One Friday night in the spring of 2002, I set out from my residence in Hanoi’s French Quarter together with an English friend to begin a 4,000 mile journey. We cabbed through the raucous cavalcade of motorcycles and beeping taxis on Tran Hung Dao Street, the tree-lined boulevard-approach to the Hanoi railway station, Ga Hanoi. The street was named for the Vietnamese commander-in-chief who repelled the 13th-century Mongol invasion dispatched by the great one himself, Kublai Khan. Tran Hung Dao and many other semi-mythical warriors from Vietnam’s heroic past are honored in every city with prominent streets bearing their names. The nation revels in its long history of resistance to invading foreign powers.
Stepping out of the taxi at the French-built station into a souk’s snare, we were surrounded by money changers, postcard boys and a string of frail market ladies under palm-leaf hats, yoked for life by shoulder poles carried like crucifixes for the peasant caste.
From here, we would travel the roads, rivers and rails of the former French and now communist Indochina—Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Having lived in Hanoi for four years up to that point, my circumstances—as an American veteran and insatiable traveler living in the bosom of the former beast—struck me as a calling to canvass postwar Indochina.
Three decades after the war, its aftershocks still convulse through my generation, and it remains a tar-baby in American politics. In the paddies of Indochina, far from American preoccupations, the war quite literally continues to detonate. Although I had succeeded in pushing the war aside within my own life, living in Hanoi I came to recognize how greatly it still shapes everyday life in Southeast Asia.
My destination would be the route itself. Unlike other trips to exotic places, this trip would be one where my memories would shape my impressions, and my own aging would be juxtaposed against an area I helped devastate. My fellow traveler was Simon Redington, a London artist and friend who lives seasonally in Hanoi. Simon was nine years old in 1968 and eating “baked beans on toast during tea time” when he first viewed the rat-a-tat-tat geography of Vietnam on television news.
Raised in a well-known London theatrical family, Simon attended art school at the University of London. After completing his degree, he continued to paint while tuning into Punk Rock music and squatting in nearly derelict housing on the south side of the city. He financed his artistic pursuits by working variously as a hospital porter, dustman, street sweeper, and art therapist in a psychiatric hospital, before becoming a social worker dealing with the homeless. Through it all, he became a kind of anthropologist of the urban jungle. “The duty of the artist is to live the artist’s life,” he is fond of saying.
In the early 1990s, he was creating powerful etchings of London’s downtrodden, set against the ironic backdrop of the moribund institutions charged with their care, in which he had worked. By 1996, a foggy montage of unrequited loves and his own dark artistic creations in the London East End led him to seek clarity and refuge in Hanoi.
The first half of our journey would, with a couple of detours, follow the Mekong River, the lifeblood for much of Indochina and a watershed still fresh with the stain of war. We would descend from Yunnan—China’s southernmost province, through which the river passes—to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a region known in ancient times as Funan. Most of Indochina’s diverse ethnic groups have made part or all of the same journey, filtering down from India or China through the Mekong River Basin, endowing the region with its cultural sustenance. The last half of our Indochinese wander would be from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) to Hanoi, the axis of war remembered by most Americans.
After a night of sleep during the train’s climb toward China, we were jolted into dawn in Vietnam’s northern border city of Lao Cai, razed by the Chinese in 1979 as payback for Vietnam’s military incursion into Cambodia.
Simon dashed outside for a cigarette and some fresh air, almost in the same breath. Facing another 24 hours on the train to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, he gave a young market girl selling baguettes three dollars and sent her after a bottle of ruou thuoc, Vietnamese rice whiskey.She returned in a few minutes feigning high drama by concealing the liter bottle of bourbon-tinged solution and floating detritus from the view of two policemen standing nearby. It was a vain attempt to avoid giving them a cut of her early morning windfall.
As we crossed the river to Hekou, the Chinese side of the border, a wacky tour guide, speaking snatches of six languages, stuck his head in our compartment offering his services in each flavor. Meanwhile, the Chinese immigration police were attempting to extort $20 from a young American couple two cabins down. Such common scam proceeds dwarf their salaries. They stopped by our cabin, pointed to the Antarctica stamp in my passport from a Brazilian research station and guffawed in Chinese.
Taking advantage of a three-hour layover, we walked the banks of the Red River, the breadbasket of northern Vietnam. With its source in China, the river eventually courses through Hanoi and out to the South China Sea. Antiquated bicycles, fashioned out of industrial-strength iron with attached carts, shuttled their brimming loads through the streets of Hekou. In the market, men in olive drab pith helmets and women in conical hats mingled with huddles of hill people in traditional raiments of homespun indigo hemp crowned in headdresses of tartan towels. Along the central market street, stir-crazed hedgehogs and coiled cobras were confined in metal cages next to aquariums of Red River catfish. Buckets of eels and croaking frogs were set amid a blaze of fruits, vegetables and spices. The busy street was bracketed by several wild game restaurants fronted by braziers with open fires and tandoori-style ovens. Hawkers offered hedgehog and cobra, two of Hekou’s hottest dishes.
Many of the animals and animal parts leaving Vietnam—bear’s gallbladder, anteater’s tail, tiger bones, turtles and various snakes—cross the border at Lao Cai, supplying the raw materials for traditional medicines and aphrodisiacs for Chinese men.
By late afternoon the train coursed along a dizzying aerie that tumbled into a jagged gorge. The river was a distant ribbon of café au lait, whipped into a white froth at times, pouring through the narrow ravine. Curved rice paddies rose from the lofty valley walls like steps for a giant climbing to the heavens. The manicured symmetry of vegetable plots bore the fingerprint of the human hand. It was the crachin season, the time when foggy skies shroud the region in an atmospheric malaise.
I joined Simon in the dining car. A cook in greasy kitchen whites donned a paper toque, wearing it in a stylish tilt. He chopped up beef gristle and greens, while a cigarette drooped from his mouth. The ash fell where he stood.
The windows were open, the air crisp and liberating as the train climbed on through hill tribe hamlets opportunistically anchored to the upper slopes. Hearing the approach of the train, swarms of shirtless men emerged from tents—corvee laborers, caterwauling like inmates on visitor’s day. The hardiest of women defied gravity along the abrupt slopes, dressed in flashy headdresses, leggings, culottes and vests: doll-like props on the vast mountainous backdrop. We ate from tin trays filled with squares of vegetables and rice, feasting on our TV dinners tuned to the dreamy landscape scrolling by.
At dawn’s break we arrived in Kunming, where the ancient hill tribe markets, rusticated Buddhist temples and the medieval wooden city, are hidden like fossils beneath the aggressive skyward advance of modern monoliths: towering trade centers, department stores, supermarkets and superhighways. Having skipped the Industrial Revolution in favor of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, China is now making up for lost time, purging the past in favor of fazhun, or development, which is the motto of modern China. Their ancient history of cultural development and massive public works programs—the Grand Canal, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City—makes them once again believe in themselves as celestial heirs to the Middle Kingdom. Although this fluorescence of fazhun shadows Indochina, throughout our southerly journey, we would not see any place so modern as Kunming.
We hired a car and driver at the local Holiday Inn, and throttled onto a six-lane national highway, or guadao, that unfurled itself in fairway fashion through mountainous terrain in the direction of Jinghong. In only six years, China’s 1,800 miles of dual carriageways have become 12,000 miles. We raced along until the road dwindled to one lane, forcing us to adjust our estimated arrival time in Jinghong from six hours to 12 hours.
Loosely rooted villages grew along the steep ridges of the Ailao Shan mountains. With an archway of Chinese characters, each village gate opened into a scrofulous gathering of brick huts with thatch or russet-tile roofs, their front doors hung in bulbous lanterns like last year’s Christmas ornaments. Cocks of paddy straw, fodder for the domestic animals, were wrapped around bamboo masts and held aloft on stilts. Men congregated in front of shops to smoke from cannon-size bamboo water pipes, exhaling clouds of tobacco smoke. One proud man walked down the middle of the road displaying a fresh-caught cobra over six feet in length, beaming as if he’d won a lottery.
Around the larger villages and cities, such as Yuanjiang and Mojiang, which were once known as “brigades” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, towering smokestacks rose above white-tile buildings, glazed in smoky-blue.
Many of the near-perpendicular hillsides were corduroyed in government tea plantations. The glossy, green-leafed camellia bushes were first grown here almost exclusively for Chinese consumption. But in the 17th century, the British took such a liking to it that the import of tea caused a substantial trade imbalance. This fiscal dilemma prompted the British East India Company to force the sale of foreign opium on the Chinese peasantry, a misguided policy with an enduring legacy.
To the east of Simao, as the valley narrowed, we twined upward through the twilight of mature conifers, paced by carbon-spewing cargo trucks, all uniformly painted in cerulean blue, grumbling their way uphill.
Suddenly the sky darkened. Gale-force winds ripped through the river divide, tossing trees into the road before us like matchsticks. The roofs flew off several houses. Rain gushed headlong as if unleashed by a broken dam. We watched as a loaded sleeper-bus slid from the road and came to rest in a 30-degree lean against a rock wall. Bedding and few clothes were scattered around the skeletal remains of several huts. Suddenly the angry sky turned calm. We had witnessed a spring tornado. Yet as the hill people instantly began reconstituting their huts and returned to the slushy mud of their paddies, I imagined them singing “my country, my country, is where the rain falls.”
An hour later we were passing along a boulevard-like road wicketed with white-painted trees. Vendors stacked watermelons in perfect pyramids the size of huts. “All the tea in China” was illustrated in an ocean of hilltops planted in tea. Darkness fell by the time we reached Jinghong, announced by the smoky pink and blue glow of the modernist tower surmounting the new bridge over the Mekong River—the lifeblood for much of Indochina and the perfect compass for much of our journey.
Although most of our planet was mapped long ago, the source of the Mekong was not pinpointed until 1994, when French adventurer Michel Peissel found it bubbling out of a rocky hillside at an altitude of 16,318 feet, in Rupsa-la Pass in eastern Tibet. From there, the rivulet courses 2,697 miles to its bountiful dispersion in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam and out into the South China Sea.
In the middle years of the 19th century, the Mekong region attracted the imperialist ambitions of France—a response to Russia and England’s grab for land in Central Asia, the “Great Game.” The French were lured by commercial prospects and by a rationalized calling to tame the “savages” of the lower Mekong through a policy of mission civilsatrice—all similar in time and spirit to Queen Victoria’s Pax Britannia.
Seeking to chart a navigable trade route to China, France dispatched Doudart de Lagree on a fact-finding mission up the Mekong in 1866, traveling via gunboat, barge, elephant, horse and palanquin. Two years later, after a series of setbacks, Lagree perished of tropical diseases and liver tumors near Kunming. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the expedition led by Francis Garnier arrived at Dali, a walled Muslim enclave on the shores of Lake Erhai in Yunnan. Receiving news of Lagree’s death, and under threat of violence by the Sultan of Dali to depart the region, Garnier decided to halt the beleaguered expedition and return to Vietnam. Yet this French project managed to accurately map approximately 1,700 miles of the Mekong and its environs, provided landscape engravings of the catchment area, and recorded insights into the anthropology of the river’s boundary states.
France’s subsequent gunboat diplomacy—an integral component of the nation’s mission civilsatrice—helped it colonize Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by the end of the 19th century, making the middle and lower Mekong a de facto French conduit. It would be almost a century before the middle-to-lower boundary countries of the Mekong regained a phase of relative peace, stability and independence.
The Mekong’s long journey unveils painterly landscapes, rich histories, and countless cultures. Many of the river’s inhabitants have ancient forgotten roots in the Middle Kingdom, having fled from the hegemonic Chinese centuries ago. The myriad peoples of the Mekong—Bai, Dai, Shan, Lao-lum, Thais, Khmers, Chams, Viets and many others—all cultivate wet rice and have domesticated the water buffalo.
Buddhism is the most pervasive religion along the Mekong, from the Mahayana school that holds sway in Tibet, to Theravadism in Indochina. Never far away is the crescent moon that rises above Islam’s mosques or the holy cross of Christianity perched atop old French missionary churches. The sacred lingam of Siva pops up in ancient temples along the river, Hinduism having predated the arrival of Buddhism in many places. And not far beneath the surface, animist spirits, inhabiting all living and inanimate forms of nature, remain as very much a part of the culture. Animism, the most elemental source of riverine cosmology, ties together the many forms of modern religious beliefs.
While making its fructifying journey to the South China Sea, the fabled waterway weaves together six nations. Yet the Mekong states do not even agree on a common name for the river. In the stark eastern Tibetan Plateau, the river is known as the Dzachu, “River of Rocks.” As it plunges from its headwaters, falling through the uninhabitable gorges of northern Yunnan Province toward China’s borders, the river drops 14,760 feet in altitude and is called Lancang Jiang, “Turbulent River.” It is known in Laos and Thailand as the “Mother of The Waters” or Mae Nam Khong, the contraction of which became the familiar name adopted by European explorers.
In Cambodia, the river feeds into Tonle Sap lake, seasonally increasing the lake’s size by 60 percent and forming the largest lake in Southeast Asia, with one of the densest fish populations in the world. It is not surprising that the Cambodian name for the river is Tonle Thom, or the “Great One.” In the Mekong Delta, the Vietnamese call their venerated realm of the river Cuu Long, or Nine Dragons—a lucky number and a symbol of power for the former Vietnamese emperors.
The theater of the Vietnam War did not end at some mythical Khmer ruins in Cambodia, as depicted in the movie Apocalypse Now. Instead, it spanned another 1,000 miles through Laos and ended at the Chinese border. At the time, the Mekong served as a porous “Berlin Wall” for most of its path upriver to China.