Tales of the Yangzi

In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing. In his retirement he sharpened up his skills in that endlessly difficult subject, classical Chinese. He has firm control of a slightly old-fashioned narrative style, in which he apologises for raising arcane matters of Chinese style, geography, military matters, history, poetry, painting and mandarin manners, which he then lays elegantly before you. This is a work of meticulous scholarship in the English tradition of the amateur scholar, or ‘much learning lightly worn’.

The book is printed on excellent paper and the text — somewhat too tightly packed — winds its way between beautiful plates of Song dynasty (10th to 13th centuries) paintings and objects, and evocative photographs taken along the Grand Canal — the diarist’s route — by Watson.

Here is the story. In the second half of the 12th century, one of China’s finest poets, Lu You, who was also a connoisseur of the major and minor arts, knew his country’s history, and appreciated every nuance of landscape, travelled along two of the country’s mightiest waterways, the Grand Canal and the Yangzi River. He kept a diary.

The Canal, one of the most colossal acts of construction anywhere, was begun in the seventh century and links the south China granaries with the bureaucratic centre in the north. But non-Han horsemen, the Jurchen, drove the northern Song from its capital, Kaifeng, establishing the Jin Dynasty and forcing the son of the defeated emperor to settle his capital in the southern city of Hangzhou.