It was now the turn of the Railway Protection Movement to spread the revolution across the nation. It was like watching a fast-burning fuse: the movement's disciples rallied soldiers to their cause by the thousands, and exulted as the rebellion spread with astonishing speed, leaping from city to city – particularly in south China – along the newly built railway lines that linked them. There were massacres of Manchus – one particularly noteworthy for its scale in the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. Governors and viceroys and Manchu generals were assassinated, unexpected alliances formed hurriedly to pledge allegiance to forces fighting against the dying Qing dynasty.
The railways sped government troops down from Beijing, but they found that other railways – rebel-held railways – had sped revolutionary forces to intercept them, to slow the progress of the Imperial counterattack. By November government generals in the north were themselves beginning to question the orders coming from within the Manchu fastness of the Forbidden City.
There were attempts at compromise, placatory noises came from the Court, from the very regents and the powerful old eunuchs who surrounded the child-emperor. But it was to no avail.
The North-China Daily News in Shanghai (the city's eventual intimate involvement in the rebellion showing once again the importance of the Yangtze valley as its birthplace) published the rebel manifesto on 14 November. It is a long document – one whose principal points should be as well-known, perhaps, as those of the American Declaration of Independence, written a century and a half before. The revolutionaries' anger had been triggered by the sale of their birthright to foreign powers, but the real enemy was still the Manchu who had performed the sale. Foreigners, if they were dealt with as equals, could offer China many benefits – but only if the Manchus would get out of the way:
The foreign powers individually and collectively have stood hammering at the door of China for centuries, pleading for the diffusion of knowledge, a reformation of the national services, the adoption of Western sciences and industrial processes, a jettisoning of the crude, out-of-date and ignoble concepts which have multiplied to keep the nation without. the pale of the great family constituting the civilized world. They have failed.
The Manchu Dynasty has triumphantly carried on its reactionary policy despite the strongest pressure exerted from within and without, until the oppressed people could endure the disgrace and the contumely of it no longer. They rose, and with what results the history of the past few weeks has shown.
The Manchu Dynasty has been tried by a patient and peaceful people for centuries, and has been found more than wanting. It has sacrificed the reverence, forfeited the regard and lost the confidence freely reposed in it by all Chinese.
Its promises in the past have proved delusions and snares. Its promises for the future can carry no weight, deserve no consideration, and merit no trust.
The popular wish is that the Dynasty must go.
On Christmas Day 1911, the man whose ideas had been central to all this ferment, Sun Yat-sen, returned from France, where he had been making sure that Europe remained neutral in the conflict.* He came by sea to Shanghai, and was swiftly elected provisional president of the Chinese Republic. He travelled upstream to Nanjing and assumed office on New Year's Day 1912. The revolution that had begun on the Yangtze saw its creator return from exile to the Yangtze, saw him travel up the Yangtze to stake his capital in a city on the Yangtze. There could be no better signal that the river was at the centre of the new national entity.
Forty-two days later, on 12 February 1912, the six-year-old Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, who was known by his reign name of Xuan-tong, formally abdicated.† He was the last of the Manchus, and he was the last Emperor of China.
Our hotel was on the very edge of the old Russian Concession, and from my room I could look out over the mansard roofs and the grimy colonnades of houses in the French Concession next door. It was raining by the time I got to my room, and I watched as an old man in his underwear clambered about on the roof outside, retrieving sooty washing from a rusted cable that sagged between two chimney pots. He had disturbed a flock of pigeons, which flapped and fluttered and swooped like a grubby blanket, back and forth over the tops of the houses. In the distance a small red helicopter chattered up and down the riverbank, a television crew on board filming the swimmers who, in their hundreds, were still crossing the flooded stream.
Wuhan in the rain is no city of joy. It bustled, certainly – in the narrow streets at the back of the concessions there were banks and boutiques and amusement arcades, and thousands of people were jammed everywhere, even on a wet Sunday like this, selling and buying, shouting and arguing.
In one scrofulous alley I stumbled across, of all things, an American yogurt shop, a franchise of the highwayside and airport giant known as T C B Y, The Country's Best Yogurt. I rushed in to buy something for Lily. She had never had frozen yogurt, and I thought her social awareness might profit from a tub of vanilla-and-chocolate swirl, topped with fragments of a crushed Heath bar. But she grimaced after the first mouthful. ‘How do you people eat stuff so sweet?’ she said, offering the tub back. I motioned to her to hold on to it, and suddenly felt keenly sorry for the young girls who worked behind the counter, and who were gazing at me intently to see if we were enjoying the results of their labours. I shrugged an excuse to the effect I had to eat the stuff out in the street, and made as dignified an exit as I could.
The simple existence of a TCBY store in Wuhan rang a bell, however. As Lily and I walked farther into town, I recalled a conversation that my wife had had a year or so before at a dinner party in Hong Kong. She had been cornered by a languid fop from Jardines, a young man whose task was to develop the firm's interests in China.
‘This cold yogurt stuff the Americans like,’ he said with obvious distaste, both for yogurt and Americans, ‘and these Mexican thingies, “tacos” I believe they're called – do you think John Chinaman would like them?
‘I ask,’ he continued, ‘because the franchise is up for grabs. Frightful-sounding places I imagine, names like Taco Bell and TCBY. But we can't be too proud, can we? – we're wondering whether to slap up a few in China.’ He smiled, in a reptilian way.
I had no way of knowing whether market research like this did any good, even whether the yogurt shop in Wuhan was indeed a Jardines venture. If it was, there was an element of drollery to the story, considering that the firm's first sales in the city were of opium, a more obviously addictive product. Whether John Chinaman likes yogurt or not, time will tell: one Jane Chinaman did not. But opium was evidently liked well enough by all.
The West has been trying things out on the people of Wuhan for decades test marketing them much as they might do in Nottingham or Chicago. It is said that, among other things, the Gatling gun, the fedora, basketball, steam engines and the notions of unionized labour and representative democracy were all first tested on the people of Wuhan. Opium, however, was not among the items that the West introduced to Wuhan, or to China. The trade that grew up between British India and China, which was explained in the previous chapter, was created to satisfy or to exploit, depending on your point of view an already existing habit. The Indian opium augmented an already very considerable domestic harvest. Even as late as 1908, a trade report for Hankou showed, for instance, that while 34,000 pounds of opium had been landed in the port from the Indian regions of Patna and Malwa, some 65,000 pounds had come downstream, from the Chinese poppy fields of Yunnan and Sichuan. The point is often forgotten: the Chinese were already heavy users of the drug by the time the British traders moved in and, like the Mafia, sought to dominate and control the trade.
There was business in more prosaic products too. At the beginning of the century scores of foreign ships – from Britain in the main, but also from Norway, Russia, Germany, France, and United States and Holland – came regularly up the Yangtze as far as Hankou. Tankers brought in paraffin for the Standard Oil Company's bunkers. British and Dutch steamers brought oil from Borneo and Sumat
ra. Oregon pinewood was brought in aboard British freighters, and a German bulk carrier brought in monthly shipments of cement from Haiphong (the port in Vietnam to which, according to the legend, the Yangtze might have flowed, had the first Chinese Emperor, Yü the Great, not had the source waters diverted).
The imports were of ordinary, unremarkable goods like this, as well as shirting material, pig iron, tin slabs, cigarettes, firebricks, matches, needles, potash, railway ties, tea chests, umbrellas. Nothing exceptional, nothing with a hint of romance about it.
But Hankou's exports at the time – these were the very stuff of China! The manifest of an outbound steamer could read like a page from The Good Earth: cargoes of bean cake, white rice, lotus seeds, fungus, raw white silk, cocoons, goatskins, cotton, vermicelli, sesame oil, tung oil, quicksilver, nutgalls, musk, ramie, cowhides, bran, bristles, rhubarb, straw braid and, of course, tea – tea in bags and boxes and half-chests, tea offered as black, brick, mixed, green, log, tablet, oolong or dust.
The docks of a century ago must have been a remarkable sight. The junks would be crowded a hundred feet deep on the banks of the Han Shui, their sides painted every colour imaginable. Scores of the shops were riverborne, with the merchant's business, or the craftsman's craft, advertised by an item flying from the mast – a hank of rope, a barber's brush, a shirt, a queue of plaited hair. And onshore the narrow lanes were overhung with crimson and gold signboards, and crowded with jostling and sweating coolies and fat mandarins in their gilded chairs passing to and fro. There would be the sound of cymbals and the whiff of incense and the strange sweet smell of opium drifting up from the dark divans. And, in the background, the ominous sounds of shunting and whistling from the steam trains that would before long play so instrumental a part in changing it all.
Wuhan was more than merely mercantile, more than a simple Chinese Chicago, however: for a while, between the mid-twenties and the late thirties, the city assumed some of the seedily anarchic qualities of Shanghai, becoming an ideological capital of China, a place through which men and women of all conceivable political persuasions passed, en route to somewhere else.
Christopher Isherwood noted the phenomenon in Journey to a War, when he wrote that ‘history, grown weary of Shanghai, bored with Barcelona, has fixed her capricious interest on Hang-kow – but where is she staying?’ He and W. H. Auden, fixing their own capricious interest on the city, decided that they liked its self-appointed role as a quasi-capital, a place where ‘Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley, Chou En-lai, generals, ambassadors, journalists, foreign naval officers, soldiers of fortune, airmen, missionaries, spies' all congregated, betraying and deceiving one another by turn.
It was a centre of revolutionary faith and fervour throughout the years between 1911 and 1949– indeed, it was for many years the city where Mikhail Borodin, the amazing and enormous Russian Comintern agent who, it is often forgotten, fashioned the Kuomintang (KMT) into what was initially a properly Leninist organization, was based and where he performed some of his most impressive labours. Chiang Kai-shek did his eventual best to remove the Communists from the KMT – in 1927 sending a campaign of terror, of ‘punishment without leniency' up along the Yangtze from Shanghai to Wuhan. But it did little to lessen Wuhan's importance as a centre of leftist militancy, and the role the city played in Mao's eventual victory in 1949 matched the role it had played in Sun Yat-sen's success in 1911. It was always as rough and gritty in its politics as industry had made it in its atmosphere. Not a pretty place – but an important one.
Today the ferment and the jostle is much the same, though cars crowd among the rickshaws and there are sleek and brilliantined men with shiny suits, cellular phones clamped to their ears. Plenty of foreigners are here: men from Budweiser setting up a brewery, men from AT&T tinkering with the telephones, the big European information firms – Siemens, Philip, Alcatel – doing much the same, plugging Wuhan into digital networks. These men live well-fed but lonely lives in a tiny hotel well away from the Bund, and they loathe the place cordially.
The longer-established business houses of the tri-cities are prospering in a thousand brand-new ways, and they are in most cases jammed into the old structures that the foreigners built in Edwardian times. Wuhan bank clerks, who when awakened will honour letters of credit and perform cable transfers and hand over cash on presentation of a credit card from almost any country on earth, sleep their afternoons away under Victorian iron archways and stained-glass windows and under the light of dull brass library lamps. Trading companies are crammed into dusty art deco palaces and crumbling godowns; there are real estate brokers and paging firms and couriers where once there were more classically Chinese functionaries, likin officials, octroi collectors and compradors.
Hong Kong businessmen have now begun to infiltrate Wuhan with a sudden eagerness not nearly as evident in other cities. It is true that most major centres in China have one or two establishments whose headquarters are in Hong Kong – there are Hong Kong-run hotels in places as remote as Ürümqi, and Hong Kong-owned office blocks in faraway Shenyang and Kashgar. But in Wuhan there is much, much more. The city has been put on a quick and easy non-stop flight route from Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport, and to the southern businessmen who fly in each day, Wuhan is now their most proximate example of the real China, the closest big city of the Chinese heartland. (What they have on their doorstep in cities like Canton and Xiamen are still very obviously southern Chinese cities, with the southern tongue spoken, southern food eaten, southern attitudes struck.) Hong Kong developers are now pouring in, busily putting up scores of hotels and department stores and trade centres, with promises of multiplex cinemas, nightclubs, and hostess palaces. Hong Kong businessmen are rebuilding the Wuhan airport. They have put money into the gleaming and delicate new Yangtze bridge. There is talk of yet another southern-built bridge, this time over the Han Shui. A Hong Kong bank is financing a new six-lane expressway into the city's heart.
It is in part because of this that I find myself unaccountably prejudiced, and have come to like Wuhan a great deal less than I like Shanghai. Cities like Shanghai and Nanjing are growing fast – too fast for comfort, it is true – but they appear, on the surface at least, to be performing their growth by a large measure of their own hard work, with their own villainy, much of their own money. The city fathers of Wuhan, however, have embarked on a developmental pas de deux with Hong Kong businessmen. There is, perhaps as a direct corollary, a temporary and jerrybuilt feel to the new Wuhan, as though a new metropolis is being constructed with its primary purpose the swift enrichment of taipans and their companies in the not-so-far-away territory to the south. Wuhan may be a city with good reason to be proud of its history. But I wonder whether it has much to be proud of in its present. Lily remarked often on the gimcrack, meretricious appearance of Wuhan, and said she disliked the place as heartily as I did. On our last evening there she made a joke about the truism of the old cliché of the city's best feature being the road out.
It turned out that this too was being built by a firm based in Hong Kong. Toll barriers were being welded into place, ensuring that some distant Southerner could make easy money and a quick profit from a city that more than most seems to have become the Southerner's unwitting new client in the Chinese heartland.
Mao Zedong was a very considerable poet – in output, if not always in quality – and he was prone to memorialize what he regarded as his greater achievements with lines of verse. His poem ‘Swimming' is one of his best-known. He wrote it in 1956, shortly after his first swim in the Yangtze: he had come from swimming both the Pearl River in Canton and Xiang River at Changsha, which is why he began this brief gem as he did – lines that retain most of their value, even allowing that Chinese poetry loses much in the translation:
I have just drunk the waters of Changsha
And come to eat the fish of Wuchang –
Now I am swimming across the great Yangtze
Looking up to the open sky of Chu.
Let the
wind blow and the waves beat –
Better far than an aimless stroll in a courtyard.
Today I am at ease:
It was by a stream that the Master said –
‘Life – like the waters – rushes into the past!’
Sails move with the wind,
Tortoise and Snake Hills are motionless.
Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the North and South
Turning a barrier into a thoroughfare.
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain Goddess, if she is still there,
Will marvel at a world so changed.
You do not have to read the runes especially deeply to interpret the various meanings that are embedded in these lines. The first stanza is at once philosophical and phlegmatic, a reflection of Mao's self-image, once his swimming was done – his self-confident view of himself as a man now ready to meet the challenges of the revolution yet to come.
I had been given a copy of the poem by a manager at the hotel, the day before we left. She knew that Lily and I were going farther upstream and she wanted me, she said, to take particular note of the second stanza. The lines mentioned the new bridge, of course; but they also mentioned the ‘walls of stone' that would cause ‘a smooth lake' to rise ‘in the narrow gorges’. She made me read it, standing in the hotel lobby; and then when I had done so she produced, with a flourish, the first copy of the new booklet that she had received just that morning by express mail. It was called, none too immodestly, An Epic Undertaking. It was bound in dark blue, the calligraphy in silver: it was the story of a project that I had felt looming over me, bearing down on me, almost since I had seen the first hills by the side of the great river, hundreds of miles beyond.
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze Page 23
