Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia. John Keay
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