Tracking the Past Along the Three Gorges

Che

n Jinchang lives with two women, three coffins and the certainty that one day the Yangtze River will flood his simple mud-walled house. But to a barge-towman who spent most of his years in the westernmost of the Three Gorges in central China, straining against ships' ropes of braided bamboo, this looming disaster is relative. "I used to pull boats through there 25 times a month," says the 73-year-old, pointing from his doorway to Qutang Gorge, where the Yangtze rushes between towering limestone cliffs.

When the Three Gorges Dam is finished in 2009 and the reservoir fills his valley, all trace of this singular way of life will be washed away. Looking at the larch-wood coffins that Chen keeps with fatalistic practicality by his family's beds, one suspects that Chen hopes he, his wife and 94-year-old mother will have slipped off by then. Chen, now retired, is one of the trackers who dragged boats upstream through the Gorges in the days before motor transport became standard. Although trackers haven't worked the Yangtze for more than a decade, they are immortalized in legend and song, and by authors in the West such as John Hersey and Paul Theroux. We have come to Chen's home in Daxi in part because of Hersey's 1956 novel, A Single Pebble, which vividly describes the Qutang trackers' path, a narrow walkway carved into the cliff wall. Hersey calls it "the most terrible place on the whole river," a tempting endorsement for any adventurer. The soaring Gorges cliffs draw thousands of visitors a year to cruise the Yangtze. But many are underwhelmed by the sterile tourist-boat experience. We're hoping to find a more unspoiled view by hiking the towpath and tracking the trackers.

The years of toil have given Chen the broad shoulders and sturdy frame of a man decades younger. But despite his brawn, he is powerless to save his home from the rising waters of the $20 billion dam project. The world's largest reservoir, 550 km long, will displace 2 million peasants, including Chen, who is tight-lipped about this coming progress. "If you think the dam is bad," he says, "best you don't say anything at all." He's far more voluble about the old path, which will also be submerged, and the way he used to drag the boats upstream. "If the current was strong, the lead man would go forward and put a hook in a stone," he says, "and then all 20 or 30 of us would drive forward at once."

Without a boat to drag, the walk along the Qutang towpath only takes four hours. A sampan carries us to the north side of the Yangtze, where the path runs some 50 m above the late-summer waterline. About 1.5 m wide, it's paved with well fitting flagstones running westward through light brush. Only a few sections have crumbled since its completion in 1900, a sharp contrast to most roads in the area. Below us are traces of lower trails, narrow and treacherous paths used by workmen who needed to be closer to the river. Short, granite pillars line the path, grooved by a thousand trackers' ropes.

The summer temperature rises to 38°C as we enter the unshaded canyon. After two sweaty hours we reach Windbox Gorge, the most spectacular section of the trail. Here the path has been chiseled out of the sheer cliff wall; some sections narrow to less than 1 m. To our left, the trail drops nearly 70 m to the rushing waters. There is no handrail, forcing us to move carefully. There are no boats below: it's the first time I've ever been in the Gorges without the accompanying puttering of a motor and chattering tourists. Our solitude is complete: it's just us, the path and the brown, swirling Yangtze.

At Seven Gate Cave we stop to rest. From here it's an hour to Baidicheng village, which has easy bus connections to the ancient city of Fengjie at the start of the Gorges. I find myself thinking about the climax of Hersey's novel, in which a tracker falls to his death in Windbox Gorge. A few weeks ago a Chinese journalist died after plunging from a similar trail in another gorge. The path was good, but it was raining and he slipped. Nevertheless, Chen assures me that in the old days skilled trackers rarely got hurt. And he cautions that Hersey added poetry to his tale as well as drama: the men rarely sang the stirring folk songs the author eulogizes in his book. "Mostly," says Chen with a broad grin, "we just grunted."