Barbarian Lost (12 page)

“What a rare individual!” Viv says.

“That's probably more peace than we'll ever see,” I blurt out, thinking of our hungry and agitated souls.

“The Taoists urge us to be like a rock in a river. The rock doesn't move even as all the water of the world passes overtop,” Viv muses.

All the monkeys said to each other:

Wonder where that water comes from.

Got nothing else to do,

why not follow it up to its source?

—Wu Cheng'en,
Journey to the West
, 1592

The riverboats are docked way below the city. As I approach the cruise terminal from the city street, high up on the edge of the cliff, the terminal seems more suited to zeppelins than ships. The banks of the river are so high and steep that a funicular actually brings passengers down from the terminal to the docks.

“Who takes these cruises?” I ask Vivien.

“Tourists, I presume. Chinese tourists, that is. The Yangtze landscapes are famous in China. Everyone wants to see them at least once.”

“Maybe the building of the dam on the Yangtze means that people want to see the gorges before they are altered by the rising waters.”

“This was surely true a couple of years ago before they started rising,” she says, “but the dam's nearly complete, and I think the waters have already risen over a hundred metres. So maybe the
opposite is now true. Maybe they're less interested in the flooded landscape. We'll see.”

The glassed-in car slides down a near-vertical track to the docks. The slow descent offers a terrific view of the confluence of the Jialing and the Yangtze at Chongqing. Our trip will take us down the Yangtze, but our moorage is on the Jialing. From above, one can see that the two big rivers are quite distinctly coloured: the Jialing is dark blue; the Yangtze is brown with silt. Where they meet, the clear Jialing disappears into the muddy Yangtze, as if it never existed at all.

Viv and I are heading down the Yangtze as far as the great dam. The cruise will take four days. We too are curious to see the river, the landscape and the Three Gorges Dam.

“It'll be like a lesson in Chinese geography,” I say to Viv, listing off not only elements of physical geography but human ones as well, for the Yangtze impacts inhabitation, agriculture, transportation and energy.

“Don't forget the arts,” Viv adds. “All the beautiful poems and paintings about the Yangtze.”

“Yes, never forget the arts.”

“Frankly, I'm worried that this journey might prove a sad one,” she says. “The destruction of a natural wonder.”

At the river's edge, the funicular opens onto a network of floating elevated docks. A huge wall of brown earth looms at our backs, extending way up to the now mysterious city above. As we walk along the gangway to our ship, I look down and back toward the shoreline. It almost isn't there, as if the landscape isn't quite finished. It's just a line where dark water hits vertical earth. The opposite shore is a distant greenish-grey blur. All around us: big water, big mountain, big city. It's enough to make one's heart beat faster.

Some seventy-five metres long and four storeys high, our riverboat floats before us—a flat-bottomed barge-like construction with low gunwales, painted black along the bottom and white everywhere else. The bottom floor, at water level, is fourth class: two large collective cabins with a few wooden benches. The engine room and crew quarters are also down there. But this is all beneath us, since the gangway leads us across to the second floor and into the main lobby, an open area at the centre of the ship where the front desk and a convenience store are located. Hallways lead both forward and aft to third-class dorm rooms, each containing a dozen or so stacked berths. Rough enough travel.

Dressed in white-and-navy polyester uniforms with neckerchiefs and caps, two young women greet us in the lobby, take our tickets and usher us up the main staircase in the usual birdsong Mandarin of hostesses. Second class, one floor up, still feels rudimentary. I peek through open doors at hostel-style berths, maybe six to a room. Finally, the top deck's forward section is first class. Simple, somewhat clean twin rooms with the smallest of private bathrooms—a shower stall, tiny sink and a squat toilet instead of a drain.

“By the looks of it, I would say that this boat isn't just for tourists,” Viv comments. “I don't think the third- or fourth-class passengers are on this boat for fun. It must be a cheap way to get somewhere if you have the time.”

“Even first class is good value for three nights' accommodation and several hundred kilometres worth of transportation.”

“And we can use the front and back observation decks,” she says. “The best places on the boat, I'm sure.”

Before long, we've taken position on the exclusive if tiny front deck, eager to see our big boat push off. For a few minutes,
there is a flurry of activity on the dock and on the lower decks as moorings are released, then engines roar and the ship powers into the flow. It quickly cuts across the Jialing to come into the Yangtze parallel to the current, leaving the city peninsula and docks fast behind.

Softened by a white haze, Chongqing goes on busily for a good while above us, but down on the Yangtze, it's an increasing abstraction. The inscrutable river, milky and brown, becomes our reality. Ripples and bulges, like glimpses of serpents and dragons' backs concealed beneath a film, undulate to remind us that the river is in constant movement.

Rivers are strange to look at for what they are. Raindrops or snowflakes, of course. And before them, clouds, drifting into mountains. And before that, oceans in the sun. All these things so diffuse and multiple, all coming together as a solid, single thing—a river. Looking at the undulating surface, at the drifting yet stable mass, is it a moment that we see? An instant of each of those things, all moving one step downhill together? No, we gaze at a continuous motion in a circuit, underfoot and overhead. A happening in both the heavens and on earth. Something beginning and ending over and over again. Something timeless and complete.

The aft area of the top deck is roofed over but open. It has a number of booths and tables. A counter displays beverages and snacks on offer. Two floors down, the ship's restaurant proper is a windowed-in space at the back of third class. Shabby but splendid, with traditional Chinese round tables bearing dirty tablecloths and, luckily, never full. Most passengers seem to have brought
their own food, to eat in their rooms. As for us, we'd return to the restaurant three times a day for its cold beer by the big bottle and salty, oily but reasonably diverse food for small money.

After dinner I wander down to the bottom deck. Unlike the decks above, where cabins with windows line the sides of the boat, the lower deck has open walkways wrapping around the whole ship. The engine room and passenger cabins are closed chambers at the centre of the ship; the place is gloomy and empty. A swift breeze washes down the corridor, but the noise of the motor and the smell of diesel are still strong. The dark water now so close washes by. Downward into the night we go.

China is a country of mountains, an uphill country. From the shores of the Pacific in the east, it rises progressively as one moves westward. Along its southwest border is Earth's highest mountain, Mount Everest, at 8,848 metres. A single high point among a sea of high peaks, it is but a small part of one of planet Earth's most important topographical features: the Himalayan range and the Tibetan Plateau.

I get a strange look when I tell Viv that India is perhaps the key to understanding China. I let her scratch her head a little—perhaps she's thinking about Buddhism. Then I tell her that it is a geographical fact, not a historical or cultural one. India is a tectonic plate, and some fifty million years ago it smashed into the south flank of the Eurasian plate, causing the land to buckle up high over a vast area. The consequences of this are far-ranging. The Yangtze River is but one small consequence of this giant topographical event.

Not just the Yangtze but all the great rivers of the Far East are in fact born of these mountains—the Indus, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Pearl,
the Yellow and even perhaps the Amur. Each draws its water from precipitation from clouds pushed up and against the rising terrain of the India-China orogeny, the mountain-making event.

Mountains are a climatic force. Push clouds up against them and they will drop their water. So the higher one goes, the drier the air is. Above the clouds, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau are vast, high, cold deserts, more akin to the Arctic than the subtropics of northern India and eastern China that they border. Great civilizations sprang up at the feet of these mountains because on their shoulders oceans of evaporated water fall and from their bellies great rivers come forth and nourish many fertile plains.

In human time, this bulging landmass has been a permanent feature, even a mythic barrier. From an Afrocentric view, China is at the far end of the mountains. Around or through them, it's a long arduous journey to get there. This hasn't meant that humans didn't get to China repeatedly. We need only imagine
Homo erectus
working their way around the mountains to go die in the Choukoutien Caves as the Peking Man and his kin three-quarters of a million years ago. Or hundreds of thousands of years later,
Homo sapiens
pushing through India on the way east, then down toward Southeast Asia or up along the Pacific Rim.

The mountains did not stop humans from getting to China. But they meant that movements back and forth around and through them were curtailed. China was at the end of the road, and its approaches protected. It evolved in relative isolation—relative compared with the territory between the Indus and the Ganges, the Nile valley, and the Mesopotamian or Danube plains, through which successive waves of humans rolled, repeatedly bringing great changes to genetics, culture and language.

I awake to find our ship moored against another riverboat. I draw the window curtain and see another curtained window. I hear a couple arguing, unseen in the cabin beyond. Before long, the ship is off again. The river remains fathomless, its bottom masked by the silty liquid it carries.

The morning air is hot, and although we are moving, it feels somewhat still. Again a white haze softens the landscape. By mid-morning it's not a pleasant effect, more a dulling one. The thick air blurs the contours of sky, mountain and river and stamps out the colours.

“When do we hit the flood zone?” I ask Viv.

“I think we already have.”

“That would mean we are now on a lake. Or a reservoir.”

“Yes, I guess,” she answers.

“Amazing. We only just left. We have three more days of water ahead. By the looks of it, the reservoir will reach Chongqing as it continues to rise.”

“Somewhere around here is a famous stone carving of a fish; it used to show where the river's lowest water level was. Now the whole thing's deep underwater.”

“Yeah, a great drowning,” I say.

“All the riverside communities for several hundred kilometres are now also gone. It's sad,” Viv says.

“I read that in the gorges, cargo ships were once pulled up the current by humans with huge ropes.”

“That's true.”

“Must have been a fairly miserable existence.”

“Of course. The worst,” Viv admits.

“And now container ships power their way from the Pacific to Chongqing. And in an apartment building somewhere, the
rope pullers' great-grandchildren live lives devoid of all their forefathers' physical suffering. Maybe they work in a factory that produces goods that will be sold into Western markets. Possibly they are now consumers of products manufactured far away and delivered to them by water. An improvement, no?”

“I'm not nostalgic for the old days, Sacha. But one can feel the loss of riverside life without endorsing the old hardships.”

“But aren't we all a bit nostalgic? Wasn't beauty an easier thing when humans were still only bit players?”

“Yes. Like the ancient landscape paintings: idealized depictions of harmony in nature without human presence.”

“Now we must seek beauty in giant skyscrapers and huge dams,” I say with a smile.

“I'll take reeds gently swaying in the current over square concrete and steel,” she counters.

“Yes, but at what cost? Filth and darkness for your peers?”

Chinese history is one of geographic transformation. As far back as the semi-mythic Xia dynasty around the second millennium before Christ, China struggled to tame the Yellow River, on whose banks and tributaries disparate tribes had long been collecting. Massive as they are, both the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers flow from deep within vast and high mountain ranges. They preserve something of spring torrents, but on a formidable scale. With the rivers' upper reaches all in steep mountain valleys and no lazy plains or wetlands to absorb and moderate the runoff, the water comes gushing forth onto the territory that proved so bountiful to early Chinese tribes.

The deposits of silt that made for such reliable agriculture owed their existence to the very same mechanism that brought danger: fast-flowing rivers grinding away at mountains, then bursting
out onto flatter ground, laying down their mineral wealth over a wide area and periodically altering course as the water broke through the banks and new channels emerged. As perennial as they were—and necessary for building the rich soils—the floods routinely devastated the farming communities set up along the banks of the rivers.

The annals tell of how the Yu family dedicated itself to trying to control the floods at the behest of an early Yellow River potentate. The father built walls against the current, but the levees ceded to the water pressure and actually worsened the floods. For his failures, father Yu was put to death. Tasked to succeed where his father had failed, Yu the younger channelled the current where it would seek to overflow. It worked. For this feat, he earned the title of Yu the Great, was made the chosen successor of the king and founded the legendary Xia dynasty at the beginning of Chinese history, forever connecting water management with political power in China.