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