And the language of the French explorers still remains important, from Saigon to the distant northern provinces of Laos. If the ghosts had passed directly across the street from the Denis Frères building to the ugly Hotel Majestic, as I did in 1966, they might have witnessed a businessmen's banquet where French still reigned supreme among the Vietnamese who met in this transplanted French provincial hotel. Set beside the Saigon River and long known for the view from its upper floors, the Majestic was a place where, in happier times, a diner could look out over seemingly endless green rice fields stretching to the horizon and observe the incongruous sight of large ships “sailing” through the flat land. In this low-lying region, the difference between land and water level is so limited that one quickly loses sight of the river's course as it coils through the green of the rice fields. One hundred years and one month after the Mekong expedition left Saigon was not, however, a happy time, and the view from the Hotel Majestic was not as peaceful as it had been in the past. The river was crowded with the shipping that fueled a war, with the ships, the black water, and the shadowy land beyond bathed in the blue-white beam of a searchlight probing in irregular sweeps to guard against sabotage. This was the surreal background for a banquet complete with inferior French wine and caustic if witty speeches about port congestion, something that was seen as the fault of les touristes – the Americans. The evening was a triumph for the power of presumed French values and the French language. These Vietnamese Francophiles were the descendants and the survivors of those among their countrymen whom Garnier thought could be recreated in the image of their colonial masters.
If the explorers' ghosts turned from contemplating men and were granted, instead, the opportunity to see the Mekong delta one hundred years after they tried to journey to the river's source, they could not be other than surprised. Here, if nowhere else, the river and the land about it have been dramatically transformed. When the French first began to establish themselves in Saigon, in the early 1860s, they had many hopes for the region's agricultural possibilities but little concrete evidence that their hopes could be realized. Garnier himself had painted an enthusiastic, if visionary, picture of what might be grown or produced for export in the lands to the west of Saigon. There could be tobacco, cotton, sugar, silk, indigo, building wood, salt, plants for oil and dyes, spices and herbs. All this, he suggested in 1864, could be added to the most fundamental product of all, rice. The equally fundamental problem, which Garnier did not discuss, was that much of the vast delta plain could not be used for agriculture until it had been drained. The enormous amount of dredging and draining required to make the Mekong delta productive was to occupy many decades and still is not complete today. In the process an agricultural transformation has been achieved, at great and continuing human cost. The newly cultivable land did not pass into the hands of a prosperous peasantry, but rather under the exploitative control of rack-renting landlords.
To fly at a low altitude across the Mekong delta is to be rewarded with an extraordinary vision of agricultural richness. From horizon to horizon the dead flat land stretches beneath an observer, the rice a vivid green directly below the aircraft, paling to a smokier tint in the far distance. The scattered points where there is any variation from the standard flatness—the Seven Mountains region far away to the west and the sacred Black Virgin Mountain to the north near Tay-Ninh—only serve to emphasize the vastness of the delta plain.
Although the flatness and the green of the plain provide the first dominant impression, it is not long before one is struck by that other tribute to man s capacity to alter his environment, the canals. Varying greatly in size, these are beyond number. Some are merely local affairs, serving a hamlet and its fields. Others are scores of yards wide and run, straight and uninterrupted, for more than forty miles at a stretch. Nowadays, there are other signs of human activity beyond those provided by the spreading rice plains and the angular pattern of intersecting canals. Great craters mark the path of B-52 carpet-bombing strikes, and distant pillars of smoke are a guide by day to show where, in 1975, artillery is engaged in still unceasing war. An altitude of two thousand feet turns war into an enormous diorama.
The explorers traveled across the delta, along one of the canals built years before the arrival of the French, to join the Mekong and set off on the first stage of their voyage of exploration. If a modern traveler had followed their path one hundred years later, he would have found that their first major stopping place along the way, Phnom Penh, still held something of the royal character so evident in 1866. A new palace had replaced the wooden structures where King Norodom ruled, and a king no longer sat on the Cambodian throne. But the royal ballet troupe still performed its dances beside the river; the dancers posturing with slow, sinuous precision, timing their movements to the music of flutes and gongs that rippled like water passing over stones in a gently falling stream. The music, the dancers' movements, and the shimmering clothes they wore, had scarcely changed in a century; and the ballet was still performed in an open pavilion, which allowed the soft breeze of a tropic night to cany with it the smells and sounds of the river city.
If there was no king, there was a prince who had been king. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a direct descendant of King Norodom I, was a ruler who, if he inherited nothing else from his great-grandfather, shared that earlier monarch's passionate belief in the need to try and preserve his country's identity. Sihanouk shared other passions with old King Norodom, though a love for “good brandy” was not one of them. As a man who had been king, Sihanouk was no more willing than his great-grand-father had been to brook argument with his decisions; nor was he ready to accept less than regal treatment. His ministers and officials, the diplomats accredited to his government, and any visiting foreign dignitaries were assimilated within his style of life and government to become members of his court. By 1966 the court lacked cohesion, and Sihanouk's power was still slipping, but the sense of majesty remained in part. And the memory was still strong of the last great royal event the kingdom had witnessed; a mere six years earlier, the last Cambodian king had died and had been cremated to the accompaniment of ancient ceremonies, in an extraordinary blending of pomp and gaiety, processions of shaven-headed women and royal elephants, the beating of funeral gongs and the shimmering light of rockets and fireworks.
Apart from the great stupa at the center of the city, Phnom Penh in the 1960s bore little resemblance to the straggling if busy settlement to which the explorers came in 1866. At that time it had a population of less than forty thousand. A hundred years later Phnom Penh's population was perhaps five hundred thousand: Cambodian, Chinese, and Vietnamese, with a scattering of Indians and Europeans. This was a cosmopolitan descendant of the town where Lagrée and his companions made their last purchases of supplies and trade goods. Electric light and modern vehicles had not driven the peddlers from the streets or stilled their cries. The soup seller, his steaming containers hung at either end of a shoulder pole, hawked his wares to the accompaniment of clacking bamboo sticks, the task of a young assistant who walked ahead. The charcoal dealer alternated his long drawn-out cry with the resonant thumping of a hand drum, a tambourine-like instrument with a “clapper” reminiscent of a hand bell. Poverty, disease, and inequities of all sorts lay beneath the surface, yet Phnom Penh seemed a happy city when I lived there in the 1960s. And, in contrast to Saigon, it was.
By 1974, only eight years later, there may have been a million and a half persons crowded into a war-ravaged capital. Phnom Penh had become a city under seige, subject to attack by rockets and artillery. The charm of the tree-lined boulevards, in the center of the city, was marred by the construction of fortified defense points about ministries and residences: sandbags, concrete, and barbed wire have an infinite capacity to diminish the appearance of a city. The greatest transformation, however, lay not so much in the city's center, where foreigners still shielded their minds from reality in the bars and French-style restaurants, as on the edges, where the tragic cost was
was reflected in the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had flocked into Phnom Penh. They huddled, family crowded upon family, in shanty towns lacking the most basic services and placed in such a way that they often bore the brunt of random shelling from the city's besiegers.
Beyond Phnom Penh, the Mekong and the land through which it runs were little changed one hundred years after the Frenchmen steamed north and east in their gunboat towards Kratie. Despite the presence of crowded river ferries, fueled by diesel oil or wood, which in the 1960s supplied the readily navigable reaches running up to the Sambor rapids, much of the river's traffic had changed little in the course of a century. Great barges drifted downstream, barely making way in advance of the current under the loose sails rigged to aid their progress. Lateen-rigged fishing boats clawed against the wind, and gondola-like sampans, rowed from the stern by a single oar with skill equal to any found in Venice, crept up and down the river's margins. The villages came down to the banks, the houses partly hidden behind the dark foliage of fruit trees. Pagodas were everywhere, with high peaked roofs of glistening ceramic tiles in patterns of yellow, red, and blue. From the distance these centers of Buddhist worship have an exotic, fantastic air, a promise of richness without and within. Closer inspection is, for an outsider, almost always disappointing. Distantly perceived carved pillars supporting the roof become crudely decorated concrete when viewed near at hand. The colors that appeared mellow and harmonious from afar too often resolve themselves into sharp and conflicting primary shades, roughly daubed on concrete and stucco, lacking harmony with either European or traditional Cambodian esthetics. Inside the pagodas the gilded images of the Buddhas are usually artistically crude, however vital to the devoted villagers who pray before them.
The land along the river from Phnom Penh to beyond Kompong Cham was full of life a century after Lagrée's party passed by. In the 1970s, in sharp contrast, most of the Mekong's course through Cambodia north of Phnom Penh is as far outside our knowledge as it was for the French explorers. As a terrible war has engulfed Cambodia, so have large areas of the country become blanks on the map. A modern cartographer might do little better than seek some twentieth-century equivalent for the device used by his predecessors of a long-distant age. The empty spaces could be filled with the warning “Here be dragons.” Farther up the river from Kompong Cham, which had been little more than a minor fishing settlement in 1866, a traveler in the middle 1960s entered another world. This region, too, has been lost to view since 1970, but even before that date few Western travelers passed through Kratie and Stung Treng. As for Cambodians, those not born in this separate area of the north-east seldom traveled there by choice.
Beyond the red cliffs of Krauchmar, north of Kompong Cham, the river enters a region distinct in character and separate from the geographical pattern of central Cambodia. The farther one penetrates, the greater is the lack of reassuring familiarity. Garnier was filled with a sense of depression when he came to Kratie, seeing in the settlement a condemnation of Cambodia's weak king and government. While it was still possible to visit Kratie, and Stung Treng farther north again, the same sense of depression was not far distant. Even if one escaped depression, it was difficult not to be gripped by an awareness of decay in these upcountry river towns.
Kratie, Stung Treng, and the river towns along the Mekong farther north into Laos are all of a pattern. Stuccoed shopfronts line the river bank, built a little above the high-water mark, offering for sale what sometimes seemed the most uninteresting merchandise in the world. Who, I always wondered, was going to buy the rusting hardware, the cheap enamel dishes, the heaped sacks of grain, and the great coils of tarred rope? There must have been customers, for the Chinese merchants, sitting calmly in their singlets, reading out-of-date newspapers sent up from Phnom Penh, would not have remained otherwise.
Back some distance from the river and the shopfronts would be the market, an area with a little more life but lacking the animation of the markets nearer to Phnom Penh. Occasionally, providing a special sense of the strange and the unknown, a tribesman from the hills would appear at the edge of the market, visibly uncomfortable in the trousers he wore only for his rare visits to the town. Such a visitor would stare and be stared at before making his purchases and slipping back to the east, where in the 1960s the forests still offered some hope of sanctuary from the encroaching world. One needed little imagination to see fear in his eyes. Much less than a century had passed since the low-land Cambodians regularly struck out from Kratie and Sambor for slaving raids on the hill peoples.
With a pattern of life dominated by the seasons and the river, these forgotten towns always summoned up for me images from Conrad. Not the images of Conrad's Lord Jim, for no white man ever came to Kratie or Stung Treng or, farther to the north, Savannakhet, with the hope of preserving an ideal against the savage onset of civilization. Instead the semi-fictional world inhabited by some of Conrad's other characters had a semi-factual existence along the Mekong. While the French still held some sway over Indochina, men with no past and less future sat in these little settlements where nothing ever happened. Almayer would have recognized the setting. So, too, would Marlow—but he would have been passing through, pausing only briefly at the bungalow where damp, peeling plaster on the walls had looked old from the day it was first spread over the rough local brick, and where the rough Algerian wine was served diluted over dubiously clean ice, brought up river, wrapped in straw. Not even the brilliant sunshine of the dry season could drive away the sense of hopelessness that cloaked so many of those whose duties called them to a lonely existence on the periphery of the colonial world.
The French in colonial times had their own literature that described and dwelled on the regions distant from Saigon, Hanoi, Hue, or Phnom Penh. Little of this writing is of Conrad's towering quality, but the themes of distance, expatriation, and slow acceptance of local values, are present in the same fashion. There is one major difference: opium played a central part in the French dream of the exotic. The evening pipes were romanticized as if only in the grip of narcotic fumes were it possible to bear with the boredom and monotony of isolation.
When I first visited Kratie, in the early 1960s, changes seemed to be on the way; there was some hope that the town would become the base for a mighty river-development plan, a dam to be built as part of the Mekong River Project. For a period, foreign engineers bustled about. Landrovers, splattered with red mud, roared off each day towards drilling sites being explored by an Australian engineering survey team. When I revisited the area in September 1966, all this seemed forgotten; the character of the town had slipped back towards the past. The pilot survey for the dam had been completed, but there was no intention to take action in the immediate future. Life in Kratie had resumed its usual somnolent pace.
The Cambodian officials in these regions in the middle 1960s were affected by their surroundings, unconsciously adopting the ways and attitudes of those half-forgotten Frenchmen whom they had replaced. They looked at the Mekong rushing in flood past their town, the river's waters the color of strong tea with the barest splash of milk, and found it as threatening as did any Frenchman fresh from the Ecole Coloniale on the Avenue de l'Observatoire in Paris. To spend an evening with them in Kratie—with the province's Governor, the army doctor, and the chief forestry official—was to be reminded that expatriation takes many guises. There was some talk of Phnom Penh and current politics. But there was much more of Paris and “that little café just off the Boul' Mich'.” I did not know whether to be saddened or amused by the matchbox holder to which the visitors' attention was carefully drawn. There, as we sat in the greenish glow of a gas lantern, with the river in flood clearly audible in the background and mosquitoes pasturing on our ankles, out host kept his grip on the past through a treasured souvenir matchbox holder from the Café de la Paix.
The matchbox holder was a reminder of the way reality and illusion, and past and present, often blended. At Sambor, just to the north of Kratie, the la
st resting spot for the French explorers before they began the first of their countless passages through rapids, it was not a continuing sense of the colonial world that impressed us in 1966. That we had left behind when we drove northward out of Kratie and took to the river, to sit at the bow of a large sampan while the powerful outboard motor struggled to overcome the current, no easy task even along the calmer waters of the bank. Rather, at the village of Sambor, the past that was important was more distant than the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when French officials had presided over the building of “modern” Kratie.
For the inhabitants of Sambor the present was blended with a past as far off as the ninth century, in the great stones that lay about their village, the debris of ancient temples built a thousand years ago. These stones, in the villagers' view, had been left by the “gods,” since gods alone would have had the capacity to move them. A more recent past was evoked by the memory of terrible raids in the 1830s, when the Thai armies leveled their forebears' houses, cut down the fruit trees, and carried off some of the inhabitants into slavery. These events were not forgotten; nor was the miraculous discovery of the unharmed body of the princess taken by a crocodile in 1834. The stupa raised above her ashes was maintained at Prince Sihanouk's orders. As late as the 1960s it was no paradox, in Cambodian minds, that the spirit of the princess, when summoned through the proper medium, gave valuable advice on questions of foreign policy.
Monuments from the past lie along the banks of the Mekong far to the north of Sambor. The ruins of Wat Phu, near Bassac in southern Laos, offered the French explorers a subject for study and a cause for reflection. De Carné had found in them evidence of the incompetence of the ancient artists responsible for decorating the temples. They did not, he insisted, “know how to copy the human body. Without requiring them to attain our ideal, realized in Greek art, we might ask that they should have tried to imitate the forms under their eyes.” Such critical remarks, however, are only a footnote to the history of growing appreciation of Khmer art, an appreciation fostered by the surveys carried out by Lagrée's exploration mission and furthered by Delaporte's later work at Angkor. Today the ruins of Wat Phu remain slumbering at the base of their mountain; war and its aftermath make archeological work difficult, if not impossible.
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