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

by Simon Winchester

  As they were leaving, one of the girls suddenly made as if she had remembered something, and produced from her pocket a set of utensils wrapped in a napkin.

  ‘Knife and fork,’ she announced proudly. ‘In case you no good at kuai-zi. Many foreign guests prefer these.’ She gave them to me, bowed slightly and smiled, and then quietly backed out of the door.

  On my table were a bowl of wheat noodles, a plate of stir-fried beef and garlic, a small orange, a much ablated bar of gritty Chinese chocolate and a tall bottle of the local beer with its label glued upside-down. There was also, in deference to the plea I thought had gone unheard (and also, I liked to think, in deference to where we were), a pale little bamboo box with a line of four characters that I recognized in an instant: Yun Wu Lu Cha – Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea. The city's most famous product of old, the seven-times-processed tea, once reserved as a gift for emperors, and still to be found here, even at two in the morning.

  Wen Zi-jian, the hotel's owner-manager – who said he had indeed once been a reporter but who was reluctant to explain how on a journalist's salary he had managed to collect enough cash to finance buying part of a hotel – arranged a car for us the next day. He stood alongside his man in the extravagant shako and waved us off. No need to pay the bill now, he said – settle everything when you leave town. He would arrange tickets on the next upstream boat – although perhaps we would like to ride in his car, as he was going to Wuhan himself in a day or so? Mr Wen was a most accommodating man, and his hotel a little gem. But we said no – we preferred to go by ship. We would talk about it over dinner, maybe, when we got back from our excursion to tea country.

  The Lushan road began to slope steeply upwards within yards. Jiujiang's suburbs – or at least the untidy mess of thatched huts, army- and police-barrack blocks and filling stations that passes for suburbia in most of China – clung onto the roadside like moss, but soon gave way to fields of corn and huddles of banana palms. Before long the straight road began to wind and then to curve in hairpins as we clawed our way up the side of the mountain. Lily, who said she had never been in a car for more than two hours at a stretch, began to look green, and closed her eyes – a shame, since the clumps of banana trees soon gave way to peach trees in blossom, and to long stands of azalea bushes.

  It was easy to see why the Europeans used to flock to Lushan. It had the same kind of appeal as Indian hill stations like Simla, or Ooty, or Kodikanal, or Murree – cool where below is hot, blue where below is brown, crisp where below is soggy, and, above all, somewhat like home where below is wholly like abroad. They had come up here for holidays, and some had built summer homes here – small limestone bungalows with a living room and two bedrooms and a hut outside the scullery where the maid or the amah might stay.

  The big companies had built villas here – Chiang Kai-shek had built one too, and named it after his wife, Mei-ling – and most of these are now hotels. There are sanatoriums, where the old or the sick can take advantage of the cool, clear air; and there is a botanical garden, designed by a Briton in 1934, and brimming with an orderly wilderness of around four thousand kinds of native plants. And there are the memorable views and sights – the peaks up on the Guling ridge that they call the Five Old Men, the Cave of the Immortals, the Single Drop Spring from which one might drink and be guaranteed eternal life.

  Long before it had attracted China's expatriate community, Lushan had drawn painters and poets and contemplative souls, too. It was a place to get away and reflect, to pause, to write, to compose lines of poetry. Li Bai, the most famous of the Tang poets, visited often and wrote poems that all Chinese children know by heart; and Mao Zedong came here for the more prosaic reasons of state, and he came away having written poems that are still quoted today, and for reasons of poetry, not state.

  The Yangtze plain was below, and it fell away behind us, and before long the river itself came into view – a brown swathe of winding-cloth, more than a mile wide, stretching far into the hazes of two horizons. It seemed then that when afloat on its surface, pinioned between the buoys of the navigation channel, or when walking on a bund beside its banks, the river looks merely immense: but from up here, half a mile up on the flanks of a mountain, the Yangtze looked like a primary feature of the planet, as much a part of the visible fabric of things as the canals on Mars, or the rings around Saturn. It was so dominant a feature of the land, and of so important and self-regarding a land, that one could see exactly why the Chinese had only one name for it. Other bodies of flowing water might be called this river or that stream or those brooks; from up here it did seem quite right that what wound terrifyingly below, erasing all thoughts of others, was properly called in these parts just Jiang. The River. Nothing more.

  The driver thought he could sneak up past the town barrier without paying, but he was wrong. After eighteen miles of hairpins the road straightened and we came to a massive cement gate, adorned with lions and dragons. There was a metal pole, raised, with an ugly-looking youth in a powder-blue uniform standing idly beside it. We passed by, but he yelled and cursed as we did, and so the driver stopped in mute obedience. The thug in pale blue demanded thirty yuan for the privilege of entering the village of Guling, a part of Lushan town: Guling had been made into a provincial park, he said, and the buildings needed to be maintained.

  ‘Buildings that you people built,’ he snarled, once he saw he was dealing with a foreigner. ‘You didn't make them so good. They keep falling down. Who is to pay for the repairs? Thirty yuan is cheap.’

  Lushan is known throughout China for three reasons. For tea, for pleasure and for politics. And in particular, in the latter category, for the events that took place in the Guling People's Theatre during one week in the summer of Lushan's most celebrated and infamous year – 1959.

  The story of tea, however, which in its own way becomes enmeshed in the other two strands of Lushan's fame, began almost exactly three hundred years before. It was in 1657 that bags of it were first offered for sale at Garway's Coffee House in London. Historians like to think that coffee, cocoa and tea all actually arrived in London and were first sampled five years before, in 1652: but in the lore of the tea industry, 1657 is said to be when the fabric of English social and commercial life began to include as an essential significant quantities of this hot brown infusion. The year marked by this development in the drinking habits of the infant British Empire also saw, and as a direct result, the beginning of the end for the existence of the infinitely older Empire of China.

  The tea plant that did it all is a potentially massive piece of botany. It is a kind of camellia that if allowed will happily grow up to sixty feet high: but in the tea gardens of China and elsewhere it is pruned and punished until it keeps itself to a stunted three- or four-foot bush, easy for the pickers to reach round. All camellias belong to the Theacea family, whose 240 species include a mere seven – Camellia sinensis among them, tea proper – that are amenable to infusion. Eighty are more obviously familiar as the garden camellias that, with their pink and white flowers and glossy green leaves, decorate herbaceous borders all around the temperate world.

  All of the Theacea, whether big or small tea plants or red or cream floral bushes, came first from western China. They were brought to the outside world by the great plant hunters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:* but not, significantly, until then. In 1657 none of this – words like ‘Theacea’, ‘Camellia' or even ‘tea' – was known to the excited patrons of Garway's. Back then no one had the first idea how the leaves in their new drink were grown, or what or exactly where they came from. They knew only that they liked the brew, that it was mildly stimulating, and that it was a better bet for imbibing than the two customary choices in the London of the day, dirty water or alcohol. At their coffeehouse counters and to the servants who entered their withdrawing rooms, they became accustomed to asking for it, using the pronunciation tay, which was perhaps their version of the Chinese word ‘cha’.

  As well they might. The
hessian bags on offer in Mr Garway's emporium did in fact all come from China, and more specifically from Canton. They came via Lisbon and Amsterdam, for the Portuguese and the Dutch had rights to trade in Canton – albeit under the strict supervision of the Court. Commerce with outsiders was for the Chinese an unnecessary vulgarism. The rights to indulge in it were granted simply as a boon to barbarians who had a need for Chinese goods. The dynasts of the Qing deluded themselves into believing that they, on the other hand, needed nothing from outside.

  It did not take long for the British East India Company to get involved in the tea trade and to try to convince the Chinese otherwise. In 1669, the supercargoes on company ships were buying cases of Chinese tea in Java – where it was cultivated, as it was in Japan and Formosa. By 1686, they were purchasing it in Canton itself. Such was the rocketing demand for the leaf in England (and so huge were the tax revenues that the British government found it could earn by levying duty both at home and on the tea exported to their colonies, like North America) that the company made huge profits. Its agents began to buy so many tons of tea from the Canton merchants that it established a near monopoly, bitterly contested by other foreigners. A new generation of ships – the magnificent tea clippers – were built in yards in London and all around the English coast to supply the huge demand: they would speed home from the China coast with hundreds of tons of tea aboard, and with additional tons of Chinese porcelain for ballast.*

  But before long an embarrassing question arose: how exactly were the Chinese to be paid for all this tea? In the early days they had been happy to accept copper, one of the few minerals in which the Empire was then deficient. They would also accept gold, though they preferred silver. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century the demand for tea had swollen to such a level that London, already near bankrupted by its European wars, found it could no longer afford to pay in metal of any kind. The company men offered paper money, but the Chinese were disdainful. They said they had no use for such stuff and distrusted it, viewing it quite sensibly as merely a promise of payment made by men quite probably unreliable. To the Chinese, it was just a new piece of foreign devilry.

  Caught in a money trap, men can do terrible things. The British were caught, and terrible things they promptly did – deciding as an act of East India Company policy that the tea trade with Canton should in future be balanced by selling the Chinese the one commodity that the peasantry appeared urgently to need – the dried, fermented, and pressed juice of the head of the Indian white poppy: opium.

  This drug had been declared illegal by China in 1729. Growing, supplying or smoking it were ultimately to become capital offences. But it was an identifiable need, a popular craving, and once Britain had identified it as such, so the purveyors – and in the early days the monopoly belonged to the company – exploited the craving to the hilt. Patna and Benares and the other great opium-growing centres in India began to produce the flat brown cakes or four-pound cannonballs of pressed opium by the hundreds: sixty tons in 1776, three hundred in 1790. It was then but a short trip to take it from Calcutta to Canton – opium ships ran a virtual shuttle-service in the summer, running the drug from Indian godown to Chinese godown and selling at an incredible profit.

  Chinese tea was sold to the British for sixty dollars a ton. For the same amount of money the Chinese merchants could buy just half a box of the opium – one layer from a standard Patna box, with twenty four-pound balls sealed in pitch and sewn up in a gunnysack. It was, from the British point of view, a perfect trade – a true licence to print money. And while the East India Company made the first good money, its own monopoly was eventually weakened and broken – after which time magnificent baronies grew up in London, headed by men who could count their cash ten thousand miles away from where their dirty trade was done, and who were making profits quite as fast and as furiously as do the cocaine bosses of Colombia three centuries later.

  There was a signal difference between then and now, however. While the Colombians are today condemned all around the world, firms in Victorian times, like Jardine, Matheson & Co. and their main rivals Lancelot Dent and Company, the American firm of Russell & Co., a lone British entrepreneur named Innes and the Parsi trader Heerjeebhoy Rustomjee, were all handsomely and officially rewarded for their business – of which opium dealing produced the greatest profit. They were able to accumulate an impressive storehouse, one that in many cases is maintained today, of respectability, political power, influence and official honours.*

  The almost fantastic cascade of political consequences of the opium trade, and China's attempts to ban it and thus curb the westerners' profiteering, are well known. They included two vicious wars between Britain and China, any number of manifestly unequal treaties that were then imposed on the vanquished Chinese (such as that signed back on HMS Cornwallis, moored in mid-Yangtze off Nanjing in 1842), the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, the steady slicing away of China (the Shandong peninsula going to Germany, Port Arthur to Russia, the Manchurian railway concession to Japan, Port Edward to Britain, and so on), its invasion by soldiers from Europe, the Americas, and Japan, the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the fall of the Republic, the creation of the People's Republic. It is by no means stretching things to say that the opium trade led more or less directly to the dropping of the atomic bomb as well – for once the Japanese had found themselves able to defeat the war-weakened Chinese at battle, to annex Manchuria and to invade and occupy fully half of the Empire, so they found an increasing confidence in their own belief that they should rule the Pacific, and began promptly to try to do so, overrunning Malaya and Burma, bombing Pearl Harbor.

  And if all in the name of opium, then all in the name of tea. The Chinese sent other products too – rhubarb and silk and the kentledge-ballast of which porcelain was the main part. But tea was what the fuss was really all about, and opium was needed to pay for it. Never, at least in this context, was there a more appropriate metaphor than a tempest in a teacup.

  But there was one further complication, and an unkind irony it was. The very Chinese tea industry whose existence sparked all of this was itself eventually consumed and virtually destroyed by those who had been its greatest patrons. The British all but ruined China, and on the way they set about ruining its tea business with a vengeance, too.

  This happened because of a chance discovery that was made in 1820 by the new commissioner of Cooch Behar in India – the finding of a plant, not seen before. The new commissioner sent samples of it down to Calcutta, where it was received by a young and ambitious Dane named Nathaniel Wallich, who had just been appointed botanist to the Government of India. He suspected what was later confirmed in London: the plant was Camellia sinenis, the tea tree, and it grew in abundance in Assam. It was not, however, used by any of the locals as an infusion. No Indian of the time drank tea. That was all to change, drastically.

  Tea, it was realized by the British, would grow as well in the hills of eastern India as it already did in the hills of western China. From the British colonists' point of view this presented a perfect opportunity. For India was their territory, and they could henceforth grow their crop on what they believed to be their land. In less than thirty years from Wallich's identification, tea plants were being cultivated and processed in India on a prodigious scale, on sprawling plantations, their managements British, their factories equipped with English machinery and European efficiency. A new industry had been established. A new subculture, that of the planter-wallah, had been created.

  In all those places where Englishmen ruled – Assam, Darjeeling, Bengal, Burma, Ceylon – the very same plants that were being farmed so secretly and primitively across the border in Yunnan and Sichuan were being made to turn out twice as much tea in a third of the time for a quarter the cost of labour. Where the Yangtze valley had for all history been the capital of tea, it was now, thanks to the foreigners, the turn of the vàlley of the Brahmaputra.

  The Chinese monopoly – until that time broken only by Japan, Form
osa and some enterprising Javans – was now ripped asunder. The Yangtze treaty ports – Jiujiang down below me here, and Hankou just a day's sailing upstream – continued to be important bases for tea sales only for another few years. By the time the Suez Canal was opened to traffic in 1869, it made sound commercial sense for Europe to buy all its teas from India. They were cheaper, of better quality, and they were rushed to the London markets with dispatch. From henceforth what was called in the drawing room ‘China tea' was to be a product of the tea industry of the Indian Empire, and all profit was to be made by the English traders and all taxes paid to the English Crown. The China tea industry was brought back to the condition it had been in before the Portuguese traders first came to Canton: it was in business to supply just the Emperor and his people.

  Our driver had a screw-topped jar beside him, half-filled with what he called his tea. This was a pale green tepid liquid that lay on top of an inch-thick and occasionally swirling sediment of coarse green leaves. Every so often the driver would unscrew the lid, take a swig – at an angle that just prevented any leaves getting in his mouth – then set the jar down again to settle. Every couple of hours he would take the opportunity to replenish the jar with boiling water, from one of the elephantine thermos flasks that are a modern Chinese ubiquity: the strength of the infusion would diminish steadily, until at the end of the day his jar looked as though it held old pond water from which a layer of even older spinach had precipitated. He sipped away at it nonetheless, though I suspect more out of habit than delight.

  Every driver in China is similarly equipped. As well as every officer worker, every policeman in his booth, every hotel receptionist, every bank clerk, probably every airline pilot too. You peer over the counter in a shop, or at a currency exchange, or in a government office, and as like as not one of the clerks who is awake will be sipping on a jar of tea. Not an elegant porcelain cup with its domed lid slightly off centre; not a tiny faience beaker of iron-tea that you get in fancy Chaozhou restaurants; but a glass jar, by Kilner, Mason, or old Nescafé, and with a rusty old lid, screwed down tight. The Chinese tea ceremony that was has come to a pretty pass. The old reverence for what used to be called the ‘froth of the liquid jade' has been denatured to a point of unrecognizability. Tea drinking in China today is no more than ‘watering the ox’.