The River at the Centre of the World (43 page)

Exploration soon put paid to that theory. A Ming dynasty geographer named Xu Xiake looked closely at the Min, and found that it splits into its various capillaries and minor tendrils only about 500 miles above Yibin. Even the most ambitious source-searcher could not discover a spring or a glacier that was more than 500 farther miles upriver from that. But Xu went on to discover that the Jinsha Jiang, by contrast, burrows into the hills for nearly 2000 miles – changing its name above the town and the bridge at Yushu to the Tongtian He, the River to Heaven. This, Xu reasoned, must be the origin-stream of the Yangtze.

Later travels confirmed that this must be so – if only because the Jinsha and its tributaries were so very long. The Tongtian He, it was found out two centuries later, went on to attract three substantial tributaries – the Qumar, which brings waters down from the north; the Dam Qu, which swirls in from the south; and seemingly most powerfully of all, the Tuotuo, which comes directly from the high snow peaks of the west. Which of these three rivers is actually the origin-stream has been a matter of debate and wonder for much of the last half of this century.

The Qumar was discounted early on: it had neither the water volume, the length nor the altitude to be a serious candidate. Its attraction lay simply in the fact that it vanished, and that it did so into some of the wildest and least hospitable plateau land on earth. The Tibetan Plateau has fewer than three people inhabiting each hundred square miles – it is a place of many black yaks, a few black tents, huge expanses of grass, sudden outcrops of rock and ice and an endless, endless sky.

The Tuotuo and the Dam Qu, however, were real candidates, and in 1976 the China Geographic Research Institute dispatched a serious expedition from Beijing, armed with systematic methods, to determine which was the true source. After a summer in the field these explorers decided it was the Tuotuo, and specifically that the Yangtze began its 3964-mile journey to the sea in a tiny lake called Qemo Ho, which lay at the foot of the Jianggudiru Glacier, at the base of the 21,723-foot-high mountain called Gelandandong. For nine years this spot remained the official source – and to many it remains so today.

But in 1985 the American National Geographic Society sponsored an expedition of its own. A group of explorers led by a Hong Kong Chinese named Wong How Man first went back to the Qemo Ho source; then doubled back to the point where the Dam Qu river splits from the Tuotuo and headed to the source of that – their argument being that more water appeared to stream into the Tongtian He from the Dam Qu than from the Tuotuo. If it was the more powerful stream
and
if it was longer, then its beginning should be officially considered to be the source.

And longer the Dam Qu turned out to be – though by a little more than a mile. The explorers headed east, following the Dam Qu's great recurving path to a point where it split into two tiny streams, the Shaja, which headed south, and the Guangzhuguo, which meandered to the north. The Shaja was short, the Guangzhuguo half as long again – and it petered out into (or rather, started from) a small and clear pool lying at the base of a hill that the local Tibetans call Jari.
*

This, according to Wong's claim – which was backed up by an official Chinese report in 1986 – was almost certainly the true, technical source of the Yangtze. It was nearly a full mile lower than the Tuotuo's source in the glacial lake, but it was one and a half river miles further away from the sea, and it provided much more water. It lies at 32° 7' North, 94°6' East, is at a height of 18,750 feet above sea level, and is 3965 miles from the ocean.

So the choice for anyone wanting to journey down the entire length is this: whether to accept this tiny and unnamed meadowland lake as the source, and so journey from Jari Hill, down along the Guangzhuguo, the Dam Qu and the Tongtian He to the Jinsha Jiang and finally onto the Chang Jiang proper; or to begin at the icebound Qemo Ho (Qemo Lake), then pass down the entire length of the Tuotuo, and only then join the Dam Qu.

Drama tended to force the choice. All would-be explorers of the river seemed to want the very same thing: to begin their journeys at the foot of a mountain range, in a lake that was surrounded by a frieze of blue-white glaciers. This setting was by far the more dramatic. It had the look of a great river's source: it was not merely a place of muddy oozings from a dismal and half-frozen Tibetan pasture. Mount Gelandandong was part of the poetry of the great river: it was how Wang Hui's painting had captured it, in the seventeenth-century imagination: it began among the clouds, spilling from ice and snow, emerging with grace from the heavens. Gelandandong was just right – it was
spiritually appropriate
.

And so when, in 1985, a thirty-two-year-old freelance photographer named Yao Mao-shu decided that he would try to become the first person ever to float the entire length of his country's greatest river, he arranged to begin his epic at the base of the mountains, and set his raft on the crystal cold waters of Qemo Ho.

He was powerfully motivated. The year before he had heard that an American team was planning to raft the river, and he had applied to go with them, but had been turned down. His dander was up. Why should the honours for such a conquest go to barbarians? The river was part of the soul and fabric of China. Only a Chinese should have the right of such triumph. He, Chinese to his very core, would go off alone, and would conquer the great river himself.

He was a tough and resourceful young man, and alone in his twelve-foot craft he went through the hell of the upper reaches with dignity and courage. After 600 miles he arrived at Yushu, and blurted out his adventures – of catching and trying to tame a lynx for company, of being threatened by wolves, of coming across an island filled with thousands of swan eggs, of going hungry for days, of being ice-cold, of being so terribly lonely in the Tibetan plains that he felt he would go quite mad. They liked him in Yushu and gave him fresh supplies, and when he drifted off downstream again the whole town wished him well.

But he never made it. Somewhere in the canyons where the River to Heaven becomes the River of Golden Sand, Yao's boat, the
Dragon's Descendant
, capsized. His body was found by herdsmen, drifting in an eddy in a downstream calm. He left a widow back in Chengdu. And he left a China that – once the tragic tale had been told around the nation – became suddenly determined to avenge his death, by conquering the river once and for all, by concerted Chinese effort, the following year.

The expedition that the luckless young Yao Mao-shu had wanted to join was led by a man who had wanted to run the Yangtze ever since 1976, when he had paddled down the white waters of one of the origin-streams of the Ganges, on the other side of the Himalayas. He was named Ken Warren; and the fact that he patted his mane of white hair into shape with mousse, and that in 1986 he took a case of said mousse along as part of the ten tons of supplies with which he intended to beat the Yangtze, should have been warning enough that he was never the man to do it.

This one-time vitamin salesman – who began his attempt on the river by praying before the cameras at the source, affecting tears and pleading with choking voice, ‘Oh beautiful Yangtze… we ask you to take care of us and we promise you no harm' – led an expedition that turned out to be both a failure and a disaster.

One man – a young photographer from Idaho named David Shippee – died of altitude sickness along the way; four other members of the expedition deserted because of Warren's questionable leadership; and when the going became too rough for comfort – when the rapids in the Tongtian He became too dangerous, too unrunnable – then Warren himself walked out on the remainder of the party. The Americans' permit to raft on the river expired when they were still 3000 miles short
*
of their intended goal – a fact that did not prevent Warren from declaring to the television cameras that what he had done really had been a success, that he would be back for more, and would return to the river with a ‘secret weapon' that would defeat the rapids that had thus far defeated him.

Ken Warren was an essentially disagreeable figure – but he was handsome, and exceptionally telegenic. The film which ABC-TV commissioned of his expedition, and which was paid for by the sponsoring insurance company, Mutual of Omaha, suggests that the expedition was honourably conducted and even heroic. But once it was over, and sober questioning replaced the hyperbole and the flattery to which television and its subjects can fall prey, so the truths about the expedition's lamentable organization and leadership began to emerge, and the bitterness began.

Margit Shippee, the widow of the dead photographer, sued for her husband's wrongful death; Warren in turn sued the four men who had abandoned him; and the whole fiasco vanished within a miasma of costly lawsuits and acrimony. Warren himself died in the early nineties, and today on the Yangtze his name is ill regarded indeed. One Chinese boatman to whom I mentioned the name simply shuddered, and remarked caustically that ‘this American above all should not have been allowed to come onto the river.’

Inevitably, and perhaps properly, it eventually fell to the Chinese to become the winners of the dangerous and often fatal competition to be the first to ‘conquer' the Yangtze. The contest was already well under way in the summer of 1986. By the time the Warren team had stage-whispered its prayers and set off, no fewer than six Chinese expeditions (one of them with our friend from Panzhihua, Wu Wei) had already set out from the Gelandandong glacier-lake source. They remained well ahead. By the time the Americans had pushed their boats off in early summer the leaders of these Chinese parties had reached more than a thousand miles downriver – and yet, tragically, already three of their number were dead. (It was first thought that eight had died: but in fact five from two of the competing parties were found safe and sound. After their boat had shattered on a rock they had clambered up the walls of a canyon and survived for days on a diet of leaves, roots and snails.)

Once matters had thus begun to become more dramatically dangerous on the river, official China unexpectedly began to take an interest. Up until now the political leadership in Beijing had looked on these home-grown efforts merely as a way of avenging the previous year's tragic death of Yao Mao-shu, who, with his good looks and his clear-eyed idealism, had become something of a minor national hero. Now, with three of the youngsters who were trying to shoot the rapids again already dead, the effort began to assume, as had Mao's swim thirty years before, the familiarly powerful man-versus-river symbolism. What was being attempted out on the Yangtze, the political leadership in Beijing decided, was now nothing less than a trial of national honour, a test of the modernization that had been brought about by the glories of socialism and the command economy. All efforts should be poured into the attempt, it was said: the youth of China should be helped and supported and egged on in the nobility of their cause.

And so by midsummer all China's eyes were on their great river, and on the teams of men who were daring to try to conquer it. The rafters, it was clear, now feared the worst from a river that was proving far more dangerous than they had anticipated. Most of the members of four teams swiftly dropped out, and those remaining were by midsummer grouped into just two competing crews, battling on gamely. These teams managed to raft all the way down from the Tibetan Plateau town of Yushu downstream to Dêgê and Batang, towns that are way stations on the great southward sweep of the river where it marks the frontier between Tibet and China Proper. They stopped, for rest and reconnaissance – reconnaissance mostly – at Qiatou, by the willow trees, and at the point where Lily and I had strolled and where the stream looked innocently placid like the Thames at Bablockhythe. They then walked, just as we had, along the perilously narrow path of the Gorge, and they dodged beneath the marble quarries, where the prisoners even back then were prising loose the tumbling slabs. They came to see and study and examine, with ever-mounting apprehension, that first rapid – the sixty-foot half-horizontal Niagara of a monster known variously as the Upper Tiger Leaping or the Upper Hutiao Shoal. It was, they thought at first from where they stood, quite unrunnable.

But then one of the teams had an idea. They built an enclosed capsule-raft out of rubber inner tubes, added a tightly fitting pneumatic doorway to one side, and lashed everything together so that it looked like a squat Michelin Man. They carried this down to the waters just above the Upper Tiger Leaping Rapid, found an unsuspecting dog, placed an oxygen mask onto its face, thrust it inside the raft, sealed up the door and kicked the capsule out into the stream. The vessel, highly buoyant and cushion-soft, careened out into the cauldron of foam and, after turning over and over a dozen times, vanishing deep into the yards-deep foam, flying up into the air, hurtling off sharp rocks and slamming itself against the canyon banks, bobbed out into the calmer waters below the rapid, still afloat. But the door had been ripped off, and the dog was missing, never to be found again.

With a logic that can only be fully understood by a Chinese, this first test run was considered to have been a success – as in ‘the operation went very well, but the patient died’. So they built a second of these seemingly unsinkable rubber capsules, this one slightly larger – for humans, not dogs. On the morning of 10 September 1986 two of the party's more experienced members – one, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher named Lei Jiansheng; the other, a boiler worker at a railway station, a thirty-two-year-old named Li Qingjian – climbed inside the capsule, and Lei read a brief statement to the watching crowd:

I think China is one of the greatest nations, but its development is hindered by some backward ideas. We should encourage the opening up of minds, and the spirit of adventure. Rafting the Yangtze is a very small wave in the long river of history, but it is worthwhile if it can help move forward the development of our country.