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

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.