The River at the Centre of the World (26 page)

Hankou lay at the centre of all this revolutionary, anti-Imperial fervour simply because of her strategic position as a Yangtze railway city. Her population – boatmen working on the Yangtze, railway workers, soldiers in what was called the New Chinese Army – was in any case peculiarly militant, much more so than farmers, say, or scholars and members of the bureaucracy. Poetic justice was surely to be served, then, when it fell to this city before all others in China to become the place where the spark of real revolution was first lit. And yet when the spark was lit, it was, ironically, for rather different reasons.

The city is famous today as the place where the first shots were fired: it is the Lexington, if you will, of the Republic of China, the precise place where five thousand years of Imperial rule came to a sudden, shuddering end. Chinese modern history is replete with engaging ironies; here, though the entire Empire was in ferment because of her railways and though Hankou was a rail centre like no other, the actual event that precipitated the Empire's end had nothing to do with railways at all. It was an event that took place on the famous day of the ‘double ten' – the tenth day of the tenth month – in 1911. More than almost any other date in China's story, this is one that is remembered, and revered. The fuse was lit at a place just a few yards from where our boat had berthed – a house in the Russian Concession, around the back of the Litvinoff Brick Tea Factory. Today there is no memorial, no blue plaque; no tour groups come and pay respects. Perhaps that is in part because it all began with an accident.

One of the many revolutionary groups that existed in the Wuhan three-cities region, and which had as a principal aim the subversion of the local army garrison, had secured rooms in a house in the Russian Concession. It seems that on the eve of the day in question they were making bombs and, as so often happens with amateur bomb-makers, there was an accidental explosion. It was a very large one, and the house was badly damaged, and several members of the insurrectionary group were killed, blown to pieces.

Since this was a foreign concession area the agreements on extra-territoriality would in normal circumstances have protected the surviving group members. The local police would be kept out, the Russians would have to deal with the matter themselves. But on this occasion the bomb and its devastation were so large – and the suspicions of the Hankou police were already so heightened – that the local Manchu viceroy ordered his heavily armed policemen to storm the site. In a panic, survivors in the ruins tried to burn documents, but still the police found papers listing the names and the whereabouts of the other revolutionary cells in the tri-city area. Word reached these remaining rebels, who decided there was now nothing for it but to make their long-planned move. They had been working patiently for months to talk the soldiers of the local garrisons round to their cause. Now, with their entire political movement imperilled by the police investigation, was the moment to see if their patient persuasion had worked.

It evidently had. At dawn the next day – the glorious tenth day of the tenth month – the Eighth Battalion of the Wuchang Engineers, one of the key regiments among which the rebels had been fomenting insurrectionary thought, formally and decisively rebelled. They seized an ammunition depot and they were joined by soldiers from a local transport regiment and an artillery battery. Between them the three units managed to storm the headquarters units of the Manchu army in the main fort in Wuchang: by the end of a day of vicious fighting the Manchu viceroy conceded defeat. The following day the Manchu commanders across the Yangtze in the cities of Hanyang and Hankou had also done the same. The entire metropolitan area that we now know as Wuhan was by midweek in the hands of a well-organized and popularly backed anti-Imperialist brigade.

It was now the turn of the Railway Protection Movement to spread the revolution across the nation. It was like watching a fast-burning fuse: the movement's disciples rallied soldiers to their cause by the thousands, and exulted as the rebellion spread with astonishing speed, leaping from city to city – particularly in south China – along the newly built railway lines that linked them. There were massacres of Manchus – one particularly noteworthy for its scale in the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. Governors and viceroys and Manchu generals were assassinated, unexpected alliances formed hurriedly to pledge allegiance to forces fighting against the dying Qing dynasty.

The railways sped government troops down from Beijing, but they found that other railways – rebel-held railways – had sped revolutionary forces to intercept them, to slow the progress of the Imperial counterattack. By November government generals in the north were themselves beginning to question the orders coming from within the Manchu fastness of the Forbidden City.

There were attempts at compromise, placatory noises came from the Court, from the very regents and the powerful old eunuchs who surrounded the child-emperor. But it was to no avail.

The
North-China Daily News
in Shanghai (the city's eventual intimate involvement in the rebellion showing once again the importance of the Yangtze valley as its birthplace) published the rebel manifesto on 14 November. It is a long document – one whose principal points should be as well-known, perhaps, as those of the American Declaration of Independence, written a century and a half before. The revolutionaries' anger had been triggered by the sale of their birthright to foreign powers, but the real enemy was still the Manchu who had performed the sale. Foreigners, if they were dealt with as equals, could offer China many benefits – but only if the Manchus would get out of the way:

The foreign powers individually and collectively have stood hammering at the door of China for centuries, pleading for the diffusion of knowledge, a reformation of the national services, the adoption of Western sciences and industrial processes, a jettisoning of the crude, out-of-date and ignoble concepts which have multiplied to keep the nation without. the pale of the great family constituting the civilized world. They have failed.

The Manchu Dynasty has triumphantly carried on its reactionary policy despite the strongest pressure exerted from within and without, until the oppressed people could endure the disgrace and the contumely of it no longer. They rose, and with what results the history of the past few weeks has shown.

The Manchu Dynasty has been tried by a patient and peaceful people for centuries, and has been found more than wanting. It has sacrificed the reverence, forfeited the regard and lost the confidence freely reposed in it by all Chinese.

Its promises in the past have proved delusions and snares. Its promises for the future can carry no weight, deserve no consideration, and merit no trust.

The popular wish is that the Dynasty must go.

On Christmas Day 1911, the man whose ideas had been central to all this ferment, Sun Yat-sen, returned from France, where he had been making sure that Europe remained neutral in the conflict.
*
He came by sea to Shanghai, and was swiftly elected provisional president of the Chinese Republic. He travelled upstream to Nanjing and assumed office on New Year's Day 1912. The revolution that had begun on the Yangtze saw its creator return from exile to the Yangtze, saw him travel up the Yangtze to stake his capital in a city on the Yangtze. There could be no better signal that the river was at the centre of the new national entity.

Forty-two days later, on 12 February 1912, the six-year-old Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, who was known by his reign name of Xuan-tong, formally abdicated.
†
He was the last of the Manchus, and he was the last Emperor of China.

Our hotel was on the very edge of the old Russian Concession, and from my room I could look out over the mansard roofs and the grimy colonnades of houses in the French Concession next door. It was raining by the time I got to my room, and I watched as an old man in his underwear clambered about on the roof outside, retrieving sooty washing from a rusted cable that sagged between two chimney pots. He had disturbed a flock of pigeons, which flapped and fluttered and swooped like a grubby blanket, back and forth over the tops of the houses. In the distance a small red helicopter chattered up and down the riverbank, a television crew on board filming the swimmers who, in their hundreds, were still crossing the flooded stream.

Wuhan in the rain is no city of joy. It bustled, certainly – in the narrow streets at the back of the concessions there were banks and boutiques and amusement arcades, and thousands of people were jammed everywhere, even on a wet Sunday like this, selling and buying, shouting and arguing.

In one scrofulous alley I stumbled across, of all things, an American yogurt shop, a franchise of the highwayside and airport giant known as T C B Y, The Country's Best Yogurt. I rushed in to buy something for Lily. She had never had frozen yogurt, and I thought her social awareness might profit from a tub of vanilla-and-chocolate swirl, topped with fragments of a crushed Heath bar. But she grimaced after the first mouthful. ‘How do you people eat stuff so sweet?’ she said, offering the tub back. I motioned to her to hold on to it, and suddenly felt keenly sorry for the young girls who worked behind the counter, and who were gazing at me intently to see if we were enjoying the results of their labours. I shrugged an excuse to the effect I had to eat the stuff out in the street, and made as dignified an exit as I could.

The simple existence of a TCBY store in Wuhan rang a bell, however. As Lily and I walked farther into town, I recalled a conversation that my wife had had a year or so before at a dinner party in Hong Kong. She had been cornered by a languid fop from Jardines, a young man whose task was to develop the firm's interests in China.

‘This cold yogurt stuff the Americans like,’ he said with obvious distaste, both for yogurt and Americans, ‘and these Mexican thingies, “tacos” I believe they're called – do you think John Chinaman would like them?

‘I ask,’ he continued, ‘because the franchise is up for grabs. Frightful-sounding places I imagine, names like Taco Bell and TCBY. But we can't be too proud, can we? – we're wondering whether to slap up a few in China.’ He smiled, in a reptilian way.

I had no way of knowing whether market research like this did any good, even whether the yogurt shop in Wuhan was indeed a Jardines venture. If it was, there was an element of drollery to the story, considering that the firm's first sales in the city were of opium, a more obviously addictive product. Whether John Chinaman likes yogurt or not, time will tell: one Jane Chinaman did not. But opium was evidently liked well enough by all.

The West has been trying things out on the people of Wuhan for decades test marketing them much as they might do in Nottingham or Chicago. It is said that, among other things, the Gatling gun, the fedora, basketball, steam engines and the notions of unionized labour and representative democracy were all first tested on the people of Wuhan. Opium, however, was not among the items that the West
introduced
to Wuhan, or to China. The trade that grew up between British India and China, which was explained in the previous chapter, was created to satisfy or to exploit, depending on your point of view an already existing habit. The Indian opium augmented an already very considerable domestic harvest. Even as late as 1908, a trade report for Hankou showed, for instance, that while 34,000 pounds of opium had been landed in the port from the Indian regions of Patna and Malwa, some 65,000 pounds had come
downstream
, from the Chinese poppy fields of Yunnan and Sichuan. The point is often forgotten: the Chinese were already heavy users of the drug by the time the British traders moved in and, like the Mafia, sought to dominate and control the trade.

There was business in more prosaic products too. At the beginning of the century scores of foreign ships – from Britain in the main, but also from Norway, Russia, Germany, France, and United States and Holland – came regularly up the Yangtze as far as Hankou. Tankers brought in paraffin for the Standard Oil Company's bunkers. British and Dutch steamers brought oil from Borneo and Sumatra. Oregon pinewood was brought in aboard British freighters, and a German bulk carrier brought in monthly shipments of cement from Haiphong (the port in Vietnam to which, according to the legend, the Yangtze might have flowed, had the first Chinese Emperor, Yü the Great, not had the source waters diverted).

The imports were of ordinary, unremarkable goods like this, as well as shirting material, pig iron, tin slabs, cigarettes, firebricks, matches, needles, potash, railway ties, tea chests, umbrellas. Nothing exceptional, nothing with a hint of romance about it.

But Hankou's exports at the time – these were the very stuff of China! The manifest of an outbound steamer could read like a page from
The Good Earth
: cargoes of bean cake, white rice, lotus seeds, fungus, raw white silk, cocoons, goatskins, cotton, vermicelli, sesame oil, tung oil, quicksilver, nutgalls, musk, ramie, cowhides, bran, bristles, rhubarb, straw braid and, of course, tea – tea in bags and boxes and half-chests, tea offered as black, brick, mixed, green, log, tablet, oolong or dust.

The docks of a century ago must have been a remarkable sight. The junks would be crowded a hundred feet deep on the banks of the Han Shui, their sides painted every colour imaginable. Scores of the shops were riverborne, with the merchant's business, or the craftsman's craft, advertised by an item flying from the mast – a hank of rope, a barber's brush, a shirt, a queue of plaited hair. And onshore the narrow lanes were overhung with crimson and gold signboards, and crowded with jostling and sweating coolies and fat mandarins in their gilded chairs passing to and fro. There would be the sound of cymbals and the whiff of incense and the strange sweet smell of opium drifting up from the dark divans. And, in the background, the ominous sounds of shunting and whistling from the steam trains that would before long play so instrumental a part in changing it all.