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

report that the Australia was detained for five days at Woosung…’ ‘The French mail-steamer Provence was unable to reach Shanghae at all…’ It made a nonsense of the river as a trading route. The great artery of China, as barkers had already long been advertising the Yangtze, suddenly had a bad case of sclerosis.
    By the mid-1870s merchants, weary of having their ships pinned by sand, began to lose their tempers. They wrote angry letters: the State of the Woosung Bar, which sounds today like a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, became a heated talking point in the coffeehouses of Cheapside and the bars on the Fulton Street waterfront.
    An august-sounding body known as the Association for the Protection of Commercial Interests as Respects Wrecked and Damaged Property wrote to Lord Granville at the Foreign Office: the Bar, they said, is ‘an impediment to shipping… a cause for great anxiety’. It could be cleared, the technical people had advised the Association, without more than ordinary difficulty, and with no extravagant expense. Indeed it could, agreed Vice-Admiral Charles Shadwell, writing from his cabin on HMS Iron Duke in Hong Kong harbour. Chinese coolies could move the mud by hand, he said; their labour was very cheap. There was, in short, no practical reason why the Bar could not be cleared, and navigation allowed to move freely. It merely needed one thing: for ‘the superior authorities at Peking’ to give their permission.
    But there, it turned out, was the rub. Peking, as it was called in the documents of the day, didn't seem to give a fig about the Bar. Haughty, aloof, unaware of all matters considered beneath their dignity, the Manchus in the Forbidden City paid no official attention to the wails of the red-haired, long-nosed Uitlanders . Privately they must have been delighted. What buffoons these foreigners were, indeed! Nothing much had changed, it seemed, since 1793, when Lord Macartney had tried in vain to cajole and flatter the Emperor of the day, and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. The diplomat had offered to the Celestial Throne the very best goods that Britain had ever made in an effort to win permission to do business, and to be recognized. But the Emperor was not remotely interested. The gifts were regarded as items of tribute from a respectful liege. Some boxes were never even opened. Macartney was asked to go home.
    And the Emperor of eight decades later was similarly unbothered by the travails and demands of the foreign merchants. The dignity of the Long River, the Throne implied by its silence, was not to be sullied by such vulgarities as dredging, just because the barbarians wanted it so. Despite torrents of letters that passed between ambassadors and ministers and high dignitaries of the Manchu Court, nothing was done. ‘You should do all that you properly can to induce the Chinese government,’ wrote Lord Granville to his man on the spot, ‘to take steps for improving the condition on the bar.’ ‘I have sent three identic letters to the Prince,’ wrote the Earl of Derby. But it did no good. Prince Kung, the mandarin who was in charge of the Tsungli Yamen – the Office of the General Administration of the Affairs of Different Countries – did not even deign to reply.
    It was not until the eve of the Revolution that was to end the rule of the emperors and princes that this impasse was ended. It was 1905: the Manchus were on their last legs and knew it, and in part because of weakness, in part as a placatory gesture that might work for their survival, they gave permission to the foreigners to begin their work. A Dutchman named de Rijke, an expert on the polders back home, was the first to bring in the dredging engines. By 1910 he had completed the first channel through the Bar. When the first Chinese president, the foreign-educated Sun Yat-sen, came home to China in 1912 he entered via the Yangtze – and he sailed symbolically to Shanghai through the foreign-engineered