Mad About the Mekong

Exploration and Empire in South East Asia (Text Only)

John Keay

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007503797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

The story of both a dramatic journey retracing the historic voyage of France’s greatest 19th-century explorer up the mysterious Mekong river, and a portrait of the river and its peoples today.

ONE

Apocalypse Then

‘Each bend of the Mekong as added to my map seemed an important geographical discovery. Nothing could distract me from this abiding concern. It came to possess me like a monomania. I was mad about the Mekong …’

FRANCIS GARNIER

IN EARLY JUNE the Mekong in its remote middle reaches is at its lowest. At that time of year, sixteen hundred kilometres to the north-west on the uplands of eastern Tibet, the river’s headwaters may be rippling with the first snow-melt, while the same distance to the south, the monsoon may already be pummelling the paddy fields of the Delta. But at its hill-pinched waist on the Lao-Burmese border the river has scarcely begun to rise. Here, the dry season still holds its fiery breath and the odd shower is no more than a lick of the tongue on parched lips. Behind the hills desultory thunder brings no relief. Beetles and cicadas fall silent in the heat; birds seem reluctant to fly. A smoke haze hangs motionless in the treetops, clogging the nostrils with the ash from slash-and-burn. Drained of all glow, the sun sets ingloriously, tracking behind a pall of parched fog to a mid-afternoon extinction. The thermometer stays stuck at thirty-something degrees.

Only the river is refreshingly animated. Darting through fifty-metre narrows, it bellies into pools a kilometre wide and then squirms, like a sleek and well-fed snake, down a barren trough isolated from the tousled shade of its banks by humped sandbars and a wilderness of spectacular upthrusts of black bedrock. Where the rock ventures into its path, the river hisses a caution and recoils in a tangle of eddies, welling up, flicking at the sunlight and glancing aside to nose out other options before slithering prodigiously over the obstruction in a cascade of watery colours.

Midway between Thailand and Chinese Yunnan, a succession of such encounters comprises the Tang-ho rapids. They extend, with intermissions, for perhaps 150 kilometres and confront the navigator with an awesome prospect of boiling whirlpools and spuming cataracts. In June 1867 they were the final straw for the Mekong Exploration Commission. After a year of canoeing up Asia’s most capricious river, the six Frenchmen who had undertaken its exploration conceded defeat. From here on they would take to the steep banks, then to the hills and the forests, plotting the river where possible but increasingly deflected from its course by obstructive princelings and their own debilitated condition.

Their proximity to China alone kept them going. Deep in the forest gloom they would stumble on a paved trail and then a humpbacked bridge built of cut stone and once inset with ceramic tiles. Evidently the civilising light of the Celestial Empire had once penetrated these dark recesses. A mandarin’s robes and the staccato sound of spoken Chinese sent the Frenchmen into raptures. In China their credentials would be acknowledged and their credit was good. After months of floundering amid malarial jungle, terrorised by tigers, devoured by leeches, often feverish and increasingly destitute, their salvation seemed nigh. They dreamed of wearing shoes again and sleeping in sheets, of tableware and postal facilities and the privacy of stone walls and stout doors. They were not to know that forsaking the river was the prelude to catastrophe, or that the controversies, no less than the crises, were yet to come.

Sensing only that the Mekong was about to elude them, Francis Garnier, the expedition’s restless surveyor, set off alone from the Tang-ho rapids on a last day’s excursion upriver. With a compass in his hand and a cold chicken in his haversack, he picked his way past the rapids, and as the sun slanted over the trees on the hilltops, became overwhelmed by an acute sense of wonder. The great river and the boundless forest were utterly deserted. He felt like a trespasser in paradise. He shouted to reassure himself but quickly resented the sound. His shadow, marching across the sandbanks beside him, was no less intrusive: it seemed, as Garnier put it, ‘to violate the virginity of a natural world that until now had escaped the profanity of man’.

Behind an outcrop of rock he surprised a young stag drinking from the river. Though only ten paces away, it stood its ground, and when he stopped to reach instinctively for his rifle, the stag actually moved towards him. ‘It came to me like a memory of Eden,’ he would write. Both thrilled and intimidated, he had no regrets about being unarmed, yet still could not resist making a grab for its antlers. The stag bolted and Garnier cursed his own impatience. It should have been like a fairy story, he thought, or one of La Fontaine’s fables. If only, instead of grabbing at it, he had engaged it in polite conversation.

After a hard scramble through the tangled forest to circumvent a portal of rock, he rejoined the river and, now sweating profusely, went for a swim. He was barely out of his depth when two elephants broke cover. One turned back; the other, a big dark tusker, waded into the water beside him. Garnier backed into midstream and prepared to take flight by launching himself into the main current. ‘The proboscidean’ fixed an eye on him and occasionally waved its trunk in his direction. But it did not approach. It seemed content just to wallow and shower itself with river-water. Naked and defenceless, Garnier cautiously floated into the bank and, grabbing his clothes, fled across the sands and into the forest. The elephant paid no attention. Later, on glancing back, Garnier could still see the spray from the fountain of its trunk raining down in a prism of sunlight.

Lunch was taken in the shade, then it was time to turn back. In the heat of the day the silence was more absolute than ever. Garnier longed to erase his own tracks in the sand; they too seemed to sully surroundings of such heart-rending beauty. Yet that night, back in camp when he told of his adventures, a colleague’s suggestion that they revisit this huntsman’s ‘Eldorado’ with shotguns and rifles met with no objection. For repaying nature’s ‘pacific and almost friendly’ reception with bullets Garnier felt a mild pang of remorse but said nothing. Bloodlust prevailed. Evidently virgin lands meant fair game – and that included the river itself.

This long, lyrical and perhaps fanciful passage stands out in the records of the Mekong Exploration Commission because it is so untypical. Disappointment and hardship had more often been the expedition’s lot; destitution and death would as surely follow. A day in paradise, for Garnier at least, was a moment of tranquillity set amid buffeting cascades of menace and misfortune. Here Heaven met Hades round every bend in the river. ‘This solitary Mekong scene,’ he concluded, ‘one of the last that it was given to me to see, would remain deeply etched in my memory.’

The passage is immediately preceded, and partly explained, by another admission. He had succumbed, he says, to a ‘monomanie de Mékong’. It was he who had insisted on pursuing the river long after it had become an irrelevance to the expedition’s political and commercial concerns. It was he who had deflected their course from the most direct route to China into the dangerous no-man’s land of the Shan states on the Lao – Burmese border. The river for Garnier had come to eclipse all else, including the expedition’s safety. What mattered was to map its every twist, chart its every rapid, explore its every secret. He had become, he says, obsessed by it, possessed by it, mad about it.

Mountaineers commonly get obsessed by particular peaks, exaggerating their mystique and slavering over their icy profile. A river obsession is more of a rarity. It takes an especially determined explorer and a peculiarly wayward river. Joseph Conrad set his Heart of Darkness in Africa and positioned the terrible Kurtz on the upper reaches of the Congo. In the film Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola, while appropriating the Conrad story and retaining Kurtz, transposed the river. Recognising a renegade American holed up in the jungles of south-east Asia as a latter-day Kurtz, he simply swapped the Congo for the Mekong. There was little to choose between them; they were rivers ‘of a kind’. Up both lurked twilight forces of good and evil, forbidding yet enticing, virgin yet corrupting. And just as for Conrad the Congo was the obvious setting for an exploration of that ‘heart of darkness’ at the core of early twentieth-century civilisation, so for Coppola the Mekong was the obvious setting for a visionary parable of damnation in the late twentieth century.

A more historically-minded Coppola could have taken as his model the Mekong Exploration Commission. The same sense of dread would dog the Commission, the same pockets of renegade authority would confront them, and the same questioning of their own credentials would result. Even today, above the Tang-ho rapids, obscure ethnic groups jealously maintain an insurgent status which goes back to colonial times, while disputed enclaves harbour a variety of illicit activities, all narcotics-related. The Golden Triangle, though now wishfully billed as an ‘Economic Quadrangle’, retains a reputation for pristine lawlessness which makes borders almost irrelevant. Thailand, Laos, Burma and China here abut one another in as mouthwatering a set of co-ordinates as one could wish for. But the maps are always misleading, and the bulldozing of unauthorised dirt roads or the declaration of phantom states renders them instantly out of date.

Garnier, like Kurtz, would have little difficulty in recognising the region today. Even spouting ‘proboscideans’ have returned to the river. Their legs are the retractable steel pilings of Chinese drilling rigs, the waterspout comes from detonating charges laboriously sunk into the bedrock, and the proboscis belongs to a mechanical excavator poised on the rig’s foredeck to scoop out the debris. China takes the Economic Quadrangle seriously. The benefits of investment depend on making the river navigable; and that means taming the Tang-ho rapids. But when the work is finished, navigation will be possible for a maximum of six months a year. For the rest of the time, when the river is low, the rapids will remain as fearsome and insuperable as they appeared to the members of the Mekong Exploration Commission nearly 150 years ago.

As expeditions go, that which first ventured into the Mekong’s ‘heart of darkness’ deserves classic status. It ought to rank with, say, the African travels of Dr Livingstone. In 1871 Livingstone was the recipient of an honorary award at the first meeting of the International Geographical Congress; the only other such award at that prestigious gathering went to Francis Garnier.

Some twenty strong, the Commission disappeared into the unknown for over two years, and when it re-emerged – those who did – it would sweep the board at every geographical equivalent of the Oscars. Anticipating H.M. Stanley’s Congo expedition of twenty years later, it would also change the geography and ultimately the whole political complexion of the region. Thanks to the Mekong Exploration Commission a French empire would be hacked from what the expedition insisted on calling ‘Indo-China’; and under this dispensation Cambodia would be rescued from extinction, Laos ingeniously contrived, and in defiance of the French, a unitary Vietnam would be painfully projected.

Yet the French were ambivalent about exploration as such and were wont to disparage it as an Anglo-Saxon conceit deficient in scientific rigour. Worse still for the expedition’s survivors, word of their achievements would coincide with momentous events at home as France was repeatedly worsted, and Paris itself besieged, during the Franco – Prussian war. It would thus fall to others, especially the British, to heap honours on the Mekong Exploration Commission and to be the first to hail it as ‘one of the most remarkable and successful exploring expeditions of the nineteenth century’.

It was also one of the best-documented expeditions of the period. Besides an official record in four hefty volumes, we have a lavishly illustrated account which appeared in serialised instalments in a leading French journal, plus two lengthy personal accounts. Remarkably for the 1860s, there are even ‘before and after’ group portraits of the six principal participants.

The ‘before’ picture, an engraving based on a photograph, has something odd about it. Just as the expedition itself tackled the river backwards, starting where it ended and going doggedly against the flow ever after, so the picture appears to have been reversed. Presumably this had something to do with the technical problems of transferring a negative to an engraved plate. It would account for later confusion in the captioning of the picture and would explain why, for instance, Lagrée and Garnier have their hair partings on the wrong side; or why Delaporte – or is it de Carné? – appears to be looking away from the camera. All is adjusted by simply inspecting the picture in a mirror.

The original photo was taken just days before the expedition headed off into the unknown. Some of the men may never before have faced the camera. The picture would serve as an official memorial and, in the not unlikely event of their failing to return, as a cherished memento for family and friends. To a suspicious mind it is also telling evidence of a dangerously self-conscious formality that would dog the whole expedition.

The Saigon photographer, a Monsieur Gsell, would not be accompanying them. His apparatus was far too cumbersome and his glass plates far too fragile. But at government expense he and his equipment had been shipped up through the Mekong Delta and into Cambodia. There, in June 1866, the expedition officially assembled – then promptly split up. While awaiting the necessary documentation, and by way of getting acquainted, the Commission’s six French officials betook themselves to Siem Reap at the far end of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap, or ‘Great Lake’. A week of tramping and archaeologising amongst the Cyclopean ruins of Angkor would follow.

They were not the first Europeans to visit the ancient Khmer capital, but they were the first to attempt a systematic record of it. They tested their survey instruments by observing for latitude and longitude, by measuring the kilometres of wall and waterway, and by mapping much of the vast complex. Late into the night they sat amongst the statuary conjecturing about the beliefs and resources of Angkor’s builders, then they slept within its bat-infested cloisters.

For the photo a suitable site was chosen on the steps leading up to one of the temple terraces. Hats – a sun helmet, a bowler, a Vietnamese straw cone – were discarded yet left ‘in shot’. With the same exaggeratedly casual air, the members of the expedition draped themselves over the warm stonework and stared imperiously at the camera, six bearded bachelors on the threshold of a great adventure.

Just so, explorers of the Nile like Burton, Speke and Baker, all of whose exploits had climaxed in the previous five years, might have posed in front of the pyramids before trudging off into the Dark Continent – except that they did no such thing. British sensibilities were offended by such rank displays of professionalism. Her Majesty’s Government involved itself in exploration only to the extent of conceding what Lord Salisbury would call ‘an Englishman’s right to have his throat cut when and where he chose’. Notching up discoveries was reckoned by the British a sporting activity, reserved principally for gentlemen, conducted with a minimum of fuss, and administered by an august scientific body – the Royal Geographical Society.

That such amateurism had nevertheless produced handsome political dividends was undeniable. To Gallic minds, it was also deeply irritating. Amongst the men on the steps at Angkor a sneaking admiration for their British counterparts was overlaid by professional jealousy and intense suspicion. For far too long, they grumbled, France had allowed her rival a free hand in the world’s terra incognita. It was time to tear a leaf out of Albion’s album. Just as the Nile had given Britain its entrée into Africa, the Mekong would give France its entrée into Asia.

Scrutinising the photo, one is impressed more by its poignancy than its bravado. Far from sustaining the intended air of relaxed informality, it is as if the postures adopted by the explorers had been carefully rehearsed and their relative positions measured out with a ruler. On the extreme right (or left, if one uses the mirror), le Commandant Ernest Marc Louis de Gonzagues Doudart de Lagrée sits slightly apart from his colleagues, and not actually on the steps but on a ledge beside them. His legs are crossed, his shoes have buckles, and a well-placed sleeve displays the gold braid of his rank. Positioned not so as to make space for his name but so as to emphasise the scope of his authority, Lagrée (for short) affects a certain dignity. An aristocrat by birth and a product of the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, he was indisputably the leader. At forty-three and with a hint of grey, he was by far the oldest as well as being the most senior in rank and the only member of the expedition with an already notable record of service in south-east Asia.

Three years previously, in 1863, Lagrée had been deputed to pioneer France’s first push up from the Mekong Delta into Cambodia. His orders had been to explore the river’s course in that country and to persuade the Cambodian king to sign an exclusive defence treaty with France. On both counts he had succeeded. Siam’s (Thailand’s) prior claims to suzerainty over Cambodia’s King Norodom had been dismissed with a well-timed display of firepower, a treaty had been signed, and Lagrée had stayed on at Norodom’s court as France’s representative. That Cambodia had just become, in effect, a French protectorate was in no small measure thanks to le Command...