This work concerns the historical entanglement of water rights between China and India across 140 years.
The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India began on 10 April 1802. The principle of triangulation is this: given the length of one side and the angles at its two ends, the position of a third point can be calculated. Today's three‑dimensional topological modelling follows the same mathematical thread. Yet in the Himalayan range everything fails—the gorges cut the line of sight. From the 1860s onward, Captain Montgomerie of the Survey of India trained local men in Dehradun, using their bodies in place of instruments. In the archives these spies are called pundits, each with a code name of his own. In order to determine whether the Yarlung Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were one and the same river, a tailor‑spy from Sikkim, code‑named K.P. and named Kinthup, carried out the instructions of Captain Harman of the Survey of India and infiltrated into Tibet. Upriver of a bend in the meandering Yarlung Tsangpo, he threw 500 marked logs into the river, while men downstream waited to keep count. Over four years he was sold into slavery and held in confinement, and on the very eve of completing his mission, word arrived of Captain Harman's death. In the winter of 1883 he cast all five hundred logs into the water—yet downstream, no one witnessed where the logs drifted. In 1914, Kinthup's experience was set down as an oral account, and the data he supplied became the basis for the McMahon Line drawn between China and India.
One hundred and forty years after the stretch of river where Kinthup dropped his logs, at the same site, in 2026, the Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower project—watched by the whole world—is under construction. A tunnel‑diversion scheme of five cascade stations turns the rolling waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo into electrical power. This hydropower station has also become an important geopolitical bargaining chip in the contest over water rights between China and India. As a temporal apparatus, the hydraulic project may perhaps have chanced upon those 500 logs of 140 years ago... The winding curve and the instantaneous straight line twine and echo in the seams of history. A river channel is the lightning of the earth: forking, bending, like a bolt frozen in time, discharging slowly... Lightning is the river channel of the sky: released in an instant, branching as it spreads, like a rushing river flowing through the air...
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