River Road to China

by Milton Osborne

  Norodom's palace was not grand, if judged against Versailles, the Vatican, or the residences of lesser European rulers both spiritual and temporal. But it had its own dignity, not least for the Cambodians, who saw the palace as a symbol of man's place within the universe, the earthly center of their existence that was the dwelling place of a semi-divine monarch. When the explorers came to the palace, they saw but the beginnings of what by the end of the nineteenth century was to be a vast complex of buildings within a compound surrounded by a castellated wall. Already, however, there was a throne hall, a pavilion for the royal ballet's performances, and another pavilion where the king met his officials in daily audience and received the petitions of his subjects. These were wooden buildings, richly carved along the eaves and lintels, painted and gilded, and roofed with glistening tiles of blue and yellow that shone in the tropical sun and provided a fitting completion to this architecture of fantasy. A few years later, following the opening of the Suez Canal, the Phnom Penh palace was enriched by a new French gift to the King: the prefabricated cast-iron palace that had been used by the Empress Eugénie at the opening ceremonies for De Lesseps' canal. Shipped out to Cambodia and re-erected, it became, if we may believe the repeated claims of French authors, Norodom's favorite building in the royal compound.

  It was not architecture alone that made the palace a matter of interest and wonder. There was the abiding fascination provided by the members of the court: the officials, the court dancers, the royal guard and the royal orchestras, the hereditary servants who tended the royal elephants, paddled the King's barges, and daily risked death at the King's passionate whim. Norodom was not a rich ruler, by whatever standards were used to judge him, but his wealth was sufficient for a court of two thousand persons. A devoted admirer of the traditional Cambodian orchestra composed of flutes, stringed instruments, and a range of drums, gongs, and xylophones, he listened with equal pleasure to his band of Filipinos who played in the Western style. His cavalry was led by men from Thailand. His gunners were the mixed-blood descendants of Iberian adventurers who had settled in Cambodia in earlier centuries.

  Guards and servants were clothed in reds and blues and wore hats that seemed to have remained unchanged in design from those shown on the low-relief sculptures of the temples at Angkor. The more elevated members of the court, both male and female, wore a rich silk sarong, a sampot in the Cambodian language, drawing its hem up between their legs to fasten at the back and give the impression of loose, floppy breeches rather like the loose-fitting trousers worn by Dutchmen in so many seventeenth-century paintings. Each day of the week had its own color; the sampots worn on a Friday, the day of the planet Venus, would be blue; those worn on Wednesday, the day of Mercury, would be green. None of this daily exoticism, however, came near to the impression created by the entertainment the explorers had been summoned to the palace to see: the special splendor of the royal troupe of dancers.

  Whatever judgments nineteenth-century Frenchmen made of Norodom—and most of them were harsh—all agreed on two aspects of his character. He loved both banquets and the dancing of his court ballet that was an essential accompaniment to the feasting. There are men still alive in Cambodia who remember, from the early days of the present century, being told by their parents of the mammoth feasting that took place within the palace at Norodom's command. Royal banquets would last as long as the King's endurance. European wine and brandy flowed alongside locally distilled spirits, and course followed course in a seemingly endless profusion, served from the heavy chiseled silver dishes made by the royal silversmiths. As the banquet progressed the royal ballet provided an ever-changing backdrop.

  The dancing that Lagree and his companions witnessed was quite unknown to all but a very few in Europe. When, fifty years later, Norodom's half-brother and successor, King Sisowath, took the Cambodian ballet to France, it was a true succes de théâtre. The artist Rodin led Paris society in lauding the dancers' grace and beauty. Dressed in the richest silk shot through with gold and silver thread, wearing golden tiered crowns or the masks of chimerical beasts and decked with jewels, the court dancers performed a repertoire that drew on the ancient Indian epics for its subjects: the heroic deeds of Rama and the legends enshrined in the Mahabharata. But the dances were not Indian in form. They were slower and more measured, less sensual but no less full of meaning. Gestures with hand and finger meant as much as a sudden movement with the whole body. In some cases, as when the monkey gods joined in battle, the dances were realistic to an almost buffoonish degree. The dancers in their monkey masks struck simian poses, bent-legged with outstretched arms or thoughtfully scratching their armpits for fleas. On other occasions, the motions of individuals and groups were as intricately abstract yet as disciplined as those of a wheeling flock of birds.

  The French visitors watched the dances by the soft light of candles, with the incense blown through the pavilion by the river breeze that floated from the water a bare three hundred yards away. They sat at a long table facing the floor on which the dancers performed, waited upon by palace servants who crawled along the floor so that they should remain below the level of the King. Seated at the head of the banqueting table, Norodom mixed banter with a more serious purpose. Which of the dancers, he inquired, struck the Frenchmen as the most beautiful and accomplished? They gratified their host by correctly pointing to the King's current favorite; Norodom's attentive gaze had made their choice none too difficult. More earnestly, in conversation with Lagrée, the King strove to press a bar of gold upon the group's leader for their expenses along the way. Doudart de Lagrée refused. He realized that Norodom hoped in offering them this gift, to ask in return for their further delay. For if the banqueting and dancing kept the Frenchmen from daily cares that were soon to be frequent and demanding, these diversions had a similar part to play for Norodom. As he savored his brandy and watched with a connoisseur's appreciation the steps that his dancers performed, he knew a rebellion was already under way in the eastern provinces of his kingdom which could threaten his hold on the throne.

  The real world beckoned the explorers. The river was visible from the dancing pavilion, and it was why they were here. Fantasy would be in short measure in a little while, but this night's experience could not be prolonged. Norodom might stay watching the ballet, but the explorers took their leave, following the strict naval discipline that Lagrée's orders demanded that he preserve. The next day the expedition left Phnom Penh. Their route lay north up the Mekong, as the smoke from their final cannon salute drifted behind them and towards the shore.

  CHAPTER II

  GREAT RIVER, GREAT IDEA

  Scholars still debate the meaning of the river's name. When its course was first uncertainly charted on the early maps of Southeast Asia, the cartographers used a Portuguese version of its Thai name. They called it the Mecon, or Mecom, and sometimes Mekong, translating this poetically if inaccurately as “The Mother of the Waters.” Later travelers, confused about the river's source and knowing only a part of its great length, named it after one of the countries through which it flowed. So it was called le Cambodge, the Cambodia River. This was the name used by the French explorers of the mid-nineteenth century. But by the end of that century the modern name had taken firm root. As France, Britain, and Thailand haggled over their spheres of influence in the Indochinese region, the diplomats' maps agreed in showing the Mekong River. For the people of Cambodia and of Vietnam, however, the river has always borne another name. The Cambodians speak of the Tonle Thorn and the Vietnamese of the Song Lon. Both names have the same meaning — the “Great River.”

  The Mekong is, indeed, a great river. Rising in the high plateaus of Tibet, its course runs some 2,800 miles to the South China Sea, passing through China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and delineating the borders of Burma and Thailand. For southern Laos, Cambodia, and the delta region of southern Vietnam the Mekong is essential to existence. The river comes into flood during the wet season as the local monsoon adds its rains
to the melted snow that feeds the Mekong when summer comes to Tibet. Standing on the revetted banks in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, one may watch the river rise day by day, until the difference between low water and high water has become as much as forty feet. Away from the artificial revetments of the city the water spills over the land, flooding the paddy fields that have been dried by six months of relentless sun.

  There is so much water at this flood time that the Mekong causes one of nature's oddest events to occur. When the river rises to flood level at Phnom Penh, it starts to back up along its tributary, the Tonle Sap. Having flowed south for half the year, the Tonle Sap reverses itself during the wet season and runs north between June and November. As the Mekong floods it irrigates the land along its course, leaving a rich silt on the flood plains. The water forced backwards up the Tonle Sap not only replenishes the Great Lake in the heart of Cambodia; it also starts a breeding cycle for the fish that swim there. When, in November after the rains have stopped, the Tonle Sap starts to flow swiftly towards the south again, the swirling brown waters carry a mass of fish. For the Cambodian peasants the annual harvest of fish that is made at this time provides the protein that is otherwise so lacking from their diet.

  Hydrographers have calculated that the vast volume of water flowing down the river carries with it enough silt to add two hundred additional feet of land each year to the coast of Vietnam near the Mekong's mouth. Modern planners have begun their efforts to control the river's flooding and to harness its power for hydroelectricity. These are the latest hopes for the river. Even if the plans finally reach fulfillment, the Mekong's vital role will still be to provide irrigation, food, and a route for travel, as it has always done, even before recorded history.

  At the dawn of history ancient civilizations rose and fell near the mouth of the Mekong. This was before the great drainage efforts of the settlers who came to the region many centuries later. The land about the lower Mekong was a watery patchwork of lakes and streams. It was possible, as one early Chinese traveler put it, to “sail through Cambodia.” Farther north in a land covered by primeval jungle and forest the Mekong provided a way to the south for the Khmers, the ancestors of modern Cambodians who migrated from an area in southern Laos during the seventh century. One of the earliest Khmer inscriptions stood in the river bed near the modern village of Sambor, in northeast Cambodia. There, below one of the Mekong's biggest sets of rapids, the Khmers paused to mark their passage by engraving an inscription on a great rock, affirming piety to the Hindu god Sambhu (Siva). The prince who ordered this Sanskrit testimony to stand in the bed of the river was Chitrasena, a shadowy figure whose name is remembered today only by scholars. But his decision to honor the god Sambhu is echoed in the place name that has survived for more than fourteen hundred years and is still used today.

  When the great Cambodian kingdom of Angkor was founded, at the beginning of the ninth century, its first ruler did not site his capital on the banks of the Mekong. This choice did not mean that Jayavarman II (reigned 802?–850) was unaware of the river's importance — quite the contrary. The site of Angkor, inland and near to the Great Lake, was safer than any position chosen on the Mekong proper. A city on the Mekong itself would have been much more readily vulnerable to attack from the Chams, a people of Indonesian stock whose kingdom once dominated the coast of modern central Vietnam. War between the Chams and the Angkorian Khmers was endemic. As Angkor grew to greater and greater strength, its rulers used the city of Sambhupura (Sambor) as a base from which to send expeditions against the Chams. The Chams, for their part, marched westward across the mountains to the banks of the Mekong.

  More than three hundred years after the kingdom of Angkor had been founded, the Chams showed that its inland site was no longer safe from attack. Sailing their huge war canoes up the Mekong, the Chams then passed along the Tonle Sap to attack Angkor from the Great Lake. The Cham defeat of the Cambodians in 1177 A.D. was a heavy blow to the Angkorian state, and only under a quite remarkable king, Jayavarman VII (1181–1219?), did the city recover its former glory. Angkor was still the mightiest city in the southern seas in the eyes of the Chinese envoy, Chou Ta-kuan, when he visited the city in 1296. His journal tells of how he, like others, had traveled to Angkor from the sea, ascending the Mekong as far as the modern site of Phnom Penh, and then making the final stages of the journey along the Tonle Sap and across the Great Lake. This was the same route used by the Cham raiders over one hundred years before. Whether men came in peace or for war, if they wished to reach the heart of the Angkorian kingdom, the waters of the Mekong and its tributaries were vital arteries for travel and trade.

  None of this was known, or at least recorded, by the Europeans of the day. Angkor's decline and fall, in the fifteenth century, was an event of profound importance, but it passed unnoticed by those in the West who had still to learn of this remote region that lay outside the experience of even Marco Polo. With the fall of Angkor the Cambodian court, reduced in wealth and power, moved south to a series of sites near the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap. It was to the Cambodian capital of Lovek, on the Tonle Sap, that the first Iberian adventurers came in the sixteenth century. They thought they would gain riches and authority, and their barely rational schemes had the zealous support of missionary priests in the Spanish Philippines. Neither the priests' prayers nor the adventurers' courage prevailed. Later, Dutch merchants established their trading stations in the same region. On the northern outskirts of modern Phnom Penh is the site of a Roman Catholic church known to Cambodians as the “Hoalong Church.” Few nowadays realize that this is a name that links the site with the early trading endeavours of men from Holland.

  The earliest European visitors to the lower reaches of the Mekong left accounts of their travels and of the information they gathered from the Asian traders they met. But these accounts were limited in both the information they provided and the geographical areas they covered. In the early years of the sixteenth century a remarkable Portuguese chronicler, Tomé Pires, an apothecary turned trader, writing from his base in Malacca, knew enough about the Indochinese region to record the fact that “the land of Cambodia possesses many rivers.” Thirty years later, in 1555, a Portuguese missionary, Father da Cruz, could supplement this information as the result of his own visit to the decaying kingdom of Cambodia. He traveled on the Mekong itself, noted the abundance of wild animals that roamed its banks, and knew from the traders he met that men from the distant principalities of Laos descended the river to trade at the Cambodian capital of Lovek. Though Da Cruz and others who followed him related some fascinating details, these early visitors to the Indochinese region were unable to gain any real knowledge of the Mekong very far north of modern Vientiane, in Laos. They believed that the source of the river was in China, possibly in a great inland sea that fed the Menam or Chao Phraya River in Thailand, as well as the Mekong. But anything more was unsubstantiated guesswork. Even those who had traveled between the lower reaches of the river near Phnom Penh and onwards to Vientiane gave little impression of the formidable natural barriers that stood in the way of easy passage, other than to note that the Laotian traders took as long as three months to make their way back up the river from the Cambodian capital.

  Men like the Dutch trader Van Wuysthof, who made this three months' journey in 1641, were no strangers to arduous travel and did not dwell on the difficulties. Concerned either with gaining wealth or souls, or both, few of these early travelers had the time or inclination to provide extended description. Though their successes and failures were spectacular for brief periods, the impact of these men was ephemeral. Priests, traders, or adventurers, they survived despite the ravages of disease and the daily discomfort of grossly unsuitable European clothes. But they were little more than parasites on the body politic of the region.

  Nearly three hundred years after Father da Cruz had written of the Mekong, the state of European knowledge had advanced scarcely at all. Traders knew of Phnom Penh as a minor
commercial center, and of Vientiane farther north along the river's course. But the passage of the centuries had not swept away uncertainty about the river's origin, and details even of its lower reaches remained scant. The brief heyday of the Iberian adventurers in Cambodia had ended by the turn of the sixteenth century. They had seen the mighty ruins of Angkor, but faraway Europe forgot about the temples' existence. A few European traders and missionaries continued to hope that the lower Mekong would provide a springboard for their efforts. For the traders this was a forlorn hope, and they faded away. Hope was just as forlorn for the missionaries, too, as they admitted to each other, if not to the world at large. The comment made by the French missionary bishop, Monseigneur Miche, in 1861, was an excellent summary of the situation that had confronted his predecessors throughout their labors in Cambodia. Writing in the Lettre Commune of his order, Miche observed that “It is certain for anyone who has lived some years in Cambodia that one can never obtain much success with Cambodians, unless it is through buying the freedom of debt slaves; but that method is long and very costly.” The missionaries remained in Cambodia despite their essential failure.