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

by Simon Winchester

  A buzz of smaller boats wove their way dangerously among the slow-moving cargo vessels. Many were fishing boats, and to judge from the huge silver arc lights that were suspended on bamboo poles from their bridge wings, they were off to hunt for cuttlefish, at night. Astronauts have reported seeing a diamond-dust twinkle on the black ink of the sea out here: scores of cuttlefish boats out at night on the waters between China and Korea. These passing craft would have been members of that little fleet, probably utterly ignorant that they were visible (unlike the much more frequently touted Great Wall, which can't be seen) from outer space.

  The river went on narrowing, steadily. On the right now was a low and treeless bulk of mud-and-misery known as Chongming Dao, the Tongue of the Yangtze – so called because on the maps it does look just like a lolling tongue, poised halfway between the open jaws of the river. It had once been a place of banishment, like Sakhalin, and the men sent there did little but build dikes to protect the island and their prison from being inundated. During the Cultural Revolution a Shanghainese poet whose daughter I know well was sent there to prepare the land for raising pigs.* Now, thanks to the labours of men like him and his predecessors, the island is quite fertile: a million people live on Chongming Island, farming rice, raising ducks, planting cotton.

  On the left – and here the total river width was now down to about ten miles – I could just see the first buildings, the first evidence of real human settlement. There were the usual constructions of a coastline: a chimney or two, a cluster of radio masts, a water tower, barracks. Then, after another mile, a tall building, maybe a block of workers' flats.

  No pagodas, though. I had very much doubted that I would see a pagoda on this coast – the people who live here, on the drying mudflats of the estuary, have long been isolated from the mainstream Chinese and from their customs. They are darker, almost Malay in their appearance, a little like the aboriginals who are to be found in central Taiwan. These never were a pagoda-building people; and any hopes I might have had for spying a graceful structure of nine slightly fluted storeys, with upcurved eaves, a delicate spire and arched windows overgrown with kudzu, and from which I could imagine some Tang duke gazing out toward the ocean in the moonlight – all such hopes were quite in vain.

  These people lived on mud; they paddled their sampans down a labyrinth of small canals, they contentedly raised ducks and rice and they fished for squid. An early guide warns Europeans that the mud-people ‘are not altogether free from piratical tendencies’. But then came civilization, of a kind: someone came and built a factory, and slapped up some modern hulk of cement and iron. This was about all I could see – mud and grey reinforced cement. There was certainly precious little drama about this particular approach to China – this was indeed no Verrazano Narrows, no Pool of London. Captain Zhu saw me looking at the coast. ‘Soon there will be a golf club there,’ he spat. ‘A country club for rich Shanghai people.’ He didn't sound too pleased.

  We were into a fairway now. The marker buoys came more regularly, and most of the ever increasing armada of ships seemed to be obeying rules of the road in the dredged channels – the inbound vessels were sticking to the right, the outbound to the left. A radar tower reared above the brilliant yellow of a rapeseed field, its thumbnail-shaped scanner turning languidly, noting all the ships passing underneath, missing nothing. But the river was starting to look crowded, dangerously so. I mentioned it to the captain.

  ‘They say it's the most dangerous approach in the world,’ he replied, cheerfully. ‘I've seen some foreign masters freeze, just stop their ships, not knowing what to do. Coming in for the first time can be quite terrifying. Even with a pilot aboard. There are sandbanks that pop up out of nowhere. Whirlpools.

  ‘The tide is terribly erratic. You can get a flood a thousand miles away and it sends a surge of water down the Yangtze and poof, it blows the tide back in its tracks. There are wrecks everywhere. You see a mast in the water and there's no buoy marking it and you think, My God! what if I hadn't seen it? What if there hadn't been anything poking up out of the water? What if I'd just sailed into it?’

  Lily nodded. She said she had once worked for a man who had a ship-breaking business a few miles upriver. She was still interested, and had made it her business to know all about the wrecks in the Yangtze mouth. One of her boss's ships, a thirty-year-old bulk carrier that he had bought for scrap in Manila and was having towed to his breakers' yard, had capsized in the river just the week before. One of the tug captains was said to have been drunk, and had no idea where he was going.

  ‘I know the ship! I know it!’ exclaimed Zhu, warming to the task. ‘It was a big one – twelve thousand tons. It hit the side of a sandbank and just turned over. Right over there.’ He pointed towards a patch of sludge-coloured river a mile off our starboard beam. ‘Now – do you see a wreck buoy, one of the green ones? No – not a thing. No one's gotten round to marking it. There's nothing to tell anything's there. Only a few people know about it. But the fact is there's a great big ship lying down there, in just three fathoms of water. So easy to hit it. It'd rip the bottom from a tanker, just like a sushi knife! Very dangerous!

  ‘And there's more! Not just the wrecks and the sand. There's all the traffic. They have wrecks in Calcutta, on the Hooghly. Lots of sand there, too. What's the big bank there – the St James's Bank? That's a bad one, I remember. I went up the Hooghly once. They have a Bund there, don't they? Just like us. But they don't have the traffic. Who wants to go to Calcutta, after all?

  ‘But here – what do they say officially – a thousand ships a day? That's only the ones with radios and radar reflectors. There are thousands more that have no marks at all, no lights, nothing. You try to keep out of their way, you run into a sandbank and, bang. Look – see if there's a red flag up on the bar there. There usually is at this time of day. That's the signal station, where they keep an eye on things. That'll tell you how bad the traffic is.’

  Sure enough, two miles ahead and waving lazily in the hot breeze, was an enormous flag. The Admiralty Pilot explains: ‘When the number of junks manoeuvring in the channel at Wusong Kou is such as to make navigation difficult, a red flag shall be hoisted.’ And as if to underscore the flag's warning, there were scores of black dots on the waters ahead, like a vast floating business of flies. Some were large ships that moved slowly across my field of view; the others, the smaller vessels, darted almost furtively back and forth on their appointed business.

  They dart where once they glided. The junks on nearly all the reaches of the Lower Yangtze have motors these days, not sails. It is a rare delight to see the distinctive shape of a classic Chinese junk – the peaked lugsail with its die-straight luff and sinuous leech and with the heavy bamboo battens jutting from the edges. But the bewildering variety of craft that scuttle between the riverbanks today performs much the same functions as the sailing junks did half a century ago – there are almost as many different designs of power vessels as there were of the old and much-loved sailing junks. Captain Zhu had a book of charts on the bridge that showed silhouettes of the different types – and at the back of the book, on pages that were less well-thumbed, were silhouettes of sailing junks as well.

  Scores of subtly different designs were to be found on the pages, dozens of sizes, boats bent to innumerable tasks, a nautical bestiary. Flipping through the pages was like seeing a shadow play, the boats the cut-paper figures from a Javan wayang show. There were outlines of the long, low cotton boats from Chongming, which take raw cotton out to the markets of Shanghai, and return with what is politely called night soil, still the principal fertilizer on the great tongue-like mudflat. There were silhouettes of the pig boats also from Chongming, but larger and fatter and with a bulk that was easy to recognize. They had to be sturdy, since their business was with pigs* taken to market, people brought back. There were pictures of ice carriers that transport blocks frozen in the fields in midwinter – and which are kept insulated through the warmth of early spring by inge
nious arrangements of straw and soil. There were broad-beamed fish carriers, made stoutly of pine to weather the estuary's storms and heavy seas and tide rips. It is said that the game of mah-jongg was invented by the crew of a Ningbo fish-carrying junk, who believed that by making up a game on which they had to concentrate their minds they might forget a discomfort which they couldn't understand, which we now know as seasickness.

  But you don't see too many of these special craft. More often than not the smaller boats on this reach of the estuary would be the tiny stern-poled (and sailless) sampans, so called because they are made of three pieces of wood, compared with the five of the wupans – and on the day I arrived they seemed to be everywhere. I knew that once in a while one might see one of the larger vessels – like a long-distance coastal trading junk, or one of the special light-wood junks built so they can ride up and over the deadly bore that sweeps down into the funnel of Hangzhou Bay, on the far side of the Yangtze herself. But on this morning I saw neither of these bigger craft. Still, with all the activity that I could see from where I stood on deck, it was small wonder that the red warning flag was flying. Small wonder, too, that inspection cruisers like this one patrol the river ceaselessly, helping, watching, guarding.

  On the left side – technically the right bank of the river, reckoned from the point of view of the water flowing downstream – there was a sudden burst of industry. Cooling towers exhaled tall florets of white cloud, cranes swung containers up from the decks of waiting ships, black rubbery umbilical cords sucked oil from waiting tankers, there was what appeared to be a mine building with two winding wheels rotating at speed, an array of great chimneys with strobe lights and with typhoon gantries bolted up their sides, to keep them standing in the storm winds of midsummer. In the distance, ranks of skyscrapers marched across the horizon. I could see the glint of the sun on hundreds of windshields as trucks and cars waited for a steam train to chuff by and let their drivers pass. The land was well established: the city was now beginning.

  And Wusong Kou, where the flag was flying, was where it all really starts. True, the Gateway is the technical beginning or the technical end of the river; but Wusong Kou is the place that anyone with any sense of the romantic, anyone with any sense of history, regards as the terminus of the river proper. The Chinese know it by this name: the world's mariners, however, know it by a slight variation, by a name that is as familiar to their rollicking community as is Blood Alley or the Liver Building or Dundalk Docks.

  This place, with its scarlet warning flag and its lighthouse and the twenty-foot dial of what looks like a clock, but is in fact the Whangpoo River Tide Gauge, is the spot where all vessels bound for Shanghai – which means most of the ships found in the estuary – turn left. It is, depending on your perspective, the beginning of the Yangtze proper, or the true end of a trip across a long, long sea. This spot on the river, formally marked by just a single red canister buoy, is known as the Woosung Bar.

  A century ago Tennyson planted an image that has lasted longest: the bar as a place of danger and melancholy, where sailors wave their farewells, where the pilots wait to steer a mariner home. Crossing the Bar is an event: leaving, you pass from still waters into swells; returning, you take one last risk, since at the bar the sea has one last chance to toy with you, and toss you over in the foam. But if you do make it past – and on a gale-swept day the waves and spindrift on a river bar can make for a terrifying sight, and perilous navigation – then you are home, safe and sound.

  The Woosung Bar is more benign, however, than anything Tennyson had in mind. It marks the spot where one river, the Whangpoo, meets the Yangtze.* The meeting is as calm as the meeting of most rivers: there is no line of breakers, no cloud of spume. It is not a dangerous place – but it is, and long has been, a wretched nuisance. It once caused great friction between East and West. It exercised the minds and pens of diplomats for scores of years. And all because a great tongue of Whangpoo mud and sand oozes endlessly out onto the bed of the Yangtze and, because the Yangtze waters are pushed and pulled back and forth by tide and flood, the mud stays more or less where it is, thickening all the time. The estuary is generally about fifty feet deep: at the Woosung Bar it shallows in places to no more than about twelve. The shallowing was a nineteenth-century cause célèbre.

  The problem was never noticed by the Chinese of a century ago: they glided serenely up and down the rivers on sailing junks that drew ten feet, or even five. But when the foreign traders began to arrive, in iron ships that customarily drew twenty feet or more, they were in for some unpleasant surprises. Perhaps their leadsmen may have warned them in time: often they did not. A river that until the 1850s had been alive with moving traffic was, twenty years later, suddenly replete with barbarian vessels stopped dead in the water and hopelessly stuck.

  Some had been stranded on their way in. Others, seemingly luckier, managed to get in, but then went to load themselves at the wharves with tons of rhubarb and tea and bolts of silk and sacks of rice – and then found they were drawing too much, that the bar would not let them get out. The local Lloyd's agent duly sent the cables home to London, warning of delay and demurrage. ‘The Travancore sailed out with the mails but was unable to cross the bar, and spent a whole day unloading her cargo into lighters to lessen her load…’ ‘I beg to report that the Australia was detained for five days at Woosung…’ ‘The French mail-steamer Provence was unable to reach Shanghae at all…’ It made a nonsense of the river as a trading route. The great artery of China, as barkers had already long been advertising the Yangtze, suddenly had a bad case of sclerosis.

  By the mid-1870s merchants, weary of having their ships pinned by sand, began to lose their tempers. They wrote angry letters: the State of the Woosung Bar, which sounds today like a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, became a heated talking point in the coffeehouses of Cheapside and the bars on the Fulton Street waterfront.

  An august-sounding body known as the Association for the Protection of Commercial Interests as Respects Wrecked and Damaged Property wrote to Lord Granville at the Foreign Office: the Bar, they said, is ‘an impediment to shipping… a cause for great anxiety’. It could be cleared, the technical people had advised the Association, without more than ordinary difficulty, and with no extravagant expense. Indeed it could, agreed Vice-Admiral Charles Shadwell, writing from his cabin on HMS Iron Duke in Hong Kong harbour. Chinese coolies could move the mud by hand, he said; their labour was very cheap. There was, in short, no practical reason why the Bar could not be cleared, and navigation allowed to move freely. It merely needed one thing: for ‘the superior authorities at Peking’ to give their permission.

  But there, it turned out, was the rub. Peking, as it was called in the documents of the day, didn't seem to give a fig about the Bar. Haughty, aloof, unaware of all matters considered beneath their dignity, the Manchus in the Forbidden City paid no official attention to the wails of the red-haired, long-nosed Uitlanders. Privately they must have been delighted. What buffoons these foreigners were, indeed! Nothing much had changed, it seemed, since 1793, when Lord Macartney had tried in vain to cajole and flatter the Emperor of the day, and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. The diplomat had offered to the Celestial Throne the very best goods that Britain had ever made in an effort to win permission to do business, and to be recognized. But the Emperor was not remotely interested. The gifts were regarded as items of tribute from a respectful liege. Some boxes were never even opened. Macartney was asked to go home.

  And the Emperor of eight decades later was similarly unbothered by the travails and demands of the foreign merchants. The dignity of the Long River, the Throne implied by its silence, was not to be sullied by such vulgarities as dredging, just because the barbarians wanted it so. Despite torrents of letters that passed between ambassadors and ministers and high dignitaries of the Manchu Court, nothing was done. ‘You should do all that you properly can to induce the Chinese government,’ wrote Lord Granville to his man on the spot, ‘to take st
eps for improving the condition on the bar.’ ‘I have sent three identic letters to the Prince,’ wrote the Earl of Derby. But it did no good. Prince Kung, the mandarin who was in charge of the Tsungli Yamen – the Office of the General Administration of the Affairs of Different Countries – did not even deign to reply.

  It was not until the eve of the Revolution that was to end the rule of the emperors and princes that this impasse was ended. It was 1905: the Manchus were on their last legs and knew it, and in part because of weakness, in part as a placatory gesture that might work for their survival, they gave permission to the foreigners to begin their work. A Dutchman named de Rijke, an expert on the polders back home, was the first to bring in the dredging engines. By 1910 he had completed the first channel through the Bar. When the first Chinese president, the foreign-educated Sun Yat-sen, came home to China in 1912 he entered via the Yangtze – and he sailed symbolically to Shanghai through the foreign-engineered channel. In 1937 – just in time for the Japanese war, as it happened – the entire length of the Whangpoo was finally dredged, so that ships drawing twenty-eight feet could pass all the way from the Pacific Ocean, along the estuary of the Yangtze, up into the Whangpoo and right up to the wharves on the Bund.

  The perils of the sands lessened, then vanished altogether. Shanghai duly took her place as one of the world's great trading cities, and the Yangtze made good on her promise to become a huge highway into the very heart of China. Yet had the Manchus remained in control in Beijing, it might never have been so. As a symbol of Chinese Imperial intransigence clashing head-on with western mercantile realism – or, viewed another way, as a symbol of ancient and home-grown pride clashing with an alien culture of greed – the sixty-year saga of the State of the Woosung Bar has few equals.