The River at the Centre of the World

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE RIVER AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and China, and now lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and makes regular broadcasts for the BBC.

Simon Winchester's other books include
Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire; Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles; The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare
, a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over;
Prison Diary, Argentina
, the story of three months spent in a Patagonian jail on spying charges during the Falklands war;
The River at the Centre of the World – A Journey up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time
; the number-one international bestseller
The Surgeon of Crowthorne
; and
The Map that Changed the World
, which tells the extraordinary story of William Smith, pioneering geologist of the British Isles.

SIMON WINCHESTER

The River at the Centre of the World

A Journey up the Yangtze,
and Back in Chinese Time

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in the USA by Henry Holt and Company Inc. 1996

First published in Great Britain by Viking 1997

Published in Penguin Books 1998

23

Copyright © Simon Winchester, 1996

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193790-8

This book is dedicated to
Lucy and David Tang –
a small token of a great delight

Contents

Map of China

In Gratitude

Author's Note

Prelude

1 The Plan

2 The Mouth, Open Wide

3 The City Without a Past

4 The First Reach

5 City of Victims

6 Rising Waters

7 Crushed, Torn and Curled

8 Swimming

9 A New Great Wall

10 The Shipmasters' Guide

11 The Foothills

12 The Garden Country of Joseph Rock

13 The River Wild

14 Harder Than the Road to Heaven

15 Headwaters

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

In Gratitude

My thanks go first to two people I have never met, Andrea and Harry Crane of Chicago. It was their unanticipated kindness that led me to meet the extraordinary and enthusiastic Wan-go Weng in his house in remotest New Hampshire, and it was he who in turn showed me the Wang Hui picture called the
Ten thousand li Yangtze
– the picture that truly set this journey in train. To all three, connected to each other only by the faint incandescent trails of digital electronics, I owe a very great deal.

A journey of this scale demands the very best maps and I am glad to count as my good friend Francis Herbert, the curator of the Map Library at the Royal Geographical Society in London: he found for me some of the best old French maps and portolanos of the Upper Yangtze, and then led me to other sources of good modern charts – the firm of Brupacher Landkarten in Switzerland, who supplied me with the frighteningly excellent Soviet General Staff maps of western China, and a young lawyer named Julie Jones of the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, D C, an agency which – after a tussle with officials that Ms Jones gamely fought on my behalf – came up with all the relevant sheets from the normally classified map series known as Joint Operations Graphics.

David Yiu, the ebullient and unforgettably generous figure behind Regal China Cruises, then helped me to make a number of reconnaissance trips along the navigable reaches of the river. His three vessels proved superbly comfortable refuges from which I could plan journeys by more rudimentary transport and one of them acted as a floating hotel for me during my frequent visits to Shanghai. If there were ever moments when my enthusiasm for continuing the voyage wavered, it was David's eagerness and sense of fun that always managed to restore it.

I cannot hope to express my gratitude to the young woman whom current Chinese circumstance obliges me to disguise with the English name of Lily. This courageous and unflappable Manchurian, who rightly hesitated long before deciding to accompany me, turned out to be absolutely central to the successful completion of the journey. The fact that the trip up the great river was as much an adventure for her as a Chinese citizen, to whom the Yangtze means so much, as it was for me as a curious foreigner perhaps offers some practical measure of my thanks for her participation. As I say elsewhere, sad reality makes it too risky to identify her more fully than I do, but she knows who she is, and I hope that when she reads these words she will understand a little more easily how very real and lasting is my admiration for her.

Among the others to whom I owe thanks in varying measure are these following, along with very many more unnamed people for whom identification in China would be similarly perilous. I was helped enormously by: Richard Bangs of Mountain Travel-Sobek in California; Betty Barr of Fudan University in Shanghai; David Brown of the Royal Navy Historical Branch in London; Jeremy Brown of Jardines; Peter Cann of the University of Pennsylvania, a specialist in Pearl Buck; Daniel Desmond, General Manager of the Holiday Inn, Lhasa; Dave Fairty and Anne McAndrew of Backcountry Outfitters in Kent, Connecticut, who sent me off properly clothed and shod; Simon Featherstone, the current British Consul-General in Shanghai; William Goodman of the Ertan Dam Project on the Yalong River; my old friend Richard Graham, who gave valuable time during his own interesting moments spent running the Barings office, post-trauma, in Shanghai; Charlotte Havilland of Swires; Huang Guo Guang, who plied me with strong drink at the Wuliangye Distillery, Yibin; Michael Ingram of Monenco Agra in Ottawa, who had much useful to say about the new dam, both when we met in Yichang and later in Canada; Penny King at the Asian Music Centre in London, who organized the Nakhi orchestra's successful tour of Britain; Li Shou Kun and Helen Jin of the Yun Ying art gallery in Wuhan; the splendid Julia Liu of the Ramada Hotel in Wuhan; the writer Madeleine Lynn in Hong Kong, who collects arcana from the Yangtze and was happy to share it; Rick Jacobs of Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis; Patrick McCully and Owen Lammers of the International Rivers Network in Berkeley, California; the magnificent Hong Kong medical personality Dr Jake O'Donovan, who made sure that I was able to keep fit and unblistered in the wildest reaches of Tibet; Pam Logan and her colleagues at the China Exploration and Research Society; Ma Jishen, Professor of Archaeology at Sichuan United University, a hugely knowledgeable source about the losses that are to be sustained in the wake of the Three Gorges flooding; the eternally good-humoured Washington writer Rudy Maxa, who accompanied me on an early scouting trip and insisted that I write this book; a number of members of the ill-fated Ken Warren rafting expedition who talked to me anonymously about that extraordinary episode; Professors Suo Lisheng, Yu Kehua and their colleague dam designers at Hohai University in Nanjing; my great friend Iain Orr of the British Foreign Office, who knows much about rivers, islands and China; Cynthia Shiu of Grid Media in Hong Kong, who first brought the world of interactive electronics to the Yangtze by publishing a CD-ROM about it; Professor Lyman van Slyke of Stanford University, who generously gave me material about Cornell Plant and shared his own long experience of writing about the river; the amusing and flamboyant Tao Chang An in Wuhan; Frank and Irene Walker, who when we met had been transplanted from their home in Lochcarron in Wester Ross to the banks of the Yalong River near Panzhihua; Tom Wallace, the editor-in-chief of
Condé Nast Traveler
, and the magazine's senior editor Gully Wells, who both helped support many of my travels to the region; my former agent Lois Wallace, who helped so ably with the initiation of this book, and my present agent Peter Matson and his colleague Jennifer Hengen at Sterling Lord Literistic of New York; Wang Naili of the Shanghai Tourism Administration; Wen Zi Jian of Jiujiang; my son Rupert Winchester of Hong Kong; Wu Wei, of the People's Insurance Company of China in Panzhihua, who loaned me his car and. his driving skills to take Lily and me to and around Lijiang; Terry Xu of Malone's Café, Shanghai; Xu Xiaoyang in Chengdu, who was inexpressibly kind in a score of ways, and who loaned us a second car to take us from Chengdu to Lhasa and to the upper reaches of the Tuotuo River; the great musicologist Xuan Ke in Lijiang; the Misses Mirra Ye and Lulu Uy and the rest of the public relations staff at the great Portman Shangri-La Hotel, Shanghai; and finally in this list, the first man whom I was to meet officially in China, at the very start of the journey - Mr Zhang Zu Long of the Woosung Supervision Station. He is the official whose task is, among other things, to keep a constant watch, as navigators have done for more than a century and a half, over the highly contentious and historically memorable phenomenon known as The State of the Woosung Bar.

All of these people gave more information, told me stories, offered me help and advice. In the end, though, I interpreted what they said and I wrote the book, and if there are errors, misjudgements or infelicities in the pages that follow, responsibility should be laid squarely at my door, and at mine alone.

Although I had long nurtured the notion of writing about the Yangtze, it was my London agent and friend of many years, Bill Hamilton, who suggested translating the idea into action: my thanks to him for setting me on the trail from the high seas to High Tibet are unqualified. My delight in having Marian Wood as editor at Henry Holt is similarly unbounded: she and her colleagues have shown the greatest diligence during all the phases of the book's creation and production, and I am proud to be associated with them and their work.

Finally it goes almost without saying that a serene and comfortable environment provides a wonderful base for writing a book about a place that is as difficult and distant as China. That Catherine, my wife, was despite her own busy life well able to keep our home cosy and welcoming, and that she put up with my occasional frustration and ill temper, is a measure of what a remarkable woman she is. The making of this book was an endurance test through which she came with flying colours.

Wassaic, New York

November 1996