On the banks of the Yangtze there has been only one public memorial raised to a foreigner – or at least, only one that still survives. There is not even a single one for any Chinese, Mongol or Manchu – if one can discount, though not quite forget, the dreadful barbarisms of the dams.
The Yangtze is a river strangely short of heroes. There is no single explorer known for performing heroic deeds in the process of conquering or discovering the river, nor does any merchant or grandee spring to mind who can be said to have tamed or dominated it. The Yangtze, it seems, has ever been a river so great and important that it was always known, was never conquered and was invariably treated with diffident respect.
For the Chinese, the Hsia dynasty's founding emperor, Yü (or Da Yü, Yü the Great), who lived more than 4000 years ago, perhaps comes closest to achieving heroic status. But then he was a mythic figure, heroic because he made sure the Long River flowed into China and not Vietnam, and also because he swept the Gorges of their more trying rockfalls. But if he lived at all he did not do so just for the Yangtze: he lived to manage all of the waterways of the Celestial Empire, and not just the single greatest of them. No statue was raised to him, though temples celebrate his memory. The great Cloud Mountain near the river's Great Bend at Shigu is said to have been placed there by him: it can perhaps be called some kind of memorial, writ large in Carboniferous geology and Miocene tectonics.
For outsiders there is a scattering of men and women who are remembered for what might be called their association with the river, and who have left thick volumes of their adventures to moulder on the shelves of well-stocked libraries. There was Thomas Blakiston, for instance, who was one of the first to go through the Gorges, in the 1850s, and who wrote scrupulously and elegantly of the birds and the plants of Sichuan. Then there was William Gill, who travelled along the headwater streams of the Yangtze fifteen years later and chronicled the puzzling doings of the minority peoples of Sichuan and Yunnan. There was Archibald Little, who pioneered steam navigation on the river. There was Augustus Margery, who was murdered horribly after entering China from Upper Burma. And as always, and inevitably, there was Isabella Bird, the redoubtable, imperturbable, amazing, thick-tweed-skirted and courageous matron ven-turer, the chronicles of whose voyages through the Yangtze Gorges return to print perennially today, and whose exploits on the Yangtze and elsewhere unfailingly manage to hoodwink us Britons into believing in our still special singularity.
All these we think of as heroes – yet they are really small-beer heroes when ranged against the likes of Speke and Livingstone and Burton and Alexander von Humboldt (and even Marco Polo) and those others whose names are linked more closely with the great rivers in the world beyond China.
But there was, for me, one man who truly did rank as a Yangtze hero. I do not mean the Royal Navy captain who took HMS Amethyst downstream under the withering fire of Communist guns back in the summer of 1949. That was heroism, to be sure, and it was heroics of a kind that kept young Britons like me riveted to our cinema seats. But it was also a heroism of the moment, a brief few hours of glory; the captain's achievement differs in kind from that of the man whom I think of as a true Yangtze hero, and that was at least in part because my man devoted the greater part of his life to the river, which he came to love.
He was named Cornell Plant. He was an Englishman, born in a village by the North Sea halfway through the last century. His principal fascination, born perhaps from his upbringing near the wide river estuaries – of the Humber, the Thames, the Tyne, the Forth – that saw small merchant ships come and go to and from the North European ports, had always been with river travel and river navigation. He began his overseas career in Mesopotamia, a captain of ships that navigated the slow majesties of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. He would have stayed in these comfortable parts for years, perhaps, had it not been for a chance encounter in London, while he was home on leave.
It came late in the nineteenth century, when Cornell Plant was dining in the Oriental Club in London. Here, also dining at a table of shipbuilders and marine architects, was the vastly more celebrated figure of Archibald Little. He was telling his companions stories of his own frustrated attempt to steam up the Three Gorges on the faraway river in China. Plant, perhaps wearying of the sunshine and sands of Iraq and Syria, was captivated by the tales, and by the thought of – China! When Little spotted his keen interest and ventured that he might actually come east and command a ship for him for the first major boat assault on the Gorges' rapids, the thirty-three-year-old Plant readily agreed.
He went out east at a time when the Chinese were laughing behind their silken sleeves at the ill-guided madness of the British river sailors. The court authorities had long since assumed it would be impossible for any powered vessel to ascend through the whirlpools and rapids of the Georges, and yet the British – in the person of men like Little – were busily, insanely in the Chinese view, trying to do so.
The conventional wisdom was that only junks might pass between Yichang and Chongqing, and then only with great effort, with the boats having to be hauled up by hundreds of human trackers. Steam vessels, with their deep draught and their thrashing propellers, had to navigate out in the more perilous centre section of the stream, where the Cassandras said they would be simply and swiftly overwhelmed. Even Yangtze explorers like Thomas Blakiston were then advising merchants not to be so foolhardy as to try to match pistons and propellers against the terrific waters of the Yangtze in the Gorges.
The Manchu government had been clever and cynical when it had signed the Convention of Chefoo in 1876. Its mandarins had seemed to be in a generous mood. They had appeared to give in to the foreigners' demand that they be allowed to appoint trade representatives in Chongqing, in the heart of the grain-rich, mineral-rich, coal-rich Red Basin. But closer scrutiny showed that their official stipulation was subtly phrased: trade could get fully under way only when steam navigation was in full swing. Since the Court believed this to be impossible, and since the mandarinate had put forward all kinds of objections,* it turned out that they had managed to offer the foreigners an apparent concession – and yet withhold it at one and the same time. It was a classic piece of Chinese trickery, whereby the Orientals seemed to outfox the barbarians, and not for the last time either.
The traders who accepted the early arrangement floundered financially: while it was easy and cheap to send goods downstream, it cost a small fortune to send them up against the raging water. Indeed, someone commented in 1880 that it cost quite as much to send a cargo the five hundred miles from Wuhan to Chongqing as it did to send it the twelve thousand miles from Wuhan to London!
Archibald Little, however, was determined to change all that. He was an unforgettable figure, though not the nicest of men. His travels in China were always done in as much comfort as possible. Little was ill named: he was large and imperious, he liked to eat and drink well (‘dinner washed down with a Lafite from the Café Voisin in Paris, hospitably broached in my honour,’ he noted after one feast) and he took pride in feeding his dog, Nigger, at the local hotels (where one night's stay for himself ‘and coolie' cost 132 copper cash, or sixpence in the English money of the day).
By the time he met Cornell Plant in London, he had already built himself a small teak steam launch named the Leechuan and, with his wife, as well as a Ningbo engineer and two stokers, he had managed, comically and slowly, to puff and snort and clank aboard it all the way through the Gorges. A Chinese gunboat – a sailing junk, heavily armed – a gang of extra trackers, and a bright red lifeboat went along too, in case of catastrophe.. One of his pilots managed to collide with another vessel, a second jumped ship, terrified. But Little was a sticker, and brooked no excuses for failure; and made it, slowly and frighteningly, to his destination.
The eventual arrival of this launch at Chongqing on 8 April 1898 turned out to be one of the greatest events in the city's history, or so the local newspaper said at the time. The entire foreign community of about sixty turned out, and the Chinese, far from being hostile, set off firecrackers by the thousand. But reality soon cooled the enthusiasm. It had taken the craft three weeks to get just 360 miles upstream, and at one time no fewer than three hundred trackers had to haul the fragile craft across one of the scarier rapids. It was clear that, with the marine technology of the time, regular steam-based commerce was not quite ready.
But it was a start. The following year the Royal Navy ordered two of its gunboats, HMS Woodlark and HMS Woodcock, all the way up to Chongqing. These boats, of shallow draught and with strengthened hulls, had been specially made in sections in Britain, and bolted together in Shanghai. When they received their signal they were on patrol on the central Yangtze station, protecting British trade downriver from Wuhan. Their captain turned them about and sped them past Yichang and into the tortured waters of the Xiling Gorge.
Some four hundred trackers were then involved in getting the vessels over the tans, the rapids, and many hours were spent warping the boats with steel hawsers through the whirlpools and boils. The Woodlark very nearly foundered: she trembled on the lip of one of the worst rapids with her stern tipped halfway down it – but the ratings were all ordered to run to the bow at the double, the ship tilted under their weight, shook herself free of the sucking waters, and moved on.
It had taken thirty-one days for the little warships to dock at Chongqing. But the Admiralty orders had been obeyed, the navy's imperial ambitions realized. By the time Cornell Plant arrived in China at the beginning of the new century, regular steam travel through the Gorges was becoming a distant reality, and the Chinese authors of the Chefoo Convention were becoming less and less confident. Their bluff, after all, was being called.
It was called to final effect in June 1900. Cornell Plant had come out to China to study the rapids of the Gorges; and Archibald Little had come out with the pieces of a brand-new ship, an iron paddle wheeler called the Pioneer.* Built by Denny's of Dumbarton on the River Clyde, she had been assembled from the kit in Shanghai. She was a big vessel, twice as heavy as the gunboats, and she carried 150 tons of cargo and a full complement of, given the circumstances, very plucky passengers.
And she turned in a bravura performance. She made the journey up to Chongqing in seventy-three steaming hours – over seven days total, because one rapid had held her up for three nerve-racking days before a hawser could be secured and allow her to be warped through. When she arrived at the congested dockside in Chongqing, her master – Captain Plant – was able to announce with pride that she had come the entire distance without once having to resort to the use of trackers. The age of steam, so far as the Gorges were concerned, had finally and formally begun.
(History turned inglorious for the Pioneer herself. The Boxer Uprising was just then beginning, and the Royal Navy promptly commandeered the vessel, not least because it had such obvious Yangtze aptitude. The Admiralty changed her name to HMS Kinsha – the Golden Sand – and used her for twenty years to evacuate civilians caught up in the seemingly endless troubles that blew up along the river, then sold her to a firm that traded chickens between Ningbo and Shanghai.)
Captain Plant then turned his full attention to the river and the rapids. He confessed a tireless affection for the river: it had some ineffable quality that captivated him, he said. ‘Truly,’ he once wrote, ‘the farther one travels along this mighty water highway of China, the more strangely fascinating it becomes.’ He built a houseboat so that he could live on or beside the rapids of the Gorges for the rest of his life. He designed a nippy little steamer called the Shutung, had it built in England and sent over, and saw it perform so well that he eventually ran a fortnightly Three Gorges services that drew a standing-room-only crowd of passengers, carrying freight aboard lighters lashed to its sides – an arrangement still in common use today.
But his heroic stature became properly apparent only when he ventured away from running a shipping business himself and started official duties with one of the most unforgettable bureaucracies that was ever to be created by a colonial power: the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service. This was a body that was every bit as grand and distinguished as its name, and its officers – Cornell Plant had the august title of Senior River Inspector, Upper Yangtze – were giants among men.
The Imperial Maritime Customs had been established under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking – signed on the Yangtze in 1842 – which allowed foreigners, the British particularly, to collect customs duties on behalf of the Chinese government. It enabled the British swiftly to exert huge economic and political influence on the Chinese government, and for that, given today's attitudes toward colonialism, it should probably be condemned. But its staff turned out, by and large, to be men of great integrity and scholarship, and their reports, which thundered from the presses, year after year, from every obscure corner of the Chinese Empire, paint – in pointillist style, admittedly – an amazingly accurate picture of how China was, ‘in the years that were fat’.
The great George Worcester, who was until his death in 1969 undeniably the world's leading expert on Chinese junks, and who served for thirty years as a Yangtze River Inspector, wrote of his service with affection and respect, many years after it had vanished from existence:
No serious student of China, her history, people or industries should neglect these publications. Written in faultless prose by men of a bygone generation who were scholars as well as administrators, their work is bound to be of the greatest historical value. Nothing was too unimportant, nothing too trivial for these earnest, lucid compilers of the Trade Reports. Statistics on the movement of umbrellas in Canton, vermicelli from Chinchew, animal tallow from Chinghai and coal dust from Putien were all treated with the same care and attention to detail as was vast ‘Treasure, Imported and Exported'… It must have been a wonderful period in which to have lived.
Cornell Plant's contribution to this great canon of lucid and elegant scholarship was an eighty-page book entitled a Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chungking Section of the Yangtze River. It is a far from romantic title, yet it is a deeply romantic book. It represented Plant's life's work, and his life's love: for the first twenty-one years of the century, he would examine with painstaking affection every twist and turn of a river he came to know like no other man before or since. Every rock and cliff, every rapid and whirlpool – this calm, self-effacing, brave and well-loved man noted, plotted, mapped, sketched, and named each one, for his own curiosity, out of duty to Empire, to navigators, and for the safety and well-being of shipmasters ever since.
The rocks' names came either from the local Chinese junkmen, or from Plant's steadily fertile imagination: Pearl Rock, one of his charts says, then Second Pearl, Monk's Rock, and Chicken Wings. In one rapid there is a rock that was infamous for the entire upper river, a pinnacle whose whirlpools had pulled a hundred ships fatally towards her: Plant marks it laconically as the Come-to-Me Rock.
In his crib sheets he handed down all the better legends from the old navigators – like that of the Yen-yu Stone at the mouth of the Qutang Gorge, which would block the river at a certain volume of low water, or else be washed over by impassably rapid streams at certain other times when the river was high. The boatmen warned thus:
When Yen-yu resembles an elephant, upstream is totally impossible,
And when Yen-yu is as small as a horse, downstream is highly inadvisable.
Nowadays the rock is shaped like neither beast: a team of Chinese government dynamiters took seven days to drill charges into it and blow it up.
Cornell Plant was a one-man river survey: his maps – beautifully executed pieces of art in and of themselves – still form the basis of all the Pilot guides to the river. Today, many of the rocks Plant described and named have been dynamited, and shoals have been dredged and rapids tamed. But his descriptions are still haunting, and for a newcomer, they make good and frightening reading as one's steamer rounds a corner into a stretch of water the old man once knew as especially dangerous:
An immense mass of black rock, some fifty feet high at low level, sticks up right in mid-stream, which, surrounded by a number of smaller ones, during low level, renders the passage on the one hand impassable, leaving only the other which is studded with submerged rocks, the channel between them being very narrow, crooked and dangerous. There are local Chinese who pilot boats up and down these Narrows during low level season… Their services should always be engaged, especially when on the downward passage; an error of judgment in making the narrow fairway between the Pearl Rocks means destruction.
He noted phlegmatically that the native junks – which carried as many as one hundred crewmen and a junkman's family of maybe thirteen members – were all too often lost: one junk in ten was badly damaged by the rocks, one in twenty was totally wrecked. The fifty days it might take a big junk to warp and track and creak her way upstream from Yichang were dangerous, deadly and tense, every one.
His Shipmasters' Guide was invaluable, particularly to those who read English – and for big vessels, the fact that the river inspectors and the customs men were invariably Englishmen came as both a comfort and a distinct commercial advantage. But Plant's system of signal stations was available to all, and it remains just the same to this day. Small white houses stand perched on precipitous cliffsides, each with a flagpole and halyards from which the lookout raises and lowers huge illuminated arrows to advise approaching vessels if the way ahead is clear or if the channel is being used by a vessel coming the other way.
To pass beneath one of these stations, a steamer captain once told me as we did so, deep in the Xiling Gorge, is to experience a small but exquisite moment of comfort. ‘I may be tired from turning round the whirlpools and dodging the quicksands, but I round a bend and there, ahead, is the little station, and the arrow tells me I may go ahead and all is clear upstream – that's something precious.
‘Your Englishman – we call him Pu Lan Tian, you know – he did great things. These signal stations, for example. They are a reminder of how man has done his best to make this terrible river safe, or as safe as it can be.’ This captain was a romantic of sorts: every time he passed below this station and all the others he would blip his siren, and if he was lucky enough, a short fellow in a cloth cap – a river inspector, no less – would peer out over the parapet, and wave him on.
Cornell Plant retired shortly after the sounds of the Great War had faded back in Europe. Out of gratitude the Imperial Maritime Customs and the Chinese government built him and his wife a small bungalow at the village of Xintan, overlooking a deliciously spectacular and murderous rapid – the so-called New Rapid – at the mouth of the Xiling Gorge.
Ships had the most trying time battering their way up through this triple-barrelled maelstrom. Junks often had to unload their entire cargo and employ scores more trackers to haul them through the boiling stream. Even today it is fun to watch from on high as a ship lurches and pitches helplessly, like a drunk on a bucking bronco – and then to breathe again as her bow breaks free and she swings into calm water and readies herself for the next ordeal, a mile or so upstream.
The Plants would watch from their terrace for years – the old man's smooth pink face beaming benignly down at the men undergoing their brief misery. A tradition arose that once safely through the rapid the captain of each ship would sound his siren in salute – for it had been Cornell Plant's charts, spread out on the bridge table, that had guided the captain safely ahead, and a small token of thanks was the least to be offered in the circumstances. Plant would always reply by waving a white handkerchief down at the passing vessel, and then would look back downstream again to see if yet another shipmaster was going to be so bold today.
In 1921 the Plants decided to go home to England for a while: China, warlord-struck, was in the throes of strange eruptions of violence and irrational wantonness, and they were tired of it. They took a ferryboat down to Shanghai, and then an oceangoing ship for Hong Kong. But Cornell Plant caught pneumonia on board, and died at sea; his wife died a month later, heartbroken. The pair still lie today in Hong Kong's Happy Valley cemetery, overlooking the racecourse and, if a point can be a little stretched to make their resting place seem an even more suitable one, the bustling maritime madness of that city's western harbour.
There is, it was said, a memorial to him in Xintan village, and Lily and I went looking for it.
Xintan is an otherwise insignificant place, and rightly so. It has a tiny coal mine up in the hills and a tung-oil plantation. Small country boats call there once in a while, and barges stop every week to haul away some of the brownish lumps that pass for coal in these parts. In Yichang I managed to persuade the skipper of a Russian-built hydrofoil to drop us off at Xintan on his way up to Wanxian and collect us on his way back. He was happy to do it – he had heard of Pu Lan Tian and remembered stories of his waving to passing ships.
‘The place has changed a lot since his time – landslides, you know,’ he said. ‘A big one in 1984, many people died. Half of the mountain came down.’ He pointed through the windscreen to a scar, five hundred feet long, where new pale green vegetation was growing again. ‘Many houses were swept into the river. I think this will be a big problem if the dam is built. These landslips make huge waves. Maybe they will damage the dam. This is a very frightening piece of river, I have always thought.’ He shuddered, and watched us nervously as we climbed out onto the sponsons and jumped onto dry land. He roared away quickly in a swirl of foam and fumes to the comparative safety, as he saw it, of the centre of the stream.
Xintan was dirty beyond belief, smoky and sulphurous. We scrambled up a bank that was sticky with wet coal dust and as we did so an utterly mad woman suddenly confronted us and started screeching and clucking like a chicken, and spitting at us. A group of small boys were tormenting her, hurling lumps of mud. Suddenly a machine in a small factory thumped into life and its chimney began to emit a thick coil of black and tarry smoke. Dozens of pigs ran through puddles of sewage that stank in the rutted roadway. It was a little difficult to imagine this as a bucolic retirement home for an old English sea captain.
But everyone knew the memorial. It stood at the far end of the village, on a knoll where a tiny tributary, the Dragon Horse Stream, trickled into the left side of the Yangtze. It was quite vast, an obelisk thirty feet high made of blocks of pink granite on a brown sandstone base. It dominated the village and could be seen downstream for miles – I had seen it from the boat, but assumed it must be a memorial to some later revolutionary heroism, and not to a long-dead Englishman. It seemed far too grand for that.
Others had thought so too. When I had clambered up closer I could see that every single word incised into the stone had been painstakingly chipped out. The words ‘Plant Memorial' were still just legible; but the panel below, which presumably had listed his accomplishments in English, had been taken away, and around the side every one of the 130 Chinese characters had been chiselled away – I could still count the holes where they had been – and made illegible. Some terrible vandalism had been executed here.
‘Red Guards,’ said a young woman who had come up beside me quietly and had been standing by while I tried to read what was left. ‘I am so very sorry. I truly am.’
She was pregnant, rather pretty, but tired looking, with wispy hair that blew about her face in the breeze.
‘They came here one day in 1968. They tried to blow it up. They said it was evil to have a stone put up in honour of a barbarian. But you know what? – they couldn't destroy it. It was built too well. So they did the next best thing – they had a group of boys with iron tools break out every letter, every character.
‘I feel so ashamed. My husband is a shipmaster, and so was his father. All our families have lived in Xintan for many years. They worship Pu Lan Tian. He was a great man. We were proud that he lived here. But his house has gone, and now his memorial has been wrecked as well.’
Her name was Mrs Du and she invited us home for lunch. She had another child at home: she wasn't certain how she was going to deal with the impending arrival – already the nurse at the local hospital had told her she must abort it. She was holding out, for the moment.
After rooting about in a drawer beside her bed she found a piece of paper. She smoothed it out, then stood before us and recited from it:
‘The British Consulate in Yichang wrote the inscription on the memorial, which was erected by public subscription among the foreign community, in 1922. It said that Plant was an Englishman born in a place called Fram-ling-gam and that he worked for the Chinese Customs Service during the Qing Dynasty. The first steamboat going up the Yangtze Gorges, the driver of it is Plant. He was born in the Qing dynasty, in the fifth year of the reign of the Emperor Dong Zhi [which would have been 1867]. During the Nationalist government time, in the springtime, he went back home, and on January 19 he died on his way home. His old friends thanked him for all his hard work, and they proudly call him the Father of the Upper River.’
Mrs Du put down the paper. She was blinking back tears, I thought.
‘Madness,’ I said, pointing back at the horribly defaced memorial. She nodded in angry agreement.
‘But worse,’ she said. ‘In a few years it will be drowned. This whole village will be under water. They have told us to move. What can we do? We will be living far away. And poor Mr Plant – he will not be remembered at all. And his rapids – they will be at the bottom of a lake. All smooth and quiet. All character taken away.’
Later that day another woman, who lived beside the memorial, gave us tea and told us something of the plans for moving – a third of the village would go in 1996, some more in 1998, the rest a year later. There would be an allowance of ten thousand yuan for every family member forced to move – thirty thousand for her husband and herself and their small boy, and another ten thousand for her grandfather, she said.
‘It will be expensive – we have to get the new house for ourselves. It is already selected where we will go, a village called Qian Shan Po, up in the hills behind.’ She jerked her hand back, contemptuously. ‘It is much cooler up there. We will not be able to farm the peaches and the oranges and the limes. Sweet potatoes and lettuce will be OK, and the corn too. But life will not be the same. And we won't be able to see the river any more. It'll be difficult – not so much for my child, nor for my husband and me.
‘But what of my grandfather?’ She nodded towards a figure sitting at the end of her garden. ‘He is too old to change.’
Her grandfather was seated under a persimmon tree at the edge of the cliff, smoking a pipe and gazing down at the boiling river below. He was quite deaf and made no move when I walked up to him and then stood beside him. He was dressed in an old gown of dark blue silk adorned with dragons. He looked perfectly at peace with his world, warming himself in the late spring sunshine, puffing on a tiny nut of tobacco, watching the ships churn by.
In a couple more years government officials would come and order him to move elsewhere. ‘There is no point in arguing with our leaders,’ sighed his granddaughter. ‘Besides, this dam is a national project – an international project, I've heard them say. We have no rights. We cannot complain. That is the way it is in China today.’
She sighed deeply – she was more unhappy for her ancient relative, I thought, than she was for herself. He had seen so much change in his lifetime, and so little of it had been for the better.
When he was a young man all the upstream boats would have been hauled by trackers, teams of naked men harnessed by bamboo hawsers and struggling along the broken shores or in the crouch-high galleries that ran along the cliff walls.
When he was a child the Manchus' power was still a bright memory, and some young men of the day wore silk robes and had their hair in queues and some of the women still bound their feet. Since then steam power had come to the river, the trackers – with their songs and their poetry and their guilds and their rude good fellowship – had been replaced and vanished into riverside villages like this, and some had said it was good that man was a beast of burden no longer.
Some kind of social justice, affecting the trackers and the coolies and concubines and the mapus and all the other drones of Imperial days, had come to modern China – but had rested only briefly, and a rude and greedy kind of commercial world that had overtaken those brief promises of fairness and equality now seemed to dominate everything. It was no good: the Confucian calm and order that this old man once knew had long since been swept away and the changes were coming faster and faster, so that if to his granddaughter it seemed as if the Chinese world might suddenly spin off its axis and explode in a million pieces, consider how it all must appear to him.
And now, because of a cascade of decisions made without a care for whom they might one day affect, this old man would have to spend his final years far away from the river beside which he had lived, so his granddaughter said, for the last ninety-four years. ‘He loved the river,’ she explained. ‘It will break his heart.’
I decided not to disturb him, and instead walked away, between the corn rows and the orange bushes and down the hill towards the river. Lily and I waited for an hour, talking to some women loading rice flour onto a waiting barge. Then I spotted a group of four Tibetans, dressed in their burgundy robes, walking quickly upstream along an old trackers' path: they were selling herbs, someone said.
They were the first Tibetans I had seen, a reminder of how close China's frontiers were now, and I wanted very much to talk to them, to show them a picture of the Dalai Lama I had tucked into the bottom of my rucksack, back in New York. But just at that moment our Russian speedboat appeared around the bend, and the captain waved to us to come aboard, and swiftly. He was late, and didn't like stopping under these unstable cliffs for longer than he had to.
I craned my neck as we passed below the Plant Memorial. The old man was still sitting, motionless, under his tree, his hawklike eyes watching our ship pulling away from the bank and into the whirling foam of the New Rapid. I stood up and waved to him and, for just a moment, he took one hand away from the stem of his pipe and gestured down back at me. Whether it was a wave of resignation or farewell I could not be sure; but I thought in that moment that he did know that his peace was about to be interrupted, but that he had chosen not to think about it, and would savour such rest as he still could, up there in the afternoon sun.