To the Ends of the Earth

IT WAS NEAR CHANG SHOU, ABOUT NOON ON THAT FIRST DAY, that I saw a sailing junk steered to the bank, and the sail struck, and five men leaping onto the shore with towlines around their waists. They ran ahead, then jerked like dogs on a leash, and immediately began towing the junk against the current. These are trackers. They are mentioned by the earliest travelers on the Yangtze. They strain, leaning forward, and almost imperceptibly the sixty-foot junk begins to move upstream. There is no level towpath. The trackers are rock climbers: they scamper from boulder to boulder, moving higher until the boulders give out, and then dropping down, pulling and climbing until there is a reach on the river where the junk can sail again. The only difference—but it is a fairly large one—between trackers long ago and trackers today is that they are no longer whipped. “Often our men have to climb or jump like monkeys,” wrote a Yangtze traveler, in the middle of the last century, of his trackers, “and their backs are lashed by the two chiefs, to urge them to work at critical moments. This new spectacle at first revolts and angers us, but when we see that the men do not complain about the lashings we realize that it is the custom of the country, justified by the exceptional difficulties along the route.” Captain Little saw a tracker chief strip his clothes off, jump into the river, then roll himself in sand until he looked half-human, like a gritty ape; then he did a demon dance, and howled, and whipped the trackers, who—scared out of their wits—willingly pulled a junk off a sandbank.

The trackers sing or chant. There are garbled versions of what they say. Some travelers have them grunting and groaning, others are more specific and report the trackers yelling, “Chor! Chor!”—slang for “Shang-chia” or “Put your shoulder to it.” I asked a boatman what the trackers were chanting. He said that they cried out, “Hai tzo! Hai tzo!” over and over again, which means “Number! Number!” in Szechuanese, and is uttered by trackers and oarsmen alike.

“When we institute the Four Modernizations,” he added—this man was one of the minuscule number who are members of the Chinese Communist party—“there will be no more junks or trackers.”

One day I was standing at the ship’s rail with a man who encouraged us to call him Big Bob Brantman. We saw some trackers, six of them, pulling a junk. The men skipped from rock to rock, they climbed, they hauled the lines attached to the junk, and they struggled along the steep rocky towpath. They were barefoot.

Brantman winced. It was a wince of sagacity, of understanding: Yes, it said, I now see what this is all about. Then he spoke, still wincing a little.

“The profound cultural difference between people!”

I looked at him. He was nodding at the trackers scampering among the rocks on the shore.

“They don’t care about television,” he said.

I said, “That’s true.”

“Huh?” He was encouraged. He was smiling now. He said, “I mean, they couldn’t care less if the Rams are playing tomorrow.”

The Los Angeles Rams were Big Bob’s favorite football team.

“Am I right, or not?”

“You’re right, Bob,” I said. “They don’t care about television or the Rams.”

The junks and these trackers will be on the river for some time to come. Stare for five minutes at any point on the Yangtze and you will see a junk, sailing upstream with its ragged, ribbed sail; or being towed by yelling, tethered men; or slipping downstream with a skinny man clinging to its rudder. There are many newfangled ships and boats on the river, but I should say that the Yangtze is a river of junks and sampans, fueled by human sweat. Still, there is nothing lovelier than a junk with a following wind (the wind blows upstream, from east to west—a piece of great meteorological luck and a shaper of Chinese history), sailing so well that the clumsy vessel looks as light as a waterbird paddling and foraging in the muddy current.

The Yangtze Gorges

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, WE PASSED THROUGH THE gorges. Many people come to the Yangtze for the gorges alone: they excite themselves on these marvels and skip the rest of the river. The gorges are wonderful, and it is almost impossible to exaggerate their splendor, but the river is long and complicated, and much greater than its gorges, just as the Thames is more than what lies between Westminster and Greenwich.