That evening as we drove in from Yangzhou – having passed the still angry cyclist – the first view was the one that seemed most apt, a panorama that showed off Nanjing's newness and her determined effort to be modern. We crossed the river not by ferry, as we had been forced to do at Zhenjiang, but on a vast bridge – the bridge that is closest to the river mouth, and one of the longest, heaviest, ugliest, most graceless triumphs of engineering built to cross a river anywhere in the world. It has a magnificence to it, though: it is solid and imperturbable looking, lined with ranks of the five-bulbed egg-lamps that have been a ubiquitous feature of the Chinese landscape since 1949 – and which were probably made in the first factory in the first Chinese soviet ever created. The bridge has four buff concrete towers, two at each end, with triple-flamed beacons on top; and on the landward side of each of these, two collections of heroic statues, one in memory of those who built the bridge, the other in honour of all of those who harbour socialist sympathies around the world.
Until I read the inscription I was rather puzzled by this second statue. It seemed a little odd to have the entrance to Nanjing memorialized by a very white cement statue of a group of people led by an obviously very black man. He was looking joyous and defiant and – given the hearty (although heartily denied) Chinese dislike for their black brethren – very irrelevant. Or certainly discordant. There was a woman running a food stall on the other side of the road: I asked her what she thought.
‘Of what?’ she grunted. ‘That statue? Wonderful, I think.’ But what, I pressed, of having a black man leading the group? She squinted up at it, disbelief written over her face.
‘Black? Black? My word – yes! I suppose he is. Would you believe I never noticed. Working on this very spot night and day for the last eight years. Eight years! I know those statues like my own bed. It never occurred to me that man might be black. Of course I can see he is now. He couldn't be anything else.’
And she wrinkled her nose, as if there was a nasty smell in the air. Which, this being Nanjing – producer of lead, zinc, dolomite, iron, televisions, cars, clocks, watches and, to judge from the huge flames I could see gushing up from refinery towers all around, petroleum products in abundance – there probably was. Time was when Nanjing was the world's great producer of a soft silk called pongee: this, not an industry known for its smell, has now all but vanished.
Building the bridge had been extraordinarily difficult. The Yangtze is for most of its length an almost impossible river for an engineer to deal with – it is very fast, very deep, it is given to eccentric turbulences and cruel unpredictability, and it rises and falls to a degree that most bridge foundations would find fatally punishing. In Nanjing, the range of water levels is particularly complicated, for not only is the river narrow enough for the outflow to vary hugely with the seasons, but it is also close enough to the sea for the effects of tides to be noticed still. (They say you can feel these effects as far away as Datong, a full 350 miles upstream, though the ocean's practical effects on shipping are of no real importance above Wuhu, 289 miles from the ocean. And it is here at Nanjing, 50 miles below Wuhu, where the river is said to start being properly tidal.)
The Yangtze at Nanjing is on average eighteen feet higher in July than it is in January; and at high tide it is nearly four feet higher than that – so the buttresses and columns designed to support the 20,000-foot-long, twin-deck, four-lane-roadway-above-two-track-railway* bridge have to withstand the river's current, the sea's tides, the estuary's bores and a range in water height that is unknown on any river elsewhere on the planet.
The problem was first approached in 1958, when the Chinese realized that they must end the nonsense and delay of having to use ferryboats to get their railway passengers and freight across the great river. The Russians, masters of river bridging at the time, were asked for advice, and then assistance – they eventually agreed to provide a design, as well as technical help and the right kind of steel. But shortly thereafter political relations with Moscow went into a tailspin and their engineers were hauled back home – insisting anyway that no bridge could be constructed over so wide and wayward a river for at least another three hundred miles upstream.
They hadn't realized just who they were talking to. The China of the late 1950s was a country intoxicated with the madness of her Great Leap Forward, a people suffused with a barely rational pride and determination, and a nation whose technical institutes were filled with engineers who insisted they could manage the building of this bridge, however difficult, quite alone. It took them eight years, and it required the total reorganization of the Chinese steel industry to provide the necessary bars and girders. But they did it. At the end of 1968, when the whole world was in the midst of revolutionary ferment and when China was starting her own, the Yangtze First Bridge was formally and proudly opened. The Chinese way, it must have seemed back then, was capable of achieving almost anything: the bridge may be ugly and graceless, but it works, and thus far it has shown few signs that it is about to fall down.
I had the address of one man in Nanjing, an Italian who worked for a truck-assembly joint venture and who had lived in the same hotel in fact the same hotel room – for the previous eight years. I telephoned him. ‘Come immediately, prontissimo!’ he demanded, and he gave me the address of the Jinling Hotel, thirty-six storeys, locally owned and, by all standards, a five-star establishment. It was in the centre of town, at the junction of four avenues each named Zhong Shan (North, South and so on), in honour of Sun Yat-sen.
Every town in China has something – a main street, a boulevard, an esplanade, a mighty building, a bund – that is named after Sun Yat-sen: Zhong Shan is the Mandarin rendering of a name that is essentially romanized Cantonese – the Christian, Western-educated Father of Modern China having been, in an irony that most Chinese would prefer to forget, a Southerner. For Nanjing to have four streets named after the great man is no surprise: it was in this city that he set up his first capital, and it is on the outskirts of this city that, after his death in 1925 at only fifty-nine, he was buried. The mausoleum, tricked out in pale blue tile, is probably the city's principal place of pilgrimage – a place of respectful comfort for the mainlanders, though for the more raucous Taiwanese who visit it has recently become a kind of Oriental Graceland, a shrine to another fallen king, and every bit as vulgar, and its souvenir stalls and hawkers, as the grave in Tennessee.
Giancarlo was standing alone in the Jinling's vast marble lobby when we arrived. He was a tall Turinese in his early sixties, with grey hair like wire wool, big teeth discoloured by years of smoking strong Craven ‘A' cigarettes and a nose as big as a small rodent. He wore a loudly checked sports jacket and a yellow cravat. He had the booming and eternally genial voice of an expatriate who was happy tonight because, for one marginally less tedious evening than most, he was about to meet a fellow wanderer, someone who might know the name of his country's latest prime minister or some news from the FIFA Cup or the Tour de France, and who might join him later for an espresso or a glass of grappa – of which, he added, he had ample supplies in his room.
“Ow are you, Meester Simmon?’ he boomed from twenty paces. ‘I 'ave cheap room for you. I also 'ave deener, which I, Giancarlo, will cook for you. You come now, please, immediate, immediate. You will drop your bags 'ere. Giancarlo will look after everything. You will 'ave wonderful time, yes?’
Eight years in the same hotel room in China can do strange things to a man. Giancarlo Barolo had clearly gone a little mad: after years in which his natural Piedmontese exuberance had been dismissed as eccentricity and had struck few sparks in either the hotel or his office, he decided to go for broke, to play his role as caricature. So he now swept waitresses off their feet and planted blizzards of tiny kisses on their cheeks, he rushed wildly into kitchens throwing startled Chinese chefs away from their woks and commandeering the stoves himself, he complained loudly about wines and demanded his own, he sat down with startled lone foreign businessmen to enjoy, if brie
fly, their company, he made endlessly long telephone calls to distant half-forgotten friends around the world, and each night at nine – this night being no different – he retired to his double room, which is furnished with a few paintings and carpets, and listened to Verdi and Rossini, and tried to forget.
Before I met him on this journey, it had never been entirely clear why he had stayed for so long. He does not speak Chinese, nor does he like China very much. He has no particular loyalty to the truck-making firm he works for, nor has he ambitions for the factory his eight years here have helped create. He loathes banquets, speeches, local food: he has had one marriage and two failed love affairs, and he doubts if he will have another.
Night after night we watched him do his routine – frightening waitresses, dismissing chefs, summoning managers, retching after tasting the local wines – except after sipping one particular Chinese red wine, a merlot, which he claimed was as good as any of the younger Antinoris. We usually said good night to him, exhausted by the performance, no later than nine each night. Behind the bluster and the braggadocio was loneliness, of course: what secret back home had compelled this man to bury himself in the wilds of central China? Who knows, any more than they knew what had really compelled celebrated westerners like the forger-scholar Edmund Backhouse to become a recluse in Beijing, or the botanist Joseph Rock to go on his ceaseless explorations in Yunnan, or the Good Man in Africa to stay for so long and so good in Africa and to choose the expatriate life with its constant frisson of solitary danger? Giancarlo seemed a picture of sadness blanketed in an enigma, but nonetheless living under the guise of being a character, a good chap, knows the scene, old boy, knows simply everyone. He was being laughed at, and knew it, and yet was unable, despite his good humour, to laugh back.
But he had a certain wisdom, and he knew Nanjing well, which is why I had sought him out. The bluster irritated me: I wanted him to be serious for a moment. He obliged one evening before dinner, when we were alone. We talked about Shanghai, a city he disliked with a passion. I said how it seemed to me unique in being a city that didn't have any real history, that it was a city without roots of any substance, except for those few years when it was a fishing village and the brief period when it was inhabited by noisy and truculent foreigners.
‘This is very different, you know,’ he replied. ‘Here is nothing else but history, you know,’ he said. ‘Nanjing is a little like your Irish city, Belfast is it? Looks new on the surface – all this gleeter, like this hotel, the shops, the pretty girls. It looks like Hong Kong, yes? But below is very different, you can feel it when you stay here long. The people here are all trapped by their city's past. And very bad past it has had. Sadder than most places. The people here look as if they have forgotten, but in fact they never can. They are very old-fashioned people. Very conservative. So very different from Shanghai.
‘You say you are going up the Yangtze and seeing if you can go backward in time? Well, coming here you have stepped back a hundred years. At least. Maybe getting on for four hundred years, back to the end of the Ming. It may not look like it. But you have. Like a living museum, Nanjing. This is why I don't like it – and at the same time it is perhaps why I do like it too. Italy is much the same in some ways. Great cities are often trapped by their past – particularly when it is a past filled with tragedy. I find that not good, and yet very good. It makes the people keep their feet on the ground. Shanghai – I spit at it! Hateful place! Here – well, there is something I like, just a bit.’
And that was as near as he came to offering an explanation. Lily came in just then, and the moment was gone. Giancarlo winked at me, stood up and kissed her noisily, and began his routine. He bellowed at the waiter: ‘This garbage, you are calling it chicken? I, Giancarlo, will come cook something good for my friends. They will not eat this rubbish food. So you please, most kind, get out of my way, prontissimo!’
I had come to Nanjing armed with an old Japanese guidebook, and I had done so very much on purpose.
Not long after Karl Baedeker and John Murray had uncovered the delights of Europe and published them in pocket-sized compendiums in Leipzig and London, so a Japanese nobleman, Baron Gotō – and for far less amiable reasons – began to do much the same for Asia, in Tokyo. By today's standards Gotō was not a very laudable figure: he was a keen believer in Japan's right to expand and to rule the lesser peoples of Asia, he had been a fairly brutal civil administrator of Formosa during her early years as a Japanese colony, and he had come to China to run the South Manchurian Railway. But his colonial attitudes aside (and what Briton can decry colonial attitudes?), he did inspire editors and writers to produce excellent guidebooks. The small red volumes published between 1908 and 1920 under the colophon of the Imperial Japanese Government Railways remain masterly.
Not, however, just as guides. Certainly, on one level the books offer hugely detailed, highly accurate, prettily designed and compact tours d‘horizon – they remain undeniably useful, even nearly a century on. But they also offer, unwittingly – and this is why I had decided to stuff them into my rucksack back in New York – an unexpected window on the Japanese mind, a revealing look at the way that Japan then regarded her neighbour states across the sea. Each of the books deals in detail with peoples (Koreans, Manchurians, Formosans and, most particularly, the Chinese) whom the Japanese considered then, and perhaps still consider today, to be amusing, colourful, interesting – but grossly inferior. Given time, Japanese readers of these volumes must have thought, each would be ripe for the plucking.
I had with me Volume IV. Its chapter on Nanjing can be seen, in hindsight, as offering the first lip-smacking, appetite-whetting accounts of a city that the Japanese were soon to brutalize like few others, anywhere. Baron Gotōs tidy little book must have seemed to the sterner souls in the Japanese army rather like a menu card in a fancy Roppongi restaurant: oh come ye sons of Nippon, some might have heard its siren call, and feast yourselves on this! Beneath the come-hither of it all, a sneering tone is audible, if faintly.
Encircled by these cyclopean walls, the city has been planned on a most magnificent scale, no unworthy capital of a great empire… Before the coming of the Taiping rebels there existed tolerably good roads and drainage… The Taipings made dreadful havoc everywhere and scarcely anything had been done by way of repairs, until the recent introduction of the new regime… which is now making roads and repairing the drainage, burning up all the garbage and filth. Carp and mandarin-fish are caught in the Yangtze-kiang, and are of a very fine flavour. The Flower Boats in the Chin-hwai-ho contain chairs, tables and quilts, food and liquor as well as singing girls… There is a club, the Hwa-Ying, established by the Japanese and Chinese together.
Such was the beguiling image of Nanjing – pools filled with succulent carp, boatfuls of pretty flower girls, a walled capital of great beauty – in the autumn and early winter of 1937. It was a treasure that such unworthies as mere Chinese should not be allowed to keep. Japan's ambitions in China – which she had stoutly denied throughout her annexation of Manchuria, and her installation of Pu Yi as the puppet emperor – were by now nakedly apparent. In July she had instigated the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which many see as the true origin of the Pacific War. By August she was occupying Beijing and Tianjin. In November she landed troops in Hangzhou Bay, and she took Shanghai with extraordinary violence but without so much as an official murmur from the League of Nations, the spokesman for the outside world; and now, come December, her soldiers were racing towards Nanjing, which for the past ten years had been the capital of the Chinese Republic.
Chiang Kai-shek was wily enough to know what would happen. He fled up along the Yangtze to Wuhan and Chongqing, declaring each a new capital in turn. Foreign ambassadors did much the same, pleading not unreasonably that they needed to be wherever the nation's heads of state and government presided and resided. Only the ragged remains of Chiang's Nanjing garrison, together with a few hundred foreigners and half a million wretched civilians, were le
ft to face the music. Chiang had left Nanjing, the city that Baron Gotōs writers had called, in their oily way, ‘one of the most interesting in China’, in the hands of an incompetent scoundrel of a general, a former warlord. And he fled too, when six divisions, containing 120,000 well-trained Japanese soldiers, began to bear down on the walls of his city.
The battle for the land south of the Yangtze was well fought: Chinese soldiers in Jiangyin and Zhenjiang fought bravely, but hopelessly. The tanks and field pieces and planes of the Japanese advanced along the river's right bank, day by ghastly day. By 6 December 1937 their troops were surrounding Nanjing on three sides – and the river that streamed below the city walls on the fourth, the west side, was about to be crossed by General Matsui Iwane's soldiers, who were also advancing on the river's left bank.
Mitsubishi bombers began to pound the city nightly: casualties were terrible. But the Chinese, even leaderless, fought on doughtily. Japanese losses rose stubbornly. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the suburbs – down where Lily and I had driven, where I had knocked the young woman from her bicycle – soldiers from the armies of the two competing tiger-states had fought with bayonets and bare hands, the victims broken and dying amid the rubble and the backyard paddies. One unit of the Chinese Army did manage to break out from within the walls which were, at 21 miles long, 40 feet high, and dating from the Ming dynasty, at the time one of the grandest sets of city walls to be found anywhere in China, a wonder of the Eastern world – and do battle with the onrushing armies. But it was all, inevitably, to no avail.