Goodbye to the River Goddess

If you feel any chagrin at the recent confirmed extinction of China’s river dolphin, congratulations. You’re in that blessed minority of mankind who can afford to believe that Homo Reclinus can co-exist with other creatures at the top of the food chain. We could if there were only a few of us, of course, but if everyone deserves a flat screen TV and dollar burgers, then other predators have to go, and the baijihas taken its cue.

A six-week expedition of over thirty scientists with high tech equipment has confirmed that the baiji is the first cetacean to be driven to extinction in historical times. It’s for the best, really. For the past twenty years or more, the baiji’s home, a 1700 km stretch of the Yangtze River, has resembled an aquatic Gazan refugee camp, fraught with danger, besiegement and privation.

Heavy boat traffic, agricultural runoff, industrial pollution, and burgeoning riverbank development had made a sordid, oxygen-starved mess of the water. More and more dams, particularly the Three Gorges, had tampered with depth levels and confined the baiji to fewer feeding grounds, where sonar from trawlers made chaos of its all-important aural environment, often sending baiji into ship propellers, or the shallows where fish are actually dynamited. Those with 20/20 hindsight must remember that the Yangtze River basin houses over six percent of the world’s population.

That basin was all sea twenty million years ago. When the sea retreated the baiji’s predecessors stayed behind. So its dealings with humans came at the tail-tip end of its run on earth, and started fairly auspiciously. The baiji was making appearances in Chinese literature when the Han Dynasty was breaking news, and starred in Yangtze fisherman folklore well before that. The Disney version tells us that a beautiful princess refused the suit of a wealthy noble, enraging her father, who threw her into the river but not to her death, rather rebirth as a creamy smooth mammal without limbs.

The PG-13, Song Dynasty version relates that a slave maiden crossing the Yangtze had the ill-fortune of choosing a sex-starved ferryman, who attempted to have his way with her. In the struggle, they both fell into the turbulent drink, where Guanyin the all-merciful changed her into the baiji, and her attacker into the black finless porpoise, known in Mandarin as the “Yangtze pig”, but still extant, for all its shameful origins.

Yet the legend as told by the fishermen themselves even today has an incestuous Classic Greek twist, all the more redemptive for its grittiness. The original baiji maiden was forced into prostitution ( a “meat factory”, to use the fishermen’s euphemism) and unwittingly slept with her father. On discovering her sin, she tried to drown herself, yet was transformed into a pure-white creature easily able to escape the lusts of men.

And for a long time, the baiji even escaped the all-consuming hunger of the Chinese. Lifeblood of southern Chinese civilization, the Yangtze has for millennia supported millions of people through many a time when food was scarce. Throughout, the baiji’s deified status protected it, a harbinger of good fishing luck when sighted. Then again, its flavor may have strengthened its taboo. Those who have eaten baiji universally deplore its oily, rancid flavor.

The transformation of baiji from goddess to lunch owes to the Great Leap Forward. The unspoken divine ban on killing the river goddess was one among a constellation of fading, bourgeois superstitions blotted out by decree. The purges and famines that followed made eating a deity all too easy. Invention of the rolling hook trawl made it easier still, scores of eight-inch iron hooks set two or three inches apart. When a baiji was snagged on one hook, it would panic and thrash, which may have worked had there been only one hook, or perhaps even a net. On rolling hooks, it would only pierce itself on another and another, and was eventually dragged from the river bleeding from a thousand deep gashes.

In the 50s and 60s, riverside markets sold baiji meat for a few cents a pound, good protein for all its foul flavor. Factories made leather goods from what un-torn baiji skin could be salvaged. Quacks discovered that baiji oil was a panacea, especially for those with skin problems. Very simple now to criticize such short-sighted opportunism, especially if the hungriest we’ve ever been is after not having had a chance to eat lunch.

Actually, those who perforce contributed to the swift demise of the baiji did so with commendably heavy heart, given the circumstances, as Simon Winchester, author of The River at the Center of the World, reveals in an interview with an old fisherman in the mid-90s:

“Back in the 60s we needed to eat. I took a lot of the dolphins out, and I sold them, or took the meat for my family. It didn’t matter that we had once called them goddesses. We didn’t care.

But then as the years went by they became more and more difficult to find. We all slowly realized what was happening. We knew we were wiping them out. We were killing them off, and by doing so we were helping to kill the river. And soon our attitude changed. Every time a baiji came out, cut to pieces by the hook, we felt we had lost a little more. So we stopped using these rolling hooks. We went back to nets. And if we ever find a baiji- and I haven’t seen one for six or seven years now – we throw it back. It’s the rule again.

Yangtze fishermen have good hearts, you know. We love this river. We love the fish. We love the dolphin and we revere her. But back then – back then it was very different. It was very difficult. We had to eat. We thought we had no choice. It was the dolphins, or it was our children. Which would you choose?”

So now you can stay in the Baiji Hotel and drink Baiji beer and Baiji cola, and pamper yourself with Baiji toilet paper, but a live baiji you’ll never see. If extremely lucky, you may glimpse a Yangtze alligator, otter, or giant soft-shelled turtle, but odds are your children won’t. Who knows but that by the time theyhave kids, the Yangtze won’t be much use to anything too high up the food chain.

Related posts:

1. Review: River Town
2. Goodbye Dali, Hello Weishan
3. River to Nowhere
4. Dogsleds on the Songhua River
5. Splashing about the Nanting River

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