The River at the Centre of the World (8 page)

The Woosung Bar is more benign, however, than anything Tennyson had in mind. It marks the spot where one river, the Whangpoo, meets the Yangtze.
*
The meeting is as calm as the meeting of most rivers: there is no line of breakers, no cloud of spume. It is not a dangerous place – but it is, and long has been, a wretched nuisance. It once caused great friction between East and West. It exercised the minds and pens of diplomats for scores of years. And all because a great tongue of Whangpoo mud and sand oozes endlessly out onto the bed of the Yangtze and, because the Yangtze waters are pushed and pulled back and forth by tide and flood, the mud stays more or less where it is, thickening all the time. The estuary is generally about fifty feet deep: at the Woosung Bar it shallows in places to no more than about twelve. The shallowing was a nineteenth-century cause célèbre.

The problem was never noticed by the Chinese of a century ago: they glided serenely up and down the rivers on sailing junks that drew ten feet, or even five. But when the foreign traders began to arrive, in iron ships that customarily drew twenty feet or more, they were in for some unpleasant surprises. Perhaps their leadsmen may have warned them in time: often they did not. A river that until the 1850s had been alive with moving traffic was, twenty years later, suddenly replete with barbarian vessels stopped dead in the water and hopelessly stuck.

Some had been stranded on their way in. Others, seemingly luckier, managed to get in, but then went to load themselves at the wharves with tons of rhubarb and tea and bolts of silk and sacks of rice – and then found they were drawing too much, that the bar would not let them get out. The local Lloyd's agent duly sent the cables home to London, warning of delay and demurrage. ‘The
Travancore
sailed out with the mails but was unable to cross the bar, and spent a whole day unloading her cargo into lighters to lessen her load…’ ‘I beg to report that the
Australia
was detained for five days at Woosung…’ ‘The French mail-steamer
Provence
was unable to reach Shanghae at all…’ It made a nonsense of the river as a trading route. The great artery of China, as barkers had already long been advertising the Yangtze, suddenly had a bad case of sclerosis.

By the mid-1870s merchants, weary of having their ships pinned by sand, began to lose their tempers. They wrote angry letters: the State of the Woosung Bar, which sounds today like a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, became a heated talking point in the coffeehouses of Cheapside and the bars on the Fulton Street waterfront.

An august-sounding body known as the Association for the Protection of Commercial Interests as Respects Wrecked and Damaged Property wrote to Lord Granville at the Foreign Office: the Bar, they said, is ‘an impediment to shipping… a cause for great anxiety’. It could be cleared, the technical people had advised the Association, without more than ordinary difficulty, and with no extravagant expense. Indeed it could, agreed Vice-Admiral Charles Shadwell, writing from his cabin on HMS
Iron Duke
in Hong Kong harbour. Chinese coolies could move the mud by hand, he said; their labour was very cheap. There was, in short, no practical reason why the Bar could not be cleared, and navigation allowed to move freely. It merely needed one thing: for ‘the superior authorities at Peking’ to give their permission.

But there, it turned out, was the rub. Peking, as it was called in the documents of the day, didn't seem to give a fig about the Bar. Haughty, aloof, unaware of all matters considered beneath their dignity, the Manchus in the Forbidden City paid no official attention to the wails of the red-haired, long-nosed
Uitlanders
. Privately they must have been delighted. What buffoons these foreigners were, indeed! Nothing much had changed, it seemed, since 1793, when Lord Macartney had tried in vain to cajole and flatter the Emperor of the day, and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. The diplomat had offered to the Celestial Throne the very best goods that Britain had ever made in an effort to win permission to do business, and to be recognized. But the Emperor was not remotely interested. The gifts were regarded as items of tribute from a respectful liege. Some boxes were never even opened. Macartney was asked to go home.

And the Emperor of eight decades later was similarly unbothered by the travails and demands of the foreign merchants. The dignity of the Long River, the Throne implied by its silence, was not to be sullied by such vulgarities as dredging, just because the barbarians wanted it so. Despite torrents of letters that passed between ambassadors and ministers and high dignitaries of the Manchu Court, nothing was done. ‘You should do all that you properly can to induce the Chinese government,’ wrote Lord Granville to his man on the spot, ‘to take steps for improving the condition on the bar.’ ‘I have sent three identic letters to the Prince,’ wrote the Earl of Derby. But it did no good. Prince Kung, the mandarin who was in charge of the Tsungli Yamen – the Office of the General Administration of the Affairs of Different Countries – did not even deign to reply.

It was not until the eve of the Revolution that was to end the rule of the emperors and princes that this impasse was ended. It was 1905: the Manchus were on their last legs and knew it, and in part because of weakness, in part as a placatory gesture that might work for their survival, they gave permission to the foreigners to begin their work. A Dutchman named de Rijke, an expert on the polders back home, was the first to bring in the dredging engines. By 1910 he had completed the first channel through the Bar. When the first Chinese president, the foreign-educated Sun Yat-sen, came home to China in 1912 he entered via the Yangtze – and he sailed symbolically to Shanghai through the foreign-engineered channel. In 1937 – just in time for the Japanese war, as it happened – the entire length of the Whangpoo was finally dredged, so that ships drawing twenty-eight feet could pass all the way from the Pacific Ocean, along the estuary of the Yangtze, up into the Whangpoo and right up to the wharves on the Bund.

The perils of the sands lessened, then vanished altogether. Shanghai duly took her place as one of the world's great trading cities, and the Yangtze made good on her promise to become a huge highway into the very heart of China. Yet had the Manchus remained in control in Beijing, it might never have been so. As a symbol of Chinese Imperial intransigence clashing head-on with western mercantile realism – or, viewed another way, as a symbol of ancient and home-grown pride clashing with an alien culture of greed – the sixty-year saga of the State of the Woosung Bar has few equals.

Yet the foreigners were not motivated merely by avarice. To those who knew its geography and its importance, the Yangtze was the principal gateway into the mysterious heart of the Middle Kingdom, the choicest place for the West's wholesale penetration of China. If major surgery was required to bring China to heel, then Woosung was the place where the anaesthetist should first sink his needle. When Sir George Balfour of the Madras Artillery arrived in 1843 to take up the post of Britain's consul to Shanghai, then nothing but a muddy, steamy village, he recognized and declared at once its strategic importance: ‘There our navy can float, and by our ships, our power can be seen and, if necessary, promptly felt. Our policy is the thorough command of this great river.’

A command that it would only be possible fully to exercise if the Woosung Bar was gone. It took almost a century to remove it. And then a little more than a decade later the British and all other foreign navies were banished from the river, for all time. Seen in this context, as a device for keeping the foreigners at bay, the Chinese intransigence over the matter has a shrewdness all of its own.

I watched the echo sounder as we passed over the Bar's submerged relics. It barely registered a change – the channel dug by the Dutchmen almost a century ago was nearly as deep as the river fairway. What had exercised so many minds for so many years was now quite invisible, utterly lacking in significance. And the red canister buoy that bobbed off our port beam – that, too, had an insignificance about it that belied its symbolism. For the buoy was Mile Zero for mariners sailing beyond, and into the Yangtze proper. The Zhong Sha light, now twenty miles behind us, was where the sea ended and the estuary began; the red Woosung buoy was where the estuary ended, and the Long River got under way. Captain Zhu sounded his siren and turned his little ship smartly to port. We passed out of the slight chop of the Yangtze proper and, once inside the curving breakwater, into the black and doubtless poisonously anoxic waters of the Whangpoo.

A squadron of Chinese ships – destroyers, frigates and corvettes – was moored on the left bank. They looked, I thought, decidedly unprepared either for the protection of China's maritime frontier or for war. Laundry was dangling from the stern of each craft, straw hats were perched on some of the after guns and the sailors were mooching about idly, smoking in the warming sun. Had these been British or American vessels the men would have been busily chipping paint, greasing bearings, polishing brass or holystoning the decks: here they looked as though they were on holiday, or else dying from boredom.

But it was a timely encounter, as it happened, and I gazed with interest at the ships through my binoculars. The headlines that I had seen in the Hong Kong papers just a few days before had all been about the Chinese Navy, and what a new and belligerent mood its admirals seemed to have adopted. There had been a lot of concern about China's high-handed attitude, so called, towards a group of low atolls called the Spratly Islands that lay close to the Vietnamese coast, and towards another group known as the Paracels, which lay even nearer.

For years the sovereignty of these islands, and of a low reef called the Macclesfield Bank, had been at the centre of a smouldering dispute. Vietnam had laid an ancient claim, as had (complicating matters hugely) the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan. In the case of the Spratly Islands, the tiny state of Brunei – hardly the world's most imperially minded state, even though its ruler was said to be the planet's richest man – had advanced a claim as well. But Beijing had airily ignored them all. Successive governments had stated flatly that the islands were historically and by geographical logic Chinese, and any official maps you buy of China inside China show a curved dotted line extending from Shanghai south and returning north to a point near Hainan, and encompassing every atoll and reef and skerry in the South China Sea. All, says China, are Chinese.

In recent years Beijing has stated these claims rather more robustly, and shortly before my arrival at Woosung the Chinese Navy had installed a detachment of the Chinese Army, who would build a small base on one of the rocks. Now, as I arrived in Shanghai, the Chinese government was publicly defying anyone to try to move it. This had led neighbour nations to complain about Chinese ‘hegemony’ – a popular word in the East, and hitherto much used by countries like Nepal and Sikkim in connection with India. Now it was China's turn, and everyone was becoming exercised about what they saw as a revival of the country's ancient imperialistic ambitions and suchlike. The role of the Chinese Navy in the mechanics of it all had suddenly become a hot topic.

To underline the alarmist talk there had been suggestions in the Hong Kong papers and magazines that this newly boisterous navy might be about to order an aircraft carrier, no less, and moor it down on Hainan Island, close to the disputed islands.
*
Such a mighty ship, it was said, would give China what naval people call ‘blue-water capability’ – the wherewithal to project her power across thousands of miles of ocean. Many of China's neighbours, as well as strategically minded analysts in Washington, were starting to fret publicly about her doing such a thing.

So it was in the context of all such superheated disputations that I found myself gazing at this clutch of some of China's most modern warships. Everything seemed sleepy and halfhearted about them. As we cruised slowly alongside it looked pretty unlikely that these sailors at least were getting into the business of flexing their maritime muscles, or that they or their officers entertained the kind of ambitions that were causing such alarm elsewhere. There didn't seem much eagerness about them, lazing as they were in the late-morning sun. It reminded me that the Chinese had invented gunpowder for use in fireworks, and yet had never thought of using it for war. It looked much the same for these half-dozen ships – they had been constructed just for the show, and not to menace, perhaps not even to fight.

We steered in to land now. Soon a gang of greasy-looking Chinese men on the quay were securing our hawsers to the bollards. Four men in uniform were waiting, and they waved up at me, indicating their relief at seeing, at last, the foreigner for whom they had been asked to wait. I said good-bye to the captain. ‘They've come to take you away,’ he said, and didn't laugh. And then I walked down the metal gangplank, stepping over a pile of rotting fish. Lily came with me. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just routine.’

One of the men was Immigration – he took my passport and neatly impressed a bright red chop on it, giving me sanction to stay six months. Another was Health, and he made me affirm that I had no illness worth mentioning. His form had a line saying ‘Describe the country you last visited’, and when I came to China in the early days I would write juvenile things like ‘hilly, green, rainy’, or ‘fine beaches, strong women’. But as he was looking on this time I simply wrote ‘United States’, and handed it over.

Customs proffered the usual form asking me how many bicycles and sewing machines I had, and the brand name of my camera. But then he took the form, crumpled it up in his hand and, with a sweeping gesture, tossed it into the water. ‘No need these days,’ he announced. ‘Waste of time.’

The fourth man turned out to be the official with whom Lily had arranged the venture – a Mr Zhang Zu Long. I thanked him profusely. ‘They didn't want you to do this, the people in Shanghai,’ he said. ‘But they are very conservative. I told them they must indulge in up-to-date thinking. Anyone who is interested in my station is welcome.’ He indicated a ten-storey building behind the fish market, a structure festooned with radar scanners and satellite dishes and radio aerials. ‘I am very proud of it. You must come and see.’