
“We believe that the palm tells about 60 percent of your life, and the face 40 percent,” Lam says, grabbing my two hands and staring at them intently. “You have a square face and square hands. Palms and face match. That is good.” Finally, something positive.
“You do what you want.” Meaning I am stubborn. “You are practical, don’t trust things of the imagination.” Not exactly desirable qualities for a writer.
“Your nose is very long,” she continues. “Most negotiators have a long nose. They are very patient, they keep insisting on hearing what they want to hear.” My eyes are deep, so I plan more than other people. My ears are close to the head, so I play safe and don’t take chances. And I have thin lips. “This gives the impression of being sincere and honest,” the chirpy diviner continues, without actually saying I possess these qualities.
“Your career line is strong. You can work all your lif
e, without retiring.” A lifetime of drudgery. “This is not a good year for you. Play it safe, other years will be better.” And finally, the stock in trade for all fortune tellers; “You will lead a long life.”
At this point, she starts to sound more like the American Medical Association. “Your face is hot, even though it is not summer. Take care of your high cholesterol. Your blood is too concentrated.” Now she is like a school counselor. “Donate blood, then don’t eat so much meat and oily food. Eat less chicken, pork and McDonald’s and more green vegetables and fresh fruit.” She continues: “As a writer, your spirit is important. Get fresh air. It is good for the brain and bright ideas.”
And finally, with a last glance at my face, she announces firmly, “You will be fatter in the future.” No one can accuse Cantonese fortune tellers of only telling you what you want to hear.
For my $37, I’ve been aged a year, had a character analysis and a frank, if not flattering, evaluation of my appearance, received health advice and been given a disquieting look into the future. It is, I suppose, quite a bargain.
THE NEW TERRITORIES
Island Hopping
January 1999
A herd of black cows grazing in the grassland seems an unlikely obstacle for a leisurely walk in Hong Kong, but there they were, a dozen ruminants chewing and mooing in the field ahead. The beasts were placid, though, calmly returning to their feeding on the appropriately named Grass Island (Tap Mun).
Many of Hong Kong’s more than 260 outlying islands scattered around the South China Sea are tiny, unpopulated islets or mere rocky outcrops accessible only by private boat and known only to yachters and scuba divers. Others have substantial communities, an hour or less away by frequent ferry service from Central District. So weekends head to Cheung Chau and Peng Chau for the Chinese village atmosphere, to Lantau for beaches, hiking and to see the Big Buddha, or to Lamma, for the seafood served in basic, open-air waterfront restaurants.
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