The sailboats were comfortable and quiet. I ask if he's ever seen another formerly common sight on the Yangtze, the baiji. I've only seen a dead dolphin, caught by a fisherman. The humid lowlands of the Yangtze River Valley have been China's rice bowl for a long time, and it's hard to find a piece of land that doesn't bear the imprint of humans.
Smoke billows from a factory along the river.
There are 500 million Chinese living within the Yangtze River watershed, and today's ferry to Tongling will probably pass 20 million souls in half a day. Yet, in the long reach of time, only recently has China been crowded, and in the last two centuries the population has fluctuated wildly. The Taiping civil war, the invasion of the Japanese, the sundry floods and famine killed so many Chinese that a 1950 census of the Lower Yangtze Valley found 20 million fewer people than the 1850 census. The 1.2 billion people of China eat most everything edible, and wild animals are merely food that's hard to catch. Any creature not caged or tamed has a dim future, and the Yangtze River dolphin is no exception.