In the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, the longest river in China, there are the Three Gorges (the Qutang Gorge, Wu Gorge and Xiling Gorge), an important water route between central China and the country ’s remote and inaccessible southwestern regions, particularly Sichuan. Due to the numerous rapids and shoals along the Three Gorges and a continuous succession of lofty peaks, the road to the southwest was considered an extremely difficult one. “The road to Shu (a shortened ancient term for Sichuan) is as hard to ascend to as the sky”, a vivid line from the great Chinese poet Li Bai in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) depicted the difficulty of passing through the hinterland region. During the past hundreds and thousands of years, the boats that traveled against the current relied on a special kind of laborer and a special kind of tool; the so-called “boat trackers” and their towlines. 

The boat trackers and towing ropes have created a largely unknown wonder in the Three Gorges region, that is, the so-called “boat tracking stones,” which are the stones or boulders bearing the marks of boat towlines or the trackers themselves.

Over ten years ago, when people started to trek across the northern banks of the Three Gorges, an unusual kind of stone was found in many places. These stones or boulders had rows of deeply dented grooves, some deep enough to accommodate a fist, the deepest reaching 60cm. What seems unbelievable is that these marks were actually left by the pulling of ropes made of bamboo fibers.

In the long years before motor boats appeared, the boat trackers were the force and power of the boats. To travel through dangerous shoals, they had to rely on towing by the boat trackers who would pull on the tight towlines embedded into their bare shoulders. The towlines rubbed against stones on the bank and, after years of rubbing, left notches or grooves on the boulders, which, as time passed, would become deeper and deeper. These stones serve as testimony to the difficult history of the Yangtze Rivers ’ water transport, being as well a unique cultural heritage of the Three Gorges valley.

Twenty years ago, boat trackers could still be seen using their flesh and blood to pull along huge thousand-ton boats, their figures passing from one dangerous shoal to another. Zheng Yunfeng, a photographer who trekked throughout the Three Gorges valley region for 7 years, describes the scenes he saw at the time:

On a boat there are scullers, oarsmen and pilots, about a dozen people at a minimum and a hundred at the most. In big boats with around a hundred people, at least seventy to eighty of them are boat trackers. The team is coordinated by the helmsman, who directs the haozi (work songs associated with boats) or beats a drum to accompany and set the pace for their hard physical labor. Twelve to twenty people stay in the boat to row. In the bow of the ship there are a number of large oars, each made from a whole single trunk of fir wood, needing seven or eight people to handle. A few other people stay on shore and nearby the boat, wading across the water and jumping on rocks to straighten and untangle the ropes that get caught and thus interfere with the towing of boat trackers. These people are called “water boat trackers”. The water boat trackers require high skills to be able to wind up the ropes in the water with facility. After the first powerful cry of a haozi, the boat trackers ’ work begins. They jump off the boat and crawl onto the rocks, and pull the towropes following the narrow path of rocks forward, sometimes able to fit their straw sandals into cracks.”

But now, this scene is history.

As the Three Gorges project starts the flooding, it is very likely that the boat tracking stones will sink into oblivion forever. The fate of the stones had once been a topic of interest.

In November 2000, a boat tracking stone amateur discovered a huge boulder with towing marks in the Wuxia Gorge, and reported it to the local government.

Apparently, this boat tracking stone is the biggest of its sort recovered by the local government. The entire bluestone is about two meters in height and length, and about one meter in width. According to the volume of the stone and the tools needed to move the stone, it is estimated that it weighs around ten tons.

In order to recover this boulder, the cultural heritage department of Wushan County spent over a week to formulate the plan. It used a 20-ton crane to hoist the stone on to a ferry that carried it to the Wushan wharf, and then a 20 tone cargo truck transported it to the County ’s Cultural Heritage Department for preservation. At the beginning of the year, the boulder was shipped to Chongqing as an exhibit to be displayed at the Three Gorges Museum under construction.