The Last Barbarians Read online

  France had long lagged behind Great Britain in the race to expand its empire. Having just colonized Indochina, the French were determined not to let the British spread east of Burma. In their never-ending quest for new territories, both countries relied heavily on the services of a new breed of independent and erudite gentlemen explorers, such as La Condamine, Mungo Park, and Alexander Humboldt.

  The Marquis of Chasseloup-Laubat, minister for the navy, was president of the Société de Géographie, and it was he who named the young elegant naval officer Doudart de Lagrée president of the Committee for the Exploration of the Upper Mekong, created “because we don’t know where this river takes its source.” The charter of the committee made the following statement: “One can say that the Mekong is unknown. This great river, the largest of Indochina, one of the most important rivers of the world, presents great prospects for exploration.” The report then specified that the leader of the expedition should, above all, “establish the course of this river … concentrating on seeking information as to where lies its source…”

  The French had good reasons to back an expedition up the Mekong. One of them was that the French explorer Henri Mouhot had gained celebrity for traveling up the lower Mekong and discovering in Cambodia the spectacular ruins of Angkor Wat, a place certain newspapers called “the Versailles of Asia.” What stung the French was that Henri Mouhot had been backed in his explorations not by the French Société de Géographie, but by the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain. Of course there was an excuse for this minor outrage: The young Mouhot had married a granddaughter of the great African explorer Mungo Park and lived on the English Channel island of Jersey. Sadly, though, Mouhot had died of fever, at thirty-five, on his second journey up the Mekong. No doubt to save face, Doudart de Lagrée, the newly appointed leader of the Mekong expedition, was asked to locate Mouhot’s grave and to raise an official French monument over it.

  At the time, another aristocrat, Vice Admiral de la Grandière, was governor of the small, relatively new French colony of Cochinchina, as French Indochina was then called, a colony whose capital at Saigon was still a sleepy little town. It was from Saigon that the vice admiral saw de Lagrée’s party off. With de Lagrée were seven men manning two gunboats and a second-in-command named Francis Garnier. It took the party all of a week to locate Mouhot’s grave, three miles from Louangphrabang, where he had been buried seven years before. Lagrée built a small monument on the site and wrote back to Mouhot’s family (with a copy to the press) that “Mouhot had acquired the esteem and affection of the local natives to such a degree that the king of Laos had kindly given the materials for erecting the modest monument upon the spot where the young man had died.”

  Little did Doudart de Lagrée imagine that within less than a few months, he himself would be dead, his expedition a disaster.

  They ran into trouble almost immediately. First came the foaming falls of Sambor around which the boats had to be hauled, then the terrible rapids of Khone near the present border between Cambodia and Laos. Struggling forward the party encountered yet more white water, as the Mekong showed its true force. Exhausted, one after the other, the explorers fell ill. Francis Garnier, delirious with typhus, suddenly got up screaming and threw himself into the river, to be fished out just as he was about to drown.

  With every member sick and their boat stuck, the expedition abandoned the Mekong and entered Yunnan in an effort to save themselves by returning home across China. Garnier recovered from his fever and eventually made it to Shanghai, but Doudart de Lagrée died somewhere in Yunnan, and the site of his grave remains unknown to this day. Thus, the Mekong had thwarted the first in a long series of expeditions to its source.

  Nearly twenty years elapsed before two other expeditions were mounted in the hope of finding the headwaters of the great river. By then it was clear that the Mekong did not, as everyone hoped, lead into China, but into the unexplored wilds of neighboring Tibet, which was, as everybody knew, closed to foreigners.

  None of this deterred Georges Eugène Simon, a French naval captain who, like Lagrée, sailed out of Saigon in the spring of 1893. With better success than their predecessors, his party made it up and around the fearful rapids, but after having traveled twelve hundred miles they had to turn back halfway along what is today the Burma-Laos frontier. The leader was given a hero’s welcome. He had explored much new territory, but the source of the river had eluded him. In fact, it lay yet another twelve hundred miles from the farthest point he had reached.

  Unknown to Simon and to nearly everybody else, a year earlier a small expedition, headed by a man named Dutreuil de Rhins, accompanied by Joseph-Fernand Grenard, had left Paris for Tibet via Samarkand. Its objectives were vague, and the journey, a very long one, was to last three years. The two Frenchmen crossed the whole of Russian Turkestan, their way paved by the Franco-Russian alliance signed that year. Leaving Russian territory, they entered Chinese Turkestan before veering south across the Karakoram into Ladakh, which had recently been incorporated into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

  With little in the way of funds and only a few ponies and local porters, the expedition then proceeded back into Chinese Turkestan, crossing the Taklamakan desert on the old Silk Road before turning south again in a bold bid to enter Tibet from the northwest, across the high plateau of Qinghai. Eventually the Frenchmen were turned back from reaching Lhasa at Nakchu-ka, and so decided to set off east across the high unexplored Tibetan plateau in the direction of western China. On the way they explored part of the upper course of the Salween River and then decided to head northwest along yet another unexplored route.

  Having crossed a high pass in the Tangla range, the explorers found themselves on a marshy plateau crossed by a meandering river, the Dam Chu (Dam meaning “marshy,” and Chu meaning “river” in Tibetan). They believed the river to be the longest branch of the Yangtze, the longest river in China, but the fact that they had guessed right was confirmed only a century later. Leaving the Dam Chu, they reached a pass sixteen thousand feet high on the ninth of April and recorded it as the Dza Nak pass, or the Black Dza pass, Dza being the Tibetan name for the Mekong and the Dza Nak being the longest of the two branches of the upper Mekong. Although the ground was covered with snow and the streams were iced over, the party jumped to the conclusion that the small river running down from the pass, a river we now know as the Lungmo, was the westernmost branch of the Mekong and, therefore, that the Mekong’s source must lie just beneath the pass somewhere under the snow. They followed the Lungmo down to the main headwater of the upper Mekong and rather hastily congratulated themselves for having discovered the source of the great river.

  The leader of the expedition was never able to make his claim, however, because two weeks further down the trail he was brutally murdered. Or so goes the official version. The story, as later told in detail by the surviving Grenard, is a tragic account of a misunderstanding between the arrogant local Khamba tribesmen and the expedition members.

  Exhausted, after having crossed most of Tibet’s highest and most barren plateau, the party was down to a half-dozen ponies when, on reaching the village of Tong-bou-mdo, they found that two of their horses were missing. Investigation revealed hoofprints alongside the boot prints of a local Tibetan leading out of the corral where the horses had spent the night. Rather haughtily and without thinking, Dutreuil de Rhins rounded up some villagers and had his men seize one of their horses, proclaiming that it would be returned if and when their own horses were found.

  Such high-handed posturing might have worked nicely in some French colony, but the Khambas of the Jeykundo area, famous for their warlike disposition, took immediate offense. On the morning of the fifth of June, 1894, when their horses were not returned after several hours, the French party set off, Grenard in the lead, the “borrowed” pony behind him, with Dutreuil de Rhins in the rear. Slowly they climbed out of a narrow valley opposite the village. The villagers, seeing them leave with the hostag
e horse, fired warning shots in the air. When the caravan continued on, they took aim for real. Several ponies were hit, then Grenard heard his companion cry out. Backtracking under fire he courageously went to the side of Dutreuil de Rhins, who had been hit in the belly and was ashen, clutching his stomach. Under a hail of bullets Grenard tried to get some of the porters to make a stretcher but they ran off. In vain Grenard alone tried to carry his companion, but then reluctantly he bade him farewell, as Dutreuil de Rhins muttered deliriously, “A glorious day … what a waste … what a waste…”

  Back in Paris Grenard repeated their claim of having found the source of the Mekong, but he was not very persuasive, as under April snow it had been practically impossible to locate a precise source. Grenard went on to become a diplomat and ended his career as ambassador to Belgrade in 1927. He never tried to validate his claim nor did he protest this statement about the Mekong in the famed eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910): “Its sources are not definitely settled, but it is supposed to rise on the slopes of the Dza-Nag-Lung-Mung in about 33° N, 93° E.”

  And so, beyond the turn of the century the mystery of the source persisted. Tibet continued to forbid entry to foreigners so strongly, in fact, that in 1904, aggravated by the isolationist arrogance of the Tibetans, the British decided to invade just to get some sort of reply from the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had continued to return unopened the letters of the arrogant Viceroy Lord Curzon. It was Curzon’s obsession with the idea that the Russians might try to occupy Tibet that led the British to march on Lhasa. Upon their withdrawal shortly afterward, Tibet closed its doors ever tighter until in 1910, China invaded, only to be booted out by the Dalai Lama two years later.

  Needless to say, these events did little to help explorers enter Tibet, although during the brief British invasion cartographers were rushed into western Tibet to check on the sources of the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Brahmaputra.

  For information on the rest of Tibet’s vast unmapped expanse the British had to rely on the sporadic reports of their secret agents. These famed “native explorers,” Indians of Tibetan origin, roamed Tibet disguised as monks or merchants and carried with them prayer wheels filled with blank paper to which they consigned their notes at night. Inside their canes were hidden thermometers, which they dipped in boiling tea kettles to get altitude readings. These men were known only by their code initials. Although they paced much of central Tibet, counting each step on fictitious rosaries, only one of these remarkable agents, Kishen Singh—known simply as A. K.—traveled across Amdo/Qinghai into the barren northeast, where lay, presumably, the sources of the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Yellow River. The year was 1882, and even he failed to reach any of the rivers’ sources. As a result the map of Tibet issued by the British was approximative at best and still full of blanks and mistakes. Sixty years later the Chinese themselves had no better maps, and even they used British maps when claiming territory from India after they seized Tibet in 1950.

  * * *

  Flying North West China Airways from Beijing to Xining, the capital of Qinghai, I peered down at the rim of the great Tibetan plateau. Barren brown chaotic ridges, cut as if by a mad plowman, rose ever higher beneath us.

  The formation of the high Tibetan plateau is nothing if not unique. It all began some sixty million years ago, a very long time, indeed, even for paleontologists. In those days the continents were fragments floating around the globe, having just broken off the two great continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland.

  For reasons ill understood linked to neotectonics, the Indian plate, or continent, moving northward across the Thetys Sea, collided with the underbelly of the Asiatic plate. This collision was not a sudden impact but nevertheless a most tremendous crash that resulted in part of the Indian plate slipping under the Asiatic plate, forcing it to rise. The result of this terrible crunch was that, after inching its way skyward (a process not yet over), the great Tibetan plateau reached a mean altitude of fifteen thousand feet. It still gains in places over four inches a year. Under this plateau the earth’s crust has been found, by Sino-French scientific expeditions that began in 1980, to be double the thickness elsewhere around the globe, some fifty miles instead of the normal thickness of approximately twenty miles.

  The plateau reached its present height only about two million years ago—not very long ago as nature goes. Animals existed by then, and before the plateau reached its full height it was, according to fossils, quite a nice warm place to live. No more.

  The highest and largest mountainous plateau in the world, the Tibetan highlands form a unique continent in the heart of Asia, a continent with its own particular animals, plants, and climate. It is so high, the plateau could well have been covered with glaciers and snow like Antarctica were it not for the Himalayan range. Fifteen hundred miles long, the Himalayas mark the surface impact line of the terrible crashing together of the continents. Culminating with Mount Everest at twenty-nine thousand feet, the continuous range is higher than the plateau and serves as a rain trap, stopping the clouds of the Indian monsoon to the south from crossing over and falling as snow over Tibet. Were the Himalayas not there, the high plateau would be but one huge ice cap. As it is, it is a frigid, dry desert at high altitude, a land where it snows, hails, and rains only sparingly during the short summer, when precipitation quickly melts and evaporates under the burning rays of the high-altitude sun. Due to the flatness of the plateau, the resulting water forms innumerable lakes, marshes, and bogs that are nearly impossible to cross in summer, the high-water season. As a result, the best season to travel is during the eight-month-long winter, when the lakes and rivers are frozen and the bogs dry or frozen—and therefore easy to cross. But therein lies the catch. If one travels in winter, like the ill-fated Dutreuil de Rhins, one cannot hope to find the source of the rivers under the ice and snow. The only logical solution to the problem, or so we hoped, was to travel in late summer, just before the winter sets in. And that was why we landed in Xining on the sixth of September, 1994.

  * * *

  Soldiers in khaki, alongside grim-looking officials in blue, filled the small modern airport only just opened to civilians, a reminder that Qinghai was, and still is, a penal colony for all of China. Here, starting in 1955, the Chinese began to settle a number now upward of three million people, most of them political exiles and prisoners sent out for indefinite terms of “reform by labor.”

  As we waited for our conspicuous baggage, I was delighted to spot in the crowd Mr. Wang Tsun Yi, the young man who had been my guide in Tibet the preceding year. With him and Caroline Puel, a diplomat and journalist expert on Chinese horses, I had spent seven weeks exploring on horseback and by jeep the remotest regions of southeastern Qinghai. It was there that I had begun to prepare our present assault on the source of the Mekong.

  Wang had proven most enthusiastic and helpful and, even though he had admitted that he was with the Public Security Bureau, the political police out to keep an eye on us, I hoped he would accompany us again. Fun-loving, and always ready for a good drink, he would be a welcome companion as far as I was concerned.

  By the time we had collected our fifteen kit bags and loaded two waiting Mitsubishi short-wheelbase vehicles, however, Wang announced that he would not be traveling with us, and then turned toward a diminutive schoolboy of a young man with well-combed greasy hair and introduced him as Mr. Ling Haitao. Mr. Ling, not he, would be our “guide”-cum-policeman.

  “Welcome, Mr. Psl,” young Mr. Ling broke out. “We will do all we can to make your journey a pleasant and memorable one. Anything you need, you ask me.”

  I took an immediate dislike to Mr. Ling, which soon justified itself as we discovered his brittle autocratic personality.

  Sebastian and I, to be fair, shared a rather debonair attitude toward life, one that for all his seriousness Jacques also possessed in a funny sort of a way. Ours was a venture more akin to those leisurely Victorian explorations than to the disciplined, ecologically
minded, humorless, dead-earnest modern-day expeditions.

  To tell the truth I hate sports, which I put down with disco dancing as a waste of good energy and an unnecessary evil. When I indulge in nightclubs and such sports as polo, it is always with a feeling of guilt that the energy involved could be better spent riding off somewhere into the unknown, where the outcome is less predictable and much more interesting.

  Ling was a sadly modern, narrow-minded young Chinese Communist with none of the undisciplined humor of the Red Guard or the intelligence of the old soldiers of the Long March. Humor he took as a personal insult, and his duty as a matter of deadly seriousness. For him we were about to travel deep into enemy territory, the enemy being all Tibetans. Ours, he explained with a deep frown, was a truly dangerous enterprise.

  In a way, of course, he was right, and we would not have been there had not the terror inspired by the Tibetans of the region we were headed for kept outsiders away for centuries.

  * * *

  If the geographical and climatic characteristics of the high plateau of Tibet pose adverse conditions for travelers, they are a small obstacle compared with the political considerations.

  As far back as the late Stone Age, according to a recent discovery by Chinese archaeologists, nomads have inhabited the high plateau. Their life today seems to be little different from what it was thousands of years ago, except, perhaps, for the fact that their original stone tools have been replaced by modern steel implements.

  These nomads are still divided into hundreds of tribes, each with a well-delineated territory. Like herders elsewhere, these tribesmen are obsessed with their territorial rights and very suspicious of all foreigners, even of their neighbors. Foreigners inevitably are taken for cattle rustlers, people out to steal their livestock—so much so that few dare wander into the pastures of neighboring tribes without special permission from the local chiefs, a permission practically impossible to get without first risking a trespass.