THE world seems in such a hurry these days. Half the time I can hardly catch my breath as I race from one hugely unimportant event to another. So, it is a great relief when I occasionally find something that forces me to slow down for a while. One such recent success was in finding a way to take slow-chugging boats up the Pearl River from Hong Kong to Guangzhou.
Most of the ferries that ply this route virtually fly; high-speed catamarans that send up volumes of spray and which make the journey almost as quickly as the train. One sees little of the life of the river, the rapidly passing scenes rendered all the less visible by having to be viewed through windows that appear not to have been cleaned since the ferries left the shipbuilders! So, it was with great excitement that I set out on my slow boat to Guangzhou, although admittedly the first part relied on the use of a high-speed ferry. The plan was to use the fast ferry to go from Hong Kong as far as Taiping, a town at the mouth of the Pearl River. From there I would take a slow steamer up-river, straight to Guangzhou if I chose, although I was intending to stop off en route at Lianhua Shan, a west-bank town with an attractive park.
Just over an hour and a half after leaving Hong Kong we started to enter the waters of Humen - Tiger Gate or Bocca Tigris in English - the narrow, rocky, island-strewn bottleneck that is the mouth of the Pearl River. Soon we were pulling into Taiping, situated not on the main shore but up a narrow creek, sheltered and hidden from the river by a cluster of hills, actually an island and one of the main points guarding the entrance to the Bocca Tigris.
For some time the ferry threaded its way up the creek past the newly developing town of Xinwan, through lines of moored fishing boats, and finally into the more spacious waters of Taiping harbour.
The area around the Bocca Tigris bore the brunt of the First Opium War (1839-42) with the British and so not surprisingly Taiping carries a number of reminders of that time. Not least of these is a series of forts lining its shores, while in the town itself is a museum to this less than inspiring episode in Sino-British relations. A modern building laid out in an attractive park, it is fronted by a regal statue of national hero Lin Zexu, special imperial commissioner appointed in 1839 to stamp out the opium trade. Close to Lin's statue are the pits in which 20,000 chests of opium surrendered to him by the British were destroyed. Contrary to popular opinion, this opium was not burned but was mixed in these pits with lime and salt water, and then sluiced out into the river. British humiliation over this event led directly to the First Opium War, Lin's disgrace, and the seizure of Hong Kong.
The museum was well presented with every exhibit captioned not only in Chinese but also English and Japanese. However, the blame for everything was heaped on the British, almost entirely denying Chinese involvement in the opium business. This was actually my second visit to the museum; I first toured it accompanied by someone from the Guangzhou Foreign Affairs Bureau. On that occasion even he had been appalled. 'This is just shouting slogans,' he had complained to me, and once the tour was over had launched into a polite but forceful rebuke of the museum guide who had accompanied us. One year later nothing had changed.