Cruising: Two sides of the three gorges

23 March 2014 - 02:03 By Fionnuala McHugh
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now

A cruise on the Yangtze reveals the stark contrast between the old China and the new, says Fionnuala McHugh

One Hong Kong morning I took a plane (to Wuhan), a train (to Yichang) and a car to a ship moored on the Yangtze River. Its destination was Chongqing, in Sichuan province. At the railway station, a local man told me there had been an earthquake in Sichuan - the epicentre was close to where an earthquake in 2008 had killed at least 90000 people - and that the nation was on standby for more information.

That's not the sort of news you want to hear when you're about to enter the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, and either an engineering miracle without equal (official Chinese media) or an unstable, unmitigated environmental disaster (large section of Western media). In China, you often find yourself juggling two opposing notions at the same time.

The ship in question was the Victoria Selina, and it was taking the upstream Yangtze route, which meant four nights on board (downstream, from Chongqing to Yichang, takes three nights). Victoria Cruises, registered in the US, markets itself as "luxurious", a viewpoint that, again, I found to be subjective.

To Chinese passengers, familiar with crowded domestic boats, the Selina with its private bathrooms is probably the nonpareil of shipping.

To Western passengers, however, who made up about a third of the 175 on board, the small cabins and unremarkable food did not herald high-end. At mealtimes, I shared a table with a family of Germans. They'd been led to believe the Selina was a floating five-star hotel, so breakfast, on day one, was a gloomy affair. "Do you find it noisy?" "Sorry, what?" "The noise - does it not disturb you?"

I had to retune my ears to hear what they heard; high-decibel yelling is China's soundtrack and on the Selina it was relatively subdued.

That was at 7.30am and we'd already passed through Xiling Gorge, the first of the famous three. Those passengers who'd gone on deck - Chinese on one side, Westerners on another - had listened to the commentary in English and Mandarin, while doing up their jackets against the foggy April chill. The views were so shrouded we might have been on the Thames, except for the early-morning karaoke coming from the motels clustered along the shore. "Here," remarked the commentary, "they are building more tea-houses, souvenir shops and restaurants for the tourists."

At 8.30am, everyone climbed into buses and we drove to the Three Gorges Dam site. On this stretch of the Yangtze, it's raining or foggy 80% of the year.

As the gateway to the smooth lake is strictly monitored by the People's Liberation Army, three of us had to hand over our Swiss Army knives to the bus-driver before we disembarked. The soldiers, the massive walls, the loudspeakers and a subtext of global domination gives it the frisson of a James Bond set; you half expect Blofeld to burst forth demanding to know why thousands of tourists with cameras have invaded his lair.

While the guides listed stupendous statistics involving tons and megawatts, the Chinese photographed each other next to a model of a tetrahedron, the man-made, four-faced granite blocks with which the Yangtze's force was quelled. The man-made shape you really notice at every tourist spot across China, however, is an inverted pyramid: a single child, his two parents, his four grandparents. One of these little emperors wailed at the stalls. He wanted a toy tank, which was parked among the cigarette packets and the Mao key rings. It cost about R180 and looked as if it was made of, though surely not - I asked the saleswoman, who closed one eye, pointed a trigger finger and helpfully cried, "Pow!" - yes, bullet casings.

After the tour, the buses dropped us back at the Selina, where we'd berthed beneath the steps of Huangling Temple. It wasn't part of the itinerary but, seeing the hordes selling "I Climbed the Great Wall" T-shirts (the nearest brick in that wall was at least 800km away) and Chinese pornography (supposedly pandering to immoral Western tourists though actually purchased by the Chinese), I sought a moment's reflection.

It was lunch time and the place was deserted. Stirring in the breeze were the orange trees, whose scent pervaded the courtyard where I sat. A temple has existed here for several millennia but the current one dates from the 17th century and has survived both the great Yangtze flood of 1870 and the dam's arrival. Just upstream from Huangling, 1.3-million people were uprooted in the '90s as 13 cities, 140 towns, 1352 villages and many temples were deliberately submerged.

I wandered about for a while, listening to the ships' horns on the river below before strolling into a silent annexe at the back. Inside, two human bodies lay floating in glass cabinets. For one insanely appalled moment, I thought they were locals who'd refused to leave their homes and were now on display as a warning. The feet of one of them had rotted completely and were floating in a separate container, like abalone in a Hong Kong seafood restaurant; but the flesh of the other remained mostly intact.

As I can't read Mandarin, and there was no one to ask, I photographed the notices and, later, asked a guide for a translation. She'd never seen the bodies, and studied the images with horror-curiosity. They were a man and a woman, dating back to the Qing dynasty, who had been discovered, somehow preserved in the river, when dam-work began; and I thought of them often in the next few days as we sailed over the ghost towns.

That evening, we passed through the dam's five ship locks. The chamber of each lock is so gigantic it can hold six Selina-sized (4500 tons) ships. We entered with several huge barges. China has a habit of exhausting superlatives and this was one of those occasions. The gargantuan gates closing, the water rising, the strange, high, singing sound as if the boats were a school of whales floating up together under what felt like the biggest floodlights in the universe: all these made the experience superhuman. I knew about the terrible costs but I couldn't help it; I wrote the word "magical" in my notebook.

Early the following morning, coddled within the dam, we went through the second gorge, Wu (which means foggy, and was), boarding smaller boats to see the Lesser Gorges and then even smaller ones to explore the tributaries, like a riverine version of nesting dolls. The further in we went, the lovelier the sheer cliff faces became, softened by brush strokes of bamboo and waterfalls and the occasional pavilion. "You may use good imagination!" said the guide, pointing out crags that resembled an elephant, a Buddha, a fishing cat; it's the man-made tracks, however, running up the mountainside to unseen villages that make you speculate about the shapes of other lives.

I'd always thought that the lost cities sat, like Atlantis, in desolate perfection beneath the flood. "Sometimes, in my dreams, I still see my old land," said Sarah, one of the guides. But it had taken six months to flatten Wushan, her 2000-year-old home town, so that not a stone of it would hinder future ships.

Sarah wasn't actually called that, of course. Like Kiwi, Cherry, Lily and Sharia (who dispensed wine in the Selina's dining room), she wore a parallel identity. The ship's guide, Steven, who hadn't seen a foreigner "by my own eye" until he was 18 and whose real name is Xu Qing Song, told me his parents had never heard his English one. That's a form of submersion too; these children of the river have learnt to swim, smiling at strangers, between both cultures and centuries. When I saw the 400-year-old statues outside Fengjie, decapitated during the Cultural Revolution but subsequently fitted with new heads, I also saw the metaphor.

Fengjie itself is a decade old, as orderly as a stage-set. You walk through it on the way to White Emperor City, a temple complex that was built on shore 2000 years ago but which the dam has converted into an island. The eighth-century poet Li Po wrote a poem about it, known to every child in China, and I asked Katie, our guide, to recite it as we walked across the bridge: "Lightly our boat skipped past 10000 green mountains." The view of the third gorge, Qutang, from here is so famous it's on the 10-yuan note, and local tourists hold up their currency as they're photographed: Mammon and literature, the two sides of the Three Gorges.

The final shore excursion was to Fengdu, known as China's "ghost city" - the humans have been relocated upstream, the wraiths remain in their ancient temples. By now, the weather had improved and the passengers were happy. No one moaned about the food any more, and the British passengers were working up to their farewells. "You're really lovely," I heard one woman telling Cherry at breakfast.

My only complaint was when the lights failed in my cabin. David, the electrician, soon arrived and changed fuses. Still no light. I gazed out at the waters of the dam (electricity-generating capacity: 22500 megawatts). After a while, inspiration struck and David jammed a bit of paper into the key card slot at the door. It worked, perfectly.

What to take Binoculars, insect repellent and flat shoes for shore trips (there are a lot of steps up to temples); layered clothing (it gets hotter as you sail inland but it was still fairly chilly when I set off in April).

When to go: The best time to visit southern China is in spring (March to mid-May) or autumn (mid-September to November). In summer, the humidity can be unbearably high. Avoid public holidays - the "golden weeks" of May (marking Labour Day), October (National Day) and Chinese New Year.

© The Daily Telegraph

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now