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

Legally hauled from the weedy depths by line and net, trap, trawl and scoop, the silver bounty is notable for its variety as well as its quantity. Here are found fish that shoot down insects with missiles of mucus and others, much appreciated by the Mekong expedition, that attain the size of boats. There’s a carp that gets drunk, a perch that climbs trees, and a black catfish that, alone and mainly at night, goes walkabout down dusty lanes. There are also, say the experts, quite a few species that have still to be identified and literally hundreds that may already be extinct.

In season, when the water level is at its lowest, catches are landed by the boatload, manhandled by the bucketload and distributed by the tractorload. At one-off markets in waterside villages buyers and vehicles from all over Cambodia converge. A festival air prevails at these gatherings. The rice spirit flows, clean shirts and brightly coloured blouses glisten with sequin-like scales, and fishy swains find fishy brides amid mountains of silver pungency. Carted home, much of the product will be pounded, salted and putrefied into fish paste, an essential ingredient of south-east Asian cuisine and, for most of the population, their principal source of protein.

Without the river and the lake, the Cambodian diet would not be deficient just in protein; it would be deficient, period. Rice is the staple food and, here as in the Delta, rice does best where an inundation of nutrient-rich water can be relied on. This is what the shuttle behaviour of the Tonle Sap river so obligingly provides. The Great Lake is served by no major rivers of its own. During the long dry season between October and June it shrinks, falling by six metres and losing more than three-quarters of its surface area. The Tonle Sap river drains it into the Mekong like any other tributary; evaporation also claims its share. The first rains in early June make little difference. The lake would in fact never recover its volume were it not for the much faster rise of the Mekong.

By mid-June the Mekong at Phnom Penh is edging up by half a metre a week. The Great Lake now being lower, the Tonle Sap river goes into reverse. Instead of being one of the Mekong’s feeders, it becomes one of its branches, drawing off its current and so replenishing the Great Lake. By mid-July the Mekong is up several metres, and by late August it is in full flood, bursting not only its own banks but also those of the Tonle Sap river and the Great Lake. In a hydraulic feat quite as wonderful as the Delta’s ‘diurnal tides’, much of Cambodia becomes a vast reservoir enriched by all those suspended phosphates and nitrogens.

The rice farmer is ready with his seedlings. As the rains cease, the Mekong falls. Now lower than the Great Lake, it retracts its floodwaters; the Tonle Sap river starts to run back into the Mekong; and the Great Lake begins to recede. As it does so, the Cambodian heartland re-emerges as a sparkling Atlantis of vaguely concentric paddy fields. From the dry stubble of what was the lake’s outermost rim, the sun-ripe gold of harvest shades inwards to the lime green of a mature sowing and then the tender lemon-grass of wispy seedlings protruding from the water’s edge of the still-receding lake.

Thanks to this phenomenon, plus the potential for a second harvest in the winter months, Cambodia reaps all that it needs and conveniently does so over an unusually long period of the year, thus releasing a large section of the population for other activities. It has always been so. The wealth which made Angkor great and the surplus labour which made its monumental extravaganzas possible are commonly ascribed to this same freak of nature. Had Lagrée and Garnier paid closer attention to the behaviour of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, they might have anticipated the most likely answer to the conundrum of how an otherwise unfavoured jungle kingdom could have attained such magnificence. They might also have drawn a valuable lesson for future French empire. The Mekong’s importance lies in its role as a provider, not as a highway.

It has ever been so, but it may not remain so. In Phnom Penh and Saigon today’s hydrologists wax paranoid about the changes being wrought along the river’s middle reaches in Laos and Thailand, and especially along its upper reaches in China. The blasting of the riverbed to improve navigation, the construction of dams for hydro-power and irrigation, and the relentless deforestation of the whole basin could easily spell disaster to the hydraulic economies of Cambodia and the Delta. If the Mekong rises too high or too fast, people drown. If it rises too little or too late, they starve.

The situation is believed to be critical. Lights burn late, and long reports get written, in the Phnom Penh headquarters of today’s Mekong River Commission. A multinational watchdog concerned with the river’s ‘sustainable development’, this organisation publicly endorses many of the ambitious projects that its advisers privately decry. The contradiction between alleviating national poverty by large-scale development schemes and endangering individual livelihoods, usually those of subsistence farmers and ethnic minorities, by the fallout from these same schemes is proving difficult to reconcile. Dazzling projections and dire warnings emanate from the Mekong River Commission as erratically as they did from its near-namesake, the Mekong Exploration Commission of 1866.

Pacing the galleries of Angkor Wat, Francis Garnier made the length of its outer wall 3.5 kilometres, estimated that there were 1800 pillars in the temple itself, and scampering up its central tower, counted 504 steps for a measured height of sixty metres. The pillars were mostly single blocks of sandstone, each weighing up to four tons. ‘Perhaps nowhere else in the world’, he wrote, ‘has such an imposing mass of stone been arranged with more sense of art and science.’ To technical skills in the cutting and manoeuvring of megaliths that rivalled those of the Pyramids was added the spark of sheer genius. ‘What grandeur and at the same time what unity!’ he exclaimed. France, ‘to whom Angkor should belong’, had here a quite spectacular opportunity to proclaim its intentions in south-east Asia. He echoed le Commandant Lagrée’s sentiments in looking forward to the day when the site would be reclaimed for Cambodia, and he called on archaeologists, artists and historians to petition the French government to undertake a wholesale restoration.

These hopes would eventually be realised. The fretted towers of Angkor Wat – nine in total but five in angled profile and three per exterior façade – would be restored to Cambodia and become its national symbol. Looking like an unfolded paper cut-out, their silhouette is today everywhere – on postage stamps, official letter-heads, ministerial car plaques, TV news logos. Cambodians seem quite oblivious of the embarrassing fact that, but for the much-maligned French, the site itself might still be in Thailand. For it was thanks to the French authorities that Lagrée’s designs on the site would bear fruit. In 1907 Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ would be wrested from Bangkok, studied, partly restored, and impressively landscaped as per Garnier’s plea.

By the 1980s the towers of Angkor Wat also featured on the national flag. The blood-red flag above the towers is raised, and will lead the nation to happiness and prosperity,’ ran the national anthem. This was doubly ironic; for at the time the Cambodian nation, still traumatised by the rule of the Khmer Rouge and ravaged by famine, knew neither happiness nor prosperity, and Angkor itself had again slipped beyond Phnom Penh’s control. Indeed Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ had been re-lost, being now held by the outlawed Khmer Rouge who, with the connivance of Bangkok and the support of the Western powers, formed part of a national front at war with the Phnom Penh regime. Even as Angkor Wat’s profile fluttered on the blood-red flag, the towers themselves were reportedly being vandalised and their statuary sold off on the international art market.

Crises of national identity are to Cambodia much as floods are to the Delta. They well up with such depressing frequency that one is inclined to accept them as a condition of the country’s existence. Independence Day is celebrated on 17 April; there is also a National Day on 7 January. But what these dates memorialise is a vexed question; there are just too many liberationist contenders in Cambodia’s modern history. Independence could refer to Lagrée’s rejection of Thai suzerainty in 1863, to the French emancipation of the ‘lost provinces’ in 1907, to the demise of French rule in 1955, to the overthrow of the US-backed Lon Nol regime in 1975 (the right answer, incidentally), to the overthrow of the Chinese-backed Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) regime in 1979, or to that of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in 1989. Other possible candidates, already discredited and now ripe for demonisation, are the UN-backed administration of the early 1990s and the elected coalition of the mid-1990s. Only the Hun Sen regime, which overthrew the last-named in a 1997 coup, has definitely to be excluded on the grounds that, although often vilified, it has yet to be overthrown.

With such a sustained record of liberating itself from tyranny, Cambodian nationalism ought to command widespread respect. Yet the suspicion lingers that Cambodians have been forever redeeming themselves not so much from foreign aggressors as from fellow Cambodians. Bangkok, Paris, Washington, Beijing and Hanoi have found collaborators rather easy to come by in Cambodia because there is no consensus about what being a Cambodian means. Even Pol Pot’s sui-genocidal Khmer Rouge could claim to represent an indigenous tradition. They traced the roots of their revolution not simply to someone else’s little red book but to supposed Angkorian traditions of mass mobilisation and draconian discipline in the pursuit of an ideologised utopia.

Of neighbouring Laos as late as the 1950s it was said that most people who lived there had no idea that they belonged to a state called Laos. Cambodians were no doubt better informed, but not therefore more involved. As Lagrée and his companions would be delighted to discover, the region was woefully lacking in those structural elements – centralised administrations, respected institutions, shared interests, recognised frontiers – which underpin statehood and steady other national mansions. Like inland Africa, inland south-east Asia had plenty of political building timber but, as the twentieth century dawned, it had yet to evolve a stable and convincing architecture. Cambodia was still waiting for the French to reclaim Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’, without which it was like a Scotland minus the Highlands. As for the anthropologists’ paradise which is Laos, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that most of its hundred-odd – and some of them very odd – ethnic groups would even be identified.

Yet international opinion as represented by organisations like the League of Nations and the UN made no allowance for such delinquency. Existing states were meant to correspond to coherent nations, and those that did not, supposedly soon would thanks to the process called ‘nation-building’. Hence the credit for the survival of a country like Cambodia – or the insinuation of one like Laos – belongs less to the strength of its nationalist sentiment and more to a benign, if alien, world order which decrees that all existing states are inviolable. Whether they are viable is another matter.

The symbolism of Angkor relies heavily on Indian ideas of a formalised cosmos in which the earth, the oceans and the universe are organised and harmonised round a central axis, a hub. This axis was represented two-dimensionally as the concentric rectangles (or wheel-like circles) of a mandala, and three-dimensionally as a conical mountain, the mythical Mount Meru. Meru’s elevation idealised the symmetry and hierarchy of a universal order to which human society must aspire and legitimate authority conform. The spatial arrangements of each of Angkor’s monuments, and above all their soaring towers, demonstrated how the authority of the Khmer kings was both cosmologically ordained and divinely favoured.

In lands as flat as the Mekong Delta, natural hills might also be co-opted into this grand scheme of environmental protocol. A phnom is a mountain. The phnom in Phnom Penh is barely as big as the stupa which crowns it, but Phnom Krom at Siem Reap is a respectable hill and has no rival on the circumference of the Great Lake. Crossing the lake all boats, coal-fired canonnières or turbo-charged cruisers, steer for Phnom Krom. It flanks the estuary of the stream which leads up to Angkor, and somewhere near its base (precisely where depends on the height of the lake) the cruisers disgorge their passengers.

Here, in 1866, the officers on Canonnière 27 had bivouacked for the night. Next morning they had risen early to scale the phnom; and on its summit, confronted by their first Angkorian monuments, Lieutenant Louis Delaporte had taken out his sketchpad to begin the pictorial record of the journey.

Besides le Commandant Doudart de Lagrée, surveyor/hydrologist Garnier and political officer de Carné, the expedition’s senior personnel included three other officers. Two were naval surgeons with specific responsibilities. Dr Clovis Thorel was in charge of botanical observations and discoveries, and Dr Lucien-Eugène Joubert of geological and mineralogical data. Official French expeditions tended towards the multi-disciplinary. No field of enquiry was to be neglected, and the resulting concourse of savants could resemble a symposium on the march. Napoleon Bonaparte had set the standard. His 1798 invasion of Egypt had been accompanied by such an impressive array of archaeologists, agriculturalists, historians, irrigationists, surveyors, draughtsmen and natural scientists that its report attained encyclopaedic status, with no fewer than twenty-three monumental volumes – the famous Description de l’Égypte. The Mekong Exploration Commission’s remit was less ambitious. In somewhere as inconnu as Indo-China it was concerned more with economic and political potential, with investigating what might be made of the place rather than appropriating whatever might already exist.

In addition to their scientific researches, Drs Thorel and Joubert would find their medical expertise much appreciated, and likewise their easy-going temperaments. Both were in their thirties, so older than the others (bar Lagrée) and perhaps less excitable. Thorel had been in Annam for five years and had some experience of working with its montagnards, or hill tribes. Joubert, though a more recent arrival, had been in Africa and had lately undertaken a geological survey in upper Senegal. He could claim a basic expertise, otherwise in short supply, in what would now be called ‘survival skills’; as the tallest and physically most robust, he would also attract local attention as the ‘Jumbo’ of the party.

Finally there was Lieutenant Louis Marie Joseph Delaporte. ‘As draughtsman and musician he principally represented the artistic aspects of the expedition.’ So put, Garnier’s introduction of Louis Delaporte seems to imply reservations about the necessity for a violinist-cum-illustrator, especially one whose few months in the colony had been spent laid up with fever. Although he was supposed to assist with the survey work, Delaporte’s inexperience and general levity at first went down badly with ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’. Elsewhere we learn that Delaporte’s naval prospects had been blighted by an untreatable disposition towards seasickness and, more generally, by ‘a great dislike of the sea’. He was evidently someone who had joined the navy to see the world, but not in ships. After some grim months in the north Atlantic he had hailed the leafy arroyos of the Delta with relief and there began sketching. His work attracted favourable comment. Although Lagrée had someone else in mind as his draughtsman – and Garnier perhaps anyone else – Admiral de Lagrandière had chosen Delaporte.

Nothing if not resilient, Delaporte would rise above such things. In a coloured version of the group photo (on which he presumably painted in the colour), his chestnut trousers invite more comment than his outsize head. Other portraits show a head so disproportionate as to suggest deformity. He looks a bit mad. But what is more significant is the fact that of Delaporte there are indeed other portraits. Against the odds, he and he alone was destined for a long and distinguished career as an explorateur. It began at Angkor, to which only he would ever return, and it would continue amongst Angkorian archaeology, of which he would become the outstanding champion of his generation.

As for the Mekong journey, it is largely thanks to Delaporte that it still has any popular resonance at all. His written contribution to the official report and to Garnier’s personal narrative would be much the most readable, vivid and sympathetic of all the writings on the expedition. He wrote with the observant eye and the kindly heart of a genuine enquirer. Still more memorably, he drew with the genius of a considerable artist. His pictures, worked up from sketches made throughout the course of the journey and then engraved as plates for the various published accounts, have since achieved a much wider currency. Not exceptional are the fifty-five Delaporte plates which, unacknowledged and extensively recaptioned, illustrate Ross Colquhoun’s 1885 book Amongst the Shans. As ‘period prints’, Delaporte’s drawings now hang in upmarket hotels from Hong Kong to Bangkok, feature in tourist brochures, grace many a calendar, and have been reliably reported adorning the nether regions of a Kunming massage parlour. Siem Reap’s newly opened Foreign Correspondents Club has a few Delaporte prints hanging amongst its press photos; the town’s grandly restored Grand Hôtel d’Angkor has whole walls of them.

In the days before photography became an easy option for the traveller, no expedition was better served by its artist. Like Garnier’s writings, Delaporte’s pictures would capture the exoticism of the whole enterprise and especially that interplay of innocence and menace, of moments of serenity between eruptions of madness, which became the received image of the Mekong. Long before Conrad and Coppola, before Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Louis Delaporte created the idea of the river at the ‘heart of darkness’; and to see the Mekong today is to look through eyes on which this idea, his image, is indelibly imprinted.

Phnom Krom was a case in point. Near the summit of the hill beside the Great Lake there stands today the most rundown wat in Cambodia. Mangy dogs scratch and snarl in the shade of its sala (the raised and roofed assembly room). An updraught from the lake eddies around the deserted courtyard, lifting the dust and wrapping an amputated tree in bandages of shredded polythene. The prayer hall is locked, information unobtainable. Most of Cambodia’s monasteries were sacked by the Khmer Rouge, and this one looks as if it has yet to be reconsecrated. But a little further, a little higher, and seven centuries earlier, the hilltop cluster of Angkorian stupas provides instant reassurance to a Delaporte disciple.

Clearly his upriver pictures with their naked savages and their jungle fronds of wallpaper intricacy owed something to artistic licence. Rhinos rootling through an abandoned palace, and elephants crowding the rock-strewn riverbed, were what nineteenth-century romantics expected. Dr Thorel teetering through the forest canopy in search of orchids was what his employers expected. For the exploding cataracts and the sheer Niagaras, as for the forest cathedrals and the obelisks of rock, allowance has also to be made. The river couldn’t actually be that fast or the trees that vast. Delaporte was exaggerating.

But not apparently with the ruins of Angkor. The three stupas of Phnom Krom are still much as he drew them. A tree has disappeared, and another has grown where there had been none. The stupas (Buddhist memorial monuments, also known as chedis, chortens, dagobas, thats or topes) look more precarious, and some of the masonry is missing. So is the stone Buddha figure that Delaporte had found lying in a bush. Otherwise all is exactly as depicted in 1866.

It is the same at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, at the Bayon and at the Bakheng (another hilltop site). To the casual observer the buildings look practically unchanged. Allowance has to be made only for the sometimes artful composition of the picture and for later site clearance of some of the more riotous vegetation. In all other respects the fidelity of Delaporte’s drawings of Angkor cannot be faulted.

This seemed to raise an intriguing question. Perhaps artistic licence was not in his repertoire. As the draughtsman for a scientific expedition, accuracy should have been paramount. Perhaps the elephants and the orchids, the lowering forest and the raging river were not exaggerations at all. Being on guard against his ‘heart of darkness’ image did not mean discounting it altogether. Perhaps upriver the gorges were still as grand, the waters as wild, and the menace as tangible as his pictures suggested.

Regardless of their accuracy, what makes Delaporte’s drawings so appropriate is their apparently prophetic quality. In 1866 Cambodia’s nightmare – ‘the horror … the horror’ evoked by Conrad and echoed by Coppola – had yet to materialise. It burst upon the country a hundred years later in the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Although the hell lasted less than a decade, it left such a reek of pain that today even the place names – ‘Svey Rieng’, ‘Kompong Chhnang’, ‘Stung Treng’ – sound like agonised utterances hissed through the gritted teeth of the dying. Actual shrieks and screams were strictly forbidden in the interrogation cells. To discourage reactions so reactionary, there was always another tweak in the torturer’s repertoire. Men protested their pain, if at all, with a click of the tongue and guttural retchings. Dying, too, was a hushed affair, rarely worth a bullet; and contrary to received opinion, much of it was not even intentional.

‘Fried frog and chips’? Or ‘virgin pork uterus in sour sweat sauce’?

The menu in today’s Café Kampuchino in Siem Reap reads like a witchdoctor’s shopping list. Cambodia’s culinary ingenuity was legendary long before the Khmer Rouge; it extends to various sorts of rat, bat, toad and snake, some of the larger, scrunchier insects, and assorted innards and extremities from more familiar animals. No great courage is required to order these things. Like heavily advertised promotions the world over, they are never available. ‘No have,’ says the waiter, scrutinising the carte as if he has never seen it before. ‘Bat no now,’ ‘Entrail finish,’ ‘Frog tomorrow.’ The list of fare is in fact a wish-list. Only rice or noodles with vegetables and a few proteinous trace elements can be guaranteed. As for the more delectable sections of, say, a chicken – the bits between its feet, its beak and its parson’s nose – they never appear. What happens to breast, leg, wing and wishbone is one of the inscrutable East’s best-kept secrets.

In the 1970s, participants in the socialist experiment pioneered by the Khmer Rouge were reported as being reduced to scouring the rice stubble for edible bugs and devouring any vertebrate in its entirety. From the killing in the Killing Fields not even butterflies were exempt. Lice were reportedly prized fare in the death camps. Cambodia was starving; and during its ‘holocaust’ far more died from malnutrition – and the reduced resistance to malaria that resulted – than from the better-documented incidence of torture, strangulation or a blow to the back of the head at the edge of a pre-dug grave.

The Khmer Rouge called their collective and depersonalised leadership the Angkar, which is usually translated as ‘the Organisation’. Organisation was precisely what it failed to provide. Allied to a lethal ideology, it was sheer inefficiency that turned the country into an abattoir. Although the numbers are disputed, the human death toll ran into seven figures; so, at the time, did the country’s total population. But a tragedy on such a scale will ever be incomprehensible if reduced to newsworthy trivia about people eating bugs.