ÑA day passed before, with the aid of Professor Zhou's letter, we were able to find an English-speaking guide and organise a small boat to go out on to the river and do what we had come to do: go out on to the Yangtze River and look for baiji dolphins ourselves.
Ñ We were by this time two or three days behind the schedule we had originally planned, and had to leave the following morning on a ferry to Wuhan. We had therefore only a few hours in which to try and see one of the rarest aquatic mammals in the world in a river in which it would be hard to see your hand in front of your face.
Ñ Our small boat chugged away from a small, crowded wharf and out on to a wide extent of the dirty brown river. We asked Mr Ho, our guide, what he thought our chances of success were.
Ñ He shrugged.
'You see there are only two hundred baiji in two thousand kilometres. And the Yangtze is very wide. Not good, I think.'
We chugged along for quite some time, making our way gradually towards the opposite bank, about two kilometres away. The water was shallower there, which meant that there was less boat traffic.
ÑThe dolphins also tend to keep close to the banks for the same reason, which means they are more likely to get snared in the fishing nets, of which we passed several, hung from bamboo frames extending from the banks. Fish populations are declining in the Yangtze and, with all the noise, the dolphins have greater difficulty in 'seeing' the fish that there are.
ÑI guessed that a net full of fish might well lure a dolphin into danger.
We reached a relatively quiet spot near the bank, and the captain turned off the engine.
Mr Ho explained that this was a good place to wait, maybe. Dolphins had been seen there recently. He said that that might be a good thing, or it might not.
ÑEither they would be here because they had been recently, or they would not be here because they had been recently. This seemed comfortably to cover all the options, so we sat quietly to wait.
The vastness of the Yangtze becomes very apparent when you try and keep a careful watch on it. Which bit of it? Where? It stretched endlessly ahead of us, behind us and to one side.
ÑThere was a breeze blowing, ruffling and chopping up the surface, and after just a few minutes of watching, your eyes begin to wobble. Every momentary black shadow of a dancing wave looks for an instant like what you want it to look like, and I did not even have a good mental picture of what to look for.
'Do you know how long they surface for?' I asked Mark.
Ñ 'Yes ...'
'And?'
'It isn't good news. The dolphin's melon, or forehead, breaks the surface first, as it blows, then its small dorsal fin comes up, and then it plunges down again.'
'How long does that take?'
'Less than a second.'
'Oh.' I digested this. 'I don't think we're going to see one, are we?'
Ñ Mark looked depressed. With a sigh he opened a bottle of baiji beer, and took a rather complicated swig at it, so as not to take his eyes off the water.
'Well, we might at least see a finless porpoise,' he said.
'They're not as rare as the dolphins, are they?' I said.
Ñ 'Well, they're certainly endangered in the Yangtze. There are thought to be about four hundred of them. They're having the same problems here, but you'll also find them in the coastal waters off China and as far west as Pakistan, so they're not in such absolute danger as a species. They can see much better than the baiji, which suggests that they're probably relative newcomers. Look! There's one! Finless porpoise!'
Ñ I was just in time to see a black shape fall back in the water and disappear. It was gone.
'Finless porpoise!' Mr Ho called out to us. 'You see?'
'We saw, thanks!' said Mark.
'How did you know it was a finless porpoise?' I asked, quite impressed by this.
Ñ 'Well, two things, really. First, we could actually see it. It came right up out of the water. Finless porpoises do that. The baiji doesn't.'
'You mean, if you can actually get to see it, it must be a finless porpoise.'
'More or less.'
'What's the other reason?'
'Well, it hadn't got a fin.'
Ñ An hour drifted by. A couple of hundred yards from us big cargo boats and barges growled up the river. A slick of oil drifted past. Behind us the fish nets fluttered in the wind. I thought to myself that the words 'endangered species' had become a phrase which had lost any vivid meaning. We hear it too often to be able to react to it afresh.
Ñ As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze I realised with the vividness of shock, that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain and fear.
Ñ We did not manage to see a dolphin in the wild. We knew that we would at least be able to see the only one that is held in captivity, in the Hydrobiology Institute in Wuhan, but nevertheless we were depressed and disappointed when we arrived back at our hotel in the early evening.
Ñ Here we suddenly discovered that Professor Zhou had managed to alert people to our arrival after all, and we were astonished to be greeted by a delegation of about a dozen officials from the Tongling Baiji Conservation Committee of the Tongling Municipal Government.
Ñ A little dazed by this unexpectedly formal attention when we'd just been going to slump over a beer, we were ushered in to a large meeting room in the hotel and shown to a long table. A little apprehensively, we sat on one side along with an interpreter whom they had provided for the occasion, and the members of the committee carefully arranged themselves along the other.
Ñ They sat quietly for a moment, each with their hands neatly folded on top of each other on the table in front of them, and looked distantly at us. My head swam for a moment with the hallucination that we were about to be arraigned before an ideological tribunal, before I realised that the distant formality of their manner probably meant that they were at least as shy of us as we were of them.
Ñ One or two of them were wearing a type of grey uniform tunic, one was wearing the old Maoist blue tunic, others were more casually dressed. They ranged in age from about mid-twenties to mid-sixties.
Ñ 'The committee welcomes you to Tongling,' began the interpreter, 'and is honoured by your visit.' He introduced them one by one, each in turn nodding to us with a slightly nervous smile. One was the Conservation Vice-Chief, another the Association Chief-Secretary, another the Vice Chief-Secretary, and so on.
Ñ I sat feeling that we were stuck in the middle of some gigantic misunderstanding about something, and tried desperately to think of some way of looking intelligent and not letting on that I was merely a science-fiction comedy novelist on holiday.
Ñ Mark, however, seemed perfectly at his ease. He explained simply and concisely who we were, missing out the science-fiction comedy bit, outlined the nature of our project, said why we were interested in the baiji, and asked them an intelligent opening question about the reserve they were building.
Ñ I relaxed. I realised, of course, that talking intelligently about conservation projects to large committees in languages he didn't know was part of what he did for a living.
They explained to us that the dolphin reserve was what they called a 'semi-nature reserve.' Its purpose was to constrain the animals within a protected area without taking them out of their natural environment.
Ñ A little upstream of Tongling, opposite the town of Datong, there is an elbow-shaped bend in the river. In the crook of the elbow lie two triangular islands, between which runs a channel of water. The channel is about one and a half kilometres long, five metres deep, and between forty and two hundred metres wide, and this channel will be the dolphins' semi-nature reserve.
Ñ Fences of bamboo and metal are being constructed at either end of the channel, through which water from the main river flows continuously. A huge amount of remodelling and construction work is being done to make this possible. A large artificial hospital and holding pools are being built on one of the islands to hold injured or newly captured dolphins. A fish farm is being built on the other to feed them.
Ñ The scale of the project is enormous.
It is very, very expensive, the committee said, solemnly, and they can't even be sure that it will work. But they have to try. The baiji, they explained, is very important to them and it is their duty to protect it.
Mark asked them how on earth they raised the money to do it. It had all been put into operation in an extraordinarily short time.
Ñ Yes, they said, we have had to work very, very fast.
They had raised money from many sources. A substantial amount came from the central government, and more again from local government. Then there were many donations from local people and businesses.
Ñ They had also, they said a little hesitantly, gone into the business of public relations, and they would welcome our comments on this. Chinese knew little of such matters, but we, as westerners, must surely be experts.
Ñ First, they said, they had persuaded the local brewery to use the baiji as their trademark. Had we tried Baiji Beer? It was of a good quality, now much respected in all of China. Then others had followed. The committee had entered into...
Here there was a bit of a vocabulary problem, which necessitated a little discussion with the interpreter before the right phrase at last emerged.
Ñ They had entered into licensing agreements. Local businesses had put money into the project, in return for which they were licensed to use the baiji symbol, which in turn made good publicity for the baiji dolphin. So now there was not only Baiji Beer, there was also the Baiji Hotel, Baiji shoes, Baiji Cola, Baiji computerised weighing scales, Baiji toilet paper, Baiji phosphorus fertiliser, and Baiji Bentonite.
Ñ Bentonite was a new one on me, and I asked them what it was.
They explained that Bentonite was a mining product used in the production of toothpaste, iron and steel casting, and also as an additive for pig food. Baiji Bentonite was a very successful product. Did we, as experts, think that this public relations was good?
Ñ We said it was absolutely astonishing, and congratulated them.
They were very gratified to know this, they said, from western experts in such matters.
We felt more than a little abashed at these encomiums.
ÑIt was very hard to imagine anywhere in the western world that would be capable of responding with such prodigious speed, imagination and communal determination to such a problem.
ÑAlthough the committee told us that they hoped that, since Tongling had recently been declared an open city to visitors for the first time, the dolphins and the semi-nature reserve might bring tourists and tourist money to the area, it was very clear that this was not the primary impulse.
Ñ At the end they said, 'The residents in the area gain some profit - that's natural - but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty.
Ñ'As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive it may go extinct if we don't take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.'
Ñ We left the room feeling, for the first time in China, uplifted. It seemed that, for all the stilted and awkward formality of the meeting, we had had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world. It was the first time we had been able to see beyond our own assumptions and have some insight into theirs.
Ñ I ordered the Thousand Year Old eggs again that night, determined to try and enjoy them.
