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

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.