Shoes in the Yangtze

August 9, 2007 10:43 AM

I recently completed a short cruise down the Yangtze River in China, ending at the new Three Gorges Dam. Along the way we noticed lots of garbage floating in the river, mostly bamboo or other natural material, some Styrofoam, and lots of shoes. Is there some significance to shoes in the river?

Is it just that many shoes float and they are being left behind in the villages being flooded by the slowly filling reservoir behind the dam? Doesn't other stuff float? Why are shoes left behind? (We also saw a handful of dead pigs, and maybe even one human corpse, but there can't be that many corpses to go with all these shoes.) Just in case, we threw one shoe in the river ourselves for good luck.

posted by pithy comment to society & culture (5 comments total)

The shoes are thrown in the river by tourists, for good luck.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:48 AM on August 9, 2007 [5 favorites]

The villages were bulldozed by the government.

This is just a guess, but it could have something to do with common Chinese practice of taking off their shoes before entering their homes. The shoes could get washed away from outside homes in Chongqing or other towns or could fall overboard from the people living on the many freighters and sanpans working the river.

Also Chinese folks tend to wear pretty cheap shoes. When they wear out, they get tossed into the trash, also known as the river.
posted by Pollomacho at 10:55 AM on August 9, 2007

Another guess: Maybe a lot of the other floating rubbish gets collected and recycled. Shoes aren't easy to recycle, since they're made of various materials bonded together.

Here's an article about the Citarum River in Indonesia, if you want to see a river that's really full of trash. Didn't spot any shoes, though.
posted by hydrophonic at 12:21 PM on August 9, 2007

Maybe it's all about the morphology... bamboo and styrofoam float because of their natural buoyancy - perhaps shoes float because of their boat-like form!
posted by nanojath at 1:00 PM on August 9, 2007

Had it been raining heavily? As Pollomacho said, it's common to take off your shoes before entering a house. A heavy downpour would carry them off and they'd end up in the river. It could also be that when they bulldozed for the dam they brought down the power poles and all the sneakers that had been thrown up onto the cables ended up in the river.
posted by tellurian at 6:08 PM on August 9, 2007