The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  It had taken thirty-one days for the little warships to dock at Chongqing. But the Admiralty orders had been obeyed, the navy's imperial ambitions realized. By the time Cornell Plant arrived in China at the beginning of the new century, regular steam travel through the Gorges was becoming a distant reality, and the Chinese authors of the Chefoo Convention were becoming less and less confident. Their bluff, after all, was being called.

  It was called to final effect in June 1900. Cornell Plant had come out to China to study the rapids of the Gorges; and Archibald Little had come out with the pieces of a brand-new ship, an iron paddle wheeler called the Pioneer.* Built by Denny's of Dumbarton on the River Clyde, she had been assembled from the kit in Shanghai. She was a big vessel, twice as heavy as the gunboats, and she carried 150 tons of cargo and a full complement of, given the circumstances, very plucky passengers.

  And she turned in a bravura performance. She made the journey up to Chongqing in seventy-three steaming hours – over seven days total, because one rapid had held her up for three nerve-racking days before a hawser could be secured and allow her to be warped through. When she arrived at the congested dockside in Chongqing, her master – Captain Plant – was able to announce with pride that she had come the entire distance without once having to resort to the use of trackers. The age of steam, so far as the Gorges were concerned, had finally and formally begun.

  (History turned inglorious for the Pioneer herself. The Boxer Uprising was just then beginning, and the Royal Navy promptly commandeered the vessel, not least because it had such obvious Yangtze aptitude. The Admiralty changed her name to HMS Kinsha – the Golden Sand – and used her for twenty years to evacuate civilians caught up in the seemingly endless troubles that blew up along the river, then sold her to a firm that traded chickens between Ningbo and Shanghai.)

  Captain Plant then turned his full attention to the river and the rapids. He confessed a tireless affection for the river: it had some ineffable quality that captivated him, he said. ‘Truly,’ he once wrote, ‘the farther one travels along this mighty water highway of China, the more strangely fascinating it becomes.’ He built a houseboat so that he could live on or beside the rapids of the Gorges for the rest of his life. He designed a nippy little steamer called the Shutung, had it built in England and sent over, and saw it perform so well that he eventually ran a fortnightly Three Gorges services that drew a standing-room-only crowd of passengers, carrying freight aboard lighters lashed to its sides – an arrangement still in common use today.

  But his heroic stature became properly apparent only when he ventured away from running a shipping business himself and started official duties with one of the most unforgettable bureaucracies that was ever to be created by a colonial power: the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service. This was a body that was every bit as grand and distinguished as its name, and its officers – Cornell Plant had the august title of Senior River Inspector, Upper Yangtze – were giants among men.

  The Imperial Maritime Customs had been established under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking – signed on the Yangtze in 1842 – which allowed foreigners, the British particularly, to collect customs duties on behalf of the Chinese government. It enabled the British swiftly to exert huge economic and political influence on the Chinese government, and for that, given today's attitudes toward colonialism, it should probably be condemned. But its staff turned out, by and large, to be men of great integrity and scholarship, and their reports, which thundered from the presses, year after year, from every obscure corner of the Chinese Empire, paint – in pointillist style, admittedly – an amazingly accurate picture of how China was, ‘in the years that were fat’.

  The great George Worcester, who was until his death in 1969 undeniably the world's leading expert on Chinese junks, and who served for thirty years as a Yangtze River Inspector, wrote of his service with affection and respect, many years after it had vanished from existence:

  No serious student of China, her history, people or industries should neglect these publications. Written in faultless prose by men of a bygone generation who were scholars as well as administrators, their work is bound to be of the greatest historical value. Nothing was too unimportant, nothing too trivial for these earnest, lucid compilers of the Trade Reports. Statistics on the movement of umbrellas in Canton, vermicelli from Chinchew, animal tallow from Chinghai and coal dust from Putien were all treated with the same care and attention to detail as was vast ‘Treasure, Imported and Exported'… It must have been a wonderful period in which to have lived.

  Cornell Plant's contribution to this great canon of lucid and elegant scholarship was an eighty-page book entitled a Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chungking Section of the Yangtze River. It is a far from romantic title, yet it is a deeply romantic book. It represented Plant's life's work, and his life's love: for the first twenty-one years of the century, he would examine with painstaking affection every twist and turn of a river he came to know like no other man before or since. Every rock and cliff, every rapid and whirlpool – this calm, self-effacing, brave and well-loved man noted, plotted, mapped, sketched, and named each one, for his own curiosity, out of duty to Empire, to navigators, and for the safety and well-being of shipmasters ever since.

  The rocks' names came either from the local Chinese junkmen, or from Plant's steadily fertile imagination: Pearl Rock, one of his charts says, then Second Pearl, Monk's Rock, and Chicken Wings. In one rapid there is a rock that was infamous for the entire upper river, a pinnacle whose whirlpools had pulled a hundred ships fatally towards her: Plant marks it laconically as the Come-to-Me Rock.

  In his crib sheets he handed down all the better legends from the old navigators – like that of the Yen-yu Stone at the mouth of the Qutang Gorge, which would block the river at a certain volume of low water, or else be washed over by impassably rapid streams at certain other times when the river was high. The boatmen warned thus:

  When Yen-yu resembles an elephant, upstream is totally impossible,

  And when Yen-yu is as small as a horse, downstream is highly inadvisable.

  Nowadays the rock is shaped like neither beast: a team of Chinese government dynamiters took seven days to drill charges into it and blow it up.

  Cornell Plant was a one-man river survey: his maps – beautifully executed pieces of art in and of themselves – still form the basis of all the Pilot guides to the river. Today, many of the rocks Plant described and named have been dynamited, and shoals have been dredged and rapids tamed. But his descriptions are still haunting, and for a newcomer, they make good and frightening reading as one's steamer rounds a corner into a stretch of water the old man once knew as especially dangerous:

  An immense mass of black rock, some fifty feet high at low level, sticks up right in mid-stream, which, surrounded by a number of smaller ones, during low level, renders the passage on the one hand impassable, leaving only the other which is studded with submerged rocks, the channel between them being very narrow, crooked and dangerous. There are local Chinese who pilot boats up and down these Narrows during low level season… Their services should always be engaged, especially when on the downward passage; an error of judgment in making the narrow fairway between the Pearl Rocks means destruction.

  He noted phlegmatically that the native junks – which carried as many as one hundred crewmen and a junkman's family of maybe thirteen members – were all too often lost: one junk in ten was badly damaged by the rocks, one in twenty was totally wrecked. The fifty days it might take a big junk to warp and track and creak her way upstream from Yichang were dangerous, deadly and tense, every one.

  His Shipmasters' Guide was invaluable, particularly to those who read English – and for big vessels, the fact that the river inspectors and the customs men were invariably Englishmen came as both a comfort and a distinct commercial advantage. But Plant's system of signal stations was available to all, and it remains just the same to this day. Small white houses stand perched o
n precipitous cliffsides, each with a flagpole and halyards from which the lookout raises and lowers huge illuminated arrows to advise approaching vessels if the way ahead is clear or if the channel is being used by a vessel coming the other way.

  To pass beneath one of these stations, a steamer captain once told me as we did so, deep in the Xiling Gorge, is to experience a small but exquisite moment of comfort. ‘I may be tired from turning round the whirlpools and dodging the quicksands, but I round a bend and there, ahead, is the little station, and the arrow tells me I may go ahead and all is clear upstream – that's something precious.

  ‘Your Englishman – we call him Pu Lan Tian, you know – he did great things. These signal stations, for example. They are a reminder of how man has done his best to make this terrible river safe, or as safe as it can be.’ This captain was a romantic of sorts: every time he passed below this station and all the others he would blip his siren, and if he was lucky enough, a short fellow in a cloth cap – a river inspector, no less – would peer out over the parapet, and wave him on.

  Cornell Plant retired shortly after the sounds of the Great War had faded back in Europe. Out of gratitude the Imperial Maritime Customs and the Chinese government built him and his wife a small bungalow at the village of Xintan, overlooking a deliciously spectacular and murderous rapid – the so-called New Rapid – at the mouth of the Xiling Gorge.

  Ships had the most trying time battering their way up through this triple-barrelled maelstrom. Junks often had to unload their entire cargo and employ scores more trackers to haul them through the boiling stream. Even today it is fun to watch from on high as a ship lurches and pitches helplessly, like a drunk on a bucking bronco – and then to breathe again as her bow breaks free and she swings into calm water and readies herself for the next ordeal, a mile or so upstream.

  The Plants would watch from their terrace for years – the old man's smooth pink face beaming benignly down at the men undergoing their brief misery. A tradition arose that once safely through the rapid the captain of each ship would sound his siren in salute – for it had been Cornell Plant's charts, spread out on the bridge table, that had guided the captain safely ahead, and a small token of thanks was the least to be offered in the circumstances. Plant would always reply by waving a white handkerchief down at the passing vessel, and then would look back downstream again to see if yet another shipmaster was going to be so bold today.

  In 1921 the Plants decided to go home to England for a while: China, warlord-struck, was in the throes of strange eruptions of violence and irrational wantonness, and they were tired of it. They took a ferryboat down to Shanghai, and then an oceangoing ship for Hong Kong. But Cornell Plant caught pneumonia on board, and died at sea; his wife died a month later, heartbroken. The pair still lie today in Hong Kong's Happy Valley cemetery, overlooking the racecourse and, if a point can be a little stretched to make their resting place seem an even more suitable one, the bustling maritime madness of that city's western harbour.

  There is, it was said, a memorial to him in Xintan village, and Lily and I went looking for it.

  Xintan is an otherwise insignificant place, and rightly so. It has a tiny coal mine up in the hills and a tung-oil plantation. Small country boats call there once in a while, and barges stop every week to haul away some of the brownish lumps that pass for coal in these parts. In Yichang I managed to persuade the skipper of a Russian-built hydrofoil to drop us off at Xintan on his way up to Wanxian and collect us on his way back. He was happy to do it – he had heard of Pu Lan Tian and remembered stories of his waving to passing ships.

  ‘The place has changed a lot since his time – landslides, you know,’ he said. ‘A big one in 1984, many people died. Half of the mountain came down.’ He pointed through the windscreen to a scar, five hundred feet long, where new pale green vegetation was growing again. ‘Many houses were swept into the river. I think this will be a big problem if the dam is built. These landslips make huge waves. Maybe they will damage the dam. This is a very frightening piece of river, I have always thought.’ He shuddered, and watched us nervously as we climbed out onto the sponsons and jumped onto dry land. He roared away quickly in a swirl of foam and fumes to the comparative safety, as he saw it, of the centre of the stream.

  Xintan was dirty beyond belief, smoky and sulphurous. We scrambled up a bank that was sticky with wet coal dust and as we did so an utterly mad woman suddenly confronted us and started screeching and clucking like a chicken, and spitting at us. A group of small boys were tormenting her, hurling lumps of mud. Suddenly a machine in a small factory thumped into life and its chimney began to emit a thick coil of black and tarry smoke. Dozens of pigs ran through puddles of sewage that stank in the rutted roadway. It was a little difficult to imagine this as a bucolic retirement home for an old English sea captain.

  But everyone knew the memorial. It stood at the far end of the village, on a knoll where a tiny tributary, the Dragon Horse Stream, trickled into the left side of the Yangtze. It was quite vast, an obelisk thirty feet high made of blocks of pink granite on a brown sandstone base. It dominated the village and could be seen downstream for miles – I had seen it from the boat, but assumed it must be a memorial to some later revolutionary heroism, and not to a long-dead Englishman. It seemed far too grand for that.

  Others had thought so too. When I had clambered up closer I could see that every single word incised into the stone had been painstakingly chipped out. The words ‘Plant Memorial' were still just legible; but the panel below, which presumably had listed his accomplishments in English, had been taken away, and around the side every one of the 130 Chinese characters had been chiselled away – I could still count the holes where they had been – and made illegible. Some terrible vandalism had been executed here.

  ‘Red Guards,’ said a young woman who had come up beside me quietly and had been standing by while I tried to read what was left. ‘I am so very sorry. I truly am.’

  She was pregnant, rather pretty, but tired looking, with wispy hair that blew about her face in the breeze.

  ‘They came here one day in 1968. They tried to blow it up. They said it was evil to have a stone put up in honour of a barbarian. But you know what? – they couldn't destroy it. It was built too well. So they did the next best thing – they had a group of boys with iron tools break out every letter, every character.

  ‘I feel so ashamed. My husband is a shipmaster, and so was his father. All our families have lived in Xintan for many years. They worship Pu Lan Tian. He was a great man. We were proud that he lived here. But his house has gone, and now his memorial has been wrecked as well.’

  Her name was Mrs Du and she invited us home for lunch. She had another child at home: she wasn't certain how she was going to deal with the impending arrival – already the nurse at the local hospital had told her she must abort it. She was holding out, for the moment.

  After rooting about in a drawer beside her bed she found a piece of paper. She smoothed it out, then stood before us and recited from it:

  ‘The British Consulate in Yichang wrote the inscription on the memorial, which was erected by public subscription among the foreign community, in 1922. It said that Plant was an Englishman born in a place called Fram-ling-gam and that he worked for the Chinese Customs Service during the Qing Dynasty. The first steamboat going up the Yangtze Gorges, the driver of it is Plant. He was born in the Qing dynasty, in the fifth year of the reign of the Emperor Dong Zhi [which would have been 1867]. During the Nationalist government time, in the springtime, he went back home, and on January 19 he died on his way home. His old friends thanked him for all his hard work, and they proudly call him the Father of the Upper River.’

  Mrs Du put down the paper. She was blinking back tears, I thought.

  ‘Madness,’ I said, pointing back at the horribly defaced memorial. She nodded in angry agreement.

  ‘But worse,’ she said. ‘In a few years it will be drowned. This whole village will be under water. They ha
ve told us to move. What can we do? We will be living far away. And poor Mr Plant – he will not be remembered at all. And his rapids – they will be at the bottom of a lake. All smooth and quiet. All character taken away.’

  Later that day another woman, who lived beside the memorial, gave us tea and told us something of the plans for moving – a third of the village would go in 1996, some more in 1998, the rest a year later. There would be an allowance of ten thousand yuan for every family member forced to move – thirty thousand for her husband and herself and their small boy, and another ten thousand for her grandfather, she said.

  ‘It will be expensive – we have to get the new house for ourselves. It is already selected where we will go, a village called Qian Shan Po, up in the hills behind.’ She jerked her hand back, contemptuously. ‘It is much cooler up there. We will not be able to farm the peaches and the oranges and the limes. Sweet potatoes and lettuce will be OK, and the corn too. But life will not be the same. And we won't be able to see the river any more. It'll be difficult – not so much for my child, nor for my husband and me.

  ‘But what of my grandfather?’ She nodded towards a figure sitting at the end of her garden. ‘He is too old to change.’

  Her grandfather was seated under a persimmon tree at the edge of the cliff, smoking a pipe and gazing down at the boiling river below. He was quite deaf and made no move when I walked up to him and then stood beside him. He was dressed in an old gown of dark blue silk adorned with dragons. He looked perfectly at peace with his world, warming himself in the late spring sunshine, puffing on a tiny nut of tobacco, watching the ships churn by.

  In a couple more years government officials would come and order him to move elsewhere. ‘There is no point in arguing with our leaders,’ sighed his granddaughter. ‘Besides, this dam is a national project – an international project, I've heard them say. We have no rights. We cannot complain. That is the way it is in China today.’