Frank invited me to ride a Terex on a working expedition into the heart of the mountain – a terrifying half-hour, as it turned out, of heat and dust and insufferable noise. The Chinese driver was an irrepressibly cheerful little man, five feet nothing and seemingly quite unsuited for driving the forty tons of mixed metals that constitute a Terex earth-moving truck. He told me he had been a farmer until the dam builders had hired him the year before – and now he was having great fun, the power steering and computerized brakes allowing him to throw his gigantic toy around as though it were made of straw and tissue paper.
We roared through the portals of a huge tunnel and, belching thick smoke from our exhaust, we gunned downwards into the centre of the mountain, under a glistening roof of wet granite. A chain of dim lights marked the way: every so often there would be an open cavern with a gaggle of men and strange machines that were digging, burrowing, tunnelling. Sirens would sound, red lights would flash, there would be the crump of distant explosions, and the walls would throb and pulse. The driver would merely pause and grin, then gun his engine, and roar forward again into the abyss.
Ten minutes later and we were at the site where we had been ordered to collect and haul away the fifty tons of newly broken rock. The driver spun the vehicle around like a London taxi and then backed gingerly downward into a brand-new raw-rock tunnel, the wheels slipping and scratching for a hold on the newly fractured gravel on the floor. The mighty vehicle at first slid this way and that, the cab scraping angrily against the dripping walls, the headlights uselessly illuminating the rock ceiling. There was no other lighting in the tunnel – and there was still smoke pouring from the blast site and ghoulish screams and yells from an excavator crew, who were eagerly talking us backward to where they could dump rock onto us.
Then there came a sudden cry to stop! The driver locked the brakes and we held our breath as, with a deafening roar and a terrible bouncing and rocking and the wails and shrieks of tortured coil springs, we reeled under the assault of tons upon tons of rock that were now pouring onto us from on high. Then a hiss of final gravel and dust and there was a blessed silence; the driver lit a cigarette, but as he did so there was a shout from outside, the crew urging us to be on our way and make room for another truck, another load. The driver snapped his gearshift into forward and slammed his foot down on the metal pedal, and we creaked slowly, but then faster and faster, back up the slope, out into the lit tunnel, and after ten more minutes and to my eternal relief, back into the sunshine again.
A foreman ticked off the driver's load – another forty renminbi added to his pay slip. I jumped down, thanking him profusely, declining his kind suggestion I might enjoy another go.
‘They kill themselves all the time,’ Frank announced cheerily. ‘They've no idea how to handle these monsters. Last week three lads stole one from the parking lot and drove it straight off the cliff into the river.
‘They've not been found. Nor has the Terex for that matter – the river's powerful deep. And you know what? One of the boys had just been married, and his widow came up to where the Terex had gone over, and she jumped in the river too, killing herself. Pretty girl. Stupid, too, so far as I can see.
‘I'll never understand these people. If they're not working they're asleep. If they're not sleeping they're eating. And if they're not doing either of those then they're killing themselves. Odd folk the Chinese, if you ask me.’*
Some of the single men took a more tolerant attitude. I spent one afternoon in a bar with two Britons, one a crane driver from Middlesbrough and the other an electrician from Cleveland, and with the six young Chinese tarts they had managed to find who, when we met, were entwined around them like convolvulus, vowing not to leave, and getting stickily drunk on enormous glasses of Bailey's.
‘Our interest in these girls?’ said the crane driver, when I asked him. He pinched one, whom he had introduced as Hourglass, and she giggled warmly. ‘It's purely sexual. Oh sure, they say they want to marry us and come back to the West – but quite frankly, and I can say this out loud because they haven't the faintest idea what I'm saying, we're only interested in screwing them. And very good at it they are, too.
‘And you know what the nice thing is – they're so fucking backward in these parts they'll do it without asking for money. They think they're in love with us! They think the sun shines out of our arseholes. Have you ever heard anything so stupid?’ And he thwacked Hourglass on her backside again, making her coo with delight.
Lily, who was appalled, was about to say something – but the expression on the man's face changed suddenly.
‘You keep quiet, young lady,’ he said, wagging a finger at her. ‘This is my business – hers and mine. No poking your nose in where it don't concern you.’
*
I found a dead man on the street that evening. I saw him from the corner of my eye, lying beside the road as we drove back to the hotel. I told the driver to turn round and go back for a look.
The man was lying on his back, his eyes wide open. He was quite naked. He seemed to have a head injury – perhaps, I thought, he had been knocked down by a car.
On the other side of the road a group of men were sitting around a small fire, tucking into blue-and-white bowls of rice. They were no more than thirty feet from the corpse. I asked them if they knew what happened.
‘Oh, that fellow!’ said one of them, laughing and pushing great balls of rice into his mouth. ‘He was just a crazy man. Always around here, shouting at the cars. Never wore any clothes. Some minority, I guess. I could never understand what he was saying. Hit by a car a couple of hours ago.’
The men seemed not in the slightest bit concerned that they were having their dinner beside a cadaver, and none of them had bothered to see – after the car hit him – if he had been killed outright. I suggested that we might cover him up.
‘Suit yourself,’ said the same man, pausing briefly from his feeding and gesturing with a chopstick to where a roll of matting stood by a wall. ‘Use that.’
And so I unrolled the matting and carried it across to the man and knelt and closed his eyes, before placing the mat over him so that his head and most of his body was covered. His feet stuck out of the end; they were dirty and calloused from years of walking barefoot. He may have been mad; but he had had a knotty stick, which I found and placed beneath the mat, beside him. When he was alive, a few hours before, he probably looked like a harmless mendicant, or a Chinese palmer. We were near Tibet; there were lots of pilgrims in these parts.
On the way home I called in at a police station, and they thanked me. Later that night I drove past and the man had been removed. The group were still sitting around the fire, and they waved at me as I passed, doubtless thinking that I was quite as crazy as the man who had met his end beside their evening dinner table.
Our taxi driver's first remark about a dam being built and the foreigners working on it had triggered a cascade of coincidence. Frank Walker was the first link in this trail: his translator, a rather sulky young lady named Ena, was the second.
Ena was a pretty and willing girl who, her pouting aside, enjoyed something of a following among the young male inhabitants of Panzhihua. One of her friends, an insurance salesman who dreamed of greater things, turned out to have as his hobby a passionate interest in the headwaters of the Yangtze. Ena knew that Lily and I were going there; and one day she introduced us to her young man, who was named Wu Wei. He fell on us with glee: as an insurance salesman his life was rather dull. But nine years before, he said with evident pride, he had been a member of one of the all-Chinese expeditions of river rafters who had managed to paddle their way down the entire length of the Yangtze. He himself had only been on the upper reaches, specifically along the tributaries known as the Dam Qu and the Tuotuo: any help he could give to us, he would. And perhaps we would like to see some videotapes?
And so for the next two days, dawn to dusk, amid the blaring car horns and the grinding din from the city's steel mills, we watch
ed tape after tape of the expedition's progress along the upper reaches of the river. Wu's interest was in Tibet – and even though he was a Han Chinese, born and brought up in Yunnan, he kept a photograph of the Dalai Lama taped to the inside of one of his living-room cupboards and was constantly critical of China's repressive policies towards what the government officially called Xizang Autonomous Province, but which he insisted on calling Tibet.
‘We have been brutes – no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘I love the Tibetan people. I have always said we should cherish them, regard them as brothers, as equals. We should not seek to dominate them. They are different. Their way of life, their religion – all different. Who are we Chinese to tell them how to live their lives?’
Lily blanched on hearing this. We had not discussed Tibet in much detail; but whenever we had, and whenever I had said how terrible a shame it was that China's policies towards the Tibetans had been so cruel, she had reacted defensively. I knew that she was secretly proud of – or at least a supporter of – her country's foreign policies, and that she saw the Tibetans as primitive innocents who had been consistently misled by religious zealots and egged on by western romantics; but now Wu – a Chinese like herself – was taking the same position as I. She fell quiet, but I knew we would have to face the problem in a day or so. I knew also, if I was to avoid a scene like that on the Panzhihua train, that I would have to deal with this disagreement with the utmost caution and tact.
Wu then came up with an idea. He would make contact with a friend who had also been on the expedition, a man who lived in Chengdu and worked for an organization that had access to four-wheel-drive cars, which would surely be needed if we hoped to get high up on the river. He had a feeling the organization would be eager to help. But that was for the following weeks. For now, he said – can I lend you my own car and let you explore the reaches close to Panzhihua? If you like, he added hopefully, I can come along as well, and be your guide.
Never before in my dozen years of travelling in China had a private individual ever offered – or been able – to supply me with both transport and his own time to show me around a corner of his country. There were always official guides available – Local Guides or National Guides, a corps d'elite of half-English-speaking and too often woefully ignorant young men and women, screened and cleared as faithful adherents to the Party line, who would, for a sizeable fee, escort you along a predetermined route to show off the nation at its best. There were also enthusiastic amateurs like Lily, who would jump at the chance of touring companionship, of helping a stranger in exchange for learning more about the cultural fingerprints of foreigners. But never before had I come across a sedate, employed, and politically independent-minded man or woman who would be willing or able to stop everything, drop everything and come away for no better reason than to demonstrate a part of his country of which he felt proud. Why would he do such a thing? I could only think of one kind of person who might do it.
‘I suppose you think I'm actually a policeman,’ Wu replied, reading my mind, chortling. ‘And I suppose you think that I think you're a spy. So that's the only logical reason we can travel together – me to show you what the Party wants and to keep an eye on you while you're travelling. That must be the logical view.
‘In fact it's more simple. I really am just fascinated by the Yangtze. Meeting someone else who likes the river – well, I just want to do anything I can to help. Believe it or not as you like. I think your people might do the same for me, if I ever come to your country.’
(I was ashamed to say this latter seemed rather improbable. The notion that a lone Chinese traveller might fetch up in Arkansas, profess a fascination with the Mississippi River, and promptly find a local insurance salesman who would take a week off to drive him from Osceola to Eudora was frankly laughable. The Chinese often have a stern and forbidding visage; but behind it, equally often, is a kindness and a hospitality few other people can imagine.)
Wu had two cars – a sporty-looking Toyota LandCruiser and a ratty-looking red Beijing Jeep, which showed that the spoils of the insurance business were every bit as handsome as in America or Europe. To our slight chagrin he elected to take the Jeep, and at five o'clock one sunny summer morning we set off westward, away from the blighted industrial landscape of Panzhihua. The last we saw of the steel city – a town that had been deliberately created by Mao's planners, and to which, during the fifties and sixties, the Great Helmsman had exhorted workers to move – was a long line of steam trains dumping torrents of molten slag down a slope that led directly into the Yangtze. It seemed a suitable memorial to the insanity of the Great Leap Forward – the making of a cliff of iron, the creation of industrial pollution on a titanic scale and with a callous disregard for the greatest of China's waterways. Wang Hui, Li Bai, Da Fu and Meng Jiao and all those other painters and poets who once loved the river – thou shouldst most decidedly not be living at this hour!
If there was to be some recompense for the dismal aspect from the rearview mirror, it was the beauty of our destination. I had a hint of it that morning when we climbed over some low hills and passed through the octroi post into Yunnan and came, via the steep valley of a tributary, to the Yangtze once again. Here we were on the Golden Road, so-called – the main route by which heroin (as well as rubies, and other more mundane trade goods) comes into China from the Golden Triangle of Burma, three days' hard driving away. The Chinese keep close watch on the trucks coming eastward: a group of policemen wearing machine guns were tanning beside the road, and they stopped us briefly, asking jokingly if we happened to be returning drug couriers, then waved us on. We stopped at a gas station and drank tea with a pair of Tibetan truck drivers: when I showed them a picture of the Dalai Lama, they clapped their hands to their foreheads in prayer and insisted on paying for the tea.
It was a warm and sunny early afternoon when we reached the main stream. The skies were a perfect blue, the air was alive with birdsong. In the short stretch of still water, the hesitant end of the tributary stream before the bar where it entered the ferocious whirlings of the Yangtze proper, two teenage girls – they were probably Yi, but perhaps Bai, a people whose homeland was a little south of here – were swimming. It looked like something out of an H. E. Bates story, filled with rustic bliss, sunshine and rude good health. The girls were astonishingly pretty; they were swimming in just their bras and panties, their bodies were strong and tanned, their hair close-cropped. They were blithely unconcerned when Lily, Wu and I drove up: they stood in the shallows and waved at us to come down and go swimming too, and they seemed genuinely disappointed when we shouted down that we had to be in Lijiang by nightfall.
We stopped at a small café beside the old stone river bridge and lunched on black chicken soup (made of a local bird with unusually dark and strongly flavoured flesh) and bowls of noodles. On the wall was a reproduction Madonna, fifteenth-century Italian, probably torn from an Alitalia calendar. A large red hen had made her nest against this wall, and the combination of old wood, Renaissance brushwork, a sleeping chicken and hanging baskets of Chinese spices made for an intriguing conversation piece. Wu smoked a couple of cigarettes and then tossed me the keys to the car. He was tired, he said, and it was as well if I became used to driving, however illegal such a thing might be. Besides, he would bribe any policemen we might meet.
And so, slowly and steadily – Beijing Jeeps having a tendency to boil on long uphill stretches, as well as a host of other problems – we inched our way up the western side of the valley. We passed small groves of banana palms and newly tilled fields where young boys were planting soybeans or rapeseed. Small fields of lavender, red stands of poppies, yellow mists of buttercups – it was all energetically colourful. Behind stood the jagged blue ranges of the Yunnan mountains, and down below the brown river was coiling and uncoiling thickly and quietly around their bases.
After climbing for half an hour the road suddenly flattened, and we came out onto a plateau of pine woods. It became greener and coole
r and more moist, and there were flashes of falling water, with kingfishers darting in and out of rainbows. And then without warning, in the northern distance, there rose a huge, rugged and totally snow-covered mountain. The sight of it made Lily gasp with astonishment, and Wu snapped awake.
‘My God!’ he said, and rubbed his eyes. ‘It is Yuelong Xueshan – the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain! It's so rare that you see it as free of cloud! Good fortune, so they say. We will be very lucky!’ My American map showed the peak as standing 18,400 feet high, the tallest point for scores of miles around. It rose over the plain of Lijiang, where there were cornfields and rice paddies glinting in the sunshine. Below it, to the southern sunlit side, which I could see from my vantage point, the land was flat. The Americans had built an airstrip there in the late thirties, and from it they sent bombers up to protect Free China from the Japanese and flew sorties over General Stilwell's Burma Road.
Behind Jade Dragon Mountain, on the north side that I couldn't see, the Yangtze passes through what is said to be the deepest and most ferocious gorge of the entire river. The Tiger Leaping Gorge is a defile all too little known to the outside world – in the mid-1980s one expedition reported that only three westerners had ever glimpsed it – and it far outranks the Three Gorges in depth and spectacle. Nowadays it is quite easy to reach, and I had plans to be there in another day or two. What a changeable stream, I thought: down where the two young girls had been swimming, beside the bridge just half an hour behind, the Yangtze was just a decorously swirling stream – powerful, but not obviously murderous. A short way ahead, behind the hills, it apparently turned into a monster.
The town of Lijiang is one of the western China's true gems – one of the very few way stations in the Middle Kingdom on what, archaically perhaps, is still known as the Hippie Trail. Youngsters from around the world come to Lijiang, en route between the equally delightful towns of Dali and Xishuangbanna in Yunnan and Yangshuo in Guangxi province. They are on a circuit – the same people who visit the back streets of Chiang Mai, Kathmandu and Lhasa, or Panajachel, Goa and Trivandrum, end up with equal enthusiasm and curiosity and camaraderie in towns like Lijiang. No matter what regime is in power, nor what rules are in force, there is a universality in the appeal of such places – laid-back, easygoing, with colourful people and cheap and wholesome food. In the normal and depressing order of business, the youngsters come to such a place first as rucksack-carrying pioneers and discoverers; the tour buses come next; and then the airports and the big hotels.
The River at the Centre of the World Page 34
