The River at the Centre of the World Read online

  No one is quite sure how the Chinese in Zhenjiang reacted to the escape. It is said that divers were sent down and located the anchor – still attached to its several tons of chain – and pulled it from the river. They paraded it around town as a spoil of battle, a trophy that their men had wrested bravely from a fleeing imperial coward. How many of the locals accepted the story is anyone's guess; but it was not to be too much longer before the city of Zhenjiang had been swept clear of all its foreign residents, and the old British Consulate had turned into a revolutionary museum: it is said the Communists dumped the relic there, in the gardens. Some guidebooks mention it: but when I asked – and when Lily asked – no one could be sure either what it was, or where it was.

  (It is a most baffling habit of most Chinese – this mute insistence that they do not know where anything is. You ask an ancient who has lived all of his long life in Zhenjiang, Where is the old British Consulate? as I did – and he will shake his head, wave you away with his hand, professing no clue, having no interest. Asking for the anchor itself produced still more puzzled refusal. No, never heard of it. Purple Stone Hero? Not anywhere here. Doesn't ring a bell with me, old man.)

  I handed over one yuan to a woman behind the museum gate's guichet, and inquired whether the anchor might be inside. No, she said, definitely not. There is no such thing as an anchor anywhere here. The cadre standing inside the gate said much the same: there were plenty of Song dynasty pots and pans, but no anchor from a barbarian war vessel. ‘You have wasted your time,’ he said, and laughed bitterly.

  Just then a young Chinese woman came down the stairs. She had been reading a novel – the museum had few visitors – and was chewing on a sweet called Sugared Cow Skin. She offered me one. She smiled warmly.

  ‘I heard there was an anchor here. But it is buried in grass, I think. Besides, they are doing some demolition work. Come with me.’

  And we followed her up a hillock, through one of the archways, past a flight of stone steps that must have once seen processions of clerks and second secretaries and consuls bearing the intelligences of the world from one empire to another. We came out onto a newly razed area of wrecked brickwork, where one of the seven buildings had recently been flattened. Behind it was a small slope, covered with jungle. The girl pointed to it.

  ‘There, I think. Use a knife, if you have one,’ she cried, and went off, back to her novel and her bag of Sugared Cow Skins.

  Thick laurel bushes had infested the hillside, and the branches slashed at my legs as I waded through to the edge of the cliff. And there, burdened by growth but unmistakably nautical, was the anchor – four feet tall, its shank covered in some kind of cracked poultice, its ring solid, a half-shackle with a pin hanging loosely from it. The anchor's crown was firmly cemented to the ground, and the flukes rose sharp and spadelike into the surrounding bushes. It looked half a century old – but it had been built well, and it was neither rusty nor broken. The Admiralty commissioned its iron to last.

  A small notice, half illegible from dirt and growth, was mounted in front. I rubbed away the grime, and read: this was the anchor from the foreign imperial war vessel Purple Stone Hero, ‘captured in the seventh month of 1949 by heroic members of the People's Liberation Army after the ship had made a cowardly run away down the Long River to the sea.’

  But was it? Since coming back, and poring over the pictures, I have begun to wonder. I have started to have doubts.

  The anchor in Zhenjiang is a much smaller device than that normally used to hold a warship. Its design is that of a fisherman's anchor, made specifically to hold a little craft. It is most certainly not the standard Admiralty Pattern Stockless Anchor, with which pictures show Amethyst's bows to have been equipped. My guess is that the Chinese have actually duped us, and themselves – not, one might say, for the first time. What stands among the undergrowth in Zhenjiang may well actually be another anchor, perhaps from one of the vessel's whalers – perhaps, indeed, a British anchor, and so a symbol of the treachery. But my guess is that the real half-ton of iron, together with all its chains – that which was so silently slipped on the night of the getaway – remains buried in the Yangtze mud, even today. It might have been a good idea to raise it, but it was in all likelihood far too heavy and far too sunk for even the bitterest Chinese to try to recover it and put it on show. A lesser substitute had to do.

  I imagined it might be tempting to cross the river and make a pilgrimage to Yangzhou, where there are temples and gardens, and supposedly the most beautiful women in China. So I went over on the chugging car ferry, and found as I had rather anticipated that it was filled with tourists and their buses; but when I saw two noble Mongolian camels locked up in a paddock for the benefit of sightseers, and that their keeper had left them so ragged and hungry that their humps had withered and fallen across their sides like empty shopping bags, I stormed off and went looking for the Grand Canal instead.

  But that too turned out to be an infinitely depressing thing. It may be long (1554 miles) and ancient (fully 2500 years, if one accepts that the first of its links was built in the fifth century BC). It may be noble and wondrous, a triumph of Tang dynasty engineering and perseverance, and a celebration of the technology of earlier times as well.* But it is now filthy dirty, its congestion makes it irredeemably ugly, it is choked with rubbish and human leavings, and it is so industrialized as to have any hint of romance hammer-pressed out of it. What remains of it, even in a supposedly picturesque place like Yangzhou, seems so ruined and broken as to be barely a canal; and it is certainly, for all of its miles, anything but grand. Canals are in general fascinating memorials to commerce and civil engineering: it is a shame indeed that this, the greatest of them all, has fallen so very far from grace.

  It was in part because I found both the camels and the canal so depressing that I decided to leave Yangzhou to its infestation of tourists. Back on the muddy flats of the riverbank I found a junk whose owner was willing to sail us back across the river for a few jiao, and within half an hour of bumping over the greyish waves Lily and I were happily back on the wet stone steps of the Zhenjiang dock. There was a sudden shout of recognition: it was the fisherman who had been showing us his collection of rolling hooks earlier in the day. He had been working all day mending a net, and since he looked cold and tired I suggested that he come and have a bottle of beer at a local bar. He puffed on his bamboo pipe, and showed Lily how to do the same. We ended up the best of temporary friends, and he gave me the name of a friend he said I should look up in Nanjing: it was another fisherman, just in case I wanted more stories about dolphins.

  There was one small pilgrimage I had to make before I left Zhenjiang. At the turn of the century Mr and Mrs Absalom Sydenstricker, Presbyterian missionaries from West Virginia, had brought up a child there, a child who later studied in Shanghai and Lynchburg, Virginia, and went on to write novels under the name John Hedges.

  But John was in fact a girl-child, named Pearl, who later married another missionary named John Buck; and it was under the name Pearl S. Buck that she wrote most famously, and under which name she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. The woman who wrote The Good Earth, the creator of Wang Lung and his slave-wife and their rise and fall through the vicissitudes of famine and locusts and war and concubinage, lived for fifteen formative years in a house in Zhenjiang. It is now a radio factory, and since Pearl Buck has been restored to a tepid kind of official favour – she was officially prevented from coming to China in 1972 – it stands open to the public, occasionally.

  No one knew where it was, naturally. I approached a dozen people and gave them Pearl Buck's Chinese name, or the Chinese title of her best-known book, and I still got blank looks on all sides – a reflection, no doubt, of my lamentable pronunciation. Lily then asked where the Zhenjiang Number One Radio Factory was, got directions in an instant, and we walked up another cobbled street to where it sat on a hilltop – and beside the plant itself was a small two-storey house behind a high barbed-wire
fence: The Home of Pearl S. Buck, said a wooden plaque, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  The house was shut, naturally. But a woman lived there, and through the wire I managed to persuade her to open both the gate and the front door to the house. ‘But' – she spluttered, and I knew what was coming next – ‘her private rooms are locked and' – and both Lily and I joined in the mantra chorus that inevitably followed, as burp follows noodles – ‘the man with the key is not here.’

  So I used my Citibank card, which had previously been so useful in Shanghai for showing me my balance on the Bund. I twisted and turned it in the lock, and within twenty seconds was in the lady's bedroom. Pearl Buck slept hard, on a plain mahogany bed, and she kept her clothes in a plain mahogany cupboard. Everything about her part of the house, indeed, was plain and unadorned, with a Shakerite austerity. But then there was a room devoted to, of all places, Tempe, Arizona, with which Zhenjiang has lately become affiliated, as a sister city. So there was a Kachina doll, a basketball signed by some of Tempe's tallest, and countless photographs of Tempe worthies shaking hands with smiling officials from Zhenjiang while paying homage, as I did, to the city's best-known daughter. There was no connection at all between Miss Buck and the city of Tempe: but the Chinese, still officially irritated at the writer for her implacable anti-communism, seemingly thought it quite reasonable to herd all western tributaries, whether they came from Arizona or the Appalachians, into the same building. Some say that the house was actually never the Sydenstrickers' at all, and that the authorities are playing a joke on Pearl Buck's memory, on the Arizonans and on us today. To the Chinese, it must not be forgotten, we are all alike, and can well afford to be the butt of their little amusements.

  I pulled her bedroom door behind me until it locked, gave the old woman five yuan to compensate for her initial shock at and later complicity in my housebreaking, and walked away from the radio factory, Pearl Buck's home or not. I flagged down a taxi, piled in our bags and asked him to take us to Nanjing.

  It turned out to be a slightly eccentric journey, though nothing particularly unusual for the adventurous universe in which Chinese taxicabs like to operate. In this case the man offered to give us the ride to Nanjing at half price if we in return would agree to let him cross the Yangtze once again to pick up one of his relations, an elderly man who lived on the outskirts of Yangzhou. This meant we would have to board the car ferry one more time, and that we would have to approach Nanjing by driving on the river's north shore, not the south. But all this seemed of little moment, and I readily agreed. The driver was very happy. I rather liked the little car ferry, anyway, and I stood happily in a thin evening drizzle, watching the lights of Zhenjiang prick on in the gathering gloom.

  It seemed that I was drawing away from the city and from one very small enigma – the minor mystery of what exactly was the long-forgotten piece of Royal Naval hardware that lay behind the bushes in the consulate garden. Later that night, once I had taken a long hot shower in the hotel in Nanjing, I found with some gratitude that I was leaving behind something else: the pervasive sharp-sour smell of the medal-winning, first-class, internationally renowned and copiously produced Zhenjiang Brown Rice Vinegar.

  5

  City of Victims

  On the outskirts of Nanjing I knocked a young woman off her bicycle. She was wearing a long white linen skirt and she fell with the slow grace of a ballerina, managing perfectly to preserve her dignity. It was all, without a doubt, my fault.

  Moments before our driver had been pulled over by the police. The routine that ensued was to become a familiar one: an officer with a flag leaps from behind a bush, waves us to a halt, mentions some alleged infraction; the driver is persuaded to cross the road and discuss matters with a group of well-fed-looking colleague-officers, a not insubstantial sum in folding money changes hands, the first policeman is told to return the licence, drop his red flag and let us proceed, whereupon he then wedges himself behind the bush once again. Thus does traffic in China keep moving smoothly; thus does the small corps of car owners pay a reasonable additional tax for the privilege; and thus do policemen lie abed happily each night.

  During these early days of my own journey I was innocent enough and arrogant enough to think I might be able to help – or to object or argue – when a situation like this presented itself. In this instance, Lily warned me not to try, saying sternly that my presence would only complicate matters. She bade me stay in the car. Ignoring her advice I opened the right-side back door to get out – and very nearly killed the young woman.

  There was a sudden cry, a scraping sound like fingernails on a blackboard, and a sickening crunch. The door was slammed rudely and forcefully back on me and then I watched in appalled silence the slow-motion image of a young woman going down with her skittering bicycle, like the last moments of a dying swan. Her front wheel headed downward from the levee on which we were parked, the other wheel swerved back into the roadway, and between them fell the woman, sinking slowly onto the gravel and the mud. She turned her head around fast so that her long mane of black hair whipped around behind her, and she glared at me – a handsome face that looked at once perplexed that anyone could not know that Chinese cyclists rode close to cars and that is how it was and always had been and how foolish of anyone to open a door without looking, and angry that she was about to be hurt, perhaps, and also that in front of a carful of strangers she was going to fall over and tumble and show her legs, and worse, and lose her dignity and face and the elegant comeliness with which she evidently tried to ride her bicycle every day.

  Gravity did its powerful work, and I thought the woman would steadily and inevitably succumb. But instead she fought for all she was worth, and as she fell so her legs twisted this way and that, and her arms did the same, and she stared ahead and around with such concentration that, by the kind of miracle no foreigner could ever manage, she did eventually stop the great black confection of iron and rubber that I recognized as a Flying Pigeon brand bicycle from falling any more, and she managed to halt its forward progress and its downward progress and its tipping and skidding as well, and she managed to stop herself falling too – she just sank, caught her balance and her breath and her dignity, and stopped, in a crumpled mass of white linen, lying between two upright wheels and in a cloud of dust.

  With a sudden weary sag of her shoulders she remounted the saddle, looked back at me in silent fury once more, straightened her wheels, shook her head in defiance of that gravity and momentum and the baleful influence of the foreigner who had initiated all this, and shakily, nervously, bumpily and then with ever-growing confidence she resumed her ride, joining in with the uncaring rows of other cyclists and merging among them, anonymous and dignified once again. She gave me one last look – a beautiful face framed by a marvel of hair, her white blouse slightly off one shoulder but still crisp and fresh, her long white skirt a little crumpled and with a small smudge of dust down one side. She looked glorious, I thought, newly arisen from what could have been the wreckage of her day, and riding serenely off into the afternoon sun.

  Rising from wreckage of one kind and another has been a perennial occupation for the city of Nanjing. Very few places in China have soared and plummeted with such fantastic and tragic recklessness. The city was the glorious capital of some dynasties, and then remaindered as a dusty and provincial backwater for others. There was, as in many Chinese cities of long history, at least one of those tragedies that scholars later term an ‘incident’: this came in 1927, when Nationalist troops killed seven foreigners, and a force of foreign gunboats sent to retaliate shelled and killed twice as many Chinese. But there had been more terrible tragedies too: during late Qing times, for example – for the eleven years between March 1853 and July 1864 – the city became the headquarters of a notorious sect of power-hungry fanatics, the Taipings, whose resistance was eventually destroyed (along with most of the city) after a siege partly staged by a foreign-led mercenary army, and whose leader was driven to s
uicide (it is said) by swallowing gold.* This most traumatic of events was sandwiched between two other humiliations: ten years before the arrival of the Taiping rebels, the city had been forced to bow low before one group of barbarians, the British; and seventy years after the Taipings, Nanjing became an epicentre of mayhem and cruelty at the hands of another group, the Japanese.

  It is a city that, more than almost any other in China, has fully deserved the doleful and all-too-common description that you will read in all Chinese history books, a sentence that appears in one guise or other, referring to some such place in some such time at the hands of some such madness: ‘Its population was greatly reduced, its trade destroyed, and many of its beautiful, historic buildings and part of its walls, reduced to ruins.’ Nanjing has had, in other words, a horribly chequered past.

  And yet on the surface you would never know it. Her present is blandly prosperous. Her image is relentlessly upbeat. It seems as though under the Communists the city of Nanjing has been urged, cajoled, made to rise from all that has gone before. Perhaps because of her past glories she has had money spent on her, she has come in for the caring attention of the central government, and has been persuaded to shake herself free of the more wretched side of her history. And she has gone along with the country's perceived wishes: she has washed off the dust and grime and, even if she is slightly crumpled from all of her trials, she looks well enough now, and quite presentable. Which is what the country seems to want for its most shabbily treated town.

  For whenever I told a Chinese that I was planning to go up the Yangtze and stop a while at Nanjing, they would invariably say what they would never say if I admitted I was off to somewhere more pedestrian, like Harbin or Changsha or Canton: ‘Oh, really? Nanjing! How nice! How lucky you are!’ one man said. ‘Lovely city!’ said another. One elderly man in New York became dreamy-eyed and hinted at romance, muttering a nostalgic formula: ‘The flower boats! Taking your ease under the shade of a weeping willow, listening to a pretty little singsong girl… ah, that was the life… What a fine, fine place!’ This old man knew what had happened to the city through the years; but he seemed to be caught up like everyone else in the earnestness with which the rest of China seems to be trying to reinvent Nanjing. ‘One of the most interesting cities in our country – truly,’ said Lily. ‘All of us are very proud of Nanjing – of the way her people have risen above all their sufferings.’