The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

channel. In 1937 – just in time for the Japanese war, as it happened – the entire length of the Whangpoo was finally dredged, so that ships drawing twenty-eight feet could pass all the way from the Pacific Ocean, along the estuary of the Yangtze, up into the Whangpoo and right up to the wharves on the Bund.
    The perils of the sands lessened, then vanished altogether. Shanghai duly took her place as one of the world's great trading cities, and the Yangtze made good on her promise to become a huge highway into the very heart of China. Yet had the Manchus remained in control in Beijing, it might never have been so. As a symbol of Chinese Imperial intransigence clashing head-on with western mercantile realism – or, viewed another way, as a symbol of ancient and home-grown pride clashing with an alien culture of greed – the sixty-year saga of the State of the Woosung Bar has few equals.
    Yet the foreigners were not motivated merely by avarice. To those who knew its geography and its importance, the Yangtze was the principal gateway into the mysterious heart of the Middle Kingdom, the choicest place for the West's wholesale penetration of China. If major surgery was required to bring China to heel, then Woosung was the place where the anaesthetist should first sink his needle. When Sir George Balfour of the Madras Artillery arrived in 1843 to take up the post of Britain's consul to Shanghai, then nothing but a muddy, steamy village, he recognized and declared at once its strategic importance: ‘There our navy can float, and by our ships, our power can be seen and, if necessary, promptly felt. Our policy is the thorough command of this great river.’
    A command that it would only be possible fully to exercise if the Woosung Bar was gone. It took almost a century to remove it. And then a little more than a decade later the British and all other foreign navies were banished from the river, for all time. Seen in this context, as a device for keeping the foreigners at bay, the Chinese intransigence over the matter has a shrewdness all of its own.
    I watched the echo sounder as we passed over the Bar's submerged relics. It barely registered a change – the channel dug by the Dutchmen almost a century ago was nearly as deep as the river fairway. What had exercised so many minds for so many years was now quite invisible, utterly lacking in significance. And the red canister buoy that bobbed off our port beam – that, too, had an insignificance about it that belied its symbolism. For the buoy was Mile Zero for mariners sailing beyond, and into the Yangtze proper. The Zhong Sha light, now twenty miles behind us, was where the sea ended and the estuary began; the red Woosung buoy was where the estuary ended, and the Long River got under way. Captain Zhu sounded his siren and turned his little ship smartly to port. We passed out of the slight chop of the Yangtze proper and, once inside the curving breakwater, into the black and doubtless poisonously anoxic waters of the Whangpoo.
    A squadron of Chinese ships – destroyers, frigates and corvettes – was moored on the left bank. They looked, I thought, decidedly unprepared either for the protection of China's maritime frontier or for war. Laundry was dangling from the stern of each craft, straw hats were perched on some of the after guns and the sailors were mooching about idly, smoking in the warming sun. Had these been British or American vessels the men would have been busily chipping paint, greasing bearings, polishing brass or holystoning the decks: here they looked as though they were on holiday, or else dying from boredom.
    But it was a timely encounter, as it happened, and I gazed with interest at the ships through my binoculars. The headlines that I had seen in the Hong Kong papers just a few days before had all been about the Chinese Navy, and what a new and belligerent mood its admirals seemed to have adopted. There had been a lot of concern about China's high-handed