The Peace Correspondent (10 page)

IT is damp, stifling and grey in the Ox Liver. Then the mist lifts as swiftly as a stage curtain to reveal the sun gleaming on awesome cliffs and high crags pressing in all around us. Cruising down the river, the mighty Yangtze, on a smoggy afternoon, we are once more dazzled by the fabled Three Gorges, even the disagreeably named Ox Liver and Horse Lungs. Our slow boat through China is nearing the end of what is perhaps China's foremost natural wonder.

For committed travelers, cruising the Yangtze is a must, ranking with seeing the Pyramids along the Nile, walking along the Great Wall or gazing at the Taj Mahal by moonlight. Known locally as Chang Jiang, the “Long River,” this is China's Mississippi, an Asian Amazon, with tributaries navigable for 30,000 kilometers. We are on a four-day cruise down a mere 1,354-kilometer stretch from Chongqing to Wuhan. But it includes the most scenic stretch, 200 kilometers of the massive Three Gorges, Qutang, Wuxia and Xiling.

Since 1890, steamboats have navigated from Shanghai on the East China Sea, through the treacherous gorges, all the way up-river to Chongqing. Today, even aboard one of the large, luxury cruise ships, we can feel the surge of the silty brown water forcing us down river.

From the deck, we look down on small wooden fishing boats, gritty coal barges, grimy little cargo boats and giant local ferries with tiered decks, like giant, floating wedding cakes crowded with rural folk, many still in Mao blue, brown or grey. There is a
certain urgency to seeing the Gorges. China has started building the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric-dam project, to provide power for development and to reduce the risk of disastrous floods in the flatlands down river.

The controversial and unpopular dam will force more than a million people from their homes, and flood the Three Gorges and other scenic spots and villages along the river. So, in recent years, local Chinese tourists have rushed to see the revered Gorges while they exist, jamming the rails of the big, but basic, ships we pass on the way.

The modern boats built for overseas tourists such as Regal China Cruise's three Princesses are scale replicas of ocean cruiseships, with bars, karaoke lounges, restaurants, barber shops, post offices, business centers and the mandatory souvenir shop. Like ocean cruisers, they have organized activities, with a decidedly Chinese flavor, with lessons in tai chi, flower arranging, mahjong and basic Mandarin.

“It's a bit like a holiday camp, isn't it?” remarks a rueful young American as the ship's PA system bellows its announcement of folk dancing in the lounge, sending truants slinking off to the Observation Deck bar.

The Yangtze is culturally important to China, dividing it between the northern noodle eaters and the southern rice eaters. So the best lesson of all is simply sitting on deck and watching China, ancient and modern, pass slowly by like a magnificent Chinese scroll painting slowly unrolling. Chongqing's grubby industrial suburbs gradually give way to scraggy mining areas with blackened figures loading coal onto baskets, then to agricultural China, with vegetable fields, grazing cows and tiny villages of rough stone houses.

We are soon reminded how dangerous the river is.

“My god, look,” a passenger screams, and we run to the side just in time to see a body floating by, turning in the powerful eddies. It is probably a fisherman who fell overboard, or a farmer who slipped into the seething river. The passing corpse doesn't
even attract a glance from the crew.

Everyone gathers on the front deck for Kuimen Pass, the entrance to Qutang, the first gorge. Eight kilometers long, it is the shortest, but narrowest, of the gorges. From the bottom of the chasm, it feels as though we are sailing through an immense crack in the earth's surface. It is often grey and misty along the river, driving photographers wild with frustration.

Here, the broad, turbulent Yangtze funnels between sheer limestone walls narrowing to 150 meters in places, the muddy water twisting and rushing through the channel at terrifying speeds, churning up dangerous whirlpools and eddies that could suck in small junks. So that explains the shortage of picturesque little wooden sampans on the river, I realize, as our steel-hulled ship delicately navigates the twisting course.

Early Western travelers called this stretch the Wind Box Gorge for the gales raging through the canyon. Now, as a steady blast whips at our clothes, we all zip up our jackets, but no one retreats inside.

The striking setting makes different impressions on the passengers. “How could anyone not want to do this?” shouts an awestruck American who has traveled the world, and is making his third trip down the Yangtze. He looks at the cliff walls pressing in on each side, head turning like someone watching a tennis match.

Yet a middle-aged woman sitting on a deck chair nearby remarks to another, “I love your hair that way.”

“I got it done for 60 yuan in Chongqing.”

“Oh, that's good. Do you know there is a hairdresser on board?”

At the narrowest part, where long, thin waterfalls slice down sheer cliffs closing in on both sides like a vice, the Gorges remind me of the Grand Canyon. But the ship is more comfortable than the raft I rode there, and we don't have to sleep on the riverbanks.

Soon, we leave the limestone cliffs overhanging the river for
open, steep hillsides where villages cling to the slopes like Inca settlements in the Andes, lonely little places accessible only by river. Later, we pass Wise Grandmother's Spring in a rock crevice, then Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon Rock.

When we steam into the 40-kilometer Wuxia (Witches Gorge), lofty hills, high, dramatic, almost unnatural, loom out of the perpetual mist that hangs over the river. The effect is unearthly, but I am struck by how familiar it looks. Chinese painters and poets have celebrated the somber, forbidding beauty of these mystical gorges for 20 centuries. Although it is my first visit, I have seen these peaks in so many ancient Chinese brush paintings and countless artistic photographs in coffee table and travel books.

The 12 peaks are partially obscured by cloud and mist, as if seen through a silk screen. Here, the Chinese inclination for seeing things in rocks, and naming them, runs wild. The Climbing Dragon, Sage Spring, Facing Clouds, Fir Tree Cone and Congregated Immortals Peaks line the north side, Assembled Cranes, Misty Screen and Flying Phoenix the south. Goddess, or Observing the Clouds Peak, the most famous, resembles a maiden kneeling in front of an altar. Unimaginative dullards can only see rock. Straight ahead, Congregated Immortals Peak seems to block the channel, but somehow the captain edges the big boat around the narrow corner and we drift on down river.

Here, man's presence is even more precarious. A hazardous path cut into the rock runs along one side of the sheer canyon, long flights of steps lead to a few landing stages. A lonely temple sits high on a cliffside, and small pagodas perch on the rock faces. In places, with binoculars, we spot the dark mouth of a cave high up the mountainside, and I imagine a hermit monk meditating there, oblivious to this floating palace.

Even here in the middle of the gorge, farmers weed corn patches growing on the cliffside, and terraced slopes reach down to the water's edge. A series of large, plain pagodas at the tops of the cliffs are observation posts to monitor the water level and, a Chinese staff member explains, to control the dragons that rage
along the river.

The Yangtze journey provides a look at life in little-known areas of China. One afternoon, we dock at the grimy, coal-sooted town of Badong, then ride a bus for two hours, lurching along a precipitous dirt road through a picturesque part of backwater Hubei province, which few foreigners can have seen. This mountain area is home of the Tujia minority people, basic farmers who plant their corn patches in rows of twos, live in mud-brick houses and carry their goods on their backs in woven bell-shaped baskets instead of Chinese-style yoke poles.

Our destination, the Shennong Stream, was opened to tourists only a few years ago. In the local version of whitewater rafting, we ride small wooden boats for hours down the clear, peaceful stream running through the forest, the banks rising high and green on both sides. A Tijua boatman steers from in front while two others with long poles keep us away from the rock walls. Sometimes we pass over water so shallow we scrape over smooth river stones. Our Chinese guide calls it “The sport of gliding in water.”

In several places we can make out ancient wood coffins set outside caves high up the cliff, remnants of a mysterious ancient tribe. Along the way, guides point to shapes of the rocks. There is a panda, there an elephant face. Some see them, others only see rocks. It is the most peaceful, satisfying afternoon I have experienced in China. Then, suddenly, the Shennong pours into the Yangtze, the clear water swallowed by the muddy, the division as plain as a line drawn on paper.

Further along, at Zigui, a Sino-Stratford-on-Avon, we make a literary stop at a mountaintop temple to pay homage to Qu Yuan, the country's most famous patriotic poet. China's Shakespeare, who lived here during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), wrote 25 poems, which have been translated into 10 languages. All along the river, we run into references to the bard of the Yangtze, although we find none of his works, aside from an ode to an orange.

A garish dragonboat barge is moored on the muddy bank, with two dragon boats tied alongside. These are now used for instant races, tourists splashing ineffectually to the beat of the boat drums. According to legend, the patriotic poet drowned himself in 278 BC to protest government corruption. Local people went out in boats, beating the river with paddles to scare the fish away and throwing rice dumplings to stop them from eating the dead poet. (Other legends have them racing their boats and beating drums in search of tragic Qu Yuan.) So started the Dragon Boat Festivals and races that are now popular worldwide.

High on the cliff, up steep steps and past a gauntlet of souvenir hawkers, sits the Qu Yuan Temple and a towering bronze statue of the poet. In the type of recycling of sacred palaces found all across China, this temple replaces the original, submerged since the massive Gezhou Dam, completed in 1971, raised the river. This incarnation, built in 1972, will also be flooded when the Three Gorges Dam project is completed, so the big brass statue will be moved to version three of the temple, further inland.

Inside the darkened temple, faded black-and-white photographs give a sense of how little this area has changed. The shots of crowds of local men at early Dragon Boat Festivals wearing broad, thatched hats and baggy costumes recall the works of the great Victorian-era photographers in China. But these were taken less than 20 years ago. Behind the temple, the good bard's tomb and red coffin behind a grilled enclosure overgrown with grass, feels somehow abandoned.

Xiling Gorge, the last and longest (76 kilometers), was also the most dangerous for early navigators and is still tricky even for modern ships. It is also the most exciting for sightseers. We slowly cruise past the Ox Liver and Horse Lungs, Yellow Ox, Bright Moon and Lantern Shadow Gorges. Finally, at Southern Crossing Pass, the end of the great Yangtze River Gorges, water rushes out of the narrows onto a broad, calmer river, and to a sudden change of scenery.

This flat, pastoral landscape reminiscent of Holland comes
to a sudden end when the river widens more and we reach the start of work on the Three Gorges Dam. Now we drift past an unsightly mega-construction site, with thousands of men and heavy equipment swarming around in a confusion of mountains of dirt and gravel and rock, the dusty scene running for miles along the bank. Enough material to build 44 Great Pyramids will be dumped into the river here, creating a dam more than a kilometer-and-a-half long and 90 meters high. It is an impressive, but depressing, sight.

Later, at the Gezhou Dam, for now China's largest, we enter a mammoth lock along with several other large cruiseships plus a few cargo boats. The gates close, the water level slowly drops, and the ships descend like plastic models in a bathtub when the plug is pulled. The gates open, and we float into a different world, a populated, flat, cultivated land.

Our short sojourn on the great river ends in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province. Even though we are still 1,125 kilometers from Shanghai and the ocean, this is a deep sea harbor. Once an international treaty port, Wuhan has a great maritime tradition. It was the starting point of the famous 18th-century Hankow Tea Races when sleek clipper ships sailed to London with their precious cargoes. And how could Britain have survived without its morning tea?

Despite the awe-inspiring experience of the Three Gorges, the visions of that massive earth-moving operation ends the cruise on a melancholy note. The great, new dam will provide electricity to build a better China, but the ancient country will lose part of its soul.