Chapter XI: Rapids of the Upper Yangtze

On inquiring of Mr. Endacott, at Ichang, his ideas of occupation on the upward voyage, his reply was, “People have enough to do looking after their lives.” Certainly the perils of the rapids are great, and few people of whom I have heard have escaped without risks to life and loss or damage to property, either, like Consul Gardner, finding their boats disappear from under them, or like a missionary, who, coming down with his wife’s coffin, came to grief, the coffin taking a lonely and ghastly voyage to a point far below, or like many others whom I met who reached their destinations minus their possessions in whole or in part. Signs of disaster abounded. Above and below every rapid, junkmen were encamped on shore under the mats of their junks, and the shore was spread with cotton drying. There were masts above water, derelicts partially submerged in quiet reaches, or on some sandy beach being repaired, and gaunt skeletons lay here and there on the rocks which had proved fatal to them. The danger signal is to be seen above and below all the worst rapids in the shape of lifeboats, painted a brilliant red and inscribed with characters in white: showy things, as buoyant as corks, sitting on the raging water with the vexatious complacency of ducks, or darting into the turmoil of scud and foam where the confusion is at its worst, and there poising themselves with the calm fearlessness of a perfect knowledge of every rock and eddy.

I have found that many of the deterrent perils which are arrayed before the eyes of travellers about to begin a journey are greatly exaggerated, and often vanish altogether. Not so the perils of the Yangtze. They fully warrant the worst descriptions which have been given of them. The risks are many and serious, and cannot be provided against by any forethought. The slightest error in judging of distance on the part of the pilot, any hampering of the bow-sweep, a tow-rope breaking, a submerged boulder changing its place, and many other possibilities, and life and property are at the mercy of a raging flood, tearing downwards at the rate of from seven to eleven miles an hour. I have no personal perils to narrate. A rock twice knocked a hole in the bottom which took a day to repair, and in a collision our bow-sweep was fractured, which led to a severe quarrel lasting half a day; this was all. I never became used to the rapids, and always felt nervous at the foot of each, and preferred the risk of fracturing my limbs among the great boulders and shining rock faces of the shores to spending hours in a turmoil, watching the fraying of the tow-ropes.

Before starting my boat’s crew made offerings and vows at their favourite temples, and on the first evening they slew a fowl as an offering to the river god, and smeared its blood over the bow-sweep and the fore part of the boat. My preparations were to pack my plates, films, and general photographic outfit, journals, a few necessaries, and a few things of fictitious value, in a waterproof bag, to be carried by my servant, along with my camera, at each rapid where we landed.

The night at Lao-min-tze was too cold for sleep, and before dawn I heard the wild chant of the boatmen as great cargo boats, with from fifty to ninety rowers, swept down the stream. We untied at daylight, and, after passing the lovely village and valley of Nan-to, admired and wondered all day. It was one long glory and sublimity. A friend lately asked me if I whiled away the time by “walking on the river banks,” thinking, doubtless, of the level towing paths of the meadows of the Thames and Ouse. The accompanying illustration shows the banks of the Yangtze below Wan Hsien at their best, and the pleasant possibilities for strolling!

The river-bed, there forty feet below its summer level, is an area of heaped, contorted rock-fragments, sharp-edged, through which one or more swirling streams or violent rapids pursue their course, the volume of water, even at that season, being tremendous. At its highest level these upper waters are practically non-navigable. Cliffs, mountain spurs, and noble mountains rise from this chaotic river-bed, and every sharp turn reveals some new beauty. The dark green pine is but a foil to the feathery foliage of the golden bamboo on the steep, terraced sides of tumbled heights; pleasant brown farmhouses are half seen among orange groves and orchards; grand temples, with noble specimens of the _Ficus religiosa_ in their grounds, lighten hill and glen sides with their walls of imperial red. Then suddenly the scene changes into one of Tibetan grandeur and savagery, and the mountains approach the river in stupendous precipices, walling in almost fathomless water. We tied up the second night in the last crimson and violet of the sunset, where the river narrowed and progress looked impossible, and crags and pinnacles, snow-covered, rose above the dark precipices.

On that afternoon a red lifeboat suggested the first rapid, the Ta-tan, rather a _chipa_ or race than a rapid, though I believe sufficiently perilous at half high water. I landed and scrambled up to the top for a three hours’ wait, while three junks, each dragged up by fifty men, came up before mine, boats having to take their turn without favour. Even that ascent was an anxious sight, for sometimes the boat hung, ofttimes slipped back, and several times it looked doubtful whether the crowd of men attached to the tow-rope could get her up at all. This was the first sight of the trackers’ villages, which are a marked feature of the Yangtze. Each boat carries enough men to pull her up against the strong stream, but at a rapid she needs many more, and during the navigation season coolies from long distances migrate to the river and put up mat huts as close to it as possible, to which dealers in food, tobacco, _samshu_, and opium at once gravitate, along with sellers of bamboo tow-ropes. Nor are rough amusements wanting. Rough, dirty, noisy, these temporary settlements are. Their population is from forty or fifty to over 400 men. When the river rises the huts are removed, and the coolies return to other avocations. At the Hsin-tan rapid my little boat required seventy men, and some of the big junks took on 300 in addition to their crews of 120.

The following day, after being hauled up the Kwa-tung rapid and enjoying superb scenery for some hours, a turn in the river revealed walls of perpendicular rock rising to a colossal height, estimated at from 1000 to 2000 feet, the stupendous chasm of the Niu-kan gorge, to my thinking the grandest and most imposing of all, though a short one, and the same afternoon, in exquisitely brilliant sunshine, we arrived at the foot of the Hsin-tan rapid, then at its worst.

This Hsin-tan in winter is the great bugbear of the Yangtze, the crux of forthcoming steam navigation, a waterfall with a boiling cataract below, a thing of awe and majesty, where the risks, turmoil, bargaining, and noise of the Upper River are centred. This great obstacle, which I wonder that any man even thought of surmounting, was formed about two hundred and fifty years ago by the descent of a rocky mountain-side into the river. It consists of what are three definite falls in the winter-time, the first caused by a great fan-shaped mass of big boulders deposited malignantly by a small stream which enters on the left bank, and the two others by great barriers of rock which lie athwart the river, above the higher of which, as is seen in the illustration, is a stretch of deep, calm water in peaceful contrast—the Ping-shu gorge. The cataracts extend for over a mile, and the fall is estimated at twenty feet.

Above the Niu-kan gorge the mountains open out, and where their sides are broken up into spurs, and where the spurs are most picturesque, the romantic villages of Hsin-tan and Yao-tsai are scattered on carefully terraced heights and bold, rocky projections, villages with good houses and fine temples, and a pagoda among oranges and loquats. Many of the houses have such handsome curved roofs that one can scarcely tell which is house and which is temple, all looking as if some of the best bits of the shores of Como had been dropped down in HUPEH.

Hsin-tan is a wild and beautiful village, and has an air of prosperity. Many junk owners have retired there to spend their days, and the comparative cleanliness and good repair are quite striking. One orange-embowered village on a spur has a temple with a pagoda built out over the edge of the cliff, without any obvious support. A village which might claim to be a town, at a height of fully 400 feet, is not only piled up on terraces, but the houses are built out from the cliff on timbers, and the flights of steps leading from terrace to terrace are so steep that I made no attempt to climb them. The colonnades in the street of shops and eating-houses which projects over the cliff reminded me of Varenna; indeed, there was a suggestion of Italy throughout, under an Italian sky.

I sat on a ledge for two hours, every minute expecting to see my boat move up to the foot of the cataract, but she was immovable. Then we went into a low restaurant, and got some fourth-class Chinese food, and after long bargaining three live fowls and three eggs. Crowds, more curious than rude, pressed upon us, everywhere choking up the balconies and entrances of the eating-house, and asking no end of questions. The men asserted, as they did everywhere on the river, that with my binoculars and camera I could see the treasures of the mountains, the gold, precious stones, and golden cocks which lie deep down in the earth; that I kept a black devil in the camera, and that I liberated him at night, and that he dug up the golden cocks, and that the reason why my boat was low in the water was that it was ballasted with these auriferous fowls, and with the treasures of the hills! They further said that “foreign devils” with blue and grey eyes could see three feet into the earth, and that I had been looking for the root which transmutes the base metals into gold, and this, though according to them I had the treasures of the hills at my disposal! They were quite good-natured, however.

The whole of a brilliant afternoon was spent on that height, which looks down on the deep-water channel by which big cargo boats ascend the rapids, small junks and native house-boats like mine taking a channel on the south side. During four hours, only two junks, which had partially discharged their cargoes, effected the ascent, though each of them was dragged up by 400 men. One big junk, after getting half-way up in three hours, jibbed, and though the trackers were stimulated by gongs and drums beaten frantically, she slowly slipped back to the point from which she started, and was there two days afterwards.

At sunset, taking a boat across the still, strong water above the fall, after having a desperate scramble over boulders of great size, we reached my boat, which was then moored at the side of the cataract in an eddy below the opposite village. The _lao-pan_ said we should go up at daylight; and so we did, but it was the daylight of the third morning from that night, and I had ample opportunities for studying the Hsin-tan and its ways.

Miserable nights they were. It was as bad as being in a rough sea, for we were in the swell of the cataract and within the sound of its swish and roar. The boat rolled and pitched; the great rudder creaked and banged; we thumped our neighbours, and they thumped us; there were unholy sounds of tom-toms, the weather relapsed, the wind howled, and above all the angry yells of the boat baby were heard. The splash of a “sea” came in at my open window and deluged my camp bed, and it was very cold.

The next two days were disagreeable, even in such majestic and exciting surroundings. The boatmen turned us and our servants out at 10 a.m., and we stood about and sat on the great boulders on the bleak mountain-side in a bitterly cold, sunless wind each day till nearly five, deluded into the belief that our boat would move. A repulsive and ceaseless crowd of men and boys stood above, below, and behind us, though our position was strategically chosen. Mud was thrown and stuck; foul and bad names were used all day by successive crowds. I am hardened to most things, but the odour of that crowd made me uncomfortable. More than 1200 trackers, men and boys, notoriously the roughest class in China, were living in mat huts on the hillside, with all their foul and ofttimes vicious accessories. The crowds were coarse and brutal. Could these people ever have come “trailing clouds of glory”? Were they made in the image of God? Have we “all one Father”? I asked myself.

A glorious sight the Hsin-tan is as seen from our point of vantage, half-way up the last cataract, a hill of raging water with a white waterfall at the top, sharp, black rocks pushing their vicious heads through the foam, and above, absolute calm. I never saw such exciting water scenes—the wild rush of the cataract; the great junks hauled up the channel on the north side by 400 men each, hanging trembling in the surges, or, as in one case, from a tow-rope breaking, spinning down the cataract at tremendous speed into frightful perils; while others, after a last tremendous effort, entered into the peace of the upper waters. Then there were big junks with masts lashed on their sides, bound downwards, and their passage was more exciting than all else. They come broadside on down the smooth slope of water above, then make the leap bow on, fifty, eighty, even a hundred rowers at the oars and _yulows_, standing facing forwards, and with shrieks and yells pulling for their lives. The plunge comes; the bow and fore part of the deck are lost in foam and spray, emerging but to be lost again as they flash by, then turning round and round, mere playthings of the cataract, but by skill and effort got bow on again in time to take the lesser rapid below. It is a sublime sight. _Wupans_ and _sampans_, making the same plunge, were lost sight of altogether in clouds of foam and spray, but appeared again. Red lifeboats, with their smart turbaned crews, dodged in the eddies trim and alert, crowds of half-naked trackers, struggling over the boulders with their 1200 feet of tow-rope, dragged, yelled, and chanted, and from each wild shore the mountains rose black and gaunt into a cold, grey sky.

At this great cataract pilots are necessary. They are competent and respectable, licensed by the authorities, and their high charges, half a dollar for the half-hour which my small boat occupied in going up the fall, and a dollar for the five minutes taken by a big junk on the descent, enable them to live comfortably, and many of the pretty whitewashed houses of Hsin-tan in the dense shade of orange groves are theirs. They deserve high pay, for it is a most perilous business, involving remarkable nerve and sleight of eye, for a single turn too much or too little of the great bow-sweep, and all would be lost. Every junk which took the plunge over the rock barrier into the furious billows of the cataract below looked bound for destruction. A curious functionary came on board my boat, a well-dressed man carrying a white flag, on which was written, “Powers of the waters, give a lucky star for the journey.” He stood well forward, waving this flag regularly during the ascent to propitiate the river deities, and the cook threw rice on the billows with the same object. The pilot was a quiet, well-dressed man, giving orders by signals which were promptly obeyed. Indeed, the strict discipline to which these wild boatmen submit in perilous places is remarkable. The _lao-pan_ trusted neither his life nor his money to the boat, and he even brought the less valuable possessions of wife and children on shore.

My boat had the twenty-fifth turn, and on the third day of detention she went up with seventy men at the ropes. It was an anxious half-hour of watching from the rocks, but there was no disaster, and I was glad to escape from the brutal crowd, as foul in language as in person, to the quiet of my cabin and the twilight stillness of the Ping-shu gorge. The whole ascent of the Hsin-tan rapids took my boat five hours and forty-five minutes.

No description can convey any idea of the noise and turmoil of the Hsin-tan. I realised it best by my hearing being affected for some days afterwards. The tremendous crash and roar of the cataract, above which the yells and shouts of hundreds of straining trackers are heard, mingled with the ceaseless beating of drums and gongs, some as signals, others to frighten evil spirits, make up a pandemonium which can never be forgotten.