The first step was the unveiling of a liquor called the Orient, ‘a fine Chinese whisky made by traditional Scottish methods, offering the typical flavour of whisky, as well as some oriental features.
‘On opening a bottle a fascinating scent will emanate. You may enjoy yourself by having it on a chafing dish [come again?] taking it to the beach in the summer. You will feel enchanted. It is delicately packaged, yet the prices are very reasonable. It carries the tender sentiment of the Home of Wine.’
Someone pressed a glass into my hand. I took a hesitant sip. It was not at all bad. I gave a thumbs-up. A roomful of white-coated men nodded with delight. ‘It has been very triumph,’ said one.
Emboldened by the success of this fascinatingly scented beach drink, the bosses of Wuliangye took the further step of arranging a joint venture with Burn Stewart, a small distillery in Fifeshire. The result was a blend of Scotch and local distillates that the Chinese then aged, bottled, and sold under one of two names – Ampress for their own people, and Empress for foreigners. And foreign, said one of the white-coated men, included Scotland.
I paused in my note taking. ‘Coals to Newcastle?’ asked. He simply beamed.
His confidence has a certain unchallengeable charm. And if a six-hundred-year-old company that had made its name distilling grains mixed with ‘the intoxicating waters of the River Yangtze' felt confident that Chinese whisky would sell well in the snug bar of the Station Hotel in Inverness, then who was I, a simple Sassenach, to disabuse them of the notion? Besides, I remarked as I had a final sip, Ampress Whisky was sweetish, peaty and really not at all bad. Empress would probably be better still.
Next morning we embarked on our final boat the last it would be possible to take up the river Yangtze – or, more properly, the first and last we would be able to take up the newborn Jinsha Jiang. It is only 60 miles to where the rapids become too strong for any forward progress. The captains of such boats as make the trip are nervous men, wary of being in places that common sense tells them they should avoid.
It was a fussy little craft, with a close-knit family of a crew – six men and a motherly young woman who bustled about, bringing rice and tea onto the bridge whenever anyone looked too fraught. The steersman was a roguish-looking fellow with alarmingly long hair, unusual for a Chinese. His captain, Mr Lu, was fifty-seven years old and had been working on the Upper Yangtze since he was twelve. All of his crew had been apprenticed under him; he had been apprenticed to his father.
The first few miles of the River of Golden Sand looked manageable, though it was rarely more than a hundred feet across, and the banks were steep and all the rapids merged into one, so the whole river frothed and boiled as it sped by. From time to time we stopped, nosing in to the black mud on the bank and here allowing a woman passenger to jump off, there letting a couple clamber on with their goats or their bindles, or with small children strapped to the mother's back. Soon, though, the muddy banks became tiny rocky coves, and then there were no stopping places at all and the cliffs began to close in beside us and, more ominously, ahead. The mountains reared ten and twelve thousand feet into the sky, according to my American charts, and their peaks were sharp, and glinted wetly in the midday sun.
‘Ayeeah!’ Captain Lu complained at one point, but smilingly. ‘She is a difficult bitch, this river here. Too narrow. Too twisty. Too much boiling and swirling. Too many things get in the way. The fellows back in the Gorges have it easy. Here we have to be tracked by engine – they pull us up near the top. Better than when it was done by the qiaofu – those men were always getting themselves drowned and killed.’
A signal station was displaying a large down arrow on its flagpole, meaning that we would have to wait until traffic passed. We idled enough to keep steady in the stream and waited, though for no more than ten minutes. The downstream shipping turned out to be a trio of great sailing junks that swept swiftly into view, and then went flying past us in the current. Their sails were patched and old, and on one a couple of the bamboo battens were broken – but otherwise the men who sat perched on the stern cabin looked to have good reason for their expressions of jauntiness and pride, as their ships rode smoothly and elegantly past through the roiling waters.
The signal station's arrow was then taken down and replaced by another, this one pointing up. Captain Lu gunned his engine and we inched slowly forward again, pushing hard against the rushing, noisy water. It became steadily harder to move: everyone on the bridge seemed to be willing the little craft on, like a driver with a slipping clutch urging his car to get to the top of the hill.
Then we spotted our target – an iron buoy in midstream, topped with a big flag. This was where the warp would begin. Everyone sighed with relief once the buoy came into sight. We headed steadily for it and eventually, taking fifteen minutes to do a hundred yards, we came alongside. As we did so, a sampan came whistling down towards us on the flood, and a tough little man handed one of the workers on our fo'c'sle a black steel hawser, which was promptly doubled around a capstan and then tightened. A cable rose dripping out of the water ahead. It led, I could see with my field glasses, to a steam donkey engine that was cemented onto a rock a hundred yards ahead.
There was an exchange of hoots from sirens on land and on our bridge, and then our engines began to roar and at the same time smoke poured from the donkey's chimney and the cable went as taut as a piano wire. We began to move forward again, painfully, slowly, the noise of straining metal and tightened bolts and roaring water filling the air. The captain began to perspire with nervousness, and the long-haired youngster at the wheel concentrated hard, his brow creased deeply with unaccustomed urgency. The sound of the stream crashing against us heightened, and huge eruptions of spray drenched the bridge as wave after wave crashed against our slow-moving bows.
And then, quite suddenly, it was all over. The waters smoothed out, the current lessened. The donkey engine – now near enough so we could see its drivers and wave to them – fell quiet. The sampan, which had been pulled upstream in tandem with us, came alongside and took the cable away, and we were moving under our own steam once again, beneath the dark cliffs, and to the delighted yells of a gang of watching children.
A mile farther and there was a small dock at a place called variously Xinshizhen or Pingshan. The captain clapped his hands and lit a cigarette and said simply ‘No more go' in English. The signs spelled out the name in Chinese and in another, unrecognizable script that looked like the daubs of a hyperactive child. That was Yi writing, the captain explained: the people of the town of Leibo nearby, and for a hundred miles farther west, all belonged to the Yi.
He shuddered. ‘I don't like them. They frighten me.’
He gave us a farewell dinner, which he extended by offering copious draughts of Wuliangye liquor, until the bus for Leibo arrived. Then he went back and began shouting excitably to his boys, readying them to take the little boat back to Yibin. He was quite alarmingly unsteady on his feet. But there was little point in his staying at Pingshan. As the great scholar of Chinese boats, George Worcester, had written sixty years before, ‘It is a small town with nothing remarkable about it except for the fact that it marks the limit of continuous junk navigation for a distance of 1,700 miles from the sea on the fifth largest river in the world.’
12
The Garden Country of Joseph Rock
Not long before arriving in China for this journey I came across the oddest of picture captions, its wording quite hauntingly bizarre. It appeared in a volume of photographs taken by an eccentric Austro-American botanist-explorer named Joseph Rock; it was beneath a black-and-white picture, dated 1924, of a scene he had captured in the mountains of the Upper Yangtze valley, which showed two teenagers supporting between them a curious-looking object, like an unformed sculpture of soft clay, as tall as each of them. Whatever the object was – plasticine torpedo, melted petrol pump, alien being, squashed motorcar – it seemed to have a nose; on close inspection it looked as if, once upon a time,
it had been some kind of animal.
Indeed it had. The caption read, without further comment:
‘Two Moso boys displaying a fine specimen of the Boneless Pig. After being slaughtered, boned and salted, these huge pigs are used as mattresses for up to a dozen years before being eaten. This custom, originally a protection against famine, still exists today in Muli and Yongning.’
Beg pardon? I read the caption once again, more carefully. Somehow the corralling within a single paragraph of such words and phrases as ‘pig’, ‘mattress’, ‘a dozen years’, and ‘eaten' had a surreal quality to it, and for a moment I wondered if I might have taken a surfeit of unfamiliar pills during the night.
But apparently not. A day or so later, while further reading up about this corner of the world, I came across a second, equally strange reference, this time to a people like the Moso, who lived near by and who were known as the Nakhi. Among the many sterling qualities of these folk was the habit, exclusive to the lovelorn among them, of committing suicide by drinking a mixture ‘so that the vocal cords become paralysed and the victim is unable to cry for help’. Clearly the people who lived in these mountains had some rum habits – and since the mountains in question were those that begin, almost precisely, at Pingshan, where the boat traffic up the Yangtze is forced to a halt, we were now fast moving into their territory.
‘This is the demarcation line,’ writes a guide, ‘between the Han people and the Yi minority ethnic groups, and the other many ethnic minority groups of the Tibetan foothills.’ Downriver, where Lily and I had been travelling for the past weeks, had been what passes for the normality of mainstream China, or what geographers call China Proper. Ahead of us now lay the very much more wayward world of the non-Chinese, the world of those who have been incorporated into the Chinese Empire, but who live irredeemably and steadfastly beyond it. In one sense, the Pingshan city boundary is the far western expression of what might be called the Chinese Pale.
It was in Leibo, the seat of a semi-autonomous Yi county, that matters began becoming a little strange. Lily and I had managed to get rooms in a small inn, and after noodles at a restaurant run by a memorably handsome Yi woman, we retired to our respective beds, exhausted. At one in the morning there was a thunderous hammering on our doors, and a squad of Chinese goons demanded that we present ourselves for questioning before the local office of the Public Security Bureau.
We came down in our pyjamas, befuddled from sleep. There were three men, all Chinese, greasy-haired, smoking, wearing black leather jackets. Why were we in town? they wanted to know. Did we not know that foreigners were prohibited here? Was I not aware that the hotel was forbidden to accept guests from outside? Lily, who was blamed for having led an innocent abroad, was given especially harsh treatment – to which she responded by standing up to her full and daunting height, and with a stentorian voice demanding respect and courtesy from men who were, she insisted, no more than mere officials whose duties were to serve the citizenry.
It was a stunning, high-stakes outburst, the kind of response to a police inquiry that would hardly be dared in London or New York, let alone the rugged hinterlands of western China. But perhaps I didn't yet know Lily to the full: her outburst was the first of many, and it worked a charm. The three policemen became promptly craven, they offered to settle their argument with us – fully justified, since Leibo (which means ‘thunder and wave’) was very definitely a closed city – by levying a fine of about one dollar apiece, and they asked only that we leave town by sunrise.
Once the mood had become calmer and more friendly, and cigarettes were being offered around, and cups of tea, I asked one of the men why they had been so suspicious, so eager to throw us out.
‘Because of the Yi,’ he said. ‘They are a very troublesome minority.* They hate us. This is their town, in their eyes. Relations between us and them can be very poor. Foreigners often stir things up, and we don't like that at all.’
So we left next morning, after having had breakfast on a grassy knoll overlooking the river, which uncoiled soundlessly a thousand feet below. There were small wild strawberries here, intensely sweet. In the distance ducks squabbled and chuckled, and large brown buzzards swung lazily in the thermals. All was perfect peace. Up here the arguments between Han and Yi had no relevance at all: only the river mattered, and made all the difference. It was a ferocious-looking beast, a rich syrup, lined with white streaks, squeezed between cliffs every bit as steep and forbidding as those back in the Gorges – an unforgiving place for any shipmaster.
Downriver the Yangtze may have been impressive for its power and width and might: here it was speed and sharpness and caprice that made it all so daunting. From high up on this perch the river looked just as everyone had said it would: the most difficult and dangerous big river in the world. There were rapids every few hundred yards. I watched idly the progress through the rapids of some of the endless procession of logs that had floated downstream from the faraway forests of northern Sichuan. As each one breasted a rapid so an end rose, arching high out of the river before then tumbling back deep below the foam, and then the whole log skittered from bank to bank in a way that no ship could ever have survived. In one or two places small sampans dashed from bank to bank, taking farmers to the water meadows opposite: but I noticed they never ventured up or downstream, for fear no doubt of being caught in the currents and ripped to pieces on the rocks below.
Navigation was out of the question. But crossing the river — that, as the sampans below were demonstrating, was not by any means an impossibility. In fact the boats were providing a timely illustration, since my next destination, a couple of hundred river-miles upstream, was the most famous crossing point of all – the place where Mao Zedong and his Red Army managed to make it from the river's south side to the north, in the early summer of 1935. In fact it was sixty years before, almost to the day, when Mao managed the most decisive act of what has since come to be known as the Long March.
To reach such a place so hallowed on the Chinese political landscape is still not easy – though hardly as trying as it had been for Mao's weary and underfed young soldiers. First we found the bus to Xichang, a town well to the north of the Yangtze on a huge tributary known as the Yalong Jiang. The ride in normal circumstances might have been merely terrifying – for its first few miles the bus roared and smoked along narrow dirt roads on top of cliffs hundreds of feet above the river, and more than once a tyre smashed the retaining mound of dirt and became instantly suspended in space, those riding above that wheel looking down a dizzying void into the river foaming below. At such moments all the passengers were asked to get out, slowly and carefully, while the driver and his men pulled the unladen vehicle back onto the roadway.
My confidence in our survival was hardly helped by the braking arrangements. The driver had a contraption of small rubber hoses that ran around the back of his seat: it provided cooling water for the brake shoes, and was supplied from a bladder on the roof.* Whenever the bus began to run downhill, usually on a road with a sharp turn and a cliff at the bottom of the slope, the driver would reach behind him and turn a small brass spigot on the tube, allowing the water to flow; but more often than not the tube would become loose, water would flood the floor of the bus, and the driver, aware that his brakes were starting to smoke and were not arresting our downward progress one bit, would call for a passenger – me, usually, since I was sitting directly behind him – to find the tube and reconnect it, quickly! It always worked – we had the system down pat after fifty miles or so – but it made the ride more interesting than perhaps it needed to be.
Had ours been an ordinary bus service the degree of onboard terror would probably have been limited to this. But in fact ours was a bus that crossed – once the red-and-white striped barrier of the Pale was passed – into territory controlled by the Yi; and that simple anthropological reality transformed a journey that was merely frightening into an experience more akin to nightmare. For the Yi – the men huge, handsome,
large-nosed, chocolate-brown, reputedly fierce, turbaned (with their hair protruding through a hole in the turban top), and the women equally attractive with blue-and-white striped costumes that in other circumstances could be thought of as charming – demanded that they had a prescriptive right to ride in this weekly bus, no matter how many were already in it and with utter disregard for any trivia like the paying of fares, or for any Han Chinese who tried to lay down the rules for running this particular service.
The bus was built for perhaps fifty passengers. By the time we were halfway to Xichang I had counted 140 people on board, as well as several dozen chickens and a pig that kept getting caught in the automatic door and might well have been rendered boneless and fit for mattress duty by the time the trip was done. Men would squeeze into the smallest of spaces that remained and still, around the next bend, another group of Yi would be waiting, would flag the bus down and insist on jamming themselves inside: woe betide any driver who might refuse. ‘I knew a man who didn't stop,’ said the driver to me in a private moment, ‘and he was never allowed to drive that route again. They threatened him and his family. They terrorized him.’
By the time the 140 were tucked inside, the vehicle was as full of humanity and assorted zoology as physics would permit – whereupon fresh members of the minority clambered up the outside and parked themselves on the roof rack. The driver had taken about as much as he could and pleaded with them to get down – in the end hurling stones at them to try to dislodge them. The men simply caught the stones and hurled them back, sending the driver scampering into the shelter of his cab and trying to drive on.