There is a lot more to Yichang than hydro-engineering
There is more to Yichang than hydro-engineering, finds Peter Simpson, as he scratches the city’s modern veneer to find remnants of a port town that helped shape China.
If walls had ears and buildings could talk then the old Butterfield & Swire shipping office, former British consulate, Christian Mission residence and colonial post office in Yichang, on the banks of Yangtze river, would make captivating dinner-party guests.
Instead, you have to make do with your imagination as you run your hand down the Victorian banisters and over the original mantelpieces, pat the walls and tread with purpose on the floorboards: who else stepped here?
You twist the brass knobs of the imposing, built-to-last panel doors, slowly pushing them open onto cavernous rooms, hoping to intrude on the unsuspecting apparitions of the building’s former residents and visitors: the merchants, hongs, captains of ships and industry, sons of empires and religious charity givers, tenacious missionary women in tweed skirts and fine hats mingling with stuffy, pipe-smoking European collars and ties, abacus-clacking Hubei traders and silk-gowned mandarins.
Most travellers to Yichang are in transit, hurrying to and from airport lounges and along pontoons at the Yangtze cruise ship docks a few miles upstream. They have little if any time to ponder the port city’s past and present. You can’t blame them. As in most second-tier Chinese municipalities, history has been muscled out of this city’s modernity-obsessed narrative and is obscured by the shadows of its concrete, glass and steel forest of high-rises, malls and cranes, the echoes of the past muffled by the din of traffic.
Much of the official promotional bumpf gushes hyperbole at the same rate as the Three Gorges Dam – located 26km upstream – discharges water; unfathomable sentences that call on readers to entertain contrived parallels: “Efforts have been made to push Yichang, the vice-centre of Hubei province, into a world-known hydroelectric tourism city and the Geneva of the East.”
