The River at the Centre of the World (36 page)

Above Chongqing the river starts to narrow significantly, to speed up, and to become more richly coloured with silt and soil. It takes a long southwesterly swing across the Red Basin, though scores of miles of farmland. This is
Good Earth
country – peppers drying on bamboo poles, banana palms, thatched cottages, acres of rapeseed, fields of wheat and paddy. The basin is the Kansas of China, a granary protected by hills, warmed by the sun, steamy and fertile and rich. There are cedar trees, pines, ash and bamboo – the bamboo of the basin, being peculiarly strong and inflexible, is used all across China for boat hooks, sounding rods and quanting poles. There are also curious tree-living insects that produce copious quantities of wax: cakes of it are collected to make candles, or to add gloss to paper, or a sheen to types of cloth.

The river performs a sizeable U-turn between Chongqing and the Yangtze's next main town, Yibin. For a change we decided to take a short cut on the bus, and to make a straighter line to Yibin across just a hundred miles of this splendid and colourful fecundity. The town is an ancient trading station, set down at the junction of the Min River and close to the head of navigation, and to where the real mountains, the Himalayan outliers, begin in earnest. Driving across the Red Basin towards Yibin is rather like driving across Colorado to Denver: you begin in the morning, and the land is flat on all sides. In the late afternoon the sun, now directly ahead, inches down to reveal a long line of jagged hills: in America, the Rockies; here, the great ragged ranges of Sichuan and Yunnan, the granite and limestone temple guardians of Tibet.

The town used to be called Suif u, and there is an old eight-storey pagoda at the point where the Min River pours its relatively clean, relatively translucent waters into the reddish gold waters of the mother-river. Until quite recently the Chinese believed the Min to be the mother-river, and many still do. The Min, for a start, is navigable for 130 miles – or even, when the water is high, the 180 miles up to Chengdu. It is vastly more important for trade than the Yangtze is above Yibin. It rises suitably far away, up in the Tibetan Plateau. By contrast, the Yangtze's rapids close it down for upstream traffic only 60 miles above Yibin, and there is no significant boat-borne trade and there are no big cities at all for the remainder of the river's length.

But length, pure length, is what counts to students of rivers. And while the Min winds a perfectly respectable 500 miles to its source – and would on its own rank high among Asia's bigger rivers – it is dwarfed by the Yangtze itself, which continues upward from Yibin for no less than 2200 and some further miles (the precise distance depending on which of the three headwater streams is chosen as the origin).

However, the nomenclature changes at this point. Above Yibin, the Yangtze ceases to be the Yangtze, or, more accurately, the Chang Jiang ceases to be the Chang Jiang. From here on the river is known as the Jinsha Jiang, the River of Golden Sand – a name that will seem particularly apt to anyone watching it ripple its voluptuous way beneath the Yibin pagoda. The Jinsha glints with sand; the Min sparkles with nothing worse than a foam of industrial effluent, and the two streams flow for a couple of miles quite separately, before mingling and becoming the sludge-brown, eau-de-Nil water of all the downstream reaches.

Like the Wedding of the Amazon Waters below Manaus, this is a spectacle of raw hydraulics: a reminder, too, of the erosion and abrasion of all that vast expanse of rough geology that, for the Jinsha Jiang, marks every further mile of its course.

On shore, sophistication seemed to be dropping away more rapidly as we got farther and farther away from the sea, closer to the frontiers, nearer to the
ur
-China. The constants of the Yangtze valley cities – taxis, cell-phones, neon signs, working lavatories – were thinning out now. A small indication that we were getting into backcountry was to be seen on the bedside table of the little hotel in which we stayed in Yibin: a list of the Punishments, so-called, that management warned would be handed down in the event of any guest damaging or stealing any of the Equipments, as also so called, in the rooms.

The notice was stern and uncompromising. For taking or ruining the Mattress, a fine of 450 yuan would be meted out as Punishment. For ditto to what was called the Singular Sofa, 140 yuan. For the Thermose, 37 yuan. Anyone strong enough to haul away the entire Contents of the Bathroom could do so on payment of 1800 yuan. The Mosquito Driver, whatever that might be, went for 15, the Lock on the door for 70, the Gorbage Buckets for 3 yuan each. All Hangers would be checked at the moment of departure, and thieves of same would be marked down 2 yuan for each offence. In all, the list had thirty-two separate categories of sixty-one items that were there for destruction or theft: if you removed everything and left the room quite naked, your bill would be swollen by no less than 8323 yuan – about $1000.

Moreover, added the rubric below, ‘If your cigarette end burns the carpet, furniture, wall-paper, curtain or anything else in the room, you will be punished 50 yuan for each hole.

‘If the end burns anything on the bed, you will be punished as wholly as it costs.

‘Welcome,’ the notice ends with a flourish, ‘to our hotel.’

*

Sichuan is the birthplace of Li Peng, China's premier; it was where Deng Xiaoping was born, too, and the guttural accents of both men remain. In Yibin the locals claim Mr Li as their own, though official biographies published in more disinterested cities say he was born in Chengdu. His picture is everywhere, however, and most notably in the one institution for which the town is known across all China – the great Wuliangye distillery, where China's best-known liquor has been fashioned for the last six hundred years.

It is called the Five Cereals Liquid, and I was shown around the piles of fermenting rice, sorghum, buckwheat, winter wheat and sticky rice that are used to make it. I thought it tasted quite foul, but the emperors have liked it for generations, and a lovingly misspelled brochure – ‘every sip of Wuliangye awakens the sweatest reminiscence of affection or experience' – lists the hundreds of gold medals it has won during decades of food fairs in such culinary epicentres as Plovdiv, Leipzig and Panama. A man the Chinese know as Jin Richen was also shown taking a glass of the stuff: the rest of the world knew him as Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, and at the time I was given the brochure he had been dead for more than a year.

White-coated and anxious company officials tried hard to kindle my enthusiasm, plying me with sips of ever rarer types of the liquor as my tour went on, but to little avail. Only when I found a room dedicated to a joint venture with a Scottish distillery did my senses waken: then another booklet was instantly produced, with a chronicle of the distillery's flirtation with the manufacture of Scotch.

The first step was the unveiling of a liquor called the Orient, ‘a fine Chinese whisky made by traditional Scottish methods, offering the typical flavour of whisky, as well as some oriental features.

‘On opening a bottle a fascinating scent will emanate. You may enjoy yourself by having it on a chafing dish [come again?] taking it to the beach in the summer. You will feel enchanted. It is delicately packaged, yet the prices are very reasonable. It carries the tender sentiment of the Home of Wine.’

Someone pressed a glass into my hand. I took a hesitant sip. It was not at all bad. I gave a thumbs-up. A roomful of white-coated men nodded with delight. ‘It has been very triumph,’ said one.

Emboldened by the success of this fascinatingly scented beach drink, the bosses of Wuliangye took the further step of arranging a joint venture with Burn Stewart, a small distillery in Fifeshire. The result was a blend of Scotch and local distillates that the Chinese then aged, bottled, and sold under one of two names – Ampress for their own people, and Empress for foreigners. And foreign, said one of the white-coated men, included Scotland.

I paused in my note taking. ‘Coals to Newcastle?’ asked. He simply beamed.

His confidence has a certain unchallengeable charm. And if a six-hundred-year-old company that had made its name distilling grains mixed with ‘the intoxicating waters of the River Yangtze' felt confident that Chinese whisky would sell well in the snug bar of the Station Hotel in Inverness, then who was I, a simple Sassenach, to disabuse them of the notion? Besides, I remarked as I had a final sip, Ampress Whisky was sweetish, peaty and really not at all bad. Empress would probably be better still.

Next morning we embarked on our final boat the last it would be possible to take up the river Yangtze – or, more properly, the first and last we would be able to take up the newborn Jinsha Jiang. It is only 60 miles to where the rapids become too strong for any forward progress. The captains of such boats as make the trip are nervous men, wary of being in places that common sense tells them they should avoid.

It was a fussy little craft, with a close-knit family of a crew – six men and a motherly young woman who bustled about, bringing rice and tea onto the bridge whenever anyone looked too fraught. The steersman was a roguish-looking fellow with alarmingly long hair, unusual for a Chinese. His captain, Mr Lu, was fifty-seven years old and had been working on the Upper Yangtze since he was twelve. All of his crew had been apprenticed under him; he had been apprenticed to his father.

The first few miles of the River of Golden Sand looked manageable, though it was rarely more than a hundred feet across, and the banks were steep and all the rapids merged into one, so the whole river frothed and boiled as it sped by. From time to time we stopped, nosing in to the black mud on the bank and here allowing a woman passenger to jump off, there letting a couple clamber on with their goats or their bindles, or with small children strapped to the mother's back. Soon, though, the muddy banks became tiny rocky coves, and then there were no stopping places at all and the cliffs began to close in beside us and, more ominously, ahead. The mountains reared ten and twelve thousand feet into the sky, according to my American charts, and their peaks were sharp, and glinted wetly in the midday sun.

‘Ayeeah!’ Captain Lu complained at one point, but smilingly. ‘She is a difficult bitch, this river here. Too narrow. Too twisty. Too much boiling and swirling. Too many things get in the way. The fellows back in the Gorges have it easy. Here we have to be tracked by engine – they pull us up near the top. Better than when it was done by the
qiaofu
– those men were always getting themselves drowned and killed.’

A signal station was displaying a large down arrow on its flagpole, meaning that we would have to wait until traffic passed. We idled enough to keep steady in the stream and waited, though for no more than ten minutes. The downstream shipping turned out to be a trio of great sailing junks that swept swiftly into view, and then went flying past us in the current. Their sails were patched and old, and on one a couple of the bamboo battens were broken – but otherwise the men who sat perched on the stern cabin looked to have good reason for their expressions of jauntiness and pride, as their ships rode smoothly and elegantly past through the roiling waters.

The signal station's arrow was then taken down and replaced by another, this one pointing up. Captain Lu gunned his engine and we inched slowly forward again, pushing hard against the rushing, noisy water. It became steadily harder to move: everyone on the bridge seemed to be willing the little craft on, like a driver with a slipping clutch urging his car to get to the top of the hill.

Then we spotted our target – an iron buoy in midstream, topped with a big flag. This was where the warp would begin. Everyone sighed with relief once the buoy came into sight. We headed steadily for it and eventually, taking fifteen minutes to do a hundred yards, we came alongside. As we did so, a sampan came whistling down towards us on the flood, and a tough little man handed one of the workers on our fo'c'sle a black steel hawser, which was promptly doubled around a capstan and then tightened. A cable rose dripping out of the water ahead. It led, I could see with my field glasses, to a steam donkey engine that was cemented onto a rock a hundred yards ahead.

There was an exchange of hoots from sirens on land and on our bridge, and then our engines began to roar and at the same time smoke poured from the donkey's chimney and the cable went as taut as a piano wire. We began to move forward again, painfully, slowly, the noise of straining metal and tightened bolts and roaring water filling the air. The captain began to perspire with nervousness, and the long-haired youngster at the wheel concentrated hard, his brow creased deeply with unaccustomed urgency. The sound of the stream crashing against us heightened, and huge eruptions of spray drenched the bridge as wave after wave crashed against our slow-moving bows.

And then, quite suddenly, it was all over. The waters smoothed out, the current lessened. The donkey engine – now near enough so we could see its drivers and wave to them – fell quiet. The sampan, which had been pulled upstream in tandem with us, came alongside and took the cable away, and we were moving under our own steam once again, beneath the dark cliffs, and to the delighted yells of a gang of watching children.

A mile farther and there was a small dock at a place called variously Xinshizhen or Pingshan. The captain clapped his hands and lit a cigarette and said simply ‘No more go' in English. The signs spelled out the name in Chinese and in another, unrecognizable script that looked like the daubs of a hyperactive child. That was Yi writing, the captain explained: the people of the town of Leibo nearby, and for a hundred miles farther west, all belonged to the Yi.

He shuddered. ‘I don't like them. They frighten me.’

He gave us a farewell dinner, which he extended by offering copious draughts of Wuliangye liquor, until the bus for Leibo arrived. Then he went back and began shouting excitably to his boys, readying them to take the little boat back to Yibin. He was quite alarmingly unsteady on his feet. But there was little point in his staying at Pingshan. As the great scholar of Chinese boats, George Worcester, had written sixty years before, ‘It is a small town with nothing remarkable about it except for the fact that it marks the limit of continuous junk navigation for a distance of 1,700 miles from the sea on the fifth largest river in the world.’