Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia

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misleading, and the bulldozing of unauthorised dirt roads or the declaration of phantom states renders them instantly out of date.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 Commandant Doudart de Lagrée.

Encouraged by the thought that where he went, the tricolour had a way of following, it was Lagrée’s idea that the new Mekong expedition first sail across the Great Lake to Siem Reap and Angkor. Neither place was then part of Cambodia. In a protracted decline and fall to rival that of Rome, the Khmer empire had been disintegrating ever since Jayavarman VII completed the stalagmite of Janus-like statuary which is Angkor’s Bayon in the thirteenth century. Southern Vietnam, as it now is, including the Mekong Delta, had been lost by the Khmers over the next three hundred years; so had most of the middle Mekong and the Menam basin in Thailand; and in the late eighteenth century, as Vietnamese and Thais squeezed the Cambodian heartland ever harder, the eastern end of the Great Lake, including Angkor, had been annexed by Bangkok.

The French, as Cambodia’s new keepers, now disputed this cession of what they chose to call the ‘lost’ or ‘alienated’ Cambodian provinces. It helped that Angkorian scholarship provided cover for occasional visits and that Angkorian preservation provided a ready pretext for administrative interference. Lagrée had himself been in Angkor for several weeks in 1865 and again in early 1866. He had begun the mapping of the site and had commissioned translations of inscriptions which demonstrated that it was indisputably of Cambodian provenance. But Bangkok was unmoved; and in the course of these labours the climate had taken its toll of the indefatigable Lagrée. Suffering from a recurrent and acute form of laryngitis, he had formally requested home leave. Admiral de Lagrandière, the colonial governor in Saigon, suggested he defer the request, then asked him ‘out of the blue’, as he put it, to accept the leadership of the Mekong Exploration Commission. ‘Why not?’ replied Lagrée, and ‘I began to laugh.’ So, apparently, did the Admiral.

The joke, unexplained at the time, would soon turn decidedly sour. Laughter of any sort would not be much heard once the expedition got underway. To his companions Lagrée would remain an enigmatic supremo, neither overbearing nor unsympathetic but aloof, sometimes hesitant, often hard to hear (the laryngitis obliged him to whisper), and so weighed down by his responsibilities as to seem indifferent to the derring-do possibilities of the enterprise. Alternatively he was a pillar of strength and decency and ‘possessed of every psychological and moral quality needed for the success of the expedition’, as Garnier would put it. By implication, any fault lay not in his lofty character but in his state of health and in the more erratic calibre of his companions.

To reach the expedition’s Cambodian assembly point, Lagrée and his companions had already sailed from Saigon up through the Mekong Delta, crossing in the course of this three-hundred-kilometre voyage from French territory to Vietnamese territory to Cambodian. Then, as now, the political geography of the river was horribly confusing. As a rule major rivers – like the Yangtse, Mississippi, Amazon, Nile, Congo, Ganges – flow through just one or two countries. This is because a river basin tends to spawn the homogeneous and mutually dependent society which makes an excellent nucleus for a unitary state. Big rivers naturally make for big states, and so the Amazon integrates much of Brazil, the Yangtse much of China, and the Ganges much of India. Rivers, in essence, unite. They do not make good borders, however invitingly delineated on the map, nor do they lend themselves to being bisected by borders. On the contrary, ‘natural frontiers’ properly follow the outermost rim of a river’s watershed, however problematic the business of definition in such remote tracts.

To this rule the Mekong has long been a conspicuous exception. Historically it has spawned only one notable civilisation, that of Cambodia’s Khmers. But although Angkor, the Khmer capital, did indeed profit prodigiously from the freakish behaviour of the Mekong, it remained geographically tangential and politically indifferent to it. Likewise French Indo-China, while it would be postulated on the Mekong basin, would serve only to emphasise the incoherence of the lands which comprised that basin. For much of the river’s course the French would elevate it into an internationally recognised border which, in the second half of the twentieth century, would become that least permeable of all frontiers, an ideological divide. As the only substantial section of the Iron Curtain (or here sometimes the ‘Bamboo Curtain’) to be suspended along a riverbed, it cut most of south-east Asia in two, opposing the beneficiaries of a freer world on one bank to the ideologues of a fairer world on the other, and so turning every boat trip into an escape epic.

Today no fewer than six countries nestle along the river (China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam); and for about a third of its length it still serves as an international frontier. Uniquely it has not, then, united the peoples strung along its course, nor encouraged much traffic and transit between them. As the Mekong Exploration Commission would quickly discover, there are good, indeed unassailable, reasons for this aberration.

But they are not apparent in the Delta. In fact, in its lowest reaches between Phnom Penh (at the apex of the Delta) and the South China Sea (as its eastward base), the Mekong bustles about its business most responsibly, smiling beneath colossal skies as if to deny a lifetime of upstream excesses. Brimming through low-lying farmland and slopping into innumerable channels and waterways, it here supports a vast population, fronts a galaxy of jaunty riverside towns, provides a carriageway for all manner of river craft, and generally exhibits the benevolent features associated with deltaic abundance. It is, in short, highly deceptive; and the Mekong Exploration Commission could be forgiven for being deceived.

Saigon itself, which in 1866 was just an enclave of French rule in an as yet uncolonialised Vietnam, is not actually on the Mekong Delta. It has its own river, the Donnai, to which it stands much as London to the Thames, the port of Saigon being the furthest point upriver to which ocean-going ships can conveniently sail. To reach the neighbouring Delta, you must today board a hydrofoil on the Saigon riverfront, skim down the Donnai’s leaden reaches past oilrigs and freighters to its estuary, and then turn right at the South China Sea.

Alternatively you can take a shortcut by making an earlier right turn into the Arroyo de Poste. An arroyo is a creek, a minor watercourse. This one, a linkage of wiggling tributaries and narrow canals, connects the sullen mangrove-fringed Donnai to a lusher landscape along the Tien Giang, the most northerly branch of the Mekong. It was the route taken in June 1866 by Canonnières 32 and 27, the pocket-gunboats by which the French explorers sailed up to Cambodia; and according to Lieutenant Garnier, it was too well known to merit description.

In that photo taken at Angkor, Lieutenant Marie Joseph Francis Garnier is the man lolling at the opposite end of the group to le Commandant Doudart de Lagrée. A gaunt little figure with deep-set eyes, he sprawls on the steps like the others and is not obviously set apart from them. One leg, though, is drawn up so that the foot can rest on the equivalent ledge to that on which Lagrée is enthroned at the other end. The foot is making a point. Garnier, as one of the instigators of the expedition, its surveyor and hydrologist, and the most senior in rank after le Commandant, was officially Lagrée’s deputy and so, by implication, second-in-command. Indeed the Mekong Exploration Commission is commonly referred to as the ‘De Lagrée-Garnier Expedition’ and sometimes, more controversially, as just the ‘Garnier Expedition’. Garnier would write both the official account of it and the best-known of the personal accounts. He would also collect all the medals and the plaudits. When Lagrée’s supporters objected, Garnier would respond with double-edged testimonials to his superior. ‘He was for us less a commandant than a father,’ he would write.

This at least rang true. A wiry twenty-six, Francis Garnier was much the smallest of the party and quite young enough to be Lagrée’s son. At Naval School the young François (he later changed the spelling to ‘Francis’) was nicknamed ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’, an unflattering reflection on the contrast between his trim diminutive build and his loud extravagant ambitions. For grand vision as for outstanding stamina and courage, no one must be able to fault Francis Garnier. Single-minded, impulsive and intrepid, he was out both to prove himself and to prove that he was right. He had, in short (so to speak), all the attributes of the indomitable explorer, including an acute sense of his own self-importance. This ruled out anything recognisable as humour. Like the distant Lagrée, the driven Garnier would not be easy company. Happily the remaining four on the steps at Angkor would betray more appealing traits.

By way of the Arroyo de Poste the expedition reached the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong at the town of My-tho, then headed upstream. The river is said to have nine mouths, nine being a fair approximation to the geographical reality as well as an exceptionally auspicious number throughout Buddhist south-east Asia. In mythology and art the river is usually represented as a nine-headed serpent or dragon (Cuu Long). But the nine open-mouthed heads on their nine sinuous necks grow from just two scaly torsos, the Tien Giang or Upper River and the Hau Giang, Bassac, or Lower River. Each about a kilometre wide, the Tien Giang and the Hau Giang comprise the main navigational channels up through the Delta, braiding together the seven other effluents until they themselves converge to form the parent stream at Phnom Penh.

On either side of these twin conduits the Delta fans out to both the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam (or Thailand). The map shows the Delta as eighty thousand square kilometres of very green land criss-crossed by a capillary of waterways. In reality, for at least half the year it is eighty thousand square kilometres of very glassy water criss-crossed by a web of causeways. The Mekong falls only six metres in its last eight hundred kilometres, but so low-lying is the Delta that the river in flood appears, and often is, the highest thing around. The land is so flat that from an upper deck you must allow for the curvature of the earth’s surface in counting the tiers of a distant pagoda; the lower ones may have ducked below the horizon. In fact the river feels as if it were itself cambered, with the boat driving along its crown, and lateral channels plunging to left and right or spilling under bridges to explore the orchards and inundate the cabbages.

After forcing its way for thousands of kilometres through mountain gorge and deepest forest, it is as if the river can scarcely believe its good fortune. Like a sluice released, it wells across the plain, exploring the arroyos, tugging at pontoons, basking in backwaters and generally making the most of its first and last unimpeded kilometres. Here nothing is quite what it seems. The man hoeing his field knee-deep in verdure turns out to be punting across it, his hoe a pole and his footing a boat. Behind him, along a tree-lined avenue, a rice barge churns into sight pushing a menacing bow wave. The Delta is said to produce more rice than any area of comparable size in the world. Beneath the glinting panes of water lie meadow and mud at no great depth. But rice-growing being a form of hydroponics, for the last six months of the year the fields are lakes and the landscape is a waterscape.

All that is not water in this aqueous world is ordained to wallow. Rusting car ferries shuttle across the main rivers with their decks awash. Upstream glides a mountain of pineapples propelled by a spluttering screw; downstream comes a haystack pirouetting on the current with a rudder and stern sticking out behind. Any craft boasting more draught than the thickness of a banana looks distinctly piratical, an impression heightened by the large painted eyes which adorn every prow and scan the flood ahead, lashless, boss-eyed and bloodshot, for any aquatic impertinence. By these eyes alone can one distinguish the houseboat from the house. Both are otherwise precarious constructions of water-blackened timbers festooned with clothing and potted geraniums.

Sampans, the river’s equivalent of bicycles, are the exception; they have no eyes because their bows, like the rest of the boat, lurk below the wash. Standing in midstream, the boatgirl plies her oars with the dexterous click of chopsticks, leaning into them and flicking through the stroke with the toss of a glossy ponytail. Porcelain forearms are encased in long-sleeved gloves, and trousered legs aflutter with the tails of a white ao dai (the long-skirted and daringly slit dress beloved of the Vietnamese). She dips in time with the stroke like a decorous metronome. This is how angels would row. Villages perched on nests of drunken stilts loom from the haze like preening storks. Children and ducks upend in the water; lawns of water hyacinth undulate along the bank.

Even the weather is of a mind to wallow. Above the eastern horizon billowing pillars of cloud mount to the stratosphere as the gathering gloom below is ignited with a son et lumière spectacle. Steel-grey and flecked with ochreous rust, another storm is lumbering up from the South China Sea. Hastily tarpaulins are hauled over open holds. A high-sterned country boat, junk-like but for the absence of a sail, guns its engine and heads for shelter. In the gathering gloom a string of tanker-barges carrying diesel for Cambodia is overhauled by the deluge.

Floods in the Mekong Delta rival cyclones in the Bay of Bengal as one of Asia’s meteorological clichés. Seldom does the rainy season (June – October) pass without an inundation, and in towns like My-tho on the Tien Giang and Can-tho on the Hau Giang the provident householder owns a liferaft. Here sampans may be seen jostling with bicycles at the traffic lights. In adjacent homes families cuddle up on top of the furniture to watch TV across a room afloat with toys. Property and crops suffer; but the Delta is used to these things, and fewer lives are lost than in the flash floods which occasionally affect the hilly areas of Vietnam. Nor is the river wholly to blame. The storms and tides surging in from the sea bear an equal responsibility.

A curious feature of these monsoon inundations in the Delta is that, while exacerbated by incoming tides, they appear to occur only in the evening. In the morning there are no floods and no visible tide. Inescapably therefore, the Mekong Delta seems to receive only one tide a day; and two tides every twenty-four hours being the rule throughout the rest of our planet, this phenomenon looks to be unique.

Such a freak of nature should surely have engaged the attention of Francis Garnier as the Mekong Exploration Commission’s hydrologist. But in his haste to whisk the expedition up to Angkor as quickly as possible, Garnier wastes not a word on the matter. Nor, to be fair, do most other writers on the Delta. In fact this tidal oddity is so little remarked and so clearly unnatural that one might suppose it imagined.