The river that went west

The Yuan is one of the four great rivers of Hunan and the second largest of them, the western counterpart of the Xiang. Its farthest source rises in the Miao Mountains of Guizhou near Duyun — the upper stream is called the Longtou, then the Qingshui — and it only takes the name Yuan after meeting the Wu River at Qiancheng in the hill country. From there it runs northeast, hugging the western flank of the Xuefeng range for hundreds of kilometres. Chinese measure gives the main stem 1,033 kilometres, 568 of them inside Hunan, draining a basin of nearly 90,000 square kilometres whose reaches extend into Guizhou, Chongqing and Hubei. It gathers the big mountain rivers of the west on the way — the Wu, the Xu, the Chen and the You among them — and at Changde it lets go: the channel fans into the western edge of the Dongting system, entering Dalian Lake at Hanshou and passing Yuanjiang city on the way to the South Dongting water. Everything the western mountains shed, this river carries east — water, flood peaks, timber and, for most of its history, the trade of half a province.

Before the railways, the Yuan was the road into western Hunan and eastern Guizhou, and Changde was where that road ended at the lake. The river is navigable for large vessels up to Changde, and smaller boats once continued above it, at least as far as Taoyuan; goods moved downstream by water and paid for the return cargo. By the late nineteenth century Changde had become the chief agricultural market of the whole Yuan basin. Chinese firms, joined after 1905 by foreign ones when the city opened to trade, kept branches there to buy rice, cotton, tung oil and timber, drawing on a hinterland that ran into northern Guizhou, southwestern Hubei and parts of southeastern Sichuan; early in the twentieth century Changde was Hunan's second city after Changsha. Timber came downstream in rafts, was floated across Dongting Lake to Yueyang, and passed there to the Yangtze boats. The corridor moved people as well as goods — Qu Yuan, exiled from Chu, was driven up this river into the hills in the third century BC — and power: the old texts called Changde the throat of Sichuan and Guizhou and the gateway to Yunnan and Guizhou, and it was from here that governments administered the mountain peoples of the west. Every old town on the banks remembers being a port.

The Yuan still works for a living. Its channel holds more than two metres of depth year-round, which keeps it open to thousand-ton ships; Yuanguan port in Changde, begun in 1999 and finished in its first two stages in 2008 with two thousand-ton berths, is the second largest port in Hunan, and since 2012 it has been linked directly to the port of Shanghai. Downstream, beyond the city, the river has been put to power: the Wuqiangxi station at Yuanling, the largest hydroelectric plant in Hunan, dams the lower Yuan for electricity, flood storage and navigation. The city stretch, meanwhile, is defended. Changde's greatest recurring danger is flooding — floods about once every two years, major floods about once every four — and the downtown bank carries the Poetry Wall, three kilometres of engraved verse that doubles as the flood wall and is listed by Guinness as the longest wall of engraved arts in the world. The towns along the bank still live off the water route: Taoyuan and Hanshou counties sit on the lower river, shipping grain, cotton and oil out in medium-sized vessels to Yueyang, Changsha or Wuhan for onward transshipment, as their predecessors did. Railways and expressways now run the western route; the river stayed as the old front door.