The bridge telegraph clanged backward to ‘Stop all engines’, the roar of our cathedral of diesels promptly softened to a low burble, the rusty white ship lost headway and hissed to a halt. The world then fell silent. We rocked listlessly on an invisible swell. The air was heavy, without movement. Stripped of the breeze of our own making, it became quickly very hot and sultry, and with no relief coming through the punkah louvres, the cabins became unbearable. The decks were scalding too, except where we could find shade – but even though the mid-morning sky seemed brassy and bright, the glare was without focus and there was neither sun nor shadows, so dark places were hard to find. We drifted in the current, rocking slightly, waiting for something to happen.
I stood at the bow and looked for China. But it was as though we had come to rest inside a cloud made of sweltering cotton wool. Everything was a featureless grey glare, stripped of any points of reference. There was no horizon, there were no landmarks or seamarks, and it was difficult even to see the waves, though I could hear them splashing untidily on the scorching iron of our plates below. The East China Sea is not known for frets or haars: but it has days like this of boiling-porridge invisibility, in which haze and dew point and temperature and a warm sea-mist combine to create a non-dimensional world, a place in which a stranded sailor could well go mad.
We had already passed the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby. It is a sort of cut-down lightship – not long ago there had been a real ship anchored here, bright scarlet, with the words Ch'ang Jiang Light Ship in white on the hull. It had been full of sailors and light keepers and wick trimmers, men who might wave a welcome or a farewell to a vessel that passed and sounded her siren. But China has taken advantage of automation like almost everybody else, and the distant markers of her busiest waterway are now all run automatically, by computers, their performance monitored by men high in darkened and air-conditioned shore-side towers, dozens of miles away.
Nonetheless, this massive buoy, fifteen feet above water and weighing a thousand tons or more, had a certain shabby romance about it, marking as it did the place where the great inbound ships leave the ocean proper, and begin their entry to China. So as we passed I took due note of its bright red hull, its white light tower, the muffled sound of its bronze bell. At the same time the master was given new orders by radio: we were to make a further five miles west, heave to and await fresh instructions.
This new spot, a glance at the charts suggested, seemed to be where one is supposed to pick up a Yangtze River pilot. Back in the old days – people who knew the old Shanghai use the phrase frequently – the river pilots used to be swashbuckling fellows, and they had a table permanently reserved for them in the bay window of the Shanghai Club. They alone could take vessels up and down the hazardous waters between here and the docks by the city Bund,* and they commanded prestige and high wages. But these are less dashing times, and the relevant portolanos, the blue volumes of China Sea Pilot – Oxford-dark from the Admiralty, Cambridge-light from the Pentagon – are a little vague as to their haunts today. London gave the right latitude and longitude and said that a boat ‘from which two or three pilots may embark’ was generally to be found within a mile or so of it. Washington's navigation instructions said the pilots would lurk in perhaps two places, one of them about four miles north of the closest lighthouse, the other three miles south. But where we were now bobbing and rolling there was no pilot boat, no buoy, no lighthouse: nothing. And so we waited, the static from the bridge radio dull and irritating, like frying fat.
Then with sudden urgency this static was interrupted. A voice in Chinese greeted our ship by name. It broke into English. ‘Our Inspection Cruiser Number Two is now coming to your starboard quarter. Kindly board your passenger to our port bow. We will arrive in three minutes. Please get ready. Please attend.’
It was time to say farewell. I said my thanks to the captain who had given me the ride this far – he was bound for other ports far away – and I ran to the poop, where a gang of sailors were uncoiling a rope ladder. On the horizon was a small black-and-white boat, its bows rearing up as it headed towards us at speed. It came closer and closer, then its prow dropped as it cut back power and it sidled slowly in and up to the dangling rope. From the foremast the boat was flying the blue-and-white burgee of the Yangtze Harbour Superintendency, and from the stern, the red, five-starred flag of the People's Republic. Two young Chinese sailors were standing on the foredeck and with them, waving up at me, was Lily.
‘They're certain you're a spy!’ was the first thing she shouted. ‘All very irregular, us meeting out here.’ She grinned wickedly as she helped me down from the swinging ladder and watched me lug my rucksack onto the bridge. ‘You'll never know what I had to do to persuade them to allow you on board.’ She said no more, but stowed my bags under a table. All was Bristol-fashion within a minute: the sailors then let go fore and aft, and the two boats parted company.
Our siren gave a yelp, and the rusty white transport that had brought me here replied with three blasts on her horn. Her screws began to thresh up the green water, and with her rudder set hard to starboard, she started to push sedately away to the northeast. The Inspection Cruiser Number Two – the Shu-in Lo – then set her own course due west, right into the mouth of the Long River. She was making for the point that is customarily regarded as marking the Yangtze River's outward end – the proper starting point for the long upstream journey.
There was still no sign of land. The bridge radar showed a fuzzy image ahead on either side, but though I squinted hard, I could see nothing except the brown-grey blur where sea met sky. We chugged inward, twisting this way and that to avoid shallows. After a while we slowed again, and ahead of us, alone in the emptiness, was another very large buoy.
It was smaller than the Gateway Buoy, but if the satellite navigator's readout was correct, then it had an importance all its own. The cruiser captain started pointing at it, jabbing his finger and shouting, ‘Zhong Sha! Zhong Sha!’ It was just as I thought, confirmed by the list of lights on the chart table: this was what the world's mariners agreed was the position of the mouth of the Yangtze River, the place where estuary encounters ocean. It is marked by twenty tons of floating and barnacle-crusted metal, a white flashing lamp, a bell and a somewhat prosaic name: Zhong Sha, or Middle Sand Light.
It was swiftly evident, too, that this structure did lie more in a river than on the sea. The tide was slack – we had organized our rendezvous with the inspection cruiser while the waters were as quiet as possible, just in case. But the waters here, only a little farther west, were not quiet at all – they were streaming hard against the great buoy, their force tilting her a good five degrees from the vertical. A rich coffee-coloured wake, murkier than the colour of the ocean behind, stretched fifty feet from the buoy's downstream side. Up close I could hear the bubbling and chuckling of the water rushing past, doing two knots at the very least. For a moment I thought the buoy itself was moving at two knots, towed by some underwater force, perhaps a shark. But then I realized what it was: even out here, where there was no land visible and no evidence that land was anywhere near, the river, the River, was running.
And running with waters that had flowed a very long way indeed. The generally accepted length is 3964 miles (6378 kilometres, and nearly ten thousand Chinese li): the waters have seeped and trickled and gurgled and foamed and roared and slowed and sidled and lumbered all the way here from Tibet – almost from China's faraway frontier with India. This urgent brown stream, heavy with silt particles that even now were drifting down to the seabed and making fresh land below us, was bringing soil all the way from the Himalayas, and leaving it here on the floor of the East China Sea.
Blue ice had thickened and shattered the granites of summits, ice-milk streams had emerged from distant glaciers, crystals of mica had glinted in salmon-rich headwaters, and all had merged with other sands and muds and gravels, and had flowed down from the plateaux for hundreds upon hundreds of miles before casting itself down here, fifty feet below on a dark ocean floor in the upper tropics, beneath the shadowless iron of a rusting light buo.
There was nothing languid in the transfer, nothing casual about the way that these waters flowed and slowed and deposited their long-hauled baggage. Like China herself, the river here seemed to be surging along, forging robustly out into the ocean, making new Chinese territory with deliberate purpose, even so far from shore. Hydrologists suggest she journeys outward on a prodigious scale: 1.2 million cubic feet of water gush from the Yangtze's mouth every second, and more than twice that amount each August and September, when the snowfields have melted back and the summer rains have dumped still more water into her seven hundred or so furious tributaries. Each year a total of 244 cubic miles of water slide out from what the radar insists is the river mouth: a veritable planet of water, of which each side is as long as the distance from New York to Washington, or from Oxford to Amsterdam.
The Yangtze journeys hugely, and she travels heavily. The same science that produces the figures for her flow calculates that her waters pick up and carry 500 million tons of assorted alluvium every year, and dump 300 million of those tons onto the seabed. (The rest stays, left inland – a swamp here, a drying patch there, a new cliff or a swelling eyot.) The result is that the Yangtze has a formidable delta, pushing itself out to sea at the quite respectable rate of 25 yards a year. All to be tilled and cropped by the rice farmers of China's easterly province of Jiangsu, of course – fortunate men indeed. The gradual abrasion of faraway mountains keeps on giving them brand-new territory, two and a half inches more of it every single day.
This steady eastward expansion has over the centuries given eastern China a comfortable, corpulent profile, so that on the map it seems puffed up like a pouter pigeon, or a diner-out – though rather more Pickwick than Falstaff. The place where the Yangtze pushes outward to cause it all is deceptive, however: the great notch that looks as though it should be the Yangtze's embouchure was once fed by three huge branches of the river, with the fourth in its present channel. But silt and sand choked the three southerly streams, and the accelerated flow in the northern branch favoured and deepened that one. In the seventh century the last of the southern delta streams was closed for good, and the Yangtze has been flowing along its present course, as a single, vastly wide river, for the thirteen subsequent centuries. The gaping mouth below provides a coastline for the old ports of Ningbo and Hangzhou; but it is, by the Yangtze's standards, quite dry.
As we moved hesitantly through the mist, so evidence of land slowly started to appear. Two white butterflies, a dragonfly. Flotsam on the water – fragments of Styrofoam, pieces of lunch containers from some distant city. A carcass, probably pig. I very much hoped it was pig, and turned back quickly to make sure, but it was lost in our wake. Then the riverbanks began to come into view – the mist and hum of coastal China at long last, even if only vaguely in the distance, first on the starboard beam, then off to port.
A hundred years ago almost every piece of this land had a recognizably English name – the Royal Navy surveyed these coasts well – and so once I might have been able to pick out Saddle Island, Parker Island and House Island, Drinkwater Point and, marking the northern entrance to the river, Cape Nelson.*
But these names have all now vanished from the charts: the islands are called now what they have in fact been called for thousands of years – Chenqian, Shengsi and Heng Sha. Drinkwater is now simply Dong Jiao, East Point. As for the hero of Trafalgar, his promontory (not visible from here, since the estuary is fifty miles wide) has long since been changed back to its rightful, if more prosaic title: Chang Jiang Kou Bei Jiao – Long River Gateway, North Cape.
As the islands started to close in, so too, did the ships. A thousand ships pass in and out of the Yangtze estuary every day. In any river entrance their presence would be carefully noted, for safety's sake; in Chinese waters they are noted, and watched, for the security of the State as well. Captain Zhu, master of Inspection Cruiser Number Two, swept the horizon with his glasses. ‘Anyone who looks unusual, we go and see him,’ he said. ‘And if very unusual, we turn to' – and he jabbed his finger off to port, to where a dark grey corvette was speeding past, a ship armed with two obvious guns, one for‘ard, the other aft, and with a forest of radio aerials grouped around her mast – ‘the Chinese Navy. She guards our river. Just in case.’
Captain Zhu looked about fifty, was slightly overweight and sweated a lot. His face was marked, for me anyway, by a single long hair that extended from a mole on his chin, curving as it did so. It looked like a wire that had been stripped for connection to a plug: I wanted it to be half-sheathed in red plastic. It was considered bad luck to cut it, Lily explained. The captain did not wear a uniform – just a yellowed cotton sleeveless singlet, a pair of ragged blue pants and sneakers. He laughed as he warmed to his theme, that of securing the nation.
‘You are a spy? We think all lao wai are wanting to know too many things about China. Why you are so curious? We are not curious about you.’ The bridge clerk, alerted by this exchange, hurriedly wrote my name into the ship's log – an exercise book with a red flag gummed onto the cover.
The captain swept his glasses along a fairway that was now becoming quite crowded with vessels. Some of the ships passed close enough, and I could read their names on the stern. There was an ore carrier from Australia, bringing iron from Mount Newman to the steel mills at Baoshan. There were a couple of squat oil tankers, Panama-registered, lying slow and sluggish in the water, their anchor nostrils flaring just above the surface. Three Indian bulk carriers, their plates streaked with rust, new names written over the old, lumbered out to sea.
A Russian reefer registered in Vladivostok was speeding in more jauntily, probably in ballast. Perhaps, I thought, she was coming to collect a cargo of pork. A wild surmise perhaps – but one that stemmed from a strange journey I had made during a planning trip a few weeks beforehand. I had booked a flight from Canton to Turkestan and was somewhat surprised to find that I was not boarding a Chinese aircraft, but an old Ilyushin dressed in Aeroflot colours, and with an Aeroflot crew. I asked the captain why – what was a Russian plane doing flying a domestic Chinese route?
He said it was a simple barter deal: Russia had too many planes and China too few, and China had – I asked him to repeat this – too many pigs and Russia not enough. So for every round-trip plane journey between Canton and Urümqi – the Russians providing the plane and the crew, the Chinese the fuel and the food – Moscow charged the Chinese government twenty railway boxcars of pork. Some of the animals went to Moscow by the Trans-Siberian Railway, others, the captain had said, by ship. ‘Down the Yangtze,’ I remembered him saying. ‘They have many pigs in that valley there.’
A buzz of smaller boats wove their way dangerously among the slow-moving cargo vessels. Many were fishing boats, and to judge from the huge silver arc lights that were suspended on bamboo poles from their bridge wings, they were off to hunt for cuttlefish, at night. Astronauts have reported seeing a diamond-dust twinkle on the black ink of the sea out here: scores of cuttlefish boats out at night on the waters between China and Korea. These passing craft would have been members of that little fleet, probably utterly ignorant that they were visible (unlike the much more frequently touted Great Wall, which can't be seen) from outer space.
The river went on narrowing, steadily. On the right now was a low and treeless bulk of mud-and-misery known as Chongming Dao, the Tongue of the Yangtze – so called because on the maps it does look just like a lolling tongue, poised halfway between the open jaws of the river. It had once been a place of banishment, like Sakhalin, and the men sent there did little but build dikes to protect the island and their prison from being inundated. During the Cultural Revolution a Shanghainese poet whose daughter I know well was sent there to prepare the land for raising pigs.* Now, thanks to the labours of men like him and his predecessors, the island is quite fertile: a million people live on Chongming Island, farming rice, raising ducks, planting cotton.
On the left – and here the total river width was now down to about ten miles – I could just see the first buildings, the first evidence of real human settlement. There were the usual constructions of a coastline: a chimney or two, a cluster of radio masts, a water tower, barracks. Then, after another mile, a tall building, maybe a block of workers' flats.
No pagodas, though. I had very much doubted that I would see a pagoda on this coast – the people who live here, on the drying mudflats of the estuary, have long been isolated from the mainstream Chinese and from their customs. They are darker, almost Malay in their appearance, a little like the aboriginals who are to be found in central Taiwan. These never were a pagoda-building people; and any hopes I might have had for spying a graceful structure of nine slightly fluted storeys, with upcurved eaves, a delicate spire and arched windows overgrown with kudzu, and from which I could imagine some Tang duke gazing out toward the ocean in the moonlight – all such hopes were quite in vain.
These people lived on mud; they paddled their sampans down a labyrinth of small canals, they contentedly raised ducks and rice and they fished for squid. An early guide warns Europeans that the mud-people ‘are not altogether free from piratical tendencies’. But then came civilization, of a kind: someone came and built a factory, and slapped up some modern hulk of cement and iron. This was about all I could see – mud and grey reinforced cement. There was certainly precious little drama about this particular approach to China – this was indeed no Verrazano Narrows, no Pool of London. Captain Zhu saw me looking at the coast. ‘Soon there will be a golf club there,’ he spat. ‘A country club for rich Shanghai people.’ He didn't sound too pleased.
We were into a fairway now. The marker buoys came more regularly, and most of the ever increasing armada of ships seemed to be obeying rules of the road in the dredged channels – the inbound vessels were sticking to the right, the outbound to the left. A radar tower reared above the brilliant yellow of a rapeseed field, its thumbnail-shaped scanner turning languidly, noting all the ships passing underneath, missing nothing. But the river was starting to look crowded, dangerously so. I mentioned it to the captain.
‘They say it's the most dangerous approach in the world,’ he replied, cheerfully. ‘I've seen some foreign masters freeze, just stop their ships, not knowing what to do. Coming in for the first time can be quite terrifying. Even with a pilot aboard. There are sandbanks that pop up out of nowhere. Whirlpools.
‘The tide is terribly erratic. You can get a flood a thousand miles away and it sends a surge of water down the Yangtze and poof, it blows the tide back in its tracks. There are wrecks everywhere. You see a mast in the water and there's no buoy marking it and you think, My God! what if I hadn't seen it? What if there hadn't been anything poking up out of the water? What if I'd just sailed into it?’
Lily nodded. She said she had once worked for a man who had a ship-breaking business a few miles upriver. She was still interested, and had made it her business to know all about the wrecks in the Yangtze mouth. One of her boss's ships, a thirty-year-old bulk carrier that he had bought for scrap in Manila and was having towed to his breakers' yard, had capsized in the river just the week before. One of the tug captains was said to have been drunk, and had no idea where he was going.
‘I know the ship! I know it!’ exclaimed Zhu, warming to the task. ‘It was a big one – twelve thousand tons. It hit the side of a sandbank and just turned over. Right over there.’ He pointed towards a patch of sludge-coloured river a mile off our starboard beam. ‘Now – do you see a wreck buoy, one of the green ones? No – not a thing. No one's gotten round to marking it. There's nothing to tell anything's there. Only a few people know about it. But the fact is there's a great big ship lying down there, in just three fathoms of water. So easy to hit it. It'd rip the bottom from a tanker, just like a sushi knife! Very dangerous!
‘And there's more! Not just the wrecks and the sand. There's all the traffic. They have wrecks in Calcutta, on the Hooghly. Lots of sand there, too. What's the big bank there – the St James's Bank? That's a bad one, I remember. I went up the Hooghly once. They have a Bund there, don't they? Just like us. But they don't have the traffic. Who wants to go to Calcutta, after all?
‘But here – what do they say officially – a thousand ships a day? That's only the ones with radios and radar reflectors. There are thousands more that have no marks at all, no lights, nothing. You try to keep out of their way, you run into a sandbank and, bang. Look – see if there's a red flag up on the bar there. There usually is at this time of day. That's the signal station, where they keep an eye on things. That'll tell you how bad the traffic is.’
Sure enough, two miles ahead and waving lazily in the hot breeze, was an enormous flag. The Admiralty Pilot explains: ‘When the number of junks manoeuvring in the channel at Wusong Kou is such as to make navigation difficult, a red flag shall be hoisted.’ And as if to underscore the flag's warning, there were scores of black dots on the waters ahead, like a vast floating business of flies. Some were large ships that moved slowly across my field of view; the others, the smaller vessels, darted almost furtively back and forth on their appointed business.
They dart where once they glided. The junks on nearly all the reaches of the Lower Yangtze have motors these days, not sails. It is a rare delight to see the distinctive shape of a classic Chinese junk – the peaked lugsail with its die-straight luff and sinuous leech and with the heavy bamboo battens jutting from the edges. But the bewildering variety of craft that scuttle between the riverbanks today performs much the same functions as the sailing junks did half a century ago – there are almost as many different designs of power vessels as there were of the old and much-loved sailing junks. Captain Zhu had a book of charts on the bridge that showed silhouettes of the different types – and at the back of the book, on pages that were less well-thumbed, were silhouettes of sailing junks as well.
Scores of subtly different designs were to be found on the pages, dozens of sizes, boats bent to innumerable tasks, a nautical bestiary. Flipping through the pages was like seeing a shadow play, the boats the cut-paper figures from a Javan wayang show. There were outlines of the long, low cotton boats from Chongming, which take raw cotton out to the markets of Shanghai, and return with what is politely called night soil, still the principal fertilizer on the great tongue-like mudflat. There were silhouettes of the pig boats also from Chongming, but larger and fatter and with a bulk that was easy to recognize. They had to be sturdy, since their business was with pigs* taken to market, people brought back. There were pictures of ice carriers that transport blocks frozen in the fields in midwinter – and which are kept insulated through the warmth of early spring by ingenious arrangements of straw and soil. There were broad-beamed fish carriers, made stoutly of pine to weather the estuary's storms and heavy seas and tide rips. It is said that the game of mah-jongg was invented by the crew of a Ningbo fish-carrying junk, who believed that by making up a game on which they had to concentrate their minds they might forget a discomfort which they couldn't understand, which we now know as seasickness.
But you don't see too many of these special craft. More often than not the smaller boats on this reach of the estuary would be the tiny stern-poled (and sailless) sampans, so called because they are made of three pieces of wood, compared with the five of the wupans – and on the day I arrived they seemed to be everywhere. I knew that once in a while one might see one of the larger vessels – like a long-distance coastal trading junk, or one of the special light-wood junks built so they can ride up and over the deadly bore that sweeps down into the funnel of Hangzhou Bay, on the far side of the Yangtze herself. But on this morning I saw neither of these bigger craft. Still, with all the activity that I could see from where I stood on deck, it was small wonder that the red warning flag was flying. Small wonder, too, that inspection cruisers like this one patrol the river ceaselessly, helping, watching, guarding.
On the left side – technically the right bank of the river, reckoned from the point of view of the water flowing downstream – there was a sudden burst of industry. Cooling towers exhaled tall florets of white cloud, cranes swung containers up from the decks of waiting ships, black rubbery umbilical cords sucked oil from waiting tankers, there was what appeared to be a mine building with two winding wheels rotating at speed, an array of great chimneys with strobe lights and with typhoon gantries bolted up their sides, to keep them standing in the storm winds of midsummer. In the distance, ranks of skyscrapers marched across the horizon. I could see the glint of the sun on hundreds of windshields as trucks and cars waited for a steam train to chuff by and let their drivers pass. The land was well established: the city was now beginning.
And Wusong Kou, where the flag was flying, was where it all really starts. True, the Gateway is the technical beginning or the technical end of the river; but Wusong Kou is the place that anyone with any sense of the romantic, anyone with any sense of history, regards as the terminus of the river proper. The Chinese know it by this name: the world's mariners, however, know it by a slight variation, by a name that is as familiar to their rollicking community as is Blood Alley or the Liver Building or Dundalk Docks.
This place, with its scarlet warning flag and its lighthouse and the twenty-foot dial of what looks like a clock, but is in fact the Whangpoo River Tide Gauge, is the spot where all vessels bound for Shanghai – which means most of the ships found in the estuary – turn left. It is, depending on your perspective, the beginning of the Yangtze proper, or the true end of a trip across a long, long sea. This spot on the river, formally marked by just a single red canister buoy, is known as the Woosung Bar.
A century ago Tennyson planted an image that has lasted longest: the bar as a place of danger and melancholy, where sailors wave their farewells, where the pilots wait to steer a mariner home. Crossing the Bar is an event: leaving, you pass from still waters into swells; returning, you take one last risk, since at the bar the sea has one last chance to toy with you, and toss you over in the foam. But if you do make it past – and on a gale-swept day the waves and spindrift on a river bar can make for a terrifying sight, and perilous navigation – then you are home, safe and sound.
The Woosung Bar is more benign, however, than anything Tennyson had in mind. It marks the spot where one river, the Whangpoo, meets the Yangtze.* The meeting is as calm as the meeting of most rivers: there is no line of breakers, no cloud of spume. It is not a dangerous place – but it is, and long has been, a wretched nuisance. It once caused great friction between East and West. It exercised the minds and pens of diplomats for scores of years. And all because a great tongue of Whangpoo mud and sand oozes endlessly out onto the bed of the Yangtze and, because the Yangtze waters are pushed and pulled back and forth by tide and flood, the mud stays more or less where it is, thickening all the time. The estuary is generally about fifty feet deep: at the Woosung Bar it shallows in places to no more than about twelve. The shallowing was a nineteenth-century cause célèbre.
The problem was never noticed by the Chinese of a century ago: they glided serenely up and down the rivers on sailing junks that drew ten feet, or even five. But when the foreign traders began to arrive, in iron ships that customarily drew twenty feet or more, they were in for some unpleasant surprises. Perhaps their leadsmen may have warned them in time: often they did not. A river that until the 1850s had been alive with moving traffic was, twenty years later, suddenly replete with barbarian vessels stopped dead in the water and hopelessly stuck.
Some had been stranded on their way in. Others, seemingly luckier, managed to get in, but then went to load themselves at the wharves with tons of rhubarb and tea and bolts of silk and sacks of rice – and then found they were drawing too much, that the bar would not let them get out. The local Lloyd's agent duly sent the cables home to London, warning of delay and demurrage. ‘The Travancore sailed out with the mails but was unable to cross the bar, and spent a whole day unloading her cargo into lighters to lessen her load…’ ‘I beg to report that the Australia was detained for five days at Woosung…’ ‘The French mail-steamer Provence was unable to reach Shanghae at all…’ It made a nonsense of the river as a trading route. The great artery of China, as barkers had already long been advertising the Yangtze, suddenly had a bad case of sclerosis.
By the mid-1870s merchants, weary of having their ships pinned by sand, began to lose their tempers. They wrote angry letters: the State of the Woosung Bar, which sounds today like a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, became a heated talking point in the coffeehouses of Cheapside and the bars on the Fulton Street waterfront.
An august-sounding body known as the Association for the Protection of Commercial Interests as Respects Wrecked and Damaged Property wrote to Lord Granville at the Foreign Office: the Bar, they said, is ‘an impediment to shipping… a cause for great anxiety’. It could be cleared, the technical people had advised the Association, without more than ordinary difficulty, and with no extravagant expense. Indeed it could, agreed Vice-Admiral Charles Shadwell, writing from his cabin on HMS Iron Duke in Hong Kong harbour. Chinese coolies could move the mud by hand, he said; their labour was very cheap. There was, in short, no practical reason why the Bar could not be cleared, and navigation allowed to move freely. It merely needed one thing: for ‘the superior authorities at Peking’ to give their permission.
But there, it turned out, was the rub. Peking, as it was called in the documents of the day, didn't seem to give a fig about the Bar. Haughty, aloof, unaware of all matters considered beneath their dignity, the Manchus in the Forbidden City paid no official attention to the wails of the red-haired, long-nosed Uitlanders. Privately they must have been delighted. What buffoons these foreigners were, indeed! Nothing much had changed, it seemed, since 1793, when Lord Macartney had tried in vain to cajole and flatter the Emperor of the day, and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. The diplomat had offered to the Celestial Throne the very best goods that Britain had ever made in an effort to win permission to do business, and to be recognized. But the Emperor was not remotely interested. The gifts were regarded as items of tribute from a respectful liege. Some boxes were never even opened. Macartney was asked to go home.
And the Emperor of eight decades later was similarly unbothered by the travails and demands of the foreign merchants. The dignity of the Long River, the Throne implied by its silence, was not to be sullied by such vulgarities as dredging, just because the barbarians wanted it so. Despite torrents of letters that passed between ambassadors and ministers and high dignitaries of the Manchu Court, nothing was done. ‘You should do all that you properly can to induce the Chinese government,’ wrote Lord Granville to his man on the spot, ‘to take steps for improving the condition on the bar.’ ‘I have sent three identic letters to the Prince,’ wrote the Earl of Derby. But it did no good. Prince Kung, the mandarin who was in charge of the Tsungli Yamen – the Office of the General Administration of the Affairs of Different Countries – did not even deign to reply.
It was not until the eve of the Revolution that was to end the rule of the emperors and princes that this impasse was ended. It was 1905: the Manchus were on their last legs and knew it, and in part because of weakness, in part as a placatory gesture that might work for their survival, they gave permission to the foreigners to begin their work. A Dutchman named de Rijke, an expert on the polders back home, was the first to bring in the dredging engines. By 1910 he had completed the first channel through the Bar. When the first Chinese president, the foreign-educated Sun Yat-sen, came home to China in 1912 he entered via the Yangtze – and he sailed symbolically to Shanghai through the foreign-engineered channel. In 1937 – just in time for the Japanese war, as it happened – the entire length of the Whangpoo was finally dredged, so that ships drawing twenty-eight feet could pass all the way from the Pacific Ocean, along the estuary of the Yangtze, up into the Whangpoo and right up to the wharves on the Bund.
The perils of the sands lessened, then vanished altogether. Shanghai duly took her place as one of the world's great trading cities, and the Yangtze made good on her promise to become a huge highway into the very heart of China. Yet had the Manchus remained in control in Beijing, it might never have been so. As a symbol of Chinese Imperial intransigence clashing head-on with western mercantile realism – or, viewed another way, as a symbol of ancient and home-grown pride clashing with an alien culture of greed – the sixty-year saga of the State of the Woosung Bar has few equals.
Yet the foreigners were not motivated merely by avarice. To those who knew its geography and its importance, the Yangtze was the principal gateway into the mysterious heart of the Middle Kingdom, the choicest place for the West's wholesale penetration of China. If major surgery was required to bring China to heel, then Woosung was the place where the anaesthetist should first sink his needle. When Sir George Balfour of the Madras Artillery arrived in 1843 to take up the post of Britain's consul to Shanghai, then nothing but a muddy, steamy village, he recognized and declared at once its strategic importance: ‘There our navy can float, and by our ships, our power can be seen and, if necessary, promptly felt. Our policy is the thorough command of this great river.’
A command that it would only be possible fully to exercise if the Woosung Bar was gone. It took almost a century to remove it. And then a little more than a decade later the British and all other foreign navies were banished from the river, for all time. Seen in this context, as a device for keeping the foreigners at bay, the Chinese intransigence over the matter has a shrewdness all of its own.
I watched the echo sounder as we passed over the Bar's submerged relics. It barely registered a change – the channel dug by the Dutchmen almost a century ago was nearly as deep as the river fairway. What had exercised so many minds for so many years was now quite invisible, utterly lacking in significance. And the red canister buoy that bobbed off our port beam – that, too, had an insignificance about it that belied its symbolism. For the buoy was Mile Zero for mariners sailing beyond, and into the Yangtze proper. The Zhong Sha light, now twenty miles behind us, was where the sea ended and the estuary began; the red Woosung buoy was where the estuary ended, and the Long River got under way. Captain Zhu sounded his siren and turned his little ship smartly to port. We passed out of the slight chop of the Yangtze proper and, once inside the curving breakwater, into the black and doubtless poisonously anoxic waters of the Whangpoo.
A squadron of Chinese ships – destroyers, frigates and corvettes – was moored on the left bank. They looked, I thought, decidedly unprepared either for the protection of China's maritime frontier or for war. Laundry was dangling from the stern of each craft, straw hats were perched on some of the after guns and the sailors were mooching about idly, smoking in the warming sun. Had these been British or American vessels the men would have been busily chipping paint, greasing bearings, polishing brass or holystoning the decks: here they looked as though they were on holiday, or else dying from boredom.
But it was a timely encounter, as it happened, and I gazed with interest at the ships through my binoculars. The headlines that I had seen in the Hong Kong papers just a few days before had all been about the Chinese Navy, and what a new and belligerent mood its admirals seemed to have adopted. There had been a lot of concern about China's high-handed attitude, so called, towards a group of low atolls called the Spratly Islands that lay close to the Vietnamese coast, and towards another group known as the Paracels, which lay even nearer.
For years the sovereignty of these islands, and of a low reef called the Macclesfield Bank, had been at the centre of a smouldering dispute. Vietnam had laid an ancient claim, as had (complicating matters hugely) the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan. In the case of the Spratly Islands, the tiny state of Brunei – hardly the world's most imperially minded state, even though its ruler was said to be the planet's richest man – had advanced a claim as well. But Beijing had airily ignored them all. Successive governments had stated flatly that the islands were historically and by geographical logic Chinese, and any official maps you buy of China inside China show a curved dotted line extending from Shanghai south and returning north to a point near Hainan, and encompassing every atoll and reef and skerry in the South China Sea. All, says China, are Chinese.
In recent years Beijing has stated these claims rather more robustly, and shortly before my arrival at Woosung the Chinese Navy had installed a detachment of the Chinese Army, who would build a small base on one of the rocks. Now, as I arrived in Shanghai, the Chinese government was publicly defying anyone to try to move it. This had led neighbour nations to complain about Chinese ‘hegemony’ – a popular word in the East, and hitherto much used by countries like Nepal and Sikkim in connection with India. Now it was China's turn, and everyone was becoming exercised about what they saw as a revival of the country's ancient imperialistic ambitions and suchlike. The role of the Chinese Navy in the mechanics of it all had suddenly become a hot topic.
To underline the alarmist talk there had been suggestions in the Hong Kong papers and magazines that this newly boisterous navy might be about to order an aircraft carrier, no less, and moor it down on Hainan Island, close to the disputed islands.* Such a mighty ship, it was said, would give China what naval people call ‘blue-water capability’ – the wherewithal to project her power across thousands of miles of ocean. Many of China's neighbours, as well as strategically minded analysts in Washington, were starting to fret publicly about her doing such a thing.
So it was in the context of all such superheated disputations that I found myself gazing at this clutch of some of China's most modern warships. Everything seemed sleepy and halfhearted about them. As we cruised slowly alongside it looked pretty unlikely that these sailors at least were getting into the business of flexing their maritime muscles, or that they or their officers entertained the kind of ambitions that were causing such alarm elsewhere. There didn't seem much eagerness about them, lazing as they were in the late-morning sun. It reminded me that the Chinese had invented gunpowder for use in fireworks, and yet had never thought of using it for war. It looked much the same for these half-dozen ships – they had been constructed just for the show, and not to menace, perhaps not even to fight.
We steered in to land now. Soon a gang of greasy-looking Chinese men on the quay were securing our hawsers to the bollards. Four men in uniform were waiting, and they waved up at me, indicating their relief at seeing, at last, the foreigner for whom they had been asked to wait. I said good-bye to the captain. ‘They've come to take you away,’ he said, and didn't laugh. And then I walked down the metal gangplank, stepping over a pile of rotting fish. Lily came with me. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just routine.’
One of the men was Immigration – he took my passport and neatly impressed a bright red chop on it, giving me sanction to stay six months. Another was Health, and he made me affirm that I had no illness worth mentioning. His form had a line saying ‘Describe the country you last visited’, and when I came to China in the early days I would write juvenile things like ‘hilly, green, rainy’, or ‘fine beaches, strong women’. But as he was looking on this time I simply wrote ‘United States’, and handed it over.
Customs proffered the usual form asking me how many bicycles and sewing machines I had, and the brand name of my camera. But then he took the form, crumpled it up in his hand and, with a sweeping gesture, tossed it into the water. ‘No need these days,’ he announced. ‘Waste of time.’
The fourth man turned out to be the official with whom Lily had arranged the venture – a Mr Zhang Zu Long. I thanked him profusely. ‘They didn't want you to do this, the people in Shanghai,’ he said. ‘But they are very conservative. I told them they must indulge in up-to-date thinking. Anyone who is interested in my station is welcome.’ He indicated a ten-storey building behind the fish market, a structure festooned with radar scanners and satellite dishes and radio aerials. ‘I am very proud of it. You must come and see.’
His card offered an impossibly long description: he was Master of the Woosung Supervision Station of the Shanghai Harbour Superintendency Administration of the People's Republic of China, Shanghai Bureau of Maritime Safety of the Superintendency of the Ministry of Communications. He gave me tea, showed me the Chinese charts of the Yangtze – stamped ‘Secret’ on every page – and then took me upstairs, to a darkened room at the top of the building. There was a double door, an air lock. Inside three men peered intently at a bank of colour computer screens and whispered occasionally into microphones.
‘These are the air-traffic controllers of the sea,’ said Mr Zhang, with a chortle. ‘They run the most up-to-date harbour control system in the world. It makes me very proud.’
The Germans supplied the computers, the Chinese made everything else themselves. Every one of the ships coming along the Lower Yangtze that day, and every single vessel turning into or out of the Whangpoo, was tracked on radar. Computers assessed all the tracks, the speeds and the directions, and calculated who might collide with whom, and what changes needed to be made to ensure they didn't. It was the operators' job to tell the skippers what the computers wanted. All of the operators were Chinese. One spoke English, another Greek, the third Russian, and they used these languages, and more often Chinese, to talk to the watch officers on the ships that passed below. Mr Chen, a man of about twenty-five who spoke impeccable English, was talking to an Indian bulk carrier, just now mooring at Baoshan. ‘Bringing coal up from Calcutta,’ he said. ‘Then coming to Shanghai to take – what is it? –wolfram and antimony ore, back to India. Typical. I have to watch him in and out. Make sure he doesn't hit anything.
‘The computers make it very easy. It really is like air-traffic control. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Very intense. But fine job, don't you agree?
‘This is bringing Shanghai into the next century, I think. Soon – not very long, I am sure – it will be the finest port in the world. It will pass Hong Kong, Singapore. This system is going to help. We will win! That I guarantee.’
Mr Zhang patted him on the shoulder, and ushered me out from the dark, and down the stairs. Soon I was stepping gingerly over the rotten fishheads on the dockside once again, this time making my way to what I hoped might be the Woosung railway station. I needed to get to Shanghai, and for purely historical reasons the train seemed the best bet.
For this was the third reason for Woosung's fame. This might now be the site of China's first computerized port; but a century and a quarter before, doubtless confirming Mr Zhang's view that his city had long been in the vanguard of China's modernization, Woosung was the site of the country's first, and as it happens very short-lived, steam railway.
It was Jardine, Matheson & Co. who built it. This is hardly surprising: the firm whose mercantile empire still remains a potent force in the Far East was instrumental – via such devices as railway making and shipbuilding – in opening up China to foreign commerce. (Its contacts back in London were such as to influence governments: it is still said today, and not entirely unfairly, that the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, suggested the prosecution of the First Opium War – with the cession of Hong Kong the most notable corollary to Britain's military success – mainly to keep the Jardines opium trade in business.) But the construction of this first modest permanent way over the twelve modest miles that separated Woosung from Shanghai proved a difficult and, eventually, unhappy experience for the firm: it showed how deeply suspicious China was then of anything – no matter how obviously beneficial – that was fashioned by barbarian hands.
Since the 1850s Jardines and other foreign firms doing business in China had suggested building railways. It was part of the mood of the moment: Britain had started its own first commercial train service back in 1825, and railways now crisscrossed the island from Cornwall to Cromarty. In America, too, tracks were being laid as fast as the Pennsylvania steel mills could forge them. And yet by 1869, the year when thousands of labourers – Chinese labourers, no less – brought the Central Pacific metals to Utah and spiked them together with the rails from the Union Pacific in Omaha, and so knitted the country into one – by that same year not one single mile of railway had been laid in China. India was at the same time tottering under the weight of iron and brass; but China was still a nation of post roads and canals and bucolic inefficiency.
Jardines, in a hurry to make money, thought all of this a nonsense. China was, in their view, woefully out of step with the rest of the world. In letter after letter the firm kept beseeching the Manchus to make way for the modern. But the Court maintained an unyielding hauteur, turning down request after request, just as they had done to the merchants who wanted progress made on the Woosung Bar. Besides, the Chinese said in one letter, which I once saw in the Jardines archive, ‘railways would only be beneficial to China if undertaken by the Chinese themselves, and constructed under their own management.’
There was only one thing for it, so the westerners thought. Displaying the combination of mercantile acumen and barefaced cheek that (perhaps in part because it is so Chinese) continues to infuriate Beijing today, the firm decided to go ahead anyway, and in secret.* There was some hesitation – the first steps were taken in 1865, abandoned two years later and then revived in 1872. But finally the company had taken into their confidence the Shanghai city taotai – the official, appointed by the mandarinate, who was essentially the local mayor. The scheme, the foreigners thought, was bound to succeed.
The subterfuge had many elements and strategies. The company first had its Shanghai land agent buy up sections of real estate north of Shanghai, saying they were planning to build nothing more threatening than a horse road. At the same time they set up a London-based company, the Woosung Road Co. Ltd, and purchased a number of tiny steam railway engines made by a British firm called Ransomes and Rapier. The firm then quietly and surreptitiously laid a few miles of track, trusting that the taotai – who by now had been so taken into confidence that he had been persuaded to buy some WR Co. shares – would not step in to prevent it.
The rails, once unveiled, were just thirty inches apart – a little more than half the width of the railways that were then being built all across Britain and America. The trains made by Ransomes were small as well – they looked like models, the kind of engines that were found in amusement parks. The carriages, too, were child-sized, and open to the elements. The whole idea was to construct a railway that was on the one hand relatively inexpensive and on the other, and rather more important, would not terrify the Chinese public – to whom the idea of a foreign-made fire-breathing iron monster rushing about on iron tracks would be unsettling, to say the least. Nor could Jardines be accused of ostentation: nothing the company was doing on the Woosung road would or could be allowed in any way to challenge the supremacy of grandeur that was embodied in the Emperor or his appointed representatives.
The railway service duly opened with only reserved fanfare on 30 June 1876. The trains – pulled by a Ransomes engine appropriately called the Pioneer – were known locally as ‘devil's carriages’, and for many weeks no one would ride in them. Slowly, though, their convenience and economy caught on 187,000 people were counted as having ridden during the first year of operation.
The business would have continued to flourish, no doubt, had not disaster struck: in October 1877 a Chinese man was hit by a train and killed – whether it was suicide, murder, contrived misfortune or just a simple accident was never made clear. Jardines promptly compensated the family; but the Qing court in faraway Beijing then heard about the line (their taotai having carelessly omitted to inform them), complained that it had been built without permission and demanded that it be taken over by the government. Besides, the officials said, the railway was clearly a dangerous invention: the public, now back to being frightened by this evil monster, was in mortal fear.
And so a few months later, with a silk merchant acting as intermediary between the court and the barbarian merchants, the line was sold for a quarter of a million Shanghai taels. A court-appointed company took over the running of the little line for a day or so, and then, presumably as planned, the Qing officials shut the operation down, ordered the lines torn up within a few days and then shipped everything – rails, carriages, signals and the little toy trains – across the sea to Formosa.
Their people, they said, felt that fiery iron dragons – no matter how modestly sized – disturbed the essential harmony of the Empire. A temple to the Queen of Heaven was to be built on the site of the terminus – a proper propitiation, it was felt, to a deity whose tranquillity had been insulted by the foreigners. It was to be twenty more years before Woosung and Shanghai were connected by rail again – by which time China was on the verge of building (and not by its own devices, but with the help of the British, Americans, Russians, Germans and French) one of the biggest railway systems in the world. The mood by then had changed, profoundly. Fiery iron monsters now rumble across every province of the People's Republic – except for Tibet – and, far from disturbing celestial harmony, they are as essential to the well-being of the nation as rice and air. But that was not how matters were viewed in the China of the 1870s: back then in Woosung railways were foreign, they were unsettling and for the while at least they were not to be.
Nor, as it happened, was a railway for me in Woosung a century and a quarter later. Try as I might to find my way through the back streets by the docks, and try as I might to get to the station where it had all begun, I managed to get myself utterly and hopelessly lost. It had been a long day – up before dawn, transferring from ship to ship, rocking and lumbering up the estuary – and so when a red Toyota taxi stopped and the driver asked if I wanted a ride, and when I considered the trials of finding the station and then dealing with the complexities of buying a ticket, I uttered my cowardly agreement.
I loaded my rucksack into the back of the car, Lily and I wedged ourselves behind a formidable wall of Perspex security shield, which even Shanghainese taxis claim they need these days, and, with the radio blaring a noisy Foochow pop song, we headed past the Baoshan steel mills – and into the city. I told the driver to take us to a gateway beside the old Russian Consulate on Whangpoo Road. There was a ship docked behind it, I knew, in a cabin aboard which I had an invitation to sleep.