Silencing the Roar of the Tiger
Postscript: The following article was
written in early 2006. In late December 2007 the Chinese government announced
that it had abandoned plans to dam Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is a rare victory
for China's environmental movement, but one which is tempered by the certainty
that further huge dams and hydropower projects are planned for the Jinsha
Jiang at less high-profile locations further upstream. The relevant (Guardian)
news report is here.
When Lesley and I found out that VSO were sending us to
China we knew that we were going to a country with huge environmental problems
as well as remarkable natural beauty. The country is home to seven of the
world’s 10 most polluted cities. Air pollution, deforestation, acid rain, sand
storms, endangered animal species, and industrial waste polluting land, river
and sea are all major issues. Arriving in China we witnessed the Xi'an smog at
first hand. Then we tried to find a
little bit of ‘wild’ China, and this is what we discovered:
It is said to be the deepest gorge on the surface of the
Earth and I can see, for once, that this isn’t a case of nationalistic Chinese
hyperbole. The unrelentingly steep slopes on the shadowed southern side of the
Tiger Leaping Gorge plunge down 3900m from a snow-corniced and serrated
limestone mountain crest to the raging green and white torrent that is the
Jinsha Jiang, the River of Golden Sand. This is northwest Yunnan, China’s
southern province tucked into the borders of Tibet, Burma and Laos.
The sunny side of the gorge, the one I was trekking along,
is also set at a high angle but the High Trail meanders round it and burrows
into its folds. The path passes through ancient Naxi villages, jumbled
constructions of mud bricks with crude tiled roofs. Local villagers are short,
dark and stocky, almost Tibetan-looking. Every one is smiling, even the rogue
charging 8 yuan to visit his photographic vista rock-with-a-view. The vegetation
is bamboo and pine, azalea and juniper. These forests are places of refuge from
the heat of the sun, even now in mid-January.
Terraced fields are squeezed into the gaps between gigantic
boulders, green and silver jewels set in a landscape which, at those times of
day when the light is dim, can appear almost mythical. A flickering light
burning in the mouth of a high shadowed cave at dawn could be a precursor to a
host of Orcs issuing from the Gates of Moria. Or perhaps a miner is preparing
his breakfast of baba, an oily flatbread, and goat’s milk.
The ambience of the gorge could be described as
claustrophobic. The mountain walls close in - Haba Xueshan on one side, the
Yulong Xueshan range on the other, 5000m peaks every one. One can always hear
the thunder of the river. It flows, constantly, 1000 metres below, its voice
echoing off the cliffs like a case of tinnitis. You might, for a few minutes,
forget about it until the wind shifts and the roar is present again, commanding
one’s attention. The river seems unstoppable.
When I next visit this wonderful place, this description
may no longer hold true. The gorge is under threat and could soon be under
water. Tiger Leaping Gorge is going to be dammed.
For the Jinsha Jiang is the upper reaches of what we call
the Yangtze, the third longest river in the world. This is no ordinary river –
it flows for 6000 kilometres through the heart of China from its headwaters in
Tibet to the sea at Shanghai, and it could be said to flow through the hearts of
the Chinese people. Its fertile flatlands have brought life, through
agriculture, and death in the form of devastating periodic floods. Now the
Yangtze is providing electricity to fuel the economic boom of 21st
Century China.
China has 85,000 dams. The biggest one of all, the Three
Gorges Dam, 1500 kilometres downstream from here, is still under construction.
When it is completed in 2009 it will create a 650 kilometre-long reservoir on
the Yangtze, drowning the cliffs and rapids of the internationally famous Three
Gorges and resulting in the forcible displacement of 1.3 million people from the
unfortunate villages and towns which will be inundated. Ecosystems will be
irreparably damaged, antiquities lost to future generations. The Chinese
government has defied fierce international criticism to go ahead with this, the
world’s largest hydroelectric project (again, this isn’t hyperbole!).
The same environmental devastation will accompany the Tiger
Leaping Gorge dam, one of eight large dams planned for the upper Yangtze.
Construction of these dams will affect 13 towns and villages and flood over
13,000 hectares of prime farmland. 100,000 people will be forced to relocate
from the valley floor to higher, less fertile terrain. The authorities say that
the series of dams is planned as an upstream buffer system to regulate river
flow and protect the Three Gorges reservoir from excessive silt build-up.
Critics of the scheme, however, draw attention to the region’s seismic
instability, its world-renowned botanical diversity and the importance of
tourism to the livelihoods of the local people. One might also add that one of
the most wildly spectacular and beautiful natural attractions in China will
disappear forever.
Even UNESCO is worried. Tiger Leaping Gorge is listed as a
World Heritage Site. The World Heritage Committee “expresses its gravest
concerns of the impacts that the proposed construction of dams could have on the
outstanding universal value of this World Heritage property.” Not that this
worries the power companies.
Test bores have already taken place at the dam site, but
the biggest concern at the moment for local people is the lack of firm
information from central government. The Chinese people are used to
communicating in rumour. Having said that, it is easy for us to criticise the
Chinese authorities. After all, we fuelled our own rise from poverty and
subsequent industrial revolution by denuding Britain’s native forest cover. We
have our own skeletons in the environmental closet. But can China be persuaded
to abandon single-minded economic growth at the expense of the natural
environment? It’s unlikely that the impetus will come from the West –
international business interests have no desire to see any slowdown in Chinese
electricity generation – in this world money and profit are more important
than aesthetics.
The parallels with John Muir’s unsuccessful battle to
prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park are
worryingly clear. In the Californian case, the city of San Francisco was
rebuilding after the destructive 1906 earthquake and a dam was deemed the
solution to the city’s burgeoning power and water supply needs. Muir’s
description of Hetch Hetchy - “a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s
rarest and most precious mountain temples” - seems the perfect one also for
this sublime piece of Chinese wild land. The Tiger Leaping Gorge has the same
place in the minds of the Chinese people as does Yosemite in the Americans’.
Every Chinese schoolchild knows the legend of the tiger that leapt the narrow
ravine to cross the mighty Jinsha Jiang.
Reinhold Messner once cited the lack of a John Muir figure
in the European Alps as one reason for those mountains’ relative
commercialisation and development. I don’t know if there’s a Chinese John
Muir out there right now, but if there is, Tiger Leaping Gorge could certainly
do with some help.
Alastair Matthewson
February 2006
For more information on John Muir and the work of the John
Muir Trust visit their website here.
I was inspired to create this woodblock print of the Hu Tiao Xia (Tiger Leaping
Gorge) after my visit there in the Spring Festival 2006. The night was very dark
and my eyes strained to take in the magnificent starry panorama. It was easy to
imagine another constellation, a leaping tiger, as part of this star-picture in
the night sky. The path leads upstream, one of the Tea Horse Ancient Roads (cha
ma gu dao) by which tea bricks were once transported from south Yunnan to Tibet.
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