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

by Simon Winchester

  For several hours we motored southwestward, the hills looming rigidly on our right. This was still China, the far corner of the Red Basin of Sichuan, and the roads were good and fast; there were factories and airfields and a dismayingly large number of army bases, with heavily armed soldiers pacing back and forth on sentry duty outside the gates. Chengdu is a major staging post for troops bound for duty in the Tibetan highlands: whenever a rebellion is to be put down, or monks arrested, or borders closed, the soldiers who do the work are flown in from Chengdu, or sent by convoy down the metalled highway from Golmud. Of the two ways to get troops to Lhasa fast, the bases and the aerodromes around Chengdu are by far the more important.

  Then we crossed a bridge and turned smartly right, to the west. The land began to rise. This was the beginning of the hills about which Li Bai had written his most famous couplet: ‘Oh how dangerous, how high! How hard is the road to Shu! It is as hard as the road to heaven.’ We were leaving China Proper and we were entering what once had been Tibet Proper, but which had for the last three centuries been a half-world, a place where the two so very different cultures came together and either merged or collided according to the mood of the moment. Between the edge of the mountains and the banks of the Yangtze – 250 miles as the crow flies, but five times that once the mountain passes were negotiated – lay a chaotic wilderness of craggy ranges and deep gorges that the Qing dynasty administrators had briefly called Sikang province, or in the words of today's Chinese historians, Xikang. The very existence of a state here had much to do with an engagingly eccentric Briton, Sir Francis Younghusband, who invaded Tibet on Britain's behalf in 1904.

  This area between the river and the eastern edge of the mountains was always a wild and lawless place, peopled by volatile rapscallions who owed their allegiances to various local chieftains. The Moso, those who favoured lying upon and then wolfing down the Boneless Pig, were one such: there were others, petty states – more than thirty – with names like Chala (into which we had come when we made our sudden right turn over the bridge) and Lithang and Gyemorong. All were lumped together under the name of Kham, and the people were collectively known as Khampas. They were widely thought of as warlike, unruly and deeply holy, and were feared by Tibetans and Han Chinese alike – said with admiration by today's Tibetans to have been the region's best killers and the greatest saints.

  Sir Francis Younghusband had come to Tibet – from India, and via Sikkim – in 1904 on what has often been described loosely as Britain's Last Imperial Adventure. The excuse provided by the Indian viceroy at the time for his doing so was laughably flimsy: Tibetans were said to be stealing Nepalese yaks, he said, and must be dealt with. The underlying purpose was very real: it was to keep Tibet out of the sphere of influence of the increasingly voracious Russians.

  This action was the Great Game between innings, and when Younghusband's soldiers were firmly settled in place under the Potala in Lhasa – having been put there by superior force of arms and, as Hilaire Belloc summarized, because ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not' – Britain forced the Tibetans to sign a convention that would keep the Russians firmly at bay. The side effect, unanticipated at the time, was that China would begin a long process that would culminate in her becoming the dominant influence on Tibet. ‘She climbed back into Lhasa,’ wrote one of Britain's critics, ‘on Francis Younghusband's shoulders.’

  The first act of the Qing dynasts, the Manchus, was to annex the region of Kham, to create a buffer state between the Chinese Empire and what was then seen, supposedly, as an outpost of British imperial interest. So they sent west a ruthless killer named General Zhao Erfang, charging him with a mission to take Kham for the Chinese and wipe out any resistance in the towns through which we were due to pass in the coming days. The general became known as the Butcher of the Monks as he sacked lamaseries by the score, and executed Buddhist leaders from Yushu and Dêgê down to Batang and the Yunnan border. He crossed the Yangtze and made for Lhasa, looking for the Dalai Lama of the day: but the Lama had fled to India, just as his successor was to do when other Chinese came to get him, fifty years later on.

  The Chinese turned the Kham they had thus conquered into the entire new province to which they gave the name Xikang – a process of Imperial administration that came to a screeching halt less than half a decade later, in 1911, when the Manchus were themselves driven from power by the republicans. But the idea of having a buffer state between China and Tibet (and at the same time of making a springboard by which the Chinese could ultimately make their leap to Lhasa itself) still carried weight. In 1928 it was revived, and there was more stern battling in the mountains as the Chinese fought to carve Xikang into an administrative reality.

  It never truly happened. Governors came and went. Bureaucracies were set up and dismantled. The capital was shifted from Batang, beside the Yangtze, to a town that was then called Dardo and which is now known as Kangding. But even that capital never became much more than an exercise in wishful thinking; and in 1955, after years of halting starts, Xikang was formally abolished: the land was swallowed up by Sichuan, though its people were made semi-autonomous, and they were recognized as racially different from both the regions that marched beside it. (But in Taiwan today the province is regarded as still being in existence, and there is a representative, notionally from Xikang, who sits in the National Assembly in Taipei.)

  The thought that Sir Francis Younghusband might have some responsibility for the unique existence of the country through which we were passing did not seem to press with undue weight on the local inhabitants. There were other diversions for them. In Ya'an, the frontier town where we spent the night, there was a very noisy market, and across from the inn some wily entrepreneur had set up a small zoo behind hastily hung mats, and he charged people one yuan to come and see his tired collection of exotica.

  I was hoping to find one of the big blue-horned pheasants that are native to these parts, and which go by the magnificent name of Temminck's Tragopan; but instead there was just one flyblown porcupine and a ratty old snake or two. There were a number of pages torn from ancient copies of the National Geographic that showed teenage African girls with bare breasts: Lily was convinced that this was the true attraction on offer by the hustler who owned the zoo – it was not to show animals at all, but to offer sex-starved Chinese men a chance to feast their eyes on tits.

  Next morning we started to climb hills in earnest, razor-sharp ridges so newly elevated that they were still crumbling and hurling down torrential landslips. I could well believe that the Indian tectonic plate was in continuing collision with its Asian cousin: the land seemed half alive here, and with the mist swirling through the rhododendron groves and the rivers coursing down every ravine, it was a place quite lacking in stillness, or in any sense of serenity or bucolic peace. It was one of these rare places

  – New Zealand is another, I suppose – where the land seems far more charged with energy than do the people.

  The roads were narrow and dangerous and clung to the side of huge black cliffs. Long diversions – one of them at least a hundred miles long – kept us away from the more serious landslips. One road across a high pass was only open westbound – the direction we needed – before two in the afternoon, and we arrived to find barrier poles up and police telling us to try the following day or take another long detour, which we did.

  The route took us, fortuitously, along the frighteningly fast-flowing Dadu River and to the small town of Luding on its left bank. There, a black iron chain bridge that had been slung across the river in early Qing times, almost three centuries ago, was still standing: it had attained heroic status in late May 1935, when Mao's Long Marchers fought their way across it, under a withering fusillade of Nationalist machine-gun fire. Their action had been just as heroic as – but much more widely publicized than – their crossing of the Yangtze back at Jiaopingdu: brightly coloured pictures of the grim-faced soldiers battling through the fires, clinging to the gre
at iron support chains, can be seen at most patriotically inclined shrines in today's China, as important an image for the collective mind as that of Mao standing before the microphones in Tiananmen Square, declaring the People's Republic born, or of him standing erect, his right arm pointing to some just attainable promise, a worthy goal for the distant Chinese future.

  There was no artist to record the crossing of the Yangtze, though, and as a result today most Chinese seem to believe that the Luding Bridge actually spans the Yangtze, and not its lesser – but scarcely less impressive – tributary.

  I strolled across the swaying planks, having paid one yuan for the privilege: Lily paid less (being Chinese) and came too, but she was frightened by the sight of the torrent swirling by below and demanded that I hold her hand as we crossed. On the other side she tried (in vain) to find a boat to take her back.

  When finally we arrived at Kangding, which as well as being the capital of Xikang had been the seat of the King of Chala – we were all exhausted. As was the car: it was already showing acute signs of distress, not least because the bonnet had broken free of its cast-iron hasps after an encounter with a particularly deep pothole, and had fallen off, bouncing down onto the highway and into a ditch.

  This town had at last the feel of Tibet about it. It was huddled in a fold among the mountains, and a small stream coursed under a string of bridges in its middle, sending up a constant roar that went echoing into the hills. I climbed up for a view: scores of red roofs glowing in the evening sun, the green of the forest-covered hills, the white of the little river rushing between the houses – this was a pretty place, and I felt a sense of relief that I realized, perhaps unkindly, came from winning some slight relief from China, and the Chinese.

  Our hotel was beside a small lamasery, the Anjue Si, which was in the midst of being restored. Old women spun prayer wheels silently, young monks in burgundy robes strung flags from the scaffolding. This has long been a religious centre: up on the hill to the south of town is a small white stupa, known as a chorten in Tibet, the first of many such shrines. Until the first half of this century the French had kept a cleric here, the head of their Mission Étrangères, of which the plant-hunting Père David had been one of the best known. Kangding's bishop was once the redoubtable Abbé Huc, who made friends with the Tibetans and was thrown out by the Chinese for so doing: he wrote one of the best-ever travel accounts of the little-known China of the mid-nineteenth century, which became something of a worldwide best-seller.

  Kangding is a crossroads town, once a terminus for the brick tea trade, now an important rest stop for anyone bound into or out of Tibet – it is the true beginning of ethnic Tibet or, for someone coming from the far side, the true beginning of the real China. The little cafés here serve Tibetan tea – a powerful decoction brewed from tea dust and twigs, with copious amounts of salt added to impart extra flavour and with large globules of rancid, hairy yak-butter floating on top. It is an acquired taste that I was not to acquire – finding it even less attractive a comestible than tsampa, the principal food of the Tibetan peasantry, which consists merely of flour worked with water and yak-butter, and which is eaten raw and has a taste like rotten dough.

  The brick tea from which the brew is made was once the main reason for Kangding's existence as an entrepôt. Mule or yak trains took it from here deep into Tibet – the bricks wrapped in coloured paper, put into tubes of bamboo matting and then sealed in waterproof bags made of yakhide. The shapeless bundles that resulted, hard as iron and heavy as lead and containing perhaps scores of pounds of precious Chinese tea, were carried by pack animals or by human bearers over the worst and most dangerously exposed roads in the world – roads that took their traffic more than three miles high, across snowfields and beside seracs at the top of windy mountain passes. The road is little better today, even though trucks have replaced the mule trains, and even though the only people who travel on foot are the pilgrims, who go on their hands and knees and take many years to get to Lhasa.

  The fact that Kangding is a crossroads came home vividly to me as I was sitting down to dinner at a small Chinese restaurant beside one of the river bridges. I was well into my steamed fish and spicy tofu when there was a commotion at the door and a young woman walked in – someone I knew very well. She was an archaeologist from California, a woman named Pam Logan who had borrowed my New York flat some six months before when she had been on her way to Paris. Neither of us could believe it – meeting at all was fairly improbable, but meeting in a small foothills town in eastern Tibet even more so. She knew the area well, and regained her composure rapidly.

  ‘Perhaps it's not so odd,’ she said finally. ‘This is Kangding, after all. When you come to think of it, it's probably more likely that we meet here than anywhere else. People have been meeting here for centuries. That's why the place exists.’

  She was on her way back from Dêgê, where she had been working on a plan to restore a number of lamaseries that had been sacked during the Cultural Revolution. She was going to Chengdu, thence to Irkutsk and the once independent statelet of Tannu-Tuva, which lay in a series of valleys west of Mongolia. I knew Tuva fairly well, having been there to see a monument to the supposed geographical centre of Asia, which an Englishman had raised there, inaccurately, a century before. I gave her the number of some people to make contact with in Kyzyl, the capital; she in turn gave me a letter for the Dêgê police chief, a Mr Ma. She owed him fifty yuan, and tucked that into the envelope as well. Then we hugged and said our goodbyes – she would be in Tuva in a week, and I should be on the banks of the Yangtze, and at Dêgê, in another couple of days – if the car performed properly.

  Next morning the road climbed high onto the basement of the Tibetan Plateau. There would be many more great ridges and plains before we reached the plateau itself, but these hills now had an organization about them, as though we had left the chaos of the collision zone behind us and were on the way to the high upthrusts of the Asian plate itself. There were villages of the strangely boxy stone houses of the settled Tibetans, and down in the meadows the large black tents of the nomads. It was all staggeringly beautiful – clean and glittering in the early sunlight, with dew-fresh grass, towering peaks, piercing blue skies and, dotting the scenery with ragged charm, hundreds upon hundreds of grazing yaks. Like sheep in Scotland, yaks always acted skittishly when we swept past: they would rear up and race away, their hooves sending sprays of earth behind them, and the ground rumbling under their speeding mass.

  There were other animals, too – small creatures like groundhogs, and big waddling rodents, like stunted capybaras, that were said to be Tibetan marmots. Birds, too: owls by night, and small blue and red and orange perching birds by day. The dreariness of China was well behind us now: we had come up into a new altitude, and the world was new and excitingly different.

  But the road was still terrible, and the car performed less and less well. Poor Miao, whose gear-lever patting rate was becoming almost manic, kept having to stop and cleanse this nozzle or rebraze that point or demand that local welders – who were becoming rare animals indeed in these parts – re-attach pieces that had fallen off. The Jeep was looking very sick indeed; and inside we were choked with dust, and all we owned was filthy and, in many cases, broken by the constant battering. Lily had rarely before been in a car for more than two hours: so far we were four days into a journey that might take at least two weeks. Her morale was not the best.

  Gas stations were rare as well, and those who found them tended to stay in them for long periods, unwilling to plunge on into the wilderness once having discovered an oasis of relative civilization. At one, deep in the middle of nowhere, I came across a beautiful young woman who spoke flawless English. She was from Sikkim and had been working in the hills a hundred miles from here, helping to build a new lamasery, to replace one torn down by Red Guards in 1968.

  She was called Changchup Dolma, and we arranged to have dinner together that night. Lily refused to come: Tibetans, an
d those who sympathized with Tibetans, were far from being her favourites.

  The young woman was indeed young – only twenty-seven, and though her family was from Sikkim, she had been educated in the town of Vizakapatnam in southeast India, taking a BA in art history. Her uncle, under whose auspices the new lamasery was being built, was an exceptionally holy man – the incarnation, she said, of the great Dêgê Lama. He had been recognized as such when he was nine years old, he had come to Lhasa in the 1950s to study, as was decreed, and then gone on to Kangding, to a lamasery under the control of the Lama of Chala. During the Cultural Revolution he had been arrested, and spent twenty years in prison, for no greater crime than claiming himself to be (as did his followers) a reincarnate deity, a trulku.

  The girl was almost weeping as she told me this. But she was not sad, she said – rather she was just tremendously happy to meet me, a foreigner who listened. She loathed the Chinese, and had made no efforts to learn their language. She spoke Sikkimese, Hindi, Tibetan, and this excellent English. ‘But Chinese is the tongue of our oppressors,’ she declared. ‘I would think of it as a betrayal to learn it.’ Since nearly 90 per cent of the local population – most of whom were nomads anyway – were Tibetan, she had little practical reason for learning the language.

  She was tall and graceful, and when she begged me to stay for some months and try to learn something of the plight, as she put it, of the Tibetan people, I was more than a little tempted. During dinner she tried to teach me to write Tibetan, which I told her I had long thought one of the prettiest-looking of languages. But I could manage only om mane padme hum, which I already knew from having seen it so often carved on the thousands of roadside stones, set there by patient masons who wanted no more than for the mantra to be carried away by passing breezes. She was a patient teacher, though, and smiled beatifically through all my clumsy errors.