‘Welcome!’ spoke the computer, with a tinny amiability that took the chill off the early morning. ‘You have mail!’
Duly, and robotlike, I then performed the slight mouse movements of finger and thumb that are all that is necessary these days to retrieve inbound electronic letters, and found in an instant the morning's mass of post. Most of it was routine, letters that I wouldn't bother with for an hour or so. But one did seem at first blush more intriguing – a note from someone I clearly did not know, someone who signed himself or herself with the rather unattractive sobriquet of ‘Lima Bean’. Peruvian? Surely not. I settled for the likelihood of an American correspondent, someone who was probably from the Middle West.
Everything that follows had its origins in this letter, leading as it did to a cascade of peculiar electronic coincidences. A journey that eventually passed thousands of miles into the remotest regions of a China far, far away from home first came about by way of a phenomenon that admirers of today's communications revolution would heartily applaud. Some might describe it, with appropriate grandiloquence, as a serendipitous moment, something that was grasped by happy chance while speeding down the information superhighway. Or as a digitally rendered equivalent of Once Upon a Time.
I had walked groggily into my study one cold morning in early winter, the first mug of Maxwell House in hand. I had switched on the computer and looked to see if there was anything of interest for me. I hoped so: even in the digital universe one still wakes and hopes for letters. The tinny ‘Welcome’, the jaunty ‘You Have Mail’, caused as always that telltale quickening of the heart. ‘All long for mail,’ Auden wrote, ‘for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’ So with a couple of keystrokes I told the computer to display the note from Mr or Mrs or Ms Lima Bean, and within seconds this uninvited stranger's words were tumbling onto the cathode tube before me.
They seemed to be asking for my advice about Hong Kong.
I could guess why. Some months before I had been asked to write up a list, on a sort of electronic self-portrait-cum-census-form, of what I considered at the time to be things that interested me. My response had been rather glib, and in retrospect not a little pretentious. Borrowing a line from Jorge Luis Borges, I said that I liked ‘hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the taste of coffee, the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson – and Hong Kong’. This last I had added to the blind sage's list, and it was this last that prompted Lima Bean's brief letter.
‘Dear Sir,’ it said, or something to that effect, ‘I am about to go with my husband on our first-ever journey to Hong Kong. Since you say you are interested in the place, could you give us some hints on where to go, what to do, what to see… We are late-middle-aged, we think of ourselves as bright, and quite adventurous… We leave next week.’ The writer lived in northern Illinois. She confessed to rarely having ventured farther afield than Boston.
I replied instantly and almost unthinkingly, in the way that electronic mail tempts us to do. A swift tap on the Write a Reply button, then a few hastily chosen suggestions – the name of a temple near Sai Kung, my membership number at the China Club, my son's phone number on Lamma Island, the titles of a couple of good books – followed by a swift tap on Send Reply, and it was done. I returned to whatever work I was planning to do, and promptly forgot all about the exchange.
Two months later, on the afternoon of a day when I had returned from a trip abroad, a bulky package came in the mail, express, special delivery. It was postmarked Chicago. The return address was unfamiliar; but since it was unlikely that the Unabomber would have any interest in me, I unwrapped the parcel, though gingerly. It turned out to be a copy of the fifth edition of Sherman Lee's classic History of Far Eastern Art, expensively produced by an upmarket Fifth Avenue art house. The jacket was nicely culturally agnostic, balancing Japanese art and Chinese art with equal weight by showing a Momoyama period screen painting and a Sung dynasty handscroll side by side. It was very elegant: the perfect temptation, no doubt, for the impulsive buyer of this kind of hundred-dollar book.
I flipped through it for a while, stopping occasionally to look at colour plates of places I knew – temple gardens in Kyoto, a fresco at Borobudur, an elephantine sandstone Buddha in China's Shanxi province. Then a handwritten note fell out: it was from someone called Andrea, thanking me for the advice I had offered her and her husband all those weeks before.
They apologized for what seemed an unconscionable delay in expressing their gratitude, the note began. They had had an unforgettable time: the China Club was wonderful, the Austin Coates book* was unforgettable, my son's phone number was always busy. The enclosed was the very least way they could express their gratitude. Enjoy.
I was astonished. For what had taken me perhaps three minutes' thought – all this? I flipped through some more pages, pleased at the generosity of strangers – and then, quite suddenly, I stopped. For there before me was a reproduction, in black and white, and spread across the upper half of two pages, of what I knew to be a remarkable work of Chinese art. And more than that: I knew, the very moment I saw it, that this was a creation that, in some way or other, was going to change my life.
It was part of a picture by a Qing dynasty court painter named Wang Hui – part of it only, because the entire thing, if unrolled, would measure fifty-three feet from end to end. It was called Wen Li Chang Jiang – the Ten thousand li Yangtze.* It had been painted in about 1680. It was a fanciful ink and pastel realization of the entire course of the Yangtze River – which the Chinese generally called Chang Jiang, the Long River, or simply Jiang, The River.
Every mile of the stream, every town along its banks, every tributary, every rapid, every rockpool, everything from the mouth to the mountains was said to be there, in a more or less recognizable form. It was very beautiful, even in this fragment – the delicate brush strokes of more than three centuries before had produced pagodas, sailing junks, mountains, tree-covered rock pillars, reeds, fishermen, ancient city walls… Even had I not been grateful for the book, I was hugely glad to be seeing the picture. For – and herein lies the most important of the cascade of coincidences – the river of the painting was the river at the centre of my world.
For the very day that the book came so unexpectedly and so pleasingly in the mail was the day that I had returned from China, and, more specifically, from the river itself. And I had made the journey along the river purely and simply because I had been casting about trying to work out how best to write a book about it.
I had been fascinated by the Yangtze for many years at least since the mid-1980s, when I first went to live in Hong Kong. I remember vividly the first time I saw it. I had travelled out to the colony by train, all the way from Liverpool Street to Kow-loon, and although our various expresses had thundered over some fine rivers on the way (the Volga, the Ob, the Yenisei) and even though we had crossed the Huang He, the Yellow River, which I knew they called China's Sorrow because of the huge amount of heartland she ripped out to sea each year – despite all of these mighty crossings, nothing quite prepared me for the thundering roar of the bridge that took the train from Hanyang to Wuchang, across the vast brown winding-cloth that, to my unlettered English mind, was still known as the Yangtze Kiang.
One moment there were the lights of a city, and then came the rumble, rumble, rumble of the bridge girders and iron railway ties, and there was blackness below, and just nothing. It was like roaring on a railway in outer space. Once in a while a firefly of a light sped by underneath, or there was a line of little lights, some red, some green; and as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could see the glint of rushing water, lit by the umbery sliver of soot-polluted moon. The dark and pinpricked river swept by below for minute after minute until suddenly, with a great relieving gush of silence, the girders dropped away, the rails became welded and seamless once again, and the lights of the steel mills of Wuchang turned sepia night into orange morning. We were past the Yangtze now: and though it was not apparent in the night we were in a different geography, in almost another country, and among quite another people.
Some geographers and writers like to think of the river as a sort of waistline, a silk ribbon that cinches China quite decidedly into two. Above the waist are the brain and the heart and soul of China, a land that is home to the tall, pale-skinned, wheat-eating, Mandarin-speaking, reclusive and conservative peoples who are the true heirs to their Middle Kingdom's five thousand years of uninterrupted history. Below the river-waist, on the other hand, are the country's muscles and sinews: the stocky, darker, more flamboyant, rice-eating peoples who speak in the furiously complicated coastal dialects, the men and women whose energies and acumen and cunning – and cooking – have spread the goods and words of China to the world beyond.
I could see nothing of this, of course, from my seat on the Shanghai Down Express. But I had been to Hong Kong before, and I had been to many of China's northern towns as well, and had been only too aware there was a certain facile truth about the geographers' theories: in summary, and superficially, one can readily observe that Northerners don't like rice, and they don't like Southerners, and the Yangtze is as convenient a line as any to draw between them.
And yet there was a paradox, too – in that the river that separates the nation also manages to unite it. The Yangtze divides the country in two by its sheer and barely bridgeable width. But at the same time and on another level it also manages to weld the country into one, at least in part by virtue of its vast and barely imaginable length. All Chinese, whether they are from Hainan Island in the far south, or Mohe in Manchuria in the far north, or whether they live in Kashgar in remotest Turkestan, or on the Korean borderland near the lake at the summit of Mt Paektu – all Chinese have a feeling of ownership for and kinship with their Long River. It is all China's river – a sacred icon revered and respected by all.
All Chinese know they are fed by the Yangtze and flooded by the Yangtze; they know the river is their country's gateway and its major highway; they write poems about it and sing songs to it, they fight battles on its banks, they sign treaties on its shores, they draw water for fishing and washing and making power, they dump rubbish in it, they drown babies in it, they scatter ashes in it and pollute it with coal and sulphur and naphtha and the excretion and decay of every animal known, and of humans too. They respect it, fear it, welcome it, run from it, hate it and love it. More than any other river in the world – more even than the Nile, which also cradles an entire country and nurtures a civilization – the Yangtze is a mother-river. It is the symbolic heart of the country, and at the very centre, literally and figuratively and spiritually, of the country through which it so ponderously and so hugely flows.
If the Yangtze valley were to be a country it would be the second most populous in the world, after India. Out of all the people in the world, one in twelve lives in the river's watershed. There are almost 500 million people whose homes and workplaces are scattered along the miles of river cliffs and mud banks between the Tibetan Plateau and the East China Sea. And although two other rivers, the Nile and the Amazon, are marginally longer, their importance – social, economic, even cultural – is almost nothing by comparison.
The Mississippi-Missouri might seem a real rival, for length, power, industrial might; and yet there is a signal difference, for Old Glory exerts none of the popular unifying power over America that the Yangtze does for China. A man in San Francisco feels precious little for the river that he or his ancestors might once have crossed to get to his present home; by contrast a man in Canton knows only too well the power and the might of the river that he or his forebears crossed in their sampan or their wupan to bring him eventually from the heartland to the coast.
Even from where I lived down on that southern coast, a thousand miles away, it is impossible to be unaware of the Yangtze's presence, of the import of this slumbering dragon of a river. It has a commanding existence, a lowering geographical reality. It was easy to be captivated by its power and stern visage: and for many years before the morning when I first gazed down at Wang Hui's masterpiece, I had indeed been captivated, quite truly. I had wanted to write about the Yangtze almost from the first moment I caught sight of it.
But if the kernel of an idea of writing an account of this great river was there, then how best exactly to write it remained a problem. Except that as I studied the picture before me that day, and looked ever more closely, an idea occurred to me. Something about the picture seemed unusual – something about its construction, its composition. It was something that hinted at a way to explore the river, a way to write the book. Perhaps, I thought, if I could actually find his picture, if I could see the original, the full-size version of the fragment that was so tantalizingly displayed in Sherman Lee's great book – if I could see the entire thing in its pristine state, then it might provide the clue. But how to see the picture? Where exactly was it?
The caption gave the name: ‘H. C. Weng Collection, New Hampshire’. A couple of phone calls – one to the publisher, another to the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – brought a further name, Wan-go Weng, and the vague thought from one of the Metropolitan's staff that he did indeed live in New Hampshire, quite probably near a university town. But as to exactly where, infinite regrets, no idea.
I had once visited Dartmouth College, near the town of Hanover, and I had a hunch this might be the place. I called directory information and my luck was in: there was indeed a listing for Weng, W. G. Within moments I had Mr Weng on the line, his barely accented Chinese voice thin, educated, precise, cheerful. I introduced myself, first in poor Chinese to suggest some credentials, then in English.
Yes, he said, he had the picture. It was one of his most precious possessions. It was locked away in a bank vault. He took it out every few years, to gaze at it, just as handscroll paintings are meant to be gazed at. Would I like to see it? He could easily take it out of the bank on a Friday evening, in time for a weekend when I might be free. He suggested a Sunday a week or so after Christmas. Would I come mid-afternoon? ‘You are English, yes?’ He gave a courteous little giggle of pleasure. ‘Teatime, yes? We'll see you for tea. I've no doubt we will have a lot of snow by then. I will send you a map. You must take care driving in the weather we have.’
Wan-go Weng and his wife lived at the end of a rutted lane in the low hills above the Connecticut River valley. Their house was new, made of warm polished pale woods like pine and butternut, and it was well insulated against the bitter cold that in these parts lasts long into the spring. Mr Weng came to the door – a slight, kindly-looking figure, he smiled easily and often. He led me indoors, through an airy living room on whose walls hung a number of small ink-brush drawings. There was a spare elegance about the place, everything tidy and bright and clean, everything chosen for a purpose, no clutter.
‘I have the scroll,’ he said, and pointed to a neat cherry-wood box, maybe two feet long and eight inches wide and deep, sitting on the kitchen table. ‘We'll look at it in a moment. But first it's important to know how I came to get it. Part of the magic of a handscroll is in its history – in how many hands it has scrolled through, if you will. Best only to see the picture when you know its story.’
Wang Hui had been one, perhaps the most distinguished, of the famous Four Wangs, the painters who won the unstinting patronage of the Chinese courts in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. He was born in 1632 – the same year as Vermeer and Christopher Wren – and he died in 1717. He was a contemporary of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Frans Hals; and though his art did not appear in the West until long after his death, the first exports from China – most notably tea – did make their appearance at about this time in England. The craze for chinoiserie, which would before long make such classical and orthodox and Confucian styles as Wang's all the rage in modish houses of London and Paris, was to erupt during his lifetime – not that he ever knew.
His best-known commission came in 1691, when the second Qing emperor, Kangxi, demanded that he accompany the court on a seventy-day Imperial Progress, an official tour through the southern and eastern provinces of the country. Wang painted like a man possessed: he produced no fewer than twelve handscrolls, recording faithfully – for he was a keenly traditional painter of the no-frills Confucian school – all the minutiae of court life and country habits. And he brought the same painstaking approach, rather dry and fussy by some accounts, to his triumphal painting of the Long River.
He completed this sometime around the end of the seventeenth century, and there is some suggestion – though no documentation to prove – that he gave it to a Court official for safekeeping. When he, and later the mandarin, died, the box, the silk wrapping cloth, and the tightly rolled painting inside were passed to a succession of wise men. The only one of these to have a personal link with Wan-go Weng was the latter's great-great-grandfather, who owned it during the opening years of the twentieth century.
This man, though a Han Chinese in the Manchu court, had once been tutor to two of the child-emperors. For his troubles he had been appointed a mandarin of the First Rank: he was allowed the distinction of wearing a violet robe,* a hat with a scarlet button on top, and a peacock feather. His great-great-grandson knows of him as an austere, Confucian, conservative figure – one of the few men in Court who stood firmly against those appeasers who wanted to treat with the Japanese. He would brook no nonsense from the invaders: he represented the unflinching spirit of China at her apogee.
But it was not long before the combined effects of Japanese and the barbarian intervention in China – to say nothing of Communism and the civil war – sapped the energies of such proud figures as this. China's Empire was ebbing its way towards extinction, the mandarinate along with it. It was during these turbulent times that the then-young Mr Weng was given charge of the painting: during the dreadful and chaotic days in 1949, when the Communists and the Nationalists were slugging it out for control, it was one of the few connections, it seemed to him, with the courtly and stable dignity of China's past. He was in Shanghai at the time, and he was planning to flee to the United States. It was vital, his family said, that he take Wang Hui's picture with him.
The tale would have had more derring-do about it had the young Mr Weng managed to escape from the Communist armies with the cherry-wood box under his arm, hidden under a cloak, his only possession. But in fact the box, along with his other luggage, went in a crate, deep in the hold of a President Lines freighter that sailed out of the Whangpoo and out of the mouth of the Yangtze and across the Pacific.
He, in more of a hurry than his bags, came out just ahead of Mao's troops by flying on the very last North West Airlines turbo-prop flight to leave China in November 1949. He reached New York via airfields in Tokyo, an Aleutian island, Anchorage, Edmonton and Minneapolis. The freighter steaming across the ocean duly docked somewhere on New York's Lower West Side. Mr Weng was eventually reunited with his boxes and with the picture, and Wang Hui's Wen Li Chang Jiang has never been out of America since.
This history all duly recited, we went over to the dining-room table, which was now brilliant in the late afternoon sun. Mr Weng, with steady and delicate movements, unfastened the two tiny ivory hasps that kept the box lid shut. Inside was what looked like a bolt of grey silk: it too was fastened with ties of ivory and white cotton, which Mr Weng undid, his hands shaking a little.
It is rare indeed that we can ever touch a work of art that is as old as three hundred years. Pictures of great age and value are invariably guarded and protected – those on public display generally well, those in private hands usually jealously. They are suspended beyond our grasp, high, unreachable, beyond molestation. Or like some sculptures they may be put behind a little fence, or a tracery of velvet ropes, or with a discreet sign that warns Don't Touch. But Chinese handscrolls had quite a different purpose.
They were meant to be touched. They were never meant for mere public display. Rather, they were specifically offered to give both visual and tactile pleasure to the owner, at home, in private. They were all part of Confucian civility: with his books and his pipes and his wine – and his paintings – a Chinese man of former times could indulge himself of an evening with a sensual experience of the highest order. As we were doing now. I watched as Mr Weng unrolled the beginning of the painting, and I felt the same electric thrill at the sensation as civilized old Chinese men must have felt through dozens of decades before.
The paper was soft, faintly spongy, like parchment, and it stayed quite flat on the table even though it had been tightly rolled for the last five years. It had a small bamboo stiffener at the end, and as he pulled it out towards the right – the picture itself remaining unrolled to the left – he laid it over the table edge, just in case there was a tendency for the paper to spring back. But there was none: it stayed just where it was, and so he unrolled, and unrolled, and watched slowly as, one by one, and as though appearing through a summer sea-mist of the purest white, small objects – junks and fishing boats! I began to identify – began to appear on the paper.
They were black. Some were triangular, some elongate. In one or two of them small figures could be made out, men in wide conical hats peering intently downward. We were on the ocean, near the coast. Mr Weng unrolled some more – the fast-forming but still slender roll at the right beginning to swell, the mother roll on the left diminishing very slightly.
Low cliffs then came into view, one with a pagoda, nine storeys high, perhaps a monument to some vainglorious Chinese duke. Then came more cliffs, a city wall, two low and tree-fringed banks of what was now clearly a river, coming together out of nowhere, and moving in a rough parallel to the left. There was a patch of colour, a dab of yellowish brown pastel on a small curved roof in a village in the foreground. ‘Shanghai!’ said Mr Weng. ‘Small place, back then.’
And so, inch by inch and mile by mile, we journeyed up the Long River of three centuries before. It was a little like watching a film, or seeing the countryside through a long lens with which the director would execute a slow and lazy pan, downstream to upstream. Occasionally, Mr Weng would see something that he thought he recognized. ‘Must be Nanking!’ he'd say. ‘There's the triangle at Chungking, the junction where the Japs used to bomb! You read Han Suyin? Terrifying place to be, Chungking.’ (Mr Weng had a tendency to use the old names, the names that were in use in China at the time he had fled. I thought it helped him cling to the China that had been his home: to talk of Nanjing and Chongqing would be to talk of another country, which in a sense Mao's China had become.)
We passed the representation of what might have been the town that is now called Yichang – though all we could see was a mere hamlet, a few huts huddled behind a low wall. This, I thought, was probably where the great new dam, the subject of so much present-day controversy, was going to be built. Mr Weng had told me he had studied hydrology, and I imagined he might hold a view on the dam, as most people did: but no, he had all the tact and circumspection of the careful scholar and ventured no opinion. ‘I have studied it in detail,’ was all he said as we passed the site by. ‘It is a most complicated issue.’
Some Chinese scroll paintings are adorned with annotations by the artist, the better to help identify the succession of locales. But Wang Hui had done no such thing, and we had to guess at the more fancifully named formations that slid before our eyes. Was this pile of rock, deep in the Three Gorges, Wang's representation of what all China knew as the ‘Military Books' formation? Could the sinuously formed limestone cliff pictured here be what they called the ‘Ox Lung and Horse Liver‘? It was difficult to tell, from this at least, what had prompted China's mariners to imagine once that the strata had been shaped like a pile of volumes, or a dish of umbles.
Steadily we journeyed upriver, and steadily upriver the stream narrowed. The drawing became rather more fanciful as – we must presume – the territory became steadily more unfamiliar to Wang Hui, and it was replaced by the more imaginary river that legend and anecdote had settled inside the artist's grizzled head. How far he had travelled we do not know. We know he completed his Progress, and that great journey must have taken him to a number of places along the course of the Long River – no emperor could avoid passing by, so central was it to dynastic China's topography. But whether the painter travelled as far along it as his scroll implies, we have no knowledge.
Some places to which he may well not have travelled did seem to be there, however – or at least they seemed recognizable. Shigu's Great Bend, for example, appeared to be represented – Mr Weng and I turned our heads this way and that to convince ourselves that one length of delicate tracery was indeed the hairpin turn, despite being hidden on the painting among wildly imagined precipices and waterfalls and mist-shrouded temples with their ever-watching monks. We couldn't be sure. After all, Shigu was getting on for two thousand miles away from country in which the painter lived and where he would have felt comfortable and secure: few Chinese in those days went any farther west from the capital than the Red Basin of Sichuan. They only imagined the wilderness, the terrifying monsters, the godless savagery that stretched beyond.
And then the source, the headwaters – unknown, unvisited and so imagined also. Fifty-three linear feet after those first few fishing boats had appeared bobbing in the East China Sea, so the river-picture came to its end in a swirl of spray and mist and cloudy heavens. A few last peaks were dotted through the snow-folds of the clouds, like nunataks on snow, tiny black triangles against the blankness.
There was an intentional symmetry here: the peaks were there to echo the mainsails of the junks on the estuary waves. Just as the boats would be fewer and fewer as we went away from land, so the mountaintops would grow smaller and less distinct as the artist's mind closed into the clouds. And so then there was nothing – just an expanse of white emptiness, the unsullied heavens from which the river had first come.
But though the painting was now quite done, the scroll itself was not quite ended. I pushed my chair away from the table. Mr Weng stopped me. ‘No, don't stop. There's more,’ he said. ‘This is what I really want to show you. Carry on. You'll get to it soon.’
What Mr Weng had wanted me to see was the artist's colophon, and all the writings that had followed it down the decades. It is a common feature of Chinese handscroll pictures that the last few feet of mulberry paper – the part of the sheet nearest to the core when the painting is wound up – are left blank. The emptiness is first for the painter himself to write a brief but elegant few lines of explanation. Three hundred years ago Wang Hui had done so – his orthodoxy demanded it – and he had written many vertical lines of characters, telling how long the work had taken him, the cities he had visited, the places he liked best. He dated it and signed it, and then sealed it with his chop, in scarlet ink.
Next to his writings were lines from others who next owned the painting – perhaps a high Court official who had kept it until the 1720s, next to whoever had it until 1760, then another in 1790, another in the early nineteenth century – and so on and on, essay succeeding essay succeeding poem succeeding poem, different interpretations, different expressions of joy, different offerings from the centuries.
The final one in the series had been written in this century, by Wan-go Weng's great-great-grandfather. It had been sealed with what I supposed to be the magisterial impression of the Reign Year of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi – the forlorn, childish, and Hollywood-memorialized Last Emperor of China.
But now what would happen? What would Weng himself write when it became his turn? And who would write after him? His children live in California, and their ability to write the kind of calligraphy necessary for so venerable a document is limited, to say the least. Wang Hui – long dead maybe, but his presence nonetheless haunting all who ever owned his work – might have to face the possibility that his painting, so long in the hands of Chinese and so long in the orbit of the Court, might now have to remain overseas, beyond the Chinese Pale, and that it might one day perhaps even come into the possession of a barbarian. Not a prospect to please, not at all.
I liked to imagine Wan-go Weng trying to salvage the situation. I liked to think of him taking the painting from its vault once in a while, trying to pluck up the courage to add his own writing to the colophon. How would he prepare? Would he take his inkstone and grind the finest and blackest ink, and select the most graceful and finest-pointed from a selection of badger-hair brushes? Would he then hold it vertically, heavy with its new load of black fluid, above the next blank space on the mulberry paper? And then would he wait, his hand poised, steady, unwavering?
What to write? he would wonder. And then, once content was composed, how best to write? Should it be with long sweeping characters, or in figures that were small, tidy, and precise? And let alone what he should do – could he do it, could he write an epigraph that was as elegant in style and expression as that of his great-great-grandfather, or of the succession of mandarins who had gone before? Would whatever he managed to write have the poetry, the rhythm, and the spare economy that was appropriate to a picture of such antiquity and to a Yangtze river that demands and deserves such greatness?
I fancy – though I never inquired – that his courage in such situations would invariably fail him. His brush would hover above the empty paper, paper that almost cried out to be marked indelibly by the owner's ink. But that very indelibility was what made it all so intimidating – and on each occasion, so I supposed, he would eventually replace the brush on its stand, clean the ink from its stone, roll the painting up again and put it back in its silken wrappings, and then in its box. Maybe later, he would say to himself, maybe when I'm eighty, ninety, or when I am back in China for good. It was, it seemed to me, an exquisite kind of dilemma, a kind of mind-torture that only China, with her perverse ways, could invent.
After I had said my good-byes that first evening and had begun the drive down through the dark and the snow, I realized that Mr Weng, though he may not yet have solved his own problem with the river, had indeed and unwittingly solved mine. As I thought about it, I realized I knew exactly now how I would tackle – and how I should tackle, indeed how I must tackle – the story of the Yangtze. It was the thought of the written colophon, which I had almost been too impatient to see, that had given me the essential clue.
The painting, which we had slowly rolled open on that dining table, had offered us, as it had offered all those who had seen it in the past, a steady and stately progression through the river as geography, as place. But the writings that followed it, the letters and poems that came from a long line of owners and borrowers, had then offered us, and all who likewise had viewed it before, a steady progression through experience, through time. Now, I realized, I could and should combine those two journeys: I could make my own exploration of the river not simply an inquiry into Chinese geography – but also an excursion through Chinese history.
If I were to travel upstream along the river, going as we had that snowy tea time, I would be able not just to travel deep inward, into the Chinese heartland; I could also travel at the same moment ever backwards into the Chinese saga. For that was a feature of the Yangtze which only began to occur to me on the drive home: that the river's history, or much of it, made a rough-and-ready parallel with its progress as a river. As the river flowed, so had China flowed as well.
The riverside cities that lay close to the sea, for instance, tended to be the cities that had been affected by more modern times. The towns and villages that lay up in the headwater hills, on the other hand, were ancient, or had lain untouched and unspoiled for centuries. Upstream was ancient; downstream was more modern. Downstream was today; upstream was yesterday.
I thought on. This uniqueness of the Yangtze, if indeed it was a true uniqueness and not a feature common to all great rivers, had much to do with foreigners, and with the remarkable interfering role that they played in the recent history of China. It had come about in part at least because the western penetration of China, which had been such a feature of China's eighteenth-and nineteenth-century history, had largely involved the Yangtze as a means of achieving that penetration. The cities that were easiest of access – by foreign gunboats, by traders, by missionaries – had naturally seen more foreign influence. Those that were more distant, more difficult to reach, had been left relatively untouched – by both foreigners and, to a lesser extent, by the Chinese themselves.
It was an imperfect argument, I could see. Other rivers shared something of the same kind: downstream means now, upstream means before on streams other than this. Cairo is a more up-to-date city than Khartoum; Belém has more skyscrapers than Iquitos – judging from such observations as these one could imagine that by travelling up all giant rivers one could venture backward in much the same way. And yet – the Yangtze seemed, in this special context, more so. And the more I thought about the Yangtze's peculiar position in the story of China – a peculiarity that came about to a measurable extent because of the influence of foreigners of one kind and another on the making and unmaking of China – so this approach became ever more tempting. It had a compelling logic, an almost tidy elegance about it.
I could begin at the twenty-first-century world of the shipping lanes and the radar-controlled approaches to the spectacularly modern city of Shanghai; and I could end among the peaks and isolated villages of a China that had probably not changed in five thousand years. Moreover, something hugely important had just been disclosed, making the argument even more potent. Some new research had just been completed at universities in both America and China, and from the sketchy details that had been made public the finds seemed to show that the original Chinese men – the ur-Chinese – had lived in the Yangtze valley.
The conventional view had long been that China's civilization had grown up along the valley of the Yellow River. In terms of the events in human evolution of a few hundred thousand years ago this may well still be true; but the new work related to events of very much more than a million years ago. Discoveries that were said to be shaking the anthropological world to its very foundations showed beyond too much doubt that the first prehuman hominid animals to arrive in Asia from Africa – from where by common consent all mankind has sprung – had first settled down in caves not on the Yellow River, but on the south side of the Yangtze. A cave no more than a dozen miles from the Three Gorges had lately been identified – and this, more than anywhere else so far discovered or known, was where the vast saga of China had seemingly all begun. The Yangtze, in other words, was by this reckoning the true anthropological cradle of the immense entity that we now call not just China, but all Asia – an irresistibly persuasive argument, if one was needed, for me to make this journey in this very way.
A voyage downstream would be a transport forward, into the present; but a journey upstream would be a voyage back into the whole spectrum of the past – to the recent, the middle and now the far, far distant aeons of unrecorded time. By relating the story of the river, I could relate after a fashion the entire story of China. And that, surely, was the way to go. Making one continuum, even though as ragged and unruly as the river itself, out of all China's vast reaches of space and history.
It did seem ideal. I stopped my car at a pay phone somewhere in the forests of Vermont. It was now pitch dark and very cold, and a snowstorm was swirling down from Canada. I called Wan-go Weng to tell him what I had decided, and to thank him for the inspiration. He said he thought the approach would probably work, though as a thesis it could be picked full of holes. But he had been thinking too, he said. There was something more he had wanted to say. And if I hadn't called, he would have written. He would have said just three things: ‘When you travel on the Yangtze – remember the painting; don't condemn; and only wonder.’
It sounded a little ominous, like a warning. I asked him to explain, but all he would say was that I should call him when I came back from China, and tell him how the river was.
It now remained to make a proper plan. Three months before my meeting with Mr Weng, when I had been vaguely pondering how best to tackle the river, I had flown to China to have a look around, taking a scouting trip on a downstream cruise ship that was attempting rather less than successfully to make passage through the Three Gorges, from Chongqing to Wuhan.* On board I had met a member of the crew, a young Chinese woman who, it seemed to me, could be an ideal companion for any long expedition. I will call her Li Xiaodi. Like many younger Chinese she also had an English name, Lily.
Lily had never been out of China, but she spoke the perfect and perfectly enunciated English that is taught in the country's better metropolitan universities (in her case, Shanghai's International Studies University). Her Chinese was classic putonghua – the so-called common speech – unaccented Mandarin, the kind of language that ought to be comprehensible in most of the Lower Yangtze basin. This was important for me: despite the best efforts of a small army of teachers, my spoken Chinese remained of a kind that the most charitable critic would call halting. (Not long before I had called over a waitress in a Chinese restaurant and had attempted to ask her for pepper and salt. She had responded by sitting down and asking me in English whether she had understood me properly: had I really wanted to come to her restaurant, as she was certain I had suggested, for a discussion on how to acquire a passport?)
When I first met Lily it was not, however, her linguistic ability that most impressed me. It was, as a navy man might say, the cut of her jib. She was, for a start, extraordinarily tall. Her back was ramrod straight, her jaw was set firm, her eyes managed to be at the same time kindly, piercing and demanding. She looked the very antithesis of the demure and sometimes coquettish waif that many westerners wrongly suppose young Chinese women to be. This woman looked tough: well-tempered, unyielding.
And toughness, I knew, would be very necessary for a journey like the one I had in mind. It was not so much a need for physical toughness – though with the Yangtze headwaters being on a cold and desolate plateau at around eighteen thousand feet, a certain stubborn endurance would be helpful. Rather there would inevitably be occasions – many occasions, I imagined – when a trip like this would run head-on into a wall of stultifying, impenetrable and incomprehensible official opposition. Someone would be needed to ensure that all such opposition was swiftly and surely overcome.
No easy task. There is perhaps no one more mulish – not even a Bengali babu, a figure who since Kipling's day has been legendary all round the East for his techniques of inventive obstructionism – than a middle-ranking Chinese cadre who tells a foreigner that he cannot, or may not, or will not do something, A journey to somewhere as outlandish as the headwaters of the Yangtze passes across territories in which foreigners have at best only a questionable right to travel – and I knew that in consequence we would encounter at least one, and possibly scores of humourless young men who would try, by fiat or trickery, to stop us. An ally with a rugged and unwearying inflexibility in dealing with such men, an ally who would never take a Chinese ‘no’ for an answer, someone who could stare down a Chinese babu and not be the first to blink – for a venture like this, such a person would be an absolute essential.
Lily, I felt at my very first sight of her, would prove an ally of heroic stature. Her height alone, and the set of her jaw, would cause even the sternest bully boy from the Public Security Bureau to shake in his boots. She had been born into an army family in Dalian in south Manchuria – by repute the meanest, hardest city in China. Her father, unwilling to be parted from her, had won permission to take her with him through all his subsequent army postings, and she lived in a succession of barracks from Heilongjiang to Hainan for the first fifteen years of her life, exposing her to a regime that mixed unremitting discipline with unshakeable pride. The years of army life, and the rigours of a Manchurian upbringing, had certainly left their marks on her. She was now thirty-two – married, divorced, with one son left behind in Dalian, being looked after by her own mother. There was an icy determination to her, a ruthlessness that, for the circumstances I had in mind at least, I admired. And I was as certain as I could be, from the two weeks I had spent talking to her on that river cruise that, if ever I did manage to make this journey, she could be the ideal companion: when matters became too trying she would brook no nonsense, give no quarter, take no prisoners.
I wrote to her in Shanghai, where the cruise company had its head office, to see if she might be interested. At first she was reluctant, unsure of her ability: ‘It will be difficult, I do not think I would be competent.’ More letters followed, and as the winter advanced and I explained the idea, she began to understand the possibilities. ‘I am quite intrigued… I doubt if such an opportunity would ever come my way again.’ A small practical doubt then crept into her mind: ‘I have only a month of holiday owing to me – but I have been looking at the map; surely to reach the headwaters will take very much longer… I might have to risk my job.’ Finally, as winter became spring, she melted: ‘I have decided to come with you… it is so difficult to get good travel gear here in China, so please bring me some sturdy boots, size 39, and a cold-weather jacket in a good fresh colour. I am mentally prepared for the venture… I just hope that I will be able to deal with any problems.’
I wrote her one final note, making certain that she would be able to come. ‘Don't worry,’ she replied. ‘I am a woman of great self-confidence. I do not want to rely on others. I have my own way of doing things. Once decided, nobody can make me change my mind.’ That, I thought, was the clincher. She, like no one else, could probably make this journey work.
It remained then only to get hold of some walking and camping gear, and a selection of good maps and charts.
I had hoped at first that I might get hold of some of the classic charts made by the British Admiralty – once the most accurate and most elegant ever made. Sedulously observant Royal Naval cartographers had been drawing maps of the Yangtze ever since Lord Macartney had been grudgingly permitted to sail along a few miles of the river in 1793. A second British expedition to China in 1816 under Lord Amherst had also resulted in some diligent mapmaking, and by the time of the First Opium War thirty years later, the river's mouth had been almost as well charted as the Thames, the Hooghly or the Hudson. The British tradition of making fine river maps continued well into the twentieth century – perhaps, I fancied, they would still be made, and still be of use.
I found a nautical chart agency in New York that stocked them – they had the Royal Navy charts of the Yangtze all the way up to Yichang, the city just downstream of the Three Gorges, 940 miles above the sea. But, the store owner warned me darkly, the maps' accuracy was no longer guaranteed, the data no longer reliable. Communism had put paid to free movement on the river since 1949, and the only extensive surveys since had been made by the Chinese, and their figures were kept broadly secret. Royal Naval survey vessels could no longer bustle along in the river's deeps and shallows, sounding and dredging by turns as they once were wont to do. But I bought the maps anyway, for séntimental reasons – they were very lovely, and I didn't mind too much if the depths were off by a fathom or two, or the distances wrong by the odd cable.
I also managed to find, in a secondhand bookstore, a 1954 copy of The Admiralty Pilot for the Yangtze – it was one of the great series of books that, bound in their distinctive and official-looking dark-blue weatherproof covers, describe in minute detail the coastlines of the entire world. These books are biblical in their authority and they display, to the delight of landlubbers, a fine dramatic economy in their prose style when talking about such matters as whirlpools and tide-rips or the dangers of Cape Horn. The Yangtze Pilot has been out of print since 1954: Communism had put an end to attempts to keep it timely and accurate too, and so the Admiralty scrapped it. There was a rather pathetic cri de coeur, I thought, penned inside one of its covers: civilian mariners making passage along the river could perhaps help, the surveyors pleaded, by writing in with any new information on any sightings of freshly formed sandbanks or other hazards to navigation. ‘A form (H.102) on which to render this information, can be obtained gratis from Creechbarrow House, Taunton, Somerset…’
But while nautical charts require visits by ships with echo sounders and tallow-ended lead lines, topographical maps are easier to find: satellites and high-flying aircraft perform most of the necessary functions for those who want no more than hills, rivers and roads. So there were plenty of maps available for the Chinese countryside on either bank of the river. No tourist map was worth having; but eleven of the huge sheets of the U S Defense Mapping Agency's Tactical Pilotage Chart series covered the entire river at a scale of 1:500,000, or about eight miles to the inch, and they were to prove useful, if occasionally frustrating. The smaller four-miles-to-the-inch joint Operations Graphics sheets, which American troops use when planning for war, cover the same ground – and, indeed, the entire world land surface – with a terrifying degree of accuracy.
The TPCs were easy to get: a charge-free phone number in Maryland, four dollars a sheet, credit cards accepted. The JOG sheets were more severely restricted, at least in theory. To have any chance of acquiring them I was obliged, starting a full six months before I was due to leave, to go through the curiously empty ritual of threatening a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. This was the only way – an almost foolproof and face-saving device, I was told – with which to unlock all kinds of government documents, these maps included, from the grip of the censors.
A young paralegal was assigned by the Defense Department's chief counsel to shepherd my request through the bureaucracy. The guiding principle of her task, she explained to me later, was President Clinton's pronounced doctrine that ‘unless a specific statutory prohibition existed, forbidding the release of any map, the map could and should be made public’. Maps of remote areas of western China are supposed to be top-secret – but were there specific laws forbidding their release? To find that out was the young woman's appointed task.
The Pentagon, makers and prime users of the maps, took a disinterested view of the impending lawsuit, and passed the buck. The matter went to the Department of State, who objected strenuously. What if the maps fell into the hands of the Taiwanese? an official wanted to know. No matter, retorted my young helper – is there a specific written order forbidding the release of the maps? The State Department had to admit there was not, so far as they knew. It was up to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then the White House and the National Security Council, to have the final say. Officials in both these agencies tried equally hard to block the release. The Chinese, they said, should not be allowed to know how well America had mapped their country. No matter, said my paralegal once again – is there a specific written prohibition? No, said the NSC, there was not. No, said the CIA, there was not.
And that was that. A formal letter arrived the next day saying the ‘releasability status of the maps had been determined positively’. The young woman telephoned to say it had been the most difficult and stimulating Freedom of Information Act case for which she had ever been responsible. ‘I've learned a lot,’ she said. To celebrate her victory she had decided to waive all charges – I would have to pay none of her own legal fees, and none of the charges for the maps themselves. And a week later a buff official envelope arrived, enclosing two dozen astonishingly detailed maps of the far Upper Yangtze – maps of a scale and a supposed accuracy that would enable American and allied air and ground forces to go to war there. I felt a strange sense of privilege holding them in my hands: few others could have ever seen them; and had I made the request in almost any other country – Britain included – there is little hope that I would ever have acquired them. The Clinton White House, I thought, had some admirable qualities.
My only concern on having the maps was that the Chinese (who restrict their own maps with understandable severity) might, if they found these on me, either confiscate them for their own use or regard me with the gravest suspicion for possessing them. ‘Don't worry – they'll think you're a spy whether you have maps or not,’ Lily wrote reassuringly when I mentioned them. ‘Where we're going, any round-eye is thought to be up to no good.’
After that all was simple. My days were dominated by the delights of rummaging around in camping stores for gear: I made myself popular indeed with the owners of a new and at the time not very successful shop close to the Appalachian Trail in Kent, Connecticut, by buying a new Kelty rucksack, a good sleeping bag guaranteed to give comfort at minus twenty degrees, an inflatable sleeping pad, a new down ski jacket (in the ‘good fresh colour’ of bright red for Lily), two new pairs of Vasquez boots, innumerable pairs of socks, two tiny flashlights, a spare Silva compass, fingerless gloves, two sets of Ex Officio dry-in-an-hour shirts and trousers, a his and hers set of Oakley high-altitude sunglasses and a pair of smart telescopic German walking canes (which proved entirely useless for anything except driving away wild dogs in Tibet).
To this collection I added my own Leica M6 camera, a Sony microcassette recorder with a remote-control switch, a tiny shortwave radio receiver and my own home-grown first-aid kit with its assortment of hypodermic syringes, morphine, painkillers and broad-spectrum antibiotics – all obtained from friendly doctors who go in for expedition medicine and don't trouble with such niceties as prescriptions. Two bottles of SPF 45 sunblock, some equally strong lip salve (I had been warned that the summer sun in Qinghai province could sear the lips from a camel), insect repellent and a trusted and battered hip flask made up the pack, which, when fully tamped down, weighed a quite acceptable fifty pounds.
I hoisted it onto my back, whistled down a taxi to Kennedy, and twenty hours later was through customs at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport. Two days later still, having made a series of complicated arrangements by telephone and having received a somewhat dubious series of assurances, having a new six-month multiple-entry ‘F’ class China visa stamped in my passport and a few wads of American dollars tucked into various waterproof pockets around my person, I stepped onto a boat.
I had a rendezvous arranged at a very precise point in the East China Sea. It was at position 31°03.5' N, 122°23.2' E. What was there, according to the charts, was known to China coast mariners, and now to me, as the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby – the Yangtze Entrance Large Automatic Navigation Buoy. Given fair winds and calm seas I expected to arrive at this point, or thereabouts, in three days' time.