The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester

The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.


9

A New Great Wall

We decided to travel the next short section upriver by plane—if only to experience the underside of Chinese civil aviation. It so happens that the connection between Wuhan and the much smaller old treaty port of Yichang—a flight of forty minutes, compared with ten hours in a bus or another day and a night in a steamer—is not between what we would conventionally describe as airports. This trip would make use of the second tier of Chinese aviation, in which the departures and arrivals are at what might be better classified only as aerodromes.

Horror stories of China’s conventional air services are legion. I was on a flight once between Qingdao (the city where Tsingtao beer is made) and Shanghai. We were grossly overbooked, as was often the case in those days, and so the staff lugged a number of armchairs from the waiting lounge and set them down in the plane’s aisle. The stewardesses, who saw no untoward safety implications in this arrangement, were irritated because they had to clamber over the lumpily stuffed chairs during the flight. But this barely affected the in-flight service: the only item the women were handing out—there was no food or drink—were small empty tins, the kind of thing in which to keep cough drops. There was no discernible reason for the gift: perhaps there had been a surplus in some distant factory.

Then again, about a year later, I was flying to some other Yangtze valley city from Harbin, in Manchuria. I was sitting next to a young man who had never flown before, and he was frightened to death. Despite my being both a stranger and a furry barbarian, he took my hand and squeezed it white as we began the take-off roll. The aircraft accelerated to full speed, after which there was a bang, an engine erupted in smoke and we lurched off onto the grass. We rested there for half an hour while technicians swarmed over the wing, and my new friend sobbed bitterly. Then we started again, trundled back onto the runway, and the pilot said in a nervous voice: “Okay—we try once more.” The youngster buried his head in his hands as we took off, this time flawlessly.

On this occasion it took us a good hour even to find the airfield. The normal Wuhan airport is a big affair, with radars, a departure hall, customs officers and touts offering taxis. But the field reserved for flights going to Yichang and similarly obscure places is not much more than a meadow, and is more or less in the middle of town. We had to find our way down a maze of back alleys, past broken-down factories and breeze-block tenements, through middens and swamps alive with black pigs. Ten minutes or so of this and then the buildings fell away and there was open land ahead, with soldiers, a couple of canvas-and-dope biplanes painted in camouflage drab and, parked outside a rusting tin shack, an ancient Russian prop-driven aircraft sporting strange wings that drooped down almost to the ground.



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