If one excludes the writings of its own personnel, scarcely any more accounts of the expedition exist in French than in English. The most recent and well researched (J.P. Gomane, 1994) appears never to have got beyond the limited circulation accorded to a typewritten thesis so scrunched into its binding as to be almost unopenable. The most ambitious and accessible reconstruction (Osborne, 1975) is by an Australian.
Celebrating dead exponents of a somewhat discredited profession seems to be an anglophonic obsession. The French ambassador, though far too diplomatic to say so, appeared to imply that while the British were today mired in nostalgia for their imperial past, the French were above such things and in healthy denial of their own colonial aberrations. Without going into the reasons for this – which may derive as much from present confidence as from past trauma – I felt encouraged. Here was a story that could usefully be retold.
The history led to the geography. Intrigued by the expedition, I became enthralled by the river. For reasons that will emerge, the Mekong is quite unlike any of the world’s other great waterways. Far from inviting navigation it emphatically challenges it with an unrivalled repertoire of spectacular water features. As if not in themselves sufficiently discouraging, the expedition found these appalling physical difficulties compounded by political uncertainties. Colonial rule would fail to remove either, and for the past half-century ideological, bureaucratic and piratical obstructions have barred the river’s course more effectively than ever.
But there has recently been a change. In the late 1990s border restrictions were eased, new rivercraft were introduced in Cambodia, and some controversial channel-clearance was begun on the Sino – and Lao – Burmese borders. For the first time in living memory retracing the route of the Mekong Exploration Commission became feasible, if not easy. A golden age in Mekong navigation looked to be dawning.
Sadly it could prove to be short-lived. Water conservation tops the agenda of all the riverine states, while hydro-electricity provides some of them with their main export-earner. In Chinese Yunnan the river is already dammed. So are many of its downstream tributaries; the chainsaw and the mechanical digger are everywhere gouging roads round unsuspected contours; and extant plans threaten to transform the entire hydrography. Natural forest, traditional livelihoods, and the occasionally alarming interplay of menace and innocence in this great green basin may all be swept away within the next few decades.
The rehabilitation of the river could prove its undoing. On the other hand, rehabilitating the story of its exploration may be instructive. Scarcely anywhere has been more traumatised by recent history than mainland south-east Asia. Retracing the expedition’s trail means revisiting the aftermath of more twentieth-century wars – international, civil, ‘secret’ and ethnic – than even the Balkans can boast. (The Vietnam war was the third but by no means the last.) It means circumventing the best natural forest because of the unexploded ordnance, tripping through smiling landscapes memorable for unparalleled savagery, and paddling up tranquil reaches still infamous for narco-insurgency. The experience takes the edge off unalloyed enjoyment and, for a Westerner, invites self-recrimination.
But stay the whip; for the Eden into which the Mekong Exploration Commission first blundered also fell far short of the idyllic. Slavery, banditry and the prevalence of almost every known tropical disease so appalled the Frenchmen that they seemed to justify colonial intervention. The explorers did not, though, berate the prevailing rulers, and mostly they thought well of the Buddhist establishment. They just diagnosed and prescribed. Blaming the acknowledged ills of one society, or one century, on the presumptions of another demeans them both.
It is simply the sequential nature of events, and in this case of intervention—its logic and its consequences – that may be instructive. As with the river at the heart of this story, natural obstructions and human interference contain merit as well as menace. Flooded forest provides the ideal spawning ground for fish; hillside erosion upriver guarantees alluvial abundance in the Delta; and the colonial cake-cutting urged by the expedition probably forestalled more cataclysmic strife than it created. Like fully-fledged trees being tumbled perilously through the rapids, events take their course, not easily deflected yet foreseeable as to season and direction by those who trouble to study the current and read the weather.
THE ADVENT OF THE FRENCH
| 1859 | French naval force seizes Saigon. |
| 1862 | Three Mekong Delta provinces round Saigon ceded to the French. |
| 1864 | Franco – Cambodian Treaty makes truncated Cambodia a protectorate. |
| 1865 | French naval ministry champions exploration of Mekong. |
| 1866–68 | Mekong Exploration Commission. |
| 1867 | French seize remaining Delta provinces. |
| 1869 | Survivors of Mekong expedition return to France. |
| 1870 | Paris besieged in Franco – Prussian War. |
| 1872 | Dupuis takes arms shipment to Yunnan up the Red River. |
| 1873 | First French intervention in Tonkin (North Vietnam); death of Garnier. |
THE FRENCH ADVANCE
| 1883 | New French offensive in Tonkin brings protectorate over the Annam emperor. |
| 1885–86 | British invasion and annexation of Upper Burma. |
| 1886–91 | Pavie contests Siamese (Thai) sovereignty in Laos. |
| 1891–93 | French attempt to navigate Falls of Khon; Stung Treng seized. |
| 1893 | Paknam Incident and French blockade of Bangkok. Franco-Siamese Treaty ends Siamese sovereignty in Laos. |
| 1894–95 | Pavie/Scott clash over Franco-British buffer (Muong Sing). |
| 1896 | Anglo – French Declaration secures neutrality of truncated Siam. British Burma’s claims to Muong Sing withdrawn. |
| 1904 | Franco – Siamese Convention adjusts Siam – Cambodia frontier, accords Laos west bank enclaves at Bassac and Luang Prabang. |
| 1907 | Franco – Siamese Treaty brings return to Cambodia of ‘lost provinces’ (including Angkor). |
FRENCH WITHDRAWAL AND US INTERVENTION
| 1930 | Nguyen Ai Quoc (‘Ho Chi Minh’) founds Indo-Chinese Communist Party. |
| 1942–45 | Japanese overrun south-east Asia. |
| 1945–54 | First (French) Indo-China War. |
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1949–50
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