The River at the Centre of the World (35 page)

But, despite the dearth of real amusement, a lot of foreigners do pass through Chongqing, and the sight of expensive furs swishing and inappropriately high heels teetering down the slippery stairways is not uncommon. This is because the city is the chosen starting point for almost all of the Three Gorges tours, and ships grind out of here, as many as a dozen a day, bound the 727 miles downstream for Wuhan via the 120 miles of the Gorges themselves.

I have rarely met anyone who, under close questioning, admits actually to having been wholly pleased with taking a voyage through the Gorges. The natural scenery is stunning – all agree on that. And the retrospective pleasure is clear: the haunting beauty of the narrower of the gorges (and there are many more than three; this number is a purely subjective construct, which has somehow stuck) is something quite impossible to forget. It becomes, like so much in the Chinese landscape, the stuff of dreams. But it has also to be said that, during the process of any voyage up or down the gorges, it becomes painfully and unremittingly evident that humans – and by that I mean twentieth-century humans, and almost certainly twentieth-century Communist humans – have made the most terrible mess of the place.

The ruination – by pollution, squalor, filth, ugly architecture, wanton tree felling, factory building and artificially induced land erosion, and by that characteristically modern Chinese combination of greed and carelessness – is something that every visitor is bound, eventually, to notice. Those who come and see – especially if they have paid a lot of money to do so, or are on a once-in-a-lifetime-journey and so gamely and understandably try to ignore this reality and choose to view the grandeur through the grime – all invariably confess to a keen sense of disappointment, and wonder at the nature of a people who can so comprehensively befoul one of the wonders of the natural world. How can it be, they ask, that a place that was for so long thought so special by so many – writers, painters, poets, classicists, aesthetes – is now in reality so grubbily unspectacular, so wholly unmemorable, and, most tragic of all, so poorly husbanded?

It doesn't help that many of the boats also fall far short of the standards that are expected by the kind of travellers who can afford to make such a journey. But there is worse: the sights – if the boat trip is well enough organized to allow one to see them (I once went on a trip where one entire Gorge transit was performed in the dark) – are often so ineptly explained, the towns in which tourists stop are so vile and so jammed with tawdry goods and populated by the unashamedly crooked, the coal-smelling pollution is everywhere so appalling, the factories and the workers' houses are so ugly and such a blot on a once pleasant landscape, that it is not surprising that so many who disembark in Wuhan three days later are eager to put the trip behind them. They all seem to categorize the Three Gorges trip as an
experience
, something all are glad to have
done
, but unlikely to ever want to do again.

‘The Taj Mahal – definitely yes,’ said one elderly American from Cleveland with whom I once travelled on a Gorges trip. ‘The Grand Canyon – yes. Paris – yes. China – most certainly yes.

‘But the Three Gorges – quite frankly, I hate to say it, but it's pretty much a waste of time. Better to read about it. And yet, my God – did those writers have imaginations! They described things that simply aren't here.’

His wife chipped in, agreeing with what her husband had said, but wanting to record her own grace note of disappointment. ‘Where,’ she wanted to know, ‘are the naked trackers? Why aren't boats being hauled over the rapids by naked Chinese men?’ She showed me a brochure: there were pictures of nude men with well-muscled buttocks and backs, lashed together with braided ropes, bending in their scores to haul a ship up and over a raging whirlpool. Some were in the water, their skin glistening like silver. Others, with the bamboo-fibre ropes bent over their backs, hauled from on land, their feet clamped onto the rocks, their arms loose and their fingertips touching the earth, their heads low, their eyes staring fixedly at the ground. On board the ship, a trackers' master beat a drum, and one could almost hear the singing and the grunts as, foot by painful foot, the army of men drew the huge wooden vessel onward against the rushing might of the stream.

I was sorry to disappoint her and to snatch away what had clearly been, back in her Ohio bedroom, a delicious erotic expectation. I explained to her that like the whiffletree, the Yangtze trackers were now all gone, victims of reciprocating engines, the power of steam, and the liberal use of dynamite in blowing up the rapids that remained.

The only trackers who could be seen on the river now work for the benefit of tourists. They are only half-naked, as it happens, with fetchingly small loincloths and bare and calloused feet, and they work on a tiny Yangtze tributary called the Shennong Stream. Foreigners who visit are driven for two hours up from the main river by dusty bus and are then taken, by staircase or palanquins, down to its crystal-clear waters, to be set in ten-person wooden boats that are paddled slowly back downstream. Half-naked steersmen armed with iron-tipped poles guide these boats through the more treacherous little rapids they encounter – there is no need for tracking on a boat going downriver, of course. But upstream is a different matter, and other half-naked men with bamboo hawsers looped around their shoulders track the empty tourist boats back upriver. In due time these tracked craft pass the fully laden downriver boats: each encounter is greeted with squeals of delight and the click and whirr of cameras. Some of the trackers stop, retrieve postcards from plastic bags they have secreted in the folds of their loincloths, and try to sell the cards while standing up to their waists in the icy waters. Others peddle marble eggs and necklaces made of translucent quartzite. It is all decidedly vulgar: fake Rolexes cannot be far behind.

And their tracking skills are clearly vanishing, too. What were once, after all, the practices of a highly sophisticated craft started to be lost upon the introduction of the steamboats. The decline of this cruel art has been much written about – by Isabella Bird and John Hersey, most notably, and also by legions of anthropologists, who recorded the trackers' songs and listened to their laments, and of sociologists who studied the trackers' clan systems, their economics and their health. Tourism then kept the skills alive, if barely, and those men who were still physically able to track continued to be studied, if no longer by academics, then at least by enthusiastic amateurs and by makers of films.

But then, in 1995, there was a terrible accident on the Shennong Stream. A rapid proved to be far stronger than expected, the iron-tipped poles failed to grip on the passing cliff faces, and a team of trackers did the unthinkable – one by one they lost their staves, and the team lost control of the boat. The entire vessel went under and stayed under for ten minutes, trapped between the rocks and the tons of foaming water. Eleven Taiwanese tourists drowned. Since the modern Chinese authorities are greedily eager to promote tourism in this region for as long as the soon-to-be-flooded Yangtze Gorges will allow, the tragedy was a commercial catastrophe for which the authorities had to find a scapegoat. The trackers, unschooled, illiterate and unchampioned, were the obvious victims: the drownings have probably put paid to the future of their displays, even as a Yangtze sideshow, and what skills they had will probably now fade away completely.

Not far from where the foreigners died is an accidental necropolis – a resting place of far, far greater antiquity that tourists are rarely able to find, but which anthropologists have recently declared to be of the most profound importance. It is called the Longgupo or Dragon Hill Cave; it is on the south side of the Yangtze, hidden deep in a jumble of limestone hills that lie about fifty miles west of the valley of the Shennong Stream. The sandy clays and gravels that fill the cave were, when first found, solid with bones of animals that had died there many thousands of years ago.

There are countless caves in these parts of China – the action of water or limestone has seen to that – and the many bones that turn up in them have long been mined by the local farmers, and sold. They are colloquially known as ‘dragon bones' – particularly the bigger specimens – and farmers have traditionally made fair sums of money on the side by selling the bones to pharmacies, who grind them up and sell them as tonics and cures to the ever gullible local peasantry. But the entrance to Longgupo Cave had collapsed several thousand years ago, preserving its contents and keeping the inquisitive out. When a farmer chanced upon a bush-covered hole in 1984 and squeezed his way inside, and then for some happy reason decided to report the existence of the cave to the government rather than plunder it for profit, he was able to show off, to the team of palaeontologists promptly sent down from Beijing, a vast space that was still filled with a pristine and quite undisturbed range of bone fossils. Cursory digging showed there were no fewer than twenty layers of bones – with the oldest bones at the bottom and the youngest, the most recently deposited, at the top. Government scientists began their official excavation in 1985, and for the next four years they carefully pulled tens of thousands of bones from the sands and wrote long reports on the wonders they had so serendipitously uncovered.

They made what was by any standards an excellent haul, a collection that would provide museums-full of spectacular new fossils. There were, for example, the bones of a huge herbivorous ape that looked rather like an orang-utan. There were specimens of
Ailuropoda
, an ancestral pygmy form of today's nearly extinct giant panda. There were large skulls of mastodon elephants, as well as recognizable pieces of a rare horse species called
Equus yunnanensis
. There was the occasional hyena, plenty of ancient types of deer, and many tons of coprolites, the fossilized droppings that are much sought after by collectors. Evidently the cave had been used as a lair by beasts like the sabre-toothed tiger and the large porcupine: many of the bones showed gouge-marks, indicating where the prey had been seized by its long-toothed predator and then dragged in out of the rain for lunch.

But the most extraordinary find at Longgupo was at first blush what seemed the most prosaic: two very small fossils of animal teeth. One was of an upper incisor; the other was part of a lower jaw with two still attached molars. The palaeontologists who examined them quickly recognized that these teeth were very unusual indeed, in that they had belonged to hominids – the three-foot-tall hairy animals of the genus
Homo
that, around 800,000 years ago, walked erect on their hind legs and are generally regarded as antecedents of man. The scientists tentatively identified the teeth from Longgupo as belonging to a new subspecies of
Homo erectus
; and when, shortly afterwards, they discovered two stones in the cave that appeared, from the marks on them, to have been used by some primitive beings for hammering and cutting, they became as excited as only palaeontologists can. They promptly declared they had discovered a brand-new site for pre-human settlement of almost a million years ago, a place on the Yangtze that would at least rival the great 1927 discovery of the
H. erectus
known as Peking Man in the valley of the Yellow River; and one which would easily rival the finding of Java Man over near the Indonesian village of Trinil in 1891.

But then in November 1995 came a stunning announcement, made from an unlikely source: the Department of Anthropology and Pediatric Dentistry at the University of Iowa. An American palaeoanthropologist there named Russell Ciochon reported – on behalf of a large international team, including three Chinese – that two highly accurate series of tests had been performed on the Longgupo fossils, which demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that the teeth were not a mere 800,000 years old, as had been thought; nor were they a million years old, as some others had speculated. Instead, tests on the residual magnetism in the various levels of deposits in the cave showed that the age of the level where the teeth had been found was more than
1.8 million years
. Moreover, electron spin resonance testing, an even more precise tool for age determination, showed them to be
1.9 million years
old. The teeth, in other words, were from hominids of a far, far greater age than either Peking Man or Java Man.

More was to come. Dental examination showed that the cusps on the three teeth shared features with early small hominids whose fossils had been found far away in East Africa. Specifically they were similar to the teeth of
Homo habilis
and
Homo ergaster
, two of the very earliest examples of the genus
Homo
. And the existence of the two stone tools underscored this point: for they were very similar to the tools that had been used by
H. habilis
in Africa.

There was an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from what, to the world of anthropology, was a spectacular set of discoveries. The hominid found in the Yangtze valley was of a far more primitive kind than had been found either at Peking or in Java, and in the absence of any other discovery it was reasonable to suspect that it was the original Asian hominid, the ancestor of all Asian mankind. The little stone-bearing beasts had evidently limped out of Africa, travelled across the southern part of what is now the Arabian peninsula and spread, slowly and steadily, all the way to Asia. The first evidence of their having arrived in the East was thus to be found here at Longgupo, in a half-collapsed and newly discovered cave a few miles south of the Yangtze – a river that now, if still not able to claim a role as the cradle of any specifically Chinese civilization, can at least in all certainty lay claim to being the cradle of all the world's Asians. It is far from unreasonable to say that, with this discovery, it is now abundantly evident that the Yangtze and its valley have played a crucial and pivotal role in the development of all civilization, and of all mankind.