The River at the Centre of the World (14 page)

Zhenjiang is – or rather was, during its more glorious days in the Song dynasty, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries – one of the great crossing points of the eastern world, for this is where the East's greatest river intersected with the world's greatest canal. The Grand Canal, which still lays claim to being the longest man-made waterway, was built during the Sui and Tang dynasties, mostly during the seventh century. While the Yangtze wanders in these parts from east to west, the Canal spears directly north and south. The two waterways intersect at right angles. The Canal enters the river from the south a few miles below Zhenjiang, and it leaves for the north at a point on the far bank almost directly opposite the city.

Five hundred years ago, the waters around Zhenjiang (the name means ‘guarding the River’, and there was once a huge military garrison) would have been busier than almost anywhere else on the Yangtze. Up and downstream commercial traffic, dominated by the huge wooden trading junks whose descendants are the great iron barges of today, would have mingled with the smaller and lighter but nonetheless important junks and skiffs that were involved in the supply and military business for which the canal had been built. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, noted the frantic activity on the waterways: this was a place, he said, that ‘lived for commerce’.

Lily and I walked down what was called Small Jetty Street, aiming for the precise spot on the dockside where Polo was said to have stepped ashore. The street itself had much of the charm of old China – it was cobbled, and there were well-worn stone steps, and every few yards an old stone archway. Behind one of these was a tall Buddhist stupa, which the locals said was eight hundred years old. It didn't look it: I suspected that, like so many relics in China, this one had been far too exuberantly restored far too often, and it was in fact almost modern.

We reached the river, an opaque grey and chocolate-coloured flood with oil rings in the eddies, and clumps of refuse bobbing on the wavelets. When Lord Macartney came here in November 1793 – he was the first foreign ambassador to try to prise open China's locked doors to trade, and he failed, signally – this stretch of the river was called the Blue River: his diarist noted, as well he might, that the name was rather ill suited, since the water's colour was in fact quite similar to that of the ochre-and-umber sludge of the Yellow River, which they had seen only a few days before. ‘The waves rolled like the sea,’ he said of the crossing (Macartney's expedition, which was travelling southward on the Grand Canal, had to cross the Yangtze with the rest of the southbound Imperial traffic), ‘and porpoises are said to be sometimes seen leaping amongst them.’

There was a fisherman sitting in a rickety-looking boat by the quay. He was puffing gently on a bamboo pipe, a smouldering nut of tobacco in its tiny brass bowl. I reminded Lily about the porpoises and the lovely little white dolphins, the
baiji
, once so common in the Yangtze and now said to be almost extinct. What did this man know about them? She shouted a question down to him.

At first he said nothing, but then as if by way of answer he slowly got up, walked to a locked box near the prow of his boat, and pulled from it a huge and tangled mess of fishing line that jangled and clanked with its several pounds of rusty ironmongery. He shook it at me, almost angrily, inviting me to take a look. But I knew what it was instantly: this was an example of the very device that had put the pathetic little Yangtze dolphin into such grave danger: it was called a rolling hook trawl, and it was every bit as vicious a device as it appeared. It didn't just catch fish: it snared them, hurt them and killed them.

The Chinese once revered the Yangtze dolphin – five-foot-long, silvery-coloured, bottled-nosed creatures that, it is said, have resisted evolution for twenty million years. Poets of the time were amazed at how gentle the creatures were, how they smiled and whistled, how they stood up in the water, breast-fed their young, seemed anthropomorphically charming. Dolphins appealed mightily to the mythmaking mind of the ancient Chinese. They called them ‘Yangtze Goddesses’, and the Song dynasty poets had a ready legend for their creation: it involved a slave-maiden who was being ferried across the river by a sex-starved boatman. He tried to rape her, she jumped into the water to preserve her dignity, God took pity on her and turned her into a white dolphin-goddess, while the boatman was tossed into the river and turned into a black finless porpoise which, also still found in the river today, is known in Chinese as a ‘Yangtze Pig’. But whether Goddess or Pig, these two cetaceans are both in dire danger today – the industrial filth of the river being one reason, the invention of the cruel rolling hook trawls another.

Up until the late 1950s fishermen regarded the animals as simply too godlike to catch. If one turned up in their nets, they let it free. That was the rule, obeyed by all. But in 1958 Mao Zedong inaugurated the Great Leap Forward and declared that there were no more Heavenly Emperors and Dragon Kings: nothing was too revered for inclusion in the great maw of China's great Communist engine-work. Overnight, whatever protection with which history and myth had invested the Yangtze dolphin was peremptorily stripped away. As one Hong Kong journalist put it, almost overnight ‘the Goddess of the Yangtze became lunch’.

Catching the animals turned out to be ridiculously easy, quite literally like shooting fish in a barrel. The rolling hook trawl was invented to make it easier still: on each line were scores of eight-inch iron hooks, set two or three inches apart. This line was trawled from behind a boat like the one that was now bobbing beside us. When a dolphin was snagged on one hook, it panicked, thrashed violently around and, instead of freeing itself (as might happen had there been only one hook), was promptly caught on a neighbouring hook and then by more and more until it was raked with slashes and cuts and was eventually dragged from the river bleeding to death from a thousand cuts.
Baiji
meat became swiftly abundant, and was to be found in the riverside markets costing only a few cents a pound. Leather factories opened to make goods from what little unslashed
baiji
skin was salvaged.
Baiji
oil was found to have magical healing properties for people with skin problems. And as the new trade flourished, so the number of dolphins in the river dropped dramatically, a tragedy for Chinese wildlife that makes the sad saga of the giant panda seem a triumph by comparison.

Now there are said by biologists to be only 100
baiji
left in the entire river, maybe 150. Did the fisherman feel responsible? I asked. He nodded, and he did indeed look contrite. I let him explain. ‘Back in the sixties we needed to eat. I took a lot of the dolphins out, and I sold them, or took the meat for my family. It didn't matter that we had once called them goddesses. We didn't care.

‘But then as the years went by they became more and more difficult to find. We all' – and here he gestured to the other fishermen, who had gathered their skiffs around his and were listening to him, nodding themselves – ‘we all slowly realized what was happening. We knew we were wiping them out. We were killing them off, and by doing so we were helping to kill the river. And soon our attitude changed. Every time a
baiji
came out, cut to pieces by the hooks, we felt we had lost a little more. So we stopped using these rolling hooks. We went back to nets. And if we ever find a
baiji
– and I haven't seen one for six or seven years now – we throw it back. It's the rule again.

‘Yangtze fishermen have good hearts, you know. We love this river. We love the fish. We love the dolphin and we revere her. But back then – back then it was very different. It was very difficult. Mao did some terrible things. We had to eat. We thought we had no choice. It was the dolphins, or it was our children. Which would you choose?’

Lily and I walked silently back up the worn old stairway. I could tell she was cross with me. A few days before, in talking to her about the well-publicized lack of fish and wildlife in China's greatest river, I had made some remarks about how it all seemed due to greed and to China's utter and contemptuous disregard for her environment. Perhaps some of this was true. But what this old fisherman had said rang true as well. It seemed something of an explanation, and a very sad one at that. Lily looked balefully at me from time to time. I made a silent vow as we tramped on upward, something to the effect that judgements about China should not be lightly made. So I mumbled an apology, and Lily grinned.

At the top of Small Jetty Street was a redbrick wall, much pitted with age. Behind it, on a small hillock, was the Zhenjiang Museum – a complex of rather ugly redbrick Victorian structures that had once been the British Consulate. Since 1861 this city had been a treaty port, a place where foreigners had been leased a concession in which to trade. The newcomers had been energetic: they built a waterworks and generating station – and, just as in Shanghai and the then Nanking and the forty-five other cities that were eventually to become treaty ports, they built clubs and courts (for both law and tennis) and established a newspaper. The quasi-western infrastructure wasn't quite enough, however, to assuage the boredom of those who lived and worked there. ‘I went to the silent street for a breath of air,’ wrote a Scandinavian called Rasmussen, who lived in Zhenjiang for many years, ‘and walked up and down the Bund, three hundred paces one way and three hundred paces back. To get a little change I walked up and down the only cross street to the south gate of the Concession, two hundred paces one way and two hundred paces back.’

Britain, Germany, France and Austro-Hungary set up consulates in Zhenjiang. Jardines and Swires had their hulks moored in midriver, a terminal for their steamers; and Standard Oil of New York – Socony Vacuum, which was later to become Mobil Oil, and a company with formidably strong connections in Old China – had a farm of oil storage tanks. Japan put paid to most of this bustle and the relative comfort and prosperity when it captured the city in 1937; later, the Communists managed to finish it off. Few outsiders have lived in Zhenjiang since: the only foreigners I heard about while we were there were a couple of Algerians said to be working in a talcum powder factory.

Behind the consulate walls, I had been told, lay a relic that would stir the hearts of any English schoolboy of my generation. I had wanted – for many years, in fact – to see it if indeed it was there: the anchor of the famous and (so all Britons of the time had been told) heroic Royal Navy vessel HMS
Amethyst
.

I told Lily what I wanted, and suggested we might go to the museum to ask where the anchor might be found. She translated the vessel's name to herself – ‘
Amethyst
, how to say?’ – and then suddenly snorted with mock annoyance.

‘I know the ship. Of course! We call it the “Imperial Make-Trouble-Vessel”, what is the name?
Purple Stone Hero
, yes, that's it! We defeated it! All Chinese know the story. You came as pirates and we made you run! You were forced to leave a part of your precious ship behind, here in Zhenjiang. You destroyed a passenger ship on your way out. Killed many people. Yes, I had forgotten. We will find the piece you left behind here as proof. The anchor – you're right! It was a great humiliation for your
precious
British Empire.’

I reeled slightly from this unexpected onslaught. Not that Lily was entirely correct. Nor entirely wrong, for that matter. The facts – or at least, the facts as presented to us as schoolchildren – had cast the whole affair in a very different light.

His Majesty's Ship
Amethyst
was a sloop-cum-frigate of 1500 tons, and in 1949 – an exceptionally dangerous year, considering the vicious civil war going on between the Kuomintang and the Communists – she was assigned to a task on the Yangtze. It was nothing new for a foreign warship: for nearly a hundred years the slew of treaties that had been imposed on the war-weakened China had given a number of foreign countries – Britain, America, France and Italy among them – certain rights on the river. They were allowed to steam their gunboats and corvettes and destroyers and frigates along every navigable mile of the river – the 1600 miles between the red buoy at Woosung and the rapids at Pingshan in Sichuan – and with all guns locked and loaded, for the purposes of protecting their own trade, their own interests and their own citizens.

By today's standards it was a bizarre arrangement – as outlandish and unimaginable as, say, letting Japanese warships patrol today's Mississippi to protect a Honda plant in Hannibal, or allowing Chinese gunboats to sidle among the punts on the Isis to look out for the interests of Beijing students up at Oxford University. But in the late nineteenth century the Chinese were too debilitated and powerless to prevent such high-handedness. It was an arrangement that had gone hand in hand with the similarly bizarre concept of extraterritoriality – by which foreign citizens in the concession areas of China's treaty ports could be judged only by their own courts, and not be subject to Chinese law. The concept, which became shortened to the word ‘extrality’, is something the sheer strangeness of which should not be forgotten. It led, among other things, to the creation of the Yangtze Patrol of the United States Navy and the Royal Navy's equally famous Yangtze Flotilla – to which, in the spring of 1949, HMS
Amethyst
was temporarily assigned.

In that year the Chinese capital was the city of Nanjing, known then as Nanking: it lies on the south side of the Yangtze a few miles above Zhenjiang, and was indeed to be our next upriver destination. All the major foreign countries that had postwar diplomatic relations with China maintained embassies in Nanjing: the Americans did, and so did the British. As China's capital the city was naturally a prime target for capture by the Communists. In March 1949 the Foreign Office in London sensed that with the recent stunning successes of General Zhu De's People's Liberation Army, matters were deteriorating rapidly. To help raise the morale of the British, and indeed all the rest of the local foreign community, and to prepare for a possible evacuation, a warship was needed: an urgent signal was sent to Hong Kong, and in return the Navy's Commander-in-Chief Far East Station sent the
Amethyst.