The River at the Centre of the World (57 page)

Yao Mao-shu,
352–3
,
355
,
358

Ye, Dr,
183–6

Yellow Emperor,
362–3

Yellow River,
3
,
11
,
25
,
101
,
150
,
152
,
244n
,
293

Yen-yu Stone,
271

Yi people,
301
,
303–5
,
307–8
,
325

Yibin,
295
,
313
,
344
,
350
,
358

Yichang,
19
,
29
,
220
,
226
,
229
,
229
,
237
,
244
,
247–9
,
253
,
262
,
265
,
274
,
281

Yongning,
303

Young Pioneers
360

Younghusband, Sir Francis,
375–6
,
376
,
377

Yu Kehua,
97–9

Yu Shan Mountain,
287

Yü the Great,
4
,
158
,
214
,
263–4
,
287
,
363–5
,
366
,
367

Yuan Mei,
98
,
99

Yuelong Xueshan,
326–7

Yunnan province,
213
,
228
,
295
,
313
,
314
,
322
,
325
,
327
,
337
,
340
,
365

Yushu,
350
,
353
,
356
,
377

Zhang Zu Long,
56–7

Zhao Erfang,
377

Zhengjiang,
94
,
96–117
,
131
,
143

Zhengjiang Museum,
104
,
111–12

Zhong Sha light,
38
,
53

Zhong Shan roads,
125

Zhongbao Island,
231
,
258
,
261

Zhou Enlai,
148
,
257
,
313
,
314

Zhou Peiyuan,
239

Zhu, Captain,
41
,
44

Zhu De,
107
,
108
,
109

*
Myself a Mandarin
, required reading for anyone bound for Hong Kong.

*
The phrase ‘ten thousand
li
’ is widely used in China to describe an entity – most notably the Great Wall – that is known for its extreme length. The phrase is not meant to be taken literally – just as well considering the
li
's notorious flexibility as a unit of measure: an uphill
li
being longer than a downhill
li
, a Shanghai
li
being shorter than a Chengdu
li
. But the Yangtze benefits from a happy arithmetical accident: the early western railway builders in China fixed a firm definition onto the unit, making one
li
equivalent to precisely 25/58ths of an English mile. Since the Yangtze measures 3964 miles from source to sea, Wang Hui might consider his fancy vindicated: his ten-thousand-
li
river is 9200
li
from end to end – near enough.

*
Yellow, the quintessential Chinese Imperial colour, was only allowed to be worn by the Emperor and Princes of the Blood Royal.

*
There had been all kinds of problems. The ships owned by the company had all been built in East Germany for the Volga trade and drew three feet more than was permissible in this unusually low-water autumn. So a journey that normally took three days took five, and involved two boats and a day-long bus journey. The following day the same bus, performing the same portage, crashed, killing three passengers.

*
Bunds – waterfront roads – exist in the foreign settlements all along the Yangtze, as well as in Calcutta. But in Hong Kong the road was named the Praya, a linguistic infection prompted by the closeness of Macau, which was run by the Portuguese.

*
The efforts of foreign hydrographers were once memorialized along the entire Chinese coastline, from Charlotte Point (near the frontier with today's North Korea) via Shovel-Nosed Shark Island and the Bear and Cubs (outside what was then called Ningpo), Crocodile Island and the Three Chimneys (by the former Foochow), the Cape of Good Hope and the Asses Ears (near the former Amoy), Cape Bastion (China's most southerly point) to Nightingale or Merryman's Island, in the Gulf of Tonkin. But since the 1950s these names have generally vanished. They went not only because of Communism's crusading zeal: the admiralties in London and Washington realized quite quickly that the Chinese had already named everything, and had inscribed the names on their own charts, hundreds of years before any foreign nation had even started to build ships.

*
He was released in 1975 but was never allowed to publish his poems again and died in 1980. His daughter insists his heart was broken.

*
And excessively bulky pigs at that: Chongming Dao pig farmers were once notorious through all China for injecting their market-bound carcasses with water, to increase the weight and the market price.

*
Given that bars are created whenever one moving body of water meets another – when a river meets the ocean, or a lake, or when a river meets another river – it should be added that there is technically a second Yangtze bar, at the place where the river meets the sea, and which Victorian hydrographers named the Fairy Flats. It is two miles wide, and at one time it limited river traffic to ships drawing less than eighteen feet. On a stormy day it can be a furious place – Tennyson would have loved it. But nowadays it no longer really exists – not as a hazard to navigation. In 1935 the Whangpoo Conservancy Board embarked on a scheme to dredge five million tons of mud away from it each year: a channel through Fairy Flats, twenty-seven feet deep at least, is now permanently guaranteed.

*
They already had the deck of an old Australian carrier, stripped off the hull and bolted onto an aerodrome runway near Beijing, where it was used for practice.

*
Much the same atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy surrounded the construction of the first telegraph cable, which also came into China via Woosung. A Danish company built it, but was told that the infernal cable could not touch any part of the Celestial Empire, but had to be landed on a hulk, moored out in the river. The Danes ignored this and paid the cable secretly out along the Whangpoo, bringing it ashore at night, in a hut. It was some while before the Court found out, by which time the telegraph's value had been indisputably proven.

*
The Prisoner
, with Patrick McGoohan.

*
When funds ran low the city government created a private company to run the tower, and floated shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Hotel rooms inside the larger pearls will produce, the owners trust, enough of a profit to keep the investors – the Shanghai public – at least happy enough not to want to storm the structure and tear it down.

*
It was actually the American Henry Wolcott's Stars and Stripes that flew first in Shanghai, because the British took a while to acquire a flagpole.

*
It commemorates the second great campaign of the 1949 revolution, when Mao's soldiers advanced from the Huai River to the sea, and were thus poised to take Shanghai.

*
The old man was deluded. Official, but unpublished, figures say that there were 300,000 unemployed in the city in 1996.

*
Academics continue to pore over the saga. A study in the
China Quarterly
showed that in 1903 Regulation Number 1 on the notice board of what was then called the Recreation Ground said ‘No dogs or bicycles are admitted’, and Regulation Number 5, several inches below, read ‘No Chinese are admitted, except servants in attendance upon foreigners.’ That was as close as dog ever came to Chinaman – close enough, though, for the mythmakers (the first of whom was an American journalist named Putnam Weale, who wrote a novel in 1914 mentioning the supposed sign).

*
Mao's revolutionary troops entered, on Wednesday 25 May 1949 without any break in the city routine, except that an insomniac radio listener noted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was played over and over again during the night. When morning came the Communists were in firm control.

*
The trip (in 1986), the first to China by a reigning British monarch, had not been a success, and there was much fodder for the tabloid press. Prince Philip, the Queen's prickly consort, had remarked tactlessly to a Scottish student in Xian that if he stayed much longer he would risk getting ‘slitty eyes’. One paper thereafter referred to him as ‘The Great Wally of China’.

*
His position was wrong by about seventy-five miles. But he can hardly be blamed: his charts were torn to pieces and soaked in officers' blood.

*
So named by George Orwell, only four years before.

*
At one time the project's overseer was a peculiarly cruel man named Ma Shumou, better known as Mahu, the Barbarous One. He was said to have eaten a steamed two-year-old child each day he worked on the Canal – and to this day naughty children are warned by their mothers to behave, ‘or else Mahu will get you!’

*
The Taiping Rebellion, led by a man named Hong Xiuquan who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, is thought today to have been the most destructive war of all time: twenty million people are said to have died during its fourteen years. Frederick Townsend Ward, an American, and Charles ‘Chinese' Gordon, a Briton who later died a hero in Khartoum, led the Chinese Ever-Victorious Army in successfully defending Shanghai from the Taiping onslaught.

*
It is possible, through judicious use of skeleton keys or a credit card, to open the locked steel door that leads from a staircase in one of the bridge towers, out onto the forbidden railway deck. There can be few more unforgettable sights of raw industrial majesty than this – an endlessly vanishing abyss of iron latticework, the thundering of the trucks speeding overhead, the roaring of the swirling waters streaming by below, and then an express train, its headlights burning brilliantly, rushing towards you at full tilt.