2008 Discount Yangtze River Cruise Starting from 290 USD p.p.! !
Sailing the Yangtze
I sailed 1,500 miles downstream,
from Chungking to shanghai. Every mile of it
was different, but there were 1,200 miles I
did not see. It crosses ten provinces, 700 rivers
are joined to it-all Yangtze statistics are
hopeless, huge and ungraspable, they obscure
rather than clarify.And 
since words have a greater
precision than numbers, one day I asked a Chinese
ship captain if he thought the river had a distinct
personality.
He said, 'The mood of the river
changes according to the season. It changes
every day. It is not easy. Navigating the river
is always a struggle against nature. And there
is only one way to pilot a ship well.' he explained
he was smiling and blowing smoke out of his
nostrils-'It is necessary to see the River as
an enemy.'
Later a man told me that In the course
of one afternoon he had counted nine human corpses
bobbing hideously down the river.
The Yangtze is China's main artery,
its major waterway, the source of many of its
myths, the scene of much of its history. On
its banks are some of its greatest cities. It
is the jountainhead of supelstition, it provides
income and food to half the population. It is
one of the most dangerous rivers in the world,
In some places one of the dirtiest, In others
one of the most spectacular. The Chinese drink
it and bathe in it and wash clothes in it and
shit in It. It represents both life and death.
It is a well spring, a sewer and a tomb, depthless
in the gorges, puddle-shallow at its raplds.
The Chinese say if you haven't been up the Great
River, you haven't been anywhere.
They also say that in the winter,
on the river, the days are so dark that when
the sun comes out the dogs barb at it. Chungking
was dark at nine in the morning, when I took
the rattling tin tram on the cog railway that
leads down the black crags which are Chungking's
ramparts, down the sooty cliffs, past the tenements
and billboayds ('Flying Pigeon Bicycles', 'seagull
Watches', 'Parrot Accordions') tothe landing
stage. A thick, sulphurous fog lay over the
city, a Coketown
of six million... Doctor Ring rose, who was
from Leeds, sniffed and said, 'That is the smell
of my childhood.'
Paul Theroax, Sailing Through China, 1984
• Yangzhou
• What
to See In Yangzhou
• Sailing the Yangtze
