There’s a fascinating trove of observation and information in Simon Winchester’s The River At The Center Of The World (Henry Holt 1996), but perhaps the most striking thing about reading the book almost 30 years after its publication is how much China has changed. Mao Zedong’s 1935 Long March retreat was 60 years into history when Winchester’s foreboding travelogue appeared. That legendary defeat by nationalist forces would by 1949 be hailed as a turning point leading to the eventual establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
Winchester arrives in modern Communist China with a plan to journey up the Yangtze River from its mouth in Shanghai to its source in the Tibetan Himalayans. Amid breathtaking national beauty and depressingly unregulated examples of environmental pollution, aided by Chinese guide “Lily,” whose true identity must be concealed, the author makes geographies of upriver travel into chapters, stopping along the way to explore, ruminate, and catalogue old and new in remarkable detail.
The need for the obfuscation of identity is covered in the Author’s Note:
The most difficult part of writing any book about the sad situation in contemporary China is not being able—thanks to the present government’s unquenchable capacity for cruelty and revenge—to give the real names of many of the participants.
Even as Winchester celebrates the good, and often friendly, Chinese people he meets, the entire narrative is replete with regretful references to the Communist rise to power. Any return to mainland China after publication of the book would’ve been ill-advised.
In Shanghai, underway in a government-surveilled boat helmed by a crew of Chi-Com loyalists, stacks of industry belch unfiltered greenhouse gases into a leaden sky. It’s not singular when the author spots a body floating in the river.
Just under 200 miles upriver, in Nanjing, in the chapter titled “City of Victims,” Winchester debarks to visit the site of the infamous Rape of Nanking, a memorial to the unchecked atrocity committed against the Chinese by the Japanese in 1937. Winchester writes:
Children were used as bayonet practice. Women were raped repeatedly by dozens of soldiers standing in line, on after another. Old people were buried alive. Contests were held to see how many heads could be cut off with a single sword blade.
A stopover in pandemically-foreshadowed Wuhan comes next, at which time the author witnesses citizenry engaged in preparation for what has become an annual rite: the reenactment of Mao’s 1956 symbolic swim across the Yangtze. Natural beauty and human harvesting of nature’s power comes into focus as the controversial plan and early construction of the gargantuan (it can be seen from space) Three Gorges Dam is chronicled.
That beauty becomes unrivaled as the story moves ever westward, to the tumultuous Tiger Leaping Gorge, which brooks no watercraft, and on to the windswept Tibetan plateau that leads to the Gelandandong glacier and fast-running stream that marks the headwaters of the river.
Even here, the ramifications of the so-called Great Leap Forward are underpinned by the presence of chained-together prison gangs. Winchester prompts his driver to speed up past the incarcerated souls working along the highway:
Chinese authorities are sensitive about their political prisoners, and merely seeing these gangs of gray-skinned men [and women], masked against the cold, shackled to one another, wielding picks and hammers with dispirited weariness—this was enough for my deportation.
As the blinding sunlight of the steppes yields to a deepening cold and sudden snowfall, Winchester lights a well-traveled cigar and reflects on all he’s seen. Thirty years later, we reflect on Communist China’s gains since the publication of this great book: possession of the second largest economy and third largest military capability on the planet.