The River at the Centre of the World Read online

  I had been on this quayside once before, when Queen Elizabeth, who had been touring China, was about to make her farewell and board the royal yacht Britannia for the voyage home.* The yacht was moored alongside where my ship, the Princess Jeannie, was berthed and as a Royal Marine band played sea shanties and anthems, so the lights along the Bund were switched on. The Chinese president of the day was an old war hero named Yang Shangkun, and I remember that he shook my hand, very affably. It was a grand evening, a moment when the old, dead Shanghai came briefly alive, stirred in her sleep.

  Nowadays the city is fully awake all the time. All night there are lights, cars, crowds, the sounds of distant music and shouting, the sirens of vessels passing by on their way to and from the sea. Our ship's arc lights blazed down on the water, and for a fathom or so the Whangpoo had a kind of translucence to it, the blackness rubbed briefly away. Lily and I were gazing down at it, looking halfheartedly for fish, when a body bobbed gently into view.

  It was that of a man in his thirties. He was floating face up, fully clothed, and his eyes were open. His would not be the first body I saw on this voyage, nor would it be the most disturbing: but the image of his face staring up at me through the waters was one I carried for many days. How he had died, how he had come to be in the waters, whom he had left behind – these were questions I could never answer. But as to notifying the police, or trying to haul the body out – Lily gave a dismissive wave.

  ‘You see them all the time,’ she said. ‘And you'll see worse. The river is a cemetery for those who can't afford a proper burial. Just let him be. He'll just drift out to sea, and that'll be an end to him.’

  4

  The First Reach

  Shanghai was already slipping well astern as the old Russian-built hydrofoil – one of the fleet of well-rusted craft used for high-speed journeying on the lower reaches of the river –crunched and clanked herself into cruising gear. We lurched uncomfortably for a few moments in the wake of a passing tanker – a stained and battered Bangladeshi ship, registered in Chittagong. Then the sponsons began to bite into the black waters of the Whangpoo and we started to accelerate noisily, our engines belching an oily, felt-like smoke. Soon, and with a thin and chilly rain falling, we were speeding along ahead of a half-mile wake of fudge-coloured foam. By the time we were out in the open reaches of the Yangtze itself and had turned sharply to the left to start the four-hour run upstream to Zhenjiang, the hostess – a plump teenage girl in a grey skirt, Cuban-heeled shoes, and knee-stockings so tight they left purple rings around the tops of her calves – was calling for requests. It was karaoke time.

  Lily asked for a song she thought might suit the occasion, a rather soothing number called ‘Zhu ni ping an’, which translates more or less as ‘Good Wishes for Arriving Safe and Sound’. Our fellow passengers, who all seemed to know where the two of us were going, thought this was an ideal choice and applauded loudly. But it turned out to be a rather odd choice. The woman who sang the song on the boat's television screen was shown, inexplicably, attempting to teach it to a group of deaf children, and so the entire performance had to be conducted in sign language. The scene was so affecting that one young woman passenger promptly burst into tears and began to wail about how terrible it must be for a child to lose its hearing. It then became impossible to hear the singer, rather proving her point. I promptly gave up on karaoke, after what had been admittedly only a brief experiment. I turned away from the set and tried as best I could to gaze out of the craft's grimy little portholes.

  Plover Point, Dove's Nest, the Centaur Buoy: according to the sailing directions there was so much Englishness about the river's reaches here we could as well be going up the Hamble from Portsmouth. But no: at Fushan, half an hour into the journey, there was supposed to be – though in this rain I couldn't see it – a ruined pagoda, the first in China, and, according to the Admiralty Pilot, ‘a small fort resembling a martello tower’. And then at Jiangyin, where the river's banks close in and for the first time I had the feeling that we were on a river and no longer in its estuary, there was supposed to be on the left ‘a walled town, quadrilateral in form, the sides of the square each being about one mile long. In it is a tall and prominent pagoda and the town is surrounded by a moat, which is joined to waterways leading southwestward to the Grand Canal.’

  There, in the bald sentence of a navigator's log, lay a first hint of the delights and terrors of Imperial China. I could close my eyes, blot out the wailing from the television and imagine what Chiang-yin – as it was known to foreigners half a century ago – must have been like before the Communist revolution. The mandarin in his chair, the citizens kowtowing before him, the scholars in their buttoned silk coats and white slippers and their spotless spats, the women with their bound feet, the prisoners fettered into their wooden neckblock constraints called cangues, the pigs running pell-mell through a market filled with spices from India and Arabia. Marco Polo, who (if he had come to China at all: some scholars say he didn't) crossed the river just a few miles ahead, would have recognized a dozen cities that were exactly like the navigator's description of what is now Jiangyin.

  And as lately as half a century ago there were walls around most cities, with gates that were slammed shut at night, and a barbican and a water gate with a lockable iron grid. All over China Proper – the official term for the eighteen provinces of Qing dynasty China that lay east of the upper reaches of the Yangtze and well south of the Gobi desert, and which omitted Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia – were sedate, well-ordered cities, the kind of place that Gladys Aylward first saw when she found her way to Wang-ching, and to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness – or rather, when Ingrid Bergman saw it from her mule, after her ten days' ride from Tientsin.

  But how many such delights remain? How many of these exquisite conceits of urban design escaped from Japanese bombs, or from Communist central planning? What happened to them all? Squinting through the drizzle in the direction of Jiangyin, I could see a low and rather crude pagoda down by the mud of the foreshore: it was overgrown with grass, which sprouted in bunches from its upper storeys. But as to a wall or a moat or a barbican tower – all gone, or else overwhelmed by the mean piles of workers' flats and their factories, all spewing smoke as thick as lava. Black coils of it lay hanging in the wet air, too thick and heavy to be blown away.

  Maybe there was a wall still, if the Japanese hadn't blown it down. But if it did still exist it would be covered with foot-thick layers of oily dust. No one would have cherished it, or have shown any pleasure in what it once had meant to the city – of how it once had defined and delineated what was to become a typically Chinese centre of order. Now all that defined the limits of a city like Jiangyin was the rule of the local police, and the range of the urban rat catchers.

  The karaoke was making my head spin. I walked out to the afterdeck of the speeding hydrofoil, feeling fresher with the rain whistling past my head at twenty knots. Up here it was prettier. The banks were lined in parts with Cunningham firs, from which the Foochow junkmen used to make their masts. There were groves of cinnamon and camphor trees, stands of bamboo that shrouded the more isolated farmhouses from the winter winds, and Japanese cedars and maidenhair trees on the low hills marking the sites of graves. Industry and communism may have changed the face of China – but there was still something immutable, even here.

  There was one other passenger up on deck, a young woman who, in spite of the stinging drizzle, had decided to come up for air.

  ‘You'll soon smell the place we're going to,’ she remarked without introduction. ‘Smelliest city in China.’ She stood at the port-side rail and sniffed deeply. ‘There!’ she exclaimed with delight. ‘Don't you get it?’

  I confessed that I didn't. But I was no stranger to olfactory humiliation. Once I had been sailing on a small boat running westward across the Indian Ocean, and after two months at sea, the yacht's cat had taken to standing with her head held high, just like this woman's, sniffing intently from
the boat's side. Nellie, the cat was called, and she would take in the air like a student of wine – savouring it before letting it out, trying to catch even the faintest whiff. One morning she went suddenly quite wild, waving her tail like a cat possessed. I could not smell a thing except the sea. But the skipper said the cat could: it was Madagascar, rather more than two hundred miles away.

  We were still eighty miles from our destination of Zhenjiang, and this woman claimed to be able to smell it. ‘Famous for vinegar,’ she said, and she gave me a card I could use as an introduction, in case I wanted to see. She was apparently a lawyer, and probably quite well known in town.

  A low hill, more a tumulus than a mountain, rose on the right bank – ‘the first hill in China’, I wrote in my diary, ‘the most easterly extension of the mountains that eventually make the Three Gorges’. And as we swept around and below it, so in swept the smell – the unmistakable pungent and sour tang of brown rice vinegar, wafting down the river in the rain. ‘It even sinks into the stones of the place,’ said Lily. ‘They say people who come from Zhenjiang can be picked out wherever they go in China. They walk into a room and there is a chorus: “Hey, you from Zhenjiang!” They hate it.’

  As soon as we docked I rushed to the factory. It was a Saturday and the plant was closing early, but the lawyer's card worked a treat. The gate was pushed back, the already struck company flags (one Chinese, one American – this was a joint venture, it turned out) were raised again on their poles. Within moments – and after battling my way upstairs through fumes so heavy that I felt as though I was somehow inside a vinaigrette dressing – I was brought to the office of the Chief Vinegar Manager, Dr Yu Kehua, a man with a face so long and pinched and lips so thin and wrinkled that he looked as if he had been sipping the stuff since the cradle.

  But Dr Yu was courteous to a fault. He quickly arranged tea, postponed a meeting with his wife, summoned in a secretary who was on the point of leaving for his weekend, found a number of scholarly books for me, trundled a blackboard in from another room and – all this at one o'clock on a wet Saturday – proceeded to give me a brief but seminal lecture on the Role of Vinegar in Chinese Society.

  He had a framed piece of calligraphy hanging over his desk, a reminder: There Are Seven Necessities in Chinese Life, it warned: Firewood. Rice. Oil. Salt. Soybean Sauce. Vinegar. Tea. Without these, people cannot survive.

  Dr Yu saw my look. ‘We have been making this particular necessity here since 1840,’ he said. ‘Vinegar is essential – it provides the contrast that is so important in all Chinese cooking. The balance. The yin and yang, you know all about that, yes? We like to think what we make is the best in China. It is certainly the most famous. We have a certain notoriety here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘They even say we smell.’

  He then got to his feet, went over to the board and began to explain matters at a clip. It was like a school chemistry lesson: how the water was mixed with polished sticky rice and allowed to ferment, how a bacterium called Acetobacter then made the alcohol react with oxygen in the air, how acetic acid formed, how the liquid was then flavoured with secret herbs and spices, how it was all then aged and casked, bottled and sold. He quoted from a brochure: ‘Sour without tasting puckery, fragrant smell with sweet taste, strong colour and tasty, stronger fragrance after storage.’

  Lily had been listening to this, occasionally shaking her head. Finally she blurted out: ‘But Dr Yu, with respect, I have heard some criticism of your vinegar. I have heard that the gourmets think it is not so good, that the vinegar from Panpu is rather better.’

  Dr Yu snorted with derision. ‘That old fool Yuan Mei! I know his book. Very famous Qing dynasty cookbook – he said that Zhenjiang vinegar wasn't sharp enough, didn't have the right penzhi, the right balance between fragrance and sourness.

  ‘Well look at our awards! Gold medals, year after year for eighty years. Eighty! The Golden Plum award. The Paris award. The Hong Kong award. Many other people believe ours is the best. Not Panpu city vinegar. That is weak, limpid, no good.

  ‘And you know what? Now we are not just a state company, now we are a joint venture, we have to be competitive. Before, if you had said the Panpu vinegar is better, I would have shrugged my shoulder and said – no matter. Now I am stung by what you say. We have to be better. Our American partner insists we make money. We have to tell all the world to buy our vinegars, no one else's.’

  A vein on Dr Yu's right temple was pulsing angrily. I thought I should try to calm him. Who was the American partner? I asked.

  ‘She is Chinese lady, lives in New York I think. Or San Francisco. One of those places. She is very strong, very demanding. Things are different now. I must defend our vinegar or she will be upset. I must put to rest that bad story by Yuan Mei. Old fool that he was. Our products are the best. Come see.’

  A whirlwind tour ensued. Strong young men, stripped to the waist (and delayed from heading off for their weekends as well), were raking trays of glutinous brown rice. Porcelain vats were bubbling with fermenting vinegar water. I was taken through warm halls of towers – some steel, some bamboo, some pottery – where the vinegar was aged. There were long bottling plants, with battalions of bottles standing silent on their racks. Smaller rooms for hand-wrapping the more costly bottles. A warehouse, with boxes of the company products arranged in long ranks, many of them bearing the old-fashioned spelling – Chinkiang – of the town where we were, Zhenjiang. So there was plain Chinkiang Vinegar, Ginger Vinegar, Ancient Well-Matured Vinegar, Chinkiang Soy Sauce, Pickled Radish, Pickled Chinkiang Coriander Heart, Pagoda-Shaped Vegetable, Sweet Gourd Pickle. ‘Fifteen thousand tons of vinegar each year,’ said Dr Yu as we left. He was calmer now. ‘Three thousand tons of soy sauce. Seven thousand tons of pickles. Here – take some.’ He pressed bottles of vinegar into our hands, and gave me a large drum of Pagoda-Shaped Vegetable. ‘You taste. You will find we are the best!’

  As the iron gates slid shut behind us, and the flags were lowered once again, I told Lily she had been brilliant, if rather forward. ‘I couldn't let him get away with it,’ she explained. ‘This is the new China. He had to rise to the bait. And he did. Quite well, I thought. He's the new breed of businessman. Such a change from the old cadres of the past. “Eating vinegar”, they say – jealousy. That's what he feels. Competition, I suppose. A bit like your West, I imagine, yes?’ She held up the sleeve of her shirt, sniffed it and made a face. She leaned over to me and did the same. ‘Now, we both smell. Everyone will know just where we've been.’

  Zhenjiang is – or rather was, during its more glorious days in the Song dynasty, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries – one of the great crossing points of the eastern world, for this is where the East's greatest river intersected with the world's greatest canal. The Grand Canal, which still lays claim to being the longest man-made waterway, was built during the Sui and Tang dynasties, mostly during the seventh century. While the Yangtze wanders in these parts from east to west, the Canal spears directly north and south. The two waterways intersect at right angles. The Canal enters the river from the south a few miles below Zhenjiang, and it leaves for the north at a point on the far bank almost directly opposite the city.

  Five hundred years ago, the waters around Zhenjiang (the name means ‘guarding the River’, and there was once a huge military garrison) would have been busier than almost anywhere else on the Yangtze. Up and downstream commercial traffic, dominated by the huge wooden trading junks whose descendants are the great iron barges of today, would have mingled with the smaller and lighter but nonetheless important junks and skiffs that were involved in the supply and military business for which the canal had been built. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, noted the frantic activity on the waterways: this was a place, he said, that ‘lived for commerce’.

  Lily and I walked down what was called Small Jetty Street, aiming for the precise spot on the dockside where Polo was said to have stepped ashore. The street itself had much of the charm of old China �
� it was cobbled, and there were well-worn stone steps, and every few yards an old stone archway. Behind one of these was a tall Buddhist stupa, which the locals said was eight hundred years old. It didn't look it: I suspected that, like so many relics in China, this one had been far too exuberantly restored far too often, and it was in fact almost modern.

  We reached the river, an opaque grey and chocolate-coloured flood with oil rings in the eddies, and clumps of refuse bobbing on the wavelets. When Lord Macartney came here in November 1793 – he was the first foreign ambassador to try to prise open China's locked doors to trade, and he failed, signally – this stretch of the river was called the Blue River: his diarist noted, as well he might, that the name was rather ill suited, since the water's colour was in fact quite similar to that of the ochre-and-umber sludge of the Yellow River, which they had seen only a few days before. ‘The waves rolled like the sea,’ he said of the crossing (Macartney's expedition, which was travelling southward on the Grand Canal, had to cross the Yangtze with the rest of the southbound Imperial traffic), ‘and porpoises are said to be sometimes seen leaping amongst them.’

  There was a fisherman sitting in a rickety-looking boat by the quay. He was puffing gently on a bamboo pipe, a smouldering nut of tobacco in its tiny brass bowl. I reminded Lily about the porpoises and the lovely little white dolphins, the baiji, once so common in the Yangtze and now said to be almost extinct. What did this man know about them? She shouted a question down to him.

  At first he said nothing, but then as if by way of answer he slowly got up, walked to a locked box near the prow of his boat, and pulled from it a huge and tangled mess of fishing line that jangled and clanked with its several pounds of rusty ironmongery. He shook it at me, almost angrily, inviting me to take a look. But I knew what it was instantly: this was an example of the very device that had put the pathetic little Yangtze dolphin into such grave danger: it was called a rolling hook trawl, and it was every bit as vicious a device as it appeared. It didn't just catch fish: it snared them, hurt them and killed them.