The River at the Centre of the World (34 page)

‘It will be expensive – we have to get the new house for ourselves. It is already selected where we will go, a village called Qian Shan Po, up in the hills behind.’ She jerked her hand back, contemptuously. ‘It is much cooler up there. We will not be able to farm the peaches and the oranges and the limes. Sweet potatoes and lettuce will be OK, and the corn too. But life will not be the same. And we won't be able to see the river any more. It'll be difficult – not so much for my child, nor for my husband and me.

‘But what of my grandfather?’ She nodded towards a figure sitting at the end of her garden. ‘He is too old to change.’

Her grandfather was seated under a persimmon tree at the edge of the cliff, smoking a pipe and gazing down at the boiling river below. He was quite deaf and made no move when I walked up to him and then stood beside him. He was dressed in an old gown of dark blue silk adorned with dragons. He looked perfectly at peace with his world, warming himself in the late spring sunshine, puffing on a tiny nut of tobacco, watching the ships churn by.

In a couple more years government officials would come and order him to move elsewhere. ‘There is no point in arguing with our leaders,’ sighed his granddaughter. ‘Besides, this dam is a national project – an international project, I've heard them say. We have no rights. We cannot complain. That is the way it is in China today.’

She sighed deeply – she was more unhappy for her ancient relative, I thought, than she was for herself. He had seen so much change in his lifetime, and so little of it had been for the better.

When he was a young man all the upstream boats would have been hauled by trackers, teams of naked men harnessed by bamboo hawsers and struggling along the broken shores or in the crouch-high galleries that ran along the cliff walls.

When he was a child the Manchus' power was still a bright memory, and some young men of the day wore silk robes and had their hair in queues and some of the women still bound their feet. Since then steam power had come to the river, the trackers – with their songs and their poetry and their guilds and their rude good fellowship – had been replaced and vanished into riverside villages like this, and some had said it was good that man was a beast of burden no longer.

Some kind of social justice, affecting the trackers and the coolies and concubines and the
mapus
and all the other drones of Imperial days, had come to modern China – but had rested only briefly, and a rude and greedy kind of commercial world that had overtaken those brief promises of fairness and equality now seemed to dominate everything. It was no good: the Confucian calm and order that this old man once knew had long since been swept away and the changes were coming faster and faster, so that if to his granddaughter it seemed as if the Chinese world might suddenly spin off its axis and explode in a million pieces, consider how it all must appear to him.

And now, because of a cascade of decisions made without a care for whom they might one day affect, this old man would have to spend his final years far away from the river beside which he had lived, so his granddaughter said, for the last ninety-four years. ‘He loved the river,’ she explained. ‘It will break his heart.’

I decided not to disturb him, and instead walked away, between the corn rows and the orange bushes and down the hill towards the river. Lily and I waited for an hour, talking to some women loading rice flour onto a waiting barge. Then I spotted a group of four Tibetans, dressed in their burgundy robes, walking quickly upstream along an old trackers' path: they were selling herbs, someone said.

They were the first Tibetans I had seen, a reminder of how close China's frontiers were now, and I wanted very much to talk to them, to show them a picture of the Dalai Lama I had tucked into the bottom of my rucksack, back in New York. But just at that moment our Russian speedboat appeared around the bend, and the captain waved to us to come aboard, and swiftly. He was late, and didn't like stopping under these unstable cliffs for longer than he had to.

I craned my neck as we passed below the Plant Memorial. The old man was still sitting, motionless, under his tree, his hawklike eyes watching our ship pulling away from the bank and into the whirling foam of the New Rapid. I stood up and waved to him and, for just a moment, he took one hand away from the stem of his pipe and gestured down back at me. Whether it was a wave of resignation or farewell I could not be sure; but I thought in that moment that he did know that his peace was about to be interrupted, but that he had chosen not to think about it, and would savour such rest as he still could, up there in the afternoon sun.

11

The Foothills

The moon was high and the sky was clear when our ship lumbered up to the dockside under the hills of Chongqing. It was the kind of night that, during the war, the local citizenry would have dreaded – for it was on moonlit nights like this that the Japanese bombers came and wrought terror on the streets below.

Back then it did no good to black out the lights and stop the traffic: the squadrons of Zeros would come in from Wuhan, or from the field at Yichang – the same aerodrome where we had landed some days before – and follow the river sparkling silver under the moon. Then, when another silver stream joined it from the north – the Jialing – they would know where to strike. There, the darkened pubic triangle at the confluence of these two huge rivers, was where to drop the bombs: it was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, an aerial rape.

Down below, the people of Chongqing – China's capital, since Chiang Kai-shek and his government and all the foreign embassies had fled there from Nanjing in 1937 – suffered almost undefended. They huddled inside caves that had been hollowed from the rock: some suffocated, others died of thirst. Until the Americans came, and the Flying Tigers took to the skies and gave them some kind of shelter, the citizens and the newly arrived refugees had to put up with six, seven or eight raids each day and night, throughout the terrible hot summers of 1938, 1939 and 1940.

Not for nothing is Chongqing called one of the four
Yangtze furnaces
: from May to October the humidity is terrific, the heat sweltering, everyone is bathed in sweat for all the hours of light and dark. And when to the murder of the heat is added the exploding of the bombs, the hiding in tunnels, the constant burials and a pile of unburied dead, the lack of running water, a total want of sanitation – back then Chongqing must have been one of the hardest cities in the world in which to try to live. And amid all the anarchy and the squalid mess, this was one of the Great Power capitals: in theory is ranked alongside London, Washington and Moscow, and generals and ambassadors and heads of state came in and out, via the most tortuous of air routes, to deal with the Generalissimo and his men, and to work out how to defend China from enemies both foreign (the Japanese) and domestic (the Communists).

Chongqing is still a grim and unlovely city, though now with 6 million people crammed into its hilly streets, compared with the 600,000 who lived there back when it was China's capital.
*
It may have been clear and moonlit when we arrived – but the most memorable feature of the city's climate is quite the reverse: a thick, pallid, warm, wet, yellow-grey fog that lies on it like a mildewed blanket. For most of the winter the combination of smoke from cheap coal fires and the soot from briquette ovens, the teeming factories and the daily atmospheric temperature inversions makes for an atmosphere like grey soup, and Los Angeles in August seems by comparison sparkling clear.

‘Coketown,’ someone called it. The air is usually like that of Leeds or Dundee in Victorian times, with a sharp smell of half-burned coal gas, rust, scorched tin, and dirt. And yet what a mercy all the fog has been: in the winters of wartime the gloom made it impossible for the Japanese to bomb, and what the city lost in the clear summer days and nights, it rebuilt and recovered on almost every dreary day of the winter.

We had been caught in an unexpected fog the day before, near the city of Wanxian. ‘The radar is no good – I have to be able to see,’ said the captain, as he shut down the engines and dropped two anchors, paying out three hundred feet of chain before they reached bottom. ‘We will have to stay till the weather clears. All ships will stop.’

It was oddly quiet – the river sucked and gurgled softly, and once in a while we could hear a truck passing on the right bank. We could hear the crewmen talking on another ship moored near by, but we couldn't see it. Then a fierce searchlight suddenly pierced the fog from astern, there was a deafening roar of a siren, and a pair of barges that were being pushed by an enormous black tug throbbed past, kicking up a wake that shook our ship like a small earthquake. ‘Bloody fool!’ said our captain, and he raced to the bridge wing to shake his fist at the tug skipper, who simply grinned.

We waited all night, calling in vain on the radio for the Chongqing inspection station, trying for a weather forecast. ‘It would have been better in the old days,’ the captain grumbled. He fingered a pencil nervously and paced back and forth across the length of the bridge: like all mariners he was only content when in deep water and clear air, far from land and other ships. Here there were obstacles all around, and matters were worse, for he could see none of them.

But in the morning came a brassy early summer sun, and the fog began to lift. A dozen yards offshore there was an elderly man in a sampan, sheltering from the chill beneath his craft's arched matting roof. He had an otter with him, tied to a length of rope. Once in a while it would leap smoothly into the water and swim ahead of the little boat, before returning to its master and neatly leaping back aboard.

Otters are the upriver equivalents of the famous Guilin cormorants, experts at catching fish – but much more trustworthy. While each bird has to have a grass or iron ring around its neck to forestall any swallowing of the catch, the otter is more obedient and releases its fish on command, like a retriever with a pheasant. Most good otters come from Tibet, and take months to train; when fully operational one will catch as many as 30 catties of fish a day – 33 pounds. I shouted to the man, asking how he had done. ‘Ten catties only!’ he said, ‘Fog – the otter doesn't like it.’

We were moving again by lunchtime, steaming fast to make up for lost time as we passed under the factories and housing blocks of Wanxian city. A hundred years ago there were stands of cypress trees on the hills and bamboo plantations, and Wanxian was the foremost junk-building city on the Upper Yangtze. Today, silk spinning is the major industry. There is still a bamboo market, and the locals talk of a Wanxian man who can supposedly balance himself in midriver standing on a single pole of floating bamboo, using another pole as an oar. Wanxian is an inauspicious-looking place, and few passersby give it more than a glance. But it played its own part in recent history; the infamous Wahnsien Incident of 1926.

Back then, the Yangtze was a perilous place for the foreign shipping lines that operated between Chongqing and Shanghai. A few large companies dominated the business: the Americans had the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company, Russell & Co., the Dollar Line, Standard Oil Company of New York, and a few smaller operations with impressive names, like the American West China Navigation Co., American-Chinese Steam, and Yangtze Transport Co., as well as tiny wood-oil shippers like Gillespie & Co. On the British side the rival firms of Jardines on the one hand and Butterfield & Swire on the other slugged it out (as they do to this day in Hong Kong) the former with Indo-China Steam Navigation, and Swires with what all knew as CNCo., the China Navigation Company. The Chinese government had its own China Merchants Steam Navigation Company (whose vernacular name was translated in more submissive language as The Bureau of Merchants Invited to Operate Steamships), and there were Japanese, Italian and French companies operating too.

And all had their naval gunboats steaming upriver and down, patrolling, keeping the trade lanes open, protecting citizens and compradors alike from the strange irrationalities of Chinese warlords. It was the collision, in August 1926, of these two aspects of Chinese life – warlords and gunboat diplomacy – that came to be called the Wahnsien Incident.

Sichuan in those days was controlled by a particularly vicious, clever, cunning, and iron-hard local warlord named Yang Sen.
*
He was almost uncontrollably powerful in the Upper Yangtze valley, and he had thousands of troops loyal to him. But he needed to move them, sometimes at short notice, along the river – and the problem arose that although the French and Japanese, typically, would allow warlord soldiers to travel on their cargo vessels, the Americans and the British would not. They were neutrals, they pleaded: they were not to become involved in the internecine rivalries of the Chinese themselves.

Warlords – and not just the local General Yang–were incensed by this ruling, and their strength in numbers allowed them to disregard it. Customarily they would board a party of their men dressed as civilians; once the ship had cast off, the men would draw their hidden sidearms, storm the bridge and hijack the ship for their own purposes. The shipping companies responded by welding iron gates all around the bridges and the sensitive doorways of their vessels – iron bars and locked wire cages kept the local passengers and the foreign crew members rigidly apart.

On 30 August two of CN Co.'s ships were seized by Yang's men off the port of Wanxian. Two Royal Naval gunboats, HMS
Widgeon
and HMS
Cockchafer
, were sent to sort matters out. (A French gunboat sat idly by, with characteristically Gallic sang-froid.) Negotiations came to nothing, and within a short while murderous gunfire broke out. The British ships, which had been sent first on an innocent rescue mission, became swiftly engaged in what was obviously a punitive expedition. They opened fire with their big guns, and subjected the port to an intense barrage. Scores of Chinese died as six-inch shells went whistling through the city streets, demolishing some of the more fragile buildings simply by the velocity of their passage. ‘Shell no hit – Chinese man die anyway,’ a local exclaimed, incredulous.

At the end of the affair seven British sailors were dead and an uncountable number of Chinese – by some accounts, three thousand. The two Swires ships were badly damaged and on fire, and one of the officers was drowned. The warlord General Yang had scuttled off into the cypress woods, to fight again. And the whole sorry issue of gunboat diplomacy was out in the open.

The western press fulminated. The new China will not tolerate such intrusions of Western power into the heart of the country,’ wrote the
Nation
. The
New York World
agreed: gunboats were an anomaly, probably more dangerous as an irritant to the Chinese than a force for good policing. (Forty years later the mood was to be summed up perfectly by Richard McKenna's classic novel, later a Hollywood film,
The Sand Pebbles
.)

And as the press and public complained, so the gunboat-happy policies of the western governments slowly changed. The Wahnsien Incident, the bombing of the
Panay
convoy eleven years later,
*
and a growing general distaste for the idea that western ships should have a prescriptive right to trade and shoot in eastern rivers – in the face of such events and such sentiment, the river was slowly and steadily abandoned. The Italians slipped away, and the French, then the Americans and finally the British. Come the Pacific War, and the untidy four years between the Japanese surrender and the Communist revolution, and eventually all the foreign warships had weighed their anchors and steamed off into the sunset. By 1949, after the
Amethyst
Incident had sounded one final tocsin to those foreigners who dared steam the river, the Yangtze was cleared of barbarians, left to her own devices. The time of the foreign gunboats, which during the twenties and thirties had provided so much material for novels and films and not a few newspaper headlines, had come to an end. And the town of Wanxian, which was now slipping into the oily haze astern, and which was a place that had played a considerably more important role in modern Chinese history than her grubby innocence seems to declare today, was where that end had its beginning.

At the Chongqing docks, the river today is more than a hundred feet below the city, and it has to be reached by way of long flights of well-worn stairs, or via flotillas of rickety funicular devices that haul small passenger railcars sideways up and down the slopes. Invariably the steps, slippery with mud and dripping sewage, are jammed with porters hauling bales of cargo suspended from bending and bouncing bamboo poles. Files of expensively, incongruously and unwisely dressed foreign tourists can often be seen as well, picking their way gingerly down towards their boats.

Their presence invariably strikes me as rather odd. Chongqing has little enough to interest foreigners. Yü the Great, the emperor whose influence on the course of the Yangtze is legendary, was born here, and there is a mountain – Yu Shan, not surprisingly – south of town, where the foreign ambassadors and Chiang Kai-shek once had their mansions. There is a museum to ‘Vinegar Joe' Stilwell (the Chinese like him because he loathed Chiang Kai-shek and privately called him ‘Peanut’), an array of prison cells in which Communists once languished, a museum with a couple of mangy dinosaurs and a few restaurants serving the local hot pot, and other Sichuan food. The city is almost alone in China in having no bicycles – the hills make even the modern Chinese-made mountain bikes all but useless. There are on-again off-again plans to build the world's tallest skyscraper in the city centre, and a New York firm of architects has spent a lot of time and money on various local villains, trying to win the contract. That is essentially all that can be said for the city – that, and the interminable, greasy, lung-fouling all-weather fogs.