Acknowledgements

Why we’re drawn to particular places is often a mystery. To the Westerner, China can seem forbidding and harsh, remote, baffling and frustrating. But I was still in my teens when I fell under its spell, and when the opportunity later arose for me to spend some time travelling, China was my immediate choice of destination. I don’t know if I found what I expected, based as it necessarily was on romantic imaginings. But circumstances have conspired to take me back to China many times since, and I shall continue to return. It has been my immense privilege to meet many Chinese people who have deepened my appreciation for their country; some are now good friends and colleagues. It is first to all of these folk that I offer my gratitude and acknowledgements: to their spirit, their warmth and generosity, by which I am humbled.

It was a leap of wild optimism to attempt a book of this sort, and the faith and trust offered by my publishers has been essential. For this, and for their diligence in seeing the project through, I am deeply grateful to Stuart Williams and Jörg Hensgen at the Bodley Head, and to Karen Merikangas Darling at the University of Chicago Press. My agent Clare Alexander was equally brave to represent it, and as ever her advice has helped me to find some kind of shape and structure for what is really a rather absurdly overwhelming subject. Several people kindly provided advice, publications and images – in particular, Sarah Allan, David Clarke, Jan Engberts, Li Cho-ying, Sam Turvey and Thomas Stephens.

My family has shared in more of this process than I have usually asked of them, braving the Yangtze drizzle and Henan heat with humour and resilience, and with not much more than dumplings by way of recompense. I hope it was worth it, for I am quite certain that more adventures await us in the Middle Kingdom.

Philip Ball

London, June 2016

ALSO BY PHILIP BALL

Designing the Molecular World:
Chemistry at the Frontier

Made to Measure:
New Materials for the 21st Century

H₂O:
A Biography of Water

The Self-made Tapestry:
Pattern Formation in Nature

Bright Earth:
The Invention of Colour

Stories of the Invisible:
A Guided Tour of Molecules

The Ingredients:
A Guided Tour of the Elements

Critical Mass:
How One Thing Leads to Another

Elegant Solutions:
Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry

The Devil’s Doctor:
Paracelsus and World of Renaissance Magic and Science

Nature’s Patterns:
A Tapestry in Three Parts

Universe of Stone:
Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind

The Sun and Moon Corrupted

The Music Instinct:
How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It

Unnatural:
The Heretical Idea of Making People

Curiosity:
How Science Became Interested in Everything

Serving the Reich:
The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

Invisible:
The History of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics

About the Author

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature.

His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible: The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.

About the Book

A secret history of China – a fresh new way of thinking about a people, a civilisation, an epic story.

The Water Kingdom takes us on a grand journey through China’s past and present, offering a unique window through which we can begin to grasp the overwhelming complexity and teeming energy of the country and its people.

Water is a key that unlocks much of Chinese history and thought. The ubiquitous relationship that the Chinese people have had with water has made it an enduring metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression. From the Han emperors to Mao, the ability to manage the waters – to provide irrigation and defend against floods – became a barometer of political legitimacy, and attempts to do so have involved engineering works on a gigantic scale. Yet the strain that economic growth is putting on its water resources today may be the greatest threat to China’s future.

The Water Kingdom is an epic, spell-binding story. Our guides are travellers and explorers, poets and painters, bureaucrats and activists, who have themselves struggled to come to terms with living in a world so shaped and permeated by water.

Bibliography

1 The Great Rivers

Yangtze and Yellow: The Axes of China’s Geography

When Confucius described water as ‘twisting around ten thousand times but always going eastward’,² he seemed to imply that the eastbound flow of rivers was tantamount to a law of nature, almost a moral precept. There is no clearer illustration of how a culture’s geography may affect its world view. Why would anyone who had never stepped foot outside China have any reason to doubt that this was how the world was made?

In China the symmetry of east and west is broken by tectonic forces. Westwards lie the mountains, the great Tibetan plateau at the roof of the world, pushed upwards where the Indo-Australian plate crashes into and plunges beneath the Eurasian. Eastward lies the ocean: only Taiwan and Japan block the way to the Pacific’s expanse, which might as well be endless. The flow, the pull, the tilt of the world, is from mountains to water, from shan to shui.

This is the direction of the mighty waterways that have dominated the country’s topographic consciousness. ‘A great man’, wrote the Ming scholar and explorer Xu Xiake, ‘should in the morning be at the blue sea, and in the evening at Mount Cangwu’³ (a sacred peak in southern Hunan province). To the perplexity of Western observers (not least when confronted with Chinese maps), the innate mental compass of the Chinese points not north–south, but east–west. The Chinese people articulate and imagine space differently from Westerners – and no wonder.

All of China’s great rivers respect this axis. But two in particular are symbols of the nation and the keys to its fate: the Yangtze and the Yellow River. These great waterways orient China’s efforts to comprehend itself, and they explain a great deal about the social, economic and geographical organization of its culture and trade. The rivers are where Confucius and Lao Tzu went to think, where poets like Li Bai and Du Fu went to find words to fit their melancholy, where painters discerned in the many moods of water a language of political commentary, where China’s pivotal battles were fought, where rulers from the first Qin Emperor to Mao and his successors demonstrated their authority. They are where life happens, and there is really nothing much to be said about China that does not start with a river.

The great rivers drove some of the earliest stirrings of an impulse to explore and understand the world. The Yü Ji Tu (‘Tracks of Yü’ Map), carved in stone sometime before the twelfth century, shows how Chinese cartography was far ahead of anything in Christendom or classical Greece. In medieval maps of Europe the rivers are schematic ribbons, serpents’ tails encroaching from the coast in rather random wiggles. But the Yü Ji Tu could almost be the work of a Victorian surveyor, depicting the known extent of the kingdom with extraordinary fidelity and measured on a very modern-looking grid. It is dominated by the traceries of river networks, with the Yellow River and the Yangtze given bold prominence. These are the ‘tracks’ defined by China’s first great water hero, the legendary emperor Yü who conquered the Great Flood (Chapter 2).

The Yü Ji Tu, carved in stone probably in the eleventh century. The cartographic use of a grid system dates at least back to the Han dynasty in the second century AD, when the polymath Zhang Heng is said to have introduced it.

China has always been interested in – one might fairly say obsessed with – its rivers. The Shui jing (Classic of the Waterways) was the canonical text of hydrological geography, traditionally credited to Sang Qin of the Han dynasty, although later scholars have placed it in the third and fourth centuries AD (the Jin dynasty). We don’t know quite what it contained, since it has been lost, but a commentary on the work, known as the Shui jing zhu by the scholar Li Daoyuan (427–527), ran to forty volumes and listed more than 1,200 rivers.

The impassioned searching for the source of the great rivers throughout Chinese history seems almost to betray a hope that it will reveal the occult wellspring of China itself, the fount of the country’s spirit (qi). The source of the Yellow River was debated at least since the Tang dynasty of the seventh to the tenth century AD, and the Yuan emperor Khubilai Khan dispatched an expedition in 1280 that was supposed to clarify the matter. Yet the point was still being argued seven centuries later, when the China Exploration and Research Society declared that the Yellow River springs from the icy, crystal-clear waters of lakes Gyaring and Ngoring in the Bayan Har Mountains of remote Qinghai.

The Wei River as depicted in the fifth-century work Shui jing zhu (Commentary on the Classic of the Waterways).

The source of the Yangtze is disputed even now. An expedition in the 1970s identified it as the Tuotuo, the ‘tearful’ river in Qinghai, but several years later it was assigned to the Damqu instead. There’s ultimately something arbitrary in conferring primacy on one of a river’s several headwater sources, but for the Yangtze the symbolic significance of this choice is too strongly felt for the protagonists to brook any compromise. The classical answer, given in the Yu gong manuscript from the Warring States period of the fifth to the third century BC, was that the Yangtze begins as the Min River in Sichuan. But during the Ming era, iconoclastic Xu Xiake (1586–1641) argued otherwise. He found that the Jinsha River, which joins the Min in Sichuan, goes back much further than the Min: a full 2,000 kilometres, deep into the wilds of the Qinghai plateau. The Jinsha (‘Golden Sand’, referring to the alluvial gold that may be found in the river’s sediment) itself stems from the Dangtian, whose tributaries in Qinghai vie as the ultimate source of the Yangtze, flowing from the glacier lakes of that high and inhospitable land.

The Yellow and Yangtze rivers.

No one better personifies the Chinese devotion to its great rivers than Xu Xiake, who wandered for thirty years into remote places, suffering robberies, sickness, hunger and all manner of hazards. ‘He would travel’, one contemporary account relates,

From shui to shan: what more nourishment could the mind need? And to get there, Xu believed, one should not march like a soldier but wander like a poet.

In the person of Xu Xiake, Confucian rectitude meets Daoist instinctiveness and reverie. He was born in the city of Jiangyin, north-west of Shanghai on the Yangtze delta. For much of his travels Xu was attended by a long-suffering servant named Gu Xing. The pair often had to rely on the benevolence of local monasteries for food and shelter, where Xu might offer payment in kind by writing down the history of the institution. On one occasion they were attacked and robbed by bandits on the banks of the Xiang River in Hunan, left destitute but lucky to be alive. Perhaps we can forgive Gu for finally robbing and deserting his master.

Xu journeyed into snowy Sichuan and harsh, perilous Tibet, where rivers could freeze so fast that wandering cattle could get trapped and perish in the ice. He went deep into the steamy Yunnan jungle, then still a region alien, foreign and wild, to determine that the Mekong (called the Lancang in China), Salween (Nu) and Red (Lishe) rivers were separate entities along their entire courses. But although he diligently recorded the local geology and mineralogy, there is little that is systematic in his itinerary: he was wandering more or less without plan or destination.

Still he deserves to be called a geographer. His methods of surveying were crude, but they rejected the local superstitions that until then supplied the usual rationale for natural phenomena. His notes, according to the great scholar of Chinese science and technology Joseph Needham, ‘read more like those of a twentieth-century field surveyor than of a seventeenth-century scholar’.⁵ And like his contemporaries in Europe, he was prepared to risk censure by preferring the testimony of experience over that of classical authorities. There had been whispers ever since the Han era that the true headwaters of the Yangtze were not, as the classics insisted, the Min, but instead the Jinsha flowing from the Kunlun Mountains of Qinghai. Xu, however, was the first to dare make the claim openly. For this he was denounced as despicable.

Ancient scholarly study of China’s rivers and waters reveals how far ahead of the West Chinese theory and practice were, not only in cartography but in an understanding of natural phenomena. While the Shan hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas, probably written in the Warring States period) was content to ascribe the tides to the comings and goings of a massive leviathan-like creature in the oceans, the Han scholar Wang Chong argued in the first century AD that tides are related to the moon. ‘The rise of the wave follows the waxing and waning moon,’ he wrote, ‘smaller and larger, fuller or lesser, never the same.’⁶ Wang Chong championed a rationalistic explanation of the world over the rather superstitious Daoism and formulaic Confucianism of his time, and his meteorological and astronomical observations were particularly astute. He described the essence of the hydrological cycle (even if his belief in the link between the moon and water extended to a lunar influence on rainfall): ‘Clouds and rain are really the same thing. Water evaporating upwards becomes clouds, which condense into rain, or still further into dew.’⁷ Wang Chong perceived the same correspondences between the movements and forms of river water and of blood circulation that were noted by Leonardo da Vinci a millennium and a half later. He wrote:

The value of such beliefs, as many historians of science have noted, is not so much a matter of whether or not they are true, as of their capacity to stimulate further observation and to explain the world in naturalistic terms. The importance of the waterways created an imperative for such speculations, just as it drove the development of technologies and systems for making careful measurements and records, for example so that water levels could be determined during dredging operations. Cartography was so far advanced in China from the Han to the Ming eras partly because water management was accorded such priority.

What a strange journey the Yellow River, China’s ‘mother river’ (muqin he), makes from mountain lake to Yellow Sea. Pouring down from the western highlands, around the city of Lanzhou in Gansu province it departs from its eastwards flow and travels north towards Inner Mongolia, then executes another bend to turn south along the border of Sha’anxi and Shanxi provinces. Finally, sluggish with silt and descending the shallowest of gradients, it turns abruptly east when joined by the Wei River near the border of Sha’anxi and Henan. It cuts north-east across the North China Plain, through Henan and Shandong, before emptying at the coast. The 4,632-kilometre journey makes the Yellow River the fourth longest in the world. The flow is not so massive compared with the Amazon or the Mississippi, but it varies hugely between the dry and wet (June–September) seasons. That is partly what makes the Yellow River so hard to manage – but the key problem is the silt.

The course of the Yellow River.

It is in the denuded and rugged landscapes of Ningxia, Sha’anxi and Shanxi that the river gets it hue. This region is a vast plateau of loose sandy soil called loess, hundreds of metres thick, blown there from the Gobi desert just to the north in Mongolia. The soil is powdery and virtually free from grit, so that it crumbles to an ochre smear under your fingers. This is China’s famous ‘yellow earth’ (huangtu). Loess is easily eroded, and winds blow it in blinding clouds as far east as Beijing. While the capital’s now infamous dust storms have been aggravated by desertification in the north-west, they have been apt for centuries to descend and leave everything – houses, trees, animals, people – coated a dirty yellow.

The great river fills with sediment as it carves its course through this landscape, loading the waters with a higher density of solids than is found in almost any other river in the world. From each kilogram of Yellow River water you can extract as much as 300 grams of sediment, making it tantamount to liquid mud. By the time the river turns eastwards again at the threefold meeting of Sha’anxi, Shanxi and Henan, it is a reddish-golden colour.

This sediment gives the Yellow River the Janus nature in which it both nourishes and devastates the nation. The loess-rich water deposits fertile soils in the middle and lower reaches – the North China Plain – where there are great fields of wheat and sorghum, millet, maize and sweet potato, the latter two imported from the New World. Half of China’s wheat is grown here, and a third of its maize and cotton. A quarter of the country’s population live on these plains, and one estimate maintains that over time more than a trillion people have lived and died here, fed by the rich alluvium. The archaeological remains of agricultural villages have been found from around the eighth millennium BC, which is when millet was first domesticated in China.

The river has been engineered for over two millennia so that it might swell the bounty from farmland. Irrigation here dates back at least to the Warring States period from the fifth century BC, when the feudal system emerged. While anthropologist Jared Diamond’s suggestion that agriculture was ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’⁹ shoulders all the burdens of counterfactual histories, there is hardly a better example than the Yellow River to advance his argument. The story of the river basin has been one of interactions between human civilization and nature that constantly raised the stakes while at the same time creating an artificial ecosystem of vast scale and perilous fragility: a landscape almost wholly shaped by human agency, yet nonetheless still massively vulnerable to nature’s whims.

For, although most major rivers are prone to flood, the Yellow River valley has suffered from it in a manner both extreme in extent and seemingly intractable in cause. As the river flows east, some of the sediment settles onto the bed, raising it higher. The waters then become increasingly likely to overrun the banks when the flood season arrives with the rains and the melting of snow at the headwaters in summer. To combat flooding, for millennia the Chinese built dykes along the river: huge ramparts of mud, reinforced with sacks of rocks, woven reed mats and clumps of vegetation. But this method of flood control is unsustainable. As the riverbed rose, so did the dykes, until the river itself flowed as if along a semi-natural aqueduct up to fifteen metres above the level of the surrounding floodplain. When a breach in the dykes occurred – and it always did eventually – the result was all the more catastrophic. Kilometres of dykes, having been laboriously built and maintained for years, might be swept away in a matter of hours, and the river water pooled into immense lakes and inland seas. As the flow was diverted, it slowed down and silt was deposited at a greater rate, choking up the old bed and making it extremely hard to return the river to its course.

Yet it was precisely because of the river’s fertile sediments that the floodplain was so attractive to farmers, accumulating a rural population at constant hazard of disaster. At the same time, intensive agriculture exacerbated the danger. The demand for cultivable land, as well as for timber to use as fuel and in construction, led to clearance of the forests that once covered the loess plains. The bleak, barren badlands of today, riven by chasms and gorges, are largely a human construct, for the forest cover on the loess plateau is thought to have declined over the past four millennia from more than 50% of the land area to just 8%. Lacking the protection of forest canopy and root systems, the exposed soil is more readily eroded by rain, which not only destroys farmland but also boosts the sediment load in the river, making the problem of silt deposition still more grave.

The effects of land clearance were already felt in the Qin and Han periods two millennia ago, and deforestation was condemned in some ancient texts. The problem worsened considerably during the Tang dynasty, when agriculture intensified to provide food for China’s army as the empire expanded its borders and maintained large garrisons against the threat of invasion. It was in Tang times that the river’s sediment load earned it the name ‘Yellow’.

Increased erosion made the river meander more dramatically, so that farmers could never be sure how long their fields would survive. Moreover, the climate was relatively dry at this time, which increased the pressure on irrigation. That was never done efficiently: fields were simply waterlogged, which meant that mineral salts deeper within the soil were dissolved and carried to the surface. There they accumulated when the water evaporated, producing saline soil with low fertility. (This process of salinization remains a blight of over-irrigation globally today.) Deforested land was sometimes over-farmed and quickly depleted in nutrients, whereupon it was abandoned and yet more land cleared. In this way, what was once farmland became barren ground and eventually desert. With the loess exposed, the river began to meander widely as it cut into and shifted the sandy deposits, creating the other-worldly terrain of ravines and gorges that distinguishes Shanxi today. The American journalist Edgar Snow gave a compelling account of these landforms in the 1930s:

Floods of unimaginable proportions have ravaged the Yellow River valley since ancient times. As the Han historian Sima Qian noted, ‘Inconceivably great are the benefits and the destruction which water can produce.’¹¹ Until modern times there were, on average, two breaches of the dykes every three years, although floods have somewhat increased in both frequency and severity over time. The great flood of 1917 elicited a starkly symbolic image: the waters exhumed wooden coffins from their shallow burial mounds and set them floating for many kilometres.

Some of the characteristic loess formations of Sha’anxi province.

With the Yellow River designated the cradle of the nation’s civilization in early Chinese historiography, its moods were linked to the fate of the nation. The massive dam that stands today at Sanmenxia, just after the final eastward turn – one of the earliest modern attempts at flood control on the lower reaches – bears an inscription attributed to the Great Yü, who conquered the Great Flood, that presents something of a glass-half-full perspective: ‘When the Yellow River is at Peace, the Nation is at Peace.’ The unspoken corollary is that if the river is not at peace, then the nation may rupture too. China’s mother river is also China’s Sorrow.

There are many other nicknames attesting to the river’s unruly nature: the Ungovernable, the Scourge of the Sons of Han. Some calamitous floods redrew the map. When it breaches its banks, the Yellow River might never find its way back between them: the inland sea that results from a major flood can find a new route to the coast. Since 600 BC there have been dozens of such shifts, eight of them classified as ‘major’, meaning that the outflow into the ocean may be hundreds of kilometres from its earlier location.

Major shifts in the course of the Yellow River over the ages.

Life on the Yellow River floodplain was not so much precarious as predictably disastrous, and it is hard to imagine how anyone, let alone millions, endured it routinely. Even in the modern era the floods could be terrible beyond imagining: a breach in the autumn of 1887 created a lake 26,000 square kilometres in extent, leaving people stranded on rooftops as the bitter northern winter closed in. Between 1 million and 2.5 million people perished by drowning or subsequently by starvation, through epidemic diseases such as typhoid, or from exposure. The hole in the dykes was not plugged until early 1889.

The problems created by the sediment that the Yellow River acquires on its looping northward detour are so great that, as early as the first century BC, emperors were considering whether to circumvent this diversion entirely – to cut a channel east–west that linked the bends across 300 miles. It is hard to imagine how anyone at that time could have considered it feasible. But the Han engineer Yan Nian, who made this bold proposal, argued that not only would it make the river easier to control by reducing its silt load, but it would also offer a better barrier against the encroachment of the ‘Huns’ (the Xiong Nu) of Mongolia. The emperor rejected the idea not because it was impractical but because it seemed sacrilege to change the course allegedly designated by the Great Yü, who solved the Flood by carving out new channels for China’s rivers. Yü, the emperor declared, had acted with ‘divine perspicacity . . . for the benefit of ten thousand generations’.¹²

One seems to have little choice but to retain the outmoded name for the Yangtze when discussing it in English; the modern Pinyin transliteration Yangzi feels somehow pedantically perverse. The name is in any event only a local one, derived from the ancient and now mostly forgotten fiefdom of Yang and strictly applying only to the last 300 kilometres. This was the entire ‘Yangtze’ to the first Western travellers, since they rarely got much further upriver.

The Chinese people do not use those names. There are local names for each stretch of the river, but the full channel, cutting the country in half geographically, climatically and culturally, is simply the Chang Jiang (), the Long River. It is the longest in all of China, 6,380 kilometres from the source in a glacier lake to the great delta on the coast beyond Shanghai, where the alluvium pushes out into the sea and adds steadily to China’s vast surface area.

‘A China without such an immense torrent at its heart is almost impossible to contemplate’,¹³ says the writer Simon Winchester. Even this understates the matter. Without the Yangtze, China would not be the nation it is today. Time and again, the river has determined the nation’s fate, whether that is by presenting a barrier to barbarian conquest, or a transport network, or a conduit for foreign invasion, or a source of fertility, flood and revolutionary fervour. Many pivotal battles in Chinese history took place on the middle reaches. The Yangtze cliffs provide the backdrop to the classic Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) from the early Ming period, one of Mao Zedong’s favourite books, in which the river hosts allegedly the biggest naval battle in history. The Yangtze was the artery of conquest and dominance when the British gunships humiliated the Qing emperor in the mid-nineteenth century, and again when the Japanese invaded in the 1930s: steadily pushing upriver from Shanghai to Nanjing and then Wuhan, they forced Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to relocate the government right back beyond the Three Gorges in Chongqing.

China is cloven in two by the Long River, and the two halves could seem like separate nations: the north cold and dry, the south hot and wet. In the north you eat wheat noodles; in the south, rice. Northerners, it is said, are tall and haughty, whether eastern Manchurian stock or Islamic Uyghurs to the west. The southerners, in contrast, are earthy, pragmatic, always on the make, a patchwork of minority races and mutually incomprehensible dialects. That division – decreed by nature, patrolled by the Yangtze – establishes the defining tension within the nation, in which the question is how unity can persist in the face of such a disparity of the most fundamental resource, water. Such stereotypical polarities do scant justice to the bewildering variety of China, of course, but they serve as crude shorthand for the contrasts that you find once you cross the Yangtze.

For the mixed blessing of the Yangtze, with a valley rich in farmland yet also suffering enormous floods, the Chinese again credit the Great Yü. From its source the river flows south, parallel to the Mekong and the Salween as the three great torrents plunge down gorges like giant sword-strikes through the mountains of Tibet and Yunnan, heading out of China in short order. But then at a place called Shigu in Yunnan, the Yangtze leaves the trio as it takes a remarkable bend, seeming almost to bounce off a modest little mountain called Yun Ling (Cloud Mountain) to execute an abrupt about-turn and then find its way east instead. Yü is said to have set down Cloud Mountain; no other legendary figure could be entrusted with the task of defining the course of China’s central artery.

In Sichuan province the Yangtze is swollen by tributary rivers running south from the Qinghai highlands, in particular the Min, Yalong, Dadu, Fu and Jialing.fn2 It has descended 90% of its source altitude even before it passes through the bustling, steep-laned citadel of Chongqing, the epitome of China’s frenetic enterprise (and, some say, the birthplace of Yü). Then it wanders through Hubei to the vigorous trading port of Wuhan, a conglomeration of the former cities of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, where the Yangtze intersects the Han River. This political and economic hub of central China was the origin of the Wuchang uprising that ended the Qing empire in the early twentieth century and gave birth to Sun Yat-sen’s Republic. The river then courses majestically across the eastern plains of Anhui and Jiangsu, through the southern metropolis of Nanjing with its long tally of bitter memories, before spilling out past Shanghai into the East China Sea.

The great bend in the Yangtze at Shigu.

While the Yellow River was commandeered in the early days of the Republic for the active construction of a national identity-myth, it is the Yangtze that today defines China’s self-image. To travel the river from source to sea is to sail down the currents of history. In the upper reaches of the Qinghai plateau one can find a way of life, often close to destitution, that has changed little for centuries (apart from the ubiquitous cheap mobile phones), while Shanghai, that promiscuous old harlot on the Huangpu tributary in the great estuary, exemplifies the brash, confident, almost unstoppable spirit of modern China. Along the route one will find some of the country’s most spectacular scenery, its most astonishing and controversial feats of hydraulic engineering, its greatest lakes, ancient cities like Jingzhou, Yangzhou and Nanjing, bleak and despondent industrial centres, dynamic river ports still bearing the traces of colonialism, sites of momentous struggles. There are rice paddies knee-deep in river water, temples and pavilions where poets sat and wove watery metaphors, there are mythical mountains and filth-belching factories. Even the bustle of commerce that has always intruded on the navigable reaches does not wholly dim the beauty that the Song administrator Lu You rhapsodized about in the twelfth century:

The Caiyuanba Bridge over the Yangtze in Chongqing.

In some ways, life along the Yangtze has changed little since Lu You described it: his ‘crowds of young lads along the water’s edge selling caltrops and lotus roots’¹⁵ are still there, although they might equally be selling fake branded goods and pirated DVDs. In the lower reaches of the Yangtze, entire villages once floated on the waters. Lu You describes them:

These floating villages were common even up to the middle of the twentieth century.

However much writers and artists might romanticize it, the Yangtze most aptly symbolizes the Chinese nation insofar as it serves as a trade thoroughfare. More than three-quarters of China’s rice is now produced in the paddy fields of the lower reaches, and for centuries transport of this grain to the power centres of the north was one of the emperors’ key priorities. The colonialist struggles of the nineteenth century focused on control of the Yangtze ports, and the river has long been engineered to push westward the limits of navigability. Even in the Han dynasty, Sima Qian labelled the lower Yangtze the ‘land of fish and rice’, where the people were so easily fed that they became lazy. The river once yielded half of China’s fish, although that proportion has now declined because of pollution and near depletion of stocks (commercial fishing is now highly regulated). The lower reaches were also a key region of silk production, which found its way into the wide world not by caravan along the Silk Road in the north but eastwards by ship over the East China Sea.

¹⁷