Dam it!

The Three Gorges Dam in China is finally ready, with final resettlement efforts underway. News features tell a heart-rending story of an old farmer who didn’t want to leave his land even though it would soon be under hundreds of feet of water. Why? Because his history was that land, where his ancestors had lived and were buried. The same land that had fed his forefathers and his grandchildren. Soon it would feed only the fish.

The Yangtse River is what nourishes most of the vast and wonderful country that is China. It is, as are all great rivers – and people – temperamental, flooding, killing and destroying even as it nurtures and cradles civilisations and mankind. The valleys and rifts are home to ancient histories, when wars were won and tribes born, where science, art and magic found roots and settled to shape humanity. There is tempest in the furious waters, tranquillity in the gentle branches and mystery in the deep gorges carved by time, ice and rapids that few can fathom and fewer know. And, above all, there is a timeless, ageless beauty about the Yangtse, of which poems have been written and human dramas played out.

Some years ago, I was taken to China by my parents as a birthday present. Part of the long and constantly astonishing visit was a cruise along the great river, a five-day journey that showed off not just the tourist-friendly side of the country, but its untamed and unheralded charms as well. The cruise began easily, with the largish group being booked into fairly comfortable cabins, with tiny attached bathrooms with showers that couldn’t decide whether to freeze or scald its users. It was a chilly time of year, so I warmed my tropical blood by sitting in the sun on an exhaust vent that managed to keep my bottom hot while my shoulders shuddered in the chill breeze. As I sat there, idly scribbling in the notebook that was a log of my travels, I watched debris floating past, bobbing and bubbling in the dirty depths of the vast watercourse. A couple of soggy sheets of newspaper sank gently in our wake, while bits of offal thrown from the ship’s galley spotted redly for a minute before vanishing.

Far to our left and right were the fertile fields of the Yangtse basin. Black dots of oxen pulled ploughs through the rich soil, while the ants that were people moved in miniscule blurs. Around the bend was a huge, messy, black, smoke-spewing township, its dirty factory chimneys incongruous against the backdrop of majestic slate-veined mountains. The waters that furled against the small bay were grey and sudsy, the air a tangible fug. We soon were past that environmental disaster and sailed along into darkness, the sunlight closed off by the steep cliffs and narrowing river.

On a side-trip in a small motorised sampan into the Little Gorges, the waters were quicker, impatient to drive us out of sacred territory. This is where the ghosts of an ancient past lingered, high in the cliffs and far away in the perennial mists. The Hanging Coffins, found perhaps only in this tiny niche carved into the world, held the dust of ancestors 3,000 years gone. One of these venerable old men, back on earth for a brief time, was trying to sell me yellow melons when we got off the boat at the rock bridge, beyond which travel was perilous and disallowed. He had a wicked twinkle in his rheumy eyes, backed by a sales patter that was Esperantoesquely comprehensible in its toothless mumble. It was where the mystical met the real, the border between the two blurring into a lovely cloud of illusion and imagination.

It was also where, for a while, you could forget the place you came from and become someone you always wanted to be. And, maybe, at that wild, lonely and truly beautiful place, now far below the surface of the floodwaters, you could have discovered who you really are.