The “facts” of the scholarly world have little importance to the people who live with the monuments as a familiar backdrop to their daily existence. Across the Mekong from the town of Stung Treng is a decaying red brick tower, a minor ruin in comparison with the great temples to be found elsewhere in Cambodia and Laos but interesting for specialists, who gain knowledge of the past from the clues given by the style and type of construction. Very different was the appreciation of the local villager who left his cattle to come and explain the monument to three Western visitors who had made their way there in 1966. It was a temple to the great gods, as we would probably guess, but there was more to be known than this. There, high above the lintel where one could see a suggestion of a pattern; there, in ancient times, had been a sparkling decoration of diamonds. The past, however distant, lived for this man. The diamonds had gone, but he had no difficulty in visualizing their legendary fire.
Beyond the great waterfalls at Khone, no less formidable one hundred years after the explorers paused below them and were forced to admit that there was no easy passage, the Mekong runs through Laos. Here the descendants of the rulers the Frenchmen met still hold some sway over the population. There are no longer any “kings” of Bassac like the one Lagrée and his companions watched so critically as he joyfully and drunkenly celebrated the arrival of a new son. But a modern traveler might well see a family resemblance between the explorers' “king” and Prince Boun Oum of Champassak, the amiable descendant of earlier rulers, who was prominent briefly when the politics of Laos took on an international character in the 1960s. This prince has lost any claim to temporal power in southern Laos, but he retains his importance for his countrymen. His presence is necessary at the major festivals, which are still celebrated with the consumption of huge drafts of rice spirit. For some observers Boun Oum is a figure of mirth, a fat, gray-haired old man, fond of wine and spirits, seldom far from the comforting presence of his household of young women. A more perceptive assessment might be that he is a saddened man, bypassed by time. He can no longer believe in the importance of the festivals at which he must preside, but the population still sees him as a semi-divine prince and believes in these rites of propitiation, and so he must participate. Despite the war, despite the blood that has been shed, some of the old ways continue, and the pirogues still race down the Mekong to welcome the coming of the dry season.
Farther north again, beyond Vientiane, the administrative capital of modern Laos, is the royal capital, Luang Prabang, possibly the settlement that has changed least since the explorers traveled along the Mekong. The French impact on this region of Indochina was never as peaceful or as unchallenged as the histories published in Paris have suggested. But neither the French, nor the contending forces who continued to wage war in Laos after the French left, have succeeded in robbing this city of its Arcadian charm. Where the Mekong mission found a Prince of Luang Prabang, there is now a King of Laos, a paradoxical change since the King has less power than his princely ancestor. Larger now than when the explorers saw it, Luang Prabang continues to lie nestled beneath the hills which in this area of northern Laos dominate the Mekong. Memories of a greater past are still brought forth by the great ceremonies of the passing year. Laos was once, the inhabitants of Luang Prabang remember, the “Kingdom of a Million Elephants,” and each New Year the King's elephants parade before the palace and attend and “listen to” a sermon preached by a Buddhist monk for their special benefit.
This would please de Carné's shade. He was fascinated by elephants, reacting to the skills displayed by the trained beasts on which the explorers traveled from time to time; and to the aura of primitive power and majesty attached to the herds of wild elephants seen in the forest of southeastern Laos. In his descriptions de Carné gave the elephants he observed almost human qualities. His own mount “discharged her duties as a mother with tenderness.” The males were something else again, and de Carné's comment suggests the prurience that lay beneath much coy nineteenth-century writing: “As to the males they are lavishly gallant. They hide their mysterious amours in the depths of the woods; but they do nevertheless, on the march, use their trunks for the most immodest sport.”
Beyond Luang Prabang, when the French explorers finally abandoned the Mekong, at Keng Hung, they traveled through an area of China at the very limits of imperial influence. The war against the Muslim rebels, which raged in the 1860s, was only the latest evidence of long-term resistance to central control. One hundred years later Yunnan province still retained its separate character. This is the most complex region of all China in terms of ethnic composition, with nearly a third of its inhabitants belonging to non-Chinese-speaking groups. Nothing gives Yunnan's distinctive character greater affirmation than the fact that the government in Peking administers large sections of this southern province through “autonomous regions.” Despite the firm grip the central authorities have over the territory of Yunnan, and the extent to which the introduction of social programs has changed the life of the population, not all of the past has vanished. Old styles of dress and manners of behavior still survive, if uncertainly. As for economic change, this too has come; but Garnier's dream of Yunnan as an industrial region, with Chinas own version of Europe's “Dark Satanic mills,” has not materialized.
It is temptingly easy to dwell on the exotic in any passing glance at the Mekong River and the lands through which it flows. Visions of dark foliage and a flooded river, of festivals, colorful clothing, and lumbering elephants are more agreeable to contemplate than the facts of war. Yet war, however tragic, is not the only threat to life along the course of the mighty river. Just as deadly is the still pervasive presence of endemic disease. The French explorers and successive generations of outside observers have marveled at the apparent bounty bestowed by nature on those who live along the Mekong. Enjoying a topical climate and a seeming abundance of food, the peasants who dwell by the river might have coined the Cambodian proverb, “If it grows, why plant it?”
The picture was and is an illusion. All along the Mekong the peasant's life involves risk and the possibility of insufficient food. A plentiful supply of tropical fruits is not a replacement for the necessary staple of rice if the crop should fail. Beyond the demands of farming, and the hardship that can follow a crop failure, the Mekong's peasantry suffers a terrible toll from disease. The fevers which were such a frequent and debilitating experience for the members of the French expedition may be better identified today, but they have not been eliminated. A century later we can be certain that some of the physical cost exacted from the explorers was the result of malaria; and malaria remains endemic. The scale of the disease is still staggering. More than ninety percent of the population of the lower Mekong basin live in high-risk malaria regions. At times the incidence of the disease comes close to one hundred per cent in some areas.
The catalogue of endemic diseases is a rollcall of poverty and deprivation: malaria, dysentery, yaws, and intestinal diseases are common over a wide area; tuberculosis and trachoma exact their toll in many regions. The incidence of venereal disease is high. For an outside observer the cost in infant deaths sometimes seems the deepest of the many personal tragedies that afflict Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, and Laotians along the Mekong. There are areas of Cambodia where only about fifty percent of the children born survive the first five years of life. Even those who do survive can look forward to an average life expectancy of only something less than fifty years. Outside the ranks of the elite, men andwomen alike look old, decades beyond their actual years, by the time they reach their fortieth year.
These medical facts would have been less disturbing to the French explorers a century ago than they are today. Medicine in Europe in the 1860s was only beginning its progress down a path of expanding discovery and scientific understanding. Compared with the cost of waging the war that has raged near and about the Mekong almost ceaselessly for nearly thirty years, the price of an effective program against disease along the course of the Mekong
would be small indeed. Governments' priorities are, however, a tragedy of their own; and the peasants along the Mekong still await deliverance from disease.
One pale ray of hope may be discernible, which could ultimately pierce through the dark clouds of war, neglect, and disregard for human suffering: in the Mekong Project. Since 1957, under United Nations sponsorship, four of the countries whose borders lie along or about the Mekong River have joined, with external assistance, to plan the transformation of the river systern. Despite the political fragmentation, the threat and fact of war, and the major uncertainties as to what program should be followed, some progress has been made.
The fact that no projects have yet been undertaken on the main stream of the Mekong is a reflection of the size of the problems to be solved. There are plans for the future and hopes of as many as ten dams along the river's course tc control flooding, facilitate navigation, and produce countless kilowatts of hydro-electricity. Such an enormous program of building and damming would have far-reaching effects, by no means all of which have been fully evaluated. On the negative side there is need for caution about the social costs involved. And research into the likely changes in the ecology, into the possible public health problems that might be associated with such a massive transformation, has, in a long-term perspective, only just begun. On the positive side, there is the hope that this giant project might provide the basis for real social and economic advance. It only needs to be recalled that the scheme is on a scale that dwarfs the achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, and that the cooperation of not only the countries of the area themselves but also of the world's major powers will be required for its execution, to suggest that the explorers' ghosts would have little difficulty in recognizing the Mekong for some time to come.
At the heart of all discussion, after all of the other factors have been reviewed, there is still the great river, the twelfth largest in the world when measured by length, the sixth largest when measured by the amount of water discharged into the sea. It still retains its mystery. We believe it is about 2,800 miles in length, but even today this is an assumption rather than a geographic certainty. Knowledge is certainly greater today than it was three centuries ago when Father Giovanni Filippo de Marini published his New and Curious History of the Kingdoms of Tunquing and Laod in Italian and French editions. His account of the river's origin was as follows:
This great river, which has been incorrectly situated by geographers ancient and modern, has its source in a very deep marsh, shaped like a lake, that lies to the north on high mountains in the province of Yunnan, on the frontiers of China; falling from thence it rushes headlong from this valley and, forcing its passage through sheer violence, small and narrow though it be, it does not tarry there long….*
Yet, while we know that this Jesuit priest was wrong in detail, many of Garnier's questions about the river's origins remain unanswered, even in the late twentieth century, as official publications of the Mekong Project clearly indicate:
The biggest problem is of course the river itself. The Mekong is believed to be about 4,500 kilometers [2,812 miles] in length, but nobody can be sure, for no man, as far as is known, has ever set eyes on its source, or followed it through all the fantastic ravines of its upper course. It is believed to rise at a height of about 5,100 meters [nearly 16,600 feet] in the Thang Hla mountains in China, probably only a few kilometers from the equally unpinpointable source of the Salween. It tumbles down about 2,100 meters [more than 6,500 feet] to Chamdo, on the main (yak) road from Kanting in China to Lhasa, where it is called the Dza Chu. It then disappears into more virtually unexplored gorges until it emerges at Paoshan on the Burma Road.
The Mekong has not become the route into China that Lagrée, Garnier, and their companions hoped it might be. But it has remained a mighty river. Whatever changes the Mekong Project may achieve, however much the river is transformed by dams and reservoirs, it will dominate its surroundings as it has always done. At low water the Mekong's surface will still be dark and calm, a study in placidity. In flood, particularly at the countless rapids, or most dramatically of all at the Khone Falls, the river will continue to overwhelm the observer with its elemental force. In flood it will threaten; as the river waters drop during the dry season, they will leave behind their great deposits of silt and be a source of vast supplies of fish.
No river so large and important can be without a personality, and this is as true one hundred years later as when Francis Garnier gave his own descriptions of the Mekong's many moods. He was fascinated by the animal life along the banks, by the kingfishers diving for prey in the swirling waters, by the tropical forests running back from the river's edge. His marveling accounts dwelled on the contrast between the emergence of great sandbanks at low water and the thundering torrents at flood time. But he knew, too, the disappointments that awaited a traveler pressing north towards China, as the banks crept in and the countryside along the river rose to enclose the Mekong in towering gorges. In a brief and unemotional comment, he said all that is necessary as a final word: “Without doubt, no other river, over such a length, has a more singular or remarkable character.”
*The English rendering of Father de Marini's account is taken from Kingdom of Laos (Limoges, 1959), p. 60, a translation of Présence du Royaume Lao, edited by René de Berval (a special issue of France-Asie).
AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT
Twenty years after I wrote the Epilogue chapter of my book, the changes that have taken place along the course of the Mekong River have been just as momentous, perhaps even more so, than those I charted as having occurred in the century that had passed since the explorers made their way towards China. When the book was completed in 1974, Vietnam was still a divided country in which war raged, as it did also in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. China was still led by Mao Zedong, and although the shockwaves of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were beginning to subside the rulers of Asia's largest country still rejected Western concepts of a market economy. Burma, now called Myanmar, in many ways the least accessible of all Southeast Asian countries, remained a state with its face turned away from the outside world.
For the countries that had once formed French Indochina, 1975 was a year of high drama. In Cambodia, 1975 saw the triumph of the Khmer Rouge forces and the subsequent descent of that country into a terrifying period of state-sponsored brutality against its own population. In Vietnam, the same year saw the end of the war that had pitched the communist forces linked to the government in Hanoi against its Saigon-based opponents and their American backers. And in Laos, too, though in an idiosyncratic and gentler Laotian fashion, a communist government finally came to power after years of war.
Now, twenty years on, there has been further change to the politics of the countries that border the Mekong. In the broadest sense, the passage of time has had the least effect in Burma, where a central government dominated by ethnic Burmans continues to hold sway and seeks by all means, including through its armed forces, to exercise control over the minority ethnic groups spread around the country's borders. These were the same ethnic groups the explorers confronted and which caused them so many painful delays.
Dramatic change has come to China in the past two decades. The death of the ‘great Helsman' in 1976 signaled the beginning of a shift from communist economic orthodoxy to an embrace of market economics, with accompanying political consequences that still cannot be fully assessed. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China finds itself in the final decade of the twentieth century the last major power to order its political affairs through the apparatus of an entrenched communist party.
Communist parties still control the politics of Vietnam, and Laos, but these countries, too, are wrestling with the dilemma that faces the Chinese leadership. How, in a post-Cold War world, with an increasing reliance on market economics and openings to the outside world, can the authority of the party be maintained?
&
nbsp; Of all the political changes that have taken place over the twenty years since my book was completed, none have been more dramatic, or more terrible, than those affecting Cambodia. For more than three awful years, a leadership espousing a bizarrely primitive version of Marxism pursued policies that caused the death of upwards of one million Cambodians, through executions, exhaustion and starvation. Only after a Vietnamese invasion and then an agonizingly protracted civil war has Cambodia been able to attain a measure of peace in the 1990s.
Yet if political change along the course of the Mekong has been considerable, the landscape through which the great river flows has altered remarkably little. In Vietnam the settlement from which the explorers began their journey is now called Ho Chi Minh city rather than Saigon and in the nearly twenty years that have passed since the communist forces gained control of the city many of the old landmarks have been demolished. But not all, for the Customs House that dominated the waterfront when they set off is still there. No longer linked to the business of the port, it has become the Ho Chi Minh Museum.
The other capitals that sit beside the river – Phnom Penh, Vientiane and Luang Prabang – have changed remarkably little over the past twenty years. Both Phnom Penh and Vientiane have grown in size, with ‘modernity' doing little to enhance their charm. Luang Prabang continues to escape the worst ravages of contemporary development. For the rest, while there has been some change to the river towns that dot the Mekong's banks as it wends its way from Tibet to the South China Sea, these changes have not been of a striking kind.
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