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SCMP Reporter

Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in Southeast Asia

by John Keay

HarperCollins $295

An alternative title to this book could have been 'The Incredible Journey' or even 'Mission: Impossible'. It tells the story of a French expedition from the mouth of the Mekong River in present-day Vietnam to Dali in China, a distance greater than the length of Africa.

'If only as an epic of endurance, the story of the Mekong Exploration Commission dwarfs nearly all contemporary endeavours,' writes  John Keay.

Yet, at the time (the 1860s) and subsequently, it caused little stir in France and its heroes were scarcely honoured there, even though their exertions led to the founding of the French empire in Indochina.

The leader of the expedition, Doudart de Lagree, perished towards the end of the journey, leaving his deputy, Francis Garnier, to take most of the credit.

Had these men been British, they might well have become as famous as Livingstone and Stanley, but, as Garnier wrote after the two-year adventure: 'The more is the pity that I am not English. I would then be someone of distinction  and influence. [But] misfortune decrees I cannot just decide not  to be French any more.'

As it was, the Royal Geographic Society in London awarded Garnier a gold medal and for once he could bask in the sort of adulation so notably lacking in France.

The principal aims of the expedition were to follow the Mekong to its source in Tibet  and to  show that the river was navigable. The explorers failed in both endeavours and, although they were reluctant to admit it, it became clear that some stretches of the river were impossible to navigate, forcing  the men to travel on land from time to time.

Apart from the almost insurmountable difficulties of negotiating the river and the  mixed receptions accorded by the locals, the expedition was plagued by disease - mainly malaria, 'typhus fever' and dysentery - meaning that members of the party had at times to be carried, delirious, on stretchers.

Occasionally the venture degenerated into farce, as when  the group lost a gold bar, which represented much of its wealth.

Mad About the Mekong, as  well as being an account of an astounding undertaking, contains much information about later developments in the region and is embellished with photographs of the river and its environs today, as well as paintings and sketches made on the expedition.

Keay, a prolific writer on Asia, has rescued a heroic episode of French history from oblivion.



Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in Southeast Asia