The coffin-covered plain outside Chiang-ch'uan.
The next three days were filled with arduous marching. At one point their route took them to a height of seven thousand feet, and along their way they encountered frequent reminders of the war that ravaged the province in the succession of burned-out villages and abandoned fields. By the fourth day after leaving Chiang-ch'uan the countryside's somber aspect had changed. In place of devastation they saw carefully tended fields and irrigation canals. The route they followed became a road rather than a stony path, and they shared its surface with a bewildering confusion of travelers: caravans of beasts bearing merchandise, human porters, and the curtained litters of those who could afford to be carried rather than walk. As they had done before, the Frenchmen reflected sadly on their worn and dirty clothing, which contrasted so sharply with the silken robes of the Chinese officials and merchants who paused to stare at them.
The first view of K'un-ming came at midday on December 23. Under the clear blue sky they saw the great city in the distance, its crenelated walls rising in stark relief. As they halted to look at this ancient city, set six thousand feet above sea level, a horseman rode rapidly out towards them. The rider bore a letter for Lagrée, sent by a missionary and in French! This was more than they had hoped for. They knew there were missionaries in northern Yunnan, but they had no certain information about their nationality. There could be no better greeting to such passionate patriots than the promise of the letter that its writer would see them “à bientôt.” With light hearts they passed through the great southern gateway into the city, cheered by the thought of an early meeting with one of their countrymen and joyfully observing the signs they saw all about them of K'un-ming's commercial importance.
This was the biggest city they had seen since they left Saigon. That had been eighteen months ago. Luang Prabang had blended Arcadian surroundings with picturesque buildings, Yüan-chiang had held a special charm in its setting beside the Red River, but K'un-ming was something else again. Despite the damage inflicted during the assaults mounted by the rebels at the beginning of the decade, the city's fortified walls were in good repair. The streets within were lively with constant streams of passersby. And there seemed every evidence that here in K'un-ming the fabled riches of southwestern China were present in abundance. Shop front succeeded shop front; the merchants' goods were displayed in carefully arranged cases. The uniform color of the buildings was relieved in the commercial quarters of the city by the thousands, as it seemed to Garnier, of golden painted characters hung above the shop fronts proclaiming the nature of the merchandise for sale. Guided through the busy crowd that parted to let them pass, the explorers were brought to their lodgings, a section of the examinations palace. Here, in less troubled days, the young men who sought admission to the imperial bureaucracy submitted to the traditional examinations in the Confucian classics. Set on a hill with a fine view out over the countryside and comfortably furnished, the building offered a happy contrast to the poverty of so many of their recent lodgings.
Father Protteau, for such was the writer of the letter of welcome they had received earlier in the day, soon appeared at the explorers' quarters. This was an emotional moment, their first meeting with a compatriot since the anticlimactic encounter with Duyshart south of Luang Prabang eight months earlier; and he, after all, was not French by birth. But it was a meeting that held a different significance for each of the various members of the expedition. For Lagrée, the missionaries the expedition met at K'un-ming were to be admired for their devotion and respected for their faith. His Jesuit schooling required no less than this, and probably ensured more. The youngest member of the party, Louis de Carné, was a fervent believer, a passionate Catholic who saw in his religion a bastion against the insidious dangers of socialism. To find men of God in the isolated southwestern corner of China was a further testimony to the spiritual power of the creed he held dear.
To Garnier the presence of the priests was another matter altogether. He was, conventionally, a member of the Catholic faith, but in his private letters he revealed that his degree of religious conviction was, at very least, debatable. He could conceive of the existence of a divine spirit, he once observed, but he had no belief in the claims of religion revealed through a savior. If Garnier had a sustaining personal faith it was the worship of his country's glory. He summed up his views of men such as Father Protteau in an uncompromisingly frank observation: “One must make use of missionaries, but not serve them.” Like many of his naval compatriots in the East, he had seen the contrast between the missionaries' claims of success in making converts and the reality of meager achievement. If they could serve France, then so much the better. But often, as he made bluntly clear, this was not a role missionaries played.
The man who now stood before them did little to change either de Carné's or Garnier's mind. The young diplomat saw in Father Protteau a living martyr. Here was a man who had sacrificed all his private interests and risked death to convert the heathen in one of the most remote corners of the globe. When, two days later, de Carné attended a midnight Christmas mass and received the Host and took wine from the priest's gnarled hands, he found it a moving religious experience. Garnier was present at the mass, too, as convention required; his real interest in Father Protteau, however, related to the amount of information the missionary could provide. There was much but not enough.
Father Protteau could, at least, solve the mystery surrounding their experience at Keng Hung. The cause of their difficulties in late September, it transpired, had been the inability of the Keng Hung officials to make an accurate translation of a letter sent by the Viceroy of Yunnan. This great official had written on the explorers' behalf, authorizing their entry into China but warning against the dangers they might find on certain routes. The warning in his letter had been mistaken for an interdiction. As for the letter from “Kosuto,” this had been sent by Father Fenouil, Protteau's immediate superior and the Deputy Apostolic Vicar in Yunnan. Fenouil had written to confirm all that had been said in the Viceroy's letter. The French party was welcome in the areas controlled by the imperial government. This was partly so, Protteau explained, because of the way Father Fenouil had embraced the imperial cause. He was indeed, as rumor had so often told them, a renowned maker of gunpowder. Unfortunately for the utility of his efforts, his powder magazine had blown up recently, the result, it was thought, of sabotage by the Islamic rebels. The news confirmed Garnier's belief that the missionaries of Yunnan were unwisely set upon a path of excessive identification with the interests of the local government.
Father Fenouil was expected in K'un-ming shortly, but before this meeting the explorers were concerned to present themselves before the local authorities. A visit to the Governor of the province passed quickly and courteously. Then it was time for the French to present themselves before General Ma Ju-lung. Although the Muslims of Yunnan had been prevented for centuries from pursuing their ancient employment as soldiers, Ma Ju-lung had readily captured the spirit of his martial ancestors. He was a large, and to the French a gross figure. As proof of his military prowess he insisted on showing them the wounds that covered his body, pulling open his tunic so they could better see the scars. Although the Frenchmen suspected from Ma Ju-lung's red-rimmed eyes that he had spent the night carousing, their host would not join them in the banquet that he later laid before them.
As the explorers feasted on swallows' nest soup, fishes' entrails, and lacquered duck, the general and his subordinates sat and watched. It was the Muslim month of Ramadan, and as a believer Ma Ju-lung could not eat until the sun had set. But perhaps most striking of all to the explorers was the manner in which the Muslim general surrounded himself with weapons. Unlike the antique guns that had been the equipment of all the Chinese soldiery they had seen so far, much of Ma Ju-lung's armory was stocked with modern equipment. There were ancient blunderbusses, it was true. Besides these, however, were repeating rifles, carbines, and revolvers. Not only that; the
evidence was all about them of Ma Ju-lung having tested his weapons. Not a piece of furniture in the general's quarters had escaped use as a target.
Picturesque as he was, Ma Ju-lung was a worrying factor in the explorers' calculations. Could they depend on him? He remained a follower of Islam, so that his enemies were his coreligionists. It was true that when he changed sides he had acted quickly to remove any doubts from the minds of his soldiers as to where their new loyalties should lie. Assembling his troops, he executed twenty among them who had dared to criticize their leader's actions. But that had been years before, and doubts about his intentions remained. Father Protteau, whose spiritual faith waged a constant battle with very earthly fear, wished himself back in the mountain refuge where he had fled on previous occasions when the Muslims threatened K'un-ming. For the French party the best assurance of Ma Ju-lung's goodwill seemed to lie in the fact that Father Fenouil had written on his behalf to the French diplomatic mission in Peking. Whether through his own wish, or because of Ma's threats, as he later himself maintained, Fenouil had written to the French Legation to argue Ma Ju-lung's case to the imperial authorities for increased supplies of men and weapons to prosecute the war against the rebels.
Finally, on January 2, 1868, the expedition's members met Fenouil. Garnier wrote that the French members of the party “loved” this missionary, but Garnier himself soon gives the lie to this description. He may have “loved” Father Fenouil's patriotism, for this feeling was present in abundance. For the rest Garnier's portrait of the Deputy Apostolic Vicar is a cruelly accurate delineation of a man and priest thrust into a role for which he had little talent and less experience. He was a different man altogether from his subordinate. Father Protteau, in the Frenchmen's eyes, had become almost Chinese, a peasant Chinese. His otherworldliness could be amusing and even irritating. Delaporte found this one day as he returned from an expedition on horseback. Crossing a wide and fast-flowing stream by means of a tree trunk serving as an improvised and shaky bridge, he spied Protteau on the other bank. The crossing achieved, Delaporte, still shaking from the experience, was told by the old missionary that there had been no need to be afraid. The priest had accorded him absolution in case he fell into the water and drowned.
Father Fenouil, too, had adapted to his surroundings, but in a very different manner. The treaties exacted from the Chinese government following the Anglo-French occupation of Peking in 1860 had allowed foreign missionaries to assume the titles and privilege of mandarins. Fenouil, a vigorous man in his forties, had hastened to avail himself of these provisions. He dressed in the robes of a mandarin of the appropriate rank, rode in a sedan chair proper to his dignity, and required the proper salutations in return. His decision to become closely involved in the affairs of the province had a cost, however, for Fenouil's name was now well known to the Muslim rebels and he feared for his life should he ever encounter them. Yet, in Garnier's skeptical eyes, this fear had not deprived Fenouil of a secret wish to act as arbiter between the two contending sides in Yunnan. For the moment he was able to render one vital service to the expedition. Acting on the French party's behalf, he negotiated a loan equivalent to five thousand francs from Ma Ju-lung. The expedition's reserves of money had finally been exhausted, and to proceed further without funds was impossible.
How to proceed, and where, remained undecided matters. Lagrée put the question of their future route to his companions, and the opinion was unanimous that they should make a final effort to travel west towards the Mekong and Ta-li. Lagrée's principal biographer doubts that this was Lagrée's personal choice, arguing that the leader now placed the need to preserve a sense of unanimity above his own judgment of what was most desirable. This may well be so, but unwillingly or not Lagrée now worked to gain the information and the papers that might make a visit to Ta-li, and even the Mekong, possible. Ma Ju-lung rejected Lagrée's first proposal: that the expedition should be escorted to the nearest rebel post and left there to fend for themselves. The next plan, however, was accepted as more reasonable. The expedition would first travel north and then turn to the west, hoping in this way to delay their meeting with the rebels until they were close to the seat of Muslim power, the city of Tali. To aid in this endeavor, the Frenchmen now looked to the former spiritual leader of the rebels, Lao Papa, the one man among the Yunnanese followers of Islam who had made the haj to Mecca.
The French approach to Lao Papa was calculated to play upon his widely known vanity. Many years before, he had studied astronomy in Istanbul. He had even spent a year in Singapore to verify the information that days and nights on the equator were of equal length. Now, alerted to the presence of the Frenchmen, Lao Papa sent them a series of questions indicating his interest and uncertainty over a number of astronomical matters. The rest was easy. The Frenchmen sent messages indicating their admiration for Lao Papa's learning. Then, in actual audience with the old haji, Garnier rendered him the best service of all. When he had sojourned in Singapore, Lao Papa had bought a powerful telescope, but on his return the instrument had proved useless. Could the Frenchmen help? Indeed they could, and with the aid of a vise Garnier adjusted the misplaced lenses. For Lao Papa the wishes of the expedition became his own. At their request he furnished a lengthy letter calling on his co-religionists to aid the Frenchmen in their travels towards Ta-li. Despite his association with the imperial forces, the eighty-year-old Lao Papa was still highly regarded by many on the other side, and the French party now seemed well prepared for a passage to the west.
Leaving K'un-ming on January 8, the Frenchmen knew that they were within two weeks' march of the great Yangtze River, which could carry them swiftly towards Shanghai on the China coast. This was a seductive vision but it was counterbalanced by a conviction of the scientific value of exploring the unknown country to the west. Accompanied at this stage of their travels by Father Fenouil, the explorers reached the town of Yang-lin in the afternoon of January 9. Once again there was a potentially dangerous incident. No sooner had the French party occupied quarters for the night in an inn than a party of Chinese soldiers sought to dislodge them from their rooms. The invaders were repulsed by the expedition's escort and, while the Vietnamese militiamen stood guard with fixed bayonets, Garnier called on Father Fenouil to alert the frustrated soldiery to the expedition's status and the nature of the passports its members bore.
When this seemed to have no effect, Garnier told Fenouil to announce that the French party was ready to fire if there were any further attempts to enter the expedition's quarters. “But,” Garnier notes, “the poor priest had completely lost his head before the unheard of audacity of our Vietnamese escort … instead of threats he addressed entreaties to the soldiers; he admitted our faults; he suggested that we were ignorant of local customs; he said we begged for pardon.” In short, the missionary acted as Garnier would have expected. When, following Fenouil's statements, a Chinese officer rushed in to make himself master of the apparently craven foreigners, he ran against one of the escort's bayonets. An end to the fracas came soon afterward. Lagrée, already suffering acutely from the dysentery that was to bring his death in a matter of weeks, left Garnier and the agitated Fenouil to bring the encounter to a satisfactory conclusion.
The next day Fenouil left the party to travel north and a little east to Ch'ü-ching, his base in the relatively secure eastern regions of the province. Even Garnier seems to have been touched by the prospect that this missionary might never see another of his countrymen again. The party's immediate concern, however, was to travel forward as quickly as possible despite the declining health of the leader and of an increasing number of the escort. On January 14 Lagrée was too ill with a fever to permit the party's further progress. As they continued on the next day, their passage was painfully slow. Although they had horses with them, Lagrée was too ill to remain seated in the saddle, and he took his turn, along with the sick members of the escort, in an improvised litter. The party was traveling over a plateau eight thousand feet high, and to
match the cold there was a bare landscape, whipped by a wind that whistled mournfully through the steep valleys running away on either side of their route. Not until January 18 was there any relief. On that day the party completed its travel to Hui-tse by boat, putting behind them for the moment the need to walk. As the early winter evening closed about them, the expedition came to Hui-tse.
With the party halted once more, Lagrée made a supreme effort to carry out his role as leader. For a few days he was able to meet with the local officials and even to consider the possibility that he too would travel to Ta-li. But his indomitable spirit could not overcome the fatigue resulting from the combined effect of three illnesses. By now it was unmistakable that he was suffering from a severe form of dysentery. Like many, perhaps all the others in the party, he had come to look on malaria as an almost routine affair. And finally his throat infection, which in the warmer air of Cambodia had improved if not disappeared, once more troubled him.
The last meeting of the whole expedition was held about Lagrée's sickbed. Again he sought opinions rather than giving an order. The group was in favor of an effort to reach Ta-li, and Lagrée gave his approval. Shortly after, a letter arrived from Father Fenouil telling the explorers that the local mandarins at Hui-tse were disturbed at the expedition's plans and begging them not to attempt a journey to Ta-li. This could only spur Garnier on. There was no way of knowing, he argued, what had inspired the missionary to write in these terms. His opinion was not to be trusted since he was clearly swayed by whatever was the most powerful influence at any given time. The second-in-command now drafted instructions for the party about to attempt the journey to the west. This was the last official document signed by Lagrée. How much he grasped of its import is debatable. In any event, the final paragraph of the instructions seemed as much due to Garnier's inspiration as to thought by the now almost totally incapacitated leader. “If, at any time in the journey,” the final paragraph read, “Monsieur Garnier thinks that he might easily reach a point anywhere on the Mekong, he should do so alone and as quickly as possible.” As a last instruction from Lagrée, Garnier could not ask for more.
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