Simon Winchester - The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE RIVER AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and China, and now lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and makes regular broadcasts for the BBC.

Simon Winchester's other books include Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire; Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles; The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare, a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over; Prison Diary, Argentina, the story of three months spent in a Patagonian jail on spying charges during the Falklands war; The River at the Centre of the World A Journey up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time; the number-one international bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne; and The Map that Changed the World, which tells the extraordinary story of William Smith, pioneering geologist of the British Isles.

SIMON WINCHESTER

A Journey up the Yangtze,
and Back in Chinese Time

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the USA by Henry Holt and Company Inc. 1996

First published in Great Britain by Viking 1997

Published in Penguin Books 1998

Copyright Simon Winchester, 1996

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193790-8

This book is dedicated to
Lucy and David Tang
a small token of a great delight

My thanks go first to two people I have never met, Andrea and Harry Crane of Chicago. It was their unanticipated kindness that led me to meet the extraordinary and enthusiastic Wan-go Weng in his house in remotest New Hampshire, and it was he who in turn showed me the Wang Hui picture called the Ten thousand li Yangtze the picture that truly set this journey in train. To all three, connected to each other only by the faint incandescent trails of digital electronics, I owe a very great deal.

A journey of this scale demands the very best maps and I am glad to count as my good friend Francis Herbert, the curator of the Map Library at the Royal Geographical Society in London: he found for me some of the best old French maps and portolanos of the Upper Yangtze, and then led me to other sources of good modern charts the firm of Brupacher Landkarten in Switzerland, who supplied me with the frighteningly excellent Soviet General Staff maps of western China, and a young lawyer named Julie Jones of the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, D C, an agency which after a tussle with officials that Ms Jones gamely fought on my behalf came up with all the relevant sheets from the normally classified map series known as Joint Operations Graphics.

David Yiu, the ebullient and unforgettably generous figure behind Regal China Cruises, then helped me to make a number of reconnaissance trips along the navigable reaches of the river. His three vessels proved superbly comfortable refuges from which I could plan journeys by more rudimentary transport and one of them acted as a floating hotel for me during my frequent visits to Shanghai. If there were ever moments when my enthusiasm for continuing the voyage wavered, it was David's eagerness and sense of fun that always managed to restore it.

I cannot hope to express my gratitude to the young woman whom current Chinese circumstance obliges me to disguise with the English name of Lily. This courageous and unflappable Manchurian, who rightly hesitated long before deciding to accompany me, turned out to be absolutely central to the successful completion of the journey. The fact that the trip up the great river was as much an adventure for her as a Chinese citizen, to whom the Yangtze means so much, as it was for me as a curious foreigner perhaps offers some practical measure of my thanks for her participation. As I say elsewhere, sad reality makes it too risky to identify her more fully than I do, but she knows who she is, and I hope that when she reads these words she will understand a little more easily how very real and lasting is my admiration for her.

Among the others to whom I owe thanks in varying measure are these following, along with very many more unnamed people for whom identification in China would be similarly perilous. I was helped enormously by: Richard Bangs of Mountain Travel-Sobek in California; Betty Barr of Fudan University in Shanghai; David Brown of the Royal Navy Historical Branch in London; Jeremy Brown of Jardines; Peter Cann of the University of Pennsylvania, a specialist in Pearl Buck; Daniel Desmond, General Manager of the Holiday Inn, Lhasa; Dave Fairty and Anne McAndrew of Backcountry Outfitters in Kent, Connecticut, who sent me off properly clothed and shod; Simon Featherstone, the current British Consul-General in Shanghai; William Goodman of the Ertan Dam Project on the Yalong River; my old friend Richard Graham, who gave valuable time during his own interesting moments spent running the Barings office, post-trauma, in Shanghai; Charlotte Havilland of Swires; Huang Guo Guang, who plied me with strong drink at the Wuliangye Distillery, Yibin; Michael Ingram of Monenco Agra in Ottawa, who had much useful to say about the new dam, both when we met in Yichang and later in Canada; Penny King at the Asian Music Centre in London, who organized the Nakhi orchestra's successful tour of Britain; Li Shou Kun and Helen Jin of the Yun Ying art gallery in Wuhan; the splendid Julia Liu of the Ramada Hotel in Wuhan; the writer Madeleine Lynn in Hong Kong, who collects arcana from the Yangtze and was happy to share it; Rick Jacobs of Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis; Patrick McCully and Owen Lammers of the International Rivers Network in Berkeley, California; the magnificent Hong Kong medical personality Dr Jake O'Donovan, who made sure that I was able to keep fit and unblistered in the wildest reaches of Tibet; Pam Logan and her colleagues at the China Exploration and Research Society; Ma Jishen, Professor of Archaeology at Sichuan United University, a hugely knowledgeable source about the losses that are to be sustained in the wake of the Three Gorges flooding; the eternally good-humoured Washington writer Rudy Maxa, who accompanied me on an early scouting trip and insisted that I write this book; a number of members of the ill-fated Ken Warren rafting expedition who talked to me anonymously about that extraordinary episode; Professors Suo Lisheng, Yu Kehua and their colleague dam designers at Hohai University in Nanjing; my great friend Iain Orr of the British Foreign Office, who knows much about rivers, islands and China; Cynthia Shiu of Grid Media in Hong Kong, who first brought the world of interactive electronics to the Yangtze by publishing a CD-ROM about it; Professor Lyman van Slyke of Stanford University, who generously gave me material about Cornell Plant and shared his own long experience of writing about the river; the amusing and flamboyant Tao Chang An in Wuhan; Frank and Irene Walker, who when we met had been transplanted from their home in Lochcarron in Wester Ross to the banks of the Yalong River near Panzhihua; Tom Wallace, the editor-in-chief of