"The Water Kingdom" by Philip Ball

 This is a history of China seen through the lens of water management. China is a vast land area with a relatively small coast which is irrigated principally by two huge rivers that flow west to east: the Yellow river, so called because of the vast amounts of silt it carries downstream, and the Yangtze. Both of these rivers periodically flood and the floods can devastate whole regions, killings millions of people: "Life on the Yellow river floodplain was not so much precarious as predictably disastrous" (Ch 1).  They have therefore been subject to water management schemes since the earliest dynasties. When you add in the importance of water for irrigation and for transport, it becomes easy to see why the empires in China rose and fell as a result of the ability of the imperial administration to control the water.

My biggest problem with this book is that the size of the subject, Chinese history over the past 3000 or more years, is vast. This, added to my utter ignorance of China, meant that a lot of what was being said went straight over my head. Ball tries to provide a soft introduction but this sometimes only served to make things more difficult. For example, he explains how to pronounce Chinese words under the pinyin system ... but q is pronounced like ch and x like sch and z like dds and c like ts ....so that I ended up thoroughly confused and resentful that the words weren't being written so that I could pronounce the,. Why not write Qin as Chin if that is how it is pronounced? When you add this first difficulty with that of understanding how the writing works,  remembering the multiple dynasties, some of which had multiple emperors, and understanding where the states and provinces are, it is a testament to the skill of this writer that I understood as much as I did. If one thing was made very clear to me it was that my ignorance of such a vast and important culture is inexcusable.

I learned inter alia that:

• soy salt was created to eke out costly salt, an essential for Chinese peasants who had little meat in their diet (Ch 1)
• that Chinese shamans made prophecies from the pattern of cracking in heated animal bones and tortoise shells (Ch 3)
• that Lao Tzu explicitly associated the tao, the way, with a water channel and that the old sign for the tao (I hadn't considered the possibility that Chinese characters have evolved) was a man at a crossroads (Ch 3) 
• that qi (chi, the energy that flows through the landscape in feng shui) is something similar to the Greek idea of pneuma, being wind, breath and spirit (Ch 3)
• that Confucius believed in a meritocracy and that if a ruler deviated from the dao, the way, it was incumbent upon his officials to speak truth to power (Ch 3)
• that there was a Ministry of Rites (shades of Titus Groan whose author, Mervyn Peake, was brought up in China) (Ch 5)
• that when the eunuch admiral voyaged to Calicut he heard about a prophet called Mouxie ... or Moses (Ch 5)
• that the leader of the Taiping rebellion (the worst civil war in history) Hong Xiuquan was inspired by the story of Noah's flood (Hong means flood) which had destroyed and then renewed the world; the Hongmen (Floodgate) is a Mason-like secret society today in Taiwan and Hong Kong ("where they are illegal because of their association with the criminal underworld organization the Triads") (Ch 6)
• that Feng shui means 'wind and water'; the magnetic compass was probably first design ed for feng shui geomancy, to find locations where chi energy flows; flowing water is good for flowing chi which is why buildings are often sited close to fast-flowing rivers; buildings with sinuous walls channel chi rather than block it (Ch 9)
• that Confucianism's emphasis on balance and harmony recommends practices that preserve ecosystems (Ch 10)
• that during the Great Leap Forward, desiring more steel production meant encouraging home smelting. "Entire forests were sacrificed in a single season in order to feed the backyard furnaces that smelted valuable tools and kitchenware into millions of tons of useless scrap metal." (Ch 10)
• that Shanghai has sunk by more than two metres in fifteen years due to the depletion of underground water reserves (Ch 10)

Selected quotes:

• "The Chinese word for 'landscape' is ... shanshui, mountains (shan) and water (shui)." (Introduction)
• "'Coolies': the anglicized word for any labourers who bore heavy loads, derived from ku li, 'bitter strength'." (Ch 1)
• "Fish forget about themselves in water, men forget about themselves in the dao." (Ch 3; quoting the Zhuangzi)
• "In Europe, empires were built by acquiring land; ib China that benefited you little unless you had a means of making it productive." (Ch 4)
• "There are two big problems with water in China today. There is not enough of it to go round, and it is often o foul that no one can use it anyway." (Ch 10)
• "Every year it is estimates that water pollution in China produces 190 million casualties and around 60,000 fatalities." (Ch 10)

Many fascinating facts but, due to my ignorance, much of it went over my head. March 2023; 314 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Amur River" by Colin Thubron

 Colin Thubron was born in 1939 and he is travelling in Outer Mongolia (on horseback) and Russia and China in 2020 (there is a reference to the Ukraine-Russia war) which makes him eighty! And travelling alone! On horseback (and taxi and car and riverboat and train and bus). He is amazing. (Like me, he's an Old Etonian, so we're not all like Boris.)

He travels the Amur river from the source of its longest tributary, the Onon (in a restricted area of Mongolia), into Siberia (where it is for a while the Shilka) and then along the Amur, for some time along the Russian-Chinese border and then later solely in Russian Siberia. The Mongolian section is lyrically natural, the Chinese parts thriving and full of agriculture, industry and lots of commerce, and the Russian sections depopulating, decaying and depressing, where old people eke out bleak existences in towns emptied of their young, and of hope.

The writing is wonderful; the achievement immense.

Selected quotes:

• Lyrical descriptions:
• "Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea." (Ch 1; opening paragraph)
• "My shadow falls black over the grass." (Ch 1)
• "The young men are hefty boys with hedgehog hair." (Ch 7)
• "We walk in harsh wind along the river, whose esplanade stretches and bulges out as if for some grand future. Waves are slapping at its foot, seagulls crying, and two men bathe in the freezing shallows." (Ch 7)
• Masterful metaphors:
• "Vladik drives as if he's angry with the world." (Ch 3)
• "It is as if the words occupy a basement in his memory, and have to be pulled up one by one." (Ch 7)
• Cultural insights:
• "You can read in histories about what happened here, but often they are wrong ... it is people, not regimes or doctrines, that do these things." (Ch 2)
• "Always they are seen not as persons, but as a composite mass. Images of insects and pollutants abound." (Ch 6) Immigrants, Chinese in this case.
• "A culture less preserved than imprisoned ... as though to define and terminate a society by consigning it beneath glass: This will not return, this we have superseded." (Ch 9)
• "Mourners returning from funerals never looked behind them, for fear that the dead would overtake them and lodge in the village of the living." (Ch 10)
• "Soon the kitchen table is spread with black bread and red caviar, gherkins, wild garlic stalks, and some wandering ants." (Ch 8)
• Fascinating facts:
• "The source of great rivers is often obscure. They descend in a confusion of tributaries, or seep from inaccessible swamps and glaciers. ... The Danube, it is claimed, issues from a gutter in the Black Forest." (Ch 1) This resonated with me. When I walked the River Lee, I found its source was a concreted-over spring behind a couple of tower blocks in a suburb of Luton. The Thames oozes from a meadow in Gloucestershire.
• "Manchu ... belongs to the obscure Tungusic branch of the Altaic family, shared by Turkic peoples, Hungarians, Finns and Mongolians." (Ch 7)
• "Every few yards, across some random surface, a blackly gleaming carving appears. ... These figures are, literally, incalculably old. They belong to some distant Neolithic antiquity, perhaps six millennia ago ... The guide identifies a mystic boat - a slanted and corrugated line - which she tells me carried dead souls into the sky. ... But the most common subject, recurring at random, is a mask-like face with hollowed eyes and simian jaw, ringed by a sunburst of spokes." (Ch 9)
• "The strangest foretelling of the Amur's isolation - and its first known record in English - emerged as early as 1719 ... in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." (Ch 10)
• And even some humour from his last hotel room:
• "A fire notice on the door ... advises that if you cannot liquidate the burning, do not use the lift for avocation (there is no lift)." (Ch 10)

This is a brilliant book! What a great writer.

December 2022; 275 pages

Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

Other travel (and exploration) books reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"News From Tartary" by Peter Fleming

 In 1935, Peter Fleming, Old Etonian (and brother of the later-to-become-more-famous Ian, author of the James Bond books), at the time a seasoned traveller and a Times correspondent attempted to travel 3,500 miles, with a French female companion called Kini, from Beijing to Kashmir, across parts of China which were remote, restricted and where there were rebellions and infiltration by both White and Red Russians. For a significant part of the journey they had no motorised transport - they spent three months without seeing any wheeled vehicle - and relied on horses, camels and donkeys. This beautifully written book is an account of their journey.

It is of its time. It speaks of racial differences when it means cultural differences. There is a definite feeling of European (and especially British Imperial) superiority (for example: "The Chinese garrison of the province was a garish and Gilbertian force, existing largely on paper and opium."; 6.1). The indigenous peoples are almost invariably represented as poor, backward, culturally bereft, dishonest, lazy, cruel to their animals (and sometimes one another) and incompetent. Fleming-the-sahib often has to bully them into doing what he wants of them. And, although he professes admiration for Kini, she is the one who cooks and sews and is in charge of the medicine.

My edition had no illustrations and I particularly missed a map.

But it is stuffed with incident (even an outbreak of plague!) and it possesses the vivid descriptions which is the hallmark of  great travel writing:

• "There was something forced and unnatural about the landscape. The little hummocks, the naked branches, looked - against the too bright, too picturesque background of sky and mountains - like the synthetic scenery which surrounds stuffed wild animals in a glass case." (4.1)
• "The sun beat down and mirage waterishly streaked the periphery of our field of vision." (5.1) I love 'waterishly'!
• "We spent five days there, lodged on a wilderness of carpets which had something of the decorative impermanence of a film set." (6.5)
• "He wore a black three-cornered hat and a rusty bottle-green coat tied around the waist with a scarf which might have been a dirty tricolour; thus clad, he looked, as he slouched along, like a minor and unsympathetic character in a play about the French Revolution." (6.6)

Selected quotes:

• "The slow train dragged itself wearily into the station - a long string of trucks ... from which the doors ... had been removed." (1.6)
• "We walked behind the lorries over a precarious bridge whose architecture seemed to be an affair of mud and mass-hypnotism." (1.8)
• "As we arrived at the inn, the building next to it - an eating-house where we had breakfasted - quietly and rather sadly collapsed, crumbling into rubble in a cloud of dust." (1.9)
• "The first day we were there a boy attached to the gold-seekers went off into the tamarisk and never came back. Search poarties ranged by day, huge bonfires blazed by night, and the lamas put in some fairly intensive clairvoyance, chanting and throwing dice to establish his geographical position. ... But the boy was never found; he must have died of hunger and thirst, perhaps only a little way away." (4.1)
• "Then there was the Lost City. We christened it in the Fawcett tradition; but I know that it is not a city and I cannot be sure that it is really lost." (4.1) Percy Fawcett was a well-known explorer of the inter-war period whose travels in the South American rain forests to locate a lost city are chronicled in The Lost City of Z by David Grann, a brilliant book (later made into a movie) which put me off exploration forever.
• "It occurs to me that there is too much grumbling in this book." (4.4)
• "We were never short of food; but, with the exception of perhaps an hour after the evening meal, there was no single moment in the day when we would not have eaten, and eaten with the greatest relish, anything that appeared remotely edible." (4.4)
• "Nobody in England now walks without putting on fancy dress to do it." (4.4)
• "Travelling Blind" (4.5, chapter heading) I include this because I have long been intending to write a novel with this title.
• "the sudden bursts of harsh song with which he emphasized rather than relieved the monotony of the march." (4.6)
• "It is a strange and terrible thing that lady novelists are right, that young men in deserts do dwell with a banal wistfulness on sentimentalized, given-away-with-the-Christmas-number pictures of their native land, forgetting the by-passes, the cloudbursts, the sheaves of bluebells lashed to motor-cycle pillions, the bungalows and the banana-skins and the bowler hats." (5.5)
• "Although we know that all men are brothers and that the peoples of the modern world are knit together in a great web of sympathy and understanding, we still find it impossible to be deeply stirred by things that happen to those fellow-beings whose skin is of a different colour to our own." (6.1)
• "The donkey, though perhaps on some beach of your childhood it provided an adventure which made you as breathless as your nurse, is a sublunary mount for the adult." (6.8) The 'nurse' tells you the social stratem for whom Fleming is writing!
• "You felt, in short, that you were at the end of the dead desert, which had swallowed - but showed no signs of having digested - the outposts of more than one civilization." (7.1)
• "You never know what may happen at a banquet in Kashgar, and each of our official hosts had brought his own bodyguard. Turki and Chinese soldiers lounged everywhere; automatic rifles and executioners' swords were much in evidence, and the Mauser pistols of the waiters knocked ominously against the back of your chair as they leant over you with the dishes." (7.2)

Peter Fleming also wrote Invasion 1940, a very amusing book about Britain's chaotic preparations at the start on the Second World War.

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 389 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan

This is a book about mothers and daughters. Four Chinese women, living in San Francisco, meet every week to play Mah Jong and to discuss their jointly invested shares as members of the Joy Luck club. This book holds their stories and, for each woman, a story of one of their daughters. The book is in four quarters, each quarter having four stories although not all of the characters is represented equally. There is no formal plot to the book: each story is complete in itself, but each connects with the others of its dynasty, and together they combine to create a sort of bricolage on the theme of the experience of the Chinese woman, especially regarding those who live in America.

As an example of ethnic literature it reminded me very much of There, There by Tommy Orange who uses a similar collage-type effect to chart the lives of American Indians in modern urban America, although in Orange's book all the stories interweave to form a more conventional plot.


There are a lot of Chinese proverbs and ways of putting things:

• "The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind." (1.1)
• "We were a city of leftovers mixed together ... Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn't matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst." (1.1)
• "You think you can see something new, riding on top of a new cart. But in front of you, it is just the ass of the same old mule. Your life is what you see in front of you." (4.1)
• "Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth." (4.1)

There are some delightful descriptions:

• "A summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground, their wings so heavy with the damp heat." (1.1)

Other wonderful moments:

• "My mother used to say, 'Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening'." (1.1)
• "After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one." (2.2)
• "Faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope." (2.3)
• "As if inspired by an old, unreachable, itch." (2.4)
• "We expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more" (3.1)
• "All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way." (4.1)

A beautifully written book with some wonderful characters but the sixteen stories are hard to comprehend as one so, for me, no overall picture emerged from the collage.

April 2020; 288 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Wild Swans" by Jung Chang

"At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general ..." is the first line of this book about three generations of remarkable women. The grandmother had bound feet and was born before the last emperor was toppled. Shortly after her daughter, the narrator's mother, is born she realises that the warlord is dying; this means that the warlord's wife will have sole possession of her and she might be sold into a brothel. So she engineers her escape, fleeing on horseback with her baby. Back in her home town she meets an old Chinese medicine doctor who falls in love with her and determines to marry her even though his three sons and their wives demand that he should not (the eldest even commits suicide). They marry and move town becoming poor and living by a sewer. But slowly his practice improves and they get richer and move into a nice house. The narrator's mother is growing up a remarkably determined and intelligent young lady, showing all the spirit of her warlord father and her concubine mother and all the compassion and humanity of her step-father.

Now the Japanese invade. Things become chaotic but the family manages to carry on, often hiding wounded soldiers. Once the Japanese go, the Kuomintang take over (and are very corrupt) and the civil war between them and the Communists erupts. This family, showing compassion and concern for the weak and the unwell, manage to have friends on both sides of the war but the narrator's mother starts to work secretly for the Communists, using a besotted Kuomintang soldier to help her. At last the Communists take over at which point she meets her husband to be, who is a high-ranking Communist having joined Mao in his enclave at the end of the Long March.

She and her new husband make a long journey to his province of Sichuan where he becomes a very high-ranking official and she a moderately high-ranking official. One of her complaints about her husband is that he is very puritanical and refuses whenever possible to do anything to help his family on the grounds that the new Communist order has no time for nepotism. So the kids are more or less neglected while the parents work all hours to create their new utopian society. They struggle with some of the edicts coming from Peking such as the requirement to find amongst their colleagues a certain percentage of traitors and 'class enemies'. They also struggle against the famine caused by Mao's Great leap Forward.

Then the Cultural Revolution begins and, having led privileged lives as high-ranking officials, they are denounced as 'capitalist roaders'. Ten years of Mao-inspired chaos ensues. The narrator is growing up; at the start she is besotted by her love for Mao but slowly she begins to realise that it is him, rather than corrupt officials, who has caused her family's miseries. She herself progresses from peasant to barefoot doctor to electrician to university student.

This book is 676 pages long but the action hardly ever flags. There is so much to tell and the style is simple and sparse, allowing the action to tell the story. Where there is description it is usually to extol the beauties of China's countryside and the elegance of her old way of life; these delicate and fragrant details are perfect counterpoints to the brutality and mindlessness of the mob.

But the main message is contained in the balance between two men. Jung Chang's father is a dedicated and inspired Communist official who is instrumental in creating what is successful in Sichuan immediately following the Communist takeover. But his idealism blinds him to everyday humanity: he is sharp with no blurred edges. When he is denounced he goes mad. He is cured after treatment in a mental hospital but he is a broken man and he realises how badly he has treated his wife and family. On the other hand, Jung Chang's step-grandfather, the doctor, is a model of enlightened humanity who marries the love of his life, an ex-concubine with a warlord's child, and protects many people at great risk to himself.

Idealism must be balanced with humanity.

This is a fantastic book about a remarkable family living through unbelievably turbulent times. It is a warning against dogmatism and an inspiring tribute to the human spirit.

Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 1994

April 2015; 676 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"1421; the year China discovered the world" by Gavin Menzies

In 1421 a huge Ming fleet set out on a voyage of exploration. By the time they returned, the Ming foreign policy had done an about face and forbidden any further voyages. The records of the voyage were systematically destroyed.

Menzies believed that this fleet sailed round India and South Africa, across to the Cape Verde islands and down to Cape Horn. Some travelled through the Magellan straits and then doubled back to the Falkland and then across to Australia. Others went up the Chilean coast and to Mexico and California. Others travelled back north to the Caribbean, some eventually going to North America and circumnavigating Greenland (Menzies claims it was a hot year and the ice had melted).

They left maps of fantastic accuracy that were subsequently copied and taken to Europe. Dom Pedro, the brother of Henry the Navigator, took maps to Portugal where they were subsequently seen by Vasco da Gama, Diaz, and Columbus and his brother (the last then drawing a map which showed a much elongated South Africa suggesting that the voyage to the Spice Islands would be quicker travelling West than via the Portuguese route of round the Cape of Good Hope). These maps show Australia and parts of Antarctica with great accuracy; they show the Magellan straits before he got there (indeed he told his sailors that he had seen a map with the passage on before he got there); they show the Caribbean; they even show all of Greenland (the Vinland map).

Menzies claims that Columbus and Magellan and Cook were not great discoverers because they had already seen maps of where they were going.

He cites a lot of evidence including obelisks with writing on them in a Tamil script (I am not sure why he doesn't draw the obvious conclusion that Tamils put these there rather than that the Chinese did). He claims that the early European explorers discovered plants and animals that are native to China in the Americas. He interprets folklore of light-skinned or yellow-skinned people as recording Chinese visitors. He finds Chinese DNA and diseases in the Americas.

I wholeheartedly accept his evidence as showing that there were great voyages of exploration and trade with Australia and Africa and the Americas long before Columbus, da Gama and Diaz. Merchants will always seek new markets. Where I disagree is that all his evidence necessarily points to this one great fleet on their one great voyage. Why should there not have been trading links down to Australia and across the Pacific for centuries before 1421; why should not other nations such as the Indians and the Arabs not have made wonderful voyages? The maps are clearly records of travel.

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God