There is a pathway clinging to the left bank of the river, and Lily and I planned to walk down it. We started on the Gorge's upstream end, at the bridge at a hamlet called Qiatou, where the river flows silently and placidly under groves of weeping willows and looks for all the world like the Thames at Bablockhythe. There was little indication here that things were about to change, except that the river's progress seemed to be blocked a few hundred yards ahead by the huge wall of mountains rising sheer to the north of the grubby little village.
But soon there turned out to be another clue: while not so long ago Tiger Leaping Gorge was rarely seen by westerners,* today the local authorities have become only too well aware of the profit they can make from those outsiders who have a fondness for strenuous journeying, and so they have built a sort of turnstile on the path and employ an old man to sell plastic tickets to walkers. Ours read, Hutiaoxia Tourist Scenic Spot Management Office of Zhongdian County and it had a sketch of an improbably long tiger jumping across an improbably narrow defile between cliffs. Permission to undertake the walk costs about a dollar, and the man told me he sells about twenty tickets a day in the summer.
‘Be very careful,’ he said morosely. ‘Two killed already this week.’
The path, an old miners' mule track, is hewn out of an almost vertical cliff face. The mountain rose mossy and dripping to our left, the cliff wall dropped off sheer to our right, directly into the river. And while the path more or less followed the contour line, the river itself began to whip down the dizzying slope, starting the fall of nearly a thousand feet down the twenty-one gigantic sets of rapids. This meant that the cliff on our left-hand side became ever higher as the river fell away. We hugged close to the mountainside, imagining what might happen if we strayed too close to the other side, a slippery piece of rock, a gust of wind…
About a mile in, as the walls of the Gorge began to close and the sun was blotted out by the walls of rock, we crossed a pile of blinding white debris, the spoil heaps of a marble quarry. Where was the quarrying? I wondered – and as I did so a van-sized piece of rock whistled down from above, crashed onto the spoil heap, bounced off it and then hurtled down over the edge. I heard a vast splash from below. The quarry, I realized, was five hundred feet above our heads, on the side of the mountain.
This was where the walkers – both North Americans, it turned out – had been killed three days before. They had been doing just what we were doing – walking slowly and carefully along the tiny track, not daring to venture too close to the river side. Suddenly and without any warning a huge piece of marble, dislodged by a careless worker up above – most of the quarry workers were prisoners, it was said, and could be expected to take an understandably cavalier attitude to the safety of those around their enforced workplace – slammed down on top of them, and dashed them away and off the path and down into the river below. They may have been killed by the rock; they may have died in the fall into the river; they may have been drowned. Whatever: their bodies, mangled beyond recognition and with every bone broken, were found at the lower end of the Gorge later that evening.
We walked even more nervously, keeping a hundred yards apart so that if one of us was hurt, the other might survive. From time to time the path petered out and we were clambering over soft talus that would slide over the edge as we shuffled through it, and would threaten to drag us with it. Once in a while we met walkers coming the other way: they looked white-faced and nervous, and greeted us with queries that we echoed to them: What's it like ahead?
Then the path widened, and there was a small stall built of rock where a young Moso man was selling soft drinks. A steep path led down from here, and someone had suspended a rope alongside it to give walkers added purchase: it went down to the bellowing and spray-drenched side of the worst rapid of all, a place where the river is cinched into its tiniest cleft and where a mansion-sized pyramid of black limestone stood in the middle of the stream, splitting the roaring white waters into two, like a half-horizontal Niagara ceaselessly churning and bellowing through the defile.
We went down and stood alongside it, struck dumb by the thunderous might of it all. This, of the twenty-one measured rapids of the Tiger Leaping Gorge, was probably the worst, the meanest dog of all. Great torrents of white and green water hurtled towards us, taking boulders and spars and trees along with the flood as though they were feathers and balsa-wood sticks. This was the quintessence of the Tiger Leaping – the rapid we had come to see, where the river showed itself as a thing of raw and unimaginable might. This was a place where no human being could ever pass. Or so I once had thought.
Someone had managed to get onto the rock in midstream, for a start: he or she had written the characters for bu and tiao – tiger and leap – in vermilion paint on the rock's most prominent surface. How this unknown painter – or this graffiti artist, or this vandal, depending on the viewpoint – had managed to get across, to daub his paint and get back without being swept away is an achievement that beggars belief.
But man has an unquenchable eagerness for the conquest, as he likes to put it, of such challenging places, Mao Zedong had swum across the Yangtze down at Wuhan, and so had conquered it, in a manner of speaking. Other men, and at later dates, had tried to voyage their way down the entire length of the river, paddling it in specially strengthened boats. This was their version of conquest; those who tried were among the best and the worst of humankind; their efforts, in which the puniness of man was matched against the strength and caprices of the river, led to some success and also to a great deal of painful failure. Tiger Leaping Gorge – and in particular this huge rapid near its beginning, officially known as the Upper Hutiao Shoal, with a sixty-foot drop through two suicidal pitches – was where that failure had been most vividly demonstrated.
The ‘conquest' of an entire river demands of course that one knows where the river begins and ends – knowledge that, for the world's big rivers, can be notoriously difficult to acquire. Close to their beginnings big rivers have a habit of splitting themselves into countless fine tendrils or capillaries, and several of these may compete legitimately for being the true fons et origo. Is it the stream that is farthest from the sea? Is it the stream that is at the highest altitude? Is it the stream with the greatest flow of water? There is little agreement on this point among either hydrologists or cartographers; and so explorers can make names for themselves even today by finding, or claiming to find, supposed new sources for well-known rivers.
The beginning of the Mekong, for example, was reportedly found by a Frenchman in 1995. But it may well be that another source, with an equally legitimate claim and yet equally difficult to verify, may be found by some other wanderer ten or fifty years hence. That, after all, is what happened with the Yangtze.
Until the closing years of the Ming dynasty, in the 1640s, the source waters of the Yangtze were thought to lie at the head of the Min Jiang, the big and (in those pre-pollution days) unexpectedly clear stream that joins the muddy Jinsha Jiang, the River of Golden Sand, at Yibin. The reason was simple: the wide and rushing Min was navigable for as much as 180 miles above Yibin, while the Jinsha, narrow, rocky and furrowed by turbulence, was closed off to boatmen by a line of mountains no more than 60 miles above town. The Min was by far the more important river for trade; logic suggested, therefore, that it had to be the origin-river.
Exploration soon put paid to that theory. A Ming dynasty geographer named Xu Xiake looked closely at the Min, and found that it splits into its various capillaries and minor tendrils only about 500 miles above Yibin. Even the most ambitious source-searcher could not discover a spring or a glacier that was more than 500 farther miles upriver from that. But Xu went on to discover that the Jinsha Jiang, by contrast, burrows into the hills for nearly 2000 miles – changing its name above the town and the bridge at Yushu to the Tongtian He, the River to Heaven. This, Xu reasoned, must be the origin-stream of the Yangtze.
Later travels confirmed that this must be so – if only becaus
e the Jinsha and its tributaries were so very long. The Tongtian He, it was found out two centuries later, went on to attract three substantial tributaries – the Qumar, which brings waters down from the north; the Dam Qu, which swirls in from the south; and seemingly most powerfully of all, the Tuotuo, which comes directly from the high snow peaks of the west. Which of these three rivers is actually the origin-stream has been a matter of debate and wonder for much of the last half of this century.
The Qumar was discounted early on: it had neither the water volume, the length nor the altitude to be a serious candidate. Its attraction lay simply in the fact that it vanished, and that it did so into some of the wildest and least hospitable plateau land on earth. The Tibetan Plateau has fewer than three people inhabiting each hundred square miles – it is a place of many black yaks, a few black tents, huge expanses of grass, sudden outcrops of rock and ice and an endless, endless sky.
The Tuotuo and the Dam Qu, however, were real candidates, and in 1976 the China Geographic Research Institute dispatched a serious expedition from Beijing, armed with systematic methods, to determine which was the true source. After a summer in the field these explorers decided it was the Tuotuo, and specifically that the Yangtze began its 3964-mile journey to the sea in a tiny lake called Qemo Ho, which lay at the foot of the Jianggudiru Glacier, at the base of the 21,723-foot-high mountain called Gelandandong. For nine years this spot remained the official source – and to many it remains so today.
But in 1985 the American National Geographic Society sponsored an expedition of its own. A group of explorers led by a Hong Kong Chinese named Wong How Man first went back to the Qemo Ho source; then doubled back to the point where the Dam Qu river splits from the Tuotuo and headed to the source of that – their argument being that more water appeared to stream into the Tongtian He from the Dam Qu than from the Tuotuo. If it was the more powerful stream and if it was longer, then its beginning should be officially considered to be the source.
And longer the Dam Qu turned out to be – though by a little more than a mile. The explorers headed east, following the Dam Qu's great recurving path to a point where it split into two tiny streams, the Shaja, which headed south, and the Guangzhuguo, which meandered to the north. The Shaja was short, the Guangzhuguo half as long again – and it petered out into (or rather, started from) a small and clear pool lying at the base of a hill that the local Tibetans call Jari.*
This, according to Wong's claim – which was backed up by an official Chinese report in 1986 – was almost certainly the true, technical source of the Yangtze. It was nearly a full mile lower than the Tuotuo's source in the glacial lake, but it was one and a half river miles further away from the sea, and it provided much more water. It lies at 32° 7' North, 94°6' East, is at a height of 18,750 feet above sea level, and is 3965 miles from the ocean.
So the choice for anyone wanting to journey down the entire length is this: whether to accept this tiny and unnamed meadowland lake as the source, and so journey from Jari Hill, down along the Guangzhuguo, the Dam Qu and the Tongtian He to the Jinsha Jiang and finally onto the Chang Jiang proper; or to begin at the icebound Qemo Ho (Qemo Lake), then pass down the entire length of the Tuotuo, and only then join the Dam Qu.
Drama tended to force the choice. All would-be explorers of the river seemed to want the very same thing: to begin their journeys at the foot of a mountain range, in a lake that was surrounded by a frieze of blue-white glaciers. This setting was by far the more dramatic. It had the look of a great river's source: it was not merely a place of muddy oozings from a dismal and half-frozen Tibetan pasture. Mount Gelandandong was part of the poetry of the great river: it was how Wang Hui's painting had captured it, in the seventeenth-century imagination: it began among the clouds, spilling from ice and snow, emerging with grace from the heavens. Gelandandong was just right – it was spiritually appropriate.
And so when, in 1985, a thirty-two-year-old freelance photographer named Yao Mao-shu decided that he would try to become the first person ever to float the entire length of his country's greatest river, he arranged to begin his epic at the base of the mountains, and set his raft on the crystal cold waters of Qemo Ho.
He was powerfully motivated. The year before he had heard that an American team was planning to raft the river, and he had applied to go with them, but had been turned down. His dander was up. Why should the honours for such a conquest go to barbarians? The river was part of the soul and fabric of China. Only a Chinese should have the right of such triumph. He, Chinese to his very core, would go off alone, and would conquer the great river himself.
He was a tough and resourceful young man, and alone in his twelve-foot craft he went through the hell of the upper reaches with dignity and courage. After 600 miles he arrived at Yushu, and blurted out his adventures – of catching and trying to tame a lynx for company, of being threatened by wolves, of coming across an island filled with thousands of swan eggs, of going hungry for days, of being ice-cold, of being so terribly lonely in the Tibetan plains that he felt he would go quite mad. They liked him in Yushu and gave him fresh supplies, and when he drifted off downstream again the whole town wished him well.
But he never made it. Somewhere in the canyons where the River to Heaven becomes the River of Golden Sand, Yao's boat, the Dragon's Descendant, capsized. His body was found by herdsmen, drifting in an eddy in a downstream calm. He left a widow back in Chengdu. And he left a China that – once the tragic tale had been told around the nation – became suddenly determined to avenge his death, by conquering the river once and for all, by concerted Chinese effort, the following year.
The expedition that the luckless young Yao Mao-shu had wanted to join was led by a man who had wanted to run the Yangtze ever since 1976, when he had paddled down the white waters of one of the origin-streams of the Ganges, on the other side of the Himalayas. He was named Ken Warren; and the fact that he patted his mane of white hair into shape with mousse, and that in 1986 he took a case of said mousse along as part of the ten tons of supplies with which he intended to beat the Yangtze, should have been warning enough that he was never the man to do it.
This one-time vitamin salesman – who began his attempt on the river by praying before the cameras at the source, affecting tears and pleading with choking voice, ‘Oh beautiful Yangtze… we ask you to take care of us and we promise you no harm' – led an expedition that turned out to be both a failure and a disaster.
One man – a young photographer from Idaho named David Shippee – died of altitude sickness along the way; four other members of the expedition deserted because of Warren's questionable leadership; and when the going became too rough for comfort – when the rapids in the Tongtian He became too dangerous, too unrunnable – then Warren himself walked out on the remainder of the party. The Americans' permit to raft on the river expired when they were still 3000 miles short* of their intended goal – a fact that did not prevent Warren from declaring to the television cameras that what he had done really had been a success, that he would be back for more, and would return to the river with a ‘secret weapon' that would defeat the rapids that had thus far defeated him.
Ken Warren was an essentially disagreeable figure – but he was handsome, and exceptionally telegenic. The film which ABC-TV commissioned of his expedition, and which was paid for by the sponsoring insurance company, Mutual of Omaha, suggests that the expedition was honourably conducted and even heroic. But once it was over, and sober questioning replaced the hyperbole and the flattery to which television and its subjects can fall prey, so the truths about the expedition's lamentable organization and leadership began to emerge, and the bitterness began.
Margit Shippee, the widow of the dead photographer, sued for her husband's wrongful death; Warren in turn sued the four men who had abandoned him; and the whole fiasco vanished within a miasma of costly lawsuits and acrimony. Warren himself died in the early nineties, and today on the Yangtze his name is ill regarded indeed. One Chinese boatman to whom I
mentioned the name simply shuddered, and remarked caustically that ‘this American above all should not have been allowed to come onto the river.’
Inevitably, and perhaps properly, it eventually fell to the Chinese to become the winners of the dangerous and often fatal competition to be the first to ‘conquer' the Yangtze. The contest was already well under way in the summer of 1986. By the time the Warren team had stage-whispered its prayers and set off, no fewer than six Chinese expeditions (one of them with our friend from Panzhihua, Wu Wei) had already set out from the Gelandandong glacier-lake source. They remained well ahead. By the time the Americans had pushed their boats off in early summer the leaders of these Chinese parties had reached more than a thousand miles downriver – and yet, tragically, already three of their number were dead. (It was first thought that eight had died: but in fact five from two of the competing parties were found safe and sound. After their boat had shattered on a rock they had clambered up the walls of a canyon and survived for days on a diet of leaves, roots and snails.)
Once matters had thus begun to become more dramatically dangerous on the river, official China unexpectedly began to take an interest. Up until now the political leadership in Beijing had looked on these home-grown efforts merely as a way of avenging the previous year's tragic death of Yao Mao-shu, who, with his good looks and his clear-eyed idealism, had become something of a minor national hero. Now, with three of the youngsters who were trying to shoot the rapids again already dead, the effort began to assume, as had Mao's swim thirty years before, the familiarly powerful man-versus-river symbolism. What was being attempted out on the Yangtze, the political leadership in Beijing decided, was now nothing less than a trial of national honour, a test of the modernization that had been brought about by the glories of socialism and the command economy. All efforts should be poured into the attempt, it was said: the youth of China should be helped and supported and egged on in the nobility of their cause.
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze Page 37