Free The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester Page A

lights and with typhoon gantries bolted up their sides, to keep them standing in the storm winds of midsummer. In the distance, ranks of skyscrapers marched across the horizon. I could see the glint of the sun on hundreds of windshields as trucks and cars waited for a steam train to chuff by and let their drivers pass. The land was well established: the city was now beginning.
    And Wusong Kou, where the flag was flying, was where it all really starts. True, the Gateway is the technical beginning or the technical end of the river; but Wusong Kou is the place that anyone with any sense of the romantic, anyone with any sense of history, regards as the terminus of the river proper. The Chinese know it by this name: the world's mariners, however, know it by a slight variation, by a name that is as familiar to their rollicking community as is Blood Alley or the Liver Building or Dundalk Docks.
    This place, with its scarlet warning flag and its lighthouse and the twenty-foot dial of what looks like a clock, but is in fact the Whangpoo River Tide Gauge, is the spot where all vessels bound for Shanghai – which means most of the ships found in the estuary – turn left. It is, depending on your perspective, the beginning of the Yangtze proper, or the true end of a trip across a long, long sea. This spot on the river, formally marked by just a single red canister buoy, is known as the Woosung Bar.
    A century ago Tennyson planted an image that has lasted longest: the bar as a place of danger and melancholy, where sailors wave their farewells, where the pilots wait to steer a mariner home. Crossing the Bar is an event: leaving, you pass from still waters into swells; returning, you take one last risk, since at the bar the sea has one last chance to toy with you, and toss you over in the foam. But if you do make it past – and on a gale-swept day the waves and spindrift on a river bar can make for a terrifying sight, and perilous navigation – then you are home, safe and sound.
    The Woosung Bar is more benign, however, than anything Tennyson had in mind. It marks the spot where one river, the Whangpoo, meets the Yangtze. * The meeting is as calm as the meeting of most rivers: there is no line of breakers, no cloud of spume. It is not a dangerous place – but it is, and long has been, a wretched nuisance. It once caused great friction between East and West. It exercised the minds and pens of diplomats for scores of years. And all because a great tongue of Whangpoo mud and sand oozes endlessly out onto the bed of the Yangtze and, because the Yangtze waters are pushed and pulled back and forth by tide and flood, the mud stays more or less where it is, thickening all the time. The estuary is generally about fifty feet deep: at the Woosung Bar it shallows in places to no more than about twelve. The shallowing was a nineteenth-century cause célèbre.
    The problem was never noticed by the Chinese of a century ago: they glided serenely up and down the rivers on sailing junks that drew ten feet, or even five. But when the foreign traders began to arrive, in iron ships that customarily drew twenty feet or more, they were in for some unpleasant surprises. Perhaps their leadsmen may have warned them in time: often they did not. A river that until the 1850s had been alive with moving traffic was, twenty years later, suddenly replete with barbarian vessels stopped dead in the water and hopelessly stuck.
    Some had been stranded on their way in. Others, seemingly luckier, managed to get in, but then went to load themselves at the wharves with tons of rhubarb and tea and bolts of silk and sacks of rice – and then found they were drawing too much, that the bar would not let them get out. The local Lloyd's agent duly sent the cables home to London, warning of delay and demurrage. ‘The Travancore sailed out with the mails but was unable to cross the bar, and spent a whole day unloading her cargo into lighters to lessen her load…’ ‘I beg to