The River at the Centre of the World (45 page)

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.

I could see it below me in the afternoon shadows. Just on the left of my field of view the river came heading towards me like a train, fast, unblinking, unstoppable. But then in an instant it halted, it hesitated in a boil of small pools and oily undercurrents and then it promptly turned and began to speed away from me. If ever a river could be said to have turned on a dime it was the Long River, here in deepest Yunnan, among the rapeseed fields and the yak meadows of the Nakhi.

The implications of this screeching, rubber-burning turn are profound. They are most obvious from a glance at the map, when one can see what the region's geography would have been like if Da Yü had
not
placed the mountain exactly where he did.

Without the barrier the southerly streaming Yangtze would have carried on in precisely the same direction – and six hundred miles later, in an undistinguished mess of mud and mangrove swamps, it would have left China for good.

The valley along which it might do so exists today. The declivity that currently brings the river down to Shigu continues through the lake bed at Erhai and on down to become the bed for a weak but also southward-flowing river called the Lishe Jiang. This stream is soon nudged a little southeastward by a range of low hills called Ailao Shan – the Misty Foothills Mountains – and, as the gradient declines, it begins to slow and widen. Before long it leaves the hill country altogether, mumbling past miles of rice paddies and bamboo groves and stands of jungle before it reaches a frontier town called Lao Cai. There it sails in stately fashion onto the steamy plains of what was once northern Annam, where it suddenly and silently escapes from China. It has entered Vietnam. It goes past towns like Yen Bai and Phu Tho and Vinh Yen and then finally it passes the great capital city of Hanoi and its port of Haiphong and reaches the Gulf of Tonkin and the sea.

What began as the River to Heaven and the River of Golden Sand thus might have gone on to become the Red River. The waters that drip from China's high glaciers might have fanned out eventually in a delta that belonged not to the People's Republic of China, but to one of her lesser neighbours.

Instead, and thanks to Da Yü, not a single drop of Yangtze water is actually permitted to escape from China. From my vantage point on the boulder – it was getting darker now, and my maps were flapping in a hot evening wind picking up from the west –I could see the diverted direction in which it was heading: it was going north and east, deep into the centre of the Middle Kingdom. It would twist and swivel for a while until it ploughed through Tiger Leaping Gorge. There it would turn briefly back south, as though still trying to nudge its way out – but the hills would now be too tall for it to slip away, and besides, the old north–south grain of the land has vanished here and there is no pattern at all in which to ease and find a convenient exit. The river is now resolutely pinioned inside China. Its way out, its path of least resistance, is no longer south, but east. And thus does it find its way to Panzhihua and Chongqing, through the Three Gorges to Wuhan, and thence to Nanjing and Shanghai and the sea.

Had it not been for Cloud Mountain, it would not have passed that way at all – and the third-longest river in the world would not exist, a valley in which a twelfth of the world's people now live and work would not exist, and all China would present a very different geography, a very different anthropology, and a very different history from that with which she is blessed or cursed today. Cloud Mountain, in short, is the axial point of China's very being.

*

Geology and tectonics present a more mundane explanation, of course. When India broke free of the Africa to which it once was joined, drifted north to Asia and then collided with it between Eocene and Miocene times, the Himalayas were thrown up, coughed up into the air by the explosive force of the collision. At the eastern end of this collision zone there was terrible tearing and distortion, and gigantic blocks of crust were spun slowly clockwise as they tried to get away from the slow but never-ending impact to their west.
*

The Yangtze, in ancestral times, flowed to the south, into the valley of what is now the Red River. The tremendous tilting that took place after the India–Asia collision wreaked havoc with this tidy plan, and a side stream began to take Yangtze water away from the tilted uplands, heading east. Soon the strength of the tilt and the depth of the new valley won out, and all of the Yangtze water began to course east, not south. The Red River lost its biggest tributary, and China gained her greatest river.

Da Yü's involvement in this grand plan can never be known. To the Chinese his role is implicit – or at least it is to those Chinese who believe him to have been a real person. To more disinterested scholars in distant laboratories, poring over their polarizing microscopes and fault-zone maps, a more impersonal explanation seems appropriate. The Chinese claim geologists have no poetry in their souls – and from halfway up Cloud Mountain, with the western sky turning to indigo and the great first bend of the Yangtze shining below like gunmetal, a poetic explanation seems, as up at Gelandandong, more spiritually appropriate to the story of this vast river.

14

Harder Than the Road to Heaven

We had pitched our tent on the slopes of a Tibetan mountainside, above a bright green meadow that was crowded with very large yaks. Camping had not been in our plan; but our car had broken down, and now lay seemingly beyond repair. The diagnosis was plain: the two mild-steel bolts that were supposed to hold the radiator secure had both sheared simultaneously, buffeted by scores of miles of vicious bumping along what is laughably called National Highway 307. Once the bolts had snapped, the radiator had fallen backwards, directly onto the cooling fan. The whirling metal blades had promptly cut a series of concentric arcs into the copper tubing, causing all of the car's cooling water to pour out onto the dry and stony ground.

In London or New York such a mishap would be serious, but not mortally so. Even if there was no service station nearby, some man would be within hailing distance who could jury-rig the radiator, sealing its leaking tubes for long enough for us to limp onward for a permanent fix. But in Tibet, hundreds of miles from anywhere, an event like this turns into a disaster on an epic scale. So we broke out the tent and readied ourselves for a long and hungry stay in the midst of this unholy wilderness.

The tent was Chinese-made, overly well weathered and decayed by years of use. The zippers intended to hold together the flaps of the front entrance and its fly sheet had been ruined and refused to work. This in itself would be no major problem – provided the weather held. But Tibetan weather is notoriously fickle, and within seconds of my putting up the tent and clambering into it and showing Lily – who had never camped before in her life – where to stash her gear, the wind suddenly picked up and marble-sized spheres of hail began to tumble from the sky.

They sounded just like bullets – a fusillade that began slowly at first and then became as intense as a wild celebration of battle, with the chunks of ice, larger and larger and rougher and with ever sharper spurs and spikes, hurtling viciously down from the clouds.

I was keeping the unzippable doors closed with my hands, and the ice was beating against the exposed skin, bruising it and then cutting it until blood flowed freely and dripped onto the tent floor and onto the ice-carpeted grass outside. Lily was terror-struck, and she fled into a corner of the tent like a wounded animal – until a torrent of hail thundered down through the fly sheet and began to bruise and batter her, upon which she sensibly moved to the centre of the space, away from the wall. She sat whimpering, her crying drowned completely by the thunder of the hail, which went on and on, becoming ever louder, half burying the tent in a thick rime of frozen water. What with her wailing, and the thunder of the ice, and my bleeding hands, and the thought of the ruined car buried in white outside, the day was turning out to be rather trying.

We were on the road to the Yangtze's headwaters, and getting there – involving a lot of backtracking – was proving anything but easy. It had seemed very much otherwise some weeks before, when the cascade of coincidences that had begun with the taxi driver miles away eventually took us to two men who had access to cars – Mr Wu back in Panzhihua, and more recently Mr Xu Xiaoyang, who lived and worked in the Sichuan capital city of Chengdu. Xu was a devoted fan of the Upper Yangtze River, and he had stated flatly that if he could help anyone wanting to get there, he would: as he told his story in his office above a local department store, reaching the headwaters would be almost child's play.

We had been given his name and a letter of introduction by Wu of Panzhihua, and he – Xu – was waiting for us at the Chengdu railway station when we pulled in after our day-long ride from the south. It had been an astonishingly beautiful journey – a combination of scenic beauty and awesome engineering as, via tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, the line pierced the eastern flanks of the Daxue Mountains and raced high above the Anning River.

The railway had been built in the seventies by gangs of convicts and soldiers, and it must have been one of the most technically difficult pieces of permanent-way construction anywhere in the world. The reward for a traveller is one of perpetual astonishment, of being hurled from the bat blackness of a tunnel into the glare of a section high up on a cliff above the river, then dashing back into darkness again before once more – two hundred times, all told – being thrust into vivid sunshine higher up the mountain still, with the rice farmers working their paddies and the fishermen poling their sampans hundreds of feet below. We reached the plains of Chengdu quite tired out, exhausted by the huge emotional overload of seeing so much unforgettable scenery, and being so overawed for so many hours, without respite.

Xu Xiaoyang was in his early thirties, an owlish man in pebble-thick glasses; he was with a friend whom he introduced as Mr Tang, who had long hair draped over the top of his shoulders, and a vaguely Tibetan cast to his features. Tang had been to the headwaters ten years before, and would guide us; Xu would organize everything: it would be his pleasure, he said, and his privilege.

His organization, which was based in two large and spartanly furnished rooms above the department store, was called the Sichuan Corporation for International Cultural Development. How it raised funds, how it paid Xu and his pretty secretary and the rent and the office machines, remained a mystery during the initial days that we waited in Chengdu, getting my Alien's Travel Permit and our car – another Beijing Jeep, as it happened. But money it seemed to have in abundance: there were cellular telephones, air conditioners, expensive dinners offered to us each evening, visits from moguls from Shanghai and Hong Kong, and a good deal of talk about future cooperation, of ‘putting Sichuan on the map’, of making films about the Three Gorges Dam, and about the headwaters themselves.

Then came a clue as to whence came the corporation's riches. A glossy brochure was delivered to our hotel one day showing the worldwide extent of its business. Most of the links appeared to be with countries in Africa – Tanzania, Kenya, Niger. There were photographs of banks and office blocks, grand houses that might have been presidential palaces, factories and hydroelectric schemes – all in gleaming white concrete, all being happily run by smiling Africans. They had all been built, it turned out, by Sichuanese – by men who had been sent out by Xu and his predecessors, to live and work in camps all over Africa, as part of what is generally known as bilateral cooperation.

I had seen such camps before – they were usually well-guarded barracks, with the inmates permitted neither to leave nor to welcome visitors. The workers' costs were met by the Sichuan provincial government, which in turn received a subvention from Beijing's foreign assistance ministry. The organization that made all the arrangements – Xu's in this case, though each province invariably had a similar foreign-assistance programme – took the provincial and national grant money, and maybe some subsidy from the foreign power to whom aid was an offer. It seemed to do very well – allowing in this case Xu, who was the manager, to drive a large Japanese car, to live alone in a comfortable house near the American Consulate (he was divorced, and his current girlfriend lived in Tokyo) and to dine famously every day.

It allowed him also to be unusually generous to friends and friends-of-friends who stopped by with what in other circumstances might seem outrageous requests. I had mentioned to Wu that Lily and I wanted to be able to see the far Upper Yangtze in a place where it was narrow enough to jump across – something that would ordinarily require months of planning and the granting of permissions. He had duly passed on this intelligence to Xu.

‘There will be no problem,’ Xu said excitedly, ‘I have the most excellent
guanxi
here. We will get all we need. You will get your wishes.’

By
guanxi
, he meant ‘connections' – the complex system of favour exchanging, of mutual back-scratching, of the calling-in of old debts which, overlying a byzantine network of family and business and school and military ties that acts as China's new-style class system, forms the essential lubricant that allows China to function, unfairly but quite efficiently. An impoverished peasant without any
guanxi
at all might not always get all of the rice he deserved or to which he was entitled; nor would a vexed citizen who lacked connections find true justice at the hands of the system. But I knew I would get a car and a driver to take me to the Yangtze headwaters because –
and only because
– I would be perceived as someone who might, one day, be able to repay a favour that would most assuredly one day be called in. This was
guanxi
in its most perfect essence: I would get all I needed because I could get them what they needed.

But what I nearly did not get was my Alien's Travel Permit. ‘I have serious suspicions about this man,’ complained the head of the Chengdu Public Security Bureau, when he was asked to give me permission to travel down Route 307, the old Lhasa brick tea road. He refused to say why he was suspicious: I had offered myself to him innocently as a teacher, bent on travelling to western Sichuan for reasons of scholarship and curiosity. But my passport was perhaps a little overfilled with stamps from previous visits to China, and he may have wondered why. Anyway, he turned me down.

So we went instead to another office, one that Xu knew had equal powers to issue permits, and eventually – and to a triumphal war whoop from Xu, who had been in danger of losing face because of the bureaucrat's obduracy – I was handed the grey folded insert for my passport, which allowed me to visit the towns of Kangding, Luding and Dêgê.

I would not be permitted to cross the Yangtze, however. The river here marks a firm frontier: on the far side, the western side, the right bank, was the province the Chinese now called Xizang, and which the rest of the world calls Tibet. The officials were adamant that I should not go that far, especially during what was said to be ‘troublesome times’. I was equally determined that I should: Lhasa may have been far from the Yangtze, but in the plan that Xu and I had conceived, it seemed an essential way station.

Back in Shigu, where the Yangtze makes its first big turn towards the north and east, I had taken a close look at the large-scale map. The road that headed north, up towards the old local capital town called Batang, was indifferent at best. It was a narrow dirt track used only by logging trucks and it led through hundreds of miles of difficult and frankly uninteresting wilderness. It would be far more interesting, I thought, to make a large zigzag of a journey, crossing the river and in doing so sampling a richer cross section of life and topography.

According to this plan, I would travel west from Chengdu along the southern branch of the tea road to the point where it crossed the Yangtze; then I would pass deep (and illicitly) into Tibet, I would cross the valleys of the rivers Salween and Mekong until I reached the only properly metalled road in the entire province, the great north–south highway that ran between Lhasa and Golmud, a dreary northern potash-mining town that lay in the gulag-land of central Qinghai province. If I took this road north from Lhasa I would then cross the Yangtze once again – and I would at this point be just a very few miles from one of the great river's supposed sources, the Tuotuo stream and its rising at the pool below the Gelandandong glacier. A brief trek into the moors near there, and I should perhaps find a Yangtze that was as narrow and as pristine as I wanted.

In this plan, journeying into Tibet and all the way to Lhasa was essential. Yet now I was told – not that I had truly expected otherwise; everyone was saying that Tibet in 1995 was a tricky place to visit – that the greater part of the road I needed to travel was off-limits. The permit that allowed me to travel along it as far as Dêgê was firm in forbidding me to proceed any farther. Besides, cautioned my Australian guidebook, the roads leading to Lhasa from here (and there are actually two) ‘are some of the wildest, highest and most dangerous routes in the world. They are not open to foreigners. If you do travel along them do not forget the physical dangers – take food and warm clothing. Travel on these routes usually takes several weeks, hitch-hiking on trucks…’ The auguries were not so good.

Tang arrived on the morning of our departure in a bright red Beijing Jeep our second. They were common enough cars in China – made under licence in what was said to be a disastrously run joint-venture factory Chrysler had set up in the mid-eighties in the Chinese capital. He was sitting in the front passenger seat: the driver was a small and nervous-looking man named Mr Miao. Normally Miao was employed by the organization that owned the car – the Propaganda Department of the Chengdu City Government, with which the owlish Xu had such excellent
guanxi.
He knew perfectly well where we were wanting to go, and he thought there was a good chance we would get there. ‘You may have some trouble with the police,’ he said with a twitching grin, ‘but you probably also have many dollars, yes? Out there they are more interested in dollars than permits.’