River Road to China

by Milton Osborne

  Finally, on June 28, there was a favorable response. The ruler of Keng Tung gave the expedition authority to proceed, but only along the valley of the Mekong itself. If the French party should wish to travel to the capital of Keng Tung, further authorization would be necessary. The bearer of this welcome news explained the reasons for delay. Although the ruler of Keng Tung had been ready enough to permit the Frenchmen to proceed, the Burmese agent at his court had opposed this view. He was apparently angered at the failure of the French to send him a gift and made every effort to reverse the ruler's decision. With the agent's opposition overcome, and the news brought back to Mong Lin, the members of the expedition could consider their next step. They knew their next major destination, if virtually nothing of the problems they might encounter along the way. An uncertain but considerable distance to the north was the town of Keng Hung (Yün-ching-hung in modern China). This was the birthplace of their interpreter Alévy, and a center known to the European world as the result of a visit there in 1837 by the British explorer Captain McLeod. McLeod had traveled there from Bhamo in northeast Burma, with six elephants, during an earlier attempt to find a commercial route into China. Lagrée and his men sought to make it their next important stopping place with a growing consciousness of their weakness, and the immediate problems of finding transportation for Delaporte. While the inhabitants of Mong Lin were ready to act as porters for the expedition's supplies, at very high rates, they would under no circumstances carry the hammock on which Delaporte was to travel. He therefore was to be the responsibility of the party's escort.

  Without regret the Frenchmen left Mong Lin on July 1. Their pleasure at moving forward was soon qualified by the experience of traveling with the incapacitated Delaporte and by the exactions of the porters. Villagers encountered along the way were reluctant to allow such a demonstrably ill man as Delaporte to travel through their settlements: he might be an omen of death or grave sickness for their village. Only through threats of violence backed by the brandishing of weapons were the explorers able to prevail over this repugnance. As for the charges exacted by the porters, no more than two days after leaving Mong Lin the Frenchmen decided to reduce their baggage once again. They could not continue to pay the prices demanded. As they had done in Luang Prabang, once more they took stock of their possessions, this time ridding themselves of all but the barest essentials, even their mattress pads. When they reached Siemlap, a week after leaving Mong Lin, the explorers were in a pitiful state. Garnier described their circumstances in the following terms:

  The state of health of the expedition was deplorable. The last stages that we had just completed, as often in the forests as in the rice fields, where the soil, soaked through by the first major rains, gave off dangerous miasmas and concealed countless leeches, had brought on attacks of fever and led to ulcerations of the feet that meant that half of our personnel were unable to move from their beds.

  The village of Siemlap lay on the western side of the Mekong, within the general dominance of the Burmese court but under the control of yet another petty ruler, the “king” of Keng Khang, whose residence was still some distance to the north. The authorities at Siemlap were ready to send on Lagrée's request for passage through the territory of the Keng Khang ruler, but they would not permit him or his party to travel further without express approval. With his companions suffering from illness and fatigue there was little Lagrée could do to counter this refusal. What the next step should be was further complicated by the arrival in Siemlap, on July 16, of a letter addressed to the expedition's leader from the ruler of Keng Tung who, reversing his earlier position, now called on the mission to travel to his capital. Judging this to be merely an invitation of courtesy, Lagrée declined, and only two days later approval came for passage through the territories of Keng Khang.

  To receive approval was one thing, to take advantage another. When the main party left Siemlap on July 23, they left behind them Joubert and Delaporte. The latter's feet were still not entirely healed, and Joubert was once again suffering from a combination of the “typhoid” fever, that had struck him down near Stung Treng nine months earlier, and some intestinal infection. For the main party the next two days of travel were a welcome change from the period of enforced inactivity in Siemlap but a renewed drain on their physical resources. They marched at first over an upland route, for the normal path beside the river was now submerged beneath floodwaters. Their bare feet were lacerated by the rough surface, and Garnier's left knee, which had been affected by his dangerous bout of fever earlier in the expedition, caused him severe pain with every step. At the end of the second day the party reached the tiny settlement of Sop Yong. Here in a broken-down pagoda beside the Mekong the party made its base for the next few days. By the time Delaporte and Joubert rejoined them on July 30 the explorers' overall situation had deteriorated. Lagrée was incapacitated with a swollen groin, the result of an infected bite by a leech. Like the other members of the expedition, Lagrée had, for the most part, given up pulling leeches from his body while marching through the day. Only in the evening was a thorough check made to find where the creatures had lodged. The results of this exercise in stoicism were clear in Delaporte's infected feet and now the leader's painfully affected groin.

  Although they had rejoined the main party, Delaporte and Joubert were far from strong, and as the rains continued to fall the problem of finding porters became more and more difficult. It was even questionable whether their rough and uncomfortable quarters in the riverside village were safe from a sudden rise in the Mekong's level. As it had so many times before, the party split into two sections. Leaving Lagrée, Joubert, and Delaporte behind at Sop Yong, Garnier went ahead with the others, marching along a muddy path that seemed paved with leeches. On August 1 Garnier's group was at the settlement of Ban Passang, and four days later the others joined them.

  Moving north as they were, the expedition had temporarily left behind the territory of the ruler of Keng Khang, returning once more to a region under the control of the ruler of Keng Tung. They were in the province of Mong Yawng, whose capital of the same name lay a little to the north. The French party's arrival had not gone unnoticed, and on the same day that Lagrée rejoined Garnier and his advance group two Burmese soldiers appeared at the explorers' camp. They were the servants of the Burmese agent for the province, and they required information on the party's intentions, indicating their superior's expectation that the French mission would present themselves before him at Mong Yawng.

  The explorers pay their respects to the hereditary chief of Mong Yawng.

  There was no alternative but to obey what was clearly an order. On August 7 the expedition crossed over the moat surrounding the once-important settlement of Mong Yawng. Within twenty-four hours the fears of serious obstruction that had been growing in the explorers' minds ever since they left Luang Prabang over two months before became a concrete reality. The hereditary chief of Mong Yawng was a weak reed, almost totally dominated by the Burmese court's representative in the settlement. Whether the Burmese agent had already been in correspondence with his senior counterpart in Keng Tung was unclear, but he knew that the Frenchmen had received and declined an invitation to travel to the capital of the territories within which Mong Yawng lay. After a series of cat and mouse exchanges lasting several days, a letter arrived from the authorities of Keng Khang withdrawing the permission that had earlier been granted for the explorers to continue their travels north through that petty principality's territories. The Frenchmen suspected that this refusal had been engineered by the Burmese agent at Mong Yawng. At the same time the weak chief of Mong Yawng, although he acted with personal goodwill towards the expedition, was unready to allow them to travel farther without approval from his master. If the expedition was ever to move forward again, and to avoid the failure that would be involved in returning to Saigon, a new initiative had to be taken. Choosing Thorel, the interpreter Alévy, and two members of the escort to accompany him, Lagrée set off on
August 14 for Keng Tung, by now at least a week's travel to the west.

  A dreary period of inaction followed Lagrée's departure, during which the remaining explorers fell ill one by one with “fever.” The men blamed this sickness on the foul airs rising from the ground of the forests and marshes they had traversed, but the accounts that remain give few clues as to the actual disease that exacted its cost in fevers and delirium. This was still an age that did not understand the connection between mosquitoes and malaria, but whether this disease alone was the cause of the outbreak of fever that Garnier describes in such restrained terms must remain a mystery. The modern reader of these nineteenth-century journals can only be amazed at the apparent speed with which already debilitated men recovered sufficiently from their bouts of disease to begin, yet again, the arduous travels their mission required. After days of delirium, when one or more of the explorers wandered aimlessly and uncomprehendingly through the rain-sodden streets of Mong Yawng, these same men devoted their energies to recording the history of the region in which they found themselves, nursed their companions, and waited for news of their leader. What depressed them more than anything else, more even than the illnesses to which they succumbed, was the need to wait and the prospect that the end of it all would be an inglorious return along the route they had traveled to this point.

  After six anxious days Garnier received a letter from Lagrée. Written before Lagrée had reached his goal, the letter gave an account of the territory through which he had traveled but could offer no certainty on how he would be received once at Keng Tung. After six further days of sickness and waiting, on August 26 another courier brought news to the Frenchmen. The Burmese agent in Mong Yawng summoned Garnier, to inform him that permission had been given for the party to proceed to Keng Hung. This was welcome news but puzzling nonetheless, for there still was no confirmation from Lagrée, who should, by this point, have been in Keng Tung. Days passed with no news other than increasingly disturbing reports of a murderous attack upon a band of opium merchants who were in the ruler of Keng Tung's employ. If bandits could kill twenty-three of the ruler's merchants, what might have happened to two Frenchmen traveling with so little protection?

  Not until September 6, more than three weeks after Lagrée's departure, was there a rumor that contained anything like positive news. The leader of the French party, according to the report that filtered into Mong Yawng, had left Keng Tung with permission to travel to Keng Khang and was going there directly. This was welcome but still unsupported news for the party in Mong Yawng. It was enough, however, for Garnier to decide to move on. With their preparations made and departure set for September 8, a letter finally arrived from Lagrée. It was undated, a small but significant indication of the physical and mental toll under which the normally precise leader of the party labored; but dated or not its news was good. The ruler of Keng Tung had received Lagrée on August 25 with the best of will. He was the son of the ruler who, thirty years before, had been visited by the British traveler McLeod. Fortunately, the memory that McLeod had left behind him was a happy one — among other things, he was admiringly remembered for his awesome appetite that led him to eat three times as much at a single meal as one of his Keng Tung hosts would consume in an entire day. But the main point was that the ruler was ready to help rather than hinder the Frenchmen. Even the Burmese agent at Keng Tung, after an initial frosty encounter with Lagrée and Thorel and continuing evidence of undisguised greed for further presents, ceded to the requests of the ruler and gave his authorization for the party to proceed to Keng Khang. On September 13 the whole mission was together again. The absence of Lagrée and Thorel, which had been expected to last no more than three weeks, had lasted nearer to five. Their detour to Keng Tung had involved nearly three hundred miles of hard travel, most of it over steep mountain tracks.

  The days spent in Keng Khang were a happy contrast with the period of anxious uncertainty in Mong Yawng. The ruler and his advisers were amiable. The Burmese agent, though clearly less than well disposed to the French party, could not question the validity of the passports issued by the ruler of Keng Tung and the Burmese agent in that capital. With all the members of the party apparently restored to good health, time passed rapidly as the customary ceremonial visits were exchanged and the explorers admired the evidence of substantial prosperity that seemed so much a feature of Keng Khang. The ruler's palace was “vast” and its construction testified to the presence of highly competent craftsmen. Senior officials wore rich silk robes, and the explorers were served from silver plates and bowls. Out of the hearing of the Burmese agent, the ruler confided to them that his territories were rich in minerals, even gold, but this had to remain a secret from the Burmese, who would, if they learned of these resources, require the population to mine them and render up a tenth of the value to the Burmese court. Information of this kind, even if it was unverified, was the stuff that Garnier's dreams were made of. Here was a memory to be guarded as a justification for yet another attempt to find a route to the upper Mekong and southwestern China. Brief though the period in Keng Khang was, it recaptured something of the idyll that the explorers had enjoyed in Luang Prabang.

  The party's sense of satisfaction was not to last much longer. One day after leaving Keng Khang on September 18, messengers brought word south that they must not proceed onwards to Keng Hung, the last major center before China. The news came to the expedition when their hopes were highest. They had reached the settlement of Mong Long, to be delighted by the evidence they saw there of their proximity to China, the “promised land,” as Garnier did not hesitate to call it. There was a bridge built in the vaulted Chinese manner at the entrance to Mong Long, and within the settlement they came upon two old Chinese women whose grotesquely small feet emphasized how close they were to the land where foot-binding remained a necessary preparation for crippled adherence to a particular view of beauty. But even as the party prepared to leave Mong Long the letter of interdiction arrived from Keng Hung and was handed to the local authorities. The Frenchmen were not to proceed but were to return along the route they had followed. Then, to add ironic confirmation to the French party's awareness of the proximity of China, the letter concluded, “Keng Hung is not only a dependency of Burma, but also of China.”

  For another four days the explorers had to wait in Mong Long while their case was carried to the authorities by the interpreter Alévy. Uncertain as to the real reason for the refusal to let them proceed, they staked all on the capacity of a subordinate whose talents and probity had, in the less demanding months at the beginning of the expedition, often been a matter for jest. If Alévy's own account of his efforts on the party's behalf is to be believed, at this critical juncture he more than justified his place as a member of the expedition. Whether his report of bluster and cajoling before the council determining affairs in Keng Hung was accurate or exaggerated, Alévy succeeded in gaining agreement for the expedition to proceed that far. The news was received on September 25 and by September 29 the group was in Keng Hung.

  Whatever their concern for the reception they would be accorded corded at Keng Hung, the route the explorers now traveled was a welcome relief from the painfully slow passages they had made in the preceding three months. Instead of the half-made tracks, churned to mud by a single traveler's progress, that they had followed through rain-sodden forests, they now walked over paths that were even provided with bridges across streams. The land in the valleys was highly cultivated, and picturesque hamlets and villages clustered beneath the heavily wooded hills that more and more came to dominate the scenery. As they drew nearer to Keng Hung the valleys became narrower and narrower. Given the Frenchmen's hopes for commercial discoveries, the oxen carrying lead, cotton, tobacco, and tea that passed by them, heading south from Keng Hung, were a cheering sight.

  The town the explorers entered was of very recent construction, but it was the latest manifestation of Keng Hung s longstanding political importance. The Frenchmen had now reached the capit
al of the fabled Sip Song Panna, a political unit of significance probably as early as the eleventh century and of some continuing importance even today when most of the region has been absorbed within the borders of the Chinese People's Republic. The dominant ethnic group within Sip Song Panna was yet another representative of the Tai-speaking peoples who then, as now, spread so widely across eastern and southeastern Asia.

  After more than a century's Western interest in the area, there is still uncertainty as to the exact meaning of the name Sip Song Panna. Gamier thought it meant the number of registered inhabitants in each of the twelve divisions making up the ancient state whose glory had once been immeasurably greater than it was in 1867. Probably the correct literal translation of the name is “Twelve Principalities,” reflecting the fact that under the loose authority of the ruler at Keng Hung there were eleven other territorial divisions spread across what is today China and northern Laos. When Lagrée, Gamier, and the others came to Keng Hung, a bare ten years had elapsed since the old town of that name had been destroyed during the battles and campaigns of the 1850s that had seen local rivalries once more bringing a confrontation between the Burmese and the Thais. Yet despite the relative poverty of the town, the ruler of Keng Hung's council had the vital power of decision over the French expedition's fate. It alone could decide whether the party might move on to China. Even though its first proscription against the expedition coming to Keng Hung had been overcome, the question of moving farther north still remained to be settled.