I was awakened the next morning at first light by the noise of passengers chattering excitedly out on deck, calling to one another to come and see something in the river. When I emerged sleepily from my cabin I could see them pointing into the middle distance. Some had cameras and binoculars – we had private cabins once again, so our neighbours were fairly well-to-do – and were busily snapping away.
At first I assumed that it was a body. We had already spotted four of them, two on the journey from Nanjing, floating with the stream. Pigs, I had at first supposed, except that on closer inspection they soon turned out to be the carcasses of children, and of those whose sex I could judge, girls. It was a particularly distressing sight, and I wasn't very eager to gawk at yet another floating testament to the tyranny of the country's birth-control policy, certainly not this early in the morning. But then Lily put on her spectacles, spotted what it was that everyone was looking at and called to me to come.
‘Swimmers!’ she cried. ‘People – swimming across the river.’
Were this almost any other country in the world, and almost any other river, the fact would barely raise an eyebrow. Dawn on a late spring Sunday might seem a generally eccentric time to go for a dip, but the simple fact of river swimming – across the Mississippi, say, or the Volga – would hardly bring slumbering passengers tearing up from their beds. But this, here, was something different.
The Chinese can by nature be an incurious and in many ways a barely competitive people. The fact that one lives beside a great river, for example, would not seem to the average Chinese a good reason for immersing oneself in it and thrashing across to the far side. What, this average Chinese would say, is the point?
And then too, not only would the exercise here be pointless, it would be very dangerous as well. The Yangtze is a peculiarly treacherous river in which to swim for almost all of its 3964 miles. It is very wide, very deep, and its currents are very fast. It is a viciously capricious, freakish stream – even in these middle reaches, where the banks are flat and covered with violets. The ragged patterns of violent upwellings and depth-plumbing vortices that are known to ship-masters as flower water and chow-chow water can render the most powerful swimmer powerless. There are also water snakes of an uncommonly poisonous kind, and in the vicinity of Wuhan, where these morning swimmers appeared, the waters are known to be afflicted by snails that carry schistosomes, wormy parasites that can wreak havoc in the human bloodstream.* Farmers working on the banks keep well away from the water or wear heavy boots. So why should anyone be out swimming?
Through the gloom I could see dozens of them, arranged in groups. A small armada of little boats led the way – one boat, sometimes two, leading each group of swimmers. Each craft had a red flag fluttering from a tall bamboo spar and one or two young men sitting in the stern, who were shouting exhortations to those splashing through the waters behind. Swim faster! Head this way! Watch out for this eddy! Steer clear of that baulk of lumber!
One group, larger than most, passed close to our steamer. It was led by a pair of boats from which rose a celebration arch made of red balloons. There were twenty swimmers in the formation, most young men, perhaps three women. They swam steadily downstream, their arms shovelling the brown waters in near unison. The current swept them along fast, and as their stake-boats evidently guided them past the more treacherous stretches, it looked as though it could have been rather good fun. Like Olympic synchronized swimmers, the men and women wore expressions mixing determination and rapture with fixed smiles and gritted teeth, but with the hint of amazing and powerful things going on underwater, out of sight.
As the lead boat passed by, a young man held up a banner for us to read: ‘Hankou Number 16 Iron Foundry. To the Eternal Glory of Comrade Mao.’ Now the reason for the swim became instantly clear: it all had to do with politics, and with reminiscence and the symbolism and sanctity of ancient deeds. And, more important still, it was because the three cities that make up the gigantic conurbation of Wuhan can rightly be said to be, in a historical sense, the most significant in modern China.
For Mao Zedong had swum this river and, precisely because of Wuhan's historical uniqueness, at this very place. One of the ship's bridge officers promptly realized what was going on, and announced over the public address system that today's swim was in commemoration of Mao's. The loyal Wuhan people, he said, performed this act of fealty each midsummer. What was going on today was a dress rehearsal for the real thing, due to take place in a month or so, when men and women who worked in factories and offices all around would come to the Yangtze to race in teams, to see who might come closest to the natatory ideals set by the late Great Helmsman.
Mao loved to swim: he saw it as an elemental kind of sport, where man's energy and wiles could be pitted against the brute strength of nature. It was June 1956 when the Chairman embarked on his first swimming expedition on the Yangtze: he did so to pit himself, symbolically, against brute strengths of quite another variety. He swam to demonstrate, as publicly as he could, his personal frustration and protest.
The People's Republic that he had fashioned was at the time less than seven years old, but already was running into all manner of trouble. Mao's reforms, as he saw things, were being slowed by the turgid pace of the bureaucracy, there were signs of real opposition to him in some of the cities,* the party elders were squabbling openly and were not always giving Mao the credit for the revolution that he had so keenly engineered.
Some of the mistakes were clearly his own. Mao had made a grave error, for instance, by so naïvely permitting a sudden measure of intellectual freedom – the movement that grew up in the wake of his repeated declarations to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. It had rapidly got out of hand – and it had to be summarily put down, as it was, with Stalinist robustness.
But the revolution also seemed to have lost its head of steam for vaguer and more puzzling reasons. The nation's enthusiasm needed to be rekindled, Mao thought. There should be some demonstration, some potent reminder that the making of the People's Republic had been a brave and physical thing – that it had been born not out of textbooks and theorizing, as in Russia, but out of the physical heroism of the Long March, out of long-fought battles and well-deserved victories over Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt armies. To remind the people of the nobility of origins like these, and to galvanize them – and to galvanize the bureaucracy, the cadres and the party elders as well – Mao decided he needed to make a physical display of his own leadership and fearlessness.
This in itself was nothing new. Chinese emperors had a long tradition of showing off their prowess to the citizenry – by painting, by calligraphy, or by very publicly performing noble deeds. Precisely why Mao chose to show off his swimming was never made clear – except that it was something that, as a young Hunanese farm boy, he had learned to do very well, and perhaps because of his own belief in the importance of the sport. Probably, considering China's peculiar intimacy with her vast hydraulics – and in Hunan, like Jiangxi and Anhui and faraway Jiangsu, the ‘land of fish and rice’, that intimacy ran even deeper – he thought a demonstration of a series of grand swims, in all the swimmable streams of the Empire, would put him in touch with his people in a way that a more intellectual distinction such as calligraphy (at which he was also very good) would not.
Besides, it would also show he was strong and fit and capable and fearless – all estimable qualities of leadership. And if nothing else it would reinforce both his and China's undeniable uniqueness. Which American president or British prime minister or even Soviet secretary-general would ever dare indulge in such a vulgar and proletarian display?
He took his first swim in the spring of 1956 in the Pearl River, near Canton – a modest but very dirty river, choked with chemical waste. Thirty guards floated downstream with him, as well as a political entourage – all of whom had to swim in their underwear, so precipitate was Mao's decision to go. The exercise seemed to do him no harm: he floated on his back like a great pink bear, as though he were sitting on a sofa. During his two hours of floating he taught Yang Shankun – who went on to be China's president, the man who accompanied Queen Elizabeth to Shanghai thirty years later – how to swim in his own relaxed and confident way. And when he emerged from waters that his doctor had seen were thick with human waste, he chided those who were aghast, who had recoiled from the idea of the Chairman swimming amid all the filth. ‘If you put a fish in distilled water,’ he asked, ‘how long do you think it will live?’
Mao was none too sure, however, that it was entirely wise to swim in the Yangtze: ‘If I'm trapped there, they say, no one will be able to rescue me.’ He sent two of his guards up to Wuhan to swim in the river themselves and they returned full of tales of the treacherous whirlpools and nematode-carrying snails. But neither dared tell Mao, and there is a painful story of the two men stammering and shivering their way through an interview with the Chairman, one of them eventually telling him, in as roundabout a way as only a Chinese knows how, that the river was indeed not suitable for swimming. Mao exploded with rage at the news, prompting the guard's colleague to change his own story on the spot, and tell Mao that the river was, in fact, an ideal place for a leisurely crawl.*
And so Mao travelled north – passing through his old homeland of Hunan, where he swam in the Xiang River for practice. One of his guards was bitten by a water snake, which didn't augur well. But finally Mao's special train chugged north again to Wuhan, his small steamer The East Is Red Number One was pressed into service for the convenience and privacy of the great swimmer, and with a flotilla of eight security boats and four longer-range speedboats in attendance, the expedition edged into midriver.
At a point where today's groups of swimmers were rehearsing for their annual ritual of homage, Mao and forty guards and an even larger entourage of secretaries, doctors, Party secretaries, courtiers and sycophants got down into the water. The general commanding the Wuhan Military Region was frightened and had to be rescued – but the others drifted downstream with the genial and, after two hours of effortless amusement, thoroughly vindicated Chairman Mao. The party touched the far bank, symbolically.
They reboarded the steamer for lunch and for a celebratory glass or two of mao-tai. Mao was brimming with pride in his achievement and looked about him for confirmation. Yang Shangkun began the encomiums: ‘No one can match the strength of the Chairman,’ he declared. ‘No other world leader looks down with such disdain on great mountains and powerful rivers. But our Chairman can. No one in history can match him.’
There was more of the same, much more. And Mao had proved his point: he was strong, spirited, irrepressible and uncontainable. He had defied the received wisdom, he had turned his back on caution and deliberate care. His swimming was a symbol, and he had meant it to be: he had now invested himself with renewed authority to run the country as he wished, with bravura. He had shown to those around him, and to the people, that he could dare and win.
The victory over the river – which Party legend suggests, improbably, may well never have been swum before by anyone – had given Mao both the necessary adulation from within his circle and the necessary self-confidence from within himself to renew his attack on the slow pace of the revolution, and to look for victory there. It led, as adulation and overconfidence do, to hubris, and then to Nemesis. It led to excess and insanity: for within two years China had accelerated her radicalism under Mao's personal ministrations, and had given birth to the lunacies – well-intentioned, but lunacies nonetheless – of the Great Leap Forward. The 1956 swim in the Yangtze presaged disaster for China, though no one then had the faintest clue that it might.
Nor had they ten years later, when Mao did the same thing once again. This time he had a far more serious agenda once the swim was done. The swimmers who were threshing alongside us on this particular morning were actually commemorating that 1966 swim, and not the first attempt in 1956. What was taking place today was a rehearsal for a race to be held on 16 July, the date chosen every year to memorialize what is still regarded as ‘Mao's legendary swim' or ‘Mao's celebrated swim' in the Yangtze. The first swim was simply the first; he would do another in 1958. But the one that he accomplished on 16 July 1966 – when he was seventy-three years old and, as it happened, even more frustrated with his country's progress than he had been ten years before – that was a truly great event, a swim seen round the world.
On that occasion five thousand children and students were swimming too, taking part in a race that Mao's first venture had helped inspire. The cadres were also in the water, in their hundreds. The balloons were arranged in great archways, scores of giant red flags fluttered from flotillas of boats, film cameras rolled to record the event – and for two hours the Chairman floated serenely down his country's greatest and most powerful river, which was in full flood. I remember seeing the blurred newspaper photographs, the strangely impressive images on the television newsreels. At the time I was living in Africa, where Mao had many friends; people would shake their heads in awe. ‘What an amazing man,’ they would say. ‘So strong, so vigorous.’
Mao was at the time returning to centre stage in China after months of a self-imposed exile, when all the world believed him to have vanished. He had gone into retreat behind the compound walls in Beijing, and then he had disappeared completely, except that now we know he travelled south to consort with that special breed of die-hard Communists who worked and thought and theorized down in Shanghai. Over the weeks and months of his absence he had read and reread books on the vicissitudes of Chinese history. He had prepared lists of those who were in favour of a true revolution and those who were against. And he then decided on a course of action so radical that it would shake the world.
He set the stage for it by travelling down to Wuhan and, on that July Saturday afternoon, immersing himself yet again, before all of his people, to see if he could swim the Yangtze once more.
And he triumphed, as he had ten years before. He swam slowly and deliberately and cheerfully and powerfully, managing the first ten miles in just over one hour. I remember so vividly the pictures of the tiny domed head amid the almost limitless waters of the river – the Chairman overwhelming an ancient force that seemed so much more likely to overwhelm him. He arose from the waters finally, alive and smiling, savouring another total triumph.
They said at the time it was all public relations, the giving of reassurance to a nation that thought he might be ailing. But it was so much more than this. Mao had given his people and his supporters and his foes evidence of his physical prowess, true, but he had also given a splendid demonstration of his authority and power. He received the adulation of the masses once again, and with it, as he perceived it, he won the people's mandate to begin something quite extraordinary.
He returned to Beijing with his mind cleared and his decision taken. The Sixteen Points for the Cultural Revolution were published: the Red Guards were born; and a period of madness and cruelty began that shook his country and the continent to its very foundations. Why it is that, thirty years later, the masses in Wuhan still mark and celebrate that swim – or any swim by Chairman Mao – remains, for me, a mystery. For swimming the Yangtze seems not to be so much a display of vigour or noble achievement, as a harbinger of terrible turmoil.
I remarked on this to Lily, as we watched the teams flailing steadily past us.
‘Wuhan people are different,’ she said. ‘I don't like them at all. I don't like the city – a very dirty place, very bad people. But they think they are special. They are very revolutionary. They are very patriotic. They look back on Mao with more reverence than most Chinese do. In Shanghai, and back home in Dalian, we know he made mistakes. We give him his due honour, but we know he was a human. I heard the stories about his girlfriends, things like that.
‘But the Wuhan people turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. They know they have a special place in China's history and they think they must revere their Chairman. So that is why they swim, I think. Besides, I think they know it is good for them. Ordinary people never used to swim this river. But now it is the modern thing to be fit and healthy. Swimming is healthy – at least, in pools it is. No one can doubt that. This is another reason they do it, I'm sure.’
In any case, as I heard on the radio some weeks later, the Great Anniversary Swim of 1995 had to be cancelled, because of the floods. The rehearsals that Sunday, the balloons and the shouting and the watery tumult – all had been in vain.
When Mao first went swimming on the Yangtze in 1956 he did so just a few yards downstream from the piles of a new bridge that was being built across the river. That bridge was duly finished the following year, and until the Yangtze First Bridge, six hundred miles downstream at Nanjing, was completed eleven years later, it was the closest of the Yangtze bridges to the sea. Mao himself declared it open: ‘a rainbow of iron and steel' he called it.
It was the bridge from which I had first seen the night-time Yangtze on my railway journey from London ten years before. Now I was seeing it from below: the piles were being buffeted and washed by waves of floodwater, and the great chunk of engineering looked solid and unmoving, a memorial to the Russians who designed and donated it, and to the Chinese who had welded and wrenched it all together.
Today a still newer bridge crosses the river at Wuhan. We had sailed beneath it while we were watching the swimmers a soaring tracery of bright steel, delicate where the old bridge had been massive, athletic where its predecessor had been ponderous. It had been opened the week before, someone said; the design was quite beautiful, like some of the new bridges in Korea and Japan, though a man I asked said happily that on this one the Chinese had done all the work, including the design.
It seemed to me that while the two spans, a couple of miles apart, obviously reflected the changes wrought by forty years of bridge engineering, they also seemed to stand for something more significant. There was the stolid and unimaginative and joylessly Stalinist construction on one side, a gift from fellow ideologues at a time when the Cold War was at its coldest and when all on the Marxist side needed to give one another comfort and friendship. And there was this slender and graceful piece of art on the other, glittering proudly in the morning sun.
The one bridge spoke of conformity and obedience, of rigidity and a lack of imagination. The other was suggestive of freedom, of an engineer being given his head, of an idea taking flight. And anchored between them, still smoky in the sunlight of a Sunday morning, lay the city they call China's Chicago.
The three cities, in fact – Wuchang, on the Yangtze's right bank; Hanyang, away on the left bank, on the far side of a huge tributary stream called the Han Shui; and here, where our steamer was now edging in towards the dock, Hankou. Four million people live here, at the Yangtze's most important mid-stream junction point. This is the city of the new China's heart, beating between the two symbols of the new China's history – on the one hand an image of the strictness of the old, and on the other, an image suggesting the half-free and only too beguiling open-mindedness of the new. More than appropriate, considering that in simple historical terms, this city is – or should be – the most important and revered in all China.
*
Wuhan's importance is not at all apparent when you arrive there by boat. It has an anonymous, forgettable aspect. On this morning we could have been coming in to almost any big industrial city set down between Manchuria and the Burmese frontier. It looked ugly, dirty, dishevelled, crowded and only the slightest bit coloured by romance. I was in no hurry to disembark when, with a clang and bump and the screech of chains and hawsers, we docked.
The lower-deck passengers streamed out into the new and soaring concrete terminal building, and I could see them humping their bundles into waiting lines of cycle-rickshaws. The taxis would wait for the upper decks to clear, a few minutes later. I clambered up to the bridge to say good-bye to the captain. He was a kindly man who had spent much of the morning showing me his charts, even though they were stamped ‘Top Secret' – in vermilion – and he had offered suggestions for where we might stay in town.
For a while I stood looking out from the bridge wing, over to the Hankou Bund, alongside which we were tied up. This was where the old foreign concessions had been. There was a ramshackle collection of grimy buildings from which the foreign hongs, the trading houses, had once operated, but they could hardly rival their sister structures back in Shanghai.
It had been a very short bund, and the foreigners had been crammed into it in small parcels. The British had the biggest sector, closest to the government offices, because they had been the first outsiders allowed here, courtesy of their triumph in what has been called the Second Opium War. But even this spoil of battle had been a fairly mean allotment of land: my old map showed the inevitable consulate at one end, the offices of Jardines and Swires and British-American Tobacco dispersed at the other, and a few scrawny lanes between, with small buildings of a very faded elegance.
There had once been seven hulks permanently moored off the British Concession and used as floating docks: the clipper ships that raced to London with their cases of China tea all began their voyages here. A cannon was fired to set them on their way, and they raced down to the Woosung Bar in less than two days if the wind was fair and the current strong. London was twelve weeks away, if every shred of canvas was employed and every breath of wind was caught.
Next to the British, downstream, had been the Russians. They were not much involved in Yangtze shipping, but they did a brisk overland trade in brick tea – the compressed dust from the tea factories up in the hills nearby. But I could not recognize the buildings of Litvinoff & Company, which had then dominated the business – indeed, the site on the map now seemed to be occupied by a new skyscraper hotel, the very one in which the captain had suggested we might stay.
After the Russian Concession had come the French, which once sported the city's best hotel, the Terminus; then came the German Concession, and finally the Japanese, a tiny settlement with little to tempt and containing only a barracks and a match factory. Thus were all Hankou's foreigners accommodated, crammed neatly into a flood-prone couple of miles between the railway and river.
The railway and the river! In Wuhan it seems that everything revolves around the existence and the conjunction of the railway and the river. From where I stood scores of feet above river level, the railways were plainly audible. Whenever the wind changed direction and the car horns quieted for a moment, I could hear the background orchestra – the shunting of faraway railway wagons, the yelp of steam engines, the rattle of trains rushing over the points, the rumble of an express passing over the bridge.
The air, thick with industrial smoke, had a familiar edge to it too, the rotten-egg-like smell of sulphur and coke and steam coal – a railway smell, the good old unhealthy smell of coal-driven steam trains, of the railways before they switched to oil. Wuhan is still very much a railway town, sooty and tarry, a terminus town, a junction city of roundhouses and repair shops and signal works. And all set down beside the wharves and the piers, the cranes and the gantries, the mud and the rising and falling waters of the river to whose vast valley the railways had come.
It was the building of the railways that gave Wuhan her peculiar and unforgettable place in Chinese history. This is a long way, both in time and geography, from the Jardines' attempt to build their little line back between Woosung and Shanghai – this was forty years later, and nearly a thousand miles upstream, and central China was now brimming with permanent ways. There was, however, one underlying problem – a problem that had much in common with the proposed Jardines line, and one that rankled with almost all the Chinese.
The main line between Beijing and the Hankou terminal on the north side of the river here had been built in 1905, financed by the French and British, its building directed by a Belgian. (Its terminus station had been put up conveniently behind the French Concession, between the Bund and the racecourse.) And in this way it was typical: it had been built and paid for by foreigners, and such profits as it made went into the pockets of foreign shareholders. Most of the new great through routes in China, all built at much the same time, were the same. The Mukden Railway was built by a Briton. The railways in Shandong were German. Those in Manchuria, Russian. The Manchu Court – then run by regents for the infant Emperor Pu Yi – had for years been gaily handing out contracts to foreign banks and companies that were slicing across the Empire with thousands of miles of track. Why, a growing number of Chinese began to ask, were the Chinese not building the railways, and why were they not making profits from the railway, themselves?
The first questions concerned, specifically, the Beijing to Hankou line that ended here. Towards the end of the new century's first decade, as the questions swelled ever louder and started to evolve into demonstrations and protests, so still more contracts were being handed out by the Court, and that also involved Hankou – the line from Hankou south to Canton, for example, and another line east from Hankou to Shanghai. Hankou, this dirty, clanking, steam-swirled coke town, had from the beginning been at the epicentre of the entire dispute.
In 1910, by which time China had some 5000 miles of railways built and 2000 more a-building, this single issue erupted into a passionate and violent display of nationalism, one that the Manchus could neither comprehend nor control. In every province, groups were formed to protest at the way the courtiers far away in the Forbidden City were giving away to outsiders what seemed to be China's birthright – her transportation routes. Serious demonstrations broke out all across the Empire – the Railway Protection Movement, as the organizing body was called, staged rallies, strikes and boycotts. Even more significant, elements of the newly reorganized Chinese Army were seen to side with the railway protesters. Within just a few months during 1910 and 1911, railways became a focus for all of the long-felt dissatisfactions – ranging over matters as far removed as taxation and foot-binding – that millions of ordinary Chinese felt for the performance of the Court. The protesters demanded a change of government – an end, in other words, to the doddering and non-Chinese theocracy, the heaven-directed Manchu Court, which still clung to power in the distant capital. ‘We must avenge the national disgrace,’ was a rallying cry. ‘We must restore China to the Chinese.’
Hankou lay at the centre of all this revolutionary, anti-Imperial fervour simply because of her strategic position as a Yangtze railway city. Her population – boatmen working on the Yangtze, railway workers, soldiers in what was called the New Chinese Army – was in any case peculiarly militant, much more so than farmers, say, or scholars and members of the bureaucracy. Poetic justice was surely to be served, then, when it fell to this city before all others in China to become the place where the spark of real revolution was first lit. And yet when the spark was lit, it was, ironically, for rather different reasons.
The city is famous today as the place where the first shots were fired: it is the Lexington, if you will, of the Republic of China, the precise place where five thousand years of Imperial rule came to a sudden, shuddering end. Chinese modern history is replete with engaging ironies; here, though the entire Empire was in ferment because of her railways and though Hankou was a rail centre like no other, the actual event that precipitated the Empire's end had nothing to do with railways at all. It was an event that took place on the famous day of the ‘double ten' – the tenth day of the tenth month – in 1911. More than almost any other date in China's story, this is one that is remembered, and revered. The fuse was lit at a place just a few yards from where our boat had berthed – a house in the Russian Concession, around the back of the Litvinoff Brick Tea Factory. Today there is no memorial, no blue plaque; no tour groups come and pay respects. Perhaps that is in part because it all began with an accident.
One of the many revolutionary groups that existed in the Wuhan three-cities region, and which had as a principal aim the subversion of the local army garrison, had secured rooms in a house in the Russian Concession. It seems that on the eve of the day in question they were making bombs and, as so often happens with amateur bomb-makers, there was an accidental explosion. It was a very large one, and the house was badly damaged, and several members of the insurrectionary group were killed, blown to pieces.
Since this was a foreign concession area the agreements on extra-territoriality would in normal circumstances have protected the surviving group members. The local police would be kept out, the Russians would have to deal with the matter themselves. But on this occasion the bomb and its devastation were so large – and the suspicions of the Hankou police were already so heightened – that the local Manchu viceroy ordered his heavily armed policemen to storm the site. In a panic, survivors in the ruins tried to burn documents, but still the police found papers listing the names and the whereabouts of the other revolutionary cells in the tri-city area. Word reached these remaining rebels, who decided there was now nothing for it but to make their long-planned move. They had been working patiently for months to talk the soldiers of the local garrisons round to their cause. Now, with their entire political movement imperilled by the police investigation, was the moment to see if their patient persuasion had worked.
It evidently had. At dawn the next day – the glorious tenth day of the tenth month – the Eighth Battalion of the Wuchang Engineers, one of the key regiments among which the rebels had been fomenting insurrectionary thought, formally and decisively rebelled. They seized an ammunition depot and they were joined by soldiers from a local transport regiment and an artillery battery. Between them the three units managed to storm the headquarters units of the Manchu army in the main fort in Wuchang: by the end of a day of vicious fighting the Manchu viceroy conceded defeat. The following day the Manchu commanders across the Yangtze in the cities of Hanyang and Hankou had also done the same. The entire metropolitan area that we now know as Wuhan was by midweek in the hands of a well-organized and popularly backed anti-Imperialist brigade.
It was now the turn of the Railway Protection Movement to spread the revolution across the nation. It was like watching a fast-burning fuse: the movement's disciples rallied soldiers to their cause by the thousands, and exulted as the rebellion spread with astonishing speed, leaping from city to city – particularly in south China – along the newly built railway lines that linked them. There were massacres of Manchus – one particularly noteworthy for its scale in the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. Governors and viceroys and Manchu generals were assassinated, unexpected alliances formed hurriedly to pledge allegiance to forces fighting against the dying Qing dynasty.
The railways sped government troops down from Beijing, but they found that other railways – rebel-held railways – had sped revolutionary forces to intercept them, to slow the progress of the Imperial counterattack. By November government generals in the north were themselves beginning to question the orders coming from within the Manchu fastness of the Forbidden City.
There were attempts at compromise, placatory noises came from the Court, from the very regents and the powerful old eunuchs who surrounded the child-emperor. But it was to no avail.
The North-China Daily News in Shanghai (the city's eventual intimate involvement in the rebellion showing once again the importance of the Yangtze valley as its birthplace) published the rebel manifesto on 14 November. It is a long document – one whose principal points should be as well-known, perhaps, as those of the American Declaration of Independence, written a century and a half before. The revolutionaries' anger had been triggered by the sale of their birthright to foreign powers, but the real enemy was still the Manchu who had performed the sale. Foreigners, if they were dealt with as equals, could offer China many benefits – but only if the Manchus would get out of the way:
The foreign powers individually and collectively have stood hammering at the door of China for centuries, pleading for the diffusion of knowledge, a reformation of the national services, the adoption of Western sciences and industrial processes, a jettisoning of the crude, out-of-date and ignoble concepts which have multiplied to keep the nation without. the pale of the great family constituting the civilized world. They have failed.
The Manchu Dynasty has triumphantly carried on its reactionary policy despite the strongest pressure exerted from within and without, until the oppressed people could endure the disgrace and the contumely of it no longer. They rose, and with what results the history of the past few weeks has shown.
The Manchu Dynasty has been tried by a patient and peaceful people for centuries, and has been found more than wanting. It has sacrificed the reverence, forfeited the regard and lost the confidence freely reposed in it by all Chinese.
Its promises in the past have proved delusions and snares. Its promises for the future can carry no weight, deserve no consideration, and merit no trust.
The popular wish is that the Dynasty must go.
On Christmas Day 1911, the man whose ideas had been central to all this ferment, Sun Yat-sen, returned from France, where he had been making sure that Europe remained neutral in the conflict.* He came by sea to Shanghai, and was swiftly elected provisional president of the Chinese Republic. He travelled upstream to Nanjing and assumed office on New Year's Day 1912. The revolution that had begun on the Yangtze saw its creator return from exile to the Yangtze, saw him travel up the Yangtze to stake his capital in a city on the Yangtze. There could be no better signal that the river was at the centre of the new national entity.
Forty-two days later, on 12 February 1912, the six-year-old Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, who was known by his reign name of Xuan-tong, formally abdicated.† He was the last of the Manchus, and he was the last Emperor of China.
Our hotel was on the very edge of the old Russian Concession, and from my room I could look out over the mansard roofs and the grimy colonnades of houses in the French Concession next door. It was raining by the time I got to my room, and I watched as an old man in his underwear clambered about on the roof outside, retrieving sooty washing from a rusted cable that sagged between two chimney pots. He had disturbed a flock of pigeons, which flapped and fluttered and swooped like a grubby blanket, back and forth over the tops of the houses. In the distance a small red helicopter chattered up and down the riverbank, a television crew on board filming the swimmers who, in their hundreds, were still crossing the flooded stream.
Wuhan in the rain is no city of joy. It bustled, certainly – in the narrow streets at the back of the concessions there were banks and boutiques and amusement arcades, and thousands of people were jammed everywhere, even on a wet Sunday like this, selling and buying, shouting and arguing.
In one scrofulous alley I stumbled across, of all things, an American yogurt shop, a franchise of the highwayside and airport giant known as T C B Y, The Country's Best Yogurt. I rushed in to buy something for Lily. She had never had frozen yogurt, and I thought her social awareness might profit from a tub of vanilla-and-chocolate swirl, topped with fragments of a crushed Heath bar. But she grimaced after the first mouthful. ‘How do you people eat stuff so sweet?’ she said, offering the tub back. I motioned to her to hold on to it, and suddenly felt keenly sorry for the young girls who worked behind the counter, and who were gazing at me intently to see if we were enjoying the results of their labours. I shrugged an excuse to the effect I had to eat the stuff out in the street, and made as dignified an exit as I could.
The simple existence of a TCBY store in Wuhan rang a bell, however. As Lily and I walked farther into town, I recalled a conversation that my wife had had a year or so before at a dinner party in Hong Kong. She had been cornered by a languid fop from Jardines, a young man whose task was to develop the firm's interests in China.
‘This cold yogurt stuff the Americans like,’ he said with obvious distaste, both for yogurt and Americans, ‘and these Mexican thingies, “tacos” I believe they're called – do you think John Chinaman would like them?
‘I ask,’ he continued, ‘because the franchise is up for grabs. Frightful-sounding places I imagine, names like Taco Bell and TCBY. But we can't be too proud, can we? – we're wondering whether to slap up a few in China.’ He smiled, in a reptilian way.
I had no way of knowing whether market research like this did any good, even whether the yogurt shop in Wuhan was indeed a Jardines venture. If it was, there was an element of drollery to the story, considering that the firm's first sales in the city were of opium, a more obviously addictive product. Whether John Chinaman likes yogurt or not, time will tell: one Jane Chinaman did not. But opium was evidently liked well enough by all.
The West has been trying things out on the people of Wuhan for decades test marketing them much as they might do in Nottingham or Chicago. It is said that, among other things, the Gatling gun, the fedora, basketball, steam engines and the notions of unionized labour and representative democracy were all first tested on the people of Wuhan. Opium, however, was not among the items that the West introduced to Wuhan, or to China. The trade that grew up between British India and China, which was explained in the previous chapter, was created to satisfy or to exploit, depending on your point of view an already existing habit. The Indian opium augmented an already very considerable domestic harvest. Even as late as 1908, a trade report for Hankou showed, for instance, that while 34,000 pounds of opium had been landed in the port from the Indian regions of Patna and Malwa, some 65,000 pounds had come downstream, from the Chinese poppy fields of Yunnan and Sichuan. The point is often forgotten: the Chinese were already heavy users of the drug by the time the British traders moved in and, like the Mafia, sought to dominate and control the trade.
There was business in more prosaic products too. At the beginning of the century scores of foreign ships – from Britain in the main, but also from Norway, Russia, Germany, France, and United States and Holland – came regularly up the Yangtze as far as Hankou. Tankers brought in paraffin for the Standard Oil Company's bunkers. British and Dutch steamers brought oil from Borneo and Sumatra. Oregon pinewood was brought in aboard British freighters, and a German bulk carrier brought in monthly shipments of cement from Haiphong (the port in Vietnam to which, according to the legend, the Yangtze might have flowed, had the first Chinese Emperor, Yü the Great, not had the source waters diverted).
The imports were of ordinary, unremarkable goods like this, as well as shirting material, pig iron, tin slabs, cigarettes, firebricks, matches, needles, potash, railway ties, tea chests, umbrellas. Nothing exceptional, nothing with a hint of romance about it.
But Hankou's exports at the time – these were the very stuff of China! The manifest of an outbound steamer could read like a page from The Good Earth: cargoes of bean cake, white rice, lotus seeds, fungus, raw white silk, cocoons, goatskins, cotton, vermicelli, sesame oil, tung oil, quicksilver, nutgalls, musk, ramie, cowhides, bran, bristles, rhubarb, straw braid and, of course, tea – tea in bags and boxes and half-chests, tea offered as black, brick, mixed, green, log, tablet, oolong or dust.
The docks of a century ago must have been a remarkable sight. The junks would be crowded a hundred feet deep on the banks of the Han Shui, their sides painted every colour imaginable. Scores of the shops were riverborne, with the merchant's business, or the craftsman's craft, advertised by an item flying from the mast – a hank of rope, a barber's brush, a shirt, a queue of plaited hair. And onshore the narrow lanes were overhung with crimson and gold signboards, and crowded with jostling and sweating coolies and fat mandarins in their gilded chairs passing to and fro. There would be the sound of cymbals and the whiff of incense and the strange sweet smell of opium drifting up from the dark divans. And, in the background, the ominous sounds of shunting and whistling from the steam trains that would before long play so instrumental a part in changing it all.
Wuhan was more than merely mercantile, more than a simple Chinese Chicago, however: for a while, between the mid-twenties and the late thirties, the city assumed some of the seedily anarchic qualities of Shanghai, becoming an ideological capital of China, a place through which men and women of all conceivable political persuasions passed, en route to somewhere else.
Christopher Isherwood noted the phenomenon in Journey to a War, when he wrote that ‘history, grown weary of Shanghai, bored with Barcelona, has fixed her capricious interest on Hang-kow – but where is she staying?’ He and W. H. Auden, fixing their own capricious interest on the city, decided that they liked its self-appointed role as a quasi-capital, a place where ‘Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley, Chou En-lai, generals, ambassadors, journalists, foreign naval officers, soldiers of fortune, airmen, missionaries, spies' all congregated, betraying and deceiving one another by turn.
It was a centre of revolutionary faith and fervour throughout the years between 1911 and 1949– indeed, it was for many years the city where Mikhail Borodin, the amazing and enormous Russian Comintern agent who, it is often forgotten, fashioned the Kuomintang (KMT) into what was initially a properly Leninist organization, was based and where he performed some of his most impressive labours. Chiang Kai-shek did his eventual best to remove the Communists from the KMT – in 1927 sending a campaign of terror, of ‘punishment without leniency' up along the Yangtze from Shanghai to Wuhan. But it did little to lessen Wuhan's importance as a centre of leftist militancy, and the role the city played in Mao's eventual victory in 1949 matched the role it had played in Sun Yat-sen's success in 1911. It was always as rough and gritty in its politics as industry had made it in its atmosphere. Not a pretty place – but an important one.
Today the ferment and the jostle is much the same, though cars crowd among the rickshaws and there are sleek and brilliantined men with shiny suits, cellular phones clamped to their ears. Plenty of foreigners are here: men from Budweiser setting up a brewery, men from AT&T tinkering with the telephones, the big European information firms – Siemens, Philip, Alcatel – doing much the same, plugging Wuhan into digital networks. These men live well-fed but lonely lives in a tiny hotel well away from the Bund, and they loathe the place cordially.
The longer-established business houses of the tri-cities are prospering in a thousand brand-new ways, and they are in most cases jammed into the old structures that the foreigners built in Edwardian times. Wuhan bank clerks, who when awakened will honour letters of credit and perform cable transfers and hand over cash on presentation of a credit card from almost any country on earth, sleep their afternoons away under Victorian iron archways and stained-glass windows and under the light of dull brass library lamps. Trading companies are crammed into dusty art deco palaces and crumbling godowns; there are real estate brokers and paging firms and couriers where once there were more classically Chinese functionaries, likin officials, octroi collectors and compradors.
Hong Kong businessmen have now begun to infiltrate Wuhan with a sudden eagerness not nearly as evident in other cities. It is true that most major centres in China have one or two establishments whose headquarters are in Hong Kong – there are Hong Kong-run hotels in places as remote as Ürümqi, and Hong Kong-owned office blocks in faraway Shenyang and Kashgar. But in Wuhan there is much, much more. The city has been put on a quick and easy non-stop flight route from Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport, and to the southern businessmen who fly in each day, Wuhan is now their most proximate example of the real China, the closest big city of the Chinese heartland. (What they have on their doorstep in cities like Canton and Xiamen are still very obviously southern Chinese cities, with the southern tongue spoken, southern food eaten, southern attitudes struck.) Hong Kong developers are now pouring in, busily putting up scores of hotels and department stores and trade centres, with promises of multiplex cinemas, nightclubs, and hostess palaces. Hong Kong businessmen are rebuilding the Wuhan airport. They have put money into the gleaming and delicate new Yangtze bridge. There is talk of yet another southern-built bridge, this time over the Han Shui. A Hong Kong bank is financing a new six-lane expressway into the city's heart.
It is in part because of this that I find myself unaccountably prejudiced, and have come to like Wuhan a great deal less than I like Shanghai. Cities like Shanghai and Nanjing are growing fast – too fast for comfort, it is true – but they appear, on the surface at least, to be performing their growth by a large measure of their own hard work, with their own villainy, much of their own money. The city fathers of Wuhan, however, have embarked on a developmental pas de deux with Hong Kong businessmen. There is, perhaps as a direct corollary, a temporary and jerrybuilt feel to the new Wuhan, as though a new metropolis is being constructed with its primary purpose the swift enrichment of taipans and their companies in the not-so-far-away territory to the south. Wuhan may be a city with good reason to be proud of its history. But I wonder whether it has much to be proud of in its present. Lily remarked often on the gimcrack, meretricious appearance of Wuhan, and said she disliked the place as heartily as I did. On our last evening there she made a joke about the truism of the old cliché of the city's best feature being the road out.
It turned out that this too was being built by a firm based in Hong Kong. Toll barriers were being welded into place, ensuring that some distant Southerner could make easy money and a quick profit from a city that more than most seems to have become the Southerner's unwitting new client in the Chinese heartland.
Mao Zedong was a very considerable poet – in output, if not always in quality – and he was prone to memorialize what he regarded as his greater achievements with lines of verse. His poem ‘Swimming' is one of his best-known. He wrote it in 1956, shortly after his first swim in the Yangtze: he had come from swimming both the Pearl River in Canton and Xiang River at Changsha, which is why he began this brief gem as he did – lines that retain most of their value, even allowing that Chinese poetry loses much in the translation:
I have just drunk the waters of Changsha
And come to eat the fish of Wuchang –
Now I am swimming across the great Yangtze
Looking up to the open sky of Chu.
Let the wind blow and the waves beat –
Better far than an aimless stroll in a courtyard.
Today I am at ease:
It was by a stream that the Master said –
‘Life – like the waters – rushes into the past!’
Sails move with the wind,
Tortoise and Snake Hills are motionless.
Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the North and South
Turning a barrier into a thoroughfare.
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain Goddess, if she is still there,
Will marvel at a world so changed.
You do not have to read the runes especially deeply to interpret the various meanings that are embedded in these lines. The first stanza is at once philosophical and phlegmatic, a reflection of Mao's self-image, once his swimming was done – his self-confident view of himself as a man now ready to meet the challenges of the revolution yet to come.
I had been given a copy of the poem by a manager at the hotel, the day before we left. She knew that Lily and I were going farther upstream and she wanted me, she said, to take particular note of the second stanza. The lines mentioned the new bridge, of course; but they also mentioned the ‘walls of stone' that would cause ‘a smooth lake' to rise ‘in the narrow gorges’. She made me read it, standing in the hotel lobby; and then when I had done so she produced, with a flourish, the first copy of the new booklet that she had received just that morning by express mail. It was called, none too immodestly, An Epic Undertaking. It was bound in dark blue, the calligraphy in silver: it was the story of a project that I had felt looming over me, bearing down on me, almost since I had seen the first hills by the side of the great river, hundreds of miles beyond.
Just a few miles ahead of us now, and affecting in a myriad of ways the temper of the people and the cities all around, were the beginnings of the most gargantuan project – one that would change the nature of the Yangtze for all time. It has many names: the New China, the Sandouping, the Sanxia, the Three Gorges. It has one name with which all who know the Yangtze today are intimately familiar: the Dam. Upstream the river's flow was about to be halted and constricted by a wall of concrete and iron that would cause a vast lake, and a score of other changes, to fall on the Yangtze valley like no other changes in the river's history. The dam is the defining entity of the new river and of the new China that the nation's leaders promise can be built around her.