The River at the Center of the World

Simon Winchester

4 ideas

1. Journeying upriver as travelling back in time

   Winchester structures his trip so that moving inland from the Yangtze's mouth at Shanghai toward its source on the Tibetan plateau also moves him away from China's most modernised, foreign-shaped coast and toward older, less-changed ways of life. Geographic direction becomes a way to read historical layers: each stretch upstream serves as an occasion to recount the history attached to it. The subtitle's phrase 'back in Chinese time' names this device.

2. HMS Amethyst trapped on the Yangtze, 1949

   In April 1949, during the final phase of China's civil war, the British frigate HMS Amethyst was shelled by Communist artillery on the lower Yangtze and pinned in the river for roughly three months. It eventually slipped downstream at night and escaped to the open sea. Winchester uses the episode to mark the end of the era when Western gunboats could move freely on China's great river.

3. Three Gorges Dam trades heritage for development

   Writing as the Three Gorges Dam was being built, Winchester presents it as a project that would flood the gorges' towns, landscapes and historic sites and displace very large numbers of residents in exchange for flood control and hydroelectric power. He treats the gorges he passes through as places about to disappear. The book records these costs and his unease more than it offers a settled verdict on whether the dam is justified.

4. One river, many local names

   'Yangtze' is largely a foreigners' name taken from a local designation for one lower stretch; Chinese speakers generally call the river Chang Jiang, the 'Long River'. Upstream sections carry their own names, such as Jinsha Jiang, the 'River of Golden Sand'. Winchester treats this naming as a sign that the people along it have known the river as a series of regional waterways rather than one continuous entity, and that outsiders' labels can misrepresent a place.

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