River Road to China

by Milton Osborne

  Garnier was later to write of this situation in terms suggesting that he and his companions were reasonably confident of a successful outcome. This seems, however, very much a case of selective memory. The French party was indeed allowed to proceed, but the necessary authorization was given only after complex maneuvering. In the uncertain circumstances, Lagrée took the offensive. Without revealing the nature of the travel papers he was carrying, he notified the council of Keng Hung that there were only two choices open to its members. They could present him with a written refusal of permission to proceed, and he would make such use of it as he saw fit, or they could provide the French party with the means to travel on to Ssu-mao, the first major Chinese town to their north.

  When Lagrée confronted the council of Keng Hung on October 3, he found in it an institutional reflection of the Sip Song Panna's geographical and political character. Presided over by a senior official, a fat old man with white hair, the council had twelve members, the four most important of them being representatives of the divisions of the Sip Song Panna that bordered on the neighboring states. In addition, however, there were places for the agents of the Burmese and Chinese governments. The Burmese agent was present, seated to the left and a little behind the presiding official. The place usually occupied by the Chinese agent was vacant.

  The opening exchanges recalled the difficulties the mission had encountered so many times before. Showing the council the passports they had received from the ruler of Keng Tung and the Burmese agent at that court, the Frenchmen were first accorded a negative response by the Burmese accredited to Keng Hung. The passports were all very well, the Burmese official argued, but there was nothing in them relating to passage from Keng Hung into China. If the Frenchmen's judgment was correct, this almost routine expression of opposition helped rather than hindered their case. No less than in the other Tai-language regions through which the explorers had passed, the Burmese agent at Keng Hung was disliked by those whom he advised.

  More disturbing was the lack of positive reaction when Lagrée proceeded to show the passports the party had received from Peking. There was uncertainty and even confusion among the council members: they did not recognize the signature on the passports; the documents had not come from the usual authority. Then the icily reserved Lagrée acted. Striving for maximum effect, he slowly drew from an envelope the letter written on the expedition's behalf by one of the most powerful men in China, Prince Kung, the brother of the Emperor Hsien Feng, who had died in 1861.

  The result was all that could be wished and more. Silence fell as Lagrée passed Prince Kung's letter to the Chinese functionary representing his country's interests in the absence of the agent. The Chinese official read the letter with amazement and informed the council of its contents. This, indeed, was a letter from Peking, written by a prince of the Chinese Empire. Those who had brought it were men of high rank and should be received with honor and courtesy. The atmosphere of the meeting was transformed. The members of the council prostrated themselves before the letter and those who had borne it to Keng Hung.

  The question of whether the party would be free to move on was no longer at issue. The matter was consecrated through a ceremonial audience with the almost powerless ruler of Keng Hung, a nineteen-year-old youth firmly in the grip of his advisers, who now received Lagrée before an assembly of some three hundred followers armed with ancient flintlocks, lances, and rusty sabers. For the Frenchmen, the silk robes of the ruler and his gilded ceremonial headdress, complete with tiny tinkling bells, left nothing more than a “bizarre” impression. With their passage assured, they could give full rein to their prejudices.

  On October 7 the expedition was once more traveling north. Leaving Keng Hung the party crossed the waters of the Mekong for the last time, passing by ferry from the western bank. After four days' march they were at Keng Neua, the last settlement of any importance outside the Chinese Empire. The settlement provided little that was of visual interest to the explorers, but they recognized its political utility – if not significance. The ruler of the region in which Keng Neua was located was responsible for translating the messages that passed backward and forward between China and the chief town of the Sip Song Panna, Keng Hung.

  The explorers were now moving rapidly through an upland countryside that was notably different from the leech-ridden rain forests to which they had become so accustomed. By October 16 the villages they encountered seemed totally Chinese in character. All the familiar signs were there: calligraphic writing on strips of red paper that hung about the doors of houses; chairs and tables, which the travelers welcomed with undisguised relief; and, overall, the “stamp of routine uniformity” which China's cultural system imposed on the diverse ethnic groups assimilated to its civilization.

  Two days later the Frenchmen saw and entered their first Chinese town, Ssu-mao. They had been traveling all day when, at four in the afternoon, rounding the flank of a hill, they saw the unmistakable sight of a Chinese provincial town. Set in a vast plain, Ssu-mao was a fortified city whose center lay behind regular walls. Surrounding this central area were the less-ordered outer settlements, the market gardens, and dotted here and there the villas of wealthy inhabitants. Running away from the settlement were roads paved with stone and gravel, a sight they had not come upon since leaving Saigon more than fifteen months earlier. Here, whatever the disappointments of the past and their state of health in the present, was the country that Gamier had described as the “promised land.” They were finally in China, the first European travelers ever to cross into this southwestern region of the Chinese Empire. The Frenchmen had succeeded where McLeod had failed thirty years previously. He had reached Keng Hung and been turned back before he could enter Yunnan. They had been able to pass on and to reach this point.

  At this culmination of so many months of effort, the French explorers for a moment doubted their fitness to proceed. When they entered the city they were met by officials alerted to their coming, and by a gawking crowd. Still walking barefoot, their clothes showed only too well the long months that had passed. Among the naval officers only Lagrée wore a uniform coat, its badges of rank dull and tarnished. The explorers, as Garnier admits in his journal, felt a momentary hesitation and a passing sense of sadness for the apparent poverty of their group. But this sense of hesitancy and near shame could not last. The dominant feeling was one of success. The explorers were in China and, as Garnier noted later, possibly with some regret in view of the trials that came afterward, “everything that proved the existence of China was welcome.” The Islamic rebellion and its possible effect on their travels could be temporarily forgotten, as could information of a devastating outbreak of cholera in the regions nearby. As the explorers rested in their quarters within a pagoda on the night of October 18, to be in China was enough.

  CHAPTER VIII

  ACROSS THE RED RIVER

  The explorers were in China but, as they soon realized, in a very special region of that varied empire. Here, at the southern fringe of imperial territory, they found the “routine uniformity” of Chinese civilization and the continuing presence of minority tribes and peoples whose language and culture were linked to the jumbled ethnic groups of northern Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. The province of Yunnan, where they now rested, had become part of China as long ago as the thirteenth century, under the Mongol dynasty. In the succeeding centuries, however, its distance from northern China and the varied character of the region's population had brought it long periods of semi-independence.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, less than twenty years before the French party came in such sorry state to Ssu-mao, one group among Yunnan's ethnically diverse population was smoldering with resentment. This was the Islamic minority. Its members were the descendants of rough-riding Central Asian soldiers who had streamed out of the distant steppes to fight as mercenaries for Kublai Khan. Despite their martial antecedents these followers of Islam were not accorded a military role by the succeeding Chinese dynast
ies, who distrusted the former servants of the Mongol barbarians. By the mid-nineteenth century they were the victims of widespread discrimination. In 1855, with two remarkable charismatic leaders, Ma Te-hsing and Tu Wen-hsiu, at their head, the Muslims rose against imperial authority. As Lagrée and his men considered their present position and their future, the Islamic revolt was twelve years old, and the rebels controlled most of western Yunnan. The explorers had to decide how this situation would affect their plans.

  More than ever before, the difficulty of decision was clear to Lagrée himself and to his subordinates, and with indecision there was the risk of dissent and disagreement. For Lagrée the value of exploring the Mekong to its source now seemed less important than making a commercial reconnaissance of southwestern China; to know more of the Mekong's origins was scientifically desirable but probably practically impossible. Garnier saw matters in a different light. His obsession with the Mekong had not abated; for France, and for himself, there could be glory and genuine scientific achievement in tracing the great river to its source, even if hopes for the Mekong as a navigable waterway had been illusory.

  Lagrée's choices would have been easier if the information available to the expedition had been less fragmentary. One further major error in planning was now apparent. The party had no truly satisfactory way of communicating with the Chinese officials upon whom they had to rely for advice. Prince Kung's letter produced a readiness to provide assistance, but it could not overcome the lack of a common language. Alévy proved unable to exchange more than the briefest words with the officials they met in Ssu-mao, and another youth brought from the regions near Keng Hung in the express hope that he would be able to aid the Frenchmen in understanding the officials of Yunnan was scarcely better. The result was a painful and often confusing series of exchanges. In audiences with the Governor of Ssu-mao, Lagrée struggled to achieve some grasp of the situation, hindered as much as helped by his interpreters. At the same time Garnier, who possessed the merest smattering of Chinese, tried to work through the intermediacy of the soldier Tei, his Vietnamese companion of the long marches in Thailand and Cambodia. Garnier and Tei could speak together in Vietnamese, and Tei knew sufficient Chinese characters to carry on rudimentary written dialogues with the local population.

  If the issues at stake had not been so vital, the situation could have been farcical. One day after their arrival in Ssu-mao, Lagrée had gone to meet the local Governor, who arrived at the audience in a sedan chair borne by eight porters, to the sound of exploding fireworks. He was an impressive figure, who wore a fur cape over his mandarin robes, and he greeted the Frenchmen cordially. But the Governor's amiability was scarcely a sufficient substitute for the exact intelligence the mission sought. Some matters were clear. The Muslim rebellion was far from over. The situation changed from day to day, but at the moment the rebels occupied the important western city of Ta-li, set by a large lake and not far, the explorers believed, from the upper course of the Mekong. Word they had received earlier of dread disease was not confirmed. Large areas of Yunnan were still ravaged by cholera. And to add further worry to the twin dangers of rebellion and epidemic, the general confusion in the province had brought a resurgence of banditry.

  Not all was so certain as these basic and discouraging facts. The Governor of Ssu-mao, the Frenchmen now learned, had played some obscure part in the frustrating drama of the past month when they were seeking to enter China. If they understood him correctly, he had been ready to authorize their passage into China but had warned them against the dangerous possibility of traveling to the Muslim stronghold of Ta-li. The suggestion that there had been this guarded authorization for their passage through Keng Hung was made the more puzzling by the news that the Governor's letter had been accompanied by another, written in European “characters,” from a famed maker of gunpowder, one Kosuto. Who, they puzzled, was this apparently renowned explosives expert, and how was it that he should have known of their presence in the remote regions of Keng Hung and written to them there? Plainly the answers would not be found in Ssu-mao, and certainly not through the aid of Alévy and the other barely useful interpreter. With an uncertain future before the party, Alévy said he would go no farther, and Lagrée made no effort to retain him. He had served his purpose at Keng Hung, if nowhere else, and there was every reason for dispensing with this servant who was “tolerable if unfaithful.” Aléyy could be sent back down the Mekong with a message for the French authorities in Saigon, and the other interpreter left to return to the regions near Keng Hung. For the future the mission would have to rely on its own limited linguistic resources.

  Beyond the problems of language, the Frenchmen did have some advantages to aid them on their way. So long as poor health did not hinder their progress, the passports they carried, in conjunction with Prince Kung's letter, ensured them an official welcome wherever the power of the Peking government remained unchallenged. In Ssu-mao, and in later resting points along their route, the two medical men in the party aided relations with the local population by treating the sick and injured. Delaporte sketched Joubert engaged in this humanitarian effect. A later engraving made from this sketch is remarkable for the standard, if unconscious, blasphemy of the nineteenth century. In this picture, as in so many others from the same period showing missionaries at work in distant and dangerous lands, the European doctor sits like a latter-day Christ as the maimed, the halt, and the blind stream towards his outstretched arms. All that is lacking are the stigmata to make the iconography perfect.

  Dr. Joubert treating the sick.

  Less of an advantage was the constant fact of curiosity. Once in China, the explorers found that they were the object of insistent and even dangerous curiosity. For those who had never seen a European, the members of this curious race were a matter for wonder and excitement. Curiosity was not restricted to the city poor who so readily crowded about the Frenchmen, particularly the children, whose sharp observation enabled them to mimic the explorers' military gait and their foreign gestures. A few days after entering Ssu-mao Lagrée was surprised and annoyed when an official with whom they were dealing suddenly attempted to remove Lagrée's hat and to stare at the back of his head. The mandarin had a ready explanation for this curious action. He was searching, he said, for Lagrée's third eye. It was well known in China that one reason for the power exercised by Europeans was that they possessed a third eye, which permitted them to look secretly for riches while apparently gazing in another direction.

  Against this background of mingled goodwill, curiosity, and incomprehension, Lagrée still had to make a decision. The reality of the Islamic rebellion was evident all about them; Ssu-mao itself had been occupied by the rebels only a few years earlier, and much damage remained unrepaired. There was a further reason for concern. The Chinese officials of Ssu-mao were well disposed towards the Frenchmen, but could the explorers depend on the capacity of the imperial troops to resist the Muslims? As naval officers the Frenchmen were alternately shocked and amused by the weapons the Chinese troops used. For Garnier, the appropriate comparison was with the period of the Hundred Years War between France and England. The wooden cannon, bound with iron bands, might have done duty at the battle of Crecy or Agincourt, as might the troops' halberds and lances. The primitive long-barreled matchlock guns, fired by a soldier supporting his unwieldy weapon's barrel on a forked stick or staff, belonged, perhaps, to a slightly later age. Armed as they were, the troops seemed barely capable of defending themselves against any serious enemy. As if to add further force to this conclusion, news arrived in Ssu-mao on October 24 that the rebel forces were preparing to attack the next major town to the north, P'uerh.

  At this news, Lagrée decided to travel north and east to K'un-ming, the capital of Yunnan, as quickly as possible. To seek a passage to the west—which Garnier later argued was the desire of the others in the party—would be to risk an almost immediate confrontation with the Muslim rebels. The mission's goal had been to explore the Mekong and to inve
stigate the commercial possibilities of southwestern China. Now was the time to concentrate on the latter aim and so ensure the well-being of the expedition as a whole. If new and more detailed information should be available when the expedition reached P'uerh, a little further to the north, then Lagrée agreed to reconsider Garnier's wish to travel towards the Mekong by way of Ta-li.

  In his later discussion of this disputed decision, Garnier suggests that he was not alone in arguing against Lagrée's point of view. Lagrée's order, he recorded, “evoked a degree of discontent in the heart of the expedition. We were all young and enamored of adventures; one is bravest when one does not hold responsibility.” This comment was written after the expedition was over and Lagrée was dead. The contrast Garnier makes between bravery and responsibility reflects his own effort to minimize a sharp difference that developed between him and his leader over the goals the expedition should pursue. Yet there is a mystery connected with his description of discontent in the “heart” of the party. Did Garnier wish the readers of his journal to believe that all or most of the others shared his reluctance to turn away from the Mekong? We can be sure from Louis de Carné's account of developments that if he felt any disappointment he was more than ready to follow the orders of a man whom he admired almost passionately, despite the sharp criticisms that Lagrée sometimes directed at him. The attitude of the others is less clear. Possibly, unlike Garnier, they were reluctant, whatever their inner feelings, to show a preference for one route over another.

  In the weeks that followed, tensions were barely hidden below the surface of correct relations between the Frenchmen. Ill and exhausted, continually exposed to unexpected dangers and disappointments, they had passed beyond the point where public displays of unity were the answer to their problems. A striking image comes across the years: the members of the party chose to march in isolation from each other during their travels in November and December 1867. There were practical reasons for this choice, not least the need to supervise porters. But this practical concern was only part of the explanation. They had all spent too long in each other's company. When Lagrée sought companionship he turned increasingly to Joubert, not to Garnier, his second-in-command.