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

by Simon Winchester

  Just a few miles ahead of us now, and affecting in a myriad of ways the temper of the people and the cities all around, were the beginnings of the most gargantuan project – one that would change the nature of the Yangtze for all time. It has many names: the New China, the Sandouping, the Sanxia, the Three Gorges. It has one name with which all who know the Yangtze today are intimately familiar: the Dam. Upstream the river's flow was about to be halted and constricted by a wall of concrete and iron that would cause a vast lake, and a score of other changes, to fall on the Yangtze valley like no other changes in the river's history. The dam is the defining entity of the new river and of the new China that the nation's leaders promise can be built around her.

  9

  A New Great Wall

  We decided to travel the next short section upriver by plane – if only to experience the underside of Chinese civil aviation. It so happens that the connection between Wuhan and the much smaller old treaty port of Yichang – a flight of forty minutes, compared with ten hours in a bus or another day and a night in a steamer – is not between what we would conventionally describe as airports. This trip would make use of the second tier of Chinese aviation, in which the departures and arrivals are at what might be better classified only as aerodromes.

  Horror stories of China's conventional air services are legion. I was on a flight once between Qingdao (the city where Tsingtao beer is made) and Shanghai. We were grossly overbooked, as was often the case in those days, and so the staff lugged a number of armchairs from the waiting lounge and set them down in the plane's aisle. The stewardesses, who saw no untoward safety implications in this arrangement, were irritated because they had to clamber over the lumpily stuffed chairs during the flight. But this barely affected the in-flight service: the only item the women were handing out – there was no food or drink – were small empty tins, the kind of thing in which to keep cough drops. There was no discernible reason for the gift: perhaps there had been a surplus in some distant factory.

  Then again, about a year later, I was flying to some other Yangtze valley city from Harbin, in Manchuria. I was sitting next to a young man who had never flown before, and he was frightened to death. Despite my being both a stranger and a furry barbarian, he took my hand and squeezed it white as we began the take-off roll. The aircraft accelerated to full speed, after which there was a bang, an engine erupted in smoke and we lurched off onto the grass. We rested there for half an hour while technicians swarmed over the wing, and my new friend sobbed bitterly. Then we started again, trundled back onto the runway, and the pilot said in a nervous voice: ‘OK – we try once more.’ The youngster buried his head in his hands as we took off, this time flawlessly.

  On this occasion it took us a good hour even to find the airfield. The normal Wuhan airport is a big affair, with radars, a departure hall, customs officers and touts offering taxis. But the field reserved for flights going to Yichang and similarly obscure places is not much more than a meadow, and is more or less in the middle of town. We had to find our way down a maze of back alleys, past broken-down factories and breeze-block tenements, through middens and swamps alive with black pigs. Ten minutes or so of this and then the buildings fell away and there was open land ahead, with soldiers, a couple of canvas-and-dope biplanes painted in camouflage drab and, parked outside a rusting tin shack, an ancient Russian prop-driven aircraft sporting strange wings that drooped down almost to the ground.

  Half a dozen soldiers were playing football with a beer bottle, and the plane's pilot was arguing with a taxi driver. Was this the plane for Yichang? we asked. He grunted and turned away, a response that Lily interpreted as a sign of assent and welcome. No one checked our tickets, and no one minded where, or indeed if, we sat. Eventually the pilot and a rather pretty girl in a sort of half uniform climbed aboard, looked at us and said, Yichang? A couple of elderly men and a schoolboy climbed into the plane along with us; we rolled into position, bumped over a few potholes, and took off.

  We flew very low, over a land filled with canals and dykes and lock gates. This was flood country – or, more properly, this was country where, year after year, floods downstream were meant to be taken care of. According to the maps, this was indeed the celebrated Jinjiang Flood Diversion Region, the main bastion of protection against downstream floods. According to ancient design, each time the river crested, so the locks would be opened, the diversion canals below us would be filled, the pressure on the main Yangtze dykes would be eased. Generally speaking the Jinjiang system had worked well since it was improved in the aftermath of the 1931 floods. Very occasionally these arrangements have proved less than adequate, and a few dikes were breached; then there were inundations, wreckage and death. But not this year, or at least not at this place.

  From ten thousand feet – our rattling old plane was not pressurized, and so we flew low – all looked quite benign. This was one of the season's infrequent rain-free days, so the visibility was good. Beneath us was far less a scene of disaster and mayhem than the newspapers and television reports of the previous weeks would have us believe. In one large diversion canal, perhaps three hundred yards wide, there was just a trickle of water coursing down the centre channel; and when we flew over the cement spillways of its diversion dam, they were quite dry, the iron gates between them and the Yangtze firmly shut.

  On the strength of the evidence below it was still difficult to imagine that the floods in the Yangtze valley this year were peculiarly bad. Farther south, in the rivers near Changsha, they could well be worse – I had no way of knowing. But here I still suspected that a useful fiction was being created, and whipped to a froth by the ever cunning government. All the time we'd been in Wuhan the drumbeat had been going on, night after night on television and in morning paper after morning paper: floods, floods, floods. And in truth there were some signs that this was a fairly bad year: the waters off the Bund wharves had been rushing by at frightening speed, and a blue truck that some careless driver had left on a pier was, on the day we left, up to its roof in water.

  But at the same time no dyke had been breached, no levee overcome, no city street flooded. The river may have been in a fairly robust mood, but what was being put about by the government-run press was, I felt sure, considerably more dramatic than reality. And, uncharitable though it might be, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was very largely propaganda, and if so, all in the cause of winning justification from a highly sceptical world – and a fairly sceptical China – for the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

  China, which came spectacularly early to so many technologies – printing, gunpowder, iron casting, the anchor, the compass, the rudder, the wheelbarrow – came surprisingly late to the idea of building dams. The Egyptians had blocked part of the Nile with a masonry dam near Memphis as long ago as 2900 B C: and there are Arabian dams dating from the seventh century before Christ. But the Chinese left dam building until nearly three thousand years after the Egyptians – the first, a modest structure on a Yangtze tributary, did not go up until around 200 B C. One might have thought that the Chinese would have arranged matters otherwise, since the single most important purpose of a dam – the elimination of floods – has long been more necessary in flood-ridden China than it ever has in most other countries.

  But there was good reason for the Celestials' apparent tardiness. Hydraulics had long been a Chinese fascination: the country's rivers were so great and so wayward, and the livelihood of so many millions depended on their proper management, that it could hardly be otherwise. But exactly how to manage them? About 2500 years ago a pair of distinct and entrenched schools of thought arose, reflecting the different views of the ruling theocracies: one was advanced by the Taoists, the other by the Confucianists. It may seem odd to westerners that religion had any impact at all on hydraulics: but it is a measure of the peculiar importance of the country's waterways – as well as a reminder of the delicious strangeness of China – that its priests and philosophers did take so seriously the question of
exerting control over them.

  The views were diametrically opposed. Taoists, followers of what we might call a bohemian way of life, supported the building of only very low levees beside rivers and, generally speaking, letting them devise their own courses to the sea. Confucianists, who took a more rigid approach to governance and life in general, were also much more rigid in their approach to rivers: they believed that massive dykes should be built to corral the waterways along man-made courses and that the extra land thus freed should be intensively used for agriculture. They had a fatalistic attitude to the disadvantages of their ideas: they accepted that their approach might well contribute to infrequent but massive flooding disasters – that their dykes would probably prevent moderate floods, but would likely break during serious flooding, causing occasional catastrophes. This, Confucian hydraulicists agreed, was an acceptable trade-off for the intervening periods of fertility and prosperity.

  The technologies of the modern world, and the end of dynastic China, brought to a sudden end such dreamy philosophical disputations. The republican governments that ran the country in the years following the 1911 Revolution were undistinguished and inexperienced, and their policies often collapsed in a shambles – but they had grandiose ideas for practical reform. They built courts and prisons, a nationwide school system and a network of new railways; they constructed a central mint, planted forests, organized sweeping reforms in animal husbandry and promoted new breeds of cattle.

  Most ambitiously of all, Sun Yat-sen wrote a paper in 1919 entitled ‘A Plan to Develop Industry’; and there, in a long section on ‘Improvements of Navigable Rivers and Canals’, he set out his ideas for a massive scheme for improving the country's flood control and irrigation system, and for generating electricity, by building scores of big dams.

  The one structure that all – and most especially Dr Sun – felt should be the lynchpin of this network, and a symbol of the way in which modern Man could tame and harness ancient and unruly Nature, was to be the mother of all dams – a dam that should, could and would be built across the Yangtze. Sun championed this cause for the remaining six years of his life: one of his last speeches, on the subject ‘The People's Livelihood’, announced his belief that such a mighty dam could create thirty million horsepower, which would produce untold and unimaginable wealth for the peoples of central China.

  A spot somewhere along the 140-mile defile known as the Three Gorges would, he declared, be the obvious site for a dam across the Yangtze. It looked just perfect: the kind of place where, if the river was scaled down enough, any playful child would want to raise a toy barrage of mud and sticks. Very big beavers would be in hydraulic heaven at a place like this.

  Upstream of the Gorges the river meanders across the former inland sea that is now known as China's Red Basin (called by geologists the Sichuan Basin). This fertile plain, warm, well watered and sheltered and layered with thick brick-red soils, is home to 100 million people. It would be a hugely populous and wealthy country if it were a self-standing nation – which in many ways it seems to be. It is hemmed in on all sides by high mountains, the Chinese spoken there has an unusual and guttural tone and its cuisine, based around a pepper that tastes uncannily like Tabasco mixed with detergent, has a memorable singularity.

  The Yangtze gathers and quietens here in the Red Basin, pausing for breath after its headlong dash down from the Tibetan Plateau. It gains its riverine maturity here, it collects huge new tributaries (the four biggest of them giving Sichuan its name, which means ‘Four Rivers’), as well as a vast new volume of water and a barely imaginable quantity of sediment. At Chongqing the river – here still known as Chang Jiang, the Long River – is 610 feet above the level of the sea at the Woosung Bar. It is also 476 feet above the level of Yichang, the city to which our rattling aircraft was heading.

  Between Chongqing and Yichang is a range of mountains – jagged three-thousand-footers all, outliers of the limestones and sandstones of the Tibetan hills that have here uncoiled their tentacles toward the eastern flats. A passerby will notice that once in a while the unfolded hills reveal a granite or a gneiss or a schist; mostly, though, the ridges are of ancient limestones, with softer shales and marls, or harder sills of volcanic rock, sandwiched between. The Yangtze escapes to the coast through them – she descends the 476 feet in just 140 miles of always fast, often turbulent and frequently raging river.* In places the defile through which she runs is squeezed to a width of no more than 350 feet – and the great volume of water, which might have occupied half a mile of width before, and which will spread languidly across a mile or more below, surges through it, slicing away the sides (and causing formidable landslips) and scouring away the riverbed, so that the Yangtze here is one of the deepest rivers in the world.

  To a builder of concrete dams, a river squeezing its way through a narrow valley presents a heaven-sent opportunity for spectacular results at relatively low cost. The engineer needs merely to find a good and geologically stable place between the cliffs at the lower end of the rift, and then build his wall of concrete there: the waters will rise and fill the valley behind, and they will spread only minimally to the sides. Few people live on such steep valley sides and only where flooding affects tributary valleys will many lives be disrupted.

  All the great structures that were built around the world during the dam builders' salad days – the Hoover and the Grand Coulee in western America, the Vaiont in Italy, the Grand Dixence in Switzerland, the Daniel Johnson in Quebec – were constructed in situations like this. A steep-sided valley and a fast-flowing stream were there first; the dam went up, and a few years later, in the place of valley and stream there was a consequently deep lake and a consequently tamed river – and fewer downstream floods. As an additional incentive, which the builders could weigh against the likely vast capital cost of the project, there would be electrical power aplenty to sell, from all the potential energy stored in the dam-impounded lake.

  Dam builders, fired by an almost religious enthusiasm for their work and its long-term profitability, have been on a construction spree since the 1930s. This was when men like John L. Savage and his US Bureau of Reclamation colleagues were persuaded that mighty barrages across great rivers could have incalculable benefits – both in power generation and in flood prevention – for countries with expanding industrial economies. So they and their disciples around the world have put up thousands of dams – of which more than a hundred are the so-called super dams, truly immense constructions of concrete or earth whose walls soar more than 500 feet.

  Almost all of the world's big rivers have been stopped up by monsters like these – the Ganges, the Zambezi, the Parana, the Nile, the Indus, the Danube, the Niger, the great Amazonian tributary known as the Tocantins. Only the Zaire (formerly the Congo), the Amazon proper – and the Yangtze – remain unblocked by a true giant dam. And from the thirties on an endless slew of good reasons have been put forward for adding the Yangtze to the list.

  But if flood control had been principally behind Sun Yat-sen's original idea, his successors turned their thoughts more keenly to what was initially the almost incidental matter of generated electricity. The Three Gorges, it turned out, is ideally placed as a nexus of power generation. Most of China's factories – electricity-hungry factories, that is – have been built in the east of the country. Most of her mountains – ravine-rich, river-filled mountains, that is – lie at the other end of the nation, in the west. The Three Gorges site is almost in the dead centre of the country; it is, in fact, the closest river-filled ravine to the Chinese east – meaning that, in terms of economy, it has to be the most efficient site for delivering power to the centres of Chinese industry. The power transmission lines – not a trivial factor in the calculation of generating economics – could be much shorter with a Three Gorges site than with one in, say, far western Yunnan.

  Developing a hydropower system has perceived environmental benefits, too; not least, it could lessen China's reliance on fossil fuels. The s
moke and other emissions from China's vast coal reserves have to be seen to be believed: it sometimes seems a pall of yellow-brown smog hangs over all of the flat country outside the Gorges – a combination of coal-fired power stations and roadside brick kilns, all belching fumes into the air, full blast. A hydropower station somewhere in the Three Gorges, generating thousands of megawatts, would be bound to lessen the nation's reliance on dirty fuels: more and more, the planners who followed up Dr Sun's bold plan agreed that a Three Gorges dam was an ideal creation for the country's future.

  But however ideal the Three Gorges project might seem to an enthusiast, it took engineers and politicians and military experts forty-nine years to choose the exact site for it. It took seventy-five years, moreover, from the day Dr Sun made his first visionary statement until the day the first sod was moved. Few construction projects anywhere in the world have taken quite so long to realize. Here was the time scale of a cathedral.

  The matter of the right site was the most vexing. Most of those directly involved in the decades of discussions agreed on one thing: that any dam should be built a few miles upstream from Yichang, at the very end of the Xiling, the lowest of the Three Gorges. But then civil war, insurrection, terrorism, shortages of cash, anti-foreign sentiment, changes in ideology, power struggles and sudden caprices of the power elite all conspired to slow a more precise choice than this down to subglacial speed. The engineers and the scientists reported and recommended until they were blue in the face: but for half a century, nothing was done.

  J. S. Lee – a British-educated Chinese geologist who went on, under the name of Li Siguang, to work for the People's Republic and to become dignified by the title of the Father of Modern Chinese Geology – performed the original surveys in the 1930s and suggested that the best site could be at a turn in the river near the village of Sandouping. George Barbour, the American who worked with Lee, thought much the same.