In Chongqing a smog of pollution lay along the Yangtze like brown Windsor
soup. I could taste bitter metal on my tongue and there were sharp needles
in my sinuses.
"You must see the pandas,'' said the Chinese guide, and she took us to a park
where three of them reclined outside their caves, pampered and smug, like
concubines, favourites of the emperor. They grinned and rolled over, ripping
up bamboo shoots, then they rolled back again, their insouciance joyful and
beyond emulation.
But we had come to Chongqing to board the MS Bashan and to sail through the
Three Gorges of the Great River the Qutang, the Wu and the Xiling. And so,
somewhere on the edge of town, in an indeterminate place, we waited on a
sloping wharf that crumbled on either side to banks of ash-coloured mud.
Next to us was a heap of our ship's provisions: crates of beer and boxes of
fruit. To the left and right the mud gleamed, releasing a rich stench of
decay, and gradually the evening light came down to the river to lose itself
inside a cloud of midnight blue. Then, at last, the Bashan emerged from the
dusk, silently, its lamps all lit, a four-tiered wedding-cake of a ship in
white, with observation lounges fore and aft. The gangplank was lowered and
we trooped into a different world where all was quiet carpets and coolness
and spacious cabins, and 114 crew members to care for just 18 of us.
In the morning, I awoke to reflections of water on the ceiling and a burst of
light blazing at the window. Up on deck, and still in my dressing gown, I
could see that the Yangtze was heavy with a silt of red ochre, gentle and
smooth like graphite on the surface, while underneath there moved a menacing
current, given body and weight by the earth it carried. The landscape was
magnificent; great hills plunging down into the water, sometimes close at
hand, pressing in on the ship, and sometimes retreating a little to allow
the ivory clouds to flood in and the terraced small-holdings to gain a
foothold. Black hawks rested on the wind and, at the water's brink, women,
their children and their washing were small and vulnerable against a land
that soared vertically to the skyline fields striped in green and gold, dark
blue in the shadows; bamboo bridges a bright yellow, and the earth roads,
their dirt the same red ochre as the river, winding upwards to where the
poplar trees shimmered like obelisks, shreds of mist lying between them.
Our mentor for the journey was Bill Hurst, a Yangtze hand of some 12 years'
experience. With him came Ernie Kemm, an itinerant piano player who had
earned his bread in every continent. ``I've got more work than I can deal
with,'' he said. ``Hotels, QE2 ... I'll never see Arizona again.'' After
dinner every evening these two entertained and informed us: Ernie with the
old songs from the 1930s and 1940s; Bill with short lectures on agriculture
and history.
Into our notebooks the information went: only 11% of the republic's territory
is suitable for farming; only 7% of the world's arable land to feed 25% of
the world's population; winter wheat, maize, potatoes, green vegetables,
sesame and rape seed. Then we sat back and watched old black-and-white films
that traced the fortunes of China since the turn of the century the fall of
the empire, the civil war, the Sino-Japanese war, the second world war and
the Long March.
The newsreel clips went straight to the heart with their awkward and abrupt
brutality; fleeting scenes of mayhem and slaughter, tears and famine, and
through those sad, jerky pictures came the smell of blood and stacked bodies
rotting. And then Ernie at the piano: ``Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you
... above all I want my arms about you...'' And out on the silent dark of
the Great River the sampans headed for the edge of the current, tying up for
the night in clusters by narrow inlets and huge slabs of rock.
At five-thirty the next morning one of the 114 crew knocked on my door to make
certain I did not miss the entry into the Qutang Gorge. Here, the mountains
leapt up from the river to heights of 4,000ft, and the current, confined,
was determined and dangerous, a bringer of death to ships and sailors, so
like a millrace that below us the tiny sampans of the night were caught up
and borne away like twigs, looking frail and doomed.
On the eastern side of the gorges, at Wushan, we moored against a floating
jetty and climbed 100 steps that led, steep as a ladder, to the top of a
high bank. The air was moist; people swarmed everywhere and the steps were
cluttered with hustlers and porters. We pushed into the crowd, by shanty
food stalls with rattan roofs. A chicken was beheaded as I looked, a hatchet
falling relentlessly. The head sprang from the body and the blood spurted
over an enamel bowl, some of it dripping into the black of the blood-rich
ground. Another chicken lay half-submerged in a pot, the steam floating
around it.
At the top of the steps the porters waited in small groups, plying for hire,
their quick eyes suspicious. Each one carried a yoke of bamboo, rigid across
his shoulders, the baskets swinging empty at the end of frayed ropes. We,
too, waited in the crowd, and there was a strong smell of coal dust
everywhere. I looked back to the river and saw why; below me, on a flat
curve of the shore, a long line of men and women moved steadily to and from
a rusty collier, coal-filled bags on their shoulders; their knees were bent
and their backs were bowed; like a column of ants they stopped for nothing,
yet the huge stack of coal they fed seemed hardly to grow at all.
Then a rackety bus came for us and we drove into the streets of Wushan streets
that were narrow and solid with bright faces, a hubbub of shouts and cries.
We stared down into shops and houses, and their inhabitants stared back at
us. And, with the driver's elbow hard on the horn, we shoved through the
throngs of the town's market; great quantities of food everywhere and long
slabs of meat with no flies crawling. ``Because Mao said `swat 30 flies a
day', and as there are more Chinese than flies, the flies disappeared in one
season ... they didn't stand a chance.''
