IN 1896, the 64-year-old British adventurer Isabella Bird set out from Shanghai to journey to the source of the Yangtze. Travelling by river boat and basket chair, she was abandoned, nearly froze and faced an angry lynch mob before she reached her destination. The round trip took her 18 months. Late last year, passengers aboard the river's newest ship completed 1,370 kilometres of Bird's odyssey in four days and air-conditioned comfort.
Travelling downstream from Chongqing to Wuhan through the Three Gorges, the East King, run by Holiday Inn, is a floating capsule of Western luxury. Where Bird once battled with officials, faced long delays and had to be towed through the rapids by human pack-mules, modern tourists view the sometimes grim reality of life on the Yangtze from a picturesque distance, disembarking occasionally for a closer look.
The China that Bird describes in The Yangtze Valley And Beyond (Virago) seems to have been a more colourful place than the drab country which crowds the river banks. Where she encountered brightly dressed mandarins in traditional robes and naked boat trackers, today's travellers meet green-suited comrades, grey-suited businessmen and Mao-suited peasants. Even the river has dimmed from the bottle-green that Bird described to a soupy red-brown flow which swirls and boils around the fat, flat-bottomed boat. Aggressive agricultural policies and deforestation in its upper reaches have laden the river with silt, to which industrialisation has added its quota of pollution.
It is a journey which must be made sooner rather than later: in 15 years, a 600-km long lake will drown the area under 110 metres of water when the controversial Three Gorges Dam is completed. The gorges which so spectacularly direct the force of the Yangtze through three provinces - Sichuan, Hunan and Hubei - will become little more than islands.
VIEWED through the smog from Chongqing wharf, the three-storey East King looks strangely out of place among the more traditional traffic of a Chinese river. With tinted windows and sleek white panelling, the boat is like something out of a 1960s sci-fi movie. A similarly hi-tech sliding car will one day take passengers down the steep river bank, but for the time being they must make their way down the slippery old steps manned by hawkers selling steamed eggs and men toting baskets of bright green vegetables. After picking their way across rusty barges and wobbly gang-planks, passengers are welcomed aboard by warm towels and an enormous cylindrical chandelier which dangles in the grand two-storey lobby.
Later, from the top deck and alarmingly close to the ear-splitting blast of the fog horn, passengers watch as the boat leaves the dock and heads into the haze.