The River at the Centre of the World (58 page)

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Unlike most of the treaty ports, Nanjing never had a formal foreign concession area where the victims might have sought sanctuary. The 1858 agreement that added Nanjing to the growing list of ports was not actually taken up until 1899, because of the frightful devastation of the city caused by the Taiping Rebellion. But the land suggested for a concession, which lay outside the city walls and on the banks of the Yangtze, was swampy, malarial and more unpleasant even than the Shanghai waterfront. The foreigners never took the offer up.

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Where he captured a giraffe and brought it back for the Emperor of the day to see. Cheng Ho is still revered as China's equivalent of Columbus, or Magellan; but in fact he was not properly Chinese, being a Muslim from a minority tribe, as well as a eunuch.

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The compensation was paid in silver, sixty-five tons of it arriving on a ship at Portsmouth in 1842 and being taken promptly to the Royal Mint.

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In places it is more like a river of syrup than of water: in some tributaries 30 per cent of its bulk is silt, compared with only 0.2 per cent for the Yangtze.

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It was actually a Shanghai junk, brought down by a local British businessman who was eager to show off. But no local boatman could, or would, work so alien a craft – which is why it found its way, uselessly, into the club gardens. It disappeared during the anti-Japanese war.

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The Qin – or Ch‘in – dynasty was the origin of the English word ‘China’.

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Including the Moravian Jesuit missionary named Kame, the Latinized version of whose name is memorialized in the genus.

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The company shipmasters' need for stability at sea – which they achieved by stowing the light cases of tea (and bolts of silk) on top, the heavy crates of china underneath as kentledge – led unintentionally to a passion for chinoiserie in England and America that flourishes to this day.

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Jardines, which went on virtually to create Hong Kong, and which still plays a dominant role in business in the territory, is understandably weary of being pilloried for the role it once played in the selling of ‘foreign mud‘. It has to be said that some in the firm's ranks objected at the time – Donald Matheson, for example, grew so distressed at the social and medical effects of the drug that he resigned from the firm. He was a rarity, however, and China to this day has not quite forgiven the company, delivering a sharp rebuke from time to time, just to keep it on its toes.

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Like theine, tea's weak equivalent of the caffeine in coffee.

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Wu Han was arrested and brutalized, and died within three years. Yao Wenyuan, who wrote the attack on Wu Han's play, went on to become one of the infamous Gang of Four, a steersman of the Cultural Revolution. Once Mao had died he, Mao's widow and their two colleagues were arrested and put on trial: Yao was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.

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Causing the blood ailment bilharzia, which British soldiers working on the Yangtze, and on the Nile, liked to call ‘Billy Harris’.

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Particularly in Wuhan, where students committed the ultimate heresy by demonstrating with banners praising Chiang Kai-shek.

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The guard who gave Mao the news he did not want to hear was soon removed from the palace staff in disgrace and vanished into obscurity. His colleague, who had both betrayed him and lied to Mao, was eventually promoted.

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At the time of the revolution's beginnings Sun had been fund-raising in America: he read news of the storming of the Wuchang fort in a Denver newspaper while he was en route to Kansas City.

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He reigned again nominally for twelve days in 1917, when a short-lived coup restored him. In 1932 the Japanese installed him as the head of their puppet-government of Manchukuo, but he was swept off to Siberia when the Russians routed the Japanese Army in Manchuria. He was later returned to China, was imprisoned and ‘re-educated' by the Communists, and died peacefully in Beijing in 1967, having spent his remaining years working humbly as a gardener.

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Through the Gorges the river drops at an average rate of 16 inches for every mile of distance travelled. Once out into the coastal plains, the Yangtze takes 940 miles to drop the remaining 134 feet, at an average of 1.6 inches drifting downward in each mile. When Chairman Mao was warned about the fierce currents and turbulences of Wuhan, it was the sheer volume of water, not the very modest gradient of the river, that concerned his aides.

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In what most of the world's dam engineers consider a moment of supreme folly, the Chinese had in 1981 considered building a dam with a pool level of no less than 660 feet. American engineers, horrified by the likely dangers inherent in so gargantuan a structure, told their Chinese counterparts that if there was going to be any American help forthcoming, a significantly smaller dam with a lower-level reservoir would have to be designed. Eventually, realizing the effect of the pressure, the Chinese side complied.

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Miss Dai dislikes being lumped together with the political dissidents of the time – deed, she went to Tiananmen Square in a vain effort to persuade the protesting students to go back to their homes, and is as a result somewhat ill regarded by many of the diehards in the opposition camp. But she spent ten months in the Qinchen high-security prison reserved for political prisoners and was threatened with execution. The Chinese government has never explained why she was arrested, though Miss Dai insists it was for her anti-dam writings. Meanwhile the woman who published her book, and who had had a record of printing and distributing controversial and polemical literature and journalism, remains active. Miss Dai, after stints in New York and Canberra, is now back in Beijing, as tireless a campaigner as ever.

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All of the sewage produced in Chongqing and the scores of other cities above the dam will also end up in the new lake, stagnating and making the waters additionally foul.

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In 1938 Chiang Kai-shek ordered his troops to blow up the dykes protecting the Yellow River, in an effort to frustrate the Japanese southerly advance towards Wuhan. The resulting floods killed tens of thousands of Chinese peasants – but held up the Japanese vehicles for little more than three months.

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A brand-new airport was being built outside town: it would have an international terminal, the better to serve would-be investors in the dam.

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Canada, having been among the first countries to show official interest in the project, felt it deserved prominent participation in the dam. Its highly experienced hydro-engineers were disappointed when Ottawa backed away from the scheme, and a number of big firms promptly formed ‘Team Canada' to exploit what they could in the Chinese market. But there was still a good deal of opposition at home: the British Columbian government, for example, forbade any formal provincial involvement whatsoever in the Three Gorges project.

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These will be as nothing compared to 180-foot-tall
illuminated
billboards with which the authorities say they are planning to decorate the spectacularly lovely cliffs of the Xiling Gorge, advertising local wines and spirits. Their illumination, of course, comes courtesy of the hydroelectric power made by the dams, so at one fell swoop they will be advertising two aspects of the country's modernization.

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Including the notion that the Gorges' cliffs were alive with angry monkeys that, enraged by the noise of passing steam engines, would pelt each ship with stones until the vessel was disabled and the crew dead.

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This hardly original name had also been given to the first railway engine that worked the narrow gauge between Woosung and Shanghai.

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The city housed the Nationalist government twice – once during the commonly remembered eight years from the fall of Nanjing in 1937 to the end of World War II and the Japanese defeat in 1945; and then again for three strange months at the end of 1949. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, they did so from Chongqing, after which the new capital was set up by the Communists in the city where it exists today – Beijing.

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These days it is reckoned as politically incorrect to call Yang a warlord as it would be to use the word to describe Nelson Mandela or, indeed, George Washington. He could perhaps be more properly termed ‘a local political leader in command of a small and highly mobile army‘, and there were many like him. But in China few were motivated by ideology or much more than territorial greed. Mr Yang was not; he was no Mandela. He was, rather, a menace.

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In December 1937 Japanese dive bombers attacked the American gunboat Panay on Yangtze convoy duty in the mistaken belief she and her charges were Chinese. The incident, in which several vessels were damaged and several American sailors died, enraged public opinion at home and caused an immediate wave of anti-Japanese hysteria – but also, more seriously, pointed up the dangers inherent in allowing foreign warships to operate deep inside China, on a Chinese river.

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There are about six million Yi, a people who have high-bridged noses, speak a Tibeto-Burman language with a crude phonetic script and are generally farmers and hunters. They dress colourfully, make much use of felt – unwoven cloth, in which the fibres are pressed together – in their dress and shelters, and hunt with poisoned arrows. Unlike some other minorities, they never had their feet bound. They are also known as the Lolo, and are divided into two castes, the White Bones and the Black Bones – the latter, less numerous, once making up a Yi ruling aristocracy.

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Other buses had enormous black rubber bladders covering the entire roof: these were filled with natural gas, the cheapest fuel available locally.

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They were recognized very swiftly, however, by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought a controlling interest in Star TV soon after its creation and now has ambitious plans for increasing the reach of his various news and entertainment organizations into this immense potential market. One of his early decisions, which sparked some anger, was to drop BBC World Service News: the Chinese, whose favours he sought, found it unpalatable, preferring their viewers to exist on a diet of music and old films, which Murdoch's managers were more than happy to supply.

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Of thirty-five – one of whom had bound feet.

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He was held hostage for several months, a victim of the turbulent politics of the region.

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Suicide turned out not to be a Chinese monopoly, by any means. A combination of alienation, loneliness and stress had already driven a significant number of the bachelor expatriates mad: only the week before, one engineer had taken a room at the Nan Shan Hotel in Panzhihua, attacked staff with a carving knife and then thrown himself to his death out of a tenth-floor window.

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Once for singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' in his sleep.

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Or bronchitis, if it is taken with grease from a boiled-up mountain bear.

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At the downstream end of the Gorge there still is a sign saying No Foreigners Allowed.

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On the far side of Jari Hill rises another tiny stream – the declared headwater of the Mekong.

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And 300 miles short of Tiger Leaping Gorge, which all had said was the most dangerous stretch of the river.

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Since Eocene times India has ploughed nearly a thousand miles northward, and it is still heading that way at two inches a year – enough of a velocity (nine times the rate of fingernail growth) to impose enormous stresses, and to trigger the devastating earthquakes – like that of October 1995 – that plague the chaotic countryside of Yunnan and the Burmese border.

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The character
Zang
, used now to denote the Tibetan people, also denotes ‘a depository for precious things' or ‘the Buddhist scriptures’. Since Xi means ‘west’, then Tibet – Xizang – is, in the Chinese syllabary, the Western Depository, or Western Buddhists.