The high drama of rafting the Upper Yangtze

A 30-year-old true story that once gripped a whole nation and was then promptly forgotten has made an unexpected reappearance and I'm surprised to find that I played a small part in it.

In 1986, American river rafter Ken Warren led a joint Chinese and US team to go down the Yangtze River. They had the best equipment in the world. To prevent a foreigner from making history as the first person to raft China's longest river, several ad hoc Chinese teams were cobbled together. They did not have any rafting experience and their training took place on urban lakes.

Two of the teams raced Warren's team. They ended up losing 10 people to the rapids and Warren's team lost one member to altitude sickness. The Chinese teams skipped many parts of the treacherous waters and went over the infamous Tiger Leaping Gorge in sealed capsules while Warren's team aborted their expedition after a mutiny among its members.