The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

expedition medicine and don't trouble with such niceties as prescriptions. Two bottles of SPF 45 sunblock, some equally strong lip salve (I had been warned that the summer sun in Qinghai province could sear the lips from a camel), insect repellent and a trusted and battered hip flask made up the pack, which, when fully tamped down, weighed a quite acceptable fifty pounds.
    I hoisted it onto my back, whistled down a taxi to Kennedy, and twenty hours later was through customs at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport. Two days later still, having made a series of complicated arrangements by telephone and having received a somewhat dubious series of assurances, having a new six-month multiple-entry ‘F’ class China visa stamped in my passport and a few wads of American dollars tucked into various waterproof pockets around my person, I stepped onto a boat.
    I had a rendezvous arranged at a very precise point in the East China Sea. It was at position 31°03.5' N, 122°23.2' E. What was there, according to the charts, was known to China coast mariners, and now to me, as the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby – the Yangtze Entrance Large Automatic Navigation Buoy. Given fair winds and calm seas I expected to arrive at this point, or thereabouts, in three days' time.

2
    The Mouth, Open Wide
    The bridge telegraph clanged backward to ‘Stop all engines’, the roar of our cathedral of diesels promptly softened to a low burble, the rusty white ship lost headway and hissed to a halt. The world then fell silent. We rocked listlessly on an invisible swell. The air was heavy, without movement. Stripped of the breeze of our own making, it became quickly very hot and sultry, and with no relief coming through the punkah louvres, the cabins became unbearable. The decks were scalding too, except where we could find shade – but even though the mid-morning sky seemed brassy and bright, the glare was without focus and there was neither sun nor shadows, so dark places were hard to find. We drifted in the current, rocking slightly, waiting for something to happen.
    I stood at the bow and looked for China. But it was as though we had come to rest inside a cloud made of sweltering cotton wool. Everything was a featureless grey glare, stripped of any points of reference. There was no horizon, there were no landmarks or seamarks, and it was difficult even to see the waves, though I could hear them splashing untidily on the scorching iron of our plates below. The East China Sea is not known for frets or haars: but it has days like this of boiling-porridge invisibility, in which haze and dew point and temperature and a warm sea-mist combine to create a non-dimensional world, a place in which a stranded sailor could well go mad.
    We had already passed the Chang Jiang Kou Lanby. It is a sort of cut-down lightship – not long ago there had been a real ship anchored here, bright scarlet, with the words Ch'ang Jiang Light Ship in white on the hull. It had been full of sailors and light keepers and wick trimmers, men who might wave a welcome or a farewell to a vessel that passed and sounded her siren. But China has taken advantage of automation like almost everybody else, and the distant markers of her busiest waterway are now all run automatically, by computers, their performance monitored by men high in darkened and air-conditioned shore-side towers, dozens of miles away.
    Nonetheless, this massive buoy, fifteen feet above water and weighing a thousand tons or more, had a certain shabby romance about it, marking as it did the place where the great inbound ships leave the ocean proper, and begin their entry to China. So as we passed I took due note of its bright red hull, its white light tower, the muffled sound of its bronze bell. At the same time the master was given new orders by radio: we were to make a further five miles west, heave to and await fresh instructions.
    This new spot, a glance at the charts suggested, seemed to be where one is supposed to pick up a Yangtze