Читать книгу Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia - John Keay - Страница 8

‘Each bend of the Mekong as added to my map seemed an important geographical discovery. Nothing could distract me from this abiding concern. It came to possess me like a monomania. I was mad about the Mekong …’

FRANCIS GARNIER

IN EARLY JUNE the Mekong in its remote middle reaches is at its lowest. At that time of year, sixteen hundred kilometres to the north-west on the uplands of eastern Tibet, the river’s headwaters may be rippling with the first snow-melt, while the same distance to the south, the monsoon may already be pummelling the paddy fields of the Delta. But at its hill-pinched waist on the Lao-Burmese border the river has scarcely begun to rise. Here, the dry season still holds its fiery breath and the odd shower is no more than a lick of the tongue on parched lips. Behind the hills desultory thunder brings no relief. Beetles and cicadas fall silent in the heat; birds seem reluctant to fly. A smoke haze hangs motionless in the treetops, clogging the nostrils with the ash from slash-and-burn. Drained of all glow, the sun sets ingloriously, tracking behind a pall of parched fog to a mid-afternoon extinction. The thermometer stays stuck at thirty-something degrees.

Only the river is refreshingly animated. Darting through fifty-metre narrows, it bellies into pools a kilometre wide and then squirms, like a sleek and well-fed snake, down a barren trough isolated from the tousled shade of its banks by humped sandbars and a wilderness of spectacular upthrusts of black bedrock. Where the rock ventures into its path, the river hisses a caution and recoils in a tangle of eddies, welling up, flicking at the sunlight and glancing aside to nose out other options before slithering prodigiously over the obstruction in a cascade of watery colours.

Midway between Thailand and Chinese Yunnan, a succession of such encounters comprises the Tang-ho rapids. They extend, with intermissions, for perhaps 150 kilometres and confront the navigator with an awesome prospect of boiling whirlpools and spuming cataracts. In June 1867 they were the final straw for the Mekong Exploration Commission. After a year of canoeing up Asia’s most capricious river, the six Frenchmen who had undertaken its exploration conceded defeat. From here on they would take to the steep banks, then to the hills and the forests, plotting the river where possible but increasingly deflected from its course by obstructive princelings and their own debilitated condition.

Their proximity to China alone kept them going. Deep in the forest gloom they would stumble on a paved trail and then a humpbacked bridge built of cut stone and once inset with ceramic tiles. Evidently the civilising light of the Celestial Empire had once penetrated these dark recesses. A mandarin’s robes and the staccato sound of spoken Chinese sent the Frenchmen into raptures. In China their credentials would be acknowledged and their credit was good. After months of floundering amid malarial jungle, terrorised by tigers, devoured by leeches, often feverish and increasingly destitute, their salvation seemed nigh. They dreamed of wearing shoes again and sleeping in sheets, of tableware and postal facilities and the privacy of stone walls and stout doors. They were not to know that forsaking the river was the prelude to catastrophe, or that the controversies, no less than the crises, were yet to come.

Sensing only that the Mekong was about to elude them, Francis Garnier, the expedition’s restless surveyor, set off alone from the Tang-ho rapids on a last day’s excursion upriver. With a compass in his hand and a cold chicken in his haversack, he picked his way past the rapids, and as the sun slanted over the trees on the hilltops, became overwhelmed by an acute sense of wonder. The great river and the boundless forest were utterly deserted. He felt like a trespasser in paradise. He shouted to reassure himself but quickly resented the sound. His shadow, marching across the sandbanks beside him, was no less intrusive: it seemed, as Garnier put it, ‘to violate the virginity of a natural world that until now had escaped the profanity of man’.

Behind an outcrop of rock he surprised a young stag drinking from the river. Though only ten paces away, it stood its ground, and when he stopped to reach instinctively for his rifle, the stag actually moved towards him. ‘It came to me like a memory of Eden,’ he would write. Both thrilled and intimidated, he had no regrets about being unarmed, yet still could not resist making a grab for its antlers. The stag bolted and Garnier cursed his own impatience. It should have been like a fairy story, he thought, or one of La Fontaine’s fables. If only, instead of grabbing at it, he had engaged it in polite conversation.

After a hard scramble through the tangled forest to circumvent a portal of rock, he rejoined the river and, now sweating profusely, went for a swim. He was barely out of his depth when two elephants broke cover. One turned back; the other, a big dark tusker, waded into the water beside him. Garnier backed into midstream and prepared to take flight by launching himself into the main current. ‘The proboscidean’ fixed an eye on him and occasionally waved its trunk in his direction. But it did not approach. It seemed content just to wallow and shower itself with river-water. Naked and defenceless, Garnier cautiously floated into the bank and, grabbing his clothes, fled across the sands and into the forest. The elephant paid no attention. Later, on glancing back, Garnier could still see the spray from the fountain of its trunk raining down in a prism of sunlight.

Lunch was taken in the shade, then it was time to turn back. In the heat of the day the silence was more absolute than ever. Garnier longed to erase his own tracks in the sand; they too seemed to sully surroundings of such heart-rending beauty. Yet that night, back in camp when he told of his adventures, a colleague’s suggestion that they revisit this huntsman’s ‘Eldorado’ with shotguns and rifles met with no objection. For repaying nature’s ‘pacific and almost friendly’ reception with bullets Garnier felt a mild pang of remorse but said nothing. Bloodlust prevailed. Evidently virgin lands meant fair game – and that included the river itself.

This long, lyrical and perhaps fanciful passage stands out in the records of the Mekong Exploration Commission because it is so untypical. Disappointment and hardship had more often been the expedition’s lot; destitution and death would as surely follow. A day in paradise, for Garnier at least, was a moment of tranquillity set amid buffeting cascades of menace and misfortune. Here Heaven met Hades round every bend in the river. ‘This solitary Mekong scene,’ he concluded, ‘one of the last that it was given to me to see, would remain deeply etched in my memory.’

The passage is immediately preceded, and partly explained, by another admission. He had succumbed, he says, to a ‘monomanie de Mékong’. It was he who had insisted on pursuing the river long after it had become an irrelevance to the expedition’s political and commercial concerns. It was he who had deflected their course from the most direct route to China into the dangerous no-man’s land of the Shan states on the Lao – Burmese border. The river for Garnier had come to eclipse all else, including the expedition’s safety. What mattered was to map its every twist, chart its every rapid, explore its every secret. He had become, he says, obsessed by it, possessed by it, mad about it.

Mountaineers commonly get obsessed by particular peaks, exaggerating their mystique and slavering over their icy profile. A river obsession is more of a rarity. It takes an especially determined explorer and a peculiarly wayward river. Joseph Conrad set his Heart of Darkness in Africa and positioned the terrible Kurtz on the upper reaches of the Congo. In the film Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola, while appropriating the Conrad story and retaining Kurtz, transposed the river. Recognising a renegade American holed up in the jungles of south-east Asia as a latter-day Kurtz, he simply swapped the Congo for the Mekong. There was little to choose between them; they were rivers ‘of a kind’. Up both lurked twilight forces of good and evil, forbidding yet enticing, virgin yet corrupting. And just as for Conrad the Congo was the obvious setting for an exploration of that ‘heart of darkness’ at the core of early twentieth-century civilisation, so for Coppola the Mekong was the obvious setting for a visionary parable of damnation in the late twentieth century.

A more historically-minded Coppola could have taken as his model the Mekong Exploration Commission. The same sense of dread would dog the Commission, the same pockets of renegade authority would confront them, and the same questioning of their own credentials would result. Even today, above the Tang-ho rapids, obscure ethnic groups jealously maintain an insurgent status which goes back to colonial times, while disputed enclaves harbour a variety of illicit activities, all narcotics-related. The Golden Triangle, though now wishfully billed as an ‘Economic Quadrangle’, retains a reputation for pristine lawlessness which makes borders almost irrelevant. Thailand, Laos, Burma and China here abut one another in as mouthwatering a set of co-ordinates as one could wish for. But the maps are always misleading, and the bulldozing of unauthorised dirt roads or the declaration of phantom states renders them instantly out of date.

Garnier, like Kurtz, would have little difficulty in recognising the region today. Even spouting ‘proboscideans’ have returned to the river. Their legs are the retractable steel pilings of Chinese drilling rigs, the waterspout comes from detonating charges laboriously sunk into the bedrock, and the proboscis belongs to a mechanical excavator poised on the rig’s foredeck to scoop out the debris. China takes the Economic Quadrangle seriously. The benefits of investment depend on making the river navigable; and that means taming the Tang-ho rapids. But when the work is finished, navigation will be possible for a maximum of six months a year. For the rest of the time, when the river is low, the rapids will remain as fearsome and insuperable as they appeared to the members of the Mekong Exploration Commission nearly 150 years ago.

As expeditions go, that which first ventured into the Mekong’s ‘heart of darkness’ deserves classic status. It ought to rank with, say, the African travels of Dr Livingstone. In 1871 Livingstone was the recipient of an honorary award at the first meeting of the International Geographical Congress; the only other such award at that prestigious gathering went to Francis Garnier.

Some twenty strong, the Commission disappeared into the unknown for over two years, and when it re-emerged – those who did – it would sweep the board at every geographical equivalent of the Oscars. Anticipating H.M. Stanley’s Congo expedition of twenty years later, it would also change the geography and ultimately the whole political complexion of the region. Thanks to the Mekong Exploration Commission a French empire would be hacked from what the expedition insisted on calling ‘Indo-China’; and under this dispensation Cambodia would be rescued from extinction, Laos ingeniously contrived, and in defiance of the French, a unitary Vietnam would be painfully projected.

Yet the French were ambivalent about exploration as such and were wont to disparage it as an Anglo-Saxon conceit deficient in scientific rigour. Worse still for the expedition’s survivors, word of their achievements would coincide with momentous events at home as France was repeatedly worsted, and Paris itself besieged, during the Franco – Prussian war. It would thus fall to others, especially the British, to heap honours on the Mekong Exploration Commission and to be the first to hail it as ‘one of the most remarkable and successful exploring expeditions of the nineteenth century’.

It was also one of the best-documented expeditions of the period. Besides an official record in four hefty volumes, we have a lavishly illustrated account which appeared in serialised instalments in a leading French journal, plus two lengthy personal accounts. Remarkably for the 1860s, there are even ‘before and after’ group portraits of the six principal participants.

The ‘before’ picture, an engraving based on a photograph, has something odd about it. Just as the expedition itself tackled the river backwards, starting where it ended and going doggedly against the flow ever after, so the picture appears to have been reversed. Presumably this had something to do with the technical problems of transferring a negative to an engraved plate. It would account for later confusion in the captioning of the picture and would explain why, for instance, Lagrée and Garnier have their hair partings on the wrong side; or why Delaporte – or is it de Carné? – appears to be looking away from the camera. All is adjusted by simply inspecting the picture in a mirror.

The original photo was taken just days before the expedition headed off into the unknown. Some of the men may never before have faced the camera. The picture would serve as an official memorial and, in the not unlikely event of their failing to return, as a cherished memento for family and friends. To a suspicious mind it is also telling evidence of a dangerously self-conscious formality that would dog the whole expedition.

The Saigon photographer, a Monsieur Gsell, would not be accompanying them. His apparatus was far too cumbersome and his glass plates far too fragile. But at government expense he and his equipment had been shipped up through the Mekong Delta and into Cambodia. There, in June 1866, the expedition officially assembled – then promptly split up. While awaiting the necessary documentation, and by way of getting acquainted, the Commission’s six French officials betook themselves to Siem Reap at the far end of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap, or ‘Great Lake’. A week of tramping and archaeologising amongst the Cyclopean ruins of Angkor would follow.

They were not the first Europeans to visit the ancient Khmer capital, but they were the first to attempt a systematic record of it. They tested their survey instruments by observing for latitude and longitude, by measuring the kilometres of wall and waterway, and by mapping much of the vast complex. Late into the night they sat amongst the statuary conjecturing about the beliefs and resources of Angkor’s builders, then they slept within its bat-infested cloisters.

For the photo a suitable site was chosen on the steps leading up to one of the temple terraces. Hats – a sun helmet, a bowler, a Vietnamese straw cone – were discarded yet left ‘in shot’. With the same exaggeratedly casual air, the members of the expedition draped themselves over the warm stonework and stared imperiously at the camera, six bearded bachelors on the threshold of a great adventure.

Just so, explorers of the Nile like Burton, Speke and Baker, all of whose exploits had climaxed in the previous five years, might have posed in front of the pyramids before trudging off into the Dark Continent – except that they did no such thing. British sensibilities were offended by such rank displays of professionalism. Her Majesty’s Government involved itself in exploration only to the extent of conceding what Lord Salisbury would call ‘an Englishman’s right to have his throat cut when and where he chose’. Notching up discoveries was reckoned by the British a sporting activity, reserved principally for gentlemen, conducted with a minimum of fuss, and administered by an august scientific body – the Royal Geographical Society.

That such amateurism had nevertheless produced handsome political dividends was undeniable. To Gallic minds, it was also deeply irritating. Amongst the men on the steps at Angkor a sneaking admiration for their British counterparts was overlaid by professional jealousy and intense suspicion. For far too long, they grumbled, France had allowed her rival a free hand in the world’s terra incognita. It was time to tear a leaf out of Albion’s album. Just as the Nile had given Britain its entrée into Africa, the Mekong would give France its entrée into Asia.

Scrutinising the photo, one is impressed more by its poignancy than its bravado. Far from sustaining the intended air of relaxed informality, it is as if the postures adopted by the explorers had been carefully rehearsed and their relative positions measured out with a ruler. On the extreme right (or left, if one uses the mirror), le Commandant Ernest Marc Louis de Gonzagues Doudart de Lagrée sits slightly apart from his colleagues, and not actually on the steps but on a ledge beside them. His legs are crossed, his shoes have buckles, and a well-placed sleeve displays the gold braid of his rank. Positioned not so as to make space for his name but so as to emphasise the scope of his authority, Lagrée (for short) affects a certain dignity. An aristocrat by birth and a product of the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, he was indisputably the leader. At forty-three and with a hint of grey, he was by far the oldest as well as being the most senior in rank and the only member of the expedition with an already notable record of service in south-east Asia.

Three years previously, in 1863, Lagrée had been deputed to pioneer France’s first push up from the Mekong Delta into Cambodia. His orders had been to explore the river’s course in that country and to persuade the Cambodian king to sign an exclusive defence treaty with France. On both counts he had succeeded. Siam’s (Thailand’s) prior claims to suzerainty over Cambodia’s King Norodom had been dismissed with a well-timed display of firepower, a treaty had been signed, and Lagrée had stayed on at Norodom’s court as France’s representative. That Cambodia had just become, in effect, a French protectorate was in no small measure thanks to le Commandant Doudart de Lagrée.

Encouraged by the thought that where he went, the tricolour had a way of following, it was Lagrée’s idea that the new Mekong expedition first sail across the Great Lake to Siem Reap and Angkor. Neither place was then part of Cambodia. In a protracted decline and fall to rival that of Rome, the Khmer empire had been disintegrating ever since Jayavarman VII completed the stalagmite of Janus-like statuary which is Angkor’s Bayon in the thirteenth century. Southern Vietnam, as it now is, including the Mekong Delta, had been lost by the Khmers over the next three hundred years; so had most of the middle Mekong and the Menam basin in Thailand; and in the late eighteenth century, as Vietnamese and Thais squeezed the Cambodian heartland ever harder, the eastern end of the Great Lake, including Angkor, had been annexed by Bangkok.

The French, as Cambodia’s new keepers, now disputed this cession of what they chose to call the ‘lost’ or ‘alienated’ Cambodian provinces. It helped that Angkorian scholarship provided cover for occasional visits and that Angkorian preservation provided a ready pretext for administrative interference. Lagrée had himself been in Angkor for several weeks in 1865 and again in early 1866. He had begun the mapping of the site and had commissioned translations of inscriptions which demonstrated that it was indisputably of Cambodian provenance. But Bangkok was unmoved; and in the course of these labours the climate had taken its toll of the indefatigable Lagrée. Suffering from a recurrent and acute form of laryngitis, he had formally requested home leave. Admiral de Lagrandière, the colonial governor in Saigon, suggested he defer the request, then asked him ‘out of the blue’, as he put it, to accept the leadership of the Mekong Exploration Commission. ‘Why not?’ replied Lagrée, and ‘I began to laugh.’ So, apparently, did the Admiral.

The joke, unexplained at the time, would soon turn decidedly sour. Laughter of any sort would not be much heard once the expedition got underway. To his companions Lagrée would remain an enigmatic supremo, neither overbearing nor unsympathetic but aloof, sometimes hesitant, often hard to hear (the laryngitis obliged him to whisper), and so weighed down by his responsibilities as to seem indifferent to the derring-do possibilities of the enterprise. Alternatively he was a pillar of strength and decency and ‘possessed of every psychological and moral quality needed for the success of the expedition’, as Garnier would put it. By implication, any fault lay not in his lofty character but in his state of health and in the more erratic calibre of his companions.

To reach the expedition’s Cambodian assembly point, Lagrée and his companions had already sailed from Saigon up through the Mekong Delta, crossing in the course of this three-hundred-kilometre voyage from French territory to Vietnamese territory to Cambodian. Then, as now, the political geography of the river was horribly confusing. As a rule major rivers – like the Yangtse, Mississippi, Amazon, Nile, Congo, Ganges – flow through just one or two countries. This is because a river basin tends to spawn the homogeneous and mutually dependent society which makes an excellent nucleus for a unitary state. Big rivers naturally make for big states, and so the Amazon integrates much of Brazil, the Yangtse much of China, and the Ganges much of India. Rivers, in essence, unite. They do not make good borders, however invitingly delineated on the map, nor do they lend themselves to being bisected by borders. On the contrary, ‘natural frontiers’ properly follow the outermost rim of a river’s watershed, however problematic the business of definition in such remote tracts.

To this rule the Mekong has long been a conspicuous exception. Historically it has spawned only one notable civilisation, that of Cambodia’s Khmers. But although Angkor, the Khmer capital, did indeed profit prodigiously from the freakish behaviour of the Mekong, it remained geographically tangential and politically indifferent to it. Likewise French Indo-China, while it would be postulated on the Mekong basin, would serve only to emphasise the incoherence of the lands which comprised that basin. For much of the river’s course the French would elevate it into an internationally recognised border which, in the second half of the twentieth century, would become that least permeable of all frontiers, an ideological divide. As the only substantial section of the Iron Curtain (or here sometimes the ‘Bamboo Curtain’) to be suspended along a riverbed, it cut most of south-east Asia in two, opposing the beneficiaries of a freer world on one bank to the ideologues of a fairer world on the other, and so turning every boat trip into an escape epic.

Today no fewer than six countries nestle along the river (China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam); and for about a third of its length it still serves as an international frontier. Uniquely it has not, then, united the peoples strung along its course, nor encouraged much traffic and transit between them. As the Mekong Exploration Commission would quickly discover, there are good, indeed unassailable, reasons for this aberration.

But they are not apparent in the Delta. In fact, in its lowest reaches between Phnom Penh (at the apex of the Delta) and the South China Sea (as its eastward base), the Mekong bustles about its business most responsibly, smiling beneath colossal skies as if to deny a lifetime of upstream excesses. Brimming through low-lying farmland and slopping into innumerable channels and waterways, it here supports a vast population, fronts a galaxy of jaunty riverside towns, provides a carriageway for all manner of river craft, and generally exhibits the benevolent features associated with deltaic abundance. It is, in short, highly deceptive; and the Mekong Exploration Commission could be forgiven for being deceived.

Saigon itself, which in 1866 was just an enclave of French rule in an as yet uncolonialised Vietnam, is not actually on the Mekong Delta. It has its own river, the Donnai, to which it stands much as London to the Thames, the port of Saigon being the furthest point upriver to which ocean-going ships can conveniently sail. To reach the neighbouring Delta, you must today board a hydrofoil on the Saigon riverfront, skim down the Donnai’s leaden reaches past oilrigs and freighters to its estuary, and then turn right at the South China Sea.

Alternatively you can take a shortcut by making an earlier right turn into the Arroyo de Poste. An arroyo is a creek, a minor watercourse. This one, a linkage of wiggling tributaries and narrow canals, connects the sullen mangrove-fringed Donnai to a lusher landscape along the Tien Giang, the most northerly branch of the Mekong. It was the route taken in June 1866 by Canonnières 32 and 27, the pocket-gunboats by which the French explorers sailed up to Cambodia; and according to Lieutenant Garnier, it was too well known to merit description.

In that photo taken at Angkor, Lieutenant Marie Joseph Francis Garnier is the man lolling at the opposite end of the group to le Commandant Doudart de Lagrée. A gaunt little figure with deep-set eyes, he sprawls on the steps like the others and is not obviously set apart from them. One leg, though, is drawn up so that the foot can rest on the equivalent ledge to that on which Lagrée is enthroned at the other end. The foot is making a point. Garnier, as one of the instigators of the expedition, its surveyor and hydrologist, and the most senior in rank after le Commandant, was officially Lagrée’s deputy and so, by implication, second-in-command. Indeed the Mekong Exploration Commission is commonly referred to as the ‘De Lagrée-Garnier Expedition’ and sometimes, more controversially, as just the ‘Garnier Expedition’. Garnier would write both the official account of it and the best-known of the personal accounts. He would also collect all the medals and the plaudits. When Lagrée’s supporters objected, Garnier would respond with double-edged testimonials to his superior. ‘He was for us less a commandant than a father,’ he would write.

This at least rang true. A wiry twenty-six, Francis Garnier was much the smallest of the party and quite young enough to be Lagrée’s son. At Naval School the young François (he later changed the spelling to ‘Francis’) was nicknamed ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’, an unflattering reflection on the contrast between his trim diminutive build and his loud extravagant ambitions. For grand vision as for outstanding stamina and courage, no one must be able to fault Francis Garnier. Single-minded, impulsive and intrepid, he was out both to prove himself and to prove that he was right. He had, in short (so to speak), all the attributes of the indomitable explorer, including an acute sense of his own self-importance. This ruled out anything recognisable as humour. Like the distant Lagrée, the driven Garnier would not be easy company. Happily the remaining four on the steps at Angkor would betray more appealing traits.

By way of the Arroyo de Poste the expedition reached the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong at the town of My-tho, then headed upstream. The river is said to have nine mouths, nine being a fair approximation to the geographical reality as well as an exceptionally auspicious number throughout Buddhist south-east Asia. In mythology and art the river is usually represented as a nine-headed serpent or dragon (Cuu Long). But the nine open-mouthed heads on their nine sinuous necks grow from just two scaly torsos, the Tien Giang or Upper River and the Hau Giang, Bassac, or Lower River. Each about a kilometre wide, the Tien Giang and the Hau Giang comprise the main navigational channels up through the Delta, braiding together the seven other effluents until they themselves converge to form the parent stream at Phnom Penh.

On either side of these twin conduits the Delta fans out to both the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam (or Thailand). The map shows the Delta as eighty thousand square kilometres of very green land criss-crossed by a capillary of waterways. In reality, for at least half the year it is eighty thousand square kilometres of very glassy water criss-crossed by a web of causeways. The Mekong falls only six metres in its last eight hundred kilometres, but so low-lying is the Delta that the river in flood appears, and often is, the highest thing around. The land is so flat that from an upper deck you must allow for the curvature of the earth’s surface in counting the tiers of a distant pagoda; the lower ones may have ducked below the horizon. In fact the river feels as if it were itself cambered, with the boat driving along its crown, and lateral channels plunging to left and right or spilling under bridges to explore the orchards and inundate the cabbages.

After forcing its way for thousands of kilometres through mountain gorge and deepest forest, it is as if the river can scarcely believe its good fortune. Like a sluice released, it wells across the plain, exploring the arroyos, tugging at pontoons, basking in backwaters and generally making the most of its first and last unimpeded kilometres. Here nothing is quite what it seems. The man hoeing his field knee-deep in verdure turns out to be punting across it, his hoe a pole and his footing a boat. Behind him, along a tree-lined avenue, a rice barge churns into sight pushing a menacing bow wave. The Delta is said to produce more rice than any area of comparable size in the world. Beneath the glinting panes of water lie meadow and mud at no great depth. But rice-growing being a form of hydroponics, for the last six months of the year the fields are lakes and the landscape is a waterscape.

All that is not water in this aqueous world is ordained to wallow. Rusting car ferries shuttle across the main rivers with their decks awash. Upstream glides a mountain of pineapples propelled by a spluttering screw; downstream comes a haystack pirouetting on the current with a rudder and stern sticking out behind. Any craft boasting more draught than the thickness of a banana looks distinctly piratical, an impression heightened by the large painted eyes which adorn every prow and scan the flood ahead, lashless, boss-eyed and bloodshot, for any aquatic impertinence. By these eyes alone can one distinguish the houseboat from the house. Both are otherwise precarious constructions of water-blackened timbers festooned with clothing and potted geraniums.

Sampans, the river’s equivalent of bicycles, are the exception; they have no eyes because their bows, like the rest of the boat, lurk below the wash. Standing in midstream, the boatgirl plies her oars with the dexterous click of chopsticks, leaning into them and flicking through the stroke with the toss of a glossy ponytail. Porcelain forearms are encased in long-sleeved gloves, and trousered legs aflutter with the tails of a white ao dai (the long-skirted and daringly slit dress beloved of the Vietnamese). She dips in time with the stroke like a decorous metronome. This is how angels would row. Villages perched on nests of drunken stilts loom from the haze like preening storks. Children and ducks upend in the water; lawns of water hyacinth undulate along the bank.

Even the weather is of a mind to wallow. Above the eastern horizon billowing pillars of cloud mount to the stratosphere as the gathering gloom below is ignited with a son et lumière spectacle. Steel-grey and flecked with ochreous rust, another storm is lumbering up from the South China Sea. Hastily tarpaulins are hauled over open holds. A high-sterned country boat, junk-like but for the absence of a sail, guns its engine and heads for shelter. In the gathering gloom a string of tanker-barges carrying diesel for Cambodia is overhauled by the deluge.

Floods in the Mekong Delta rival cyclones in the Bay of Bengal as one of Asia’s meteorological clichés. Seldom does the rainy season (June – October) pass without an inundation, and in towns like My-tho on the Tien Giang and Can-tho on the Hau Giang the provident householder owns a liferaft. Here sampans may be seen jostling with bicycles at the traffic lights. In adjacent homes families cuddle up on top of the furniture to watch TV across a room afloat with toys. Property and crops suffer; but the Delta is used to these things, and fewer lives are lost than in the flash floods which occasionally affect the hilly areas of Vietnam. Nor is the river wholly to blame. The storms and tides surging in from the sea bear an equal responsibility.

A curious feature of these monsoon inundations in the Delta is that, while exacerbated by incoming tides, they appear to occur only in the evening. In the morning there are no floods and no visible tide. Inescapably therefore, the Mekong Delta seems to receive only one tide a day; and two tides every twenty-four hours being the rule throughout the rest of our planet, this phenomenon looks to be unique.

Such a freak of nature should surely have engaged the attention of Francis Garnier as the Mekong Exploration Commission’s hydrologist. But in his haste to whisk the expedition up to Angkor as quickly as possible, Garnier wastes not a word on the matter. Nor, to be fair, do most other writers on the Delta. In fact this tidal oddity is so little remarked and so clearly unnatural that one might suppose it imagined.

Confirmation can be found, though, in the appendices to volume two of a little-read but delightful work by H. Warington Smyth entitled Five Years in Siam. During his five years in the employ of the Siamese (Thai) government as a minerals prospector Warington Smyth also noticed the occurrence of what he calls ‘diurnal tides’ (once-daily, as opposed to the universal ‘semidiurnal’, or once-half-daily, tides). Writing in the 1890s and with reference to Thailand’s Menam river (or Chao Phraya) below Bangkok, he too had been puzzled and felt the matter worth investigating. This he had done with thoroughness, making his own observations throughout his five years, looking up such tide records as existed, and consulting all manner of seafarers.

‘The tides in the Gulf of Siam’, he begins, ‘present peculiarities which are at first very confusing to the observer.’ These peculiarities ‘originate in the China Sea’ and are detectable, in varying degrees, all down the coast from Hong Kong to Saigon and on round into the Gulf of Thailand and Bangkok. At certain times of the year, just after a full or new moon, and most noticeably in the estuarine approaches of rivers which are in flood, alternate tides vary markedly in size and duration. Thus it happens, continues this paragon of memorialists, that the flow of the lesser tide, usually that in the morning, may be overwhelmed, indeed completely obliterated, by the ebb of the greater, usually that in the evening.

Warington Smyth follows this with complicated notes on how the lesser tide, over a twenty-eight-day period, gradually swells as it gets later in the day until eventually it usurps both the dimensions and the hour of the last great tide. Sadly he ventures no opinion as to why this phenomenon occurs. Even today the workings of the attractive mechanism by which the moon and sun control the action of the tides are not widely understood. But he does note that ‘the highest tides are much influenced by the wind’ and that a brisk easterly can ‘add another half a foot’ even in the Gulf of Thailand, which is a more sheltered shore than that of south Vietnam.

This diurnal mother-of-a-tide ought, of course, to spell disaster to the Delta. A salty inundation, albeit only once a day, would soon sour the world’s most productive ricebowl and turn the green dazzle of paddy into maudlin thickets of mangrove like those along the Donnai below Saigon. What prevents such a disaster is the power of the mighty Mekong. The inrushing tide meets the outrushing river, and in the best traditions of ecological equilibrium they compromise. The river rises, its progress barred by the tide. The backing-up of the river by a big ‘diurnal’ is measurable as far upstream as Phnom Penh and beyond. But there and throughout the three to four hundred kilometres down to the sea, salination is barely detectable. The floodwaters surging through My-tho and Can-tho leave no salty sensation and are, in a manner of speaking, fresh. The river thus defends the Delta from its deadliest foe since the rising waters are overwhelming its own, not the China Sea’s.

So too is the silt. For their major export crop the Vietnamese have to provide only seed and labour. The rest is down to the river. The farmers of the Delta plunge their rice seedlings into Mekong water and then anchor them in Mekong mud. In general, facts about the river are disputed. Is it the world’s fourteenth longest or its twelfth? Is its discharge the fifth largest or the sixth? No two books agree; even the river-mad Garnier never hazards a guess on such matters. But that it reigns supreme as the world’s most industrious earthmover seems highly likely. The Mekong in spate discharges not muddy water but runny mud. A cup of Turkish coffee, heavily sugared, has less sediment per cubic centimetre. In its suspended grit, modern propeller screws get so quickly blunted that riverside repair shops offer a regrinding and replacement service.

To offload this sediment – a sludge of mica and minerals from Tibet, Yunnanese phosphates, nitrogenous Burmese clays and leafy loams from Laos – the river waits until the plains of Cambodia and the Delta. There, as those capricious ‘diurnals’ halt its flow, and as its level drops after the monsoon floods, it deposits its burden in a silk-glistening tilth of prime growing potential.

Admittedly, when the Mekong Exploration Commission headed upriver in 1866, the diurnal tides may not have been very evident. From Saigon the expedition took three days to reach Cambodia. At night they moored by the banks of the Hau Giang and slept in the boats. Otherwise they stopped only at My-tho to load coal for the canonnières’ boilers. It was early June, and according to both Garnier and Louis de Carné (who also wrote a personal narrative of the expedition), the monsoon rains were then just beginning. The river would have been rising but not yet in flood; and if the moon was also unfavourable, the effect of the tides might have been negligible.

But if June is a bad month for observing tidal variation, it is the best of times for observing a still stranger phenomenon. Possibly unique to the Mekong and certainly germane to would-be empire-builders, this second fluvial aberration is as much the sine qua non of Cambodia as the ‘diurnal’ tides are of the Delta. Yet it too would elude the savants of the Commission. Perhaps they felt that until they ventured into what French maps called territoires peu connus they were off-duty so far as science was concerned. Measuring Angkor’s great wat was by way of an exercise. Likewise, their speculation on how such a jungle kingdom could have produced the world’s most monumental city was something of a formality and still rates high on the conversational bill-of-fare of every tourist. It never seems to have occurred to Lagrée and Garnier that between the mysterious river they were engaged to explore and the inexplicable splendours amid which they first congregated there lay a simple, if bizarre, cause-and-effect connection.