You are in a taxi, curving round a wooded hill on a two-lane road and then you see it, the Yangtze River, known as the Chang Jiang in China, simply because Chang means long and Jiang means River. The Chinese are practical and simple when it comes to naming things other than food so the road becomes a bridge named First Bridge. You are a bit disappointed, because on this as on all days the great river is shrouded in smog. Below, you see one of the five-storey tour boats that travel through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. You strain your eyes to see the other side of the river and as your cab progresses something emerging on the other side catches your attention. It is a pagoda on a small hill at the other end of the bridge. It’s your destination.
Yellow Crane Tower, or Huang He Lou to the Chinese, has a history as obscure and misty as the smog on the river below but one thing is clear, it was not always part of a great industrial city. Perhaps it was built as a watch tower so some local ruler could keep surveillance over the traffic on the Chang Jiang or maybe it was built by a grateful innkeeper favoured by a magical visitor. History suggests the first and legend would have us believe the second.
Poets were perhaps attracted here first by the legend and found a view worthy of their verse. Later, in a very Chinese phenomenon, they were attracted by the fact that other poets had been here and came to try to write the very best Yellow Crane Tower poem. Now people come here mostly because they have read the poems and loved them. They want to see what Li Bai saw.
The original tower burnt down many centuries ago and several have burnt to the ground since. To save us the eyesore of a ruin the People’s government has built a beautiful new tower and beautified the grounds. It is certainly a nice piece of architecture in an ancient style and a pleasure to visit. You climb to the top storey and survey the soft focus landscape. You strain your eyes to see the hill by the other end of the great bridge. Unfortunately, the soft focus is not provided by a river mist rising in the half light of early morning or evening and what you see through the brownish haze is just another dirty city. You could have seen it in South America, or any Asian country prosperous enough to support a Metropolis, or in any one of twenty-odd Chinese cities. You could have seen it in Europe or America in my youth but we have learned since then.
Some locals would challenge my perception that there is never a clear day in Wuhan. The fact is that in fifteen months of residence and many crossings of the Yangtze I have never seen one riverbank clearly from the other. After many days of rain I expected the smog to have settled but it didn’t. The factories and the cars still operate. A few days of wind after the days of rain allowed me to have a wonderful experience. I looked up and saw a star, my first in Wuhan. The next morning I crossed the bridge again and couldn’t see the other side.
My favourite poem is by Li Bai and in it he is entranced by the view from Yellow Crane Tower, amazed at being able to see ‘the individual blades of grass on Parrot Island’. I was disappointed to find it difficult even to see Parrot Island, let alone the blades of grass. In itself the contrast between my experience and Li Bai’s is an experience of history and of what modern China and the industrial world defines as progress. Perhaps we and China can learn from that. When another generation has come to the time of life when pollutants have had their way with breath-challenged lungs, maybe Wuhan locals can be helped to climb the stairs of Yellow Crane Tower so they can share Li Bai’s experience of a wonderful view of the Long River.