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

by Simon Winchester

  And so by midsummer all China's eyes were on their great river, and on the teams of men who were daring to try to conquer it. The rafters, it was clear, now feared the worst from a river that was proving far more dangerous than they had anticipated. Most of the members of four teams swiftly dropped out, and those remaining were by midsummer grouped into just two competing crews, battling on gamely. These teams managed to raft all the way down from the Tibetan Plateau town of Yushu downstream to Dêgê and Batang, towns that are way stations on the great southward sweep of the river where it marks the frontier between Tibet and China Proper. They stopped, for rest and reconnaissance – reconnaissance mostly – at Qiatou, by the willow trees, and at the point where Lily and I had strolled and where the stream looked innocently placid like the Thames at Bablockhythe. They then walked, just as we had, along the perilously narrow path of the Gorge, and they dodged beneath the marble quarries, where the prisoners even back then were prising loose the tumbling slabs. They came to see and study and examine, with ever-mounting apprehension, that first rapid – the sixty-foot half-horizontal Niagara of a monster known variously as the Upper Tiger Leaping or the Upper Hutiao Shoal. It was, they thought at first from where they stood, quite unrunnable.

  But then one of the teams had an idea. They built an enclosed capsule-raft out of rubber inner tubes, added a tightly fitting pneumatic doorway to one side, and lashed everything together so that it looked like a squat Michelin Man. They carried this down to the waters just above the Upper Tiger Leaping Rapid, found an unsuspecting dog, placed an oxygen mask onto its face, thrust it inside the raft, sealed up the door and kicked the capsule out into the stream. The vessel, highly buoyant and cushion-soft, careened out into the cauldron of foam and, after turning over and over a dozen times, vanishing deep into the yards-deep foam, flying up into the air, hurtling off sharp rocks and slamming itself against the canyon banks, bobbed out into the calmer waters below the rapid, still afloat. But the door had been ripped off, and the dog was missing, never to be found again.

  With a logic that can only be fully understood by a Chinese, this first test run was considered to have been a success – as in ‘the operation went very well, but the patient died’. So they built a second of these seemingly unsinkable rubber capsules, this one slightly larger – for humans, not dogs. On the morning of 10 September 1986 two of the party's more experienced members – one, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher named Lei Jiansheng; the other, a boiler worker at a railway station, a thirty-two-year-old named Li Qingjian – climbed inside the capsule, and Lei read a brief statement to the watching crowd:

  I think China is one of the greatest nations, but its development is hindered by some backward ideas. We should encourage the opening up of minds, and the spirit of adventure. Rafting the Yangtze is a very small wave in the long river of history, but it is worthwhile if it can help move forward the development of our country.

  And then the rubber door was shut tight, and the capsule was pushed out into the centre of the stream.

  For a tantalizing while it hung there, as if the rubber itself was frightened and did not dare move. But then, after some prodding with sticks and a push from a man who swam out while tied to the bank with a rope, it was swept out into the maelstrom. The film of the event, one that I have now watched with horrified fascination scores upon scores of times, shows the flimsy craft being sucked whirling down into the white foam, vanishing, reappearing, going down for a second time and then, only moments later, bobbing up in the still waters downstream. Then the door is opened and two wet, smiling faces peer out blinking in the sunlight. Their friends lift them out, check their arms and legs, find all still there in good working order. The run was over, and the pair were badly shaken – but they were all right.

  There are many more rapids within Tiger Leaping Gorge – me, like the Meteor-Studded Rapid five miles blow, even worse than the first. But in essence, with the running of the Upper Hutiao Shoal, the great deed was done. The second Chinese team completed its own run through the Gorges without incident, at about the same time as it was announced that Ken Warren's venture had failed, and that the Americans were all going home. The two Chinese teams, now without competition, savoured the remainder of their journey – down through the lower reaches of the Jinsha Jiang to Yibin and the confluence with the Min Jiang, and then along the much more placid hundreds of miles of the Yangtze proper. It was not all plain rafting: another rafter died on the way; and a reporter was killed when he was hit by a falling stone – a total of five people had died by the time the teams reached the flatwaters, and before the remainder of the journey became no more than a tedious tide-lapped routine.

  The two parties reached the buoy in the ocean in November. The first to do so, on 12 November, was the team that had titled itself the Luoyang Expedition for Sailing and Exploring the Yangtze; two weeks later came the China Yangtze River Scientific Observation Drifting Expedition. All told, when the deaths of the American David Shippee and Yao Mao-shu were added to those who died on these two Chinese expeditions, and when a group of others were later discovered to have died as well while making other and lesser attempts on other parts of this terrible river, it was realized that much had been sacrificed during that extraordinary Yangtze year. And for what, other than the sustenance of China's national pride? There seems in retrospect to have been – at least once the government became involved – a gladiatorial aspect to the entire affair, in which young men were sacrificed to the terrors of the great river, in part to keep the people entertained, and to maintain them in harmony with the political temper of the time.

  Above the Gorge that water is clear and calm and wide again. There is a paper factory on the left bank, which discharges a horrid grey stain into the stream a few miles farther on; and then, at Shigu, named after a stone drum that still stands there as a memorial to an ancient battle, the river executes its most obvious and extraordinary physical feature. It spins around, in the space of a few hundred yards, from heading due south, to due north. Because of this sudden redirection of the river it can fairly be said that at this very place, where there is now the town, all China's destiny was once held hostage by the whim of ancient tectonics – and specifically by a hill, lying to the south of town, called Yun Ling, Cloud Mountain. I knew it well from studying the maps: now, at long last, I had the opportunity to see it, to walk up its slopes and see for myself why it was so crucially important – if unwittingly so – to the story of China.

  Late in the afternoon Lily and I reached the little town. The heat was like a furnace, and was made even hotter by the unmistakable and oddly soapy scent of Sichuan fire-pepper. From time to time there was a relieving waft of northern air, a breeze that was liquid with the thick smell of new-mown hay. But generally it was quite still, the valley shimmering and hazy. The cattle drowsed in the slowly lengthening shadows of the jagged mountains to the west, the Heng Duan Shan, the Horizon Splitting Range. All the town of Shigu seemed asleep, tier upon tier of adobe houses rising up the hillside, hushed for the siesta under their sinuous blankets of tile.

  Down below the memorial that held the old stone drum – a millstone-shaped slab with scores of lines of incised verses giving details of the long-ago battle – a group of children were diving noisily into a rock pool from the town's old wooden bridge. It was a lovely bridge, three hundred years old at least and suspended, like so many in these parts, from a pair of heavy iron chains. There were still early Qing dynasty gates at each end, with patches of peeling vermilion and gold paintwork and elaborate bronze locks that the village elders shut each day at sunset.

  A woman was creeping slowly along a cobbled path, her old bones creaking under the weight of her wooden back-frame with its afternoon crop of corn. She was evidently mother to one of the boys below.

  ‘Come on home and help me thresh this lot!’ she called down.

  ‘Just a little while. It's far too hot to work!’ the boy shouted in reply. The woman nodded and walked on, trailing
stalks of corn and a furrow of yellow dust.

  To get up to the side of Cloud Mountain one must climb the long staircase of slabs that snake through the old part of town, a normally busy lane with open-fronted shops lining each side. In one of these a man with a screw-topped Nescafe jar half full of green tea lay snoring under a billiard table. No one was stirring, no one noticed my passing. Shelves in the little stores were stacked high with supplies for the evening: cylinders of powder-dry noodles wrapped in old copies of the People's Daily, plastic bags of peppers, whole pigs' heads cut raggedly from their shoulders, cans of Coke, piles of white cabbages, tall bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer with the labels stuck all askew, bricks of dust tea, watermelons, thermos flasks, primrose-yellow sachets of Pantene hair conditioner (made under licence in Shanghai). On each storefront table was an abacus and a steelyard. Under almost every table was a dog, asleep.

  Before long I came to a tall cement monument with a red star on top and a plaque. Three children, all wearing the red scarves of the Young Pioneers, were sprawled asleep on the podium. I trod as quietly as I could. The plaque above the children was dominated by a long revolutionary message and then a short poem in the familiar sprawling, looping calligraphy of Chairman Mao. I managed to read a few characters: it was yet another of his hymns to the Long River – a river which, now that I was a few hundred feet up, was just coming into sight.

  From the angle of the sun it was clear that Cloud Mountain's lower slopes, directly ahead, lay to the south. They were meadowlike Chinese alps with short grass and a dusting of white camellias. The upper few hundred feet of the mountain were different, lightly forested with camphor laurels and rhododendrons. Above that the hill seemed to have a rounded, stony summit. The top was elongated into a lozenge shape that ran very noticeably east and west: up there it had a shape rather like a Brecon Beacon, or the Red Hills of Skye, or a very small edition of Kilimanjaro.

  It is a hill that looks to be a thing of no consequence at all. It is something of a dwarf: it rises sedately, almost sheepishly, from the turmoil of this eastern extension of the Himalayas where much grander mountains – like the Horizon Splitting Range, in whose shadows the cows were settling down – are thrusting themselves into the skies on all sides. It is not exactly a holy mountain, like the more famous Chinese and Tibetan summits of Emeishan or Taishan or Kailash: it has never attracted pilgrims or mendicants. It is far too far away from anywhere to be of much interest to tourists. A hundred years ago the plant hunters from Harvard and Kew came here to look for primulas and gentians and perhaps (though without success) for samples of that marvellous piece of botany known as the dove tree, which some, because of its huge white flowers, called the handkerchief tree.

  But the hill does have a certain importance, and it has given the otherwise rather ordinary – pretty, but ordinary – town of Shigu a kind of fame that no nine-storey pagoda or ruined lamasery or Maoist resting place could ever bring. Cloud Mountain, it is fair to say, is regarded by Chinese myth to have guided and directed China's very being.

  To grasp its standing in legend, one must remember that the Chinese believe that their origins as a people mimic and parallel those of the origins of the planet itself. The history of the World and the history of the East are to their thinking inseparable, party to the same divine plan – one of the reasons that they are the Celestials, and the rest, barbarians. The Chinese, to their own belief, never came from anywhere else: they were always, in their minds, there. The world was created, China was created, the Chinese were created: all was one, seamless and of high purpose. The details of this story tell of a vast expanse of years during which myth and proven history were hopelessly and inextricably entwined.

  Most of these protohistorians believe that the world – and hence China – started after the Egg of Chaos had spawned a deity named P'an-ku. This remarkable proto-god grew ten feet a day and lived for 10,000 years; he is perhaps best known in the Chinese context for having chopped into two parts the mighty universe stone and by doing so separating for all time the Heaven from the Earth. Immediately after this, China was created and was promptly blessed by the successive presence of twelve Emperors of Heaven and eleven Emperors of the Earth (who each ruled the new land for 18,000 years), followed by nine Emperors of Mankind (who ruled for a total of 45,600 years).

  Next came sixteen nondescript kings about whom almost nothing is known, and then three sovereigns who had (or, at least, two of them had) the heads of men but the bodies of snakes. One of these (or maybe not; maybe he belonged to a group of five, slightly later on) was Huang Ti, the so-called Yellow Emperor, father figure to the nation, the revered founder of the Chinese civilization.

  Huang Ti's life marks the notional end of primitivism and savagery: it is from the time of his reign – perhaps around the year 2697 BC – that China becomes heir to an organized and sophisticated system of society and government. It was during his time that people began to live in wooden houses, to wear silk clothing, to ride in carts, to sail in junks, to fire-harden ceramics, to hunt with longbows, and, most important of all, to write. The much vaunted ‘five thousand years of history' begins with the reign of the Yellow Emperor. All Chinese think of themselves as this great man's sons.

  It is said that the towering figures who then lived immediately after the founding Emperor went on to invent all the pillars of China's early civilized life. Fu-hsi, the Ox-tamer, domesticated animals. Shen-nung, the Divine Farmer, invented the plough and the hoe and set up the organizing of produce markets. Yao, the Fourth Emperor, created the calendar and organized some kind of central government. But it was Shun, the Fifth Emperor, whose decisions were to devolve eventually, onto Cloud Mountain. It was in 2200 BC, or thereabouts, that the work was performed which makes Cloud Mountain so vital a site in the creation and development of modern China.

  It came about because, during the Imperial reigns of both these men, Yao and Shun, China was plagued by the most terrible floods. One or the other of these two emperors called upon a young and apparently technically competent bureaucrat named Yü to try and control the waters – to dredge new channels, to stop up dangerous rivers, to create lakes and, in a decision of potent symbolism, to try and keep all of these tamed waters within the orbit of China. China's waters were a great national treasure, the two emperors declared during each of their reigns: they must be made to behave themselves, but they must remain in China.

  Yü, working under the orders of either one or both of the emperors, rose manfully to the task. With the assistance of a small brigade of dragons he ranged across China for the next fifty years, reshaping the hills and the valleys in such a way that – in theory at least – the country would be protected from the seasonal ravages of her great waterways. He did his work so well he came to be an emperor himself, Da Yü – Yü the Great; and even today he is referred to by Chinese who know about Christianity as ‘China's Noah’.

  He was said to have been utterly obsessive, and an instance of his dedication is still taught in schools: he is said to have passed by his family house on three occasions as he tracked across the kingdom, and each time heard his family weeping for him to come home. Never once, the Chinese say proudly, did he soften. He went right on to stop up another river and dredge another canal, and to save China, and China's waters, for all time. His family, he declared, would have to wait.

  The achievements of the flood control era are legion, and there are said to be moss-covered memorials to his works dotted beside rivers all around China. But his greatest success, the most spectacular triumph of his half-century of earthmoving and shaping, is said still to have been the siting of Cloud Mountain. From halfway up its slopes and from any large-scale map of China, or indeed, of the world – it is abundantly clear why. For by placing the mountain where it now stands, Yü changed the course of the Yangtze, keeping the huge river inside a China that would otherwise have watched impotently while its potentially most important waters streamed away.

  Any good map will amply dem
onstrate the strategic positioning of Cloud Mountain. In this part of western China all of the hills around are clearly ranged to the north and the south, spearing down from the jumbled ranges of Sichuan. I could see this, more or less, from where I stood: the ranges tumbled into the blue haze of the northern sky in serried ranks, regular, like soldiers. And the rivers that run in the valleys between – the Yangtze, which I could see, as well as others, like the Mekong and the Salween, which I could not because they lay a few dozen miles off to the west – all run north and south as well. The trend continues to the south of where I stood as well: seventy miles or so away to the south is a long lake called Erhai Hu and it, too, is aligned from north to south. Every geographical feature, in fact, seemed to be aligned like the folds of a concertina – sharp valleys, narrow ranges of hills, up and down, up and down in rank upon rank, and all beginning in the north, all ending in the south.

  All, that is, except Cloud Mountain, where Lily and I were standing. Though it is smaller, less spectacular, more modest than its rivals, it lies right across the lie of the land. In a land of such unyielding north–south predilection it is an eccentric, an erratic. And most of its bulk lies – and in this lay Da Yü's triumph – right across the path of the oncoming Yangtze.

  Regarded from its source, the Yangtze had up until this point been roaring due southward for the last one thousand miles. But here in Shigu, and, according to Chinese legend, on the specific orders of the Imperially charged Yü the Great, it slammed suddenly and unexpectedly right up against this newly placed and massive wall of Carboniferous limestone. It collided against the wall and rebounded dramatically in a huge, tight hairpin bend that has it thundering northward with as much vigour and determined might as, a few hundred feet before, it had been thundering and roaring south.