Last Chance to See

think about them in the bar of the Peace Hotel. This turned out not to be a good place to think because you couldn’t hear yourself doing it, but we wanted to see the place anyway.
    The Peace Hotel is a spectacular remnant of the days when Shanghai was one of the most glamorous and cosmopolitan ports in the world. In the Thirties the hotel was known as the Cathay, and was the most sumptuous place in town. This was where people came to glitter at one another. In one of its suites Noël Coward wrote a draft of
Private Lives
.
    Now the paint is peeling, the lobby is dark and draughty, the posters advertising the World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band are written in felt tip and Scotch-taped onto the paneling, but the ghost of the Cathay’s former grandeur still lurks high up among the dusty chandeliers, wondering what’s been going on for the last forty years.
    The bar was a dark, low-ceilinged room just off the lobby. The World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band was out for the evening, but a deputy band was playing in their place. The promise is that this is one of the only places in the world where you will still hear the music of the Thirties played as it was played, where it was played. Maybe the World Famous combo keeps the promise, but their deputies did not. They banged their way through endless repetitions of “Edelweiss,”“Greensleeves,” and “Auld Lang Syne,” interspersed with the occasional bash at “New York, New York,” “Chicago,” and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
    There were two odd things about this. First of all, this wasn’t just for the tourists. This was the music we heard everywhere in China, particularly the first three titles: on the radio, in shops, in taxis, in trains, in the great ferries that steam continually up and down the Yangtze. Usually it was played by Richard Clayderman. For anyone who has ever wondered who in the world buys Richard Clayderman records, it’s the Chinese, and there are a billion of them.
    The other odd thing was that music was clearly completely foreign to them. Well, obviously it was foreign music, so that’s not altogether surprising, but it was as if they were playing from a phrase book. Every extempore flourish the trumpeter added, every extra fill on the drums, were all crashingly and horribly wrong. I suppose that Indians must have felt this hearing George Harrison playing the sitar in the Sixties, but then, after a brief indulgence, so did everybody else; clumsy replications of Indian music never supplanted the popular music of the West. When the Chinese listened avidly to mangled renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Little Brown Jug,” they were obviously hearing something very different than what I was hearing and I couldn’t work out what it was.
    Traveling in China, I began to find that it was the sounds I was hearing that confused and disoriented me most.
    It occurred to me, as we tried to find a table in one of the more muffled corners of the bar, that the dolphins we had come to look for must be suffering from the same kind of problem. Their senses must be completely overwhelmed and confused.
    To begin with, the baiji dolphin is half-blind.
    The reason for this is that there is nothing to see in the Yangtze. The water is so muddy now that visibility is notmuch more than a few centimetres, and as a result the baiji’s eyes have atrophied through disuse.
    Curiously enough, it is often possible to tell something about the changes that have occurred during an animal’s evolution from the way in which its fetus develops. It’s a sort of action replay.
    The baiji’s eyes, feeble as they are, are placed quite high up on its head to make the most of the only light that ever reaches them, i.e., from directly above. Most other dolphins have their eyes much lower down the sides of their heads, from where they can see all around them, and below; and this is exactly where you will find the eyes on a young baiji fetus.
    As the fetus grows, however, its eyes gradually migrate up the sides of its head, and the muscles that would normally pull the eyeball downward don’t even bother to develop. You can’t see anything downward.
    It may be, therefore, that the entire history of soil erosion into the Yangtze can be charted in the movement of a single baiji fetus’s eyes. (It may also be that the baiji arrived into an already turbid Yangtze from somewhere else and just adapted to its new environment; we don’t know. Either way, the Yangtze