River Road to China

by Milton Osborne

  CHAPTER IV

  ONE STEP BACKWARD AND ONE STEP FORWARD

  What the explorers expected at Khone it is hard to know. They had heard of a waterfall, and Lagrée later confided in a letter to his sister-in-law that he had hoped to see another Niagara, a vast single fall of water, tumbling from precipitous heights. He did not explain how this would affect his repeated hopes that the Mekong might be a navigable route for trade. Instead they found a series of falls and cascades, some dropping directly more than sixty feet into the broad basin of deep water immediately below, others falling in stages, a few feet at a time. This was not Niagara, but it was a formidable obstacle nonetheless, a series of interlocking falls and cascades running some seven miles and extending from one bank to the other.

  Observed from the eastern bank of the river in the closing weeks of the rainy season — the time when the explorers first saw the falls — the scene at Khone is impressive. Instead of the spectacular combination of height and flow that so marks Niagara, the sense here is of limitless power spread over a vast horizontal distance. The traveler must shout to be heard above the thunderous roar of the nearest falls, reinforced by the accumulated volume of sound rising from the rest of the river system stretching out of sight to the west. Standing and watching, one sees tree trunks thrown outward and upward by the water before splashing downwards as the Mekong surges over the top of the falls. It seems a wonder that this force has not been sufficient to level the rocks that stand in the river's path and form the multitude of islands separating fall from fall and cascade from cascade. Spume rises in the air, forming a misty cloud that catches the sun to create passagery rainbows contrasting with the muddy khaki of the river above and below the falls. A breath of wind is enough to carry the spray hundreds of yards to dampen the watcher downstream. In their combination of noise and power these cataracts are almost too overwhelming for the onlooker, who soon becomes exhausted — even repelled by — what he sees.

  The leader of the Mekong expedition, Doudart de Lagrée.

  An architectural drawing of the western façade of Angkor Wat, see page 42. This temple was built during the reign of Suryavarman II (1113–1150).

  The Bayon Temple in an imagined reconstruction by Delaporte. This temple was built during the reign of Jayavarman VII (1181–c.1219).

  An entrance gate to Angkor Thorn in an imagined reconstruction. Angkor Thorn was a great walled area built during Jayavarman VII's reign.

  Angkor Wat seen from the western entrance. Built in only 55 years, Angkor Wat is the world's largest religious monument.

  The explorers entertained by King Norodom, see page 50.

  The passage of a rapid. The frequent presence of rapids in the course of the Mekong doomed the explorers' hopes of using the river for large-scale navigation.

  The French explorers at Angkor in June 1866. Front left, Garnier, Delaporte, Joubert, Thorel, de Carné, Lagrée. See page 54.

  The explorers camped before a set of rapids in Laos. Rapids continue to present major problems for navigation of the Mekong in the present day.

  A view of Stung Treng, where the Se Kong River flows into the Mekong. Garnier fell seriously ill here. See pages 62–3.

  A plan of a pirogue, the boats carved out of dingle tree trunks that transported the explorers, their escort, and their supplies along the Mekong.

  A photograph of Delaporte, the artist of the expedition.

  With Garnier still slowly recovering from his illness, the other members of the expedition surveyed the area from their camp below the falls. They learned that light, local craft used water-ways to the extreme east and west of the main river system to bypass this great natural barrier. Lagrée's reconnaissance to the east suggested it would be the best route for the expedition. This was confirmed by Delaporte after he had examined the passage to the west where one of the highest falls was located. Although the western passage might be passable by small craft in the dry season, he reported, it was not worth considering at this time of flood. The deep water below the falls was dotted with the dead bodies of fish and alligators that had been caught in the fierce current upstream and pounded to death by the height and force of the falls. Possibly Delaporte's survey work was regarded as routine; whatever the cause, the expedition's official record makes no mention of the more unpleasant hazards Delaporte encountered. In the course of his short expeditions during the week the explorers spent below the Khone falls, he narrowly escaped death in quicksand, barely avoided a confrontation with tigers, and fell victim to a mass of leeches that gripped his flesh in their dozens. Only by climbing a tree, shedding his clothes, and then pulling off the leeches one by one did he rid himself of these loathsome creatures. Delaporte's experience was a distasteful harbinger of things to come. For the next twelve months leeches were an annoyance, and even a serious hazard, for the members of the expedition.

  After a week camped below the falls, the explorers made their way up the eastern passage, leaving at midday on August 25. The difficulties of maneuvering even their light craft through the fast-flowing water slowed their progress. To cover only the few miles separating them from their next destination, the island of Khong above the falls, took until the late afternoon of the following day. There, at long last, the river had a single course once more. Ever since Kratie — even in the calmest stretches near Stung Treng — the Mekong had been a river of divided channels, running on either side of large and small islands. Here, northwards from the island of Khong, the river was formed by one great stream, over a mile wide. They found a sense of peace in the village at Khong and a prosperous population numbering perhaps ten thousand inhabitants on the island. Authority was exercised by a friendly octogenarian governor who responded to the gifts the Frenchmen gave him by remarking that he now realized that the Buddha must have been born in France; how else could the visitors be so munificent? He sent the explorers the gift of a bullock in return. Nothing could have been more welcome as they ate fresh beef for the first time since leaving Phnom Penh two months before.

  The temptation to remain at Khong was strong. In this unknown region the party needed a base for exploration to the east and west of the Mekong, while they awaited passports for China. Despite their expectation that these would reach them soon after leaving Phnom Penh, the documents were still not in hand. Lagrée was left with difficult choices. Should he travel forward or wait? And what was the explanation for this unexpected delay in the arrival of the documents? For the moment Lagrée was reluctant to proceed further without the passports, so he planned a program that combined local exploration with some rest while they awaited the papers. For surely it could not be much longer before the French authorities in Phnom Penh would send them by local Cambodian and Laotian messengers. Lagrée s choice of a base was not Khong but Bassac, the chief political center for this area of southern Laos, five days' river travel further north. Early on September 11, 1866, the expedition landed there, never thinking that this was to be their base for over two months.

  Quite without foreknowledge, Lagrée s choice proved excellent. Bassac was scenically striking, set on the western bank of the river with a large, cultivated island before the settlement, and dominated to the rear and west of the long, winding settlement following the river's bank by a series of dramatic mountains. As the explorers also soon found, there was a major temple ruin (Wat Phu) nearby to attract their interest. But before this could be investigated, or any survey made of the country to the east or west, they had to wait until the end of the rains. Other than exchanging courtesies with the local ruler, the “king” of Bassac, there was little the French party could do but sit restlessly in their quarters. At the end of the rainy season the monsoon clouds sometimes seem to make one final major effort to flood the land below, and this was what the Frenchmen now experienced. For eight days the rain fell almost without interruption. It was September 20 before the members of the expedition could move freely about their tasks.

  Eagerly they undertook the duties that Lagrée assign
ed to them. A climb three-quarters of the way up one of the mountain peaks directly behind Bassac showed Garnier, Thorel, and Delaporte the magnificent vista of the Mekong winding its way past forest and mountain with only the most limited areas along the banks cultivated by man. At the beginning of October Garnier and Thorel, accompanied by Renaud from the escort party, set off to survey the Se Don River, a tributary of the Mekong that joined the major stream a little above Bassac. Traveling by canoe, by elephant, and on foot, they penetrated up the Se Don valley to an area where the inhabitants were no longer the Buddhist Laotians of the lowland regions, but scantily clad hill tribesmen living on the fringes of society. The Frenchmen searched unsuccessfully for the silver mines that rumor placed in these hills; but none were to be found. They were sure that native cunning had triumphed over the frankness of their European inquiries.

  In Bassac itself the explorers watched and recorded the busy life that went on about them. After the lassitudes of the long wet season the population prepared to engage in the busy occupations of the dry months that would last until April. Like so many Western observers before and after them, the Frenchmen wrote almost simultaneously of the “laziness” of the Laotians and of the way in which the population hastened to fish in the falling waters of the Mekong or spent long hours in the paddy fields building shelters in preparation for the weeks of labor that would occupy them during the rice harvest.

  How does one explain this curious double standard? Possibly it stemmed in this case from a form of selective memory. In the course of the explorers' stay at Bassac they saw one of the great festivals of the year, the water festival or festival of the boats: a great calendrical event, a blend of fertility rite and pre-Lenten festivity, sometimes almost saturnalian. All along the Mekong, whether at Bassac, Vientiane, or Phnom Penh, the rites associated with the festival have a fundamental similarity. Canoe races are held to celebrate the end of the rains and the swift fall of the river's level; giant pirogues, as long as ninety feet, manned by as many as sixty men, compete in races before the local ruler and the assembled population. On the shore, each night, there is feasting and unrestrained search for pleasure in drinking and sex. Transvestites appear in great numbers, so that this element of Indochinese sexuality becomes suddenly apparent to Europeans whose awareness of local mores is usually of the more obvious male-female relationships.

  The events of the festival took place before the fascinated eyes of the French exploratory mission. Indeed, its members became part of some, at least, of the celebrations. In Bassac the festival included a ritual swearing of allegiance by the vassal “king” of the region to the throne of Bangkok. Lagrée attended with his personnel, and, to lend luster to the occasion, escorted by his tiny guard bearing fixed bayonets. It added, Garnier noted, “not a little to the splendor of the affair.” So too did the fact that the “king” of Bassac found he was the father of a new son during the course of the festival. The ruler's joy in the daytime, the Europeans recorded, became drunkenness in the evening.

  The great pirogue races climaxed the third day's events. Bearing the colors of particular villages and pagodas, the slim shallow craft, with scarcely any freeboard, sped down the river, fifty or sixty paddles flashing in the sun before dipping in unison to push the craft faster than the foreign observers thought possible. In the middle of each craft stood a masked buffoon, balancing, gesturing, urging the boatmen on and shouting ribald commentary. The watching Frenchmen knew that the commentary was “lascivious,” but they did not record more. They may have been uncertain of what was being said; more probably they felt that although they might laugh at what they heard, this was not what they should record for posterity. One hundred years later observers were less influenced by this type of judgment. When the same kind of race, with the same kind of buffoons, took place in Phnom Penh, the chants from the pirogues were probably little different from those the explorers heard in Bassac:

  It has rained a great deal this year, the river has broken its banks. There will be much rice and joy. All the women are pregnant, either by their husbands or by their lovers. It doesn't really matter. Aya!

  or:

  Oh you women, lift up your sarongs so that I can tell who amongst you pleases me the most. Aya!

  Then, finally, on October 28, the festival ended with a floating fireworks display as bamboo frames were set upon the water to drift with the current past the watching crowd. It was a gay and uninhibited affair.

  But the end of the festival signaled the true beginning of the dry season, for the explorers as well as for the local population. This was the best time of the year for travel; but still the French party was in Bassac, six weeks after leaving the Khone falls, and four months after their departure from Saigon. Their passports for China had not arrived, and already there were hints of indiscipline in the escort which were later to become overt and challenging problems. The essential need was to begin traveling north once more; yet, without the passports, to press on might only lead to great disappointment. The solution was for Garnier to travel downstream to Stung Treng, where they now confidently expected the much desired documents would be waiting for collection.

  On November 2, still not in full health but with the best of spirits, Garnier set off for the south, accompanied by Renaud (his escort from their earlier passage of the Preatapang rapids), a Vietnamese militiaman, and the Cambodian interpreter, Alexis Om, who was again refusing to remain with the explorers. Only six days later the little party was in Stung Treng — where Garnier found that their hopes for the passports were illusory. In the period of a little more than two months since the expedition left Stung Treng, much had changed in the border lands of Cambodia and Laos. The rebellion against the King of Cambodia, that had seemed a minor matter when the Frenchmen sat with Norodom watching the palace dancers in Phnom Penh at the beginning of July, was now an affair of consequence. The rebel leader, Pou Kombo, a pretender to the throne without any justification for this claim other than his forceful personality, had gathered a mass of peasants about him. To the south, in the area about Kratie, the rebels held sway, having killed the Governor at Sambor, the last Cambodian official the expedition had seen before beginning their ascent of the Sambor rapids. Any thought that, by depending on the swiftness of the current, Garnier might pass unnoticed down the river to Phnom Penh was negated by the realization that he was almost certain to be captured on his return voyage by the insurgents who held the banks on either side of the Mekong.

  For Garnier the problem was insoluble. Each day that he spent in Stung Treng gave greater confirmation to the reports he had received. There was nothing he could do. Travel to Phnom Penh, or even to Kratie, was out of the question. The Laotian Governor of Stung Treng was suffering from a fever that Garnier alleviated through the use of quinine, but nothing improved the French officer's spirits. The sight of a caravan of slaves being brought into Stung Treng from the eastern highlands, the men seemingly indifferent but the women deeply moved and clutching their children in desperate efforts of protection, depressed him further. He could only return to Bassac, leaving the interpreter Alexis Om at Stung Treng in the hope that, being a Cambodian, he might be able to pass undetected down the river to alert the French in Phnom Penh to the plight of the expedition. Leaving Stung Treng on November 12, Garnier again started north; this time, in contrast to the period almost exactly two months before, fully conscious of all that he saw. Once past the Khone falls he traveled along the right bank of the river, stopping where the onset of each night found him, showing already his willingness to travel through unknown regions with a minimum of companionship.

  The camp to which Garnier returned on November 23 was not a happy place. Delaporte had found Bassac enchanting, and his journal is full of enthusiasm for the time he spent there. The inhabitants readily sat as subjects for his sketches, not least a young woman whose parents, so the young officer believed, hoped he might marry their daughter. The local ruler prevailed on him to build an armchair, having learned that this
was how men of Europe chose to be seated. Then, in the evenings, Delaporte played his violin to the enjoyment of the local population, trading an excerpt from “Orpheus in the Underworld” or “La Belle Hélène” in return for the opportunity to hear the local musicians perform their own airs. But this type of entertainment had not been sufficient for the French military men in the escort, or for Séguin, the expedition's European interpreter whose conduct had hovered near insubordination for weeks. They wanted liquor and they wanted women. These were natural enough desires, and ones that neither officers nor rankers denied themselves in Phnom Penh or Saigon in the 1860s. Writing with a trembling hand in the early 1870s, the French Apostolic Vicar of Saigon vehemently condemned the almost universal practice by French officials of keeping Vietnamese concubines. But an expedition, for the officers, was a different thing — a time when physical desires should be sublimated to the greater good of confronting hardship in the name of France. The same standards had little attraction for the personnel of the escort.