Despite the big filthy cities alongside it, the travel writer finds the river largely unchanged over hundreds of years
The Observer Magazine’s first issue of 1982 included Paul Theroux’s 1,500-mile journey downriver from Chongqing to Shanghai on the Yangtze (‘The great Observer holiday package’).
‘Every mile of it was different,’ he wrote, ‘but there were 2,000 miles I did not see. It crosses 12 provinces or regions, 700 rivers are joined to it – all Yangtze statistics are hopelessly huge and ungraspable; they obscure rather than clarify.’
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