The River at the Centre of the World Read online

  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.’

  His card offered an impossibly long description: he was Master of the Woosung Supervision Station of the Shanghai Harbour Superintendency Administration of the People's Republic of China, Shanghai Bureau of Maritime Safety of the Superintendency of the Ministry of Communications. He gave me tea, showed me the Chinese charts of the Yangtze – stamped ‘Secret’ on every page – and then took me upstairs, to a darkened room at the top of the building. There was a double door, an air lock. Inside three men peered intently at a bank of colour computer s
creens and whispered occasionally into microphones.

  ‘These are the air-traffic controllers of the sea,’ said Mr Zhang, with a chortle. ‘They run the most up-to-date harbour control system in the world. It makes me very proud.’

  The Germans supplied the computers, the Chinese made everything else themselves. Every one of the ships coming along the Lower Yangtze that day, and every single vessel turning into or out of the Whangpoo, was tracked on radar. Computers assessed all the tracks, the speeds and the directions, and calculated who might collide with whom, and what changes needed to be made to ensure they didn't. It was the operators' job to tell the skippers what the computers wanted. All of the operators were Chinese. One spoke English, another Greek, the third Russian, and they used these languages, and more often Chinese, to talk to the watch officers on the ships that passed below. Mr Chen, a man of about twenty-five who spoke impeccable English, was talking to an Indian bulk carrier, just now mooring at Baoshan. ‘Bringing coal up from Calcutta,’ he said. ‘Then coming to Shanghai to take – what is it? –wolfram and antimony ore, back to India. Typical. I have to watch him in and out. Make sure he doesn't hit anything.

  ‘The computers make it very easy. It really is like air-traffic control. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Very intense. But fine job, don't you agree?

  ‘This is bringing Shanghai into the next century, I think. Soon – not very long, I am sure – it will be the finest port in the world. It will pass Hong Kong, Singapore. This system is going to help. We will win! That I guarantee.’

  Mr Zhang patted him on the shoulder, and ushered me out from the dark, and down the stairs. Soon I was stepping gingerly over the rotten fishheads on the dockside once again, this time making my way to what I hoped might be the Woosung railway station. I needed to get to Shanghai, and for purely historical reasons the train seemed the best bet.

  For this was the third reason for Woosung's fame. This might now be the site of China's first computerized port; but a century and a quarter before, doubtless confirming Mr Zhang's view that his city had long been in the vanguard of China's modernization, Woosung was the site of the country's first, and as it happens very short-lived, steam railway.

  It was Jardine, Matheson & Co. who built it. This is hardly surprising: the firm whose mercantile empire still remains a potent force in the Far East was instrumental – via such devices as railway making and shipbuilding – in opening up China to foreign commerce. (Its contacts back in London were such as to influence governments: it is still said today, and not entirely unfairly, that the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, suggested the prosecution of the First Opium War – with the cession of Hong Kong the most notable corollary to Britain's military success – mainly to keep the Jardines opium trade in business.) But the construction of this first modest permanent way over the twelve modest miles that separated Woosung from Shanghai proved a difficult and, eventually, unhappy experience for the firm: it showed how deeply suspicious China was then of anything – no matter how obviously beneficial – that was fashioned by barbarian hands.

  Since the 1850s Jardines and other foreign firms doing business in China had suggested building railways. It was part of the mood of the moment: Britain had started its own first commercial train service back in 1825, and railways now crisscrossed the island from Cornwall to Cromarty. In America, too, tracks were being laid as fast as the Pennsylvania steel mills could forge them. And yet by 1869, the year when thousands of labourers – Chinese labourers, no less – brought the Central Pacific metals to Utah and spiked them together with the rails from the Union Pacific in Omaha, and so knitted the country into one – by that same year not one single mile of railway had been laid in China. India was at the same time tottering under the weight of iron and brass; but China was still a nation of post roads and canals and bucolic inefficiency.

  Jardines, in a hurry to make money, thought all of this a nonsense. China was, in their view, woefully out of step with the rest of the world. In letter after letter the firm kept beseeching the Manchus to make way for the modern. But the Court maintained an unyielding hauteur, turning down request after request, just as they had done to the merchants who wanted progress made on the Woosung Bar. Besides, the Chinese said in one letter, which I once saw in the Jardines archive, ‘railways would only be beneficial to China if undertaken by the Chinese themselves, and constructed under their own management.’

  There was only one thing for it, so the westerners thought. Displaying the combination of mercantile acumen and barefaced cheek that (perhaps in part because it is so Chinese) continues to infuriate Beijing today, the firm decided to go ahead anyway, and in secret.* There was some hesitation – the first steps were taken in 1865, abandoned two years later and then revived in 1872. But finally the company had taken into their confidence the Shanghai city taotai – the official, appointed by the mandarinate, who was essentially the local mayor. The scheme, the foreigners thought, was bound to succeed.

  The subterfuge had many elements and strategies. The company first had its Shanghai land agent buy up sections of real estate north of Shanghai, saying they were planning to build nothing more threatening than a horse road. At the same time they set up a London-based company, the Woosung Road Co. Ltd, and purchased a number of tiny steam railway engines made by a British firm called Ransomes and Rapier. The firm then quietly and surreptitiously laid a few miles of track, trusting that the taotai – who by now had been so taken into confidence that he had been persuaded to buy some WR Co. shares – would not step in to prevent it.

  The rails, once unveiled, were just thirty inches apart – a little more than half the width of the railways that were then being built all across Britain and America. The trains made by Ransomes were small as well – they looked like models, the kind of engines that were found in amusement parks. The carriages, too, were child-sized, and open to the elements. The whole idea was to construct a railway that was on the one hand relatively inexpensive and on the other, and rather more important, would not terrify the Chinese public – to whom the idea of a foreign-made fire-breathing iron monster rushing about on iron tracks would be unsettling, to say the least. Nor could Jardines be accused of ostentation: nothing the company was doing on the Woosung road would or could be allowed in any way to challenge the supremacy of grandeur that was embodied in the Emperor or his appointed representatives.

  The railway service duly opened with only reserved fanfare on 30 June 1876. The trains – pulled by a Ransomes engine appropriately called the Pioneer – were known locally as ‘devil's carriages’, and for many weeks no one would ride in them. Slowly, though, their convenience and economy caught on 187,000 people were counted as having ridden during the first year of operation.

  The business would have continued to flourish, no doubt, had not disaster struck: in October 1877 a Chinese man was hit by a train and killed – whether it was suicide, murder, contrived misfortune or just a simple accident was never made clear. Jardines promptly compensated the family; but the Qing court in faraway Beijing then heard about the line (their taotai having carelessly omitted to inform them), complained that it had been built without permission and demanded that it be taken over by the government. Besides, the officials said, the railway was clearly a dangerous invention: the public, now back to being frightened by this evil monster, was in mortal fear.

  And so a few months later, with a silk merchant acting as intermediary between the court and the barbarian merchants, the line was sold for a quarter of a million Shanghai taels. A court-appointed company took over the running of the little line for a day or so, and then, presumably as planned, the Qing officials shut the operation down, ordered the lines torn up within a few days and then shipped everything – rails, carriages, signals and the little toy trains – across the sea to Formosa.

  Their people, they said, felt that fiery iron dragons – no matter how modestly sized – disturbed the essential harmony of the Empire. A temple to the Queen of Heaven was to be
built on the site of the terminus – a proper propitiation, it was felt, to a deity whose tranquillity had been insulted by the foreigners. It was to be twenty more years before Woosung and Shanghai were connected by rail again – by which time China was on the verge of building (and not by its own devices, but with the help of the British, Americans, Russians, Germans and French) one of the biggest railway systems in the world. The mood by then had changed, profoundly. Fiery iron monsters now rumble across every province of the People's Republic – except for Tibet – and, far from disturbing celestial harmony, they are as essential to the well-being of the nation as rice and air. But that was not how matters were viewed in the China of the 1870s: back then in Woosung railways were foreign, they were unsettling and for the while at least they were not to be.

  Nor, as it happened, was a railway for me in Woosung a century and a quarter later. Try as I might to find my way through the back streets by the docks, and try as I might to get to the station where it had all begun, I managed to get myself utterly and hopelessly lost. It had been a long day – up before dawn, transferring from ship to ship, rocking and lumbering up the estuary – and so when a red Toyota taxi stopped and the driver asked if I wanted a ride, and when I considered the trials of finding the station and then dealing with the complexities of buying a ticket, I uttered my cowardly agreement.

  I loaded my rucksack into the back of the car, Lily and I wedged ourselves behind a formidable wall of Perspex security shield, which even Shanghainese taxis claim they need these days, and, with the radio blaring a noisy Foochow pop song, we headed past the Baoshan steel mills – and into the city. I told the driver to take us to a gateway beside the old Russian Consulate on Whangpoo Road. There was a ship docked behind it, I knew, in a cabin aboard which I had an invitation to sleep.