Читать книгу Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia - John Keay - Страница 9

The Mekon [in Cambodia] is a vast melancholy-looking river, three miles broad, covered with islands, and flowing with the rapidity of a torrent.’

LORD ASHBURTON,

President of the Royal Geographical Society, 1862

LIKE THE IMPETUOUS GARNIER, his young colleague Louis de Carné, the author of what would be the first account of the expedition to be published, allows just a paragraph for transporting the Commission’s personnel from Saigon to Angkor. The farewells had been fond, says de Carné. Some shook his hand ‘as if we were doomed’, more predicted ‘a speedy return after an abortive attempt’. Otherwise there was little to report. Six enervating months into his first Eastern posting, de Carné insists that he personally felt nothing, no excitement, no trepidation, just ‘a worldly indifference’. More a superior ennui, it would permeate his narrative and stay with him for the rest of his pathetically brief life. The climate showed him no favours; but in the light of later disagreements this early reserve smacks of pique. Like an unwanted playfellow scuffing a stone with studied indifference, Louis de Carné nursed the heavy heart of a misfit.

In the group photo de Carné is the one at the back dressed in black and with the thickest of spade-like beards; sunk in reverie, he looks to be slightly out of it already. At twenty-two he was the youngest of the party, and as a junior official in the French Ministry of External Affairs he was the only civilian, all the others being naval officers. Additionally he seems to have taken instant exception to the bullish and undiplomatic Francis Garnier. In the pecking order he rated ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’ as just another naval scientist, one among several and with no greater claim to the direction of the expedition than the rest. Only le Commandant could command; and it was thus to the more soft-spoken and dignified Lagrée that de Carné attached himself.

Like Lagrée, de Carné had aristocratic connections. His father was a comte and a member of the Académie Française, and his uncle was the self-same Admiral de Lagrandière who was governor of the colony. Young Louis de Carné owed his appointment entirely to this connection, a fact of which Garnier would miss no opportunity to remind him. As the expedition’s political officer reporting directly to the Quai d’Orsay, de Carné’s position was potentially influential; yet it was prejudiced by his inexperience and fraught with ambivalence. Unaccustomed to naval discipline, he was expected to submit to it. Untutored in any relevant science, he was liable to be treated as a dogsbody by his more qualified companions. And as one unknown to the colony’s naval establishment, he was widely suspected of being an informer for the civil authorities and the government of the day in Paris.

The government in Paris was that of the high-handed Louis Napoleon, otherwise Napoleon III. A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon had been chosen as French president in 1848 and had successfully installed himself as emperor in 1852. The next two decades were therefore those of the ‘Second Empire’, a period of ambitious national reconstruction well exemplified by Baron Haussmann’s proud grey boulevards in Paris and by a succession of sometimes quixotic enterprises overseas. An attempt to foist the francophile emperor Maximilian on the Mexicans would prove disastrous; so nearly were similar schemes in the Levant. On the other hand gains were made in west Africa and the Pacific. And after a long absence, the tricolour had been seen again in the Far East.

Other nations, notably the British and the Dutch, liked to think that they had come by their colonies either accidentally or as a result of patient trade and an earnest desire on the part of the locals for the security afforded by heavy cannon and accessible law courts. The French had no such illusions. They sought exotic dominions because, without them, France looked like a second-rate power. Nor could they be too particular as to how they acquired them. National prestige was at stake, and casual enterprise had failed. In the eighteenth century France had lost an empire in India to the British; in the nineteenth she had been consistently outbid in China, again mainly by the British. The British were also established in Lower Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya and Borneo; and they were menacingly well-placed in Siam (Thailand), where the Thai determination to hang on to Cambodia’s ‘lost provinces’ around Angkor owed much to a stiffening British presence.

By the 1850s, then, not much unattached Asiatic shoreline was left. If the Second Empire were to make any impression in the East, it had to move fast and ask questions later. The questions so deferred would include such details as what the place was for, how it would pay for itself, and what other nations, especially the British, would make of it. But the place itself was not in question. Between India and China the only remaining option had been the long thin strand which is now Vietnam.

Then called Annam, Vietnam was under an Annamite emperor based in Hué (roughly halfway up the Vietnamese coast) who claimed sovereignty over both Tonkin in the north (where Hanoi is) and ‘Cochin China’ in the south (where Saigon and the Delta are). Rarely, though, did Hué’s sovereignty go uncontested; and the consequent spectacle of repeated rebellions, disputed successions and arbitrary attacks on Vietnam’s mission-run native Christian communities had duly emboldened the government of Louis Napoleon to stake its claim. The plight of the missions meant that the clergy in France, on whose support Louis Napoleon relied, welcomed the idea; so did French commercial interests anxious for ready access to Oriental produce like cotton, silk and hardwoods.

The international situation also obliged. In 1858 Britain’s watchful eye was turned to India as all available troops were diverted for the suppression of what the sahibs of the Raj called the ‘Indian Mutiny’. Simultaneously there had occurred a lull in a joint Anglo – French assault on the Chinese empire. The French fleet, with time to spare, had been ordered south. Assisted by troops from the Philippines, whose Spanish rulers also supported missionary activity in Annam, it effected a landing at Tourane (now Da Nang), the nearest seaport to Hué. Tourane was slated to become a French trading station equivalent to British Singapore; and the emperor in Hué, presented with this fait accompli, was confidently expected to grant France commercial privileges elsewhere in Vietnam and protectoral status over the whole country.

Not surprisingly the Annamite emperor had other ideas. His troops gave a good account of themselves on the landward route to Hué, while the French ships found it impossible to force the city by way of its Perfume River. Stalemate ensued; and for the French, delay meant defeat – from the climate if not from the Annamites. After some fateful debate over the respective merits of Tonkin and Cochin China, the fleet sailed away, heading south again. In the judgement of its commander, the location of Saigon midway between Hong Kong and Singapore, plus the rice surplus of the Delta and the inland access afforded by the Mekong, were a persuasive combination.

Saigon had been duly surprised and taken in early 1859. Annamite forces responded by laying siege to the now French town; for over a year the garrison barely held its own. A second French expedition in 1861, on which the then twenty-one-year-old Francis Garnier served with typically rash distinction, saved the day. The Annamites were repulsed, and their emperor was obliged to cede to France the three small provinces adjacent to Saigon that comprised about half of the Delta.

A bridgehead had thus been established, though it was not quite what was intended. Instead of a protectorate over the whole of Annam – a cut-price arrangement with enormous potential – the Second Empire had been lumbered with a minuscule colony that was expensive to administer and not in the least bit prestigious. Saigon could never rival Singapore because it was sixty kilometres up the dreary Donnai with nothing to trade but rice. Moreover it afforded no obvious protection to Annam’s Christian communities, all of them a thousand kilometres away in Tonkin.

With the addition of Lagrée’s protectorate over a truncated Cambodia, such was the very limited extent of the French presence in south-east Asia when the Mekong Exploration Commission set off in 1866. Two years earlier even Louis Napoleon had been prey to second thoughts. The foreign affairs ministry in the Quai d’Orsay, Louis de Carné’s employer, was under pressure from the British, who upheld Bangkok’s claim to sovereignty over Cambodia. Moreover the French exchequer was facing a financial shortfall exacerbated by sustained resistance in the Delta that necessitated military expenditure of about twenty million francs a year against tax receipts of two million. The colony would never pay for itself; it was time to pull out, argued the government.

The Cambodian protectorate put a slightly rosier complexion on things, but it was the verdict of the naval establishment that carried the most weight. In Paris the Ministère de Marine (that is the navy ministry, or admiralty) had responsibility for all colonial operations. The Annamite initiative had been conducted by the Navy, the colony was run by the Navy, nearly all its officials were naval officers, and in Saigon as in Paris the Navy now adamantly opposed the retrocession of any territory.

In this debate – essentially a spat between the ministries of external affairs and marine affairs but with undertones of the running battle (it would run for forty years) between an ever cautious metropolis and an over-adventurous colony – Francis Garnier figured conspicuously. To rescue a shipmate washed overboard he had once leapt into the South China Sea; the man was fished out, and Garnier famously promoted. With the same hopeful bravado he now launched himself to the rescue of the colony. Soirees were held in Saigon and a pressure group of like-minded friends was formed; to whet commercial appetites an exhibition of colonial artefacts and produce was organised; and to better inform the home authorities a number of publications appeared, all proclaiming the future potential of ‘Indo-China’ in the most extravagant terms. Petitions bore the signature of Francis Garnier, but pamphlets carried the byline of ‘G. Francis’ – an alias of such crystal transparency that one wonders why he bothered.

In identical language, all urged the exploration of the Mekong as the certain saving of the colony. The river’s navigational potential was crying out to be realised; the rich mineral deposits (especially gold and silver) of its tributaries and the resins and timbers of its forests could only be exploited by French expertise and enterprise; likewise inland China, the country from which the river was believed to flow, waited only on French initiative for its fabled produce to come gushing downstream, so making the Mekong the rival of the Yangtse, and Saigon a second Shanghai.

The enthusiasm of Garnier and his companions could not be faulted; nor could their arguments be easily rebuffed in the then state of ignorance about the river. The powerful Navy Minister had gratefully taken up the cry, threatening resignation if not heeded. The struggling colony had been reprieved. And in 1865 the Mekong Exploration Commission had been authorised.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the colony’s future depended entirely on the success of the expedition; other factors would be just as influential. But the weight of colonial expectation was considerable and it bore heavily on all the expedition’s personnel, none more so than Garnier. Whether or not the Mekong itself lived up to his billing as a highway to inland China, he for one was resolved that the expedition must somehow proclaim the political, strategic and economic advantages of extending French rule in the region. In effect, he must make the case for what he called ‘a new empire of the East Indies rising in the shadow of our flag’.

Writing of the lands through which the river supposedly flowed, Garnier and his friends popularised the term ‘Indo-China’. Although not their invention, it epitomised their thinking. It would figure in the titles of the expedition’s official report, of Garnier’s personal account and of Louis de Carné’s. ‘Indo-Chine’ might be unknown to its inhabitants, but the adoption and promotion of the term by the French awarded to the lands along the Mekong a new and convincing territorial integrity. Better still, it defined this integrity in terms which other European powers would understand. The region was no longer to be regarded as some hybrid borderland between other people’s empires in India and China proper. As Indo-China, it was an arena for colonial endeavour in its own right. Indeed, in Garnier’s fevered imagination it would be to France an ‘India-and-China’ in one – compensation for past disappointments in both, and equivalent to either in prestige and potential. It would also be a sensational assertion of France’s revival under the ‘Second Empire’, and might one day become the ‘jewel in the crown’ of French possessions, indeed ‘le perle de l’Empire’ as later writers would put it.

The river offered some grounds for taking the idea of ‘Indo-China’ seriously. Its basin evidently embraced most of the lands that comprised the south-east Asian peninsula, and its course would be found to thread through them. Like the hanked necklaces nowadays being hawked in every Cambodian market, the looping Mekong strings together cultural souvenirs of unmistakably Indian provenance with jade-and-porcelain reminders of China, both being interspersed with filler-beads of dark wood and chunky silver from the intervening lands.

Angkor is Indian – or Indic, a word implying linguistic association rather than any aggressive acculturation from India. Debate rages as to the primacy given by its builders to Buddhist as opposed to Hindu cults (or, indeed, whether they should be deemed mutually exclusive); but the aesthetic of Angkor, the iconography, the scale and the building techniques all find parallels in the Indic monuments of Indonesia and take their inspiration from India itself. Also Indian are the Angkor scripts, indeed the Khmer script in use today and even the name ‘Cambodia’ (or ‘Kampuchea’ as those traditionalist sticklers in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime preferred); both words derive from Kamboja, a place name and lineage bestowed on several remote kingdoms in ancient Sanskrit literature.

To archaeologically inclined empire-builders like Lagrée and Garnier, Angkor’s Indian associations were as exciting as its scale. If for no other reason than to spite Britain’s pretension to a monopoly of all things Indian, they found the site a mouthwatering experience; and they did not doubt that it would soon be restored to Cambodia – and so come under French protection.

From their base in Angkor Wat, which Garnier immediately dubbed ‘the Buddhist Nôtre Dame’, they explored Angkor Thom, or ‘Great Angkor’, the nearby palace-city. Even the lugubrious de Carné was mildly impressed, although still determinedly downbeat. It was all very remarkable, he thought, but where were the people, their history, their literature? ‘The ruins of a monastery mouldering in the bosom of an English wood … move us more deeply.’ Mouldering English monasteries being the lowest form of what was recognisable as civilisation, Angkor was off the scale; it was just too much, too barbaric, too dead.

To the more fanciful Garnier it was more like a living fairytale. The city’s towered gateway with its myriad stone faces put him in mind of The Thousand and One Nights. They rode towards it on elephants through trees of Brobdignagian proportions and over a riverwide moat by the so-called ‘Bridge of Giants’.

You can still do this. The elephant-ride costs ten US dollars and the steel tubing of the howdah is reminiscent of a prison cage. But at least for elephants, the traffic is stopped and the gateway’s images may be examined at leisure. Alternatively you can just donate a fistful of Cambodian riels to the mahout; for that, you gain merit and the elephant gets a banana.

Crammed into one of the puffing little canonnières, the French explorers had taken two days to sail from Phnom Penh to Angkor – one to navigate the Tonle Sap river which connects the Mekong to the Great Lake and another to cross the Great Lake itself. Nowadays the whole trip takes five hours in an eighty-seater river-cruiser offering five karaoke, iced beer and chronic sunburn on the cabin roof. All boat journeys in Cambodia take five hours. Promoters have latched onto the idea that five hours is an acceptable journey time for foreigners, distance and horsepower notwithstanding.

Given a run of 270 kilometres, the Phnom Penh – Angkor cruisers go some way towards discrediting the idea that Cambodians have no sense of urgency. Snug at the apex of a surfer’s dream wave, they slice through the cat’s cradle of fishing lines along the Tonle Sap river, casually capsizing sampans and dousing innocent bottoms in slatted riverside toilets. Acres of water hyacinth are no impediment; they hightail over them like heifers on spring pasture, pausing only to reverse engines and disentangle propellers before making a three-hour dash across the choppy seas of the Great Lake itself. Big barn-like wats, startled from their morning meditations beneath a stack of upturned roofs, whiz past in a blur of maroon, gold and whitewash; corrugated towns peek from the towpath through a curtain of sugar palms; a hazy escarpment to the north interrupts an otherwise unpunctured horizon. Opinion rates the voyage an adventure, not a cruise.

At thirty knots it is quite impossible to ascertain which way the Tonle Sap river is flowing. For most of the year it definitely runs into the Mekong; but in June, when the expedition sailed up it, it was definitely running out of the Mekong. Garnier would confirm as much on the return journey. The Tonle Sap river is in fact that rarest of fluvial oddities, a river that flows both ways.

As the only link between the Great Lake and the Mekong, it is about eighty kilometres long and, where its course is defined by embankments, as wide as the Thames at Maidenhead. It is not deep, but like the Great Lake itself it supports what is said to be the richest freshwater fishery in the world. Fishing rights operate like logging rights and are no less controversial. Auctioned by the government, they make a substantial contribution to the national exchequer but occasion bitter accusations of corruption. Additionally successful contractors, in an effort to recoup both their bids and their bribes, are inclined to flout the regulations against electrocution-fishing and the use of explosives. The losers, apart from the fish, are inevitably the local fishermen, who nurse an abiding sense of injustice. Unpopular concessions require the protection of armed guards, and as catches decline, violent affrays are of frequent occurrence. These may have an international dimension. As in the timber trade, foreigners are well represented, notably the Vietnamese whose cross-eyed trawlers still monopolise the offshore waters of the Great Lake just as they did in the 1860s.

Legally hauled from the weedy depths by line and net, trap, trawl and scoop, the silver bounty is notable for its variety as well as its quantity. Here are found fish that shoot down insects with missiles of mucus and others, much appreciated by the Mekong expedition, that attain the size of boats. There’s a carp that gets drunk, a perch that climbs trees, and a black catfish that, alone and mainly at night, goes walkabout down dusty lanes. There are also, say the experts, quite a few species that have still to be identified and literally hundreds that may already be extinct.

In season, when the water level is at its lowest, catches are landed by the boatload, manhandled by the bucketload and distributed by the tractorload. At one-off markets in waterside villages buyers and vehicles from all over Cambodia converge. A festival air prevails at these gatherings. The rice spirit flows, clean shirts and brightly coloured blouses glisten with sequin-like scales, and fishy swains find fishy brides amid mountains of silver pungency. Carted home, much of the product will be pounded, salted and putrefied into fish paste, an essential ingredient of south-east Asian cuisine and, for most of the population, their principal source of protein.

Without the river and the lake, the Cambodian diet would not be deficient just in protein; it would be deficient, period. Rice is the staple food and, here as in the Delta, rice does best where an inundation of nutrient-rich water can be relied on. This is what the shuttle behaviour of the Tonle Sap river so obligingly provides. The Great Lake is served by no major rivers of its own. During the long dry season between October and June it shrinks, falling by six metres and losing more than three-quarters of its surface area. The Tonle Sap river drains it into the Mekong like any other tributary; evaporation also claims its share. The first rains in early June make little difference. The lake would in fact never recover its volume were it not for the much faster rise of the Mekong.

By mid-June the Mekong at Phnom Penh is edging up by half a metre a week. The Great Lake now being lower, the Tonle Sap river goes into reverse. Instead of being one of the Mekong’s feeders, it becomes one of its branches, drawing off its current and so replenishing the Great Lake. By mid-July the Mekong is up several metres, and by late August it is in full flood, bursting not only its own banks but also those of the Tonle Sap river and the Great Lake. In a hydraulic feat quite as wonderful as the Delta’s ‘diurnal tides’, much of Cambodia becomes a vast reservoir enriched by all those suspended phosphates and nitrogens.

The rice farmer is ready with his seedlings. As the rains cease, the Mekong falls. Now lower than the Great Lake, it retracts its floodwaters; the Tonle Sap river starts to run back into the Mekong; and the Great Lake begins to recede. As it does so, the Cambodian heartland re-emerges as a sparkling Atlantis of vaguely concentric paddy fields. From the dry stubble of what was the lake’s outermost rim, the sun-ripe gold of harvest shades inwards to the lime green of a mature sowing and then the tender lemon-grass of wispy seedlings protruding from the water’s edge of the still-receding lake.

Thanks to this phenomenon, plus the potential for a second harvest in the winter months, Cambodia reaps all that it needs and conveniently does so over an unusually long period of the year, thus releasing a large section of the population for other activities. It has always been so. The wealth which made Angkor great and the surplus labour which made its monumental extravaganzas possible are commonly ascribed to this same freak of nature. Had Lagrée and Garnier paid closer attention to the behaviour of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, they might have anticipated the most likely answer to the conundrum of how an otherwise unfavoured jungle kingdom could have attained such magnificence. They might also have drawn a valuable lesson for future French empire. The Mekong’s importance lies in its role as a provider, not as a highway.

It has ever been so, but it may not remain so. In Phnom Penh and Saigon today’s hydrologists wax paranoid about the changes being wrought along the river’s middle reaches in Laos and Thailand, and especially along its upper reaches in China. The blasting of the riverbed to improve navigation, the construction of dams for hydro-power and irrigation, and the relentless deforestation of the whole basin could easily spell disaster to the hydraulic economies of Cambodia and the Delta. If the Mekong rises too high or too fast, people drown. If it rises too little or too late, they starve.

The situation is believed to be critical. Lights burn late, and long reports get written, in the Phnom Penh headquarters of today’s Mekong River Commission. A multinational watchdog concerned with the river’s ‘sustainable development’, this organisation publicly endorses many of the ambitious projects that its advisers privately decry. The contradiction between alleviating national poverty by large-scale development schemes and endangering individual livelihoods, usually those of subsistence farmers and ethnic minorities, by the fallout from these same schemes is proving difficult to reconcile. Dazzling projections and dire warnings emanate from the Mekong River Commission as erratically as they did from its near-namesake, the Mekong Exploration Commission of 1866.

Pacing the galleries of Angkor Wat, Francis Garnier made the length of its outer wall 3.5 kilometres, estimated that there were 1800 pillars in the temple itself, and scampering up its central tower, counted 504 steps for a measured height of sixty metres. The pillars were mostly single blocks of sandstone, each weighing up to four tons. ‘Perhaps nowhere else in the world’, he wrote, ‘has such an imposing mass of stone been arranged with more sense of art and science.’ To technical skills in the cutting and manoeuvring of megaliths that rivalled those of the Pyramids was added the spark of sheer genius. ‘What grandeur and at the same time what unity!’ he exclaimed. France, ‘to whom Angkor should belong’, had here a quite spectacular opportunity to proclaim its intentions in south-east Asia. He echoed le Commandant Lagrée’s sentiments in looking forward to the day when the site would be reclaimed for Cambodia, and he called on archaeologists, artists and historians to petition the French government to undertake a wholesale restoration.

These hopes would eventually be realised. The fretted towers of Angkor Wat – nine in total but five in angled profile and three per exterior façade – would be restored to Cambodia and become its national symbol. Looking like an unfolded paper cut-out, their silhouette is today everywhere – on postage stamps, official letter-heads, ministerial car plaques, TV news logos. Cambodians seem quite oblivious of the embarrassing fact that, but for the much-maligned French, the site itself might still be in Thailand. For it was thanks to the French authorities that Lagrée’s designs on the site would bear fruit. In 1907 Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ would be wrested from Bangkok, studied, partly restored, and impressively landscaped as per Garnier’s plea.

By the 1980s the towers of Angkor Wat also featured on the national flag. The blood-red flag above the towers is raised, and will lead the nation to happiness and prosperity,’ ran the national anthem. This was doubly ironic; for at the time the Cambodian nation, still traumatised by the rule of the Khmer Rouge and ravaged by famine, knew neither happiness nor prosperity, and Angkor itself had again slipped beyond Phnom Penh’s control. Indeed Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ had been re-lost, being now held by the outlawed Khmer Rouge who, with the connivance of Bangkok and the support of the Western powers, formed part of a national front at war with the Phnom Penh regime. Even as Angkor Wat’s profile fluttered on the blood-red flag, the towers themselves were reportedly being vandalised and their statuary sold off on the international art market.

Crises of national identity are to Cambodia much as floods are to the Delta. They well up with such depressing frequency that one is inclined to accept them as a condition of the country’s existence. Independence Day is celebrated on 17 April; there is also a National Day on 7 January. But what these dates memorialise is a vexed question; there are just too many liberationist contenders in Cambodia’s modern history. Independence could refer to Lagrée’s rejection of Thai suzerainty in 1863, to the French emancipation of the ‘lost provinces’ in 1907, to the demise of French rule in 1955, to the overthrow of the US-backed Lon Nol regime in 1975 (the right answer, incidentally), to the overthrow of the Chinese-backed Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) regime in 1979, or to that of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in 1989. Other possible candidates, already discredited and now ripe for demonisation, are the UN-backed administration of the early 1990s and the elected coalition of the mid-1990s. Only the Hun Sen regime, which overthrew the last-named in a 1997 coup, has definitely to be excluded on the grounds that, although often vilified, it has yet to be overthrown.

With such a sustained record of liberating itself from tyranny, Cambodian nationalism ought to command widespread respect. Yet the suspicion lingers that Cambodians have been forever redeeming themselves not so much from foreign aggressors as from fellow Cambodians. Bangkok, Paris, Washington, Beijing and Hanoi have found collaborators rather easy to come by in Cambodia because there is no consensus about what being a Cambodian means. Even Pol Pot’s sui-genocidal Khmer Rouge could claim to represent an indigenous tradition. They traced the roots of their revolution not simply to someone else’s little red book but to supposed Angkorian traditions of mass mobilisation and draconian discipline in the pursuit of an ideologised utopia.

Of neighbouring Laos as late as the 1950s it was said that most people who lived there had no idea that they belonged to a state called Laos. Cambodians were no doubt better informed, but not therefore more involved. As Lagrée and his companions would be delighted to discover, the region was woefully lacking in those structural elements – centralised administrations, respected institutions, shared interests, recognised frontiers – which underpin statehood and steady other national mansions. Like inland Africa, inland south-east Asia had plenty of political building timber but, as the twentieth century dawned, it had yet to evolve a stable and convincing architecture. Cambodia was still waiting for the French to reclaim Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’, without which it was like a Scotland minus the Highlands. As for the anthropologists’ paradise which is Laos, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that most of its hundred-odd – and some of them very odd – ethnic groups would even be identified.

Yet international opinion as represented by organisations like the League of Nations and the UN made no allowance for such delinquency. Existing states were meant to correspond to coherent nations, and those that did not, supposedly soon would thanks to the process called ‘nation-building’. Hence the credit for the survival of a country like Cambodia – or the insinuation of one like Laos – belongs less to the strength of its nationalist sentiment and more to a benign, if alien, world order which decrees that all existing states are inviolable. Whether they are viable is another matter.

The symbolism of Angkor relies heavily on Indian ideas of a formalised cosmos in which the earth, the oceans and the universe are organised and harmonised round a central axis, a hub. This axis was represented two-dimensionally as the concentric rectangles (or wheel-like circles) of a mandala, and three-dimensionally as a conical mountain, the mythical Mount Meru. Meru’s elevation idealised the symmetry and hierarchy of a universal order to which human society must aspire and legitimate authority conform. The spatial arrangements of each of Angkor’s monuments, and above all their soaring towers, demonstrated how the authority of the Khmer kings was both cosmologically ordained and divinely favoured.

In lands as flat as the Mekong Delta, natural hills might also be co-opted into this grand scheme of environmental protocol. A phnom is a mountain. The phnom in Phnom Penh is barely as big as the stupa which crowns it, but Phnom Krom at Siem Reap is a respectable hill and has no rival on the circumference of the Great Lake. Crossing the lake all boats, coal-fired canonnières or turbo-charged cruisers, steer for Phnom Krom. It flanks the estuary of the stream which leads up to Angkor, and somewhere near its base (precisely where depends on the height of the lake) the cruisers disgorge their passengers.

Here, in 1866, the officers on Canonnière 27 had bivouacked for the night. Next morning they had risen early to scale the phnom; and on its summit, confronted by their first Angkorian monuments, Lieutenant Louis Delaporte had taken out his sketchpad to begin the pictorial record of the journey.

Besides le Commandant Doudart de Lagrée, surveyor/hydrologist Garnier and political officer de Carné, the expedition’s senior personnel included three other officers. Two were naval surgeons with specific responsibilities. Dr Clovis Thorel was in charge of botanical observations and discoveries, and Dr Lucien-Eugène Joubert of geological and mineralogical data. Official French expeditions tended towards the multi-disciplinary. No field of enquiry was to be neglected, and the resulting concourse of savants could resemble a symposium on the march. Napoleon Bonaparte had set the standard. His 1798 invasion of Egypt had been accompanied by such an impressive array of archaeologists, agriculturalists, historians, irrigationists, surveyors, draughtsmen and natural scientists that its report attained encyclopaedic status, with no fewer than twenty-three monumental volumes – the famous Description de l’Égypte. The Mekong Exploration Commission’s remit was less ambitious. In somewhere as inconnu as Indo-China it was concerned more with economic and political potential, with investigating what might be made of the place rather than appropriating whatever might already exist.

In addition to their scientific researches, Drs Thorel and Joubert would find their medical expertise much appreciated, and likewise their easy-going temperaments. Both were in their thirties, so older than the others (bar Lagrée) and perhaps less excitable. Thorel had been in Annam for five years and had some experience of working with its montagnards, or hill tribes. Joubert, though a more recent arrival, had been in Africa and had lately undertaken a geological survey in upper Senegal. He could claim a basic expertise, otherwise in short supply, in what would now be called ‘survival skills’; as the tallest and physically most robust, he would also attract local attention as the ‘Jumbo’ of the party.

Finally there was Lieutenant Louis Marie Joseph Delaporte. ‘As draughtsman and musician he principally represented the artistic aspects of the expedition.’ So put, Garnier’s introduction of Louis Delaporte seems to imply reservations about the necessity for a violinist-cum-illustrator, especially one whose few months in the colony had been spent laid up with fever. Although he was supposed to assist with the survey work, Delaporte’s inexperience and general levity at first went down badly with ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’. Elsewhere we learn that Delaporte’s naval prospects had been blighted by an untreatable disposition towards seasickness and, more generally, by ‘a great dislike of the sea’. He was evidently someone who had joined the navy to see the world, but not in ships. After some grim months in the north Atlantic he had hailed the leafy arroyos of the Delta with relief and there began sketching. His work attracted favourable comment. Although Lagrée had someone else in mind as his draughtsman – and Garnier perhaps anyone else – Admiral de Lagrandière had chosen Delaporte.

Nothing if not resilient, Delaporte would rise above such things. In a coloured version of the group photo (on which he presumably painted in the colour), his chestnut trousers invite more comment than his outsize head. Other portraits show a head so disproportionate as to suggest deformity. He looks a bit mad. But what is more significant is the fact that of Delaporte there are indeed other portraits. Against the odds, he and he alone was destined for a long and distinguished career as an explorateur. It began at Angkor, to which only he would ever return, and it would continue amongst Angkorian archaeology, of which he would become the outstanding champion of his generation.

As for the Mekong journey, it is largely thanks to Delaporte that it still has any popular resonance at all. His written contribution to the official report and to Garnier’s personal narrative would be much the most readable, vivid and sympathetic of all the writings on the expedition. He wrote with the observant eye and the kindly heart of a genuine enquirer. Still more memorably, he drew with the genius of a considerable artist. His pictures, worked up from sketches made throughout the course of the journey and then engraved as plates for the various published accounts, have since achieved a much wider currency. Not exceptional are the fifty-five Delaporte plates which, unacknowledged and extensively recaptioned, illustrate Ross Colquhoun’s 1885 book Amongst the Shans. As ‘period prints’, Delaporte’s drawings now hang in upmarket hotels from Hong Kong to Bangkok, feature in tourist brochures, grace many a calendar, and have been reliably reported adorning the nether regions of a Kunming massage parlour. Siem Reap’s newly opened Foreign Correspondents Club has a few Delaporte prints hanging amongst its press photos; the town’s grandly restored Grand Hôtel d’Angkor has whole walls of them.

In the days before photography became an easy option for the traveller, no expedition was better served by its artist. Like Garnier’s writings, Delaporte’s pictures would capture the exoticism of the whole enterprise and especially that interplay of innocence and menace, of moments of serenity between eruptions of madness, which became the received image of the Mekong. Long before Conrad and Coppola, before Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Louis Delaporte created the idea of the river at the ‘heart of darkness’; and to see the Mekong today is to look through eyes on which this idea, his image, is indelibly imprinted.

Phnom Krom was a case in point. Near the summit of the hill beside the Great Lake there stands today the most rundown wat in Cambodia. Mangy dogs scratch and snarl in the shade of its sala (the raised and roofed assembly room). An updraught from the lake eddies around the deserted courtyard, lifting the dust and wrapping an amputated tree in bandages of shredded polythene. The prayer hall is locked, information unobtainable. Most of Cambodia’s monasteries were sacked by the Khmer Rouge, and this one looks as if it has yet to be reconsecrated. But a little further, a little higher, and seven centuries earlier, the hilltop cluster of Angkorian stupas provides instant reassurance to a Delaporte disciple.

Clearly his upriver pictures with their naked savages and their jungle fronds of wallpaper intricacy owed something to artistic licence. Rhinos rootling through an abandoned palace, and elephants crowding the rock-strewn riverbed, were what nineteenth-century romantics expected. Dr Thorel teetering through the forest canopy in search of orchids was what his employers expected. For the exploding cataracts and the sheer Niagaras, as for the forest cathedrals and the obelisks of rock, allowance has also to be made. The river couldn’t actually be that fast or the trees that vast. Delaporte was exaggerating.

But not apparently with the ruins of Angkor. The three stupas of Phnom Krom are still much as he drew them. A tree has disappeared, and another has grown where there had been none. The stupas (Buddhist memorial monuments, also known as chedis, chortens, dagobas, thats or topes) look more precarious, and some of the masonry is missing. So is the stone Buddha figure that Delaporte had found lying in a bush. Otherwise all is exactly as depicted in 1866.

It is the same at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, at the Bayon and at the Bakheng (another hilltop site). To the casual observer the buildings look practically unchanged. Allowance has to be made only for the sometimes artful composition of the picture and for later site clearance of some of the more riotous vegetation. In all other respects the fidelity of Delaporte’s drawings of Angkor cannot be faulted.

This seemed to raise an intriguing question. Perhaps artistic licence was not in his repertoire. As the draughtsman for a scientific expedition, accuracy should have been paramount. Perhaps the elephants and the orchids, the lowering forest and the raging river were not exaggerations at all. Being on guard against his ‘heart of darkness’ image did not mean discounting it altogether. Perhaps upriver the gorges were still as grand, the waters as wild, and the menace as tangible as his pictures suggested.

Regardless of their accuracy, what makes Delaporte’s drawings so appropriate is their apparently prophetic quality. In 1866 Cambodia’s nightmare – ‘the horror … the horror’ evoked by Conrad and echoed by Coppola – had yet to materialise. It burst upon the country a hundred years later in the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Although the hell lasted less than a decade, it left such a reek of pain that today even the place names – ‘Svey Rieng’, ‘Kompong Chhnang’, ‘Stung Treng’ – sound like agonised utterances hissed through the gritted teeth of the dying. Actual shrieks and screams were strictly forbidden in the interrogation cells. To discourage reactions so reactionary, there was always another tweak in the torturer’s repertoire. Men protested their pain, if at all, with a click of the tongue and guttural retchings. Dying, too, was a hushed affair, rarely worth a bullet; and contrary to received opinion, much of it was not even intentional.

‘Fried frog and chips’? Or ‘virgin pork uterus in sour sweat sauce’?

The menu in today’s Café Kampuchino in Siem Reap reads like a witchdoctor’s shopping list. Cambodia’s culinary ingenuity was legendary long before the Khmer Rouge; it extends to various sorts of rat, bat, toad and snake, some of the larger, scrunchier insects, and assorted innards and extremities from more familiar animals. No great courage is required to order these things. Like heavily advertised promotions the world over, they are never available. ‘No have,’ says the waiter, scrutinising the carte as if he has never seen it before. ‘Bat no now,’ ‘Entrail finish,’ ‘Frog tomorrow.’ The list of fare is in fact a wish-list. Only rice or noodles with vegetables and a few proteinous trace elements can be guaranteed. As for the more delectable sections of, say, a chicken – the bits between its feet, its beak and its parson’s nose – they never appear. What happens to breast, leg, wing and wishbone is one of the inscrutable East’s best-kept secrets.

In the 1970s, participants in the socialist experiment pioneered by the Khmer Rouge were reported as being reduced to scouring the rice stubble for edible bugs and devouring any vertebrate in its entirety. From the killing in the Killing Fields not even butterflies were exempt. Lice were reportedly prized fare in the death camps. Cambodia was starving; and during its ‘holocaust’ far more died from malnutrition – and the reduced resistance to malaria that resulted – than from the better-documented incidence of torture, strangulation or a blow to the back of the head at the edge of a pre-dug grave.

The Khmer Rouge called their collective and depersonalised leadership the Angkar, which is usually translated as ‘the Organisation’. Organisation was precisely what it failed to provide. Allied to a lethal ideology, it was sheer inefficiency that turned the country into an abattoir. Although the numbers are disputed, the human death toll ran into seven figures; so, at the time, did the country’s total population. But a tragedy on such a scale will ever be incomprehensible if reduced to newsworthy trivia about people eating bugs.

For about nine years (1970–79) – five in partial control of the country and four in power – the Khmer Rouge set about the killings in the fields and the torturings in the camps with a ferocious intensity. Society had to be cleansed of those elements tainted with the ‘bourgeois criminality and debauchery’ of previous regimes. Cambodia must start again from ‘year zero’, building a socialist utopia based on the labour of the masses divided into agrarian communes. No wages would be needed; the Angkar would provide food according to need from the collective pool. State centralism was designed to protect the masses from exploitation, not to appropriate the fruits of their labour. And as dictatorial regimes go, that of the Khmer Rouge was indeed a model of incorruptible probity. Its leaders lived simply, extravagant consumption was unknown, and the revolution itself was subjected to relentless and mind-numbing analysis. The scrutiny, like the savagery, was always devastatingly sincere.

But in this excess of method lay utter madness. During a speech delivered in 1977, Pol Pot could congratulate ‘the great mass movement’ on having liquidated ‘the exploiting classes’ while in his next breath calling for a population of ‘fifteen to twenty million’. Having decimated the nation he demanded that it double. Years of civil war had already traumatised the country. US bombing had perforated the paddy fields and destroyed embankments, like those along the Tonle Sap river, by which floodwater was funnelled to crops. The ground fighting had dislocated vital distribution systems, like that of the Tonle Sap’s yield of fishy protein. Hundreds of thousands had flocked from the countryside to Phnom Penh for sanctuary. When the bandana-ed cadres entered the city in April 1975, they found a vast population that had become entirely reliant on US-aided food imports. These now ceased forth-with. Evacuation was the logical response.

The failure was not of logic but of logistics. In the absence of transport, shelter, medical facilities or adequate food, the evacuees were marched into the wilderness and there marooned to die of a combination of overwork, undernourishment and malaria, or to be systematically liquidated as scapegoats for the regime’s rank incompetence. Countryman killed countryman, neighbour neighbour, and cousin cousin not in the cold conviction of a racial holocaust but in a fight for survival born of mutual destitution and paranoia.

It ended when in 1979 the Angkar was ousted from Phnom Penh by a Vietnamese invasion that imposed its own regime under Heng Samrin, a Hanoi puppet. Seeking to legitimise itself, the new regime lit on the idea of publicising the atrocities of its predecessor. Former interrogation centres were reopened as tawdry holocaust museums; mass graves were exhumed and the bones, after being sorted into skulls and limbs, exhibited by the nearest roadside. As journalists began to trickle back into the country, Cambodians were encouraged to recall the horrors they had somehow survived. The blame was laid squarely at the door of the leadership as each witness duly told of siblings, parents, friends who had died at the hands of ‘Pol Pot and his clique’. But in reality the killers too were siblings, parents, friends. Thirty years later the survivors and their tormentors still live side by side in the same villages.

Downriver in Vietnam neither better times nor worse block the historical perspective. There the war with the US retains its immediacy, rumbling on not with bursts of resentment or hostility but in a wave of officially sanctioned nostalgia for a time of simple truths and inconceivable sacrifice. Army and air force museums compete for the nation’s affection with war crimes monuments, ‘War Remnants’ museums, theme-parked bunkers, downed aircraft doubling as climbing frames, and whole bazaars devoted to recycled armaments and US military memorabilia. With a reverence that would not be misplaced in the Uffizi, schoolchildren join veterans to study the photos – torture cages, dead and disfigured American airmen, defoliated villages, raddled call-girls. Thirty years on, and the war is still paramount in the national psyche. As a defining moment in Vietnamese history the fall of Saigon in 1975 ranks with the fall of the Bastille in French history.

But upriver in Cambodia memories of the carpet bombing initiated by Nixon and Kissinger have been swept under mats stiff with fresher bloodstains. Some of the craters left by the B-52s are now fishponds; others, after serving as receptacles for the harvest of the Killing Fields, have been reopened as genocide sites. Pol Pot’s pogrom obstinately blocks the historical perspective. ‘Year zero’ remains the psychological backstop of modern Cambodia’s calendar, and today’s government ministers, some of them tainted with Khmer Rouge associations, others with Vietnamese collaboration (and Prime Minister Hun Sen with both), naturally stall over bringing the killers to justice. They also agonise over the nation-building role to be accorded to the death camps and the mass graves. The exhumed skulls are still stacked by the roadside like bleached watermelons; but the visitors are mostly foreign tour groups and the souvenir potential is limited. Pol Pot is dead, but life does not go on.

The unbearable burden of recall placed on survivors of a conventional holocaust would be a relief to the survivors of a self-inflicted genocide. With no one to blame but themselves, Cambodians seem still to teeter on the edge of a pre-dug grave, restrained only by the presence of international agencies and the promise of foreign investment. The trees trill with the deafening protest of unseen insects. The earth smells of blood. Seeing the country as other than the site of a holocaust proves nigh impossible. A ‘heart of darkness’ horror occludes the charm; and the innocence of a natural paradise is irretrievably tainted by the horrors of its fall. As for the dozy colonial outpost that was Phnom Pehn whence in 1866 the Mekong Exploration Commission ventured into the unknown, it simply beggars conception.

Though Louis de Carné characterises the expedition’s stay at Angkor as a week of ‘painful trips and incessant study’, to Francis Gambier it had been more like a holiday. He would later complain that the time might have been better spent chasing up supplies and intelligence and preparing the subordinate members of the expedition for the rigours ahead. Instead, they pursued their individual interests. Lagrée archaeologised, Joubert geologised, Delaporte drew, Garnier mapped and de Carné moped. Only Dr Thorel did nothing; supposedly the best acclimatised of them all, he was the first to go down with dysentery. The others nursed him as best they could while they took the measure of one another. A routine of sorts was established in which each day ended with a round-the-campfire discussion on some weighty, if not philosophical, matter.

On 1 July they struck camp and headed back to the Mekong across the Great Lake and up the Tonle Sap river. This time it was definitely ‘up’ the Tonle Sap river, because Garnier noted that the waters had so risen during their absence that Kompong Luang, where Lagrée had his house, had become an island. Just above Phnom Penh, and perhaps where today the river-cruisers tie up, the little gunboats were moored and the expedition’s stores stowed aboard one of them.

To the heavy cases of instruments, preservatives and drawing materials, and to the decidedly generous quantities of flour and biscuit (five hundred kilos) and liquor (766 litres of wine, 302 litres of brandy) was added the wherewithal for defraying expenses. Cash came in gold bars, gold leaf, Mexican silver dollars and Siamese silver ticals to a total value of thirty thousand francs. The trade goods included bolts of velvet, silk and cotton, glass trinkets, an enormous quantity of brass wire and a selection of pistols and rifles. The brass wire was reportedly in great demand upriver, says de Carné; the guns were ‘a purely speculative investment’. At a rough calculation, the total displacement must have been around five tons, a hefty load for a cannonière and way beyond the capacity of most local craft.

Properly speaking, the river at Phnom Penh is the Mekong itself. To the French, though, this particular three-kilometre-wide reach was always Le Quatre-bras. The four arms’, or crossroads, corresponded to the junction of the four rivers: the Mekong itself which comes swinging down from the north, the Hau Tien which exits east, the Hau Giang (Bassac) which exits south, and the Tonle Sap which comes and goes somewhat north by north-west.

Poised on the bank of such a vital confluence, it is curious that Phnom Penh had only just been selected by King Norodom as his capital. Lagrée liked to think it was French protection that had emboldened the king’s move from his less accessible abode at Udong, and certainly the new site could be comfortably commanded by a canonnière’s cannon. Whether this was meant to reassure His Highness or to restrain him was debatable. A new palace was being built on the waterfront (where it still is), and the expedition’s send-off celebrations seem to have doubled as part of the dedication ceremonies. A sweltering evening of speeches, toasts, light refreshments and leaden jokes was cheered, though scarcely enlivened, by the appearance of gold-girt beauties performing the statuesque posturing which is Cambodian classical dance. The Frenchmen lusted dutifully, then fidgeted involuntarily as they melted into their dress uniforms.

Departure came as a relief. As they cast off, the French flag was run up the tiny mast of Lagrée’s canonnière. The other canonnière fired its single gun four times by way of salute, and on the command of a whistle – these things were strictly regulated – the crews cheered in unison ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ then, after another blast of the whistle, ‘Vive le Commandant de Lagrée.’ It was midday on 7 July 1866. There was no answering salute from the shore. The cheers died on the waters with the finality of what was indeed the last farewell. ‘A few moments later,’ says Garnier, ‘we sailed alone on the vast river.’