The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  Here the Yangtze was really narrow, and so it was where the first of the river's many bridges had been built. In this foul weather it was also quite probably as far as we were going to go. We all got out to investigate.

  The bridge was concrete, standing on a dozen buttresses, and it was about three hundred yards long. The river itself, murky and greyish, made an unappealing sucking noise as it passed under our feet. It was divided into a number of channels, each separated from the others by bars of brown gravel – on high-water days they would be submerged, but here, on this midsummer's day, the river was quite low. All told, it was perhaps a hundred yards wide, and it wallowed along quite placidly, compared with the wilder sections just a few score miles downstream.

  There was a furious blast of snow, and the others skittered back to the car. But I was determined that this should not be quite the end. Not yet. So I fastened the zip on my polar jacket and put on my gloves, and I jumped down onto the grass on the left-hand side of the bridge, at its far end.

  I began walking. My compass showed that I was going due west. I was on the river's left bank, and if I kept on walking for perhaps another week, and if I climbed up another three thousand feet, then I might reach the source – the spiritually appropriate, wholly photogenic, mountain-ice-fed but nevertheless not-exactly-correct source – at the Gelandandong Glacier. But then again – and here was the rub – I could walk in quite the opposite direction, keep going for about two weeks and climb up a little less far, and I might reach the other correct but unappealingly ugly ooze-of-a-source on the puddle-sized lake at the head of the Dam Qu stream. And whichever source I reached would, in someone's eyes, be quite the wrong one.

  So I had made more modest plans. I strode along through the muddy grass for an hour or so, following the lazy twists and turns of the riverbank. The gusts of wind slowed and then suddenly, and just as I had hoped, the snow stopped altogether. The clouds swirled away, and I found myself standing quite alone in the middle of a vast white plain, crisp with frost, under the perfect blue sky and a low late-morning sun.

  Behind me I could see the smoky smudge of the grey-brown buildings of Tuotuoheyan. To my right was a small encampment of nomads, and a man was riding slowly towards me on a pony. I waved at him, and he waved back and yelled something unintelligible, but clearly friendly.

  I looked ahead of me, to the far west, and then just a little south. There, rising starkly from the high plateau of the Tanggula Range, stood the ring of high and snowy peaks called Gelandandong. Through my field glasses I could see arêtes and bergschrunds and couloirs and all the other features of Alpine geography. In the midst of this magnificent scrum of young mountainhood was the glacier and the small circular pool from which, said most – and from which, said Wang Hui, in the painting at which I had looked so carefully all those thousands of miles away in New Hampshire – this great river started its long journey.

  The great river was not great here, not at all. It was beside me now, shallow and quite clear, running fast through a gravel-bottomed channel that was ten feet wide. There must have been a dozen such channels, each glinting blindingly in the sun. This was a braided stream, meandering its way through the boggy flatlands of the plateau, not quite knowing which was the path of least resistance along which gravity should most effectively direct it. I didn't care to know: all I was interested in was this single narrow rivulet beside me, a rill of ice-cold and pure water: the Yangtze heading eastward to the sea.

  I reached into my pocket for the tiny prayer block that the monk had given me back in Dêgê – I had hoped, I think, that I might imprint a few good thoughts on the waters and send them scurrying down to sea level. But it was not there: I had left it behind carelessly. It was back in the army base. In any case, I told myself, for me to do such a thing was more than a little out of character: I was no Buddhist, I had no real idea what sentiments had been inscribed on the wood, and would feel plagued that I had performed some disingenuous act, just for the symbolic sake of it.

  So instead I got out a cigar. A friend had given it to me in Hong Kong. The Mandarin Hotel had imported a Cuban maestro from Cohiba in Havana, and had set him to work hand-rolling cigars in a corner of the hotel lobby. My friend had bought two for me, for some exorbitant sum. One, he said, was to be smoked at the start of the Yangtze journey, and the second was to be savoured in mood victorious if, and only if, I reached the headwaters. This battered and somewhat stale object that I pulled from my jacket pocket was the very one.

  I straightened it as best I could and listened to it: there was a slightest crackle of a few stale leaves, but not too much – it seemed to have kept most of its supple softness, and it might not be too bad. So I tilted my head out of the breeze and lit it slowly and carefully, then blew a cloud of pure blue smoke out into the chilly air.

  Once, a few weeks back, this had been a grand cigar; now, old and tired from its journey, it had just a hint of its glory: in any restaurant it would have been sent right back. Out here, though, it was the best smoke I could ever, ever imagine. And so I sat there in a state of utter contentment, listening to the gurgling of the stream, listening to the lone Tibetan behind me marshalling the yaks from a herd that had been scattered in the storm, and listening to the soughing winds. They began to pick up again, and they started to scatter the grass and to riffle the calm surface of the river waters once more.

  The furious caprices of the great Tibetan Plateau: four seasons in an hour, they like to say. It had just been high summer for ten minutes, and now wintertime was blowing back. It started to get cold once more – and so I stood up and turned back, and – walked to the waiting friends in their car beside the Tuotuoheyan bridge. It struck me that for the first time in nearly four thousand miles, I was travelling in the same direction as the waters of the river. It was heading seaward, and I was too.

  All the cars and trains and boats and planes that I had booked for the coming days would take me in the same direction, too, carrying me until I ended up in Shanghai once again. Then, just like the river water here, I would push out across and over the Woosung Bar and its red canister buoy, and I would pass the winking lighthouses and the huge navigation buoy just off what they had once called Cape Nelson, and I would soon be out onto the ocean once more, and back on my way to the rest of the world.

  Back on my way to what they call the outside world. Back from having been at its very centre, and along the river that runs right through it.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  The River in General

  In recent years the Yangtze, despite its immense size and obvious importance, has been more often the subject of journalistic adventuring than of longer inquiry. Of the large number of essays only one, written by Paul Theroux for the London Observer, has lasted. Sensibly he had it published as a small book, illustrated with charming woodcuts. It was called Sailing Through China (London and Boston, 1984) and anyone wanting the briefest of introductions to the general mysteries of the river would do well to look at it.

  Also short, but still majestic in its sweep and tone, is John Hersey's A Single Pebble (New York, 1956), the novella which he wrote exactly a decade after his better-known work from the ruined city of Hiroshima. The protagonist is a young American engineer bent on building a dam across the Yangtze: the hero of the tale is one of the Chinese trackers who hauls the American's boat up against the stream – two images that remain as haunting and topical at the end of this century as they were when the book came out to wide acclaim in the middle of it. Those contemplating seeing the river in what the dramatic might call its death throes – before the dam is finished – should slip this into the coat pocket: it remains a classic.

  Lyman van Slyke's excellent Yangtze – Nature, History and the River, which was published as a Stanford paperback in 1988, offers a rag-bag of fascinations about the river, and is eccentric, scholarly and amusing. It has countless maps and diagrams and photographs, and a good list of suggestions for further inquiry.


  And finally there is Judy Bonavia's splendid guidebook, The Yangzi River, in a new edition (Hong Kong, 1995) with additional comments by the knowledgeable Madeleine Lynn. The book has precious little information about the river anywhere upstream of Yibin, but for coverage of Chongqing and the Gorges, and of the more placid and more historically notable sites below Yichang and downriver to Shanghai, it is unrivalled. To fill in the gaps in those parts of Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet that are overlooked by this guide, one might with profit consult either a recent edition of Lonely Planet's Travel Survival Guide to China (Melbourne, 1994), or the Odyssey Guide to Sichuan (Hong Kong, 1993).

  There are two good Admiralty charts of the river: numbers 2916, covering Shanghai to Datong, and 2947 for ships and their passengers wishing to go up to Yichang and the Gezhouba Dam.

  The best easily available topographical maps of the area are the American 1:500,000 Tactical Pilotage Charts: the numbers of the ten sheets needed to cover the entire river are as follows (they begin as I did, at the sea): H-12B, G-10D, H-12A, H-11B, H-11A, H-11D, H-10C, H-10B, G-8C and G-8D. The less easily obtained JOG charts, which are at the very useful scale of 1:250,000 (four miles to the inch), have a very different notation system: for instance, the JOG chart of the Great Bend at Shigu is sheet number NG 47–7, and that covering Tiger Leaping Gorge is NC 47–3.

  Ships and Shipping

  There can be few books more indicative of a lifetime's passion than G. R. G. Worcester's The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze, which the Naval Institute Press of Annapolis sensibly put out as a revised single volume (there had been four) in 1971. It reads easily, and is copiously illustrated with Worcester's own line drawings: every imaginable detail about the river, its boats and boatsmen, and its boatsmen's lore, is tucked away in this sea chest of history.

  But even Worcester's great effort must pale in comparison with Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, which a team working for Cambridge University Press is still labouring to produce, even though Needham himself, the originator, has now died. The volume that covers matters of interest to river travellers is Volume 4, Part III – Civil Engineering and Nautics, published in 1971. It is well worth hunting down in a secondhand bookshop. I found mine, a treasure true, in a shop in Connecticut, on payment of what I still think of as a bargain $75.

  The Royal Navy's Yangtze Pilot – later the Ch'ang Chiang Pilot – is a typically unsmiling and bloodless sailor's account of the river from Cape Nelson to the Head of Navigation, prepared for use on ships' bridges, and in the bathtubs of those who, on cold winter nights, derive great pleasure (as I do, and as did Mr Mitty) from sailing on imagined journeys to exotic and faraway ports. Sadly the Pilot went out of print after its 1954 London edition, largely because the Communists sharply limited foreign access to their rivers; but a shortened version of the material is to be found still in chapter 9 of the Admiralty's China Sea Pilot, Volume 3, printed in London in 1982 and still available in chart shops.

  I would also strongly recommend reading Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles, a deservedly classic novel set among the Yangtze Patrol sailors and the missionaries they helped protect during the turbulent warlord years. (There is no connection between McKenna's Pebble and Hersey's – the gunboat in McKenna's story is called the USS San Pablo, and Sand Pebble is her nickname.) See the film too: a very winsome Candice Bergen and the late Steve McQueen appear in it, and the mood that it captures – even though it was largely made on location on Hong Kong – has an uncanny truth that all travellers in China will recognize.

  David Grover's American Merchant Ships on the Yangtze 1920–1941 (Westport, 1992) and Admiral Kemp Tolley's Yangtze Patrol (Annapolis, 1971) present useful and competent accounts of foreign shipping on the great river. Captain Graham Torrible, who worked on a number of CN Co. boats from 1925 until the outbreak of the Second World War, wrote his amusing and informative Yangtze Reminiscences, which was privately published by Swires in London in 1975.

  The Three Gorges and the New Dam

  Dai Qing's Yangtze, Yangtze (Earthscan, Toronto, 1994), the publication of which in China won her plaudits for her courage, is available in English now, and presents a formidable collection of engineering papers and polemics that may be too technical for many readers' tastes. I rather prefer the lighter but none the less passionate tone of Caroline Walker's On Leaving Bai Di Cheng (the title is that of one of Li Bai's best-known poems about the river), which was published by NC Press, Toronto, in 1993. It is a somewhat ill-organized book, but the four writers share a deep concern for the loss of so much of China's archaeological relics, once the waters from the dam begin rising.

  Since Cornell Plant is such a hero of mine, I can find little to criticize in his slim volume Glimpses of the Yangtze Gorges (Shanghai, 1936), which some enterprising publisher may one day see fit to republish, given the new topicality of the Gorges story. The somewhat matter-of-fact writings of Mr Plant are enhanced hugely by Ivon Donnelly's charming pen-and-ink drawings, and the book is a collector's joy.

  Archibald Little's Through the Yangtze Gorges or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London, 1888) has the cumbersome literary style common to most Victorian travel writings; but his achievements were such, and his journeyings so extensive, that it is still a book to be read, more than a century on. Similarly Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, which first came out in London in 1899, but which was republished in London and Boston in 1985, should be consulted as a record of amazing personal achievement – as well as being an advertisement for the continuing benefits of Mrs Bird's thick tweed skirt – but it is a somewhat trying read today.

  In Addition

  There are countless books about the city of Shanghai: I have long liked Noel Barber's The Fall of Shanghai (London, New York, 1979) which more than most has managed to capture the feckless and amoral mood of the place and time that made up this great whorehouse of a city. The 1983 Hong Kong reprint of the 1934 edition of the Standard Guide Book to Shanghai does much the same, though in a more mannerly fashion.

  Henry Hobhouse wrote engagingly about the Chinese tea industry in his astonishing Seeds of Change (New York, 1986). Joseph Rock's monumental work, Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China (Cambridge, 1948), is complemented today by a book of Rock's pictures, Lamas, Princes and Brigands, edited by Michael Aris (New York, 1992). This elegant coffee-table book tells much of Rock's amazing story and offers a full bibliography including references to all nine of his National Geographic magazine articles, which should be read by anyone thinking of venturing to this most fabulous part of the world.

  The Thistle and the Jade by Maggie Keswick (London, 1982) is the Jardines account of its operations in the East; and ten years later Swires published its Pictorial History of China Navigation Company Limited: both volumes, though vanity books, offer a wealth of detail about the operations in the Yangtze valley during the height of European penetration.

  Finally, Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen, both of whom are well skilled in the rigours of the outdoors, have written a splendid account of the bizarre contest during the late 1980s between the teams of Americans and Chinese who were determined to be the first to raft the entire length of the river. Riding the Dragon's Back (New York, 1989) turns out to be a simply excellent book – about China, about the river, about the history of both, and almost incidentally about the fatal lunacy that propelled men and women from around China and the world to try to descend through terrible stretches of white water like Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge. If I had to read only one book about the river, it would probably be this. The story evidently so captivated the authors that they managed to make this a general and wide-ranging book about the Yangtze, with the race and its attendant disasters a mere metaphor to display the might of the world's most important river.

  Index

  Admiralty Pilot for the Yangtze, The, 30, 45, 94, 161, 410

  Aerodromes, 220, 246, 375

  Agricultural communes, 187

  Agriculture, 174–
5, 184, 294–5

  Ailao Shan, 365

  Air services, 220–22

  Airports, 216, 220–21, 246, 253

  Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, 21, 130, 206, 211

  Alien's Travel Permit, 372–3

  Alligators, 162, 246

  Altitude sickness, 354, 396–7

  American Merchant Ships on the Yangtze 1920–1941 (Grover), 410

  Amethyst, HMS, 105–11, 265, 286

  Amherst, Lord, 29

  Amoy, 72

  Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China (Rock), 412

  Anhui province, 197

  Anjue Si lamasery, 380

  Annam, 366

  Anning River, 370

  Anqing, 160

  Anthropological discoveries, 25, 292–3

  Aris, Michael, 412

  Armstrong, Lord, 71

  Asian Development Bank, 241

  Assam, 151

  Aswan Dam, 234, 235

  Auden, W. H., 8, 73, 215

  Aylward, Gladys, 95

  Azhu relationships, 334

  Backhouse, Edmund, 127

  Backyard furnaces, 187

  Baedeker, Karl, 128

  Bai people, 325

  Bakong Scripture Printing House, 389–91

  Balfour, Sir George, 52, 75

  Bamboo industry, 283, 294

  Bangs, Richard, 412

  Barber, Noel, 412

  Barhour, George, 229

  Barolo, Giancarlo, 125–8

  Batang, 356, 373, 377, 386

  Bates, H. E., 325

  Beard, Daniel, 236

  Beijing, 50–51, 54, 124, 189, 200, 201, 240, 281n, 351, 355, 401

  Belloc, Hilaire, 376

  Bergman, Ingrid, 95

  Bicycle accident, 118–20