JOHN KEAY
MAD ABOUT
THE MEKONG
Exploration and Empirein South-East Asia

DEDICATION

FOR ALEXANDER

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

An Indo-China Chronology

1 Apocalypse Then

2 Shuttle to Angkor

3 To the Falls

4 Unbuttoned in Bassac

5 Separate Ways

6 River Rivals

7 Hell-Bent for China

8 Heart of Darkness

9 Into the Light

10 Death in Yunnan

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

A Short Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

FOREWORD

In the great age of exploration, while momentous expeditions in Africa were grabbing the English-language headlines, a French initiative through the heart of south-east Asia was arguably more ambitious than any of them. The Mekong Exploration Commission of 1866—68 outmarched David Livingstone and outmapped H.M. Stanley. It also outshone them in that display of sociological categorising, economic sleuthing and political effrontery that was expected of nineteenth-century explorers. In darkest Africa the British were feeling their way, but the French in tropical Asia unashamedly advertised their patriotic intentions, planted their flag and promoted their rule wherever they could. Empire-building was their business. An ‘empire of the Indies’, otherwise French Indo-China, would duly emerge as a direct outcome of the expedition.

The human cost of travel in the south-east Asian subcontinent was as high as in Africa, and the disappointments just as acute. Danger overtook the Mekong expedition within a week of its official departure; tragedy struck within a week of its effective conclusion. In between, as they clocked up the months and the kilometres in a marathon of survival, the explorers fought their way through the equatorial forests of Cambodia and Laos to climb from the badlands of remotest Burma onto blizzard-swept tundra along the China-Tibet border. Rarely was at least one of the six officers – and sometimes all of them – not delirious or incapacitated. Tigers barred their path, village maidens diverted their attentions, forbidden cities yielded up their secrets. The boats got smaller and the river more impetuous. They took to the jungle, riding on elephants, bullock carts and horses; mostly they just sloshed through the monsoons knee-deep in mud and festooned with leeches. If only as an epic of endurance, the story of the Mekong Exploration Commission dwarfs nearly all contemporary endeavours.

Yet – and hence this book – it is to most people unknown. Doudart de Lagrée, Francis Garnier and their companions are not household names. Any geographical features once called after them have long since been erased from the maps; and histories and anthologies of exploration habitually ignore them (my own included). One might suppose this to be an anglophone conceit. Had the Commission been British, London would now be graced with statues of the Mekong pioneers, streets would be named after them, and symposia convened for them. Their mistake, as Garnier himself wryly put it just before his premature death, lay in being born French.

Posthumous amends had, I presumed, been made in Paris, but it was during an encounter with the French ambassador in London that I first found a chance to confirm this. By way of something to say, I enquired how the Commission was commemorated in France. The ambassador looked blank. A charming and erudite diplomat, he evidently didn’t understand the question. I plied him with names, dates and places. He shook his head.

‘Never heard of them, I’m afraid.’

‘But that’s like a British ambassador saying he’s never heard of Dr Livingstone, or Scott of the Antarctic.’

‘Ah, but you don’t understand. In France we have a different attitude to the colonial past.’

A visit to Paris eventually bore this out. Except in the Bibliothèque Nationale and among the treasures poached from Angkor in the Musée Guimet, mention of the Commission brought nothing but Gallic shrugs. A friend whom I counted as an ardent supporter eventually confessed that even he only knew of the expedition because of my incessant prattling about it. Rue Garnier turned out to be named not for Francis Garnier; likewise the tomb in the Père Lachaise cemetery that is commonly awarded to him. Both pertain to some other Garnier. The short entry under ‘Garnier, Francis’ in the popular Larousse dictionary of biography contains only a sentence on the expedition; there is no entry at all for its leader, Doudart de Lagrée.

If one excludes the writings of its own personnel, scarcely any more accounts of the expedition exist in French than in English. The most recent and well researched (J.P. Gomane, 1994) appears never to have got beyond the limited circulation accorded to a typewritten thesis so scrunched into its binding as to be almost unopenable. The most ambitious and accessible reconstruction (Osborne, 1975) is by an Australian.

Celebrating dead exponents of a somewhat discredited profession seems to be an anglophonic obsession. The French ambassador, though far too diplomatic to say so, appeared to imply that while the British were today mired in nostalgia for their imperial past, the French were above such things and in healthy denial of their own colonial aberrations. Without going into the reasons for this – which may derive as much from present confidence as from past trauma – I felt encouraged. Here was a story that could usefully be retold.

The history led to the geography. Intrigued by the expedition, I became enthralled by the river. For reasons that will emerge, the Mekong is quite unlike any of the world’s other great waterways. Far from inviting navigation it emphatically challenges it with an unrivalled repertoire of spectacular water features. As if not in themselves sufficiently discouraging, the expedition found these appalling physical difficulties compounded by political uncertainties. Colonial rule would fail to remove either, and for the past half-century ideological, bureaucratic and piratical obstructions have barred the river’s course more effectively than ever.

But there has recently been a change. In the late 1990s border restrictions were eased, new rivercraft were introduced in Cambodia, and some controversial channel-clearance was begun on the Sino – and Lao – Burmese borders. For the first time in living memory retracing the route of the Mekong Exploration Commission became feasible, if not easy. A golden age in Mekong navigation looked to be dawning.

Sadly it could prove to be short-lived. Water conservation tops the agenda of all the riverine states, while hydro-electricity provides some of them with their main export-earner. In Chinese Yunnan the river is already dammed. So are many of its downstream tributaries; the chainsaw and the mechanical digger are everywhere gouging roads round unsuspected contours; and extant plans threaten to transform the entire hydrography. Natural forest, traditional livelihoods, and the occasionally alarming interplay of menace and innocence in this great green basin may all be swept away within the next few decades.

The rehabilitation of the river could prove its undoing. On the other hand, rehabilitating the story of its exploration may be instructive. Scarcely anywhere has been more traumatised by recent history than mainland south-east Asia. Retracing the expedition’s trail means revisiting the aftermath of more twentieth-century wars – international, civil, ‘secret’ and ethnic – than even the Balkans can boast. (The Vietnam war was the third but by no means the last.) It means circumventing the best natural forest because of the unexploded ordnance, tripping through smiling landscapes memorable for unparalleled savagery, and paddling up tranquil reaches still infamous for narco-insurgency. The experience takes the edge off unalloyed enjoyment and, for a Westerner, invites self-recrimination.

But stay the whip; for the Eden into which the Mekong Exploration Commission first blundered also fell far short of the idyllic. Slavery, banditry and the prevalence of almost every known tropical disease so appalled the Frenchmen that they seemed to justify colonial intervention. The explorers did not, though, berate the prevailing rulers, and mostly they thought well of the Buddhist establishment. They just diagnosed and prescribed. Blaming the acknowledged ills of one society, or one century, on the presumptions of another demeans them both.

It is simply the sequential nature of events, and in this case of intervention—its logic and its consequences – that may be instructive. As with the river at the heart of this story, natural obstructions and human interference contain merit as well as menace. Flooded forest provides the ideal spawning ground for fish; hillside erosion upriver guarantees alluvial abundance in the Delta; and the colonial cake-cutting urged by the expedition probably forestalled more cataclysmic strife than it created. Like fully-fledged trees being tumbled perilously through the rapids, events take their course, not easily deflected yet foreseeable as to season and direction by those who trouble to study the current and read the weather.

AN INDO-CHINA CHRONOLOGY
THE ADVENT OF THE FRENCH

1859 | French naval force seizes Saigon.
1862 | Three Mekong Delta provinces round Saigon ceded to the French.
1864 | Franco – Cambodian Treaty makes truncated Cambodia a protectorate.
1865 | French naval ministry champions exploration of Mekong.
1866–68 | Mekong Exploration Commission.
1867 | French seize remaining Delta provinces.
1869 | Survivors of Mekong expedition return to France.
1870 | Paris besieged in Franco – Prussian War.
1872 | Dupuis takes arms shipment to Yunnan up the Red River.
1873 | First French intervention in Tonkin (North Vietnam); death of Garnier.

THE FRENCH ADVANCE

1883 | New French offensive in Tonkin brings protectorate over the Annam emperor.
1885–86 | British invasion and annexation of Upper Burma.
1886–91 | Pavie contests Siamese (Thai) sovereignty in Laos.
1891–93 | French attempt to navigate Falls of Khon; Stung Treng seized.
1893 | Paknam Incident and French blockade of Bangkok. Franco-Siamese Treaty ends Siamese sovereignty in Laos.
1894–95 | Pavie/Scott clash over Franco-British buffer (Muong Sing).
1896 | Anglo – French Declaration secures neutrality of truncated Siam. British Burma’s claims to Muong Sing withdrawn.
1904 | Franco – Siamese Convention adjusts Siam – Cambodia frontier, accords Laos west bank enclaves at Bassac and Luang Prabang.
1907 | Franco – Siamese Treaty brings return to Cambodia of ‘lost provinces’ (including Angkor).

FRENCH WITHDRAWAL AND US INTERVENTION

1930 | Nguyen Ai Quoc (‘Ho Chi Minh’) founds Indo-Chinese Communist Party.
1942–45 | Japanese overrun south-east Asia.
1945–54 | First (French) Indo-China War.
1949–50 | Triumph of Mao’s Communists in China. Some Chinese Nationalists (KMT) relocate in Shan states.
1954 | Geneva Accords and defeat at Dien Bien Phu end French rule.
1962 | Military (General Ne Win) seize power in Burma.
1963–73 | CIA’s ‘Secret War’ in Laos.
1965–66 | First US ground troops arrive in south Vietnam.
1967 | ‘Second Opium War’ as Shan, KMT and Lao drugs barons clash.
1968 | 500,000 US troops in Vietnam. US bombing of Cambodia begins.
1973 | Paris Agreements herald withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.
1975 | Saigon falls to North Vietnamese, Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge, and Pathet Lao triumph in Laos.
1975–79 | Cambodia under Khmer Rouge.
1979 | Vietnamese invade Cambodia, install puppet (Heng Samrin) regime.
1988 | Burma’s military rulers suppress democratic victory (Aung San Suu Kyi).
1989 | Vietnamese withdraw from Cambodia. Burma’s insurgent Communist leaders come to terms with Rangoon.
1991–93 | Paris Peace Accord leads to UN deployment in Cambodia and elections.
1997 | Hun Sen overthrows elected Cambodian government, engineers own mandate (1998, 2003).

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 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.

Confirmation can be found, though, in the appendices to volume two of a little-read but delightful work by H. Warington Smyth entitled Five Years in Siam. During his five years in the employ of the Siamese (Thai) government as a minerals prospector Warington Smyth also noticed the occurrence of what he calls ‘diurnal tides’ (once-daily, as opposed to the universal ‘semidiurnal’, or once-half-daily, tides). Writing in the 1890s and with reference to Thailand’s Menam river (or Chao Phraya) below Bangkok, he too had been puzzled and felt the matter worth investigating. This he had done with thoroughness, making his own observations throughout his five years, looking up such tide records as existed, and consulting all manner of seafarers.

‘The tides in the Gulf of Siam’, he begins, ‘present peculiarities which are at first very confusing to the observer.’ These peculiarities ‘originate in the China Sea’ and are detectable, in varying degrees, all down the coast from Hong Kong to Saigon and on round into the Gulf of Thailand and Bangkok. At certain times of the year, just after a full or new moon, and most noticeably in the estuarine approaches of rivers which are in flood, alternate tides vary markedly in size and duration. Thus it happens, continues this paragon of memorialists, that the flow of the lesser tide, usually that in the morning, may be overwhelmed, indeed completely obliterated, by the ebb of the greater, usually that in the evening.

Warington Smyth follows this with complicated notes on how the lesser tide, over a twenty-eight-day period, gradually swells as it gets later in the day until eventually it usurps both the dimensions and the hour of the last great tide. Sadly he ventures no opinion as to why this phenomenon occurs. Even today the workings of the attractive mechanism by which the moon and sun control the action of the tides are not widely understood. But he does note that ‘the highest tides are much influenced by the wind’ and that a brisk easterly can ‘add another half a foot’ even in the Gulf of Thailand, which is a more sheltered shore than that of south Vietnam.

This diurnal mother-of-a-tide ought, of course, to spell disaster to the Delta. A salty inundation, albeit only once a day, would soon sour the world’s most productive ricebowl and turn the green dazzle of paddy into maudlin thickets of mangrove like those along the Donnai below Saigon. What prevents such a disaster is the power of the mighty Mekong. The inrushing tide meets the outrushing river, and in the best traditions of ecological equilibrium they compromise. The river rises, its progress barred by the tide. The backing-up of the river by a big ‘diurnal’ is measurable as far upstream as Phnom Penh and beyond. But there and throughout the three to four hundred kilometres down to the sea, salination is barely detectable. The floodwaters surging through My-tho and Can-tho leave no salty sensation and are, in a manner of speaking, fresh. The river thus defends the Delta from its deadliest foe since the rising waters are overwhelming its own, not the China Sea’s.

So too is the silt. For their major export crop the Vietnamese have to provide only seed and labour. The rest is down to the river. The farmers of the Delta plunge their rice seedlings into Mekong water and then anchor them in Mekong mud. In general, facts about the river are disputed. Is it the world’s fourteenth longest or its twelfth? Is its discharge the fifth largest or the sixth? No two books agree; even the river-mad Garnier never hazards a guess on such matters. But that it reigns supreme as the world’s most industrious earthmover seems highly likely. The Mekong in spate discharges not muddy water but runny mud. A cup of Turkish coffee, heavily sugared, has less sediment per cubic centimetre. In its suspended grit, modern propeller screws get so quickly blunted that riverside repair shops offer a regrinding and replacement service.

To offload this sediment – a sludge of mica and minerals from Tibet, Yunnanese phosphates, nitrogenous Burmese clays and leafy loams from Laos – the river waits until the plains of Cambodia and the Delta. There, as those capricious ‘diurnals’ halt its flow, and as its level drops after the monsoon floods, it deposits its burden in a silk-glistening tilth of prime growing potential.

Admittedly, when the Mekong Exploration Commission headed upriver in 1866, the diurnal tides may not have been very evident. From Saigon the expedition took three days to reach Cambodia. At night they moored by the banks of the Hau Giang and slept in the boats. Otherwise they stopped only at My-tho to load coal for the canonnières’ boilers. It was early June, and according to both Garnier and Louis de Carné (who also wrote a personal narrative of the expedition), the monsoon rains were then just beginning. The river would have been rising but not yet in flood; and if the moon was also unfavourable, the effect of the tides might have been negligible.

But if June is a bad month for observing tidal variation, it is the best of times for observing a still stranger phenomenon. Possibly unique to the Mekong and certainly germane to would-be empire-builders, this second fluvial aberration is as much the sine qua non of Cambodia as the ‘diurnal’ tides are of the Delta. Yet it too would elude the savants of the Commission. Perhaps they felt that until they ventured into what French maps called territoires peu connus they were off-duty so far as science was concerned. Measuring Angkor’s great wat was by way of an exercise. Likewise, their speculation on how such a jungle kingdom could have produced the world’s most monumental city was something of a formality and still rates high on the conversational bill-of-fare of every tourist. It never seems to have occurred to Lagrée and Garnier that between the mysterious river they were engaged to explore and the inexplicable splendours amid which they first congregated there lay a simple, if bizarre, cause-and-effect connection.

TWO
Shuttle to Angkor

The Mekon [in Cambodia] is a vast melancholy-looking river, three miles broad, covered with islands, and flowing with the rapidity of a torrent.’

LORD ASHBURTON,

President of the Royal Geographical Society, 1862

LIKE THE IMPETUOUS GARNIER, his young colleague Louis de Carné, the author of what would be the first account of the expedition to be published, allows just a paragraph for transporting the Commission’s personnel from Saigon to Angkor. The farewells had been fond, says de Carné. Some shook his hand ‘as if we were doomed’, more predicted ‘a speedy return after an abortive attempt’. Otherwise there was little to report. Six enervating months into his first Eastern posting, de Carné insists that he personally felt nothing, no excitement, no trepidation, just ‘a worldly indifference’. More a superior ennui, it would permeate his narrative and stay with him for the rest of his pathetically brief life. The climate showed him no favours; but in the light of later disagreements this early reserve smacks of pique. Like an unwanted playfellow scuffing a stone with studied indifference, Louis de Carné nursed the heavy heart of a misfit.

In the group photo de Carné is the one at the back dressed in black and with the thickest of spade-like beards; sunk in reverie, he looks to be slightly out of it already. At twenty-two he was the youngest of the party, and as a junior official in the French Ministry of External Affairs he was the only civilian, all the others being naval officers. Additionally he seems to have taken instant exception to the bullish and undiplomatic Francis Garnier. In the pecking order he rated ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’ as just another naval scientist, one among several and with no greater claim to the direction of the expedition than the rest. Only le Commandant could command; and it was thus to the more soft-spoken and dignified Lagrée that de Carné attached himself.

Like Lagrée, de Carné had aristocratic connections. His father was a comte and a member of the Académie Française, and his uncle was the self-same Admiral de Lagrandière who was governor of the colony. Young Louis de Carné owed his appointment entirely to this connection, a fact of which Garnier would miss no opportunity to remind him. As the expedition’s political officer reporting directly to the Quai d’Orsay, de Carné’s position was potentially influential; yet it was prejudiced by his inexperience and fraught with ambivalence. Unaccustomed to naval discipline, he was expected to submit to it. Untutored in any relevant science, he was liable to be treated as a dogsbody by his more qualified companions. And as one unknown to the colony’s naval establishment, he was widely suspected of being an informer for the civil authorities and the government of the day in Paris.

The government in Paris was that of the high-handed Louis Napoleon, otherwise Napoleon III. A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon had been chosen as French president in 1848 and had successfully installed himself as emperor in 1852. The next two decades were therefore those of the ‘Second Empire’, a period of ambitious national reconstruction well exemplified by Baron Haussmann’s proud grey boulevards in Paris and by a succession of sometimes quixotic enterprises overseas. An attempt to foist the francophile emperor Maximilian on the Mexicans would prove disastrous; so nearly were similar schemes in the Levant. On the other hand gains were made in west Africa and the Pacific. And after a long absence, the tricolour had been seen again in the Far East.

Other nations, notably the British and the Dutch, liked to think that they had come by their colonies either accidentally or as a result of patient trade and an earnest desire on the part of the locals for the security afforded by heavy cannon and accessible law courts. The French had no such illusions. They sought exotic dominions because, without them, France looked like a second-rate power. Nor could they be too particular as to how they acquired them. National prestige was at stake, and casual enterprise had failed. In the eighteenth century France had lost an empire in India to the British; in the nineteenth she had been consistently outbid in China, again mainly by the British. The British were also established in Lower Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya and Borneo; and they were menacingly well-placed in Siam (Thailand), where the Thai determination to hang on to Cambodia’s ‘lost provinces’ around Angkor owed much to a stiffening British presence.

By the 1850s, then, not much unattached Asiatic shoreline was left. If the Second Empire were to make any impression in the East, it had to move fast and ask questions later. The questions so deferred would include such details as what the place was for, how it would pay for itself, and what other nations, especially the British, would make of it. But the place itself was not in question. Between India and China the only remaining option had been the long thin strand which is now Vietnam.

Then called Annam, Vietnam was under an Annamite emperor based in Hué (roughly halfway up the Vietnamese coast) who claimed sovereignty over both Tonkin in the north (where Hanoi is) and ‘Cochin China’ in the south (where Saigon and the Delta are). Rarely, though, did Hué’s sovereignty go uncontested; and the consequent spectacle of repeated rebellions, disputed successions and arbitrary attacks on Vietnam’s mission-run native Christian communities had duly emboldened the government of Louis Napoleon to stake its claim. The plight of the missions meant that the clergy in France, on whose support Louis Napoleon relied, welcomed the idea; so did French commercial interests anxious for ready access to Oriental produce like cotton, silk and hardwoods.

The international situation also obliged. In 1858 Britain’s watchful eye was turned to India as all available troops were diverted for the suppression of what the sahibs of the Raj called the ‘Indian Mutiny’. Simultaneously there had occurred a lull in a joint Anglo – French assault on the Chinese empire. The French fleet, with time to spare, had been ordered south. Assisted by troops from the Philippines, whose Spanish rulers also supported missionary activity in Annam, it effected a landing at Tourane (now Da Nang), the nearest seaport to Hué. Tourane was slated to become a French trading station equivalent to British Singapore; and the emperor in Hué, presented with this fait accompli, was confidently expected to grant France commercial privileges elsewhere in Vietnam and protectoral status over the whole country.

Not surprisingly the Annamite emperor had other ideas. His troops gave a good account of themselves on the landward route to Hué, while the French ships found it impossible to force the city by way of its Perfume River. Stalemate ensued; and for the French, delay meant defeat – from the climate if not from the Annamites. After some fateful debate over the respective merits of Tonkin and Cochin China, the fleet sailed away, heading south again. In the judgement of its commander, the location of Saigon midway between Hong Kong and Singapore, plus the rice surplus of the Delta and the inland access afforded by the Mekong, were a persuasive combination.

Saigon had been duly surprised and taken in early 1859. Annamite forces responded by laying siege to the now French town; for over a year the garrison barely held its own. A second French expedition in 1861, on which the then twenty-one-year-old Francis Garnier served with typically rash distinction, saved the day. The Annamites were repulsed, and their emperor was obliged to cede to France the three small provinces adjacent to Saigon that comprised about half of the Delta.

A bridgehead had thus been established, though it was not quite what was intended. Instead of a protectorate over the whole of Annam – a cut-price arrangement with enormous potential – the Second Empire had been lumbered with a minuscule colony that was expensive to administer and not in the least bit prestigious. Saigon could never rival Singapore because it was sixty kilometres up the dreary Donnai with nothing to trade but rice. Moreover it afforded no obvious protection to Annam’s Christian communities, all of them a thousand kilometres away in Tonkin.

With the addition of Lagrée’s protectorate over a truncated Cambodia, such was the very limited extent of the French presence in south-east Asia when the Mekong Exploration Commission set off in 1866. Two years earlier even Louis Napoleon had been prey to second thoughts. The foreign affairs ministry in the Quai d’Orsay, Louis de Carné’s employer, was under pressure from the British, who upheld Bangkok’s claim to sovereignty over Cambodia. Moreover the French exchequer was facing a financial shortfall exacerbated by sustained resistance in the Delta that necessitated military expenditure of about twenty million francs a year against tax receipts of two million. The colony would never pay for itself; it was time to pull out, argued the government.

The Cambodian protectorate put a slightly rosier complexion on things, but it was the verdict of the naval establishment that carried the most weight. In Paris the Ministère de Marine (that is the navy ministry, or admiralty) had responsibility for all colonial operations. The Annamite initiative had been conducted by the Navy, the colony was run by the Navy, nearly all its officials were naval officers, and in Saigon as in Paris the Navy now adamantly opposed the retrocession of any territory.

In this debate – essentially a spat between the ministries of external affairs and marine affairs but with undertones of the running battle (it would run for forty years) between an ever cautious metropolis and an over-adventurous colony – Francis Garnier figured conspicuously. To rescue a shipmate washed overboard he had once leapt into the South China Sea; the man was fished out, and Garnier famously promoted. With the same hopeful bravado he now launched himself to the rescue of the colony. Soirees were held in Saigon and a pressure group of like-minded friends was formed; to whet commercial appetites an exhibition of colonial artefacts and produce was organised; and to better inform the home authorities a number of publications appeared, all proclaiming the future potential of ‘Indo-China’ in the most extravagant terms. Petitions bore the signature of Francis Garnier, but pamphlets carried the byline of ‘G. Francis’ – an alias of such crystal transparency that one wonders why he bothered.

In identical language, all urged the exploration of the Mekong as the certain saving of the colony. The river’s navigational potential was crying out to be realised; the rich mineral deposits (especially gold and silver) of its tributaries and the resins and timbers of its forests could only be exploited by French expertise and enterprise; likewise inland China, the country from which the river was believed to flow, waited only on French initiative for its fabled produce to come gushing downstream, so making the Mekong the rival of the Yangtse, and Saigon a second Shanghai.

The enthusiasm of Garnier and his companions could not be faulted; nor could their arguments be easily rebuffed in the then state of ignorance about the river. The powerful Navy Minister had gratefully taken up the cry, threatening resignation if not heeded. The struggling colony had been reprieved. And in 1865 the Mekong Exploration Commission had been authorised.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the colony’s future depended entirely on the success of the expedition; other factors would be just as influential. But the weight of colonial expectation was considerable and it bore heavily on all the expedition’s personnel, none more so than Garnier. Whether or not the Mekong itself lived up to his billing as a highway to inland China, he for one was resolved that the expedition must somehow proclaim the political, strategic and economic advantages of extending French rule in the region. In effect, he must make the case for what he called ‘a new empire of the East Indies rising in the shadow of our flag’.

Writing of the lands through which the river supposedly flowed, Garnier and his friends popularised the term ‘Indo-China’. Although not their invention, it epitomised their thinking. It would figure in the titles of the expedition’s official report, of Garnier’s personal account and of Louis de Carné’s. ‘Indo-Chine’ might be unknown to its inhabitants, but the adoption and promotion of the term by the French awarded to the lands along the Mekong a new and convincing territorial integrity. Better still, it defined this integrity in terms which other European powers would understand. The region was no longer to be regarded as some hybrid borderland between other people’s empires in India and China proper. As Indo-China, it was an arena for colonial endeavour in its own right. Indeed, in Garnier’s fevered imagination it would be to France an ‘India-and-China’ in one – compensation for past disappointments in both, and equivalent to either in prestige and potential. It would also be a sensational assertion of France’s revival under the ‘Second Empire’, and might one day become the ‘jewel in the crown’ of French possessions, indeed ‘le perle de l’Empire’ as later writers would put it.

The river offered some grounds for taking the idea of ‘Indo-China’ seriously. Its basin evidently embraced most of the lands that comprised the south-east Asian peninsula, and its course would be found to thread through them. Like the hanked necklaces nowadays being hawked in every Cambodian market, the looping Mekong strings together cultural souvenirs of unmistakably Indian provenance with jade-and-porcelain reminders of China, both being interspersed with filler-beads of dark wood and chunky silver from the intervening lands.

Angkor is Indian – or Indic, a word implying linguistic association rather than any aggressive acculturation from India. Debate rages as to the primacy given by its builders to Buddhist as opposed to Hindu cults (or, indeed, whether they should be deemed mutually exclusive); but the aesthetic of Angkor, the iconography, the scale and the building techniques all find parallels in the Indic monuments of Indonesia and take their inspiration from India itself. Also Indian are the Angkor scripts, indeed the Khmer script in use today and even the name ‘Cambodia’ (or ‘Kampuchea’ as those traditionalist sticklers in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime preferred); both words derive from Kamboja, a place name and lineage bestowed on several remote kingdoms in ancient Sanskrit literature.

To archaeologically inclined empire-builders like Lagrée and Garnier, Angkor’s Indian associations were as exciting as its scale. If for no other reason than to spite Britain’s pretension to a monopoly of all things Indian, they found the site a mouthwatering experience; and they did not doubt that it would soon be restored to Cambodia – and so come under French protection.

From their base in Angkor Wat, which Garnier immediately dubbed ‘the Buddhist Nôtre Dame’, they explored Angkor Thom, or ‘Great Angkor’, the nearby palace-city. Even the lugubrious de Carné was mildly impressed, although still determinedly downbeat. It was all very remarkable, he thought, but where were the people, their history, their literature? ‘The ruins of a monastery mouldering in the bosom of an English wood … move us more deeply.’ Mouldering English monasteries being the lowest form of what was recognisable as civilisation, Angkor was off the scale; it was just too much, too barbaric, too dead.

To the more fanciful Garnier it was more like a living fairytale. The city’s towered gateway with its myriad stone faces put him in mind of The Thousand and One Nights. They rode towards it on elephants through trees of Brobdignagian proportions and over a riverwide moat by the so-called ‘Bridge of Giants’.

You can still do this. The elephant-ride costs ten US dollars and the steel tubing of the howdah is reminiscent of a prison cage. But at least for elephants, the traffic is stopped and the gateway’s images may be examined at leisure. Alternatively you can just donate a fistful of Cambodian riels to the mahout; for that, you gain merit and the elephant gets a banana.

Crammed into one of the puffing little canonnières, the French explorers had taken two days to sail from Phnom Penh to Angkor – one to navigate the Tonle Sap river which connects the Mekong to the Great Lake and another to cross the Great Lake itself. Nowadays the whole trip takes five hours in an eighty-seater river-cruiser offering five karaoke, iced beer and chronic sunburn on the cabin roof. All boat journeys in Cambodia take five hours. Promoters have latched onto the idea that five hours is an acceptable journey time for foreigners, distance and horsepower notwithstanding.

Given a run of 270 kilometres, the Phnom Penh – Angkor cruisers go some way towards discrediting the idea that Cambodians have no sense of urgency. Snug at the apex of a surfer’s dream wave, they slice through the cat’s cradle of fishing lines along the Tonle Sap river, casually capsizing sampans and dousing innocent bottoms in slatted riverside toilets. Acres of water hyacinth are no impediment; they hightail over them like heifers on spring pasture, pausing only to reverse engines and disentangle propellers before making a three-hour dash across the choppy seas of the Great Lake itself. Big barn-like wats, startled from their morning meditations beneath a stack of upturned roofs, whiz past in a blur of maroon, gold and whitewash; corrugated towns peek from the towpath through a curtain of sugar palms; a hazy escarpment to the north interrupts an otherwise unpunctured horizon. Opinion rates the voyage an adventure, not a cruise.

At thirty knots it is quite impossible to ascertain which way the Tonle Sap river is flowing. For most of the year it definitely runs into the Mekong; but in June, when the expedition sailed up it, it was definitely running out of the Mekong. Garnier would confirm as much on the return journey. The Tonle Sap river is in fact that rarest of fluvial oddities, a river that flows both ways.

As the only link between the Great Lake and the Mekong, it is about eighty kilometres long and, where its course is defined by embankments, as wide as the Thames at Maidenhead. It is not deep, but like the Great Lake itself it supports what is said to be the richest freshwater fishery in the world. Fishing rights operate like logging rights and are no less controversial. Auctioned by the government, they make a substantial contribution to the national exchequer but occasion bitter accusations of corruption. Additionally successful contractors, in an effort to recoup both their bids and their bribes, are inclined to flout the regulations against electrocution-fishing and the use of explosives. The losers, apart from the fish, are inevitably the local fishermen, who nurse an abiding sense of injustice. Unpopular concessions require the protection of armed guards, and as catches decline, violent affrays are of frequent occurrence. These may have an international dimension. As in the timber trade, foreigners are well represented, notably the Vietnamese whose cross-eyed trawlers still monopolise the offshore waters of the Great Lake just as they did in the 1860s.

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.

For about nine years (1970–79) – five in partial control of the country and four in power – the Khmer Rouge set about the killings in the fields and the torturings in the camps with a ferocious intensity. Society had to be cleansed of those elements tainted with the ‘bourgeois criminality and debauchery’ of previous regimes. Cambodia must start again from ‘year zero’, building a socialist utopia based on the labour of the masses divided into agrarian communes. No wages would be needed; the Angkar would provide food according to need from the collective pool. State centralism was designed to protect the masses from exploitation, not to appropriate the fruits of their labour. And as dictatorial regimes go, that of the Khmer Rouge was indeed a model of incorruptible probity. Its leaders lived simply, extravagant consumption was unknown, and the revolution itself was subjected to relentless and mind-numbing analysis. The scrutiny, like the savagery, was always devastatingly sincere.

But in this excess of method lay utter madness. During a speech delivered in 1977, Pol Pot could congratulate ‘the great mass movement’ on having liquidated ‘the exploiting classes’ while in his next breath calling for a population of ‘fifteen to twenty million’. Having decimated the nation he demanded that it double. Years of civil war had already traumatised the country. US bombing had perforated the paddy fields and destroyed embankments, like those along the Tonle Sap river, by which floodwater was funnelled to crops. The ground fighting had dislocated vital distribution systems, like that of the Tonle Sap’s yield of fishy protein. Hundreds of thousands had flocked from the countryside to Phnom Penh for sanctuary. When the bandana-ed cadres entered the city in April 1975, they found a vast population that had become entirely reliant on US-aided food imports. These now ceased forth-with. Evacuation was the logical response.

The failure was not of logic but of logistics. In the absence of transport, shelter, medical facilities or adequate food, the evacuees were marched into the wilderness and there marooned to die of a combination of overwork, undernourishment and malaria, or to be systematically liquidated as scapegoats for the regime’s rank incompetence. Countryman killed countryman, neighbour neighbour, and cousin cousin not in the cold conviction of a racial holocaust but in a fight for survival born of mutual destitution and paranoia.

It ended when in 1979 the Angkar was ousted from Phnom Penh by a Vietnamese invasion that imposed its own regime under Heng Samrin, a Hanoi puppet. Seeking to legitimise itself, the new regime lit on the idea of publicising the atrocities of its predecessor. Former interrogation centres were reopened as tawdry holocaust museums; mass graves were exhumed and the bones, after being sorted into skulls and limbs, exhibited by the nearest roadside. As journalists began to trickle back into the country, Cambodians were encouraged to recall the horrors they had somehow survived. The blame was laid squarely at the door of the leadership as each witness duly told of siblings, parents, friends who had died at the hands of ‘Pol Pot and his clique’. But in reality the killers too were siblings, parents, friends. Thirty years later the survivors and their tormentors still live side by side in the same villages.

Downriver in Vietnam neither better times nor worse block the historical perspective. There the war with the US retains its immediacy, rumbling on not with bursts of resentment or hostility but in a wave of officially sanctioned nostalgia for a time of simple truths and inconceivable sacrifice. Army and air force museums compete for the nation’s affection with war crimes monuments, ‘War Remnants’ museums, theme-parked bunkers, downed aircraft doubling as climbing frames, and whole bazaars devoted to recycled armaments and US military memorabilia. With a reverence that would not be misplaced in the Uffizi, schoolchildren join veterans to study the photos – torture cages, dead and disfigured American airmen, defoliated villages, raddled call-girls. Thirty years on, and the war is still paramount in the national psyche. As a defining moment in Vietnamese history the fall of Saigon in 1975 ranks with the fall of the Bastille in French history.

But upriver in Cambodia memories of the carpet bombing initiated by Nixon and Kissinger have been swept under mats stiff with fresher bloodstains. Some of the craters left by the B-52s are now fishponds; others, after serving as receptacles for the harvest of the Killing Fields, have been reopened as genocide sites. Pol Pot’s pogrom obstinately blocks the historical perspective. ‘Year zero’ remains the psychological backstop of modern Cambodia’s calendar, and today’s government ministers, some of them tainted with Khmer Rouge associations, others with Vietnamese collaboration (and Prime Minister Hun Sen with both), naturally stall over bringing the killers to justice. They also agonise over the nation-building role to be accorded to the death camps and the mass graves. The exhumed skulls are still stacked by the roadside like bleached watermelons; but the visitors are mostly foreign tour groups and the souvenir potential is limited. Pol Pot is dead, but life does not go on.

The unbearable burden of recall placed on survivors of a conventional holocaust would be a relief to the survivors of a self-inflicted genocide. With no one to blame but themselves, Cambodians seem still to teeter on the edge of a pre-dug grave, restrained only by the presence of international agencies and the promise of foreign investment. The trees trill with the deafening protest of unseen insects. The earth smells of blood. Seeing the country as other than the site of a holocaust proves nigh impossible. A ‘heart of darkness’ horror occludes the charm; and the innocence of a natural paradise is irretrievably tainted by the horrors of its fall. As for the dozy colonial outpost that was Phnom Pehn whence in 1866 the Mekong Exploration Commission ventured into the unknown, it simply beggars conception.

Though Louis de Carné characterises the expedition’s stay at Angkor as a week of ‘painful trips and incessant study’, to Francis Gambier it had been more like a holiday. He would later complain that the time might have been better spent chasing up supplies and intelligence and preparing the subordinate members of the expedition for the rigours ahead. Instead, they pursued their individual interests. Lagrée archaeologised, Joubert geologised, Delaporte drew, Garnier mapped and de Carné moped. Only Dr Thorel did nothing; supposedly the best acclimatised of them all, he was the first to go down with dysentery. The others nursed him as best they could while they took the measure of one another. A routine of sorts was established in which each day ended with a round-the-campfire discussion on some weighty, if not philosophical, matter.

On 1 July they struck camp and headed back to the Mekong across the Great Lake and up the Tonle Sap river. This time it was definitely ‘up’ the Tonle Sap river, because Garnier noted that the waters had so risen during their absence that Kompong Luang, where Lagrée had his house, had become an island. Just above Phnom Penh, and perhaps where today the river-cruisers tie up, the little gunboats were moored and the expedition’s stores stowed aboard one of them.

To the heavy cases of instruments, preservatives and drawing materials, and to the decidedly generous quantities of flour and biscuit (five hundred kilos) and liquor (766 litres of wine, 302 litres of brandy) was added the wherewithal for defraying expenses. Cash came in gold bars, gold leaf, Mexican silver dollars and Siamese silver ticals to a total value of thirty thousand francs. The trade goods included bolts of velvet, silk and cotton, glass trinkets, an enormous quantity of brass wire and a selection of pistols and rifles. The brass wire was reportedly in great demand upriver, says de Carné; the guns were ‘a purely speculative investment’. At a rough calculation, the total displacement must have been around five tons, a hefty load for a cannonière and way beyond the capacity of most local craft.

Properly speaking, the river at Phnom Penh is the Mekong itself. To the French, though, this particular three-kilometre-wide reach was always Le Quatre-bras. The four arms’, or crossroads, corresponded to the junction of the four rivers: the Mekong itself which comes swinging down from the north, the Hau Tien which exits east, the Hau Giang (Bassac) which exits south, and the Tonle Sap which comes and goes somewhat north by north-west.

Poised on the bank of such a vital confluence, it is curious that Phnom Penh had only just been selected by King Norodom as his capital. Lagrée liked to think it was French protection that had emboldened the king’s move from his less accessible abode at Udong, and certainly the new site could be comfortably commanded by a canonnière’s cannon. Whether this was meant to reassure His Highness or to restrain him was debatable. A new palace was being built on the waterfront (where it still is), and the expedition’s send-off celebrations seem to have doubled as part of the dedication ceremonies. A sweltering evening of speeches, toasts, light refreshments and leaden jokes was cheered, though scarcely enlivened, by the appearance of gold-girt beauties performing the statuesque posturing which is Cambodian classical dance. The Frenchmen lusted dutifully, then fidgeted involuntarily as they melted into their dress uniforms.

Departure came as a relief. As they cast off, the French flag was run up the tiny mast of Lagrée’s canonnière. The other canonnière fired its single gun four times by way of salute, and on the command of a whistle – these things were strictly regulated – the crews cheered in unison ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ then, after another blast of the whistle, ‘Vive le Commandant de Lagrée.’ It was midday on 7 July 1866. There was no answering salute from the shore. The cheers died on the waters with the finality of what was indeed the last farewell. ‘A few moments later,’ says Garnier, ‘we sailed alone on the vast river.’

THREE
To the Falls

‘The highest point previously fixed by the French on the Great Cambodia River [i.e. the Mekong] was Cratieh, about 280 miles from the mouth. Beyond this a long succession of rapids was encountered, occurring in a scarcely inhabited region of splendid forest which separates Laos from Cambodia.’

SIR RODERICK MURCHISON,

President of the Royal Geographical Society, May 1869

ABOVE PHNOM PENH the river is at last the Mekong proper rather than one of its deltaic necks. Low-lying islands of unremarkable verdure clutter the stream and conceal its full extent; in Garnier’s day they were planted with cotton from which King Norodom derived a sizeable tax yield. Beyond them, knee-deep in bamboo fronds and badly in need of a hairbrush, spindly sugar palms reel across the floodplain like pin-men with hangovers. Untroubled and still unconfined, the Mekong wallows, buffalo-brown in a swamp of green, as if reluctant to reveal its majestic proportions in such disrespectful company.

More interesting is the traffic. Smaller, slimmer launches than the Angkor cruisers today swoop upriver to Kratie, bus-stopping at riverside pontoons to offload passengers and take on hardboiled eggs. Sampans and the occasional rustbucket recall the Delta; but both are here upstaged and outpaced by the first pirogues. In October, as the annual water festival in Phnom Penh draws near, pirogues predominate, darting out onto the river like agitated crocodiles. From bays and side creeks, from round the next bend and behind the last island, they nose into midstream, an Oxbridge armada not of rowing eights but of paddling eighties. The climax of the water festival is the boat races, and to that end competitors practise hard and then make their way downriver.

Most waterside villages, and quite a few nowhere near the river itself, participate. Each has its long racing pirogue and each racing pirogue is propelled by anything from twenty to a hundred paddlers ranged along its length in file. Many boats sport flags with their crews attired in identical bandanas, like cadres of some Khmer Rouge water fraternity. Others, clearly scratch outfits, have yet to master a stroke or merit team status. Adding much to the hilarity as well as the hazards, supporters offer abuse and encouragement from an accompanying flotilla of listing workboats and redundant ferries. Nowhere else, and at no other time, is the river so animated. The pirogues, sensationally tapered from hollowed-out tree trunks, skim between the sky above and the sky in the water, prows raised like fabulous sea-serpents.

Steaming upriver in July, with the rains growing heavier by the day, the Mekong Exploration Commission missed this spectacle. But come October they would find themselves at Bassac (now Champassak) in lower Laos and would there witness the same festival with equivalent boat races. Again Delaporte would be vindicated. He duly drew the scene: and but for the spectators, who seem somewhat underdressed and anthropologically over representative, he again took few liberties. Two of his most reproduced prints depict, respectively, the river races in the morning and the fireworks at night. In each there is much, perhaps too much, livestock and vegetation. Would not the pigs have taken their dustbath in the shade, or the elephants have been stampeded by the fireworks? But to carp at this is to nitpick, just like the mother cradling her child in the foreground. Delaporte’s pirogues are superb; profiled against the great white river they are aligned like words in an unknown script, random runes adrift on an empty page.

Kompong Cham, the first port above Phnom Penh, is today notable as the hometown of Prime Minister Hun Sen and as the site of a brand-new bridge. The two things are not unconnected. Kompong Cham roots for Hun Sen and Hun Sen rewards Kompong Cham. The country’s strongman is as locationally linked with its most impressive piece of civil engineering as are the two sides of the river by the bridge. This is, in fact, the only bridge across the Mekong in Cambodia, and as is the way with high-striding spans of gleaming ferro-concrete, it makes the river look misleadingly manageable. Having passed under it with eyes shut, a Mekong-lover may be excused for passing over it in silence.

In the 1860s there were no bridges over the Mekong anywhere, and this remained the case for more than another century. In Chinese Yunnan, where the river is called the Lancang, a rickety Meccano construction reportedly replaced the ferry in the mid-twentieth century; but below that, for over three thousand kilometres, the river was unspanned until 1994. It was as if, in the United States, there were no way to cross the Mississippi south of Minneapolis. The engineering was not the problem. Few rivers so obligingly constrict themselves. Bridges were not built because the traffic which might use them did not exist.

Amongst the world’s major rivers the Mekong, though neither the longest nor the largest, still enjoys the distinction of being the least utilised. No great ports disfigure its shores. Phnom Penh and Vientiane, though national capitals, scarcely qualify as cities; the towns are few and mostly disappointing; and the villages keep their distance, preferring the seclusion of a sidestream or the security of adjacent hill and forest.

In English, rivers are usually masculine and often geriatric – ‘Ol’ Man River’ or ‘Old Father Thames’. Fleuve in French is also masculine. But it was rivière, a feminine noun denoting a youthful river indirectly connected to the sea, which slowly gained currency among the personnel of the Mekong Exploration Commission. Their river was unquestionably female. Clad in virgin forest, she suffered no bridges across her bosom, no promenades along her brow nor trade routes down her limbs. Beguiling, wanton and capricious, in a pre-feminist era she conformed to every bearded bachelor’s fantasy of a wild maiden from the hills.

For this apparent neglect of commercial grooming there are sound practical reasons, the first of which was about to confront the Mekong Exploration Commission. Above Kompong Cham the islands of greenery compose themselves and rejoin the shoreline. In the dry season, their place midstream is taken by shoals of the finest sand on which the skeletons of mighty trees lie stranded. Propped on tangled limbs, the trees recline on the sandbars with feet in the air like giants on holiday. But in July, with the river rising, the giants launch themselves into the flood, a hazard to diminutive gunboats. More worryingly for the expedition, glistening gobs of muddy foam accompanied the trees and, drifting erratically with no apparent regard for the current, told of sub-surface disturbance and turbulent times ahead.

Low hills loomed simultaneously through the mist to the north. Excluding solitary outcrops like Phnom Krom, the hills were the first hint of higher ground. The landscape had at last acquired a horizon and the Delta a conclusion. To the Commission the prospect imparted a new sense of direction and purpose. This was quickened by the changing shoreline. Almost imperceptibly the river had settled between natural margins. Just low sandy ledges, they were the sort of cliffs on which thrift might thrive and sand-martins nest. Though unsensational, to new arrivals from the Delta they were another welcome novelty. After five hundred kilometres of welling, slopping, brimming confusion, the river had recognisable banks.

They soon grew higher. On the second day the expedition reached Kratie and had to climb from the landing stage up a long flight of muddy steps to gain the palm and bougainvillea parkland on which the village was scattered. Here they halted for a week. Though barely thirty-six hours into the voyage, it was time to trans-ship.

The new boats were dugout canoes, and although they had evidently been pre-ordered, they needed to be substantially customised for the conditions ahead. Meanwhile the five tons of baggage had to be carefully sorted and, not for the last time, ferociously reduced. ‘It foreshadowed the utter destitution which awaited us further on,’ noted the rueful de Carné.

This transfer, so soon after leaving Phnom Penh, raises questions about just how much Lagrée and Garnier already knew of the river ahead. Was it really about to take them by surprise? Or were they rather better informed than they pretended? If nothing was known of its navigational properties, why had they anticipated the need for canoes? Yet if canoes were inevitable, why had they burdened themselves with such an impossible quantity of luggage? And why, as the downpours of June were succeeded by the deluges of July, were they tackling the river at the height of the rains, the least comfortable season for travel and the surest for contracting malaria?

While they unpacked and repacked, the canonnière took its departure. Last letters home were hastily written and entrusted to the crew. As the gunboat pulled away, the six explorers felt as if they themselves were being cast adrift. Their last link with all that was French and familiar steamed out of sight round a bend in the river, leaving them to a silence broken only by the whine of mosquitoes. Kratie had nothing to offer. They lodged in a hut through whose roof dripped the rain. It was ‘a completely isolated village … with no commercial trade of any kind’, according to Garnier. The only way home was now the way ahead. ‘Henceforth France was before us, not behind us,’ wrote de Carné. ‘Our sights were set on China.’

But Lagrée, with the wisdom of years and the economy of the sore-throated, sounded a note of caution. Between Cambodia and China lay more than sixteen hundred kilometres of river attended, no doubt, by a like number of perils and disappointments. Excitement was premature, he croaked, if not downright dangerous; for was not ‘enthusiasm near neighbour to despair’?

Above Kratie leggy trees of impressive height and symmetry take up position along the river’s bank like spectators awaiting a naval review. The mud-thick flood, over a kilometre wide, nuzzles their roots and tugs at their dangling lianas but concedes nothing to them in scale. During the few months of the year in which navigation onwards to Stung Treng is possible, the little white passenger launch looks like a bathtime accessory as it skims through the frothy suds. In a setting so grand something more palatial seems called for – a Mississippi paddle-steamer, perhaps, with the orchestra playing, the tables set, and Scarlett O’Hara on the topmost deck against a blood-red sky.

This is not altogether fanciful. To patriotic French explorers the Mekong also brought to mind the Mississippi. Primed on colonial history, Garnier rarely missed a relevant parallel, while Louis de Carné’s diplomatic training lent an international dimension to his political horizons. In the early eighteenth century Louisiana had been French. It had been named in honour of Louis XIV, and its port of New Orleans had developed to provide continental access by way of the Mississippi. Subsequent French losses in the New World had been as much a matter for patriotic regret as those in India. To redress them, the Second Empire had just wished Maximilian on the Mexicans. And now, with the delicious complementarity which so appealed to Gallic logic, Saigon and the Mekong were supposed to afford that exclusively French access to the Asian interior which New Orleans and the Mississippi had promised to the American interior.

That was the theory anyway, and although it was about to be seriously compromised, the dream of one day being able to paddle-steam into the heart of the continent would not readily be relinquished. In the wake of the Mekong Exploration Commission a succession of pounding little vessels would, over the next fifty years, try and generally fail to force a passage upriver, prompting all manner of bizarre technological solutions, most of which would also fail.

The slim launch which today plies, conditions permitting, from Kratie to Stung Treng is the unworthy inheritor of this dream. A twenty-first-century apology for nineteenth-century presumption, it addresses the increasingly angry flood with circumspection, swooping across its troubled surface in search of sheltered water and unimpeded channels like an ice-queen on a busy rink. Hastily the luggage is lashed beneath plastic tarpaulins; passengers are ordered inside and the cabin door sealed. The turns become sharper, the engine noisier. Condensation streams down the windows as if the exertion were too much. But wiping away the trickles makes no difference. The waves thrashing against the hull on the outside preclude visibility. It is like being marooned in a storm-tossed diving capsule.

Although not the ideal way of experiencing the Mekong’s first rapids, the voyage compares favourably with a week of wet boating at the height of the monsoon. For the same run the expedition had secured a fleet of the dugout canoes which they called radeaux. The word translates as ‘barges’, but they were really modified pirogues. Closely related to those now reserved for racing, they were destined to become painfully familiar. Though their numbers would be reduced from the initial eight, this mode of transport would remain the same until the expedition abandoned the river altogether. Boats and boatmen would be frequently changed, a cause for endless delay and no little grumbling, but the style of boat and the method of propulsion would be much the same throughout.

Delaporte’s sketches faithfully portray the design. To the basic hollowed-out tree trunk, some twenty to thirty metres long, was added a roof made of hooped bamboos thatched with palm fronds which extended from stem to stern and made the boat look like a large waterborne caterpillar. This canopy was supposed to afford shade and shelter for the squatting passengers but was never quite high enough for comfort and nowhere near waterproof enough to keep out the monsoon.

More bamboo poles of much larger diameter were lashed to the gunwales in bundles to form a semi-submerged platform which ran the length of both sides and met at either end in a poop. Bamboo trunks being hollow, these side projections acted as flotation chambers, adding some much-needed buoyancy and stability to the overloaded canoes and acting, in effect, like the outriggers of a trimaran. The poop aft was where the helmsman rigged his steering sweep, that where the bamboos met at the bow was where the lookout sat. More importantly, the whole platform arrangement served as a walkway for the six to eight circulating boatmen. Down one side they punted, following their poles from stem to stern, and up the other side they panted, poles aloft, to start all over again.

More correctly this was not in fact punting but ‘piking’. Since the current in open water was far too strong for heavily laden craft to be paddled against, propulsion on the middle Mekong depended entirely on purchase. The poles were strictly pikes, because they were tipped with a piece of ironmongery which combined a boathook with a sharp spike. Progression entailed warping along the most convenient bank, either by spiking rocky interstices and tree trunks or by hooking onto roots and branches, then pushing or hauling on the pikes as the boat slid forward beneath the retreating feet of the pikers. Handling the pikes required the skills of heavy-duty crochet and involved reading the bank as much as the water. Locomotion, in other words, owed more to jungle craft than to nautical skills. They were literally climbing the stream. From one point of purchase to the next the men pulled and shoved the boats upward as if the current were gravity and the river a hill.

This rotational system [says Garnier of the piking] can impart to the pirogue the speed of a walking man provided that the pikers are capable and the bank to be followed is straight and unimpeded. The skipper must devote his full attention to keeping the boat’s helm into the current, or rather, slightly inclined towards the bank. Should he let the stream catch the other side, the boat will come across and he must make a full circuit before he can hope to bring it back into the bank again.

De Carné, less nautically inclined, took a more human view of this unconventional form of propulsion. For eight hours a day, he writes, the ‘unhappy Cambodgians [sic] revolved around us with the docility of those blinkered horses used for turning wheels’. Any slackening brought threats of a beating from the skipper. Yet the boatmen, who had been snatched from their fields and their families to work unpaid under their corvée obligations to the king, showed no signs of resentment. On the contrary, they remained ‘good-natured, resigned and often almost cheerful’ – which was more than could be said for de Carné himself.

I was leaving civilisation behind and entering on a savage country; I had passed at one step from a steamship to a canoe. The roof being too low to let me sit up, I had to stay half lying down; and the rainwater accumulating in the bottom of the boat continually invaded my person.

The skipper fussed over him whenever he could, ‘for I was a great lord in his eyes’. But the roof continued to leak and the only baler was a scoop formed from a banana leaf sewn together with rattan. Technology, like civilisation, was becoming a thing of the past. All that remained of the nineteenth century was packed away in their luggage or their heads. Otherwise they were adrift in a deep green version of the dark ages.

To most of them the scenery was the great consolation. There were no villages and no sign of man, but the trees were truly magnificent and the river was again studded with islands between which the current dashed through dozens of channels and rocky defiles. These formed a series of treacherous cascades which Garnier dutifully recorded as the Sombor, Somboc and Preatapang rapids. Each made ‘a great thundering sound’, says de Carné, but progress proved possible thanks to the trees and shrubs whose roots clawed to every visible surface and whose branches waved excitedly in midstream. The latter reminded de Carné of drowning sailors. As the only landlubber he greeted terra firma at each day’s end with undisguised relief.

Come evening we cut down trees, cleared the soaking under-growth, and finally got fires going. Everyone exerted himself and dinner began. It was usually a frugal affair – but sometimes sumptuous if the hunters had been successful – and always very cheerful. For dining room we had the forest; herds of wild boar had often to make way for us. Our bedroom was the damp and narrow jail of our canoes. A cicada followed us relentlessly from campsite to campsite and at the same hour emitted its single, long-drawn note, as if to set the pitch for all the local musicians of these sombre palaces of verdure.

Garnier was less enraptured. The rain and the mosquitoes made sleep impossible and, more worryingly, his well-laid plans for the river were being dashed to bits by every cascade. At Kratie he had been bitterly disappointed when the captain of the canonnière had refused to go any further. Steam-powered or not, the little gunboat was reckoned too old to take on the rapids and too precious to be risked. That meant a postponement of the titanic contest between technology and nature which he anticipated; but it did not constitute a defeat. Around the Sombor rapids he was cheered to find ‘an easy passage’ by which steamboats might indeed, when the river was in spate, progress – provided their engines were up to it. The navigability of the river, which at the beginning of the journey was the most important point to research, had been ascertained up to this point without fear,’ he crowed.

But the Somboc rapids proved much more challenging. Here the current was estimated at eight kilometres an hour, the sounding lead gave a depth of only three metres in the main channels, and all of these were choked by submerged rocks and trees which would be fatal to a steamship. By following the east bank closely and by dint of a week of Herculean labours, they somehow surmounted these hazards and entered the broader, calmer waters of the river’s confluence with its Se Kong tributary just below Stung Treng. Evidently the main current followed the opposite bank through the even more dangerous Preatapang rapids. Garnier reasoned that the river there must be deeper and, however impetuous, therefore more practical for steam-powered vessels with greater draught than a pirogue. To investigate he crossed to the west bank to return alone downstream and take another look.

The river was here five kilometres across and, where it was not interrupted by islands, ‘as wide as if not wider than the great rivers of America’. On the other hand it was considerably faster. They were racing along even when the paddlers (downstream it was easier to paddle) paused to consider the approaching cloud of spray. This heralded the dreaded rapids of Preatapang. Garnier ordered the paddlers to shoot through them. They refused. A bribe was offered and willingly accepted but still they veered away from the main flood. Garnier expostulated, swore, then pulled a pistol on them. It was 25 July, his twenty-seventh birthday, perhaps he felt lucky. His courage would never be questioned but his reputation as a far-seeing navigator was in serious jeopardy.

As is the way with solitary excursions, the hair’s-breadth escapes now came thick and fast. At gunpoint they entered the raging flood. It was here running at an irrésistible ten kilometres an hour and his paddlers were gibbering with fear, though whether from the gun-toting antics of their diminutive master or from the rapids themselves is unclear. They dodged floating tree trunks the size of whales, rode the white waters in a cloud of spray – ‘the noise was deafening, the spectacle hypnotic, [but] it was too late to turn back’ – and then slalomed through a flooded forest with the river running at what Garnier now estimated to be an incroyable seventeen kilometres an hour.

It was altogether an unmissable experience. In a single day he had shot downriver a distance which it had taken the expedition six days to ascend. But so what? He would rather have been flushed with triumph. Excitement merely signified failure. For Preatapang, however spectacular, spelled death to navigation. As he now despairingly conceded, ‘the future of rapid commercial relations (of which I had happily dreamed the previous evening) by way of this vast river, the natural route from China to Saigon, seemed to me seriously compromised from this moment on’.

It was not quite the end of the dream. Perhaps a channel could be cleared round the rapids; and perhaps, although Sombor looked most practicable when the river was high, Preatapang would be navigable when it was low. There was always hope. Nemesis was being deferred, fended off with the push of a pike like another arboreal torpedo. But not for long. And not, as it would appear, unexpectedly.

Although accounts of the expedition are reticent on the subject, no forensic skills are needed to deduce that the Mekong above Phnom Penh was neither as mysterious nor as navigationally promising as Garnier, especially, had made out. After all, the French, including Lagrée, had been in Cambodia for three years. They can hardly have failed to notice that precious little trade came downriver, and that none of what did (principally forest produce) originated from further up than Stung Treng. Nor can they have been ignorant as to the cause. Several French prospectors and traders had already been to Stung Treng. Some had probably been beyond. And in the previous year Lagrée himself had been as far as the Sombor rapids.

It had been soon after this excursion that, on meeting Admiral de Lagrandière in Saigon, the question of the Mekong Exploration Commission had come up ‘out of the blue’ and le Commandant had accepted the leadership with that conspiratorial laugh. Knowing perfectly well what to expect – namely that the river was almost certainly unnavigable for anything but pirogues, and that even they could force the rapids only when it was in flood – his ‘Why not?’ began to make sense. The whole thing was indeed a joke. Garnier might be obsessed with the Mekong’s hydrography – that was his job – but the more cynical Lagrée had long since acknowledged that the river itself was a canard. As elsewhere in the world, geographical enquiry was being used to lend scientific respectability to what was essentially a political reconnaissance.

Hence, too, the otherwise inexplicable decision to launch the expedition at the height of the monsoon. Everything had been timed to place the party in the vicinity of the well-attested rapids when the river was at its highest and the rapids, hopefully, deep enough to be negotiable. The two weeks wasted at Angkor and on the Tonle Sap had been by way of marking time while the river rose. Not without interest, Garnier had been recording its further rise ever since. And the three weeks that they now spent at Stung Treng were because the river was still rising, a vital consideration when, by all report, their only hope of progressing further lay in cresting the next obstacle on a veritable tsunami.

What they knew of the river above Stung Treng in Laos may have been less credible than what they knew of it in Cambodia. But it was not inconsiderable. In the 1670s Geritt von Wuystorff, an agent of the Netherlands East Indies Company, had travelled upstream from Cambodia to the Lao capital of Vientiane. He had later written a brief account of his odyssey, and this was known to the members of the expedition. It told of astounding cities in the midst of endless forest, of barbaric tribes and impenetrable mountains, and of colossal waterfalls and all-devouring whirlpools. That was the sort of thing one expected of seventeenth-century travelogues. But it was not necessarily a fabrication; and rereading it in the light of their own discoveries, de Carné would ask, not unreasonably, ‘how anyone who had read the Dutchman’s report could ever have held out any hope of the river proving navigable’. The ‘anyone’ he had in mind was, needless to say, Francis Garnier.

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