Holidays in Heck by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2011-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

* Well, not quite, but one takes Mr. Wu’s point.

10

SIDE TRIP UP THE YANGTZE

June 2006

It was déjà vu like I’d never seen before. The cliff walls rose from the Yangtze River with a shockingly familiar exoticism. For two and a half millennia China’s artists have been inspired by the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. And I suddenly understood the improbable, fantastic imagination of Chinese artists. It turns out they’re just copying. The crackle-glaze boulder shapes, the crinkum-crankum ledges, the skewed pagoda silhouettes of the mountains belonged to no Occidental geography. Crevice-rooted trees grew branches in chinoiserie decorative curves. Noodle-thin waterfalls splashed columns of calligraphy patterns beside scenery half-emphasized and half-obscured by a feng shui of mist. And in the narrow, crooked alley of sky above the canyons cirrocumulus clouds formed into the endless loops and curlicues of an imperial dragon’s butt. Here was every Chinese landscape-painting scroll rolled, as it were, into one.

This is to take nothing away from Chinese art. The average Qing dynasty daub still knocks a Monet into the water lily pond. But bad news for painters: China’s government has built the largest dam in the world. The Three Gorges are filling up. Artists will need shorter scrolls.

The Three Gorges Dam was begun in 1993, and the last batch of concrete had been poured in May 2006—a month before my visit. The water level behind the dam had already risen 200 feet. But, in past flood seasons, the Yangtze sometimes flowed that high. It would be the next 100 feet of water, rising gradually for three years, that would swamp the panorama, plus temples, tombs, and archaeological sites, not to mention 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages. Jamais replaces déjà in the vue.

Sanxia (“Three Gorges,” as the Three Gorges are prosaically called in Mandarin) is the notch the Yangtze has cut through the mountains on the eastern rim of the Szechwan basin. The gorges are 600 miles inland from the Shanghai region at the Yangtze’s mouth, where China doesn’t look Chinese at all. Rapid economic development has made it look like everything on earth.

The city of Yichang, below the Three Gorges Dam, didn’t look Chinese, either. That is, it looked Communist Chinese, a remnant of the Maoist love affair with concrete. It’s a colorless sprawl of clunky bunkers, the factories indistinguishable from the housing. The East is Gray, or used to be. And cracked and flaking.

But economic development has come to the Yichang region as well. A part of it is Victoria Cruises, an American-managed company that runs a handsome fleet of riverboats on the Yangtze. The ships are new, each with about 100 cabins and staterooms ranging in size from the more than grand to the more than adequate. Our ship, the Victoria Star, was 50 feet at the beam and 277 feet long, displaced 46,000 tons, and had all the swabbed decks, shiny brass, and polished teak that nautical pretensions could demand. Hatches in the starboard bulkheads led to private deck space. (I’m too nautically pretentious to say that there were sliding doors to the balconies.

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