The River at the Centre of the World (7 page)

Captain Zhu looked about fifty, was slightly overweight and sweated a lot. His face was marked, for me anyway, by a single long hair that extended from a mole on his chin, curving as it did so. It looked like a wire that had been stripped for connection to a plug: I wanted it to be half-sheathed in red plastic. It was considered bad luck to cut it, Lily explained. The captain did not wear a uniform – just a yellowed cotton sleeveless singlet, a pair of ragged blue pants and sneakers. He laughed as he warmed to his theme, that of securing the nation.

‘You are a spy? We think all
lao wai
are wanting to know too many things about China. Why you are so curious? We are not curious about you.’ The bridge clerk, alerted by this exchange, hurriedly wrote my name into the ship's log – an exercise book with a red flag gummed onto the cover.

The captain swept his glasses along a fairway that was now becoming quite crowded with vessels. Some of the ships passed close enough, and I could read their names on the stern. There was an ore carrier from Australia, bringing iron from Mount Newman to the steel mills at Baoshan. There were a couple of squat oil tankers, Panama-registered, lying slow and sluggish in the water, their anchor nostrils flaring just above the surface. Three Indian bulk carriers, their plates streaked with rust, new names written over the old, lumbered out to sea.

A Russian reefer registered in Vladivostok was speeding in more jauntily, probably in ballast. Perhaps, I thought, she was coming to collect a cargo of pork. A wild surmise perhaps – but one that stemmed from a strange journey I had made during a planning trip a few weeks beforehand. I had booked a flight from Canton to Turkestan and was somewhat surprised to find that I was not boarding a Chinese aircraft, but an old Ilyushin dressed in Aeroflot colours, and with an Aeroflot crew. I asked the captain why – what was a Russian plane doing flying a domestic Chinese route?

He said it was a simple barter deal: Russia had too many planes and China too few, and China had – I asked him to repeat this – too many pigs and Russia not enough. So for every round-trip plane journey between Canton and Urümqi – the Russians providing the plane and the crew, the Chinese the fuel and the food – Moscow charged the Chinese government twenty railway boxcars of pork. Some of the animals went to Moscow by the Trans-Siberian Railway, others, the captain had said, by ship. ‘Down the Yangtze,’ I remembered him saying. ‘They have many pigs in that valley there.’

A buzz of smaller boats wove their way dangerously among the slow-moving cargo vessels. Many were fishing boats, and to judge from the huge silver arc lights that were suspended on bamboo poles from their bridge wings, they were off to hunt for cuttlefish, at night. Astronauts have reported seeing a diamond-dust twinkle on the black ink of the sea out here: scores of cuttlefish boats out at night on the waters between China and Korea. These passing craft would have been members of that little fleet, probably utterly ignorant that they were visible (unlike the much more frequently touted Great Wall, which can't be seen) from outer space.

The river went on narrowing, steadily. On the right now was a low and treeless bulk of mud-and-misery known as Chongming Dao, the Tongue of the Yangtze – so called because on the maps it does look just like a lolling tongue, poised halfway between the open jaws of the river. It had once been a place of banishment, like Sakhalin, and the men sent there did little but build dikes to protect the island and their prison from being inundated. During the Cultural Revolution a Shanghainese poet whose daughter I know well was sent there to prepare the land for raising pigs.
*
Now, thanks to the labours of men like him and his predecessors, the island is quite fertile: a million people live on Chongming Island, farming rice, raising ducks, planting cotton.

On the left – and here the total river width was now down to about ten miles – I could just see the first buildings, the first evidence of real human settlement. There were the usual constructions of a coastline: a chimney or two, a cluster of radio masts, a water tower, barracks. Then, after another mile, a tall building, maybe a block of workers' flats.

No pagodas, though. I had very much doubted that I would see a pagoda on this coast – the people who live here, on the drying mudflats of the estuary, have long been isolated from the mainstream Chinese and from their customs. They are darker, almost Malay in their appearance, a little like the aboriginals who are to be found in central Taiwan. These never were a pagoda-building people; and any hopes I might have had for spying a graceful structure of nine slightly fluted storeys, with upcurved eaves, a delicate spire and arched windows overgrown with kudzu, and from which I could imagine some Tang duke gazing out toward the ocean in the moonlight – all such hopes were quite in vain.

These people lived on mud; they paddled their sampans down a labyrinth of small canals, they contentedly raised ducks and rice and they fished for squid. An early guide warns Europeans that the mud-people ‘are not altogether free from piratical tendencies’. But then came civilization, of a kind: someone came and built a factory, and slapped up some modern hulk of cement and iron. This was about all I could see – mud and grey reinforced cement. There was certainly precious little drama about this particular approach to China – this was indeed no Verrazano Narrows, no Pool of London. Captain Zhu saw me looking at the coast. ‘Soon there will be a golf club there,’ he spat. ‘A country club for rich Shanghai people.’ He didn't sound too pleased.

We were into a fairway now. The marker buoys came more regularly, and most of the ever increasing armada of ships seemed to be obeying rules of the road in the dredged channels – the inbound vessels were sticking to the right, the outbound to the left. A radar tower reared above the brilliant yellow of a rapeseed field, its thumbnail-shaped scanner turning languidly, noting all the ships passing underneath, missing nothing. But the river was starting to look crowded, dangerously so. I mentioned it to the captain.

‘They say it's the most dangerous approach in the world,’ he replied, cheerfully. ‘I've seen some foreign masters freeze, just stop their ships, not knowing what to do. Coming in for the first time can be quite terrifying. Even with a pilot aboard. There are sandbanks that pop up out of nowhere. Whirlpools.

‘The tide is terribly erratic. You can get a flood a thousand miles away and it sends a surge of water down the Yangtze and
poof
, it blows the tide back in its tracks. There are wrecks everywhere. You see a mast in the water and there's no buoy marking it and you think, My God! what if I hadn't seen it? What if there hadn't been anything poking up out of the water? What if I'd just sailed into it?’

Lily nodded. She said she had once worked for a man who had a ship-breaking business a few miles upriver. She was still interested, and had made it her business to know all about the wrecks in the Yangtze mouth. One of her boss's ships, a thirty-year-old bulk carrier that he had bought for scrap in Manila and was having towed to his breakers' yard, had capsized in the river just the week before. One of the tug captains was said to have been drunk, and had no idea where he was going.

‘I know the ship! I know it!’ exclaimed Zhu, warming to the task. ‘It was a big one – twelve thousand tons. It hit the side of a sandbank and just turned over. Right over there.’ He pointed towards a patch of sludge-coloured river a mile off our starboard beam. ‘Now – do you see a wreck buoy, one of the green ones? No – not a thing. No one's gotten round to marking it. There's nothing to tell anything's there. Only a few people know about it. But the fact is there's a great big ship lying down there, in just three fathoms of water. So easy to hit it. It'd rip the bottom from a tanker, just like a sushi knife! Very dangerous!

‘And there's more! Not just the wrecks and the sand. There's all the traffic. They have wrecks in Calcutta, on the Hooghly. Lots of sand there, too. What's the big bank there – the St James's Bank? That's a bad one, I remember. I went up the Hooghly once. They have a Bund there, don't they? Just like us. But they don't have the traffic. Who wants to go to Calcutta, after all?

‘But here – what do they say officially – a thousand ships a day? That's only the ones with radios and radar reflectors. There are thousands more that have no marks at all, no lights, nothing. You try to keep out of their way, you run into a sandbank and,
bang
. Look – see if there's a red flag up on the bar there. There usually is at this time of day. That's the signal station, where they keep an eye on things. That'll tell you how bad the traffic is.’

Sure enough, two miles ahead and waving lazily in the hot breeze, was an enormous flag. The
Admiralty Pilot
explains: ‘When the number of junks manoeuvring in the channel at Wusong Kou is such as to make navigation difficult, a red flag shall be hoisted.’ And as if to underscore the flag's warning, there were scores of black dots on the waters ahead, like a vast floating business of flies. Some were large ships that moved slowly across my field of view; the others, the smaller vessels, darted almost furtively back and forth on their appointed business.

They dart where once they glided. The junks on nearly all the reaches of the Lower Yangtze have motors these days, not sails. It is a rare delight to see the distinctive shape of a classic Chinese junk – the peaked lugsail with its die-straight luff and sinuous leech and with the heavy bamboo battens jutting from the edges. But the bewildering variety of craft that scuttle between the riverbanks today performs much the same functions as the sailing junks did half a century ago – there are almost as many different designs of power vessels as there were of the old and much-loved sailing junks. Captain Zhu had a book of charts on the bridge that showed silhouettes of the different types – and at the back of the book, on pages that were less well-thumbed, were silhouettes of sailing junks as well.

Scores of subtly different designs were to be found on the pages, dozens of sizes, boats bent to innumerable tasks, a nautical bestiary. Flipping through the pages was like seeing a shadow play, the boats the cut-paper figures from a
Javan wayang
show. There were outlines of the long, low cotton boats from Chongming, which take raw cotton out to the markets of Shanghai, and return with what is politely called night soil, still the principal fertilizer on the great tongue-like mudflat. There were silhouettes of the pig boats also from Chongming, but larger and fatter and with a bulk that was easy to recognize. They had to be sturdy, since their business was with pigs
*
taken to market, people brought back. There were pictures of ice carriers that transport blocks frozen in the fields in midwinter – and which are kept insulated through the warmth of early spring by ingenious arrangements of straw and soil. There were broad-beamed fish carriers, made stoutly of pine to weather the estuary's storms and heavy seas and tide rips. It is said that the game of mah-jongg was invented by the crew of a Ningbo fish-carrying junk, who believed that by making up a game on which they had to concentrate their minds they might forget a discomfort which they couldn't understand, which we now know as seasickness.

But you don't see too many of these special craft. More often than not the smaller boats on this reach of the estuary would be the tiny stern-poled (and sailless) sampans, so called because they are made of three pieces of wood, compared with the five of the wupans – and on the day I arrived they seemed to be everywhere. I knew that once in a while one might see one of the larger vessels – like a long-distance coastal trading junk, or one of the special light-wood junks built so they can ride up and over the deadly bore that sweeps down into the funnel of Hangzhou Bay, on the far side of the Yangtze herself. But on this morning I saw neither of these bigger craft. Still, with all the activity that I could see from where I stood on deck, it was small wonder that the red warning flag was flying. Small wonder, too, that inspection cruisers like this one patrol the river ceaselessly, helping, watching, guarding.

On the left side – technically the right bank of the river, reckoned from the point of view of the water flowing downstream – there was a sudden burst of industry. Cooling towers exhaled tall florets of white cloud, cranes swung containers up from the decks of waiting ships, black rubbery umbilical cords sucked oil from waiting tankers, there was what appeared to be a mine building with two winding wheels rotating at speed, an array of great chimneys with strobe lights and with typhoon gantries bolted up their sides, to keep them standing in the storm winds of midsummer. In the distance, ranks of skyscrapers marched across the horizon. I could see the glint of the sun on hundreds of windshields as trucks and cars waited for a steam train to chuff by and let their drivers pass. The land was well established: the city was now beginning.

And Wusong Kou, where the flag was flying, was where it all really starts. True, the Gateway is the technical beginning or the technical end of the river; but Wusong Kou is the place that anyone with any sense of the romantic, anyone with any sense of history, regards as the terminus of the river proper. The Chinese know it by this name: the world's mariners, however, know it by a slight variation, by a name that is as familiar to their rollicking community as is Blood Alley or the Liver Building or Dundalk Docks.

This place, with its scarlet warning flag and its lighthouse and the twenty-foot dial of what looks like a clock, but is in fact the Whangpoo River Tide Gauge, is the spot where all vessels bound for Shanghai – which means most of the ships found in the estuary – turn left. It is, depending on your perspective, the beginning of the Yangtze proper, or the true end of a trip across a long, long sea. This spot on the river, formally marked by just a single red canister buoy, is known as the Woosung Bar.

A century ago Tennyson planted an image that has lasted longest: the bar as a place of danger and melancholy, where sailors wave their farewells, where the pilots wait to steer a mariner home. Crossing the Bar is an event: leaving, you pass from still waters into swells; returning, you take one last risk, since at the bar the sea has one last chance to toy with you, and toss you over in the foam. But if you do make it past – and on a gale-swept day the waves and spindrift on a river bar can make for a terrifying sight, and perilous navigation – then you are home, safe and sound.