But China never did let him return. He stayed in America, working in solitary misery, and he died in a Honolulu hospital in 1962. His books remain, and an Italian publisher brought out his definitive study of the Nakhi pictographs, completing the work in 1972. They remain as Joseph Rock's memorial – his books, his remarkable photographs – and three species of flowers: Rhododendron rockii, Primula rockii and Omphalog-ramma rockii. Considering that this son of a dreary Viennese manservant never took a degree in botany, or in anything else, and that he achieved all he did by an unquenchable combination of courage and barefaced cheek, the flower memorials seem touchingly appropriate.
Although he was memorialized by the names of plants, there were others who tramped these same hills and who made a great deal more of the region's extraordinary botany than Rock ever did. There was, for instance, Augustine Henry, a medical officer with the Imperial Maritime Customs and a colleague of the very unbotanical but properly named Cornell Plant. Henry, who found expatriate life tedious, explored in great detail the mess of vegetation zones that Yunnan's precipitous mountains piled on top of one another. He, like other plant hunters, would travel uncomfortably in a huagan, a chair, slung from the shoulders of local bearers. The work was dangerous and difficult, but well seasoned with rewards: Henry had numerous flowers named after him – a rhododendron, a viburnum – and he was one of the first westerners to sight the famously beautiful dove tree, which grows wild in western China, and nowhere else.
More famous still were the French missionaries Père David and Jean André Soulié, whose decades spent in the isolation of the western Chinese hills were amply rewarded by the discoveries of scores of splendid specimens. It fell to Père David actually to find the first dove tree – a delight that offers the illusion, created by paired white bracts that sprout beneath each flower, that scores of doves with outstretched wings have alighted on the branches and are waiting to fly away. The Linnaean Society gave it the name Davidia involucrata, and seeds from it were brought back to London by another hunter, the Royal Horticultural Society's great Ernest Wilson, a few years later.
Seeds from countless plants that were first found by these brave and inquiring men came pouring into Britain and America during Victorian and Edwardian times. Today, the fact that gardens and hillsides in the West are coloured by tea roses and peonies, by azaleas, camellias, chrysanthemums and rhododendrons is owed almost exclusively to the efforts of these men. Christian converts in western China remain something of a rarity: botanical converts in western gardens, however, suggest that the missionaries and their friends performed memorable tasks – even if, like Joseph Rock, they were not quite the tasks to which they were first assigned.
I had one more task before leaving Lijiang, and I was prompted to undertake it by a newspaper article that Bruce Chatwin had written of a trip in 1986 – three years before his early death of what those who cared for him said was an illness that he had contracted in China, and perhaps even on this trip. Ironically the man about whom he had written then, and who I was now coming to see a decade later, was a healer, a herbalist. He was a man whom Bruce Chatwin has made almost famous.
He is named Ho Shi-xiu, and he lives still as he did then, in a small Nakhi village called Baisha, halfway between Lijiang and the hamlet where Joseph Rock kept his country villa. Lily and I drove the six miles there, parked the Jeep in the grounds of a school, walked to the main street and turned south. Farmers and housewives and children were busying themselves on all sides – threshing grain, washing clothes, noisily spilling in and out of classes. Where would we find Dr Ho? Lily asked. I told her not to worry: Dr Ho was such an avid self-publicist that it would only be a matter of moments before he found us.
Turning south was in fact a mistake. We walked for more than a mile, pleasurably but pointlessly, drinking in the mountain air, peering up cross-streets, asking questions. The street was lined with willows, and a bright stream tumbled between the flagstones. A teacher asked me to spend a few minutes telling her class of ten-year-olds exactly where I was from; an old Nakhi woman asked me to help her untie the bridle of her donkey, which had become snarled on a tree; another woman, her daughter, showed me how to shave garlic to the thinness of gold leaf.
The guidebook I had with me struck a rather irritable tone about Dr Ho and Bruce Chatwin's somewhat overripe profile of him as ‘the Taoist physician in the Jade Dragon Mountains’. The publicity had gone to his head, said the book: now everyone wrote about him, everyone visited him, he was formidably wealthy compared to his fellow villagers, and he never let visitors pass without impressing his fame upon them. But where exactly was he? No one here seemed to know who he was; if he existed at all he had evidently gone to ground.
We retraced our steps, frustrated. After twenty minutes we found ourselves back in the stone-paved central piazza and struck off to the north. Two hundred yards along the way there was an almond tree in the middle of the road, and from behind it, as if responding to a stage manager's cue, stepped a slight man dressed in a blue wool cap and a long white doctor's coat.
‘My friends, welcome!’ he said, in the familiar and oily way of a man who is about to sell you something you know you don't want. ‘How very good of you to take time to visit my humble village. You have time to come to my little home?’
Dr Ho had found us. His having done so there was now no getting away from him. He looked quickly around to make sure there were no other potential clients coming up the street, then bundled us into the front room of his cottage, beneath a small sign that said Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic. It was by no means an extraordinary house: the walls were of wood and a dark reddish mud from which poked tiny bristles of chaff. Inside there were shelves of papers and a desk covered with vials and bags of seeds, and there was a pleasant smell, like an old Irish Medical Hall.
Dr Ho spoke English quietly, just comprehensibly, telling us his life story in the compressed manner of a telephone pitchman who knows that at any moment his listener may put down the receiver. If ever I showed a sign of wearying he would put his hand gently on my knee. ‘Wait for just a moment, kind sir you have come a very long way to hear my story.’ He said he had learned his English at the nearby American air base: but it sounded quite Dickensian, not at all as though he had been schooled by the men of the Flying Tigers.
The Cultural Revolution that swept through Lijiang came as something of a mixed blessing for Dr Ho, who had returned to the town from Nanjing after falling ill some time in the early 1960s. The Red Guard detachment assigned to this part of Yunnan selected the doctor promptly for reform through struggle, or some such madness: he was immediately suspect for no better reasons than his ability to speak, not only fair Dickensian English, but an alarming number of other foreign languages as well, a skill that in the eyes of the Guards rendered his commitment to Han supremacy and Maoist ideals very far from certain. So his house was ransacked, suspect goods and books were confiscated and he was forced outside to work, set to tilling the mountainside and making orderly fertility out of wild Yunnanese fecundity.
But what the Guards did not realize was that the work they had set Dr Ho as punishment brought him into contact with the makings of a new and very profitable career. Working in the fields halfway up the Jade Dragon Mountain, he came across samples of some of the rare and unusual plants that forty years before had been studied assiduously by Joseph Rock. Dr Ho knew Rock's work and he recognized the possible importance of the flowers and shrubs that were growing in such abundance on these slopes.
He started to collect them, keeping them well away from the scrutiny of his minders, bringing them back each night to the small plot of land behind the house. There he began to grow them in pots and under glass. Thus was born the tiniest and most exotic of physic gardens, with strange and exotic samples of botany that exist to this day. As part of his discourse Dr Ho takes visitors to see them: there is a lichen guaranteed to cure shrunken ovaries,* the root of an orchid that is said to be goo
d for migraine, a delicate green grass known as heaven's hemp – said to be peculiarly efficacious in seeing off bladder problems – and something called Meconopsis horridula, which, as its name half implies, works wonders for the temporarily dysenteric.
Dr Ho ground his plants to powder and soaked them in hot spring waters – trying them out on the villagers, varying the amounts and the mixes depending on the ailments presented and the age and sex of those he treated. Before long he had a following: the Chinese have always been eager for natural cures, for their own version of the Ayurvedic arts practised farther west, and Dr Ho's discoveries on the mountainsides seemed to work wonders, either from their chemistry or from their placebo effect.
He next combined his newfound pharmaceutical skills with his professed lifelong commitment to the way of Taoism – a philosophy that in any case sets great store by internal hygiene, the quest for immortality, internal alchemy and healing. And in 1985, formally and with some ceremony attended by Taoist priests, he established himself as a full-blown Taoist herbal healer. He sat back and anticipated a late middle age of well-meaning obscurity. What actually happened, however, was that a few months after setting up shop, and by pure chance, he was visited by the Adonis-like figure of Bruce Chatwin, his hand-tooled leather rucksack on his back, who swung into town with his pencil, notebook and an assignment from an American newspaper. Chatwin plucked Dr Ho from nowhere and cast him into the blinding spotlight of thoroughly respectable fame.
Whether or not there is any therapeutic value to any of Ho Shi-xiu's seemingly limitless range of teas, decoctions, infusions and tisanes, there is no saying – there have been no laboratory tests, so far. But such was Bruce Chatwin's following that, on his say-so alone, a string of the distinguished and the gullible promptly started to stream into Baisha to seek solace and comfort and the botanical assistance of Dr Ho's tiny clinic.
The doctor, a man not at all backward at coming forward, presents to anyone who is interested – and to most who are not – a thick stack of files and visitors' books that demonstrate the vast number of the great and the good, as well as the ordinary German tourists and Japanese bus-tour groups, who have come a-calling. There were the signatures of British ambassadors by the score, of television personalities like Michael Palin and John Cleese (‘interesting bloke – crap tea' he had written), of writers like Patrick Booz, of society ladies from the Upper East Side, and of regiments of Californians and health nuts from Oregon, Montana and the hills of Bavaria. There were newspapers articles in all known languages, preserved in folders of cellophane: he took them reverently from the stacks, offered them for viewing as though they were fragments of the True Cross.
Finally he peered at me, placing his wispy little white beard close up against my face and examining my skin and eyes. He leaned back:
‘Blood pressure, anxiety, loose bowels,’ he declared. And though I protested that I had none of these afflictions – although my daily inspection of the leavings below dozens of Yunnanese hole-in-plank lavatories had convinced me that the latter problem was endemic in rural Chinese life – he pressed a bag of powder into my hand, then a leaf or two and a twig, which he pressed between the pages of the book I was carrying, and cocked his head on one side.
‘These will clear up all your problems, I have no doubt,’ he said, and cocked his head again, an expectant expression on his impish face. I twigged: he wanted cash, and Lily counted out some ten renminbi bills into his hand, one bill, then two, then five – until, finally he smiled, closed his fist on the money and stood up.
‘You have been so kind to give me of your valuable time,’ he said, in as non-Flying Tigers a patois as it is possible to imagine. ‘I hope you will tell your friends to come and visit me too.’ Not I hope you will come back; just I hope your friends will come, listen to my spiel, hear about my fame, listen to my diagnosis of a life of diarrhoea and dyspeptic discomfort, buy samples of my potions and make me richer, and pass it on in due course.
He was a rogue, I thought – a lovable rogue of a snake-oil salesman, an amiable bit player in a circus of a grand tradition. He and his Taoist wizardry had taken me for fifty quite affordable yuan. But he had taken the late and much missed Bruce Chatwin, I thought, for really rather more.
13
The River Wild
During its 3964-mile passage from the fringe of glaciers at the foot of Mount Gelandandong in Qinghai province, to the navigation buoy on the East China Sea, the Yangtze drops 17,660 feet – three and a third miles. Most of that drop occurs, as is the case with almost all rivers, in its first half. Between the glaciers and the distillery city of Yibin – a distance of 1973 miles, which happens to be almost precisely half the distance between the source and the sea – the river drops very nearly 17,000 feet – almost all of its total drop, in other words. Below Yibin the river is wide and generally placid: it is flatwater, as mountain boatmen like to say.
But above it, on that first half of the river, the water is anything but flat. Above Yibin, every river mile of the Yangtze sees its waters falling an average of eight and a half feet. That is very steep by the standards of any major river. It is worth noting that the Colorado slides down along a similar gradient as it passes through the Grand Canyon – but manages to do so for only for 200 miles. The Yangtze, by contrast, keeps going down and down at the same average rate for fully 1900 miles.
The upper half of the Yangtze is, in other words, for almost all of its length, a very turbulent, very fast and very steeply inclined body of water indeed. Once it has been properly established as a big river – once the dozens of lesser source streams have braided and knitted themselves together to begin the process of emptying the high Tibetan Plateau of all available running water – tens of thousands of cubic feet of water course every single second down it towards the sea. And though on average these gigantic quantities of water fall more than eight feet in every mile, it must be remembered this is on average.
In some places the waters sidle gently between low banks and sandy beaches. They pass by silently, they give sanctuary to wading birds, they provide watering holes for antelope and bear and other animals of the high cold plains. The waters are icy and clear and shallow; the river is wide; there are low sandy islands; and looking down from a boat one can see huge fish waving slowly in the current. Places like these are rare and beautiful; and their beauty has an ominous quality, since invariably beyond the lip of the downstream horizon everything changes, and what is placid up here becomes down there a place of speed and foam and spray and, for any humans caught there, a place of matchless danger.
At these much more numerous other places – both on the River of Golden Sand and on its upstream extension that the local Tibetans call the Tongtian He, the River to Heaven – and once the Tibetan Plateau's encircling hills have been breached and the waters begin to roll inexorably down towards the ocean, the vast volumes of water steadily transmute into terrifying, awesome stretches of river where the power and fury of the rushing Yangtze become barely imaginable. All these millions of tons of roaring water are suddenly squeezed between gigantic cliffs, are contorted by massive fallen stones and by jagged chunks of masonry, and they sluice and slice and slide and thunder down slopes so steep that the waters hurtle down ten, twenty, fifty feet in no more than a few hundred furious yards.
In places like these the water is not so much water as a horrifying white foam – a cauldron of tortured spray and air and broken rock that is filled with the wreckage of battered whirlpools and distorted rapids and with huge voids of green and black, the whole maelstrom roaring, shrieking, bellowing with a cannonade of unstoppable anger and terror. The noise is almost more frightening than the sight: the sound roars up from the cliffs, echoing and resounding from the wet rocks so that it can be heard from dozens of miles away, a sound of distress like a dragon in pain.
These stretches of wild water are nothing at all like the troublesome boils and shoals and whirlpools of the Three Gorges, across which trackers were able t
o haul the great trading junks, and where Cornell Plant and Archibald Little eventually triumphed with their iron boats: these are upriver rapids where any survival is impossible, where any craft sucked in would emerge only as matchwood, and where any passengers or cargo swept down would be pulverized by the ceaseless might of the roaring waters. These are the Upper Yangtze's rapids, and they are worse than any others in the world.
There are many of them, all unutterably dreadful, all formidably dangerous. But none is more dangerous and dreadful – nor more spectacular and unforgettable – than those in the gorge near Lijiang, where the river squeezes itself through a twelve-mile-long cleft that in places is no more than fifty feet across: narrow enough, some say, for a tiger fleeing from a hunter to have once jumped clear across. This notion is almost certainly quite fanciful, but the name has stuck – Hutiao Xia, Tiger Leaping Gorge, unarguably the most dramatic sight on the entire route of the river.
During these twelve miles the river falls at least six hundred feet – by some estimates, a thousand. That means it falls at the rate of between fifty and eighty feet each mile, a drop with more of the characteristics of a waterfall than of a river rapid. According to the Chinese there are three main groups of white water in the Gorge and twenty-one separate rapids. All of them are dangerous: two in particular, one close to the beginning of the Gorge itself, one halfway down, are truly terrifying.
The river courses along a natural fault line, tearing through rock that has already been crushed and weakened by the tectonic forces that have shaped this geologically chaotic corner of the world. Near-vertical cliffs of limestones and granites, porphyries and slates, soar directly up on either side of the stream for fully seven thousand feet; the mountains of which they are faces rise behind them to twelve thousand feet, and from the dark gorge shadows below one can peer up into the narrow strip of blue sky and glimpse snow and ice sparkling on the upper slopes.