The first is that China receives a very great deal of rain each year – far more, per square mile, than Europe or the Americas, and, in places, as much as the record-holding villages of Assam. Second, nearly all of this precipitation falls in the topographically chaotic west and the south of the country – the principal reason, as it happens, why rice is the crop of choice grown in the wet warm south, and wheat the staple of the dry and cool north. (The dividing line, the so-called wheat–rice line, almost precisely parallels the track of the Yangtze.)
Third, this substantial and geographically concentrated rainfall is intensely seasonal – the summer monsoon dominates southwestern China's weather system, just as it dominates the northern part of the India against which China abuts. This is a very odd combination: in very few regions around the world is rain concentrated both by place and by time. It is not in India, for instance. It is not in the Amazon valley. Nor is it anywhere in Europe. But in China, savagely, more or less all of it falls in one place, and more or less all of it falls in one four-month period, between June and September.
Fourth, and as if the other reasons were not enough, the rain falls just when the summer sun begins warming things up things that include, crucially, the snows and glaciers of China's western mountains. These start to melt, and to produce their own torrents of eastbound water, at exactly the time the rains come.
The coincidence of these four factors – each of which, like St John's Four Horsemen, is an agent of potential destruction – produces results that are often quite literally apocalyptic. Every summer and all of a sudden, gigantic quantities of water begin to course down each of the tributary streams of China's two main river systems. Some comes from the melting ice and snow. Some comes from the torrential monsoonal rains. But all goes eventually to the same two places.
In the north of the country the Huang He, the Yellow River, swells rapidly and enormously. It collects additional waters from its two main feeder streams, and it wrenches millions more tons of loess out of China's heartland and carries them swiftly out to the delta, and the sea.* Not for nothing is this river known colloquially as China's Sorrow, or The Unmanageable.
But the Yellow River's history of flooding, while spectacular, has rarely been as catastrophic as the Yangtze's. The Yangtze is nearly a sixth as long again as the Yellow, and rages through hundreds more miles of mountainous and well-watered land. It has in addition very many more tributaries – about seven hundred in total, and among them are formidable rivers like the Yalong, the Min, the Jialing, the Han Shui, the Wu and the Yuan. Each of these deserves to be ranked among the world's biggest rivers itself, but in this context they are mere contributors to the Yangtze and to its huge engorgement.
Furthermore, unlike the Yellow River, the Yangtze flows through a part of China that is itself rained upon during the monsoon season – meaning that to whatever mass of waters it has collected from the hills and the tributaries, still more is added from the rain that simply falls upon the river's surface as it slides languidly through the lower stages.
The results are invariably stupendous, occasionally disastrous and, more often than seems fair, catastrophic. In 1871, the river at one point rose – and quite suddenly – by no less than 275 feet. A little above where I was sailing this night, places exist where the average summertime rise is 70 feet, year after year; and painted on the rocky walls and on cliffs and poles and riverside buildings all along the way are the ragged white numerals - once in feet, now in metres – showing the possible range of the water. At Jiujiang, which we were due to reach after a day's hard sailing, there was said to be a plaque recording the level on the fateful 19 August 1931: the river rose 53 feet, 7 inches above normal, and inundated everything for miles around.
During that summer, in addition to all the normal mountain monsoons and snowmelts, calamitous rains fell along the entire length of the middle and Lower Yangtze. Storms raged all over these very lowlands through which I was now steaming – lowlands that begin at the foot of a mountain range five hundred miles ahead and extend to the ocean that now lay three hundred miles behind. This extraordinary amount of water was dumped into a river that had already been swollen massively by the melting of the Tibetan snowfields and was, moreover, about to get huge shock infusions of storm water from its mightiest tributaries.
The results were that the Yangtze, at precisely the point where I was now rumbling through the night, first rose to 30 feet above its present level and then, no fewer than six times in quick succession, was jolted by great storm bores as the new tributary waters kicked in.
The tributary bores are no joke. In a bad-flood year a grotesquely swollen Min River, for example, discharges itself into the Yangtze and produces a ten-foot tidal wave, which sweeps down and along the river for days. Another bloated river like the Jialing disgorges its water in the same way but a few days later, or earlier, depending on the weather near its own source, this causes another tidal wave to rush out into the great river – and so on and so on. Before long an aerial view of the Yangtze would show it overflowing its banks for hundreds of miles, and then those broken banks and inundated villages and towns being buffeted by successive new water pulses, each a few days or so apart. In 1931 there was no slow inundation: it was rapid flooding, followed by episodes of total immersion, then a brief relief, then total immersion once again, five more times.
The consequences of what the history books now record as the Central China Flood were staggering, the figures numbing and barely credible. More than 140,000 people drowned. Twenty-eight million people were affected – forty million by some estimates. Seventy thousand square miles of central China were submerged – as much land area as in all of New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut combined, or all of England and most of Scotland. Twelve million people had to migrate or leave their ruined homes – twice that number, according to the more doom-laden reports. Two billion dollars in losses – and those are 1931 figures, when the average family earnings in China were just a fistful of cents in copper cash – were directly attributable to the flooding. Some streets in cities like Wuhan, two days sailing away from me this night, were under nine feet of water, others under twenty feet. The city remained awash for four months. Fields nearby, not protected by dykes, were thirty feet under. Nanjing was under water for six weeks.
And though this was the worst for many years, floods like it had happened before, and others like it would happen again. The country's formidably well-annotated history records more than one thousand major inundations in the last two thousand years. Catastrophes on the Yangtze alone seemed to have occurred roughly every fifty years. Even if one disregards Chinese record keeping – which is unwise, since the Courts kept scrupulous watch over their Empire – and relies only on the records of the British-run Imperial Maritime Customs, the regularity of disaster is obvious: the 1931 floods were preceded by terrible calamities in 1896 and 1870, and even higher river levels were seen in 1949, 1954 and, on my own journey, in 1995.
The inevitability of such happenings has annealed and anaesthetized the national psyche. The Chinese have long been accustomed to a mute subservience to nature. A glance at almost any classical Chinese painting – with its tiny and peripheral figures of men surrounded and dominated by mountains and waterfalls, clouds and trees – indicates the state of mind, with its stoic acceptance of the overarching gigantism of the world, the puny insignificance of man. A European painting on the other hand is invariably very different in all respects: man or his creations lie usually at the centre. Nature is peripheral, portrayed as background, or barely noted at all, and if it is, is usually seen as gentle, pastoral, merely pretty.
A phlegmatic acceptance of this insignificance, of powerlessness when set against the alternating benevolent and minatory cycles of nature, is an immutable part of the Chinese peasant's psychological makeup. Of course, all mankind acknowledges reality. Most peoples have variations on our own ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’ But in China it is said with far greater dramati
c flourish: ‘Heaven nourishes,’ goes the Celestials' equivalent, ‘and Heaven destroys.’ Acceptance is all, it seems. Once in a while things have become so desperate that the supposed benevolence of the supervising gods was invoked: in 1788 the Emperor Qianlong had nine iron oxen forged and submerged in the rising river. The act, he declared, should propitiate the guardians of the stream since, according to the cumbersome cosmology of the day, the sea submits to iron, the ox belongs to the earth, and so a herd of oxen should be able to suppress a flood. But it didn't and the floods of the summer of 1788 were devastating – and records from later times consistently show that prayer has rarely managed to halt or slow a rising Chinese river. The yin and the yang are in constant operation in the matter of China's wayward waterways; here is every advance countered by a setback, there are the years of too little followed by the months of too much. The entire history of China seems patterned like this, the Yangtze simply a paradigm.
Not that all the drama of 1931 seemed so tragic – particularly for the foreigners living in the region. Newspapers reported how the businessmen in the flooded treaty ports went to work in newly bought sampans, lazing in overstuffed armchairs that coolies had mounted in the stern, reading the morning paper. Police sampans cruised along the flooded roads, Browning machine-guns mounted in swivels on their bows. Wuhan had a fire brigade boat equipped with a siren and painted a properly searing shade of red. A boat shuttle-service operated between the westerners' offices on the Hankou Bund and the racecourse – where the bar still operated, even though the horses did not.
A notice went up at the Jardines office forbidding employees from mooring their boats on the roof and tying them to the firm's chimneys. The post office set up floating substations, and cancelled their stamps with a mark still highly valued by philatelists. A junk floated into the gardens of the Hankou Club, and when the waters went down it remained. It was later mounted on four pillars of concrete, a memorial to the barely credible height that the waters had reached.*
It was left to Chiang Kai-shek's new and untested government – just three years old, and based in Nanjing – to deal with the mess. The Flood Relief Commission's 300-page report, issued when the waters had gone down and the fields had been sown again with rice and tobacco and cotton, refers wearily to the fact that workers, set to rebuilding the damaged dykes, ‘had to be protected against Communists and bandits’. Another page – nowadays it reads like agitprop – has references to the depredations of ‘the Reds’. Politics intruded in 1931, as often before and always afterwards, conspiring to make a trying situation a very great deal more so.
Measures to attempt to control China's disastrous floods have been a recurrent feature of her history. As early as the second century BC letters were written referring to China's five ‘harmful influences' – flood, drought, unseasonable weathers, pestilence, and insects: of these, a second-century duke wrote, floods are by far the worst. His correspondent agreed: the consequences of water gone awry could be profound – though he went rather further than most. ‘Running wild, it injures men. When it injures men there is great distress among them. In great distress they treat the laws lightly. Laws being treated lightly it is difficult to maintain order. Good order lapsing, filial piety disappears. And when people have lost filial piety, they are no longer submissive.’
The notion that flooding might stimulate insubordinate behaviour may seem a peculiarly Chinese rationale – but it did sufficiently alarm the mandarinate that the Court took very seriously the problem of taming the Empire's wild rivers. More than two thousand years ago there were documents that specified how to build and repair dykes, how to muster corvées of workers to maintain them, how many baskets, spades, earth-tamping devices and carts to assign to each water conservancy office; if ever the maturity of Chinese civilization were in doubt, the record of her attitude to her waterways would provide more than ample confirmation of its antiquity.
So dykes were built, for thousands of miles along the most vulnerable riverbanks. They were not always built sturdily enough – those that broke too often, and let the waters escape, were known as dou-fu dykes – the word is rendered in English as ‘tofu' – after the jellylike bean curd with which they were compared. From the Yangtze, well-dyked sluiceways were also constructed to carry off excess water from the main river and dribble it into a number of retention basins, as well as into two gigantic lakes that, quite fortuitously, spread to the mouth of the river – Dongting Lake, near Wuhan, and Poyang Lake, a little to the south of where we were steaming now.
In the low-water period of the winter and early spring, these lakes – especially Dongting – shrink dramatically. What in the summertime is a great expanse of water, often as much as 3000 square miles, is in winter reduced to a sandy marsh, like a huge inland delta. People move back onto this newly exposed land: rice paddies are hastily built, straw huts go up, little farms oversee vast flocks of swans, geese and ducks. And then, come June, the river rises once again, the lake re-creates itself, and, with dispatch born of centuries of experience, the temporary farmers move out and site themselves back on high ground to wait out the season.
Ships ply the deeper channels of both lakes – in fact, thanks to an astonishing achievement of canal building and diversion that dates back to the third century BC, a system of waterways passing through Dongting Lake allows ships to pass from the Yangtze all the way south to Canton. Only small ships, admittedly (and the railway from Wuhan now parallels the route, taking most of the north–south cargoes); but as a piece of hydraulic engineering, the Qin dynasty's extraordinary Miracle Canal, as it is still known, was truly a Panama of its day.*
Dykes and retention basins improved as the centuries wore on – the former became higher and stronger, the latter larger and more numerous. After the 1931 catastrophe formidable efforts were made to try and solve the problem for ever; dykes were built and new diversion schemes were co-tructed that could deal with the so-called hundred-year floods, as well as with the more modest disasters in between. The Flood Relief Commission, eager to show the ability of the Nationalist government, wrote that ‘the amount of earthwork done by this army of labourers would have built a dyke two metres high and two metres thick, long enough to encircle the earth at its equator’.
Work was still going on twenty years later, despite the anti-Japanese war, the Civil War, Mao's revolution. In 1951 a huge new retention basin was finished upstream at Jinjiang. It had mile-long cement spillways, hundreds of lock gates, seemingly endless concrete canals. Three years later the monsoon storms lashed down, the snowmelt was huge, and the Yangtze rose again – brimming as high as it had in 1931, and then higher still as shock wave after shock wave came with the joining of the tributary floods. But the Jinjiang locks all opened in proper time, the commission's earth-girdling chain of new dykes all held – and after a week of anxious, rain-sodden nights and days, the Yangtze's level began to fall. What could have been a more terrible calamity had been averted. Old Emperor Yü the Great, who legend said had begun all this river taming four thousand years before, would have been well pleased.
*
I slept well in the little cabin. Lily did too, and she was still deeply asleep when the dim morning light filtered in. It was raining hard, and when I went up on deck I heard a group of fellow passengers worrying out loud about the grim possibilities of rising waters at their various destinations. But it seemed I hadn't missed much of importance along the river during the night: the only thing was that at Datong, the captain said, he had seen the earthworks for the new bridge. We had also passed the town of Wuhu, where there was the very last vague hint of influence from the ocean tides: this now was the Yangtze pure and simple, its flow unaffected by anything except the rain and the melting snows, still far away.
After a breakfast down in the ship's grubby little shop, with rice congee and deep-fried strips of dough called oilsticks that are far from my favourite way of jump-starting the day, I went back out on deck to take the morning air, and to see if t
he river had risen much. Sure enough it had: buildings beside the river were now standing in several feet of muddy water, and at one point I could see a convoy of trucks, half-submerged themselves, driving along a water-lapped riverside road, taking people and their cattle up to higher ground.
But also as I watched I saw by chance two examples of perhaps the most emblematic of all the ancients' river remedies. Pagodas, quite rare in the lower reaches, had been erected by the score by Ming and early Qing viceroys in the more flood-prone regions. They were built there to propitiate gods, to persuade them not to permit floods – but also from which to spot the floods at a distance if the deities were, as so often, unrelenting. On this damp morning here were a couple of them, in quick succession.
The first was on the river's right bank, outside the wretched-looking little town of Guichi, where we stopped for five minutes. The pagoda was a forlorn thing, too – seven storeys, rotting masonry, a tottering cupola and tufts of greenery sprouting from its windows. Perhaps, I thought sourly, its abandonment was due to the existence of one of the country's newer pagodas, a steel and wire temple to a replacement religion, for Guichi's modern skyline is now dominated by a brand-new telecommunications tower, and through one of the old pagoda's ragged windows I could see men working on it and the blue sputterings of a welding torch.
The ship slid home beside an old pontoon, with much screeching of rust against rust. Six passengers disembarked: they were from Taiwan, and one of them had told me they were bound for the sacred mountain of Jiuhua, some few hours' bus journey away.
‘Most times it's Koreans who get off here,’ remarked one of the crew, a man I had met on the bridge the night before. He was squinting down into the drizzle. ‘It was a Korean monk who made the mountain famous, you know. He set up a monastery on the top, back in the old days. So in August they come in their hundreds, celebrating his birthday. The whole boat reeks of kimchi.’
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze Page 17