The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze

by Simon Winchester

  I fancy – though I never inquired – that his courage in such situations would invariably fail him. His brush would hover above the empty paper, paper that almost cried out to be marked indelibly by the owner's ink. But that very indelibility was what made it all so intimidating – and on each occasion, so I supposed, he would eventually replace the brush on its stand, clean the ink from its stone, roll the painting up again and put it back in its silken wrappings, and then in its box. Maybe later, he would say to himself, maybe when I'm eighty, ninety, or when I am back in China for good. It was, it seemed to me, an exquisite kind of dilemma, a kind of mind-torture that only China, with her perverse ways, could invent.

  After I had said my good-byes that first evening and had begun the drive down through the dark and the snow, I realized that Mr Weng, though he may not yet have solved his own problem with the river, had indeed and unwittingly solved mine. As I thought about it, I realized I knew exactly now how I would tackle – and how I should tackle, indeed how I must tackle – the story of the Yangtze. It was the thought of the written colophon, which I had almost been too impatient to see, that had given me the essential clue.

  The painting, which we had slowly rolled open on that dining table, had offered us, as it had offered all those who had seen it in the past, a steady and stately progression through the river as geography, as place. But the writings that followed it, the letters and poems that came from a long line of owners and borrowers, had then offered us, and all who likewise had viewed it before, a steady progression through experience, through time. Now, I realized, I could and should combine those two journeys: I could make my own exploration of the river not simply an inquiry into Chinese geography – but also an excursion through Chinese history.

  If I were to travel upstream along the river, going as we had that snowy tea time, I would be able not just to travel deep inward, into the Chinese heartland; I could also travel at the same moment ever backwards into the Chinese saga. For that was a feature of the Yangtze which only began to occur to me on the drive home: that the river's history, or much of it, made a rough-and-ready parallel with its progress as a river. As the river flowed, so had China flowed as well.

  The riverside cities that lay close to the sea, for instance, tended to be the cities that had been affected by more modern times. The towns and villages that lay up in the headwater hills, on the other hand, were ancient, or had lain untouched and unspoiled for centuries. Upstream was ancient; downstream was more modern. Downstream was today; upstream was yesterday.

  I thought on. This uniqueness of the Yangtze, if indeed it was a true uniqueness and not a feature common to all great rivers, had much to do with foreigners, and with the remarkable interfering role that they played in the recent history of China. It had come about in part at least because the western penetration of China, which had been such a feature of China's eighteenth-and nineteenth-century history, had largely involved the Yangtze as a means of achieving that penetration. The cities that were easiest of access – by foreign gunboats, by traders, by missionaries – had naturally seen more foreign influence. Those that were more distant, more difficult to reach, had been left relatively untouched – by both foreigners and, to a lesser extent, by the Chinese themselves.

  It was an imperfect argument, I could see. Other rivers shared something of the same kind: downstream means now, upstream means before on streams other than this. Cairo is a more up-to-date city than Khartoum; Belém has more skyscrapers than Iquitos – judging from such observations as these one could imagine that by travelling up all giant rivers one could venture backward in much the same way. And yet – the Yangtze seemed, in this special context, more so. And the more I thought about the Yangtze's peculiar position in the story of China – a peculiarity that came about to a measurable extent because of the influence of foreigners of one kind and another on the making and unmaking of China – so this approach became ever more tempting. It had a compelling logic, an almost tidy elegance about it.

  I could begin at the twenty-first-century world of the shipping lanes and the radar-controlled approaches to the spectacularly modern city of Shanghai; and I could end among the peaks and isolated villages of a China that had probably not changed in five thousand years. Moreover, something hugely important had just been disclosed, making the argument even more potent. Some new research had just been completed at universities in both America and China, and from the sketchy details that had been made public the finds seemed to show that the original Chinese men – the ur-Chinese – had lived in the Yangtze valley.

  The conventional view had long been that China's civilization had grown up along the valley of the Yellow River. In terms of the events in human evolution of a few hundred thousand years ago this may well still be true; but the new work related to events of very much more than a million years ago. Discoveries that were said to be shaking the anthropological world to its very foundations showed beyond too much doubt that the first prehuman hominid animals to arrive in Asia from Africa – from where by common consent all mankind has sprung – had first settled down in caves not on the Yellow River, but on the south side of the Yangtze. A cave no more than a dozen miles from the Three Gorges had lately been identified – and this, more than anywhere else so far discovered or known, was where the vast saga of China had seemingly all begun. The Yangtze, in other words, was by this reckoning the true anthropological cradle of the immense entity that we now call not just China, but all Asia – an irresistibly persuasive argument, if one was needed, for me to make this journey in this very way.

  A voyage downstream would be a transport forward, into the present; but a journey upstream would be a voyage back into the whole spectrum of the past – to the recent, the middle and now the far, far distant aeons of unrecorded time. By relating the story of the river, I could relate after a fashion the entire story of China. And that, surely, was the way to go. Making one continuum, even though as ragged and unruly as the river itself, out of all China's vast reaches of space and history.

  It did seem ideal. I stopped my car at a pay phone somewhere in the forests of Vermont. It was now pitch dark and very cold, and a snowstorm was swirling down from Canada. I called Wan-go Weng to tell him what I had decided, and to thank him for the inspiration. He said he thought the approach would probably work, though as a thesis it could be picked full of holes. But he had been thinking too, he said. There was something more he had wanted to say. And if I hadn't called, he would have written. He would have said just three things: ‘When you travel on the Yangtze – remember the painting; don't condemn; and only wonder.’

  It sounded a little ominous, like a warning. I asked him to explain, but all he would say was that I should call him when I came back from China, and tell him how the river was.

  It now remained to make a proper plan. Three months before my meeting with Mr Weng, when I had been vaguely pondering how best to tackle the river, I had flown to China to have a look around, taking a scouting trip on a downstream cruise ship that was attempting rather less than successfully to make passage through the Three Gorges, from Chongqing to Wuhan.* On board I had met a member of the crew, a young Chinese woman who, it seemed to me, could be an ideal companion for any long expedition. I will call her Li Xiaodi. Like many younger Chinese she also had an English name, Lily.

  Lily had never been out of China, but she spoke the perfect and perfectly enunciated English that is taught in the country's better metropolitan universities (in her case, Shanghai's International Studies University). Her Chinese was classic putonghua – the so-called common speech – unaccented Mandarin, the kind of language that ought to be comprehensible in most of the Lower Yangtze basin. This was important for me: despite the best efforts of a small army of teachers, my spoken Chinese remained of a kind that the most charitable critic would call halting. (Not long before I had called over a waitress in a Chinese restaurant and had attempted to ask her for pepper and salt. She had responded by sitting down and asking me in English
whether she had understood me properly: had I really wanted to come to her restaurant, as she was certain I had suggested, for a discussion on how to acquire a passport?)

  When I first met Lily it was not, however, her linguistic ability that most impressed me. It was, as a navy man might say, the cut of her jib. She was, for a start, extraordinarily tall. Her back was ramrod straight, her jaw was set firm, her eyes managed to be at the same time kindly, piercing and demanding. She looked the very antithesis of the demure and sometimes coquettish waif that many westerners wrongly suppose young Chinese women to be. This woman looked tough: well-tempered, unyielding.

  And toughness, I knew, would be very necessary for a journey like the one I had in mind. It was not so much a need for physical toughness – though with the Yangtze headwaters being on a cold and desolate plateau at around eighteen thousand feet, a certain stubborn endurance would be helpful. Rather there would inevitably be occasions – many occasions, I imagined – when a trip like this would run head-on into a wall of stultifying, impenetrable and incomprehensible official opposition. Someone would be needed to ensure that all such opposition was swiftly and surely overcome.

  No easy task. There is perhaps no one more mulish – not even a Bengali babu, a figure who since Kipling's day has been legendary all round the East for his techniques of inventive obstructionism – than a middle-ranking Chinese cadre who tells a foreigner that he cannot, or may not, or will not do something, A journey to somewhere as outlandish as the headwaters of the Yangtze passes across territories in which foreigners have at best only a questionable right to travel – and I knew that in consequence we would encounter at least one, and possibly scores of humourless young men who would try, by fiat or trickery, to stop us. An ally with a rugged and unwearying inflexibility in dealing with such men, an ally who would never take a Chinese ‘no’ for an answer, someone who could stare down a Chinese babu and not be the first to blink – for a venture like this, such a person would be an absolute essential.

  Lily, I felt at my very first sight of her, would prove an ally of heroic stature. Her height alone, and the set of her jaw, would cause even the sternest bully boy from the Public Security Bureau to shake in his boots. She had been born into an army family in Dalian in south Manchuria – by repute the meanest, hardest city in China. Her father, unwilling to be parted from her, had won permission to take her with him through all his subsequent army postings, and she lived in a succession of barracks from Heilongjiang to Hainan for the first fifteen years of her life, exposing her to a regime that mixed unremitting discipline with unshakeable pride. The years of army life, and the rigours of a Manchurian upbringing, had certainly left their marks on her. She was now thirty-two – married, divorced, with one son left behind in Dalian, being looked after by her own mother. There was an icy determination to her, a ruthlessness that, for the circumstances I had in mind at least, I admired. And I was as certain as I could be, from the two weeks I had spent talking to her on that river cruise that, if ever I did manage to make this journey, she could be the ideal companion: when matters became too trying she would brook no nonsense, give no quarter, take no prisoners.

  I wrote to her in Shanghai, where the cruise company had its head office, to see if she might be interested. At first she was reluctant, unsure of her ability: ‘It will be difficult, I do not think I would be competent.’ More letters followed, and as the winter advanced and I explained the idea, she began to understand the possibilities. ‘I am quite intrigued… I doubt if such an opportunity would ever come my way again.’ A small practical doubt then crept into her mind: ‘I have only a month of holiday owing to me – but I have been looking at the map; surely to reach the headwaters will take very much longer… I might have to risk my job.’ Finally, as winter became spring, she melted: ‘I have decided to come with you… it is so difficult to get good travel gear here in China, so please bring me some sturdy boots, size 39, and a cold-weather jacket in a good fresh colour. I am mentally prepared for the venture… I just hope that I will be able to deal with any problems.’

  I wrote her one final note, making certain that she would be able to come. ‘Don't worry,’ she replied. ‘I am a woman of great self-confidence. I do not want to rely on others. I have my own way of doing things. Once decided, nobody can make me change my mind.’ That, I thought, was the clincher. She, like no one else, could probably make this journey work.

  It remained then only to get hold of some walking and camping gear, and a selection of good maps and charts.

  I had hoped at first that I might get hold of some of the classic charts made by the British Admiralty – once the most accurate and most elegant ever made. Sedulously observant Royal Naval cartographers had been drawing maps of the Yangtze ever since Lord Macartney had been grudgingly permitted to sail along a few miles of the river in 1793. A second British expedition to China in 1816 under Lord Amherst had also resulted in some diligent mapmaking, and by the time of the First Opium War thirty years later, the river's mouth had been almost as well charted as the Thames, the Hooghly or the Hudson. The British tradition of making fine river maps continued well into the twentieth century – perhaps, I fancied, they would still be made, and still be of use.

  I found a nautical chart agency in New York that stocked them – they had the Royal Navy charts of the Yangtze all the way up to Yichang, the city just downstream of the Three Gorges, 940 miles above the sea. But, the store owner warned me darkly, the maps' accuracy was no longer guaranteed, the data no longer reliable. Communism had put paid to free movement on the river since 1949, and the only extensive surveys since had been made by the Chinese, and their figures were kept broadly secret. Royal Naval survey vessels could no longer bustle along in the river's deeps and shallows, sounding and dredging by turns as they once were wont to do. But I bought the maps anyway, for séntimental reasons – they were very lovely, and I didn't mind too much if the depths were off by a fathom or two, or the distances wrong by the odd cable.

  I also managed to find, in a secondhand bookstore, a 1954 copy of The Admiralty Pilot for the Yangtze – it was one of the great series of books that, bound in their distinctive and official-looking dark-blue weatherproof covers, describe in minute detail the coastlines of the entire world. These books are biblical in their authority and they display, to the delight of landlubbers, a fine dramatic economy in their prose style when talking about such matters as whirlpools and tide-rips or the dangers of Cape Horn. The Yangtze Pilot has been out of print since 1954: Communism had put an end to attempts to keep it timely and accurate too, and so the Admiralty scrapped it. There was a rather pathetic cri de coeur, I thought, penned inside one of its covers: civilian mariners making passage along the river could perhaps help, the surveyors pleaded, by writing in with any new information on any sightings of freshly formed sandbanks or other hazards to navigation. ‘A form (H.102) on which to render this information, can be obtained gratis from Creechbarrow House, Taunton, Somerset…’

  But while nautical charts require visits by ships with echo sounders and tallow-ended lead lines, topographical maps are easier to find: satellites and high-flying aircraft perform most of the necessary functions for those who want no more than hills, rivers and roads. So there were plenty of maps available for the Chinese countryside on either bank of the river. No tourist map was worth having; but eleven of the huge sheets of the U S Defense Mapping Agency's Tactical Pilotage Chart series covered the entire river at a scale of 1:500,000, or about eight miles to the inch, and they were to prove useful, if occasionally frustrating. The smaller four-miles-to-the-inch joint Operations Graphics sheets, which American troops use when planning for war, cover the same ground – and, indeed, the entire world land surface – with a terrifying degree of accuracy.

  The TPCs were easy to get: a charge-free phone number in Maryland, four dollars a sheet, credit cards accepted. The JOG sheets were more severely restricted, at least in theory. To have any chance of acquiring them I was obliged, starti
ng a full six months before I was due to leave, to go through the curiously empty ritual of threatening a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. This was the only way – an almost foolproof and face-saving device, I was told – with which to unlock all kinds of government documents, these maps included, from the grip of the censors.

  A young paralegal was assigned by the Defense Department's chief counsel to shepherd my request through the bureaucracy. The guiding principle of her task, she explained to me later, was President Clinton's pronounced doctrine that ‘unless a specific statutory prohibition existed, forbidding the release of any map, the map could and should be made public’. Maps of remote areas of western China are supposed to be top-secret – but were there specific laws forbidding their release? To find that out was the young woman's appointed task.

  The Pentagon, makers and prime users of the maps, took a disinterested view of the impending lawsuit, and passed the buck. The matter went to the Department of State, who objected strenuously. What if the maps fell into the hands of the Taiwanese? an official wanted to know. No matter, retorted my young helper – is there a specific written order forbidding the release of the maps? The State Department had to admit there was not, so far as they knew. It was up to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then the White House and the National Security Council, to have the final say. Officials in both these agencies tried equally hard to block the release. The Chinese, they said, should not be allowed to know how well America had mapped their country. No matter, said my paralegal once again – is there a specific written prohibition? No, said the NSC, there was not. No, said the CIA, there was not.

  And that was that. A formal letter arrived the next day saying the ‘releasability status of the maps had been determined positively’. The young woman telephoned to say it had been the most difficult and stimulating Freedom of Information Act case for which she had ever been responsible. ‘I've learned a lot,’ she said. To celebrate her victory she had decided to waive all charges – I would have to pay none of her own legal fees, and none of the charges for the maps themselves. And a week later a buff official envelope arrived, enclosing two dozen astonishingly detailed maps of the far Upper Yangtze – maps of a scale and a supposed accuracy that would enable American and allied air and ground forces to go to war there. I felt a strange sense of privilege holding them in my hands: few others could have ever seen them; and had I made the request in almost any other country – Britain included – there is little hope that I would ever have acquired them. The Clinton White House, I thought, had some admirable qualities.