During its 3964-mile passage from the fringe of glaciers at the foot of Mount Gelandandong in Qinghai province, to the navigation buoy on the East China Sea, the Yangtze drops 17,660 feet – three and a third miles. Most of that drop occurs, as is the case with almost all rivers, in its first half. Between the glaciers and the distillery city of Yibin – a distance of 1973 miles, which happens to be almost precisely half the distance between the source and the sea – the river drops very nearly 17,000 feet – almost all of its total drop, in other words. Below Yibin the river is wide and generally placid: it is flatwater, as mountain boatmen like to say.
But above it, on that first half of the river, the water is anything but flat. Above Yibin, every river mile of the Yangtze sees its waters falling an average of eight and a half feet. That is very steep by the standards of any major river. It is worth noting that the Colorado slides down along a similar gradient as it passes through the Grand Canyon – but manages to do so for only for 200 miles. The Yangtze, by contrast, keeps going down and down at the same average rate for fully 1900 miles.
The upper half of the Yangtze is, in other words, for almost all of its length, a very turbulent, very fast and very steeply inclined body of water indeed. Once it has been properly established as a big river – once the dozens of lesser source streams have braided and knitted themselves together to begin the process of emptying the high Tibetan Plateau of all available running water – tens of thousands of cubic feet of water course every single second down it towards the sea. And though on average these gigantic quantities of water fall more than eight feet in every mile, it must be remembered this is on average.
In some places the waters sidle gently between low banks and sandy beaches. They pass by silently, they give sanctuary to wading birds, they provide watering holes for antelope and bear and other animals of the high cold plains. The waters are icy and clear and shallow; the river is wide; there are low sandy islands; and looking down from a boat one can see huge fish waving slowly in the current. Places like these are rare and beautiful; and their beauty has an ominous quality, since invariably beyond the lip of the downstream horizon everything changes, and what is placid up here becomes down there a place of speed and foam and spray and, for any humans caught there, a place of matchless danger.
At these much more numerous other places – both on the River of Golden Sand and on its upstream extension that the local Tibetans call the Tongtian He, the River to Heaven – and once the Tibetan Plateau's encircling hills have been breached and the waters begin to roll inexorably down towards the ocean, the vast volumes of water steadily transmute into terrifying, awesome stretches of river where the power and fury of the rushing Yangtze become barely imaginable. All these millions of tons of roaring water are suddenly squeezed between gigantic cliffs, are contorted by massive fallen stones and by jagged chunks of masonry, and they sluice and slice and slide and thunder down slopes so steep that the waters hurtle down ten, twenty, fifty feet in no more than a few hundred furious yards.
In places like these the water is not so much water as a horrifying white foam – a cauldron of tortured spray and air and broken rock that is filled with the wreckage of battered whirlpools and distorted rapids and with huge voids of green and black, the whole maelstrom roaring, shrieking, bellowing with a cannonade of unstoppable anger and terror. The noise is almost more frightening than the sight: the sound roars up from the cliffs, echoing and resounding from the wet rocks so that it can be heard from dozens of miles away, a sound of distress like a dragon in pain.
These stretches of wild water are nothing at all like the troublesome boils and shoals and whirlpools of the Three Gorges, across which trackers were able to haul the great trading junks, and where Cornell Plant and Archibald Little eventually triumphed with their iron boats: these are upriver rapids where any survival is impossible, where any craft sucked in would emerge only as matchwood, and where any passengers or cargo swept down would be pulverized by the ceaseless might of the roaring waters. These are the Upper Yangtze's rapids, and they are worse than any others in the world.
There are many of them, all unutterably dreadful, all formidably dangerous. But none is more dangerous and dreadful – nor more spectacular and unforgettable – than those in the gorge near Lijiang, where the river squeezes itself through a twelve-mile-long cleft that in places is no more than fifty feet across: narrow enough, some say, for a tiger fleeing from a hunter to have once jumped clear across. This notion is almost certainly quite fanciful, but the name has stuck – Hutiao Xia, Tiger Leaping Gorge, unarguably the most dramatic sight on the entire route of the river.
During these twelve miles the river falls at least six hundred feet – by some estimates, a thousand. That means it falls at the rate of between fifty and eighty feet each mile, a drop with more of the characteristics of a waterfall than of a river rapid. According to the Chinese there are three main groups of white water in the Gorge and twenty-one separate rapids. All of them are dangerous: two in particular, one close to the beginning of the Gorge itself, one halfway down, are truly terrifying.
The river courses along a natural fault line, tearing through rock that has already been crushed and weakened by the tectonic forces that have shaped this geologically chaotic corner of the world. Near-vertical cliffs of limestones and granites, porphyries and slates, soar directly up on either side of the stream for fully seven thousand feet; the mountains of which they are faces rise behind them to twelve thousand feet, and from the dark gorge shadows below one can peer up into the narrow strip of blue sky and glimpse snow and ice sparkling on the upper slopes.
There is a pathway clinging to the left bank of the river, and Lily and I planned to walk down it. We started on the Gorge's upstream end, at the bridge at a hamlet called Qiatou, where the river flows silently and placidly under groves of weeping willows and looks for all the world like the Thames at Bablockhythe. There was little indication here that things were about to change, except that the river's progress seemed to be blocked a few hundred yards ahead by the huge wall of mountains rising sheer to the north of the grubby little village.
But soon there turned out to be another clue: while not so long ago Tiger Leaping Gorge was rarely seen by westerners,* today the local authorities have become only too well aware of the profit they can make from those outsiders who have a fondness for strenuous journeying, and so they have built a sort of turnstile on the path and employ an old man to sell plastic tickets to walkers. Ours read, Hutiaoxia Tourist Scenic Spot Management Office of Zhongdian County and it had a sketch of an improbably long tiger jumping across an improbably narrow defile between cliffs. Permission to undertake the walk costs about a dollar, and the man told me he sells about twenty tickets a day in the summer.
‘Be very careful,’ he said morosely. ‘Two killed already this week.’
The path, an old miners' mule track, is hewn out of an almost vertical cliff face. The mountain rose mossy and dripping to our left, the cliff wall dropped off sheer to our right, directly into the river. And while the path more or less followed the contour line, the river itself began to whip down the dizzying slope, starting the fall of nearly a thousand feet down the twenty-one gigantic sets of rapids. This meant that the cliff on our left-hand side became ever higher as the river fell away. We hugged close to the mountainside, imagining what might happen if we strayed too close to the other side, a slippery piece of rock, a gust of wind…
About a mile in, as the walls of the Gorge began to close and the sun was blotted out by the walls of rock, we crossed a pile of blinding white debris, the spoil heaps of a marble quarry. Where was the quarrying? I wondered – and as I did so a van-sized piece of rock whistled down from above, crashed onto the spoil heap, bounced off it and then hurtled down over the edge. I heard a vast splash from below. The quarry, I realized, was five hundred feet above our heads, on the side of the mountain.
This was where the walkers – both North Americans, it turned out – had been killed three days before. They had been doing just what we were doing – walking slowly and carefully along the tiny track, not daring to venture too close to the river side. Suddenly and without any warning a huge piece of marble, dislodged by a careless worker up above – most of the quarry workers were prisoners, it was said, and could be expected to take an understandably cavalier attitude to the safety of those around their enforced workplace – slammed down on top of them, and dashed them away and off the path and down into the river below. They may have been killed by the rock; they may have died in the fall into the river; they may have been drowned. Whatever: their bodies, mangled beyond recognition and with every bone broken, were found at the lower end of the Gorge later that evening.
We walked even more nervously, keeping a hundred yards apart so that if one of us was hurt, the other might survive. From time to time the path petered out and we were clambering over soft talus that would slide over the edge as we shuffled through it, and would threaten to drag us with it. Once in a while we met walkers coming the other way: they looked white-faced and nervous, and greeted us with queries that we echoed to them: What's it like ahead?
Then the path widened, and there was a small stall built of rock where a young Moso man was selling soft drinks. A steep path led down from here, and someone had suspended a rope alongside it to give walkers added purchase: it went down to the bellowing and spray-drenched side of the worst rapid of all, a place where the river is cinched into its tiniest cleft and where a mansion-sized pyramid of black limestone stood in the middle of the stream, splitting the roaring white waters into two, like a half-horizontal Niagara ceaselessly churning and bellowing through the defile.
We went down and stood alongside it, struck dumb by the thunderous might of it all. This, of the twenty-one measured rapids of the Tiger Leaping Gorge, was probably the worst, the meanest dog of all. Great torrents of white and green water hurtled towards us, taking boulders and spars and trees along with the flood as though they were feathers and balsa-wood sticks. This was the quintessence of the Tiger Leaping – the rapid we had come to see, where the river showed itself as a thing of raw and unimaginable might. This was a place where no human being could ever pass. Or so I once had thought.
Someone had managed to get onto the rock in midstream, for a start: he or she had written the characters for bu and tiao – tiger and leap – in vermilion paint on the rock's most prominent surface. How this unknown painter – or this graffiti artist, or this vandal, depending on the viewpoint – had managed to get across, to daub his paint and get back without being swept away is an achievement that beggars belief.
But man has an unquenchable eagerness for the conquest, as he likes to put it, of such challenging places, Mao Zedong had swum across the Yangtze down at Wuhan, and so had conquered it, in a manner of speaking. Other men, and at later dates, had tried to voyage their way down the entire length of the river, paddling it in specially strengthened boats. This was their version of conquest; those who tried were among the best and the worst of humankind; their efforts, in which the puniness of man was matched against the strength and caprices of the river, led to some success and also to a great deal of painful failure. Tiger Leaping Gorge – and in particular this huge rapid near its beginning, officially known as the Upper Hutiao Shoal, with a sixty-foot drop through two suicidal pitches – was where that failure had been most vividly demonstrated.
The ‘conquest' of an entire river demands of course that one knows where the river begins and ends – knowledge that, for the world's big rivers, can be notoriously difficult to acquire. Close to their beginnings big rivers have a habit of splitting themselves into countless fine tendrils or capillaries, and several of these may compete legitimately for being the true fons et origo. Is it the stream that is farthest from the sea? Is it the stream that is at the highest altitude? Is it the stream with the greatest flow of water? There is little agreement on this point among either hydrologists or cartographers; and so explorers can make names for themselves even today by finding, or claiming to find, supposed new sources for well-known rivers.
The beginning of the Mekong, for example, was reportedly found by a Frenchman in 1995. But it may well be that another source, with an equally legitimate claim and yet equally difficult to verify, may be found by some other wanderer ten or fifty years hence. That, after all, is what happened with the Yangtze.
Until the closing years of the Ming dynasty, in the 1640s, the source waters of the Yangtze were thought to lie at the head of the Min Jiang, the big and (in those pre-pollution days) unexpectedly clear stream that joins the muddy Jinsha Jiang, the River of Golden Sand, at Yibin. The reason was simple: the wide and rushing Min was navigable for as much as 180 miles above Yibin, while the Jinsha, narrow, rocky and furrowed by turbulence, was closed off to boatmen by a line of mountains no more than 60 miles above town. The Min was by far the more important river for trade; logic suggested, therefore, that it had to be the origin-river.
Exploration soon put paid to that theory. A Ming dynasty geographer named Xu Xiake looked closely at the Min, and found that it splits into its various capillaries and minor tendrils only about 500 miles above Yibin. Even the most ambitious source-searcher could not discover a spring or a glacier that was more than 500 farther miles upriver from that. But Xu went on to discover that the Jinsha Jiang, by contrast, burrows into the hills for nearly 2000 miles – changing its name above the town and the bridge at Yushu to the Tongtian He, the River to Heaven. This, Xu reasoned, must be the origin-stream of the Yangtze.
Later travels confirmed that this must be so – if only because the Jinsha and its tributaries were so very long. The Tongtian He, it was found out two centuries later, went on to attract three substantial tributaries – the Qumar, which brings waters down from the north; the Dam Qu, which swirls in from the south; and seemingly most powerfully of all, the Tuotuo, which comes directly from the high snow peaks of the west. Which of these three rivers is actually the origin-stream has been a matter of debate and wonder for much of the last half of this century.
The Qumar was discounted early on: it had neither the water volume, the length nor the altitude to be a serious candidate. Its attraction lay simply in the fact that it vanished, and that it did so into some of the wildest and least hospitable plateau land on earth. The Tibetan Plateau has fewer than three people inhabiting each hundred square miles – it is a place of many black yaks, a few black tents, huge expanses of grass, sudden outcrops of rock and ice and an endless, endless sky.
The Tuotuo and the Dam Qu, however, were real candidates, and in 1976 the China Geographic Research Institute dispatched a serious expedition from Beijing, armed with systematic methods, to determine which was the true source. After a summer in the field these explorers decided it was the Tuotuo, and specifically that the Yangtze began its 3964-mile journey to the sea in a tiny lake called Qemo Ho, which lay at the foot of the Jianggudiru Glacier, at the base of the 21,723-foot-high mountain called Gelandandong. For nine years this spot remained the official source – and to many it remains so today.
But in 1985 the American National Geographic Society sponsored an expedition of its own. A group of explorers led by a Hong Kong Chinese named Wong How Man first went back to the Qemo Ho source; then doubled back to the point where the Dam Qu river splits from the Tuotuo and headed to the source of that – their argument being that more water appeared to stream into the Tongtian He from the Dam Qu than from the Tuotuo. If it was the more powerful stream and if it was longer, then its beginning should be officially considered to be the source.
And longer the Dam Qu turned out to be – though by a little more than a mile. The explorers headed east, following the Dam Qu's great recurving path to a point where it split into two tiny streams, the Shaja, which headed south, and the Guangzhuguo, which meandered to the north. The Shaja was short, the Guangzhuguo half as long again – and it petered out into (or rather, started from) a small and clear pool lying at the base of a hill that the local Tibetans call Jari.*
This, according to Wong's claim – which was backed up by an official Chinese report in 1986 – was almost certainly the true, technical source of the Yangtze. It was nearly a full mile lower than the Tuotuo's source in the glacial lake, but it was one and a half river miles further away from the sea, and it provided much more water. It lies at 32° 7' North, 94°6' East, is at a height of 18,750 feet above sea level, and is 3965 miles from the ocean.
So the choice for anyone wanting to journey down the entire length is this: whether to accept this tiny and unnamed meadowland lake as the source, and so journey from Jari Hill, down along the Guangzhuguo, the Dam Qu and the Tongtian He to the Jinsha Jiang and finally onto the Chang Jiang proper; or to begin at the icebound Qemo Ho (Qemo Lake), then pass down the entire length of the Tuotuo, and only then join the Dam Qu.
Drama tended to force the choice. All would-be explorers of the river seemed to want the very same thing: to begin their journeys at the foot of a mountain range, in a lake that was surrounded by a frieze of blue-white glaciers. This setting was by far the more dramatic. It had the look of a great river's source: it was not merely a place of muddy oozings from a dismal and half-frozen Tibetan pasture. Mount Gelandandong was part of the poetry of the great river: it was how Wang Hui's painting had captured it, in the seventeenth-century imagination: it began among the clouds, spilling from ice and snow, emerging with grace from the heavens. Gelandandong was just right – it was spiritually appropriate.
And so when, in 1985, a thirty-two-year-old freelance photographer named Yao Mao-shu decided that he would try to become the first person ever to float the entire length of his country's greatest river, he arranged to begin his epic at the base of the mountains, and set his raft on the crystal cold waters of Qemo Ho.
He was powerfully motivated. The year before he had heard that an American team was planning to raft the river, and he had applied to go with them, but had been turned down. His dander was up. Why should the honours for such a conquest go to barbarians? The river was part of the soul and fabric of China. Only a Chinese should have the right of such triumph. He, Chinese to his very core, would go off alone, and would conquer the great river himself.
He was a tough and resourceful young man, and alone in his twelve-foot craft he went through the hell of the upper reaches with dignity and courage. After 600 miles he arrived at Yushu, and blurted out his adventures – of catching and trying to tame a lynx for company, of being threatened by wolves, of coming across an island filled with thousands of swan eggs, of going hungry for days, of being ice-cold, of being so terribly lonely in the Tibetan plains that he felt he would go quite mad. They liked him in Yushu and gave him fresh supplies, and when he drifted off downstream again the whole town wished him well.
But he never made it. Somewhere in the canyons where the River to Heaven becomes the River of Golden Sand, Yao's boat, the Dragon's Descendant, capsized. His body was found by herdsmen, drifting in an eddy in a downstream calm. He left a widow back in Chengdu. And he left a China that – once the tragic tale had been told around the nation – became suddenly determined to avenge his death, by conquering the river once and for all, by concerted Chinese effort, the following year.
The expedition that the luckless young Yao Mao-shu had wanted to join was led by a man who had wanted to run the Yangtze ever since 1976, when he had paddled down the white waters of one of the origin-streams of the Ganges, on the other side of the Himalayas. He was named Ken Warren; and the fact that he patted his mane of white hair into shape with mousse, and that in 1986 he took a case of said mousse along as part of the ten tons of supplies with which he intended to beat the Yangtze, should have been warning enough that he was never the man to do it.
This one-time vitamin salesman – who began his attempt on the river by praying before the cameras at the source, affecting tears and pleading with choking voice, ‘Oh beautiful Yangtze… we ask you to take care of us and we promise you no harm' – led an expedition that turned out to be both a failure and a disaster.
One man – a young photographer from Idaho named David Shippee – died of altitude sickness along the way; four other members of the expedition deserted because of Warren's questionable leadership; and when the going became too rough for comfort – when the rapids in the Tongtian He became too dangerous, too unrunnable – then Warren himself walked out on the remainder of the party. The Americans' permit to raft on the river expired when they were still 3000 miles short* of their intended goal – a fact that did not prevent Warren from declaring to the television cameras that what he had done really had been a success, that he would be back for more, and would return to the river with a ‘secret weapon' that would defeat the rapids that had thus far defeated him.
Ken Warren was an essentially disagreeable figure – but he was handsome, and exceptionally telegenic. The film which ABC-TV commissioned of his expedition, and which was paid for by the sponsoring insurance company, Mutual of Omaha, suggests that the expedition was honourably conducted and even heroic. But once it was over, and sober questioning replaced the hyperbole and the flattery to which television and its subjects can fall prey, so the truths about the expedition's lamentable organization and leadership began to emerge, and the bitterness began.
Margit Shippee, the widow of the dead photographer, sued for her husband's wrongful death; Warren in turn sued the four men who had abandoned him; and the whole fiasco vanished within a miasma of costly lawsuits and acrimony. Warren himself died in the early nineties, and today on the Yangtze his name is ill regarded indeed. One Chinese boatman to whom I mentioned the name simply shuddered, and remarked caustically that ‘this American above all should not have been allowed to come onto the river.’
Inevitably, and perhaps properly, it eventually fell to the Chinese to become the winners of the dangerous and often fatal competition to be the first to ‘conquer' the Yangtze. The contest was already well under way in the summer of 1986. By the time the Warren team had stage-whispered its prayers and set off, no fewer than six Chinese expeditions (one of them with our friend from Panzhihua, Wu Wei) had already set out from the Gelandandong glacier-lake source. They remained well ahead. By the time the Americans had pushed their boats off in early summer the leaders of these Chinese parties had reached more than a thousand miles downriver – and yet, tragically, already three of their number were dead. (It was first thought that eight had died: but in fact five from two of the competing parties were found safe and sound. After their boat had shattered on a rock they had clambered up the walls of a canyon and survived for days on a diet of leaves, roots and snails.)
Once matters had thus begun to become more dramatically dangerous on the river, official China unexpectedly began to take an interest. Up until now the political leadership in Beijing had looked on these home-grown efforts merely as a way of avenging the previous year's tragic death of Yao Mao-shu, who, with his good looks and his clear-eyed idealism, had become something of a minor national hero. Now, with three of the youngsters who were trying to shoot the rapids again already dead, the effort began to assume, as had Mao's swim thirty years before, the familiarly powerful man-versus-river symbolism. What was being attempted out on the Yangtze, the political leadership in Beijing decided, was now nothing less than a trial of national honour, a test of the modernization that had been brought about by the glories of socialism and the command economy. All efforts should be poured into the attempt, it was said: the youth of China should be helped and supported and egged on in the nobility of their cause.
And so by midsummer all China's eyes were on their great river, and on the teams of men who were daring to try to conquer it. The rafters, it was clear, now feared the worst from a river that was proving far more dangerous than they had anticipated. Most of the members of four teams swiftly dropped out, and those remaining were by midsummer grouped into just two competing crews, battling on gamely. These teams managed to raft all the way down from the Tibetan Plateau town of Yushu downstream to Dêgê and Batang, towns that are way stations on the great southward sweep of the river where it marks the frontier between Tibet and China Proper. They stopped, for rest and reconnaissance – reconnaissance mostly – at Qiatou, by the willow trees, and at the point where Lily and I had strolled and where the stream looked innocently placid like the Thames at Bablockhythe. They then walked, just as we had, along the perilously narrow path of the Gorge, and they dodged beneath the marble quarries, where the prisoners even back then were prising loose the tumbling slabs. They came to see and study and examine, with ever-mounting apprehension, that first rapid – the sixty-foot half-horizontal Niagara of a monster known variously as the Upper Tiger Leaping or the Upper Hutiao Shoal. It was, they thought at first from where they stood, quite unrunnable.
But then one of the teams had an idea. They built an enclosed capsule-raft out of rubber inner tubes, added a tightly fitting pneumatic doorway to one side, and lashed everything together so that it looked like a squat Michelin Man. They carried this down to the waters just above the Upper Tiger Leaping Rapid, found an unsuspecting dog, placed an oxygen mask onto its face, thrust it inside the raft, sealed up the door and kicked the capsule out into the stream. The vessel, highly buoyant and cushion-soft, careened out into the cauldron of foam and, after turning over and over a dozen times, vanishing deep into the yards-deep foam, flying up into the air, hurtling off sharp rocks and slamming itself against the canyon banks, bobbed out into the calmer waters below the rapid, still afloat. But the door had been ripped off, and the dog was missing, never to be found again.
With a logic that can only be fully understood by a Chinese, this first test run was considered to have been a success – as in ‘the operation went very well, but the patient died’. So they built a second of these seemingly unsinkable rubber capsules, this one slightly larger – for humans, not dogs. On the morning of 10 September 1986 two of the party's more experienced members – one, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher named Lei Jiansheng; the other, a boiler worker at a railway station, a thirty-two-year-old named Li Qingjian – climbed inside the capsule, and Lei read a brief statement to the watching crowd:
I think China is one of the greatest nations, but its development is hindered by some backward ideas. We should encourage the opening up of minds, and the spirit of adventure. Rafting the Yangtze is a very small wave in the long river of history, but it is worthwhile if it can help move forward the development of our country.
And then the rubber door was shut tight, and the capsule was pushed out into the centre of the stream.
For a tantalizing while it hung there, as if the rubber itself was frightened and did not dare move. But then, after some prodding with sticks and a push from a man who swam out while tied to the bank with a rope, it was swept out into the maelstrom. The film of the event, one that I have now watched with horrified fascination scores upon scores of times, shows the flimsy craft being sucked whirling down into the white foam, vanishing, reappearing, going down for a second time and then, only moments later, bobbing up in the still waters downstream. Then the door is opened and two wet, smiling faces peer out blinking in the sunlight. Their friends lift them out, check their arms and legs, find all still there in good working order. The run was over, and the pair were badly shaken – but they were all right.
There are many more rapids within Tiger Leaping Gorge – me, like the Meteor-Studded Rapid five miles blow, even worse than the first. But in essence, with the running of the Upper Hutiao Shoal, the great deed was done. The second Chinese team completed its own run through the Gorges without incident, at about the same time as it was announced that Ken Warren's venture had failed, and that the Americans were all going home. The two Chinese teams, now without competition, savoured the remainder of their journey – down through the lower reaches of the Jinsha Jiang to Yibin and the confluence with the Min Jiang, and then along the much more placid hundreds of miles of the Yangtze proper. It was not all plain rafting: another rafter died on the way; and a reporter was killed when he was hit by a falling stone – a total of five people had died by the time the teams reached the flatwaters, and before the remainder of the journey became no more than a tedious tide-lapped routine.
The two parties reached the buoy in the ocean in November. The first to do so, on 12 November, was the team that had titled itself the Luoyang Expedition for Sailing and Exploring the Yangtze; two weeks later came the China Yangtze River Scientific Observation Drifting Expedition. All told, when the deaths of the American David Shippee and Yao Mao-shu were added to those who died on these two Chinese expeditions, and when a group of others were later discovered to have died as well while making other and lesser attempts on other parts of this terrible river, it was realized that much had been sacrificed during that extraordinary Yangtze year. And for what, other than the sustenance of China's national pride? There seems in retrospect to have been – at least once the government became involved – a gladiatorial aspect to the entire affair, in which young men were sacrificed to the terrors of the great river, in part to keep the people entertained, and to maintain them in harmony with the political temper of the time.
Above the Gorge that water is clear and calm and wide again. There is a paper factory on the left bank, which discharges a horrid grey stain into the stream a few miles farther on; and then, at Shigu, named after a stone drum that still stands there as a memorial to an ancient battle, the river executes its most obvious and extraordinary physical feature. It spins around, in the space of a few hundred yards, from heading due south, to due north. Because of this sudden redirection of the river it can fairly be said that at this very place, where there is now the town, all China's destiny was once held hostage by the whim of ancient tectonics – and specifically by a hill, lying to the south of town, called Yun Ling, Cloud Mountain. I knew it well from studying the maps: now, at long last, I had the opportunity to see it, to walk up its slopes and see for myself why it was so crucially important – if unwittingly so – to the story of China.
Late in the afternoon Lily and I reached the little town. The heat was like a furnace, and was made even hotter by the unmistakable and oddly soapy scent of Sichuan fire-pepper. From time to time there was a relieving waft of northern air, a breeze that was liquid with the thick smell of new-mown hay. But generally it was quite still, the valley shimmering and hazy. The cattle drowsed in the slowly lengthening shadows of the jagged mountains to the west, the Heng Duan Shan, the Horizon Splitting Range. All the town of Shigu seemed asleep, tier upon tier of adobe houses rising up the hillside, hushed for the siesta under their sinuous blankets of tile.
Down below the memorial that held the old stone drum – a millstone-shaped slab with scores of lines of incised verses giving details of the long-ago battle – a group of children were diving noisily into a rock pool from the town's old wooden bridge. It was a lovely bridge, three hundred years old at least and suspended, like so many in these parts, from a pair of heavy iron chains. There were still early Qing dynasty gates at each end, with patches of peeling vermilion and gold paintwork and elaborate bronze locks that the village elders shut each day at sunset.
A woman was creeping slowly along a cobbled path, her old bones creaking under the weight of her wooden back-frame with its afternoon crop of corn. She was evidently mother to one of the boys below.
‘Come on home and help me thresh this lot!’ she called down.
‘Just a little while. It's far too hot to work!’ the boy shouted in reply. The woman nodded and walked on, trailing stalks of corn and a furrow of yellow dust.
To get up to the side of Cloud Mountain one must climb the long staircase of slabs that snake through the old part of town, a normally busy lane with open-fronted shops lining each side. In one of these a man with a screw-topped Nescafe jar half full of green tea lay snoring under a billiard table. No one was stirring, no one noticed my passing. Shelves in the little stores were stacked high with supplies for the evening: cylinders of powder-dry noodles wrapped in old copies of the People's Daily, plastic bags of peppers, whole pigs' heads cut raggedly from their shoulders, cans of Coke, piles of white cabbages, tall bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer with the labels stuck all askew, bricks of dust tea, watermelons, thermos flasks, primrose-yellow sachets of Pantene hair conditioner (made under licence in Shanghai). On each storefront table was an abacus and a steelyard. Under almost every table was a dog, asleep.
Before long I came to a tall cement monument with a red star on top and a plaque. Three children, all wearing the red scarves of the Young Pioneers, were sprawled asleep on the podium. I trod as quietly as I could. The plaque above the children was dominated by a long revolutionary message and then a short poem in the familiar sprawling, looping calligraphy of Chairman Mao. I managed to read a few characters: it was yet another of his hymns to the Long River – a river which, now that I was a few hundred feet up, was just coming into sight.
From the angle of the sun it was clear that Cloud Mountain's lower slopes, directly ahead, lay to the south. They were meadowlike Chinese alps with short grass and a dusting of white camellias. The upper few hundred feet of the mountain were different, lightly forested with camphor laurels and rhododendrons. Above that the hill seemed to have a rounded, stony summit. The top was elongated into a lozenge shape that ran very noticeably east and west: up there it had a shape rather like a Brecon Beacon, or the Red Hills of Skye, or a very small edition of Kilimanjaro.
It is a hill that looks to be a thing of no consequence at all. It is something of a dwarf: it rises sedately, almost sheepishly, from the turmoil of this eastern extension of the Himalayas where much grander mountains – like the Horizon Splitting Range, in whose shadows the cows were settling down – are thrusting themselves into the skies on all sides. It is not exactly a holy mountain, like the more famous Chinese and Tibetan summits of Emeishan or Taishan or Kailash: it has never attracted pilgrims or mendicants. It is far too far away from anywhere to be of much interest to tourists. A hundred years ago the plant hunters from Harvard and Kew came here to look for primulas and gentians and perhaps (though without success) for samples of that marvellous piece of botany known as the dove tree, which some, because of its huge white flowers, called the handkerchief tree.
But the hill does have a certain importance, and it has given the otherwise rather ordinary – pretty, but ordinary – town of Shigu a kind of fame that no nine-storey pagoda or ruined lamasery or Maoist resting place could ever bring. Cloud Mountain, it is fair to say, is regarded by Chinese myth to have guided and directed China's very being.
To grasp its standing in legend, one must remember that the Chinese believe that their origins as a people mimic and parallel those of the origins of the planet itself. The history of the World and the history of the East are to their thinking inseparable, party to the same divine plan – one of the reasons that they are the Celestials, and the rest, barbarians. The Chinese, to their own belief, never came from anywhere else: they were always, in their minds, there. The world was created, China was created, the Chinese were created: all was one, seamless and of high purpose. The details of this story tell of a vast expanse of years during which myth and proven history were hopelessly and inextricably entwined.
Most of these protohistorians believe that the world – and hence China – started after the Egg of Chaos had spawned a deity named P'an-ku. This remarkable proto-god grew ten feet a day and lived for 10,000 years; he is perhaps best known in the Chinese context for having chopped into two parts the mighty universe stone and by doing so separating for all time the Heaven from the Earth. Immediately after this, China was created and was promptly blessed by the successive presence of twelve Emperors of Heaven and eleven Emperors of the Earth (who each ruled the new land for 18,000 years), followed by nine Emperors of Mankind (who ruled for a total of 45,600 years).
Next came sixteen nondescript kings about whom almost nothing is known, and then three sovereigns who had (or, at least, two of them had) the heads of men but the bodies of snakes. One of these (or maybe not; maybe he belonged to a group of five, slightly later on) was Huang Ti, the so-called Yellow Emperor, father figure to the nation, the revered founder of the Chinese civilization.
Huang Ti's life marks the notional end of primitivism and savagery: it is from the time of his reign – perhaps around the year 2697 BC – that China becomes heir to an organized and sophisticated system of society and government. It was during his time that people began to live in wooden houses, to wear silk clothing, to ride in carts, to sail in junks, to fire-harden ceramics, to hunt with longbows, and, most important of all, to write. The much vaunted ‘five thousand years of history' begins with the reign of the Yellow Emperor. All Chinese think of themselves as this great man's sons.
It is said that the towering figures who then lived immediately after the founding Emperor went on to invent all the pillars of China's early civilized life. Fu-hsi, the Ox-tamer, domesticated animals. Shen-nung, the Divine Farmer, invented the plough and the hoe and set up the organizing of produce markets. Yao, the Fourth Emperor, created the calendar and organized some kind of central government. But it was Shun, the Fifth Emperor, whose decisions were to devolve eventually, onto Cloud Mountain. It was in 2200 BC, or thereabouts, that the work was performed which makes Cloud Mountain so vital a site in the creation and development of modern China.
It came about because, during the Imperial reigns of both these men, Yao and Shun, China was plagued by the most terrible floods. One or the other of these two emperors called upon a young and apparently technically competent bureaucrat named Yü to try and control the waters – to dredge new channels, to stop up dangerous rivers, to create lakes and, in a decision of potent symbolism, to try and keep all of these tamed waters within the orbit of China. China's waters were a great national treasure, the two emperors declared during each of their reigns: they must be made to behave themselves, but they must remain in China.
Yü, working under the orders of either one or both of the emperors, rose manfully to the task. With the assistance of a small brigade of dragons he ranged across China for the next fifty years, reshaping the hills and the valleys in such a way that – in theory at least – the country would be protected from the seasonal ravages of her great waterways. He did his work so well he came to be an emperor himself, Da Yü – Yü the Great; and even today he is referred to by Chinese who know about Christianity as ‘China's Noah’.
He was said to have been utterly obsessive, and an instance of his dedication is still taught in schools: he is said to have passed by his family house on three occasions as he tracked across the kingdom, and each time heard his family weeping for him to come home. Never once, the Chinese say proudly, did he soften. He went right on to stop up another river and dredge another canal, and to save China, and China's waters, for all time. His family, he declared, would have to wait.
The achievements of the flood control era are legion, and there are said to be moss-covered memorials to his works dotted beside rivers all around China. But his greatest success, the most spectacular triumph of his half-century of earthmoving and shaping, is said still to have been the siting of Cloud Mountain. From halfway up its slopes and from any large-scale map of China, or indeed, of the world – it is abundantly clear why. For by placing the mountain where it now stands, Yü changed the course of the Yangtze, keeping the huge river inside a China that would otherwise have watched impotently while its potentially most important waters streamed away.
Any good map will amply demonstrate the strategic positioning of Cloud Mountain. In this part of western China all of the hills around are clearly ranged to the north and the south, spearing down from the jumbled ranges of Sichuan. I could see this, more or less, from where I stood: the ranges tumbled into the blue haze of the northern sky in serried ranks, regular, like soldiers. And the rivers that run in the valleys between – the Yangtze, which I could see, as well as others, like the Mekong and the Salween, which I could not because they lay a few dozen miles off to the west – all run north and south as well. The trend continues to the south of where I stood as well: seventy miles or so away to the south is a long lake called Erhai Hu and it, too, is aligned from north to south. Every geographical feature, in fact, seemed to be aligned like the folds of a concertina – sharp valleys, narrow ranges of hills, up and down, up and down in rank upon rank, and all beginning in the north, all ending in the south.
All, that is, except Cloud Mountain, where Lily and I were standing. Though it is smaller, less spectacular, more modest than its rivals, it lies right across the lie of the land. In a land of such unyielding north–south predilection it is an eccentric, an erratic. And most of its bulk lies – and in this lay Da Yü's triumph – right across the path of the oncoming Yangtze.
Regarded from its source, the Yangtze had up until this point been roaring due southward for the last one thousand miles. But here in Shigu, and, according to Chinese legend, on the specific orders of the Imperially charged Yü the Great, it slammed suddenly and unexpectedly right up against this newly placed and massive wall of Carboniferous limestone. It collided against the wall and rebounded dramatically in a huge, tight hairpin bend that has it thundering northward with as much vigour and determined might as, a few hundred feet before, it had been thundering and roaring south.
I could see it below me in the afternoon shadows. Just on the left of my field of view the river came heading towards me like a train, fast, unblinking, unstoppable. But then in an instant it halted, it hesitated in a boil of small pools and oily undercurrents and then it promptly turned and began to speed away from me. If ever a river could be said to have turned on a dime it was the Long River, here in deepest Yunnan, among the rapeseed fields and the yak meadows of the Nakhi.
The implications of this screeching, rubber-burning turn are profound. They are most obvious from a glance at the map, when one can see what the region's geography would have been like if Da Yü had not placed the mountain exactly where he did.
Without the barrier the southerly streaming Yangtze would have carried on in precisely the same direction – and six hundred miles later, in an undistinguished mess of mud and mangrove swamps, it would have left China for good.
The valley along which it might do so exists today. The declivity that currently brings the river down to Shigu continues through the lake bed at Erhai and on down to become the bed for a weak but also southward-flowing river called the Lishe Jiang. This stream is soon nudged a little southeastward by a range of low hills called Ailao Shan – the Misty Foothills Mountains – and, as the gradient declines, it begins to slow and widen. Before long it leaves the hill country altogether, mumbling past miles of rice paddies and bamboo groves and stands of jungle before it reaches a frontier town called Lao Cai. There it sails in stately fashion onto the steamy plains of what was once northern Annam, where it suddenly and silently escapes from China. It has entered Vietnam. It goes past towns like Yen Bai and Phu Tho and Vinh Yen and then finally it passes the great capital city of Hanoi and its port of Haiphong and reaches the Gulf of Tonkin and the sea.
What began as the River to Heaven and the River of Golden Sand thus might have gone on to become the Red River. The waters that drip from China's high glaciers might have fanned out eventually in a delta that belonged not to the People's Republic of China, but to one of her lesser neighbours.
Instead, and thanks to Da Yü, not a single drop of Yangtze water is actually permitted to escape from China. From my vantage point on the boulder – it was getting darker now, and my maps were flapping in a hot evening wind picking up from the west –I could see the diverted direction in which it was heading: it was going north and east, deep into the centre of the Middle Kingdom. It would twist and swivel for a while until it ploughed through Tiger Leaping Gorge. There it would turn briefly back south, as though still trying to nudge its way out – but the hills would now be too tall for it to slip away, and besides, the old north–south grain of the land has vanished here and there is no pattern at all in which to ease and find a convenient exit. The river is now resolutely pinioned inside China. Its way out, its path of least resistance, is no longer south, but east. And thus does it find its way to Panzhihua and Chongqing, through the Three Gorges to Wuhan, and thence to Nanjing and Shanghai and the sea.
Had it not been for Cloud Mountain, it would not have passed that way at all – and the third-longest river in the world would not exist, a valley in which a twelfth of the world's people now live and work would not exist, and all China would present a very different geography, a very different anthropology, and a very different history from that with which she is blessed or cursed today. Cloud Mountain, in short, is the axial point of China's very being.
*
Geology and tectonics present a more mundane explanation, of course. When India broke free of the Africa to which it once was joined, drifted north to Asia and then collided with it between Eocene and Miocene times, the Himalayas were thrown up, coughed up into the air by the explosive force of the collision. At the eastern end of this collision zone there was terrible tearing and distortion, and gigantic blocks of crust were spun slowly clockwise as they tried to get away from the slow but never-ending impact to their west.*
The Yangtze, in ancestral times, flowed to the south, into the valley of what is now the Red River. The tremendous tilting that took place after the India–Asia collision wreaked havoc with this tidy plan, and a side stream began to take Yangtze water away from the tilted uplands, heading east. Soon the strength of the tilt and the depth of the new valley won out, and all of the Yangtze water began to course east, not south. The Red River lost its biggest tributary, and China gained her greatest river.
Da Yü's involvement in this grand plan can never be known. To the Chinese his role is implicit – or at least it is to those Chinese who believe him to have been a real person. To more disinterested scholars in distant laboratories, poring over their polarizing microscopes and fault-zone maps, a more impersonal explanation seems appropriate. The Chinese claim geologists have no poetry in their souls – and from halfway up Cloud Mountain, with the western sky turning to indigo and the great first bend of the Yangtze shining below like gunmetal, a poetic explanation seems, as up at Gelandandong, more spiritually appropriate to the story of this vast river.