Throughout this period of sorrowful recrimination Garnier's body still lay in a Hanoi grave. Claire and her late husband's family wished the body to be buried in Saigon; like Lagrée, Garnier should rest in French soil. But when arrangements for the removal of Garnier's corpse began, it was in a very different climate of feeling from that extended to the Mekong expedition's leader. Dupré was no longer Governor of Cochinchina. Instead the chief French official was another admiral, an austere autocrat, the Baron Victor Duperré. For Garnier's partisans, little could be said that was more damaging than that he relied upon Philastre for advice.
As the efforts to bring Garnier's body to Saigon commenced in 1875, Duperré gave blunt notice of his unreadiness to join in official testimonies to the young officer's memory. To an officer acting on Claire Garnier's behalf he refused to sell the lead she sought from the Saigon naval shipyard for an outer coffin; it had to be bought in Singapore. Then to emphasize his view that Garnier was disgraced, Duperré issued further orders. When the body, its head now returned to lie with the trunk, arrived in Saigon, at the beginning of 1876, the governor forbade any general mourning as the coffin was drawn to the cemetery. Only those officers who could justify their presence on the basis of personal friendship had Duperré's permission to take part in the funeral procession. Fewer than half a dozen mourners walked behind the hearse including, to the outrage of Garnier's strongest partisans, Philastre. They would have been even more outraged if they had known that their hero's death was already the subject of a satirical Vietnamese poem, a mock funeral oration that heaped scorn on Garnier's actions in Tonkin.
Dupuis, meanwhile, faced financial disaster. Prevented from using the Red River for commerce, he had, in addition, to contend with the seizure of his goods and small flotilla while the French Government debated the proper course of action to be taken towards him. Still full of fight, he returned to France with two goals: his financial re-establishment and a renewed French advance into Tonkin. For decades he was vigorously engaged in both these tasks. He was growing a little plumper, but above his sweeping mustache his eyes still sparkled with belief in future possibilities. As he besieged the French Government and the Chamber of Deputies with petitions insisting on his right to financial restitution, his unflagging energy led him to write a series of books and pamphlets. In the best nineteenth-century tradition the author's name, on the title page of these works, is followed by the proud affirmation, “Explorer of the Red River.”
This Dupuis insisted upon, and it led to yet another sharp exchange with those who cherished the memory of either Garnier or Lagrée. Whatever others might argue, Dupuis declared, the right to be known as both the explorer and the discoverer of the Red River s possibilities belonged to him alone. No matter that Louis Delaporte argued the contrary case, telling of how he and the other members of the Mekong mission had alerted Dupuis to the potentiality of the Red River in 1868 during their halt at Hankow. The commercial adventurer rejected their position. Again and again he insisted that his own awareness of the river's possibilities dated from as early as 1861. What evidence there is does little to support Dupuis' contention, but it was one he held throughout his life, until his death in obscurity in 1912.
As with so much of the history of the Mekong expedition, the debate as to who first discovered the Red River's commercial possibilities ended with a final twist of irony. Just as the Mekong was found to be impossible for long-distance navigation by craft of any size, so eventually did the Red River prove to have little commercial value. It was, as Dupuis had found, navigable, with some difficulty, from the Gulf of Tonkin into China, but his experience did not represent any general indication of the river's possibilities. Dupuis' arms sales to the imperial forces in Yunnan had been a special case. He had, for a brief period, stood ready to supply the one commodity which the officials in Yunnan required. When, more than a decade later, France did occupy Tonkin, the last thing the new colonial administration wished to see was the use of the Red River as a conduit for arms. In later years the upper waters of the Red River were important for local commerce, but little more.
With Dupuis asserting his right to be regarded as the “discoverer” of the Red River's reputed possibilities, the old dispute between Garnier's and Lagrée's supporters did not end with the death of the two principals. The issue was fought out, in generally restrained terms, with Léon Garnier defending his brother's claims and two of Lagrée's closest friends, Félix Julien and Captain de Villemereuil, acting on his behalf. For the rest, the surviving French explorers faded into the background. Delaporte's failure to join Garnier in the latter's final exploits had a happy consequence for the Mekong expedition's artist. He went, instead, to survey the great Cambodian ruins of Angkor and to use his artistic talents to record the state of the temples before they were cleared of the jungle's embrace. This was the start of a new career, which lasted until Delaporte's death, fifty-two years later at the age of eighty-three. The violin-playing naval officer of the exploration party was transformed into one of France's most eminent authorities on the ruins of Cambodia.
Delaporte outlived all his companions of the Mekong party. Thorel, who remained in contact with Delaporte and introduced him to his future wife, died in 1911. Joubert, who practiced medicine in the provinces after leaving the navy, died in 1893, in his sixty-first year. Mouëllo, Lagrée's faithful orderly, did not survive so long. He died, still serving in the navy, in 1880.
As for Claire, she remained the widow Garnier all her life, never remarrying before her death in 1923. In the fifty long years between the loss of her husband and the end of her own life she did not join in the sharp controversies over the events in Hanoi, nor in the arguments as to who should gain most kudos for the leadership of the Mekong expedition. This was the province of her brother-in-law, Léon. Hers was an obscure life, even including a period when she worked as a secretary to supplement her tiny income. For herself, her daughter, and posterity, she guarded Garnier's letters to remind later generations of the brief period of halcyon joy that she and the young explorer had known.
Yet, as the first explorers slowly slipped out of sight, the idea of the rivers of Indochina offering a route into southwestern China remained alive. Decade after decade, French planners pored over maps still convinced that it ought to be possible to use the Mekong as a link to China; if only the rapids could be conquered, this great river would offer a way to the country that had been so very much in French minds from the earliest days of their colonial presence in Vietnam. In the eighties and nineties, and even into the early twentieth century, plans were made and, more rarely, put into action. All to no avail. Highly powered steam launches could master some of the rapids, but the Khone falls remained a major obstacle to passage from Cambodia into Laos. In Laos itself, navigation above Vientiane was made tortuous and slow by the rapids that had cost the French expedition so much effort. The best that could be done was to link the navigable stretches of river by other, land-based forms of transport. When British naval intelligence produced a handbook on the Indochinese region during the Second World War, the information provided on the Mekong as a navigable route was succinct and to the point. At the end of the 1930s it still took longer to travel by river from Saigon to Luang Prabang than by sea from Saigon to Marseilles. The golden route to China did not lie along the Mekong.
Nor did it lie up the Red River — not, in any event, along the river itself. Despite the major arms sale Dupuis made in 1873, using the river to transport his goods, the Red River remained a commercial backwater. When France did officially follow the policy Garnier embraced in Tonkin, eleven years after his death, the thought of access to China was firmly in the minds of those who both made and executed policy. This access was finally gained with the construction of the Yunnan railway in the early years of the twentieth century. Built on a line roughly parallel with the Red River as far as the Chinese border, the Yunnan railway was a testimony to engineering ingenuity and human greed. To push the track through the sta
ggeringly difficult physical obstacles required an immense expenditure in money and lives. During the seven years required for construction, more than twenty-five thousand coolies died working on the railway, some from accidents but most from malaria. And when it was completed the line proved to be of only the most limited commercial importance. Apart from the profits gained by speculators in Paris, the Yunnan railway was a financial failure. The riches of Yunnan that Garnier so readily conjured up in his mind were, in the final analysis, illusory.
History and historians play strange tricks with men's reputations. The English-speaking world, and beyond, has remembered David Livingstone: Livingstone of Africa, the missionary, the explorer. Few today, however, will remember that he and Garnier shared a special award at the geographical congress held in Antwerp in 1871. Few, even fewer, have heard of Doudart de Lagrée. Yet the expedition he led for so much of its slow and painful progress was seen as a mighty triumph of discovery and endurance one hundred years ago. No greater accolade could be bestowed than that given by Sir Roland Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, in 1870. He spoke as the foremost authority on exploration of his day; the man whose judgment was appealed to when questions of priority were in dispute; the arbiter who had declared that John Speke had indeed discovered the source of the Nile. When Murchison assessed the achievement of the Mekong expedition, he called it “the happiest and most complete of the nineteenth century.” “Happiness” for a man such as Murchison was, of course, no simple hedonistic value. What he spoke of was the happiness of duty done and a task achieved.
Perhaps it should not be too surprising that Garnier, Lagrée, and the others are unremembered. Their lives and deaths were linked with Asia, and Asia has always occupied a more ambivalent place than Africa in the European mind. Then, too, they were French. Their achievements and their failures have remained, essentially, the preserve of French writers addressing a French audience. Yet the aim of the Mekong River expedition was far more universal in character than its French membership suggests. The French explorers were seeking a way into China, a goal harking back to Marco Polo and stretching into the present when the political route to China is still uncertain for the Western world.
To write of the Mekong explorers, and of Garnier's fatal search for another way into China, is not to celebrate their imperial values. In the long course of Indochinese history they played their small part in the tragedy of French advance and withdrawal, when the flame of the colonial spirit passed to other hands. The interest of the explorers' story lies in more fundamental matters than concern for imperial glory or even the age-old preoccupation with trade routes to China. The real interest of their story stems from their enduring courage in the face of hardships, their resilience after the experience of many bitter failures and all too few successes. In the past, French secular hagiography has often replaced a simple account of the facts of these men's lives and their actions. The facts, in themselves, are eloquent enough.
Yet if hagiography has left its mark, there is always other evidence to remind us that human frailty lurks not far distant, even when heroes pass in review. Among the yellowing papers carefully preserved in the Paris archives that relate to the expedition is correspondence dating from the years 1874–75. The letters deal with requests from Father Fenouil in Yunnan, couched in almost despairing terms as he wrote on behalf of the Governor of Yunnan province. Fenouil wanted to know when some effort would be made to repay the five thousand francs the explorers had, with his assistance, borrowed over seven years before in K'un-ming. It is far from clear that he ever received a reply.
CHAPTER XIII
EPILOGUE-A HUNDRED YEARS LATER
A century after Lagrée, Garnier, and the other members of the French party left Saigon on their mission of exploration, much of the great river over which they traveled remain unchanged. There have been physical alterations in the passage of more than one hundred years, but these are dwarfed by the political transformations. The French colony of Cochinchina, where they began their travels, is now in 1975 part of an independent if fragmented Vietnam. Cambodia, which had only recently been placed under French “protection” when they journeyed through it in 1866, has passed from independence to near disintegration as the result of a savage civil war.
Further north, in Laos and upstream towards China, the political changes have been, if anything, greater. There was no single state of Laos as the explorers moved slowly towards their Chinese goal over the dark waters of the Mekong. Even Thailand, in some ways the most resilient of the nineteenth-century Southeast Asian states, was a very different country, with different boundaries and circumscribed power, one hundred years ago from the state existing today. The French party traveled with Thai passports, but some of these were for use in dealing with petty “kings” whose partly independent domains had not then passed firmly under the control of the central power of Bangkok.
As for those northerly regions where the Burmese court Uneasily confronted Chinese power, and where the party experienced one of the most dispiriting and exhausting stages of their journey, change here has been remarkable but in some ways extraordinarily limited. The fabled Sip Song Panna, still an important entity in late 1867, has ceased to exist. A solitary southeastern segment has passed into the territory of modern Laos, but the remainder is now firmly within the confines of the Chinese state. This represents change indeed. But an observer conscious of history might very well ask skeptical questions about the extent to which real change has taken place outside the borders of China. Maps mark the border regions of China, Thailand, Burma, and Laos with clearly defined lines, as if there were geographical and political order in these still out-of-the-way regions. The confident delineations of the cartographer are an illusion. The question of who rules what and where in this area remains a matter for continuing debate, at times a cause for conflict. Separatist groups of Shans oppose attempts to incorporate them into the Burmese state, and maintain their own armies and a framework of government. In the region where Thai territories join with Burma, the rump of a Chinese Nationalist Army maintains a tenuous existence, more concerned now with the profits to be made from opium trading than with any military goal of confronting the Peking government's forces, which drove the Nationalists south in the late 1940s. Despite the modern weapons used by the competing forces in this “Golden Triangle” area, despite the political aims that have linked opium trading with the American attempt to find allies in the Second Indochinese War, something of the character of the past is retained here. Lagrée and his party encountered a fragmented political structure, open to pressure and manipulation by stronger powers. The same general description is valid today.
Within China itself change has been the most remarkable, by comparison with all the other areas traversed by Lagrée and his companions. The People's Republic of China controls its south-western province of Yunnan in a manner never achieved by the Chinese imperial dynasties. This is still a distinct region, with its identity marked by the presence of large numbers of non-Chinese inhabitants. But there is no doubt concerning the province's firm links with the government in Peking.
Of all the political changes that have occurred, France's disappearance from the region as a power would surely have been the least expected by the men who suffered so much in the hope of advancing their country's interests. For Garnier the advance of France into the countries of Indochina was a cause to dream about, to work for, and finally to die for. Lagrée and most of the other members of the expedition held the same views, though they expressed them with less passion and eloquence. Here, as in other ways, Louis de Carné was the exception. His passion matched Garnier's, as his public denunciation of the second-in-command revealed. He was never so eloquent a writer, despite almost painful efforts to find a telling phrase. Yet in the final pages of his account of the expedition, written shortly before his death, he revealed a skepticism about France's future in the Indochinese region that was more accurate than Garnier's enthusiastic e
xpectations. He hoped France would succeed, but he also saw the distant possibility that his country might lose its colonies and be regarded as no more than “a school for political casuists.”
Later French imperial triumphs in the half-century after the Mekong mission, and the early attempts to capitalize on the Red River, brought profound change to the region. The French position in Vietnam ended with the bitterest possible form of failure, the defeat at Dien-Bien-Phu, but aspects of the French position lingered on after 1954 and the evidence of the French impact is still clear today despite the overlay of the later American influence. The explorers' ghosts drifting through Saigon in the 1960s, one hundred years after they had set forth with such high hopes and cheerful hearts, would still have been able to see buildings dating from their own era. But not many, and few that remained were linked with their original purpose. The Denis Frères building would have been one of the exceptions to the general rule of disappearance and transformation. As important and remarkable in its own way as the better-known British Far Eastern commercial firms, such as Jardine Matheson, Denis Frères grew with French power in Indochina and survived its fall. The original offices still stand by the Saigon waterfront. The shadowed interior, with dark wood furnishings and the decorative presence of great Shanghai jars, strikes the visitor as a curiously unsurprising mixture of southern France and the East.
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