The River at the Centre of the World (20 page)

And though this was the worst for many years, floods like it had happened before, and others like it would happen again. The country's formidably well-annotated history records more than one thousand major inundations in the last two thousand years. Catastrophes on the Yangtze alone seemed to have occurred roughly every fifty years. Even if one disregards Chinese record keeping – which is unwise, since the Courts kept scrupulous watch over their Empire – and relies only on the records of the British-run Imperial Maritime Customs, the regularity of disaster is obvious: the 1931 floods were preceded by terrible calamities in 1896 and 1870, and even higher river levels were seen in 1949, 1954 and, on my own journey, in 1995.

The inevitability of such happenings has annealed and anaesthetized the national psyche. The Chinese have long been accustomed to a mute subservience to nature. A glance at almost any classical Chinese painting – with its tiny and peripheral figures of men surrounded and dominated by mountains and waterfalls, clouds and trees – indicates the state of mind, with its stoic acceptance of the overarching gigantism of the world, the puny insignificance of man. A European painting on the other hand is invariably very different in all respects: man or his creations lie usually at the centre. Nature is peripheral, portrayed as background, or barely noted at all, and if it is, is usually seen as gentle, pastoral, merely pretty.

A phlegmatic acceptance of this insignificance, of powerlessness when set against the alternating benevolent and minatory cycles of nature, is an immutable part of the Chinese peasant's psychological makeup. Of course, all mankind acknowledges reality. Most peoples have variations on our own ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’ But in China it is said with far greater dramatic flourish: ‘Heaven nourishes,’ goes the Celestials' equivalent, ‘and Heaven destroys.’ Acceptance is all, it seems. Once in a while things have become so desperate that the supposed benevolence of the supervising gods was invoked: in 1788 the Emperor Qianlong had nine iron oxen forged and submerged in the rising river. The act, he declared, should propitiate the guardians of the stream since, according to the cumbersome cosmology of the day, the sea submits to iron, the ox belongs to the earth, and so a herd of oxen should be able to suppress a flood. But it didn't and the floods of the summer of 1788 were devastating – and records from later times consistently show that prayer has rarely managed to halt or slow a rising Chinese river. The yin and the yang are in constant operation in the matter of China's wayward waterways; here is every advance countered by a setback, there are the years of too little followed by the months of too much. The entire history of China seems patterned like this, the Yangtze simply a paradigm.

Not that all the drama of 1931 seemed so tragic – particularly for the foreigners living in the region. Newspapers reported how the businessmen in the flooded treaty ports went to work in newly bought sampans, lazing in overstuffed armchairs that coolies had mounted in the stern, reading the morning paper. Police sampans cruised along the flooded roads, Browning machine-guns mounted in swivels on their bows. Wuhan had a fire brigade boat equipped with a siren and painted a properly searing shade of red. A boat shuttle-service operated between the westerners' offices on the Hankou Bund and the racecourse – where the bar still operated, even though the horses did not.

A notice went up at the Jardines office forbidding employees from mooring their boats on the roof and tying them to the firm's chimneys. The post office set up floating substations, and cancelled their stamps with a mark still highly valued by philatelists. A junk floated into the gardens of the Hankou Club, and when the waters went down it remained. It was later mounted on four pillars of concrete, a memorial to the barely credible height that the waters had reached.
*

It was left to Chiang Kai-shek's new and untested government – just three years old, and based in Nanjing – to deal with the mess. The Flood Relief Commission's 300-page report, issued when the waters had gone down and the fields had been sown again with rice and tobacco and cotton, refers wearily to the fact that workers, set to rebuilding the damaged dykes, ‘had to be protected against Communists and bandits’. Another page – nowadays it reads like agitprop – has references to the depredations of ‘the Reds’. Politics intruded in 1931, as often before and always afterwards, conspiring to make a trying situation a very great deal more so.

Measures to attempt to control China's disastrous floods have been a recurrent feature of her history. As early as the second century BC letters were written referring to China's five ‘harmful influences' – flood, drought, unseasonable weathers, pestilence, and insects: of these, a second-century duke wrote, floods are by far the worst. His correspondent agreed: the consequences of water gone awry could be profound – though he went rather further than most. ‘Running wild, it injures men. When it injures men there is great distress among them. In great distress they treat the laws lightly. Laws being treated lightly it is difficult to maintain order. Good order lapsing, filial piety disappears. And when people have lost filial piety, they are no longer submissive.’

The notion that flooding might stimulate insubordinate behaviour may seem a peculiarly Chinese rationale – but it did sufficiently alarm the mandarinate that the Court took very seriously the problem of taming the Empire's wild rivers. More than two thousand years ago there were documents that specified how to build and repair dykes, how to muster corvées of workers to maintain them, how many baskets, spades, earth-tamping devices and carts to assign to each water conservancy office; if ever the maturity of Chinese civilization were in doubt, the record of her attitude to her waterways would provide more than ample confirmation of its antiquity.

So dykes were built, for thousands of miles along the most vulnerable riverbanks. They were not always built sturdily enough – those that broke too often, and let the waters escape, were known as
dou-fu
dykes – the word is rendered in English as ‘tofu' – after the jellylike bean curd with which they were compared. From the Yangtze, well-dyked sluiceways were also constructed to carry off excess water from the main river and dribble it into a number of retention basins, as well as into two gigantic lakes that, quite fortuitously, spread to the mouth of the river – Dongting Lake, near Wuhan, and Poyang Lake, a little to the south of where we were steaming now.

In the low-water period of the winter and early spring, these lakes – especially Dongting – shrink dramatically. What in the summertime is a great expanse of water, often as much as 3000 square miles, is in winter reduced to a sandy marsh, like a huge inland delta. People move back onto this newly exposed land: rice paddies are hastily built, straw huts go up, little farms oversee vast flocks of swans, geese and ducks. And then, come June, the river rises once again, the lake re-creates itself, and, with dispatch born of centuries of experience, the temporary farmers move out and site themselves back on high ground to wait out the season.

Ships ply the deeper channels of both lakes – in fact, thanks to an astonishing achievement of canal building and diversion that dates back to the third century
BC
, a system of waterways passing through Dongting Lake allows ships to pass from the Yangtze all the way south to Canton. Only small ships, admittedly (and the railway from Wuhan now parallels the route, taking most of the north–south cargoes); but as a piece of hydraulic engineering, the Qin dynasty's extraordinary Miracle Canal, as it is still known, was truly a Panama of its day.
*

Dykes and retention basins improved as the centuries wore on – the former became higher and stronger, the latter larger and more numerous. After the 1931 catastrophe formidable efforts were made to try and solve the problem for ever; dykes were built and new diversion schemes were co-tructed that could deal with the so-called hundred-year floods, as well as with the more modest disasters in between. The Flood Relief Commission, eager to show the ability of the Nationalist government, wrote that ‘the amount of earthwork done by this army of labourers would have built a dyke two metres high and two metres thick, long enough to encircle the earth at its equator’.

Work was still going on twenty years later, despite the anti-Japanese war, the Civil War, Mao's revolution. In 1951 a huge new retention basin was finished upstream at Jinjiang. It had mile-long cement spillways, hundreds of lock gates, seemingly endless concrete canals. Three years later the monsoon storms lashed down, the snowmelt was huge, and the Yangtze rose again – brimming as high as it had in 1931, and then higher still as shock wave after shock wave came with the joining of the tributary floods. But the Jinjiang locks all opened in proper time, the commission's earth-girdling chain of new dykes all held – and after a week of anxious, rain-sodden nights and days, the Yangtze's level began to fall. What could have been a more terrible calamity had been averted. Old Emperor Yü the Great, who legend said had begun all this river taming four thousand years before, would have been well pleased.

*

I slept well in the little cabin. Lily did too, and she was still deeply asleep when the dim morning light filtered in. It was raining hard, and when I went up on deck I heard a group of fellow passengers worrying out loud about the grim possibilities of rising waters at their various destinations. But it seemed I hadn't missed much of importance along the river during the night: the only thing was that at Datong, the captain said, he had seen the earthworks for the new bridge. We had also passed the town of Wuhu, where there was the very last vague hint of influence from the ocean tides: this now was the Yangtze pure and simple, its flow unaffected by anything except the rain and the melting snows, still far away.

After a breakfast down in the ship's grubby little shop, with rice
congee
and deep-fried strips of dough called oilsticks that are far from my favourite way of jump-starting the day, I went back out on deck to take the morning air, and to see if the river had risen much. Sure enough it had: buildings beside the river were now standing in several feet of muddy water, and at one point I could see a convoy of trucks, half-submerged themselves, driving along a water-lapped riverside road, taking people and their cattle up to higher ground.

But also as I watched I saw by chance two examples of perhaps the most emblematic of all the ancients' river remedies. Pagodas, quite rare in the lower reaches, had been erected by the score by Ming and early Qing viceroys in the more flood-prone regions. They were built there to propitiate gods, to persuade them not to permit floods – but also from which to spot the floods at a distance if the deities were, as so often, unrelenting. On this damp morning here were a couple of them, in quick succession.

The first was on the river's right bank, outside the wretched-looking little town of Guichi, where we stopped for five minutes. The pagoda was a forlorn thing, too – seven storeys, rotting masonry, a tottering cupola and tufts of greenery sprouting from its windows. Perhaps, I thought sourly, its abandonment was due to the existence of one of the country's newer pagodas, a steel and wire temple to a replacement religion, for Guichi's modern skyline is now dominated by a brand-new telecommunications tower, and through one of the old pagoda's ragged windows I could see men working on it and the blue sputterings of a welding torch.

The ship slid home beside an old pontoon, with much screeching of rust against rust. Six passengers disembarked: they were from Taiwan, and one of them had told me they were bound for the sacred mountain of Jiuhua, some few hours' bus journey away.

‘Most times it's Koreans who get off here,’ remarked one of the crew, a man I had met on the bridge the night before. He was squinting down into the drizzle. ‘It was a Korean monk who made the mountain famous, you know. He set up a monastery on the top, back in the old days. So in August they come in their hundreds, celebrating his birthday. The whole boat reeks of
kimchi
.’

The Guichi pagoda may not have been a very fine specimen, but half an hour later, and on the opposite shore, one of the finest pagodas in all China swept into view: the famous Wind Moving Pagoda of Anqing. It is said to sway in the wind; it was built in 1570; and it has eight sides and, uncommonly, eight storeys – most pagodas having an odd number, usually five, seven, or nine.

The junkmen on the Yangtze are said to revere the Anqing pagoda. In the old days the walls of the city were arranged in the outline of a junk with the pagoda at the centre, rising like a mast. On the gates of the fort outside are the flukes of a gigantic grapnel anchor: the fishermen believe that if these are ever removed, the city will drift away downstream and vanish for ever.

They also believe that the pagoda is the king of all other pagodas in the world – including those built later in Japan and Korea, and also of the stupas in Thailand and India and the chortens in Tibet. During the autumn moon festival, it is said, the pagodas all come to pay homage to their monarch. Priests praying in the upper storeys say that on the choppy waters of the Yangtze below, the images of the thousands of other pagodas can be seen flickering in the moonlight – transported reflections of the world's tributary temples, all paying their brief annual respects. No junk or other ship dares pass the river during these night-time hours, for fear of disturbing the reflections.

Among the stones of the pagoda's basement there is said to be a tomb containing the heart of a fallen Chinese warrior. The structure's topmost pinnacle holds a strange confection of bells, which ring in even the most gentle breeze. And in rougher winds – the winter gales especially – the whole whitewashed structure leans back and forth, the bells shaking noisily, warning the citizens below of a coming storm.

I had with me a photograph of the town taken during the 1931 floods, which showed the pagoda standing, its skirts dipping deep into the river, a sailing junk passing gracefully below. The
Admiralty Pilot
of 1954 has a picture of it, too – it is a major navigation mark, vital for the masters of all passing ships. In this photograph the structure towers above a neat arrangement of curl-topped roofs and fortess walls, a classic illustration of China.