River Road to China Read online

  In the nineteenth century, however, interest in the Mekong quickened. British commercial and political involvement now extended beyond the Indian subcontinent into Burma and the Malay archipelago, and by 1830 there was a lively discussion of the still largely unknown lands of Indochina. French, British, and American travelers had all skirted around the periphery of these territories, but extensive and scientific exploration had still not taken place. One has only to read the travelers' accounts of the period to realize how great was the lack of knowledge. Even when all the available information was brought together, the unknown factors were greater than the known and the doubt and distortions greater than the certainties. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Josiah Conder's engagingly titled book, The Modern Traveller, published in London in 1830. Here Conder drew upon the most modern, if not always the most complete, knowledge. Yet the picture he gives of Indochina bears striking similarities to that provided by Tomé Pires and Father da Cruz three hundred years before. The sixteenth-century idea of all the great rivers of Southeast Asia flowing from a single source still deserved consideration in Conder's view. And he ventured agreement with another idea of the early travelers in the region: that the Mekong and the Chao Phraya, and possibly other major Southeast Asian rivers such as the Salween in Burma, formed a huge inland lake during the flood period of the rainy season.

  Inaccurate though Conder's information was, his account of the Indochinese region showed why there was a growing interest in the upper reaches of the Mekong. Europe was already set on the path of imperialist expansion. The value of the China trade had long been recognized, and ten years after Conder had written his book the First Opium War was fought to ensure that trade with China would be on terms that European merchants wanted, not on those the Chinese government desired. British traders and soldiers in Burma discussed the possibility of trade with China by an overland route — a hope that was never truly realized during the nineteenth century. For Josiah Conder, summing up the import of his information on the Indochinese region, the future seemed rosy: “Who can tell but that, in a few years,” he wrote, “we may have a British factory at Touron [modern Da-Nang], steam boats plying on the Saigon River, or even ascending the unknown course of the Mei-kong, and that a joint stock company may be formed to work the gold mines of Tongkin!” Who, indeed, could tell? The irony of Conder's point of view was that the men who did come to try and trade in Indochina and to explore the Mekong were French and not British. And the double irony was that these Frenchmen were spurred on in their efforts by the quite erroneous belief that the perfidious English were poised to grab a position in Indochina when such was demonstrably not the case.

  Nothing was more convincing to those who finally hoisted their country's flag over the Colony of Cochinchina and then the “Protectorate” of Cambodia than the proposition that they were the latest in a long line of Frenchmen who had forged an indestructible link between this region and France. Undeniably there were links stretching back over a long period. That these links were in some fashion indestructible and God-ordained is a less easy proposition to defend. Frenchmen were first associated, in any sustained fashion, with the Indochinese region through the work of missionaries whose names resound through the canon of colonial literature on Vietnam and Cambodia. Heading the list is the name of a Jesuit priest, Father Alexander of Rhodes. His labors in Vietnam began at the end of 1624. Over the next twenty-five years, whether in Vietnam or elsewhere, Alexander of Rhodes worked constantly to advance the cause of the Catholic Church in this distant region. Modern scholars may doubt the reliability of the numbers he claimed as converts to Christ, but none question the contribution he made to the task of developing a romanized transcription of the Vietnamese language.

  Through his endeavors, Alexander of Rhodes established a pattern in which French missionaries came to look upon the Indochinese region as their special preserve. In succeeding centuries the results achieved were sparse. The names of missionaries such as Bishop Pallu are remembered for dedication rather than for evangelical success. Whatever the interest of a limited number of French priests and traders in the Indochinese region may have been through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the actual accomplishments were limited. It is arguable that the most particular exception to this rule was Pigneau de Behaine, Bishop of Adran.

  As a member of the French missionary order founded following Alexander of Rhodes' enthusiastic propaganda, the Société des Missions Etrangères, Pigneau de Behaine did, indeed, play an important role in the politics of late eighteenth-century Vietnam. Pigneau was as convinced a French nationalist as he was a Christian. Lending his support to one side in the major Vietnamese civil war that was raging at the time, he sought to involve his country as well for the benefit he thought would follow. In this aim he failed, not least because of the fall of the French monarchy which had been more sympathetic to his proposals than those who triumphed in the Revolution. But he was able to recruit more than three hundred Frenchmen to fight on the side of the Nguyen family, who eventually united Vietnam under their rule in 1802.

  The men who responded to Pigneau de Behaine's call to assist the Nguyen were a varied lot. Many were impoverished French adventurers, ready to take employment in any enterprise that promised booty. A more limited number were trained military officers, men such as Chaigneau, Vannier, and Olivier, whose talents undoubtedly played some part in bringing the Nguyen dynasty success; just how significant the part played by the French really was remains a matter for dispute between French and Vietnamese historians. Neither the French mercenaries nor Pigneau de Behaine acted as representatives of their government, and their efforts did not lead to France's gaining any special position in Vietnam once the Nguyen dynasty was in control of the country in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  After the first Nguyen ruler's death in 1820, his successors were even more reserved towards the West, and grew less and less ready to tolerate the activities of missionaries whose proselytizing they saw as a political rather than a religious threat. By ordering the deaths of a limited number of French missionaries and a much greater number of Vietnamese Christians, the Vietnamese Emperor, Ming Mang (1820–1841), and his successor, Thieu Tri (1841–1848), helped to accelerate the coalescence of French missionary and government interest in the Indochinese region. When, by the early 1850s, the hope of trade was added to the zeal of evangelism and the expectation of imperial glory, the stage was set for French intervention.

  The hope for trade did not, however, reflect any clear understanding of the commercial opportunities in this remote corner of the world. France's checkered political history from the beginning of the nineteenth century had frequently left its successive governments unready to devote their energies to the promotion of distant enterprises. Once Louis Napoleon came to power after 1848, he and his ministers were more ready to listen to the advocates calling for French action in the East. The missionaries wanted protection for their priests and followers; the naval officer corps believed that French gloire required action equal to that of the British; and the merchants, particularly those of Lyons and Bordeaux, fretted because France did not have possessions to match Singapore and Hong Kong. Vietnam, when it was attacked in 1858, was not to be saved merely for the greater glory of God, but also for the prestige of la patrie and the pockets of the commerçants.

  There was nothing hypocritical about linking these three goals in the minds of mid-nineteenth-century Frenchmen. The age of rampant imperialism was yet to come, but France's entry into Vietnam was seen by its promoters as opening many paths to glory, not least to the presumed riches of China. The question was how to reach the valuable markets of the Middle Kingdom. This was no simple matter, for when the French attacked the Vietnamese port of Tourane (Da-Nang) in 1858, their expectation of an easy victory quickly faded away—almost as quickly as did the Vietnamese Christians, who showed that whatever their missionary leaders may have promised, they had no intention of fighting with the French tro
ops against the forces of the Emperor. So successful was the Vietnamese resistance at Tourane, and so greatly did the combined French and Spanish expeditionary force suffer from tropical diseases, that a new invasion point was chosen farther south, at the inland port city of Saigon. Here, from 1859 onwards, the French slowly worked to consolidate a colonial position, abandoning for the moment their hopes for major commercial posts farther north and nearer to China. If trade with China was to be a chief concern of a French colony in the Far East, then the Cochinchinese region was far removed from that goal. It was in these circumstances that young and eager French officers came to think about the possibilities afforded by the Mekong River.

  Even though the French were firmly established in Saigon by 1863, the Mekong remained an unknown quantity. Its course to some distance above Phnom Penh was by now quite well known. French missionaries, despite their difficulties in gaining converts, continued to live near the Cambodian court, then still at Oudong, a settlement near the Tonle Sap about twenty miles north of Phnom Penh. Here, if nothing else, they were free from the persecutions of the Vietnamese government, and they knew a little of the country to the north of the royal settlement. One Catholic missionary had even traveled to the fabled city of Angkor. Father Bouilleveaux's visit in 1850 must be counted as the first step in the modern rediscovery of the Angkor temples, even if he was strangely unimpressed by them. Certainly his concern with his evangelizing mission outweighed his interest in providing a detailed description of the remarkable buildings he saw. His travels, arduous though they were, still lay within the generally if imperfectly known area of the Indochinese region. It was left to another Frenchman, Henri Mouhot, both to proclaim the wonders of Angkor to the European world and to take the next steps in the exploration of the Mekong.

  An ardent naturalist and explorer, Henri Mouhot was to some extent a prophet without honor in his own country. His interest in exploration received more encouragement in England than in France. This may well have been because of his links, through his English wife, with the famous British explorer Mungo Park. The period Mouhot spent exploring in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos between 1858 and 1861 was relatively brief, but the importance of his efforts was considerable. His description of the temples at Angkor was not the first to come before the European public, but it surpassed all that had gone before in detail and feeling. Unencumbered by ethnocentric esthetic standards, Mouhot recognized the grandeur of the temples he found set in the deep forest. He could not believe that buildings of such magnificence were built by forebears of the Cambodians of 1860. The men and women he saw were surely the descendants of a lesser race, he argued. The greatest of all the temples, and the least damaged, was Angkor Wat, and this Mouhot considered a “rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo … grander than anything left us by Greece or Rome … a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.”

  If Mouhot might with justice be described as the man who brought the wonders of the Angkor ruins to the attention of the Western world, his efforts to explore the Mekong were less successful and failed to resolve most of the questions of detail that puzzled the French community in Saigon. His sudden death in November 1861 prevented him from following his goal of traveling down the Mekong, from a point near Luang Prabang in Laos, to the region in Cambodia, just above Kompong Cham, that he had reached when he had gone northward from Phnom Penh in 1859. In his diary he left a vivid description of the river between Luang Prabang and Pak Lay, of its fast-flowing current rushing through high gorges with a sound like the stormy sea. He wrote, too, of the darkness of the tropical night and of the hardships he faced as a solitary explorer. His diary is strangely and movingly evocative of his determination and loneliness in the forests and jungles of Laos.

  While the middle reaches of the Mekong remained unexplored, let alone those remoter sections of its course closer to China, there was a risk — or so the Saigon community feared — that Britain would steal a march on France. The force of this imperial rivalry cannot be overstated. French naval officers, in particular, looked back on their country's history since the Revolution with feelings approaching despair for the loss of colonies it had seen. In a crude distortion of the social Darwinism that was to be so influential later in the century, the young naval officers who played such an active part in seizing and then administering the new colony of Cochinchina saw imperial expansion as necessary for France's survival. The index of greatness, ran the argument of one publicist, was the acquisition of colonies. It should not be France's role to hold back and then try to benefit from the efforts of others, as the United States had done in its commercial relations with China. Previewing the arguments of the pieds-noirs one hundred years later, this writer argued that the fact of French expansion into Algeria did not count, for by its proximity to France and the nature of its products Algeria could not be considered a colony. Glory was to be found in the East, and “since the last distant expeditions, France can dream of not only again finding overseas the activity necessary for its commerce, for the development of its industry and the creation of outlets for the future, but also of beginning again the noble civilizing mission that has always given it such a high place in the world.”

  There was no cant in these views, however self-interested they appear more than a century later. But there were distinct problems associated with such hopes. Most particularly in 1864, when these words were written, there seemed little promise that Cochinchina would provide the commerce that was to speed France towards greatness. True, some individual Frenchmen might gain wealth by selling goods to their fellow countrymen in Saigon. And in Cholon, Saigon's twin city, the resident Chinese population seemed to prosper in a manner that excited French envy and admiration. But none of this disguised the basic fact: taken as a whole, the colony was a clear financial liability on the French state. The growth of the rice trade would not be really significant for several decades, and the thought of rubber plantations was not even in the imaginings of the Frenchmen of the 1860s. The answer, it was increasingly argued by the men on the spot, lay in the commercial opportunities of the Mekong River.

  The staggering naïveté of this view, as it appears more than one hundred years later, must not disguise the force and conviction with which it was held at the time. For both the British and the French commercial communities in the early 1860s, China remained a presumed source of boundless mercantile success. The huge population of the interior of China was cited again and again as a basis for commercial hope. It seemed indisputable that China's millions were only waiting to be given the opportunity to buy the products of Europe. As for China's own resources, these too were thought to be ready for exploitation by industrious foreigners. The British in Burma had long dwelled on these possibilities. As early as 1837 a Captain McLeod had traveled up the Salween River and then to the Chinese border before being refused permission to enter Yunnan. After McLeod other British soldiers and officials continued to speculate on the possibilities of a trade route into western China from Burma. Interest quickened at the beginning of the sixties. With the efforts of earlier explorers in mind, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce asked for government support in 1860 so that trade might be opened with western China. Two years later the British authorities in India gave an indication of new official interest in the possibilities of trading with China by way of Burma when Arthur Phayre was dispatched as an envoy to the Burmese court at Mandalay.

  All this the advocates of French expansion knew and feared. Even before their hold over the area around Saigon was assured, the French in Cochinchina were preoccupied with the Mekong and its commercial and navigational potentialities. After 1863, in the words of one Frenchman in Saigon, the “idea of the Mekong was in everybody's mind.” The immediate problem was to translate the “idea” into reality.

  CHAPTER III

  THE FIRST RAPIDS

  Death was a close companion for the French administrators who came to Saigon in the 1860s. The colony's off
icial newspaper, the Courrier de Saigon, lists a constant succession of early deaths, with few of those who died being above thirty years of age. Fever, malaria and dysentery took their continual toll. Yet the letters that have been left by those who survived give little if any sense of an atmosphere of mortality hanging heavily over the small colonial society that developed in Saigon as the French hold over southern Vietnam slowly tightened. For those who survived, the risks of tropical disease and the deaths of their friends were accepted with a forbearance that reflected experience in a Europe where many of the great medical advances were still to come. But this only partly explains the sense of confidence and impatience for activity that marked the letters the young men based in Saigon wrote to their families and friends. There was so much of importance to be done. And for many of them in the 1860s the exploration of the Mekong was the most important concern.

  The great river and the riches thought to lie along its distant northern banks were discussed again and again in the evening gatherings that took place under the informal direction of Francis Garnier, the young naval officer appointed “prefect” of Cholon in 1863. A faded photograph of one of these evening meetings, held on the outskirts of Saigon, shows solemn young men, grouped about the base of a tree, eyes firmly fixed to the front, luxuriant beards only partially disguising their relative youth. It is an unfair picture, for if Garnier and his associates could be serious they were certainly not solemn. More than enough is known to be sure of this. Wine was drunk and plays acted in fancy dress. But above all there was discussion of the “great idea.”

  Frenchmen such as these were the last persons to live easily with the clear but bitter fact that the new colony in which they served was a commercial failure. Garnier and the other young naval officers who formed the nucleus of the colony's administration believed passionately in the worth of what they were doing and in the need to do more. France had gained a colony in Cochinchina; now they feared that foolish minds in Paris might renounce the new possession. If the colony was to be retained, it must find some commercial justification. By 1865 earlier tentative thoughts had become firm convictions. Trade should be sought with China, up the Mekong River. This was the thinking that spurred men to speak and write of exploring the upper reaches of the Mekong. Fears that the British might preempt the trade of Yunnan by a route through Burma, or that the Thais might block French efforts to trade along the Mekong, added urgency. But this was not all. For those who thought and talked about the possibility of opening trade with China by an inland route there was also the attraction of mystery. No one knew what lay along the river's length. This fact of mystery only encouraged speculation — which rapidly became belief — that the Mekong could make Saigon, and the colony spread about it, rich.