WHAT BRITONS DID FOR THE YANGTSE

Hokitika Guardian, 19 March 1927, Page 4

WHAT BRITONS DID FOR THE YANGTSE

(By G. C. DIXOX, in the London “ Daily Mail.”) The Chinese Bolsheviks have been learning the truth of Oscar Wilde’s cynical maxim that nothing succeeds like excess. Having devised Cleveland Unscrupulous anti-British propaganda for the heartening of their own luke-warin adherents, they arc now finding that their stories of British tyranny on the Yangtse are being accepted by the ignorant throughout the world _ When Britons themselves swallownonsense of this kind, probably to the vast diversion of China’s Reds, it is j time that we all learned something of I the real history of the enterprise | through which the Upper Yangtse has | developed from the grave of countless | rotting junks into the world's greatest I commercial waterway. The romance of the Upper Yangtse < begins in ISB3, when the late Archibald Little chartered a junk and made the voyage from Shanghai to (hungking, 1,427 miles.

The journey took o 9 days, no less than three weeks being required to negotiate the dreaded gorges between lehang and Chungking, which for

thousands of years had strangled trade and communication. True, junks did pass and still do pass them—at a cost. I p tins section,'where the river thunders and foams between rocky walls, each junk is hauled by teams of sweating. chanting, groaning junkmen, bungs and hearts may hurst, foot may slip and men may fall clawing into the foam beneath, but the onward surge never halts. For once a junk enters the danger zone there can he no pause. A moment’s slackening of the ropes and the craft would swing round with the torrent and be dashed to pieces.

Even with the most heroic efforts one junk in ten goes aground each voyage, and one in twenty is wholly lost, usually with all aboard. As for the junkmen, the number lost is beyond all knowing. This rocky path lias been drenched, every foot of it. with sweat and blond ; and the junkmen earn, if they arc lucky, sixpence a dav.

If goods and the great majority of passengers, Chinese as well as foreign, are carried to-day in happier and safer conditions the change is mainly due to a few dogged British pioneers. In 1888. live years after his voyage of exploration, Mr Little steamed up the Yangtse in the Killing, specially built for the rapids.

t'be Killing proved unsuitable. Tn 1898 Mr Little made another attempt in i little 7-ton launch ; and in the following year he sent up the Pioneer, a paddle-wheel steamer of .'i.'il tons, built on tlic Clyde, under Captain Plante. She. too. proved unsatisfactory, and "ben a Berman vessel was wrecked in the pessimists declared that a service was impossible. But, fired still bv Mr Little's dream, Captatu Plante imbued some Chine e capitalists to form the Szechwan Steam Navigation Company, and designed a vi ssel with twin screws that worked in tunnels so that they might not bo shattered on the rocks. She passed the gorges safely in October, ISfO9, made 11 trips in 1910, and the battle ol 3(1 years bad been won. How the trade of Chungking alone has grown since then may be seen from the following figures: Year. Steamers Tonnage, entered and cleared.

Tho decay of the junk traffic, which, together with the sinking of junks by

the wash of steamers, has naturally embittered thousandsof junkmen, has not been due to the foreigner alone. The Chinese have learned that passengers and goods, if conveyed by steamer, run less risk of being seized by militarists. And it 'is also worth remembering that ships flying the British flag, like the prosperous-looking buildings in the British Concessions, are as often as not owned by Chinese anxious to obtain the security and justice under the Union Jack that their own laws deny them.

l'.'lU L’<) 5,(IS 1 liur, 1i :M.liL>7 73.758 H)i’5 1.171 ■Ml ,478