River Road to China

by Milton Osborne

  In the official instructions given to Lagrée in Saigon, the French Governor of Cochinchina had written of the explorers penetrating into lands known to be rich and prosperous in former times and linking them in profitable trade with the newly founded colony near the Mekong's mouth. Whatever the stress on the value of pure scientific inquiry to be found later in the instructions, the desire for commercial advantage was dominant. This was made clear in the heavy emphasis given to the need for speed and the disinclination of the officials in Saigon to provide the explorers with adequate scientific equipment. Now, nine months after the expedition had left Saigon, the record of progress towards the principal goal was limited indeed. The members of the mission had shown abundant courage and determination. Their capacity to endure and recover from disease seems remarkable in a later century that has adjusted to the medical revolution of wonder drugs and antibiotics. The Frenchmen had charted the great river over a course that was unknown to the West. But in terms of the high hopes held at the beginning of the enterprise, the best that could be said was that the future might offer more than the past.

  Despite a multitude of causes for disappointment, the explorers were sustained by the sense that they were seeing and recording the existence of a world that had not been visited by any European traveler for more than two hundred years. Ahead lay the once notable city of Vientiane. In 1641 the Dutchman Van Wuysthoff had found it to be a bustling commercial center when he journeyed there on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. Beyond Vientiane was the capital of one of the largest Laotian principalities, Luang Prabang, close to the spot where their countryman, Henri Mouhot, had died, and the point at which they would, for a brief time, enter a known and charted segment of the Indochinese world. Yet even with the continuing fascination of the unknown, the rewards of exploration often seemed meager. The explorers had seen evidence of gold in the mountains to the east of the Mekong, but there had been more commerce in slaves than in the precious metal. Dr. Joubert, acting as the mission's geologist, had pursued every suggestion provided by the local populations of the existence of lodes of this or that mineral, but to little avail. Typically disappointing was the experience in the mountains behind Uthen. There, Lagrée and Joubert had found a straggling settlement whose inhabitants were locked into a mortal system of lead mining. Without any understanding of the reasons for the illnesses and deaths that went with their exploitation of the mines, other than the blame they placed upon evil spirits, the miners and their families were victims of chronic lead poisoning. Suffering from skin diseases and internal illnesses, the wretched miners, and the even more frequently afflicted men who crudely refined the ore, tried to stave off further deaths, when one of their number died, by week-long ceremonies of propitiation. Just as uselessly they banned the wearing of white and red cloth in the mines, colors they believed offensive to the spirits. The high cost in lives extracted by the mines was not, however, a gauge of the opportunities for later profitable French exploitation of the region.

  Nonetheless, the explorers continued with their allotted tasks as they moved along the river, recording linguistic data, searching for minerals and medicinal plants, and noting the characteristics of Buddhism. The records made during the expedition were sufficient to fill a folio volume of more than five hundred pages, quite separate from the equally lengthy narrative of the expedition. Dated and sometimes notably inaccurate as these records may seem one hundred years later, the achievement involved in compiling them was one the explorers themselves could appreciate and find sustaining. In private correspondence, Garnier was to complain that his leader made excessive demands in requiring him to prepare two copies of all his maps and charts. Clearly, however, he prided himself on the accuracy of his cartographic work and knew in full measure the satisfaction of recording a previously unknown area of the globe. As for Delaporte, the most junior of the naval officers and without doubt themost light-hearted, even the monotony of the scenery he and his companions frequently encountered in their slow passage was transformed by an artist's eye. He gloried in the light of the brilliant tropical days as it sparkled on the river and flooded over the dark green of the foliage until, in his own words, he and his companions were dazzled. Delaporte's contribution to the records of the expedition consisted of many hundreds of sketches of pencil, pen, and water color; transformed into wood engravings, these later formed a vital part of the mission's report. Delaporte's illustrations, ranging from detailed architectural drawings to sketches of people and places the Frenchmen encountered, make the record of the Mekong mission one of the most pictorially complete from the exploration of Indochina in the nineteenth century.

  One of the French explorers peacock hunting.

  Leaving Uthen on March 13, 1867, the six French explorers and their escort moved steadily along the river, which still ran in a largely north-south direction. A little more than seventy miles beyond Uthen, however, there was new cause for concern. The Frenchmen were certain that the Mekong had its origins somewhere in Tibet. Yet suddenly the great river was no longer flowing from the north; following its course as it turned sharply, the explorers found themselves traveling first west and then, even worse, southwest. They could not believe that all of their assumptions were incorrect, not least because they knew of Van Wuysthoff's travels up the Mekong to Vientiane in the seventeenth century. But the pirogues in which they traveled were now set on a course that was contrary to all expectation, and, to add further gloom, the countryside through which they passed became tiringly unchanging. Garnier later reflected on his own psychological reaction to the situation. He recognized that novelty was an essential in an explorer's experience. Without it, the actual fact of progress along the route was not enough; “a day without a new emotional experience,” he wrote, “is a disappointment.”

  This honest and perceptive admission related to a period when there was cause for further somber anticipation. Somewhere ahead lay the once important city of Vientiane. The Frenchmen knew that it had been sacked some forty years before, when the Thai king had taken terrible vengeance on the city's ruler, Chao-Anou, for daring to renounce his position as a vassal of Bangkok. That some trace might remain of the rich commercial market reported by Van Wuysthoff over two hundred years before seemed just possible. Vientiane was, after all, set in unknown territory, outside the area explored by Mouhot between 1859 and 1861. Only four years in advance of the expedition s formation, two of the most erudite geographers in France, Cortambert and de Rosny, pillars of the Ethnographic Society, had suggested that Laos might hide riches beneath its soil that could make it another California. The explorers by this stage hoped for rather less, yet even for their more modest commercial hopes the sight of an almost deserted river that greeted them as they drew nearer to Vientiane was depressing. There was little reason to expect the bustling scene that Van Wuysthoff had described, in which “Moors” traded with merchants from Thailand, exchanging rich silk cloth and dealing in rare forest products, such as benzoin and lacquer, and that most prized of metals, gold. Yet they had hoped for more than they found.

  A little downstream from Vientiane the expedition came to the Thai town of Nong Khay, a trading center of some size that had gained a measure of importance following the destruction of the older city in the 1820s. In terms of the trade and commerce that had once existed in this area, however, there was nothing remarkable about the town, except that it was of sufficient size to have its own separate quarter for the Chinese merchants and craftsmen who lived there. Here Doudart de Lagrée found an opportunity to rid himself of the troublesome Séguin, the interpreter whose undisciplined conduct had been a matter for earlier complaint. The Thai Governor at Nong Khay was ready to arrange for Séguin's travel, under escort, to Bangkok, where he could be left in the custody of the French Consul. A minor character in the drama of exploration, Séguin receives scant mention in the published and private accounts of the expedition, apart from those incidents of insubordination and drunkenness in which he played a role. He had
lived in Thailand since childhood. But this experience had led to more than fluency in the Thai language. It brought in addition, to use de Carné's censorious words, “the love of adventures, the love of money, and the craving for debauchery.” There seemed to be no limit to the “abysses of such a degraded nature.”

  Yet he survived, and, in an infuriatingly brief reference in a later publication, Garnier notes that he and Séguin met again in France after the expedition was over. Séguin had made the long journey overland from Nong Khay to Bangkok and returned to France (whether to punishment or not, Garnier does not say). Having traveled over a route similar to that followed earlier by Mouhot, Séguin, Garnier noted tersely, “provided some useful information on the region he passed through.” With the departure of Séguin, the mission included only one French subordinate, the sailor Mouëllo. None of the records gives any indication of Mouëllos feelings at the departure of the one man with whom it would have been possible for him to have an easy relationship, unaffected by the protocol of rank and status.

  On April 2, 1867, the expedition reached Vientiane. They quickly saw how thorough the Thai destruction had been. Vientiane's ruler had been singularly unwise in choosing to rebel against King Rama III of Thailand. This Thai monarch matched austerity with a determination to ensure that his kingdom would never again be a prey to the attacks and invasions that had been such a feature of the eighteenth century. When his trusted and favored vassal rebelled, Rama III did not offer half-measures in response. Vientiane was occupied in 1827 and the destruction began. Religious monuments were left standing, but the temporal buildings of the city were razed. Inhabitants who had not been killed in battle or chosen for slavery were driven into great bamboo structures and burned to death. When Chou-Anou, the defeated ruler of Vientiane, was captured a year later, he was sent to Bangkok, where he was immediately displayed in a cage to reap a bitter harvest of taunts and abuse. Within a few years — experts disagree on just how many— he was dead, though whether through disease or secret assassination is unknown.

  Despite the destruction and depopulation of Vientiane, such vestiges as the French explorers found of the city's former greatness impressed them. The royal Buddhist pagoda, Wat Pha Keo, still preserved its basic form, with delicately carved wooden panels, rich gold leaf on the pillars supporting the roof, and decorative chips of glass that glistened in the sun like some gigantic setting of diamond brilliants. This was the pagoda that had once sheltered the famed “Emerald Buddha,” whose origins are lost in legend and mystery and which may now be seen in the royal palace in Bangkok. Supposedly first discovered in the Thai city of Chiang Rai in the fifteenth century, the Emerald Buddha is carved out of green jasper, a quartz-like precious stone. More than three feet in height, it was one of the most treasured possessions of Laotian princes before it was taken to Thonburi, near Bangkok, in 1779 during another Thai campaign against Vientiane. But this fabled statue was only a memory to be evoked as the explorers left the overgrown pagoda to search for other relics of the past.

  Finding the Wat Si Saket virtually untouched by time or the advancing forest, the Frenchmen saw that piety here was manifest in row upon row of Buddha images. These statues, of varying heights, set in niches along the walls, reminded the men who saw them of the vast monument of Borobudur in Java with its seemingly endless rows of stone Buddhas. From the library of the Si Saket pagoda the explorers carried away specimens of sacred books, recognizing that this would be regarded as sacrilege by the local population but justifying their action in the name of scientific interest. Finally, walking through the forest that had replaced the houses and streets of the devastated city, the Frenchmen came to That Luang, the most famous monument in Vientiane and one of the most revered in all of the Laotian states. Founded in the late sixteenth century, the great Buddhist stupa had only recently been restored when the explorers saw it. The central pyramid was covered with gold leaf, giving the Frenchmen some sense of the wonder expressed by Van Wuysthoff, who had described the central stupa as being covered with gold plates when he saw it in 1641. More than a century after Lagrée, Garnier, and the others had seen the continuing respect paid to the monument by Thais and Laotians alike, That Luang remains a potent symbol of some form, however inchoate, of Laotian identity. On the bank notes circulated in the early 1970s by the Pathet Lao, the left-wing political and military group in contemporary Laos, a picture of That Luang is set on one side, aligning the traditional past with such decidedly recent and delicately engraved scenes as Pathet Lao antiaircraft weapons operating on the war-torn Plain of Jars.

  However much the atmosphere of Buddhist piety amid decay appealed to the explorers' romantic spirit, their stay in Vientiane could not be prolonged, for once again they faced the prospect of the rainy season. On April 4 they were back on the river and traveling, as Garnier recorded proudly, over a region that had previously known no association whatever with Europeans. Van Wuysthoff and a sole Jesuit priest, Father Leria, had seen Vientiane in the seventeenth century. Henri Mouhot had traveled beside the Mekong from Pak Lay to Luang Prabang. But between Vientiane and Pak Lay, nearly a hundred miles along the river, there had been no precursor to the French party.

  The unknown section of the river quickly turned a grim face to the expedition. Only a few miles above Vientiane the wide valley or plains that had spread out from the river's course for most of the distance between Khone and Vientiane were replaced by increasingly forbidding hills. And with the narrowing of the river's width came the familiar barrier of successive rapids. The floor of the gorge enclosing the Mekong was now, in Garnier's words, like some giant mosaic as different colored rocks projected unevenly above the dark waters of the river. Navigation through this region of rapids would have been impossible later in the year, when the full flood swept down through the narrowing gorges. This was not very far below the area that Mouhot had visited in June 1861, with the Mekong in flood, when he expressed wonder that even the gorges were able to contain the river s torrential force. In April navigation was still possible, but at the cost of painfully slow progress. Portage became necessary so the pirogues were unloaded and pulled with heavy ropes through the most difficult rapids. In three days, between April 5 and 8, 1867, the expedition advanced only a dozen miles. To the necessity of ascending the rapids and of changing boatmen when they refused to risk their craft through some of the worst sections, the explorers had to add a further painful handicap; their supplies of boots and shoes were exhausted, torn apart in the repeated treks over the river's rocky banks. From this point onwards most in the party were reduced to walking barefoot over whatever path lay in their way. In April by the rapids it was a way filled with bruising and cutting stones. In later months the bare feet of the explorers were to traverse grass and mud that swarmed with voracious leeches.

  With the course of the river still running in its unexpected direction, the Frenchmen came to Chiang Khan, the southern limit of the principality of Luang Prabang and a town where they were soon alerted to the possibility of political difficulties ahead. First, they feared they would find British representatives already active in the region of northern Laos, preempting any presumed commercial advantages and robbing the Frenchmen of their right to claim the first scientific survey of the upper Mekong. That they were already close to the British possessions in Burma was borne in upon them by the presence of Burmese traders in Chiang Khan. And they knew that in terms of distance the region they had now reached was considerably closer to Moulmein, in British Burma, than to any other major trading city. Worse information now came to them from the Deputy Governor of Chiang Khan. British timber companies seeking to exploit the teak forests around the nearby semi-independent state of Chiang Mai had come into conflict with the ruler of that region. The Thai court, the Deputy Governor reported, had decided to back British interests against those of its northern vassal. As a result, the explorers were told, some forty British officers were on their way down the Mekong to bolster their countrymen's position.

&n
bsp; The verb Garnier used to describe his group's reaction was accabler, a word which has its English equivalent but which, lacking a cognate form, loses its force in any single-word translation. To understand just how dreadful was the news the French expedition received, one must realize that they were affected, in the term chosen by the group's most famous member, in a fashion that overwhelmed, overcame, and, at least metaphorically, prostrated them. Whatever their limited successes up to their arrival in Chiang Khan, all would be ashes in their mouths if it proved that the rival, if not actually hated, British had already accomplished the task of surveying the territory they had believed uncharted, and had planted the first tentative foot of political power in a region that the French dearly wished to see fall eventually under their control. Lagrée sought to rally his associates with the thought that there was still the possibility that they could make their mark, and better their rivals, by surveying the Mekong to its ultimate source in Tibet, something he felt sure the British would not have done. Even in the account written by Garnier three years after the event, however, the hollowness of Lagrée's brave words rings loud.

  Secondly, and as it was to prove later more seriously, from this region of the northern Laotian states onwards the explorers were entering a political framework that had little if any similarity with the nation-state system by then established in Europe. Until and after the expedition had passed through Vientiane the local authorities they encountered were linked firmly with one or another major ruler. Cambodian writ had run as far as Sambor. Then, despite the readiness of the Frenchmen to describe the local petty rulers as “kings,” they were on the fringe of the possessions of the court of Bangkok. Once within the ambit of the principality of the Luang Prabang, however, the local rulers, upon whom they depended for passports and the provision of men, supplies, and transport, were not so clearly the vassals of any single distant suzerain. This was already partly apparent in the news they heard of events in Chiang Mai. The princes of that state were the vassals of the King of Thailand, but they were capable of surprising shows of independence and were under pressure from Englishmen who claimed, in some juridically curious fashion, the rights that had one been held by Burmese monarchs in an area that was geographically peripheral but political important to their state's concerns.