Читать книгу Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia - John Keay - Страница 6

In the great age of exploration, while momentous expeditions in Africa were grabbing the English-language headlines, a French initiative through the heart of south-east Asia was arguably more ambitious than any of them. The Mekong Exploration Commission of 1866—68 outmarched David Livingstone and outmapped H.M. Stanley. It also outshone them in that display of sociological categorising, economic sleuthing and political effrontery that was expected of nineteenth-century explorers. In darkest Africa the British were feeling their way, but the French in tropical Asia unashamedly advertised their patriotic intentions, planted their flag and promoted their rule wherever they could. Empire-building was their business. An ‘empire of the Indies’, otherwise French Indo-China, would duly emerge as a direct outcome of the expedition.

The human cost of travel in the south-east Asian subcontinent was as high as in Africa, and the disappointments just as acute. Danger overtook the Mekong expedition within a week of its official departure; tragedy struck within a week of its effective conclusion. In between, as they clocked up the months and the kilometres in a marathon of survival, the explorers fought their way through the equatorial forests of Cambodia and Laos to climb from the badlands of remotest Burma onto blizzard-swept tundra along the China-Tibet border. Rarely was at least one of the six officers – and sometimes all of them – not delirious or incapacitated. Tigers barred their path, village maidens diverted their attentions, forbidden cities yielded up their secrets. The boats got smaller and the river more impetuous. They took to the jungle, riding on elephants, bullock carts and horses; mostly they just sloshed through the monsoons knee-deep in mud and festooned with leeches. If only as an epic of endurance, the story of the Mekong Exploration Commission dwarfs nearly all contemporary endeavours.

Yet – and hence this book – it is to most people unknown. Doudart de Lagrée, Francis Garnier and their companions are not household names. Any geographical features once called after them have long since been erased from the maps; and histories and anthologies of exploration habitually ignore them (my own included). One might suppose this to be an anglophone conceit. Had the Commission been British, London would now be graced with statues of the Mekong pioneers, streets would be named after them, and symposia convened for them. Their mistake, as Garnier himself wryly put it just before his premature death, lay in being born French.

Posthumous amends had, I presumed, been made in Paris, but it was during an encounter with the French ambassador in London that I first found a chance to confirm this. By way of something to say, I enquired how the Commission was commemorated in France. The ambassador looked blank. A charming and erudite diplomat, he evidently didn’t understand the question. I plied him with names, dates and places. He shook his head.

‘Never heard of them, I’m afraid.’

‘But that’s like a British ambassador saying he’s never heard of Dr Livingstone, or Scott of the Antarctic.’

‘Ah, but you don’t understand. In France we have a different attitude to the colonial past.’

A visit to Paris eventually bore this out. Except in the Bibliothèque Nationale and among the treasures poached from Angkor in the Musée Guimet, mention of the Commission brought nothing but Gallic shrugs. A friend whom I counted as an ardent supporter eventually confessed that even he only knew of the expedition because of my incessant prattling about it. Rue Garnier turned out to be named not for Francis Garnier; likewise the tomb in the Père Lachaise cemetery that is commonly awarded to him. Both pertain to some other Garnier. The short entry under ‘Garnier, Francis’ in the popular Larousse dictionary of biography contains only a sentence on the expedition; there is no entry at all for its leader, Doudart de Lagrée.

If one excludes the writings of its own personnel, scarcely any more accounts of the expedition exist in French than in English. The most recent and well researched (J.P. Gomane, 1994) appears never to have got beyond the limited circulation accorded to a typewritten thesis so scrunched into its binding as to be almost unopenable. The most ambitious and accessible reconstruction (Osborne, 1975) is by an Australian.

Celebrating dead exponents of a somewhat discredited profession seems to be an anglophonic obsession. The French ambassador, though far too diplomatic to say so, appeared to imply that while the British were today mired in nostalgia for their imperial past, the French were above such things and in healthy denial of their own colonial aberrations. Without going into the reasons for this – which may derive as much from present confidence as from past trauma – I felt encouraged. Here was a story that could usefully be retold.

The history led to the geography. Intrigued by the expedition, I became enthralled by the river. For reasons that will emerge, the Mekong is quite unlike any of the world’s other great waterways. Far from inviting navigation it emphatically challenges it with an unrivalled repertoire of spectacular water features. As if not in themselves sufficiently discouraging, the expedition found these appalling physical difficulties compounded by political uncertainties. Colonial rule would fail to remove either, and for the past half-century ideological, bureaucratic and piratical obstructions have barred the river’s course more effectively than ever.

But there has recently been a change. In the late 1990s border restrictions were eased, new rivercraft were introduced in Cambodia, and some controversial channel-clearance was begun on the Sino – and Lao – Burmese borders. For the first time in living memory retracing the route of the Mekong Exploration Commission became feasible, if not easy. A golden age in Mekong navigation looked to be dawning.

Sadly it could prove to be short-lived. Water conservation tops the agenda of all the riverine states, while hydro-electricity provides some of them with their main export-earner. In Chinese Yunnan the river is already dammed. So are many of its downstream tributaries; the chainsaw and the mechanical digger are everywhere gouging roads round unsuspected contours; and extant plans threaten to transform the entire hydrography. Natural forest, traditional livelihoods, and the occasionally alarming interplay of menace and innocence in this great green basin may all be swept away within the next few decades.

The rehabilitation of the river could prove its undoing. On the other hand, rehabilitating the story of its exploration may be instructive. Scarcely anywhere has been more traumatised by recent history than mainland south-east Asia. Retracing the expedition’s trail means revisiting the aftermath of more twentieth-century wars – international, civil, ‘secret’ and ethnic – than even the Balkans can boast. (The Vietnam war was the third but by no means the last.) It means circumventing the best natural forest because of the unexploded ordnance, tripping through smiling landscapes memorable for unparalleled savagery, and paddling up tranquil reaches still infamous for narco-insurgency. The experience takes the edge off unalloyed enjoyment and, for a Westerner, invites self-recrimination.

But stay the whip; for the Eden into which the Mekong Exploration Commission first blundered also fell far short of the idyllic. Slavery, banditry and the prevalence of almost every known tropical disease so appalled the Frenchmen that they seemed to justify colonial intervention. The explorers did not, though, berate the prevailing rulers, and mostly they thought well of the Buddhist establishment. They just diagnosed and prescribed. Blaming the acknowledged ills of one society, or one century, on the presumptions of another demeans them both.

It is simply the sequential nature of events, and in this case of intervention—its logic and its consequences – that may be instructive. As with the river at the heart of this story, natural obstructions and human interference contain merit as well as menace. Flooded forest provides the ideal spawning ground for fish; hillside erosion upriver guarantees alluvial abundance in the Delta; and the colonial cake-cutting urged by the expedition probably forestalled more cataclysmic strife than it created. Like fully-fledged trees being tumbled perilously through the rapids, events take their course, not easily deflected yet foreseeable as to season and direction by those who trouble to study the current and read the weather.