The Original Yangtse Cruise

Most journeys through China involve many internal flights and changes of hotel which naturally increase the cost and ‘hassle’ factor. The reintroduction of the full Yangtse cruise and a British Airways service direct to Shanghai now allow a journey through China with minimum change of accommodation and flying. The Yangtse is the world’s third longest river, some 4000 miles east to west and known in China as Changjiang or ‘Long River’. Traditionally river navigation was by small sampans, wupans and sailing junks which can still be seen today, journeying upstream assisted by teams of trackers. Hankow, now part of Wuhan, inspired the famous Tea Races in the 18th and 19th centuries when clippers and later steamships sailed downstream to the South China Sea, Singapore and on to London. The British connection with the Yangtse began when Lord Elgin sailed along the Yangtse to Wuhan. The Treaty of Nanjing that same year provided for the creation of five treaty ports including Shanghai. It was the Englishman, Archibald Little, who established the first regular steamer service to Chongqing, where the Yangtse and Jialing rivers meet.

It is a curious fact, half a century after the city began its irreversible decline as a centre of entrepreneurial capitalism that the name ‘Shanghai’ is as arresting as ever, a byword for allure and intrigue. Bounded on the east by the Huangpu River the city is dominated on one side by an imposing line of buildings in the grand European style, ‘The Bund’. In its heyday the city was ‘life itself’ with grandiose town hall architecture owing more to the City of London or the Liverpool waterfront than its own delicate and traditional craft style. Whilst this is still found today, tucked away in the form of pagodas, temples and ornamental gardens, it is modern western influence that has determined the visual character of the rapidly expanding city.