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

by Simon Winchester

  The Guichi pagoda may not have been a very fine specimen, but half an hour later, and on the opposite shore, one of the finest pagodas in all China swept into view: the famous Wind Moving Pagoda of Anqing. It is said to sway in the wind; it was built in 1570; and it has eight sides and, uncommonly, eight storeys – most pagodas having an odd number, usually five, seven, or nine.

  The junkmen on the Yangtze are said to revere the Anqing pagoda. In the old days the walls of the city were arranged in the outline of a junk with the pagoda at the centre, rising like a mast. On the gates of the fort outside are the flukes of a gigantic grapnel anchor: the fishermen believe that if these are ever removed, the city will drift away downstream and vanish for ever.

  They also believe that the pagoda is the king of all other pagodas in the world – including those built later in Japan and Korea, and also of the stupas in Thailand and India and the chortens in Tibet. During the autumn moon festival, it is said, the pagodas all come to pay homage to their monarch. Priests praying in the upper storeys say that on the choppy waters of the Yangtze below, the images of the thousands of other pagodas can be seen flickering in the moonlight – transported reflections of the world's tributary temples, all paying their brief annual respects. No junk or other ship dares pass the river during these night-time hours, for fear of disturbing the reflections.

  Among the stones of the pagoda's basement there is said to be a tomb containing the heart of a fallen Chinese warrior. The structure's topmost pinnacle holds a strange confection of bells, which ring in even the most gentle breeze. And in rougher winds – the winter gales especially – the whole whitewashed structure leans back and forth, the bells shaking noisily, warning the citizens below of a coming storm.

  I had with me a photograph of the town taken during the 1931 floods, which showed the pagoda standing, its skirts dipping deep into the river, a sailing junk passing gracefully below. The Admiralty Pilot of 1954 has a picture of it, too – it is a major navigation mark, vital for the masters of all passing ships. In this photograph the structure towers above a neat arrangement of curl-topped roofs and fortess walls, a classic illustration of China.

  Today, however, matters have changed a lot. The pagoda still towers nobly, the fort's roofs are still untouched – but all around them are cindery blocks of godowns and office buildings, cranes and iron wharves. In the background, dominating the skyline far more obviously than the pagoda itself, is a huge cone-shaped stain of oily smoke, belching blackly from an unseen chimney and drifting high above the entire town. The ruin of modern China is a sorry thing to see, and in Anqing more so than in many places. What had gone before had been so very, very lovely.

  And much vanishes still that is not so easy to see. The animal and fish life of the Yangtze, for example, has been ruined by pollution and greed: the building of great hydroelectric projects upstream is doing yet more damage, and the whole world says it is alarmed about the fate of cetaceans and sturgeons that once were abundant in the river, but which are now fast dying out. In the waters between Anqing and Wuhu, for example, there were until quite recently thousands of specimens of the Yangtze alligator, Alligator sinensis – a miniature version of the familiar reptile, with a black stripe along its side. Three thousand years ago the local warlords used to make battle drums from its skin, since the hide was said to remain taut in rain or summer heat. In more recent times, the river's toxins have probably claimed more alligators than the drum makers ever did. Local quacks also sell alligator skins and heads – a big skin goes for two hundred yuan, a small head for twenty – as a sexual stimulant (ground alligator head allowing for semiperpetual erection, it is said). There are thought to be fewer than a couple of hundred of the beasts left – more or less the same number as the surviving baiji a little farther downstream – and one wildlife organization has declared that the Yangtze alligator is in fact now wholly extinct.

  An hour past Anqing and the mood on the ship's bridge suddenly became tense. We were due to negotiate a narrow pass in the river. There was a steep cliff on the port side, a reedy islet to starboard, the shallow and whirling channel in between. The islet is known as the Little Orphan, and the cliff the Mirror Mountain, and legends concerning drowned children and turtles and capsizing rescuers abound. The radio operator in Jiujiang had called to caution Captain Wu that the whirlpools of the so-called chow-chow waters here by Mirror Mountain were exceptionally bad, that the floods were causing the river to race at a dozen feet a second, and that it might not be possible for our slow and deep-draught ship even to pass that day.

  Captain Wu put on a shirt, stubbed out his cigarette. Lookouts were posted on the bridge wings, and a detail stood to beside the anchor chains. The engineers were asked for full power, and the steersman called for quiet on the bridge.

  The cliff loomed before us and to our left. The channel ahead was clearly visible – huge whorls of muddy water sucking and gulping as they spun down towards us. The marshes waited patiently to our starboard, eager for us to strand. Fifty years ago the invading Japanese had been checked here by a boom: a dozen junks were arranged in line abreast above the rapid, with bamboo hawsers and chains connecting them. A siege cannon had been placed on top of the mountain. Any Japanese ships that made it through the choppy waters had to negotiate the guns and the barrier ahead, and for a while, all of them turned back. But only, the Chinese shake their heads and sadly admit, for a while.

  We seemed first to steer in quite the wrong direction, heading directly for the cliff. At the last moment, when the great limestone walls seemed ready to smash into our bows, the captain whispered an instruction, the vessel heeled hard to starboard and we lurched back into the full force of the stream. We then were kicked from side to side as though on a bronco, and for a moment it seemed just as likely that we would plough into the reeds and be stuck in mud for the day. But then another huge wave crashed into us and knocked us back into the channel, just as Captain Wu, I supposed, had calculated. A few more knocks, a host of lesser crashes, a roar of thick black smoke from the funnel as the engines were gunned hard – and we were through. The reach widened, the waters calmed.

  Fifty years ago a band of naked men would have tracked our boat along the Little Orphan Channel. They would have been bending low in the mud, pulling to a drumbeat and an ancient song, straining against the bamboo ropes that would have been fastened to our mast. But trackers were rare men in the China of today: it would be a few hundred miles farther upstream before I had any chance of encountering them. Big engines did the heavy hauling in these parts these days, and on a dangerous day like this, when the stream was running high, it was probably just as well. Trackers died in accidents by the score: the work was dangerous, damp, dirty and cold.

  The flooding did seem to be spreading farther and farther afield on both sides of the river. A line of trees, half-submerged, marked where the river's bank had been a week ago: a new one, changing by the hour, now lay scores of feet beyond. Nonetheless I had a sneaking feeling that these floods were actually not as terrible as the radio was endlessly telling us.

  It was just a hunch. I had no evidence to support it – other than the ubiquity and the relentlessness of information to the contrary. Yes, I could see that the waters were high. But I had seen them this high before, on earlier visits to the river, and there hadn't been all this fuss before. There didn't seem to be a feeling of disaster in the air – there didn't seem, from this vantage point, to be a catastrophe that was at all related to the dire headlines that I saw each day in the China Daily, or to the grim-faced announcements made on the evening television news. We didn't see refugees at the little ports, nor were there more than the average number of drowned bodies bobbing down our stream each day. No ruined houses swirling in the stream, no shards of shattered timber, no shaking thunderstorms, no embarked battalions or patrol vessels, no bags of rice or sand, no Red Cross officials anywhere. There was no panic, nothing more than a vaguely concerned equanimity. Perhaps it was fatalism. Perhaps this
is how the Chinese always behave in a crisis. Or perhaps, the sceptic gnawing away inside me thought, this flood was not so terrible as it was made to seem.

  I had one good reason, and only one, for my doubts. Five hundred miles ahead of where the Jiang Han 18 was sailing, the Chinese were starting to build the greatest flood control mechanism of all time – a giant dam, the biggest in the world, that would block the Yangtze just below the famous Three Gorges. Its primary actual purpose was to generate lots and lots of electricity; its primary stated purpose, on the other hand, and according to the propagandists in Beijing, was ‘to control the river and prevent the recurrence of the devastating floods of the past’.

  The whole world seemed implacably set against the building of the dam. Almost everyone of influence and knowledge appeared to have good reason to oppose its construction. Big dams generally were seen as outdated and environmentally irresponsible totems, wasteful symbols of national pride. This one, for a score of reasons, was even worse than most. The World Bank was against it. The Americans were against it. Almost no one had sympathy for the Chinese case. But if central China were to be devastated by another flood, thus proving the Yangtze to be an uncontrollable monster – then perhaps, just perhaps, this lack of sympathy might begin to turn. That, I unpleasantly suspected, was what the Chinese might be thinking.

  This year was crucial, a year when the fund-raising for the almost unbelievably costly dam was at its most energetic stage. So it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Chinese leadership might have thought a hostile outside world could be persuaded to take some kind of pity and begin to think anew about the wisdom of building the brute. The Chinese Communists have a proven capacity for lying on an epic scale – and to lie about the size of a summertime flood was not wholly beyond their range of mendacity. The bigger the lie, after all. So were they telling the truth? Or were they exaggerating matters, the better to make their case for the immense project, one in which so much national, ideological and political face was involved? It was an intriguing thought, at the very least.

  It had in any case now stopped raining, and through the pale blue haze I could see that hills were rising in the distance – mountain ranges, a whisper of the terrain of the coming western lands. On the flanks of the nearer hills grew the one crop for which this part of China had once been famous all around the world, and which once gave the Yangtze the bulk of her downstream cargoes. Around the bend ahead, past the entrance to Poyang Lake, was the town of Jiujiang, a place that was known only a few years ago – and to some specialists, still even now – for the pure and elegant excellence of her tea.

  7

  Crushed, Torn and Curled

  Considering the immense damage that the British once did to China, and all of it essentially perpetrated in the hot pursuit of tea, it is not too surprising to find that it is well-nigh impossible to get today what most Britons would consider a decent cup of the stuff anywhere in the People's Republic.

  You can of course always get Earl Grey at the Portman Hotel in Shanghai, or Lapsang Souchong at the White Swan in Canton – but these are teas imported from India, and they will cost you five dollars a pot. In a city like Jiujiang, once the epicentre of an industry that had half a world bent in mute submission, it is about as pointless to ask for a cup of oolong or keemun or orange pekoe as it would be to demand a plate of scones and clotted cream. The damage that the British did to China's body politic was echoed in the damage they did to her tea business – more so, in truth, because while the former recovered and survived, the latter was more or less done to death.

  At the Jiujiang Hotel that night, it not only appeared impossible to get any tea: there also wasn't any food. The boat was late – because of the floods, Captain Wu kept insisting – and we finally disembarked at midnight and found a broken-down taxi. As it limped along with us to what all agreed was the best hotel, we still had high hopes for a substantial dinner. The Jiujiang was after all a spanking new hotel, tricked out impressively in chrome and polished marble. It had fake columns six feet wide, coloured fountains playing outside and in, a doorman who wore the uniform of some steamy Latin republic – a mauve shako, a long heliotrope jacket in velvet with gold epaulettes and the yellow stripes of a master sergeant – and a small battalion of scarlet-coated little girls who stood behind a reception desk so long that the girls at one end had to telephone to speak to colleagues at the other.

  ‘Welcome to our new Jiujiang Hotel,’ said one of them, as I approached her for rooms. She bowed low. ‘We offer five-star comfort and extreme luxury for all our honoured foreign guests.’ It was a memorized speech, but good. She smiled, and pushed a ‘foreigners' registration form' at me. She tried to give another to Lily, who sniffed haughtily, said something curt, and flashed her Chinese identity card. The girl blushed and handed her instead the much smaller form that Chinese are required to sign. ‘Smaller card, smaller price,’ she said, with a winsome grin. The cost of a room for a Chinese citizen was ten dollars. For me, three times as much.

  Right then, I said, as I handed over the deposit money. Food.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the girl. She telephoned her friend at the far end of the desk, and both shook their heads as if connected by an invisible string.

  ‘No food here. All the cooks gone home. They leave at eight, to have their dinner.’

  ‘Not even a cup of tea?' I wailed, in mock disgust. But I was too tired to argue. They must have seen my dismay, for they kept up a continual bright banter all the time I was checking in, and while the man in the shako wrestled gamely with our two rucksacks, trying and failing repeatedly to load them onto his velveted back.

  ‘President Jiang Zemin was here last week,’ said the girl, conversationally. I stopped in my tracks.

  ‘You mean – the president of China?’ I asked. She nodded.

  ‘He came here, to this hotel?’ I had turned to listen, and I must have looked incredulous, for she nodded vigorously for emphasis.

  ‘Certainly he did. And you know how much he spent? Four hundred thousand yuan – just two days he was here. Four hundred thousand. Can you believe it?’

  I couldn't. Nor could I really believe she was telling me this. This was the kind of information only imparted in whispers in the old days and never, never mentioned to foreigners.

  ‘Look – I show you the bill we made up.’ She waved a long sheet of paper at me. ‘Bodyguards, secretaries, members of the Central Committee. They took two whole floors. They came in on Tuesday, and they left on Thursday.’

  I asked why. Why would the president of the People's Republic come to a tired old one-time tea port halfway up the Yangtze? It wasn't as though he was running for elected office and needed to secure the votes in Jiangxi province (although with more than 25 million of them, they would be handy to have in the event China ever became a democracy).

  ‘Yes, I can answer that, too,’ replied the girl, eagerly. She would go far, this young woman. She was really good. ‘You know the dam they are building up at Sanxia – the Three Gorges. Well, a million and a quarter people are going to have to move out, you know? President Jiang was here because he wants to suggest to the mayor of Jiujiang that quite a lot of them should move here. To this city. I think it is about two hundred thousand. They will come here in a number of stages. We heard them talking about it weeks ago. Our mayor wasn't sure it was a good idea. So the President came down from Beijing to tell him it was.

  ‘So they had their talks, and I hear they've decided exactly where they're going to put them, where they're going to live. Beijing's going to give some money to the city to build some houses, over near Binjiang Road, on the Yangtze, on the riverside. Plenty of room there. It'll be good for the city. There's no life here. It'll be good to have a few more people.’

  The would-be Nicaraguan master sergeant, who had finally managed to get the two rucksacks over his epaulettes and was perspiring heavily from the effort, ushered us into the lift. I asked the girl why it was that she knew so much, and
why she was talking so much. I propped the lift door ajar.

  ‘The odd thing is – the main owner of this hotel is actually a journalist,’ she said. ‘He used to work for the Renmin Wenbao. He still writes stories, in fact. But he thought it was better to run a hotel. He bought sixty per cent of it. But he talks news all the time. It's part of life here – he makes me take an interest in everyone who comes to stay here. It is much more interesting. You will meet him tomorrow, I think. He will confirm all that I am saying.’

  I made notes of this rather unexpected exchange and then climbed into the lumpy bed. No matter how grand hotel reception halls may be in China, the carpets upstairs are always stained and the beds are always lumpy. I was too tired to care: it must have been about one o'clock by the time I fell asleep.

  Some time later, however, I was awakened by a noise. There was someone knocking at my door, softly but insistently. I looked at my watch: it was just before two. Well accustomed to the sensual thrills in Eastern hotels that begin with a soft tap from outside, I tiptoed over to the door and with an expectant flourish threw it open.

  Two of the reception girls stood there, together with a crisp young man who was wheeling a small trolley laden with food. Lily was standing there too, a towel draped around her. They had, prudently, gone to her room first.

  ‘They've been to their homes and cooked for us,’ she explained. ‘They thought we looked hungry, and they knew we were disappointed. So look – noodles! beef! beer! These Jiujiang people are wonderful, yes?’

  And I had to agree. The young man was in charge of the hotel's food, and he had been telephoned at home. He in turn had roused his mother and asked her to prepare something for two strangers who had come in late from the Nanjing steamer. The girls had set the trays. They would accept no money, and they only apologized that everything had taken so long, and that perhaps they had awakened me.