This concession was made easier by the knowledge Garnier now had of a journey made by Jean Dupuis. The French merchant the explorers had met in Hankow, in 1868, had not waited long to follow up the information he had gained from them about the Red River. Starting from K'un-ming in January 1871, Dupuis had traveled to the Red River and then down its course to Yen-Bay, a Vietnamese administrative post about halfway between the border with China and the river's entry into the sea. The assumptions of the Mekong explorers had proved correct. Commerce could pass up and down the Red River. But it had been Dupuis, rather than one of the explorers, who had demonstrated it. As Garnier considered his own plans for the future, Dupuis had already returned to France, reported his findings to the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, and left France for Vietnam again. He departed without firm, or at least public, assurances that his plans to use the Red River for commerce with Yunnan would have French support. But the Minister was prepared to offer assistance with transport, and a measure of official approval was certainly implied in the ready authorization which Dupuis received to purchase cannon for his Chinese clients. The arrangement fell into that shadowy world where officials give “semi-official” support to risky projects: with success there can be a ringing affirmation of association, while failure brings forth a bland denial of knowledge. Whatever the qualifications involved, this guarded assistance to Dupuis was to have fatal consequences for Garnier little more than a year later.
In late 1872, however, as Garnier prepared to leave for China, the horizon seemed unblemished by a single cloud. There could scarcely have been another time in Garnier's life when reality seemed to accord so well with his own hopes. He had put the disappointments of the past behind him. The navy had granted him leave, and he found backers who were ready to finance his attempts to find the commercial sources of the rich silk and costly tea exported from China. As he prepared to set out for China with Claire, who was now expecting another child, Garnier was gripped by enthusiasm for the future. A friend who saw him just before he left France records the rhapsodic tones in which Garnier spoke of the months ahead. His friends, Garnier observed, could not understand why he wanted to return to Asia. They could not realize the wonder of it all:
…it is not at all depressing: Laos is marvelous. But even more so is Yunnan with its great mineral resources; with the high blast furnaces, the hissing machines, the forges, the rolling mills that Europe could install there in abundance, what might it not become? But what of Tibet? And what of the western provinces of China, these provinces which are, up till now, the source of silk, transported in an uncertain fashion, with expensive intermediaries who, from stop to stop, from hand to hand, raise the price ten times before the goods arrive at warehouses on the coast…?
For the moment my goal lies between Shanghai and Tibet. There a mystery waits to be unraveled. These Chinese middlemen of whom I have spoken, who gain such a profit from the transport of tea and silk, understandably make a secret of the origin of the goods, so as to maintain a monopoly of their contacts with the unknown producers. Up till now this secret had been maintained because of the difficulties of the routes. But, once the European has overcome this problem, once he has penetrated into these lands, you will see an economic revolution whose effect will be felt in the old world. We wall have tea and silk at half their present price.
It was a happy prospect; exploration through unknown regions with the possibility of personal gain and a triumph for defeated France. Years later Garnier's brother, Léon, suggested that the new journey to the East was undertaken in a melancholy mood, that the weight of accumulated disappointments was such as to rob the enterprise of the hopes more easily held in the past. Garnier's own writings do not seem to bear this out. True, there were setbacks and sadnesses to record along the way. Some were deeply personal. In November Claire gave birth, prematurely, to another daughter. Within a week the child was dead.
Other disappointments mixed personal with public concerns. The brief visit Garnier made to Saigon, en route to China, had left him with mixed feelings. He was glad to return to the region where he had started his administrative career, but in the four years which had passed since he lasted visited the colony so little seemed to have changed. And so many reforms remained to be made. Yet beyond such concerns lay the prospect of the unknown. With a passion akin to that felt by Sir Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, or St. John Philby, Garnier longed for distant unexplored places. When he had left Marseilles, in early October 1872, he looked forward to fulfilling his desire. The hope still remained when he reached Shanghai in mid-November.
The next months were filled for Garnier with almost constant travel. Leaving Claire in Shanghai, he visited Peking, to arrange for the passports he would need during his projected journey towards Tibet. Passports for such distant regions could not be gained quickly. In the interim Garnier set off on a further reconnaissance. His goal was Chungking, the city in western China that he planned to use as a jumping-off point for his projected travel to Tibet. For three months, between early May and the end of July, he traveled alone in central China, without escort or interpreter, his only regular company two spaniels named Tali and Lhasa: one named with memory of the past, the other with hope for the future.
There was a possibility that passports for Tibet might overtake him along the way, but nothing of the sort happened. No documents awaited him at Chungking, the most westerly point of his journey, nor at Hankow, when he returned to the east. Instead, when he came joyfully back to Shanghai and Claire, at the beginning of August 1873, there was a brief but important letter waiting for him. It came from the French Governor of Cochinchina, Admiral Dupré, and it asked Garnier to come to Saigon as soon as possible. “I have,” Dupré wrote, “some matters of importance to discuss with you.”
Garnier needed little urging, yet he set off for Saigon without realizing the true import of Dupré's summons. His newest dream was to be appointed as a French representative in Yunnan, and he was unaware of how fast events were moving in Tonkin. For the “matters of importance” of Dupré's letter were the potentially dangerous developments taking place in northern Vietnam. Since the end of 1872 Dupuis had pursued his aim of taking commercial advantage of the Red River. By mid-1873 Dupuis' activities threatened to spark armed conflict.
This was not known to Garnier and he had not expected a sudden call to duty from Saigon. Nor, it seems fair to say, had Dupré seized on Garnier as his first choice for the delicate program of action he had in mind for Tonkin. Yet it would have been difficult for Dupré not to have had Garnier's name in mind when his thoughts turned to risky new initiatives. The explorer had passed through Saigon only seven months before, and his passion for adventure, combined with a knowledge of the region, was matched by few. Cumbersome theories of historical accident are not necessary to explain the manner in which Garnier was once more moved back to the center of the stage.
For a decade Garnier's life had been sustained by hopes for exploration, adventure and the pursuit of France's imperial glory. The mysteries of the upper Mekong were still unsolved, but in the summons he now had from Dupré there seemed a possibility that his hopes for the Red River might become a reality. Uninformed though he was of Dupuis' activities and difficulties, Garnier's dream of holding a post in Yunnan was linked with an expectation that commerce would be able to pass up and down the Red River, the river that had so fascinated the explorers in November 1867, when they were still pressing north to K'un-ming. Later, Garnier wrote of his thoughts at that time, recording his firm conviction that the opening of the Red River should be “an exclusively French affair.”
As he read Dupré's letter in Shanghai, he found a call that could not be ignored. Duty and glory beckoned irresistibly, and he sailed for Saigon on August 17, a bare week after rejoining Claire at the end of a three-month absence. Garnier was about to embark on the last and most sharply debated episode of his career. There was still one more river to cross.
CHAPTER XII
ONE MORE RIVER
The final act in Garnier's dramatic life had all the qualities of adventure, disputed glory and tragedy appropriate to a heroic figure in the nineteenth century. This is not altogether surprising. Garnier, after all, wrote much of the script himself, but he did so within a web of circumstance which ensured that the drama was played out with apparently unlimited promise of private prestige and public imperial gloiy. For a brief period Jean Dupuis by himself, and then he and Garnier together, held the hope of transforming the French position in the Far East. With tenuous, or at best ambiguous, official connection these two men for a time defied the Government of Vietnam, intrigued with and against the Chinese imperial authorities, and acted as an advance guard for those Frenchmen who were determined that the tricolor should fly over the whole of Indochina. As a reflection of the imperial spirit at its best, or worst, the final months of Garnier's life are a notable model.
Even today, despite the long searches that have been carried out in official archives and private papers, we do not know exactly what Admiral Dupré told Garnier in August 1873. The official instructions, which Garnier received from Dupré on October 10,1873, were remarkable more for the caution of their tone than for explicit recommendations matching Garnier's later actions. But there need be no doubt about the basic reasons for the summons Dupré sent to Garnier: first and foremost, the explorer of the Mekong was to bring some sort of order to the muddled and dangerous situation in which Jean Dupuis found himself in Hanoi.
When, more than five years earlier, the ragged and exhausted members of the Mekong mission had met Jean Dupuis in Hankow, the astute French businessman had recognized the vital commercial significance of their information about the Red River. As an arms merchant, Dupuis did not need to be told that a river route into Yunnan, such as they believed the Red River to be, offered great opportunities. Instead of having to ship weapons by the long and costly way of the Yangtze, and then overland to the Yunnanese capital at K'un-ming, the Red River could be used to transport supplies into the heart of southwestern China. After two visits to the capital of Yunnan, Dupuis had, by early 1871, a major commission to purchase arms for the imperial forces. His plan was to buy these in France, then bring them up the Red River to Yunnan.
In theory, the explorers, and Dupuis, were correct in their belief that the river could be used for commerce. Politically, however, Dupuis' plan brought him face to face with a situation of staggering complexity. It would be hard to draw a map that showed clearly the political situation along the Red River's course in the years between 1868 and 1874. Running in a southeasterly direction through Yunnan, the river traversed this province of China, where imperial and Muslim forces were still joined in unresolved conflict. For the eastern portions of Yunnan to the border of China with Vietnam, superiority, but no more, lay with the imperial forces. Once the border was crossed, however, the complications grew greater.
Vietnam's northern border coincided with the border of the Chinese province of Kwangsi, and in the late 1860s this region was still disturbed in the aftermath of the Taiping rebellion, which had broken out in the 1850s. One important result of that rebellion, and its collapse, was the seepage into northern Vietnam of large groups of Chinese bandits. These were men who had fought, or pillaged, on one side or the other during the course of the rebellion. The two largest groups of bandits to move into the Vietnamese border regions after 1865 were the Black Flag and Yellow Flag bandits—they took their names from the banners they carried into battle.
The border region, where they now established themselves, was a traditionally separate area. To the north, in China, lay the great southern provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The southernmost sections of these provinces were, in a fashion similar to Yunnan, at the outer extremity of China's imperial influence. In some areas ethnic Chinese settlers were only a minority among the various hill peoples of the Chinese deep south. Over the border in Vietnam, the Vietnamese Government barely had control of the mountainous northern areas. At the best of times the Tonkinese uplands were a distant and even sinister region in Vietnamese eyes, a land more sympathetic to bandits and free-booters than to agriculture and the orderly pattern of a Confucian administrative system. And in the later 1860s the border lands were not enjoying their best times. Indeed the Black Flags and Yellow Flags controlled large sections of the Red River, so that the first Vietnamese Government outpost was at Yen-Bay, nearly one hundred and forty miles from the point where the river passed from China into Vietnam.
Jean Dupuis, “Explorer of the Red River.”
There were further complications, which could be either an obstacle or an opportunity for a man with Dupuis' aims. The Vietnamese of Tonkin were by no means all convinced adherents of the cause of the ruling dynasty in Hue. This dynasty, the Nguyen, had united Vietnam, after more than a century of wars, in 1802. But in Tonkin there were those who still dreamed of the return of an earlier dynasty, the Le. They showed their feelings in periodic rebellion. As for the representatives of the Vietnamese court who were based in Tonkin, many of these mandarins were at least as concerned not to give offense to the Chinese bandits who roamed the region as to follow the directives of their emperor.
The circumstances seemed to offer much to an adventurer, or imperialist, ready to take risks in the hope of gaining advantage from divided, and so weakened, authority. Dupuis was ready to take the commercial risk. Then, later, when Dupuis' position was threatened, Admiral Dupré, Governor of Cochinchina, saw a way to join imperial interest to the businessman's hopes for profit.
Jean Dupuis was far too knowledgeable not to recognize the possibility of danger in his use of the Red River. But danger had to be weighed against the financial returns that might be gained. The affair that began with his visit to France in 1872, when he bought armaments on behalf of Chinese officials in Yunnan, was just such a case. He left France largely content with the semiofficial backing of the authorities in Paris for his trading venture up the Red River. To have assurances from the Minister of the Navy that he would receive assistance in the matter of transport was an important step towards success. Once he reached Saigon, in May 1872, there was even more cause for satisfaction. Many of the officials whom he met there were more than ready to render covert assistance to their fellow countryman. He was, after all, about to involve himself in the affairs of Tonkin, an area many of them hoped might eventually pass under French control, despite established French policy, which recognized Vietnamese sovereignly over that region. When Dupuis returned to the China coast to complete his arrangements, he seemed justified in believing that he had, at least, an important measure of support within the French colonial administration.
At the end of 1872 Jean Dupuis entered the Red River at the head of a private flotilla — two gunboats, a steam launch, and a junk, all heavily laden with the seven thousand rifles, thirty artillery pieces, and ammunition Dupuis had bought in France. Money could buy most things in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and Dupuis had found little difficulty in recruiting twenty-seven Europeans and some one hundred and twenty Chinese, and other Asians, to accompany him in his enterprise. They were, European and Asian alike, a cutthroat crew, the scourings of the Eastern Seas. With their gunboats and modern weapons they were ready, if necessary, to fight their way up the Red River. They were certainly well enough armed to override the objections to their passage of the Vietnamese authorities in Hanoi. For Dupuis the fact that he had a commission from the Chinese leaders in Yunnan was more important than his lack of any permission from the Vietnamese Government to proceed up the Red River.
His first encounter with the Vietnamese mandarins suggested that he had his priorities in the right order. Angry though they might be, the mandarins had to let him proceed. Trans-shipping the arms into junks, Dupuis' force moved up the Red River and into Yunnan. Difficulties had to be overcome, but he had demonstrated that the river was navigable for commerce. In mid-March he was in K'un-ming, successfully and profitably concluding his sale.
So fa
r Dupuis' plans had been successful. When he returned to Hanoi, at the beginning of April 1873, he looked to the prospect of continuing operations; and he came accompanied by an escort of troops from Yunnan, about a hundred and fifty men provided by Ma Ju-lung, the general whom the Mekong explorers had met five years before. Dupuis now had enough men at his disposal to prevent the Vietnamese from chasing him from the country. They were not sufficient, however, to overcome a growing Vietnamese determination that the French commercial adventurer should not again use the Red River to his advantage.
From May onwards tension mounted in Hanoi. Dupuis tried to send a cargo of salt up the river, reckoning on an enormous profit by the time he had transported this scarce commodity into Yunnan. The Vietnamese thwarted his plans, ensuring by force and threat that no craft should be available to transport the salt. When, on June 2, Dupuis was threatened with arrest himself, he riposted by assuming a posture of open hostility. Flying the French flag, as if to suggest some official connection, Dupuis defied the Vietnamese authorities, acting with the aid of his troops as if Hanoi was little more than a foreign concession. This was an unsatisfactory situation for all concerned, and both Dupuis and the Vietnamese authorities sent messages to Admiral Dupré in Saigon seeking a resolution.
The historical problem, still not fully resolved, is to know the exact nature of Dupré's reaction to the situation in Hanoi. The evidence strongly suggests that he was ready and willing to use the occasion of Dupuis' difficulties as a basis for a French advance into northern Vietnam. But neither in written instructions nor in public statements was he ready to admit such an intention, which would not only have represented a hostile act at a time when France was at peace with the Vietnamese court but would also have gone against what was, at least in public terms, the policy of the authorities in Paris. It was in these circumstances that he summoned Garnier to Saigon to receive his secret instructions.
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