Yangtze River

The Yangtze basin was the country of Chu, whose religious world reaches us through the Chuci, the Songs of the South. Its poems are not the measured ritual hymns of the northern classics but invocations: a spirit is summoned, courted and lost, the speaker travels through the sky, and the river goddesses of the Xiang are addressed directly. Scholars have argued for a century about how far these texts record an actual shamanic practice, but they preserve a religious idiom that the northern canon does not have.

Attached to the same landscape is the death of Qu Yuan, the Chu official who, exiled and despairing of his state, is said to have drowned himself in the Miluo, a tributary of the Yangtze. The tradition holds that people raced boats out to find him and threw rice into the water so the fish would not take his body, and the Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, with its races and its wrapped rice parcels, is explained by that story across the Chinese world and among its diasporas.

The river itself was worshipped as a power. Its gorges were and are dangerous water, and shrines to dragon kings, to the goddess of Wushan and to local river deities stood at the difficult passages, receiving offerings from boatmen who had reason to make them.

When the north fell to non-Chinese rulers in the fourth century the courts and the gentry moved south to the Yangtze, and Buddhism moved with them. Erik Zurcher's study of that migration shows how the religion was received by an educated southern elite already versed in Daoist metaphysics, and how the two vocabularies were read through one another. At Mount Lu, overlooking the river, the monk Huiyuan founded the Donglin monastery in 386 and in 402 gathered a company before an image of Amitabha to vow rebirth in his Pure Land, an event the Pure Land tradition takes as its beginning in China.

The basin holds a remarkable density of holy mountains. Mount Jiuhua, seat of the bodhisattva Kshitigarbha, and Mount Emei, seat of Samantabhadra, both stand within the watershed, as do the Daoist centres of Mount Qingcheng, where the Celestial Masters tradition locates its founding, and Mount Wudang with its Ming imperial temple complex. At Leshan, where three rivers meet, a monk began in 713 to carve a Buddha seventy one metres high into the cliff in order to calm the water at the confluence.

The Three Gorges Dam, begun in 1994 and completed in 2012, raised the water by more than a hundred metres. More than a million people were resettled and many temples, shrines and rock inscriptions were moved, recorded or lost, including the Zhang Fei temple, which was dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.