The last traces of the evening sun were glimmering from behind the purple clouds of factory smoke as the Jiang Han 18 edged gingerly out into the swollen stream. A long freight train rumbled over the bridge behind, its wagons heaped high with coal for plants and smelters on the north bank. The ferry from Pukou, its lower decks crammed with passengers and bicycles, was sweeping around the harbour buoy. An old man in a string vest standing beside me on the Jiang Han's second deck was pissing happily over the side of the boat; as he buttoned the fly on his khaki shorts so he spat down into the river, thirty feet below, for good measure. The clock on the Nanjing Ship Terminal then struck – or clanked – a tinny and discordant nine times: we were leaving exactly on schedule, with just over six hundred passengers jammed among the hot ironwork below.
We had managed to secure a cabin just below the navigation bridge. It had cost us: the usual double price that foreigners are invariably obliged to pay, together with a twenty-yuan bribe. But the alternatives had been less than enticing: either a huge dormitory, its sizzling floors awash with dubious-looking fluids and crammed with a jolting mass of shouting humanity, or a third-class bunkhouse in which twelve beds – four tiers of three – provided some measure of serenity and comfort. But for only twenty dollars one could travel second-class – first-class still being an officially forbidden phrase – with a lockable door, a working fan, and beds with curtains. The journey was to take twenty-five hours: at that price comfort seemed very good value.
‘More like thirty hours, this trip,’ said Captain Wu De Yin, when I went up to the bridge. ‘The flooding this year seems very bad. The stream is quite fast. Downstream we came along like a rocket. But upstream we are having to fight every inch of the way.’
Captain Wu had been on the Yangtze since he was eleven – more than forty years. He had once worked on the Kunlun, the boat that was now used to take tourists along the Yangtze and which was mistakenly said by its American charterers to have been used by Chairman Mao. ‘Zhou Enlai, yes,’ he said. ‘Mao, never, I'm sad to say.’ He pointed respectfully to a small photograph of Mao that bobbed on a string from a bulkhead pipe, a talisman. All long-distance travellers in China had them, Mao or Zhou and sometimes both, together with a length of red cloth that fluttered in the wind: they doubled as Saint Christophers and as a visible sign of faith in the Party.
Captain Wu had left the Kunlun with honours ten years before, and for the last decade had worked on the scheduled passenger boats like ours, shuttling between Nanjing and Wuhan. This is what one might call the upper reach of the Lower Yangtze – and journeying in these waters always sorely tried his nerves.
‘Everyone imagines the Yangtze is only difficult in the Gorges,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘But this river – pah! – it is always difficult. Always. It changes every day, every hour. One moment there is clear water and then – pah! – there is a whirlpool that will suck you in and turn you round and before you know it, you're heading for a rock, or a cliff.
‘You have to treat it like your enemy. It is a real battle, going up this river. I will show you in the morning. But even now you can hear it – just listen.’
And I cocked an ear to hear something above the deep-throated roaring of the engines, and below the cries of a legion of off-key singers in a crew cabin behind us. After a few seconds there was a sort of iron hiccup in the rhythm of the diesels, a squeal of distant chains, and the boat seemed to lurch slightly from the port side. I staggered. The captain did not. For a moment or two longer the boat resumed her smooth progress, and then there came another battering, this time from starboard. There was a second squawk of industrial pain from below, another sound of tortured metal, another lurch.
‘See what I mean? All you can see ahead is the night. It looks quite calm. But below us the river is doing strange things. I can never say I know it. I know the ports, the destinations. I know the bridges, and all the lights. But the water – wah! – it is a strange beast. I should get paid more than I do!’ He said he was paid about 6000 yuan a month, around £450.
Before turning in I stood on the bridge wing, gazing out into the inky blackness. It was a warm and humid late spring night, and rivulets of condensation ran down the steel plates. In the distance there was the glow of factory furnaces, each a silent indication of China's strength. But from down below came an unsteady gurgling roar as the river coursed by our hull – a reminder that the river was stronger still and, as all who live along her banks know full well, that she would be able to snuff out all those distant fires and a great deal else besides, with no more than a summertime shrug of her giant shoulders.
This stretch of the river suffers terribly from floods. Later on I would find out that what was at that moment swirling below our hull was reported to be a memorably bad flood: it was said that 1500 people were killed and hundreds of millions more were ‘affected’. Patriotic television films would show heroic soldiers gallantly fighting to secure dykes and dams along thousands of miles of brimming streams. But however destructive the 1995 floods, they were as mere wettings compared with what the Chinese believe to have been one of the worst natural calamities of all time: the Central China Flood of 1931. The wild and wayward Yangtze, as usual, was to blame.
Except that the blame can be apportioned much more fundamentally than this. China is a country that is doubly and uniquely cursed, both by her climate and her topography.
Her cross-section, for example, is dramatically unlike any other on earth. China's western side is universally high – an immense mélange of contorted geologies that involve the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, and the great mountain ranges of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. Her eastern side, on the other hand, is flat and alluvial and slides muddily and morosely down into the sea. The country in between is far from a smoothly inclined plane, of course, but the difference in altitude between her western provinces and the sea is so vast – involving four and a half miles of vertical drop – and the trend of the slope so unremitting that anything which falls onto her western side, be it snow, hail, torrential rain or the slow grey drizzle of a Wuhan autumn afternoon, will roll naturally and inevitably down to the east.
Her two greatest rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, flow in precisely that direction – west to east. They take this runoff from the high Himalayas and the other ranges and then, capturing river after river after river along the way – all of which do just the same, scouring their source mountains for every drop of water they can find – they cascade the entire collected rainfall from tens of thousands of square and high-altitude miles down into the earth-stained waters of the East China Sea.
But the configuration of China's surface is not the only factor. It is eccentric, certainly, like one half of a temple roof. Nonetheless, it could have offered the country a hydraulically manageable situation, were it not for four additional curses.
The first is that China receives a very great deal of rain each year – far more, per square mile, than Europe or the Americas, and, in places, as much as the record-holding villages of Assam. Second, nearly all of this precipitation falls in the topographically chaotic west and the south of the country – the principal reason, as it happens, why rice is the crop of choice grown in the wet warm south, and wheat the staple of the dry and cool north. (The dividing line, the so-called wheat–rice line, almost precisely parallels the track of the Yangtze.)
Third, this substantial and geographically concentrated rainfall is intensely seasonal – the summer monsoon dominates southwestern China's weather system, just as it dominates the northern part of the India against which China abuts. This is a very odd combination: in very few regions around the world is rain concentrated both by place and by time. It is not in India, for instance. It is not in the Amazon valley. Nor is it anywhere in Europe. But in China, savagely, more or less all of it falls in one place, and more or less all of it falls in one four-month period, between June and September.
Fourth, and as if the other reasons were not enough, the rain falls just when the summer sun begins warming things up things that include, crucially, the snows and glaciers of China's western mountains. These start to melt, and to produce their own torrents of eastbound water, at exactly the time the rains come.
The coincidence of these four factors – each of which, like St John's Four Horsemen, is an agent of potential destruction – produces results that are often quite literally apocalyptic. Every summer and all of a sudden, gigantic quantities of water begin to course down each of the tributary streams of China's two main river systems. Some comes from the melting ice and snow. Some comes from the torrential monsoonal rains. But all goes eventually to the same two places.
In the north of the country the Huang He, the Yellow River, swells rapidly and enormously. It collects additional waters from its two main feeder streams, and it wrenches millions more tons of loess out of China's heartland and carries them swiftly out to the delta, and the sea.* Not for nothing is this river known colloquially as China's Sorrow, or The Unmanageable.
But the Yellow River's history of flooding, while spectacular, has rarely been as catastrophic as the Yangtze's. The Yangtze is nearly a sixth as long again as the Yellow, and rages through hundreds more miles of mountainous and well-watered land. It has in addition very many more tributaries – about seven hundred in total, and among them are formidable rivers like the Yalong, the Min, the Jialing, the Han Shui, the Wu and the Yuan. Each of these deserves to be ranked among the world's biggest rivers itself, but in this context they are mere contributors to the Yangtze and to its huge engorgement.
Furthermore, unlike the Yellow River, the Yangtze flows through a part of China that is itself rained upon during the monsoon season – meaning that to whatever mass of waters it has collected from the hills and the tributaries, still more is added from the rain that simply falls upon the river's surface as it slides languidly through the lower stages.
The results are invariably stupendous, occasionally disastrous and, more often than seems fair, catastrophic. In 1871, the river at one point rose – and quite suddenly – by no less than 275 feet. A little above where I was sailing this night, places exist where the average summertime rise is 70 feet, year after year; and painted on the rocky walls and on cliffs and poles and riverside buildings all along the way are the ragged white numerals - once in feet, now in metres – showing the possible range of the water. At Jiujiang, which we were due to reach after a day's hard sailing, there was said to be a plaque recording the level on the fateful 19 August 1931: the river rose 53 feet, 7 inches above normal, and inundated everything for miles around.
During that summer, in addition to all the normal mountain monsoons and snowmelts, calamitous rains fell along the entire length of the middle and Lower Yangtze. Storms raged all over these very lowlands through which I was now steaming – lowlands that begin at the foot of a mountain range five hundred miles ahead and extend to the ocean that now lay three hundred miles behind. This extraordinary amount of water was dumped into a river that had already been swollen massively by the melting of the Tibetan snowfields and was, moreover, about to get huge shock infusions of storm water from its mightiest tributaries.
The results were that the Yangtze, at precisely the point where I was now rumbling through the night, first rose to 30 feet above its present level and then, no fewer than six times in quick succession, was jolted by great storm bores as the new tributary waters kicked in.
The tributary bores are no joke. In a bad-flood year a grotesquely swollen Min River, for example, discharges itself into the Yangtze and produces a ten-foot tidal wave, which sweeps down and along the river for days. Another bloated river like the Jialing disgorges its water in the same way but a few days later, or earlier, depending on the weather near its own source, this causes another tidal wave to rush out into the great river – and so on and so on. Before long an aerial view of the Yangtze would show it overflowing its banks for hundreds of miles, and then those broken banks and inundated villages and towns being buffeted by successive new water pulses, each a few days or so apart. In 1931 there was no slow inundation: it was rapid flooding, followed by episodes of total immersion, then a brief relief, then total immersion once again, five more times.
The consequences of what the history books now record as the Central China Flood were staggering, the figures numbing and barely credible. More than 140,000 people drowned. Twenty-eight million people were affected – forty million by some estimates. Seventy thousand square miles of central China were submerged – as much land area as in all of New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut combined, or all of England and most of Scotland. Twelve million people had to migrate or leave their ruined homes – twice that number, according to the more doom-laden reports. Two billion dollars in losses – and those are 1931 figures, when the average family earnings in China were just a fistful of cents in copper cash – were directly attributable to the flooding. Some streets in cities like Wuhan, two days sailing away from me this night, were under nine feet of water, others under twenty feet. The city remained awash for four months. Fields nearby, not protected by dykes, were thirty feet under. Nanjing was under water for six weeks.
And though this was the worst for many years, floods like it had happened before, and others like it would happen again. The country's formidably well-annotated history records more than one thousand major inundations in the last two thousand years. Catastrophes on the Yangtze alone seemed to have occurred roughly every fifty years. Even if one disregards Chinese record keeping – which is unwise, since the Courts kept scrupulous watch over their Empire – and relies only on the records of the British-run Imperial Maritime Customs, the regularity of disaster is obvious: the 1931 floods were preceded by terrible calamities in 1896 and 1870, and even higher river levels were seen in 1949, 1954 and, on my own journey, in 1995.
The inevitability of such happenings has annealed and anaesthetized the national psyche. The Chinese have long been accustomed to a mute subservience to nature. A glance at almost any classical Chinese painting – with its tiny and peripheral figures of men surrounded and dominated by mountains and waterfalls, clouds and trees – indicates the state of mind, with its stoic acceptance of the overarching gigantism of the world, the puny insignificance of man. A European painting on the other hand is invariably very different in all respects: man or his creations lie usually at the centre. Nature is peripheral, portrayed as background, or barely noted at all, and if it is, is usually seen as gentle, pastoral, merely pretty.
A phlegmatic acceptance of this insignificance, of powerlessness when set against the alternating benevolent and minatory cycles of nature, is an immutable part of the Chinese peasant's psychological makeup. Of course, all mankind acknowledges reality. Most peoples have variations on our own ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’ But in China it is said with far greater dramatic flourish: ‘Heaven nourishes,’ goes the Celestials' equivalent, ‘and Heaven destroys.’ Acceptance is all, it seems. Once in a while things have become so desperate that the supposed benevolence of the supervising gods was invoked: in 1788 the Emperor Qianlong had nine iron oxen forged and submerged in the rising river. The act, he declared, should propitiate the guardians of the stream since, according to the cumbersome cosmology of the day, the sea submits to iron, the ox belongs to the earth, and so a herd of oxen should be able to suppress a flood. But it didn't and the floods of the summer of 1788 were devastating – and records from later times consistently show that prayer has rarely managed to halt or slow a rising Chinese river. The yin and the yang are in constant operation in the matter of China's wayward waterways; here is every advance countered by a setback, there are the years of too little followed by the months of too much. The entire history of China seems patterned like this, the Yangtze simply a paradigm.
Not that all the drama of 1931 seemed so tragic – particularly for the foreigners living in the region. Newspapers reported how the businessmen in the flooded treaty ports went to work in newly bought sampans, lazing in overstuffed armchairs that coolies had mounted in the stern, reading the morning paper. Police sampans cruised along the flooded roads, Browning machine-guns mounted in swivels on their bows. Wuhan had a fire brigade boat equipped with a siren and painted a properly searing shade of red. A boat shuttle-service operated between the westerners' offices on the Hankou Bund and the racecourse – where the bar still operated, even though the horses did not.
A notice went up at the Jardines office forbidding employees from mooring their boats on the roof and tying them to the firm's chimneys. The post office set up floating substations, and cancelled their stamps with a mark still highly valued by philatelists. A junk floated into the gardens of the Hankou Club, and when the waters went down it remained. It was later mounted on four pillars of concrete, a memorial to the barely credible height that the waters had reached.*
It was left to Chiang Kai-shek's new and untested government – just three years old, and based in Nanjing – to deal with the mess. The Flood Relief Commission's 300-page report, issued when the waters had gone down and the fields had been sown again with rice and tobacco and cotton, refers wearily to the fact that workers, set to rebuilding the damaged dykes, ‘had to be protected against Communists and bandits’. Another page – nowadays it reads like agitprop – has references to the depredations of ‘the Reds’. Politics intruded in 1931, as often before and always afterwards, conspiring to make a trying situation a very great deal more so.
Measures to attempt to control China's disastrous floods have been a recurrent feature of her history. As early as the second century BC letters were written referring to China's five ‘harmful influences' – flood, drought, unseasonable weathers, pestilence, and insects: of these, a second-century duke wrote, floods are by far the worst. His correspondent agreed: the consequences of water gone awry could be profound – though he went rather further than most. ‘Running wild, it injures men. When it injures men there is great distress among them. In great distress they treat the laws lightly. Laws being treated lightly it is difficult to maintain order. Good order lapsing, filial piety disappears. And when people have lost filial piety, they are no longer submissive.’
The notion that flooding might stimulate insubordinate behaviour may seem a peculiarly Chinese rationale – but it did sufficiently alarm the mandarinate that the Court took very seriously the problem of taming the Empire's wild rivers. More than two thousand years ago there were documents that specified how to build and repair dykes, how to muster corvées of workers to maintain them, how many baskets, spades, earth-tamping devices and carts to assign to each water conservancy office; if ever the maturity of Chinese civilization were in doubt, the record of her attitude to her waterways would provide more than ample confirmation of its antiquity.
So dykes were built, for thousands of miles along the most vulnerable riverbanks. They were not always built sturdily enough – those that broke too often, and let the waters escape, were known as dou-fu dykes – the word is rendered in English as ‘tofu' – after the jellylike bean curd with which they were compared. From the Yangtze, well-dyked sluiceways were also constructed to carry off excess water from the main river and dribble it into a number of retention basins, as well as into two gigantic lakes that, quite fortuitously, spread to the mouth of the river – Dongting Lake, near Wuhan, and Poyang Lake, a little to the south of where we were steaming now.
In the low-water period of the winter and early spring, these lakes – especially Dongting – shrink dramatically. What in the summertime is a great expanse of water, often as much as 3000 square miles, is in winter reduced to a sandy marsh, like a huge inland delta. People move back onto this newly exposed land: rice paddies are hastily built, straw huts go up, little farms oversee vast flocks of swans, geese and ducks. And then, come June, the river rises once again, the lake re-creates itself, and, with dispatch born of centuries of experience, the temporary farmers move out and site themselves back on high ground to wait out the season.
Ships ply the deeper channels of both lakes – in fact, thanks to an astonishing achievement of canal building and diversion that dates back to the third century BC, a system of waterways passing through Dongting Lake allows ships to pass from the Yangtze all the way south to Canton. Only small ships, admittedly (and the railway from Wuhan now parallels the route, taking most of the north–south cargoes); but as a piece of hydraulic engineering, the Qin dynasty's extraordinary Miracle Canal, as it is still known, was truly a Panama of its day.*
Dykes and retention basins improved as the centuries wore on – the former became higher and stronger, the latter larger and more numerous. After the 1931 catastrophe formidable efforts were made to try and solve the problem for ever; dykes were built and new diversion schemes were co-tructed that could deal with the so-called hundred-year floods, as well as with the more modest disasters in between. The Flood Relief Commission, eager to show the ability of the Nationalist government, wrote that ‘the amount of earthwork done by this army of labourers would have built a dyke two metres high and two metres thick, long enough to encircle the earth at its equator’.
Work was still going on twenty years later, despite the anti-Japanese war, the Civil War, Mao's revolution. In 1951 a huge new retention basin was finished upstream at Jinjiang. It had mile-long cement spillways, hundreds of lock gates, seemingly endless concrete canals. Three years later the monsoon storms lashed down, the snowmelt was huge, and the Yangtze rose again – brimming as high as it had in 1931, and then higher still as shock wave after shock wave came with the joining of the tributary floods. But the Jinjiang locks all opened in proper time, the commission's earth-girdling chain of new dykes all held – and after a week of anxious, rain-sodden nights and days, the Yangtze's level began to fall. What could have been a more terrible calamity had been averted. Old Emperor Yü the Great, who legend said had begun all this river taming four thousand years before, would have been well pleased.
*
I slept well in the little cabin. Lily did too, and she was still deeply asleep when the dim morning light filtered in. It was raining hard, and when I went up on deck I heard a group of fellow passengers worrying out loud about the grim possibilities of rising waters at their various destinations. But it seemed I hadn't missed much of importance along the river during the night: the only thing was that at Datong, the captain said, he had seen the earthworks for the new bridge. We had also passed the town of Wuhu, where there was the very last vague hint of influence from the ocean tides: this now was the Yangtze pure and simple, its flow unaffected by anything except the rain and the melting snows, still far away.
After a breakfast down in the ship's grubby little shop, with rice congee and deep-fried strips of dough called oilsticks that are far from my favourite way of jump-starting the day, I went back out on deck to take the morning air, and to see if the river had risen much. Sure enough it had: buildings beside the river were now standing in several feet of muddy water, and at one point I could see a convoy of trucks, half-submerged themselves, driving along a water-lapped riverside road, taking people and their cattle up to higher ground.
But also as I watched I saw by chance two examples of perhaps the most emblematic of all the ancients' river remedies. Pagodas, quite rare in the lower reaches, had been erected by the score by Ming and early Qing viceroys in the more flood-prone regions. They were built there to propitiate gods, to persuade them not to permit floods – but also from which to spot the floods at a distance if the deities were, as so often, unrelenting. On this damp morning here were a couple of them, in quick succession.
The first was on the river's right bank, outside the wretched-looking little town of Guichi, where we stopped for five minutes. The pagoda was a forlorn thing, too – seven storeys, rotting masonry, a tottering cupola and tufts of greenery sprouting from its windows. Perhaps, I thought sourly, its abandonment was due to the existence of one of the country's newer pagodas, a steel and wire temple to a replacement religion, for Guichi's modern skyline is now dominated by a brand-new telecommunications tower, and through one of the old pagoda's ragged windows I could see men working on it and the blue sputterings of a welding torch.
The ship slid home beside an old pontoon, with much screeching of rust against rust. Six passengers disembarked: they were from Taiwan, and one of them had told me they were bound for the sacred mountain of Jiuhua, some few hours' bus journey away.
‘Most times it's Koreans who get off here,’ remarked one of the crew, a man I had met on the bridge the night before. He was squinting down into the drizzle. ‘It was a Korean monk who made the mountain famous, you know. He set up a monastery on the top, back in the old days. So in August they come in their hundreds, celebrating his birthday. The whole boat reeks of kimchi.’
The Guichi pagoda may not have been a very fine specimen, but half an hour later, and on the opposite shore, one of the finest pagodas in all China swept into view: the famous Wind Moving Pagoda of Anqing. It is said to sway in the wind; it was built in 1570; and it has eight sides and, uncommonly, eight storeys – most pagodas having an odd number, usually five, seven, or nine.
The junkmen on the Yangtze are said to revere the Anqing pagoda. In the old days the walls of the city were arranged in the outline of a junk with the pagoda at the centre, rising like a mast. On the gates of the fort outside are the flukes of a gigantic grapnel anchor: the fishermen believe that if these are ever removed, the city will drift away downstream and vanish for ever.
They also believe that the pagoda is the king of all other pagodas in the world – including those built later in Japan and Korea, and also of the stupas in Thailand and India and the chortens in Tibet. During the autumn moon festival, it is said, the pagodas all come to pay homage to their monarch. Priests praying in the upper storeys say that on the choppy waters of the Yangtze below, the images of the thousands of other pagodas can be seen flickering in the moonlight – transported reflections of the world's tributary temples, all paying their brief annual respects. No junk or other ship dares pass the river during these night-time hours, for fear of disturbing the reflections.
Among the stones of the pagoda's basement there is said to be a tomb containing the heart of a fallen Chinese warrior. The structure's topmost pinnacle holds a strange confection of bells, which ring in even the most gentle breeze. And in rougher winds – the winter gales especially – the whole whitewashed structure leans back and forth, the bells shaking noisily, warning the citizens below of a coming storm.
I had with me a photograph of the town taken during the 1931 floods, which showed the pagoda standing, its skirts dipping deep into the river, a sailing junk passing gracefully below. The Admiralty Pilot of 1954 has a picture of it, too – it is a major navigation mark, vital for the masters of all passing ships. In this photograph the structure towers above a neat arrangement of curl-topped roofs and fortess walls, a classic illustration of China.
Today, however, matters have changed a lot. The pagoda still towers nobly, the fort's roofs are still untouched – but all around them are cindery blocks of godowns and office buildings, cranes and iron wharves. In the background, dominating the skyline far more obviously than the pagoda itself, is a huge cone-shaped stain of oily smoke, belching blackly from an unseen chimney and drifting high above the entire town. The ruin of modern China is a sorry thing to see, and in Anqing more so than in many places. What had gone before had been so very, very lovely.
And much vanishes still that is not so easy to see. The animal and fish life of the Yangtze, for example, has been ruined by pollution and greed: the building of great hydroelectric projects upstream is doing yet more damage, and the whole world says it is alarmed about the fate of cetaceans and sturgeons that once were abundant in the river, but which are now fast dying out. In the waters between Anqing and Wuhu, for example, there were until quite recently thousands of specimens of the Yangtze alligator, Alligator sinensis – a miniature version of the familiar reptile, with a black stripe along its side. Three thousand years ago the local warlords used to make battle drums from its skin, since the hide was said to remain taut in rain or summer heat. In more recent times, the river's toxins have probably claimed more alligators than the drum makers ever did. Local quacks also sell alligator skins and heads – a big skin goes for two hundred yuan, a small head for twenty – as a sexual stimulant (ground alligator head allowing for semiperpetual erection, it is said). There are thought to be fewer than a couple of hundred of the beasts left – more or less the same number as the surviving baiji a little farther downstream – and one wildlife organization has declared that the Yangtze alligator is in fact now wholly extinct.
An hour past Anqing and the mood on the ship's bridge suddenly became tense. We were due to negotiate a narrow pass in the river. There was a steep cliff on the port side, a reedy islet to starboard, the shallow and whirling channel in between. The islet is known as the Little Orphan, and the cliff the Mirror Mountain, and legends concerning drowned children and turtles and capsizing rescuers abound. The radio operator in Jiujiang had called to caution Captain Wu that the whirlpools of the so-called chow-chow waters here by Mirror Mountain were exceptionally bad, that the floods were causing the river to race at a dozen feet a second, and that it might not be possible for our slow and deep-draught ship even to pass that day.
Captain Wu put on a shirt, stubbed out his cigarette. Lookouts were posted on the bridge wings, and a detail stood to beside the anchor chains. The engineers were asked for full power, and the steersman called for quiet on the bridge.
The cliff loomed before us and to our left. The channel ahead was clearly visible – huge whorls of muddy water sucking and gulping as they spun down towards us. The marshes waited patiently to our starboard, eager for us to strand. Fifty years ago the invading Japanese had been checked here by a boom: a dozen junks were arranged in line abreast above the rapid, with bamboo hawsers and chains connecting them. A siege cannon had been placed on top of the mountain. Any Japanese ships that made it through the choppy waters had to negotiate the guns and the barrier ahead, and for a while, all of them turned back. But only, the Chinese shake their heads and sadly admit, for a while.
We seemed first to steer in quite the wrong direction, heading directly for the cliff. At the last moment, when the great limestone walls seemed ready to smash into our bows, the captain whispered an instruction, the vessel heeled hard to starboard and we lurched back into the full force of the stream. We then were kicked from side to side as though on a bronco, and for a moment it seemed just as likely that we would plough into the reeds and be stuck in mud for the day. But then another huge wave crashed into us and knocked us back into the channel, just as Captain Wu, I supposed, had calculated. A few more knocks, a host of lesser crashes, a roar of thick black smoke from the funnel as the engines were gunned hard – and we were through. The reach widened, the waters calmed.
Fifty years ago a band of naked men would have tracked our boat along the Little Orphan Channel. They would have been bending low in the mud, pulling to a drumbeat and an ancient song, straining against the bamboo ropes that would have been fastened to our mast. But trackers were rare men in the China of today: it would be a few hundred miles farther upstream before I had any chance of encountering them. Big engines did the heavy hauling in these parts these days, and on a dangerous day like this, when the stream was running high, it was probably just as well. Trackers died in accidents by the score: the work was dangerous, damp, dirty and cold.
The flooding did seem to be spreading farther and farther afield on both sides of the river. A line of trees, half-submerged, marked where the river's bank had been a week ago: a new one, changing by the hour, now lay scores of feet beyond. Nonetheless I had a sneaking feeling that these floods were actually not as terrible as the radio was endlessly telling us.
It was just a hunch. I had no evidence to support it – other than the ubiquity and the relentlessness of information to the contrary. Yes, I could see that the waters were high. But I had seen them this high before, on earlier visits to the river, and there hadn't been all this fuss before. There didn't seem to be a feeling of disaster in the air – there didn't seem, from this vantage point, to be a catastrophe that was at all related to the dire headlines that I saw each day in the China Daily, or to the grim-faced announcements made on the evening television news. We didn't see refugees at the little ports, nor were there more than the average number of drowned bodies bobbing down our stream each day. No ruined houses swirling in the stream, no shards of shattered timber, no shaking thunderstorms, no embarked battalions or patrol vessels, no bags of rice or sand, no Red Cross officials anywhere. There was no panic, nothing more than a vaguely concerned equanimity. Perhaps it was fatalism. Perhaps this is how the Chinese always behave in a crisis. Or perhaps, the sceptic gnawing away inside me thought, this flood was not so terrible as it was made to seem.
I had one good reason, and only one, for my doubts. Five hundred miles ahead of where the Jiang Han 18 was sailing, the Chinese were starting to build the greatest flood control mechanism of all time – a giant dam, the biggest in the world, that would block the Yangtze just below the famous Three Gorges. Its primary actual purpose was to generate lots and lots of electricity; its primary stated purpose, on the other hand, and according to the propagandists in Beijing, was ‘to control the river and prevent the recurrence of the devastating floods of the past’.
The whole world seemed implacably set against the building of the dam. Almost everyone of influence and knowledge appeared to have good reason to oppose its construction. Big dams generally were seen as outdated and environmentally irresponsible totems, wasteful symbols of national pride. This one, for a score of reasons, was even worse than most. The World Bank was against it. The Americans were against it. Almost no one had sympathy for the Chinese case. But if central China were to be devastated by another flood, thus proving the Yangtze to be an uncontrollable monster – then perhaps, just perhaps, this lack of sympathy might begin to turn. That, I unpleasantly suspected, was what the Chinese might be thinking.
This year was crucial, a year when the fund-raising for the almost unbelievably costly dam was at its most energetic stage. So it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Chinese leadership might have thought a hostile outside world could be persuaded to take some kind of pity and begin to think anew about the wisdom of building the brute. The Chinese Communists have a proven capacity for lying on an epic scale – and to lie about the size of a summertime flood was not wholly beyond their range of mendacity. The bigger the lie, after all. So were they telling the truth? Or were they exaggerating matters, the better to make their case for the immense project, one in which so much national, ideological and political face was involved? It was an intriguing thought, at the very least.
It had in any case now stopped raining, and through the pale blue haze I could see that hills were rising in the distance – mountain ranges, a whisper of the terrain of the coming western lands. On the flanks of the nearer hills grew the one crop for which this part of China had once been famous all around the world, and which once gave the Yangtze the bulk of her downstream cargoes. Around the bend ahead, past the entrance to Poyang Lake, was the town of Jiujiang, a place that was known only a few years ago – and to some specialists, still even now – for the pure and elegant excellence of her tea.