June 2006
It was déjà vu like I’d never seen before. The cliff walls rose from the Yangtze River with a shockingly familiar exoticism. For two and a half millennia China’s artists have been inspired by the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. And I suddenly understood the improbable, fantastic imagination of Chinese artists. It turns out they’re just copying. The crackle-glaze boulder shapes, the crinkum-crankum ledges, the skewed pagoda silhouettes of the mountains belonged to no Occidental geography. Crevice-rooted trees grew branches in chinoiserie decorative curves. Noodle-thin waterfalls splashed columns of calligraphy patterns beside scenery half-emphasized and half-obscured by a feng shui of mist. And in the narrow, crooked alley of sky above the canyons cirrocumulus clouds formed into the endless loops and curlicues of an imperial dragon’s butt. Here was every Chinese landscape-painting scroll rolled, as it were, into one.
This is to take nothing away from Chinese art. The average Qing dynasty daub still knocks a Monet into the water lily pond. But bad news for painters: China’s government has built the largest dam in the world. The Three Gorges are filling up. Artists will need shorter scrolls.
The Three Gorges Dam was begun in 1993, and the last batch of concrete had been poured in May 2006—a month before my visit. The water level behind the dam had already risen 200 feet. But, in past flood seasons, the Yangtze sometimes flowed that high. It would be the next 100 feet of water, rising gradually for three years, that would swamp the panorama, plus temples, tombs, and archaeological sites, not to mention 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages. Jamais replaces déjà in the vue.
Sanxia (“Three Gorges,” as the Three Gorges are prosaically called in Mandarin) is the notch the Yangtze has cut through the mountains on the eastern rim of the Szechwan basin. The gorges are 600 miles inland from the Shanghai region at the Yangtze’s mouth, where China doesn’t look Chinese at all. Rapid economic development has made it look like everything on earth.
The city of Yichang, below the Three Gorges Dam, didn’t look Chinese, either. That is, it looked Communist Chinese, a remnant of the Maoist love affair with concrete. It’s a colorless sprawl of clunky bunkers, the factories indistinguishable from the housing. The East is Gray, or used to be. And cracked and flaking.
But economic development has come to the Yichang region as well. A part of it is Victoria Cruises, an American-managed company that runs a handsome fleet of riverboats on the Yangtze. The ships are new, each with about 100 cabins and staterooms ranging in size from the more than grand to the more than adequate. Our ship, the Victoria Star, was 50 feet at the beam and 277 feet long, displaced 46,000 tons, and had all the swabbed decks, shiny brass, and polished teak that nautical pretensions could demand. Hatches in the starboard bulkheads led to private deck space. (I’m too nautically pretentious to say that there were sliding doors to the balconies.)
Traveling by river in China is preferable to traveling by road. The English drive on the left. The Americans drive on the right. The Chinese respect both customs. Mai and I arrived on the quay to find that there were 1,000 stone steps between us and the Victoria Star’s gangplank. An actual coolie appeared with the kind of bamboo shoulder pole that I thought no longer existed except on the printed chintz of fancy upholstery fabrics. He slung our suitcases on each end and, balancing luggage that weighed as much as he did, skittered downstairs for two U.S. dollars. We were piped on board by the Victoria Star’s band to the tune of what, given the band’s minor difficulties with Western melody, might be called “Yangtze Doodle Dandy.”
In the morning we embarked for the Gezhou Dam, 8,579 feet long, 154 feet high, and completed in 1988. This was an earlier effort to tame the Yangtze. The dam’s concrete looked homemade. As the father of three young children I am, perforce, a fan of handicrafts, but not when they’re 154 feet tall.
The Victoria Star filled the ship lock with maybe eighteen inches to spare on either side. Later I talked to Captain Gong Ju Chen, a mast-straight and very captain-like fellow. Maybe, thanks to Mai’s fluency and understanding of cultural nuance, I could catch the real flavor of Yangtze shipping, plumb its lore. An Asian Life on the Mississippi? With 1.3 billion potential readers?
Me: “How do you maneuver such a large ship into such a narrow lock?”
Captain: “Very carefully.”
We docked twenty-some miles above the Gezhou Dam at Sandouping and got on buses for a tour of the Three Gorges Dam. There was bus tour guide humor: “We call this a ‘dam day.’ Hope you do not think I am ‘worst dam guide.’”
Three Gorges was more professionally constructed than Gezhou, and it had better be. By 2009 the dam would be holding back more than 10 trillion gallons of water. Any slipup will make New Orleans after Katrina look as if somebody didn’t close the shower curtain. The dam lacks the high swoop of dramatic grandeur that “man’s harnessing of a mighty river” calls to mind. No Margaret Bourke White photograph could turn it into a Life magazine cover. It’s a blocky structure blocking a gorge. The fluted downstream wall makes it slightly (and it is to be hoped not ominously) resemble a squat World Trade Tower. The thing is big, bus tour guide pun big—496 feet high and almost 1½ miles long. Apparently there was plenty of concrete left over from the Maoist romance. Thirty-five million cubic yards of it were used.
Two shipping lanes are built into the dam. Passage requires the traverse of five locks. There’s also a ship elevator able to lift boats and the water they float in, 16,000 tons in all. Or, rather, it’s unable to lift them. After the ship elevator was built, it was discovered that no cable ever made is strong enough to hoist it. “German company is being consulted,” said our guide.
China being still, officially, a communist country, in a confused way, mixed signals abound. There are old socialist touches. On top of the monumental dam is a monument to the dam. It’s in the middle of a parking lot full of the Buicks, VWs, and Audis. Next to that is a Buddhist garden, perfect for meditation except that loudspeakers in the shrubbery are playing pop songs.
The garden, however, was perfect for a confused meditation on the Three Gorges Dam. It is vehemently condemned by nosy, whining world-savers. It is fervently defended by Communist central planners. These are two groups that are usually reliably wrong. And they both have good arguments.
Environmentalists say the dam will destroy the Yangtze’s environment, trapping pollutants and waste in a 400-mile-long reservoir, which will become what that backpacking world-savers’ bible, the Lonely Planet guide, calls “the largest toilet in the world.” Having spent some time peering into the Yangtze’s waters, both up- and downstream from Three Gorges, I don’t think the Ty-D-Bol Man’s job could get any harder.
According to a Chinese government brochure, the dam has technology allowing it to “store clear water and discharge muddy water.” But, in the matter of technology and the Chinese government, there is that phone call to the Association of Big, Thick Cable Manufacturers that no one made before the ship elevator was built.
Ecologists say the dam will destroy the Yangtze’s ecology. Species such as the Yangtze sturgeon will become extinct. There are no fish ladders at Three Gorges (or fish elevators, either). Fish won’t be able to get upriver.
But, the central planners point out, boats will. The dam project clears navigational hazards for 1,000 miles inland on a river with so much shipping that it has to be guided from what, at first glance, seem to be misplaced airport control towers along its banks. “There is disadvantage to the fish,” our guide said. “We have built an institute to solve this.”
Human rights activists say the rights of 1.5 million humans are being violated by forced relocations from the Yangtze valley. The central planners say the main purpose of the dam is to control the flooding in that valley. The worst flood in recent history, in 1931, terminally violated the human rights of the 3 million humans who died.
The dam’s twenty-six hydroelectric turbines are expected to supply 50 percent of China’s electrical power, although that is communist central planner math. Maybe the central planners haven’t looked at how Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are lit up these days. They may be thinking of 50 percent of electrical power when it was generated from the static of Mao jacket sleeves as Little Red Books were waved in the air.
The Chinese government also intends, our tour bus guide told us, to build an “International Holiday Center” at the dam. Perfect for people who plan vacations to Southern California to see the freeway intersections. Or maybe members of the World Wildlife Fund will stop by on an Indignation Tour.
But the central planners may be more right about resort possibilities than they realize. To keep the riverbanks from eroding as the water rises, thousands of acres of concrete have been poured directly over the contours of the ground. The Yangtze is lined for miles with rolling, bucking, precipitously inclined pavement. It is a skateboard paradise, a thrasher’s Eden. Forget the Beijing Olympics and make Three Gorges the permanent home of the X-Games.
Anyway, the dam is built. The tour bus guide said, “Three Gorges are beautiful, but I do not think that living your whole life in a gorge is a beautiful thing.”
That afternoon the Victoria Star entered the gorges. They stretch for 120 miles. During the next twenty-four hours we traveled though the Chinese puzzle boxes of the Xiling Gorge; between the Great Wall-dwarfing 2,800-foot cliffs of the Wu Gorge, and up the five-mile opium pipe of the Qutang Gorge, where the river narrows to 330 feet.
I consult my notes. There aren’t any. I had meant to write a magazine travel piece, but I stood at the rail, reporter’s spiral-bound pad in hand, and couldn’t look away long enough to get the cap off my pen. As the bus tour guide had implied, the Three Gorges are too beautiful to make a living in.
Sometimes I would step back inside the parlor deck, where the Victoria Star’s private river guide, Michael Yang, was giving a lively commentary to the passengers. Who were not so lively. There were three package tours of Europeans on board, mostly British of a certain age and divided between the earnestly dull and the simply dull. The earnestly dull were deeply concerned with the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon. The simply dull were like a house party in an English murder mystery without the murder. Thankfully, there were two very jolly Australian couples for Mai and me to dine with at the “Independent Tourists” table. The cruise would have been more fun if it had been filled with Chinese—Gan bei!
The Victoria Line is popular with Mainlanders, but they prefer the downstream trip through the gorges. It’s one day shorter and lets them have their vacation more quickly. “Everyone on the Mainland is in a hurry, even with their leisure,” Mai said.
Coming back from the dam tour I’d overheard two of the simply dull tourists discuss the social and economic transformation of twenty-first-century China:
First tourist: “We did Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi’an eight years ago.”
Second tourist: “Must have changed.”
First tourist: “Traffic is horrendous.”
On the parlor deck Michael was pointing to a rock formation off the port bow. It’s known as “Rhinoceros Admiring the Moon.” The Chinese have a different way of looking at things. I would have said Bill Clinton giving Newt Gingrich the finger.
“What of the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon?” asked an earnestly dull tourist.
Between the Xiling and Wu gorges was the birthplace of the poet Qu Yuan (330–295 BC). Michael said that Qu Yuan drowned himself in despair over the political policies of the Qin dynasty, and the event is still celebrated all over China in the annual Dragon Boat Festival. Anybody who’s met a political-activist suicidal poet knows how the Chinese feel. But it seems harsh to make a national holiday out of it.
There are many important temples, pagodas, and places of historical interest along the Three Gorges. But I was having a bachelor-party-at-a-strip-club experience—intrigued with appearances and not too interested in listening to histories. I liked Michael’s commentary best when fog descended on the river and visibility was zero. Then Michael, who knew exactly where the boat was, would continue his discourse anyway. It took me back to the days of being stoned in the college classroom, the prof going on in a very entertaining manner about the significance of something—maybe the poetry of Qu Yuan—that was totally lost on me.
It was hard to sleep at night. I kept getting up to watch the ship’s spotlights sweep the sides of the gorges. The beams glittered in the skinny, fitful waterfalls—reminding one of the Mandate of Heaven pouring approval on Chinese economic reforms, perhaps, or of prostate problems, depending on one’s age. Along the river verge the lights shone on gutter-wide towpaths that had been cut into the cliffs in the days when Yangtze riverboats were roped to naked laborers and yanked upstream. Another picturesque feature of the Three Gorges was about to be sacrificed to ecologically woeful navigational channels and their polluting boat engines—doubtless to the applause of a million ghosts of Yangtze boatmen.
When we emerged from the Three Gorges, Michael had everyone go to the stern and hold up a ten-yuan bill. There, on the back, were two almost conjoined mountains, like a pair of rugged Yangtze boatman hands about to clap, forming the gate to the Qutang Gorge. The engraving looked exactly like what we saw from the taffrail, but slightly taller because it was engraved a while ago. Mai said, “Mainlanders would be keeping their eye on the ten yuan.”
After a fortnight spent in a hurry with those Mainlanders, three days and four nights on the Victoria Star were welcome. The ship has no casino, video game room, hot tub, wave pool, climbing wall, jogging track, or character actors in mouse costumes. The cruise directors, Jenny Goodman and Bob Shigo, actually gave useful directions instead of taking the Poseidon movie approach and turning the boat upside down to keep everyone busy.
Jenny speaks Mandarin and looks like a lass in a Robert Burns ballad. The combination startles people when she travels in hinterland China, she said, as if George W. Bush all of a sudden spoke English. The food—Western and Chinese—was good. The Chinese food was somewhat tame, which was also good. With the Mainland entrepreneurs and industrialists I had learned that duck tongue is good. Duck foot webs less so. Donkey meat tastes like corned beef. And chicken stomach boiled in hot pepper oil tastes better than it looks (and hardly could do otherwise). It was a relief to lift the lid of a serving platter and discover lo mein.
Mai practiced tai chi, got a foot massage, flew kites from the top deck (losing one in a suspension bridge that has loomed lower since the Yangtze began to rise), and went to a cabaret show of traditional Chinese music and folk dance with Broadway improvements by former drama major Bob Shigo. I made the acquaintance of highly skilled chief bar steward Ricky Yang.
And I stared at the shore. The ordinary sights of the Yangtze are, in some ways, more extraordinary than the Three Gorges. The terracing on the hillsides could have been done for artistic effect. But it wasn’t. The stones of the walls were carried and stacked, generation after generation, to make, in some places, no more than a flower box of level soil for crops. The overwhelming economic power that is modern China all grew from these narrow margins of substance. And the economic power is visible everywhere. A fishing village of six stone hovels, without a road in or any sign of plumbing, displayed five satellite dishes.
It came so close to not happening. I noticed that, in the highlands above the terraced farms, the forest hills of the Yangtze valley lacked something. Forests. I asked Michael about this.
“They were cut down to feed backyard blast furnaces during Mao’s attempt to match U.S. steel production.” Michael, who had been born in 1977, after China began to become normal, gave a baffled shrug.
Sometimes, however, China’s embrace of market economics manifests itself oddly. On a brief shore excursion, a government-employed guide told us that a street parade was an advertisement for a furniture store sale. Mai, reading the parade banners, said it was an announcement of the upcoming Communist Party May Day celebrations.
We stopped at a 3,000-year-old town that was being slowly inundated. Another government guide brought us ashore. She took us to a new town that had been constructed to house the residents of the drowning town. The buildings were made of concrete and topped with fiberglass panels imitating roof tiles. There was an industrial area to provide jobs for displaced farmers. Nothing was in it except stacks of waste paper. “The industry is recycling,” said the government guide.
We went ashore at Fengdu to visit Snowy Jade Cave, which occupies the whole interior of a small peak. Traveling through it is like an inside-out mountain hike. The cave was discovered in 1994, opened to the public in 2003, and appears in none of the guidebooks I’ve consulted. This is just as well. The cave contains millions of calcite crystals. There’s a certain kind of American tourist who believes that crystals make something special happen, and I don’t want to be near that tourist when every one of those special things starts to happen to her all at once.
The interior is, as the cave’s name implies, white. The crystals are formed into Sun Valley mogul fields, peels of New England birch bark, backyard clothesline bedsheet billows, Dairy Queen swirls, diner mugs, urinals, and stalactites and stalagmites ranging in shape from ash blond bang fringe to obscene personal vibrator. Obviously Snowy Jade Cave had been discovered too late to inspire China the way Three Gorges did. The names in the cave had a Chinese touch, however. One scenic area was called “Improve Your Life.”
On the day before our boat reached Chongqing, David gave a talk for the passengers titled “Modern China.” But what he told was the story of his family. During the Cultural Revolution his parents had made, between them, fifty yuan a month. There was rationing until 1990. When David was born, the most expensive item in his house was a radio.
After the “open door,” farmers were able to lease their land from the government in return for 15 to 20 percent of their harvest. David’s father was a truck driver. He leased a truck from the government trucking company for 10 percent of his profits. Before Deng’s reforms, all jobs had been assigned by the government, for life. “Everything was assured,” David said, not reassuringly.
David’s father was scolded by his mother for leasing the truck. But in five years his father had made 80,000 yuan (about $10,000), which, in those days, was enough to buy a house. The largest banknote then in circulation was the ten-yuan bill. His father brought his profits home in a large sack. David’s mother thought he’d stolen the money. They had the first refrigerator in their neighborhood.
David went away to boarding school. He came home to Chongqing after a year, and so much building had been done that he couldn’t find his house.
His parents lost everything in the Asian market crash of 1989. “They moved to a small village,” David said, “and worked all day and all night to start a tourist resort. Now they are prosperous again.”
David was educated as a chemical engineer. He was working as a guide while he waited for a visa to get his PhD in the United States. After September 11, 2001, visas became hard to obtain.
“China’s economic and social progress has been very fast,” David said. “Just five years ago I was amazed by the cleanliness and order of Singapore.” He said that in the 1980s if a family had a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine, they were considered rich. In the 1990s it was a color TV, a refrigerator, and air-conditioning. Now it’s a car, a computer, and a mobile phone.
David explained, “The Chinese constitution is somewhat similar to that in the United States. The highest authority is the Party.” He then offered to take questions.
Among the tourists was a British woman who looked as though she cut her own hair. “But who’s been hurt by all this economic development?” she asked.
David was puzzled. At a loss for an answer, he said, “Even ten years ago we had spy machines in all four-star hotels.”
“If the old days were so terrible,” said the British woman, “why the long queue at Mao’s tomb?”
I resisted the temptation to say, “They’re making sure he’s dead.”
“Some older people,” David said, “are nostalgic for the Mao era. They have the grudge in their hearts about the big differences of income. And about the insecurity. Old people say, ‘You cannot use the money of tomorrow.’ ”
“What are the main problems facing China over the next ten years?” asked another, less irritating tourist.
“The income gap,” David said. “The next five-year plan has to increase the living standards of farmers, eliminate the agricultural tax, and provide incentives for people to stay in the countryside.”
“What about all those rich farmers on their private plots?” said the woman who cut her own hair.
“The outsides of the houses may be nice,” David said, “but the insides are empty.”
“And what about all these beggars we see?” said the woman.
“We used to arrest them,” David said. “But Western countries criticized China’s human rights.”
“What will China’s geopolitical role be in the future?” asked a third tourist, who looked smug about coming up with such a BBC interview of a question, albeit posed to a twenty-nine-year-old chemical engineer.
“In the long run, a very neutral role,” David said. “China tries to be as humble as possible. There is the Taiwan issue and the Tibet issue, both handled very well by the government. But all these issues are basically economic concerns. If China’s economy climbs, all these problems will disappear.”
“I was thinking,” said the DIY haircut woman to a promenade deck full of people who wished she’d quit doing so, “that there are some world problems that need handling by China, such as global warming.”
“We want to have more friends,” David said.
“But what about global warming?” the woman said.
“We just want to be loved,” David said and looked at his watch and announced with relief that time was up.