Dragon Apparent Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface to the 1982 edition

  Background

  1 Saigon and the Vietnamese

  2 The Universal Religion

  3 Sunday Diversions

  4 A Convoy to Dalat

  5 Région Inconnue

  6 Ban Méthuot

  7 The Moïs

  8 Darlac

  9 The Rhadés

  10 The Vanishing Tribes

  11 Central Annam

  12 Cholon and Cochin-China

  13 Into Cambodia

  14 King Norodom’s Capital

  15 Angkor

  16 Bandit Country

  17 Laos

  18 The Road to Xien Khouang

  19 Into the Meo Country

  20 The Viet-Minh

  Index

  About the author

  Copyright

  Preface to the 1982 edition

  THE ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were already falling into decay when I travelled through South-East Asia prior to writing this book. Inevitably degeneration had followed contact with the West, and the invasion and subsequent colonisation by the French; yet much of the charm and the grandeur of the past had survived in these countries, protected by their remoteness and the dense rainforests and mountain ranges covering half their area.

  The central plateau of Vietnam was peopled largely by tribes of Malayo-Polynesian origin, living in spectacular long-houses, whose existence had barely been noticed until the coming of the Japanese. These Moïs, as they were called, were living as their ancestors had probably lived for thousands of years when I visited them, and although the French had carried off some hundreds for forced labour in the tea-plantations, they had otherwise been left alone, to live their complicated, highly ceremonial and – to an outsider like myself – idyllic lives. The long-houses accommodating a whole village, shown in this book, no longer exist. They were bombed to nothingness by the B25s in the Vietnam war, and such of the population who survived were forced into the armies fighting the Nationalist Viet Cong, who were revenged on them in due course when the US abandonment of the country took place.

  With the exception of these gracious and endearing people, the population of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were Buddhist, and therefore in essence gentle, tolerant, and addicted to pleasures and satisfactions of a discriminating kind. Just as in Japan, popular excursions would be made in certain seasons to admire trees in blossom. There were night-scapes in Saigon to be visited only when the moon was in a certain phase, and rich mandarins – still existing in those days in what remained culturally a province of China – would pay for white herons to be released across the sky when the party was seated in readiness for this aesthetic experience. At five in the evening, when one took the breeze on the waterfront in Saigon, stalls were put out with soft drinks of many colours, and one chose refreshment as much for its auspicious colouring as its taste. There was a right way in Vietnam to do everything, a gentle but persuasive protocol, full of subtle allusions, and nuances in gesture and speech that evaded the foreign barbarian. The Europeans corrupted but failed to barbarise Indo-China, and many of them who lived there long enough were happy enough to go native and cultivate what they could of the patina of the old civilisation. Laos was considered the earthly paradise of South-East Asia, although Cambodia ran it a close second. So much was this realised by French officialdom that the competition for a posting to either country was strenuous. Many a wily administrator manoeuvred his way to a position in Ventiane or Luang Prabang, where he instantly married a Laotian wife, set up a shrine with joss-sticks to the lares of his house, and spent much of his leisure decking out Buddha caves with fresh flowers.

  Both of these oases of decorum and charm were to be devastated and debauched in the Vietnam war, when as many bombs were showered among the shrines and the pagodas of these small countries as were expended in all the bombings put together of the World War in Europe.

  Protocol demanded that visits be made to the rulers of these countries. I was warned to present myself at the palace of King Norodom Sihanouk, who later demoted himself to prince, and succeeded in holding the French, and after them the Americans, at bay for so many years. He was a gentle, softly-spoken young man, and we sat side by side on a sofa, deploring the inroads made by the West on the traditions of his country. In that year, despite his protests, a cinema had opened in Pnom Penh, and his subjects who flocked thither to see Arsenic and Old Lace forsook the ancient shadow play forever, while temple dancers ceased to have appeal for those who had been entertained by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in action.

  Some dignitaries were more formal in style. The Emperor Bao Dai liked visitors to crawl into his presence, or at least make a token obeisance by falling on one knee, but these were experiences I managed to evade. Many surprises awaited the traveller. A reputedly ferocious war lord could find nothing to talk about but the cultivation of chrysanthemums. An ex-governor of South Vietnam received me with what was regarded as charming informality while seated upon a close-stool ornamented with dragons. The Pope of the Cao Daï, the universal religion which included Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and the Duc de la Rochefoucauld among its saints, appeared briefly in an entourage of white robed twelve-year-old girls, said to have formed his harem.

  General des Essars was in command of French troops in Cambodia, and I had two meetings with him, the first a formal one at his headquarters, and the second totally informal in the romantic and justly famous opium den run by Madame Shum, where he was accustomed to settle his nerves by smoking two pipes of an evening. Whereas on the first occasion the General had been brimming with confidence and euphoria, on the second, sedated and perhaps somewhat dispirited by his two pipes, he saw a vision of the future that left him no better than resigned in his frame of mind. He had 2,500 Cambodian troops under his command, and he accepted the fact that nothing would ever turn them into fighters. Their religion, he said, had knocked all the aggression out of them. What could you expect in a country where every man-jack of them had done a year in a monastery, where they taught you that ‘thou shalt not kill’ had to be taken literally?

  At the root of the trouble, said the General, lay the fact that Buddhism deprived the people of South-East Asia of the motives we Westerners understood and admired. If the aim in life was nothing more than to acquire virtue, what was the point of any form of competitive endeavour? If people only bothered to gather possessions for the spiritual benefit of giving them away, why then work hard? Why go to war?

  And this was largely true. There were pagodas everywhere, full of monks who lived by begging, each of them holding a five-day festival once a year. A festival was always going on somewhere to provide villages in search of virtuous poverty with an opportunity for showering gifts on all comers, and shedding their burden of surplus wealth. Pnom Penh must have been the world’s only city where a man taking a taxi sometimes found himself offered a tip by the driver.

  It was of course, improper to take life in any form, however lowly. Devout Cambodians allowed mosquitoes to feast on their blood, and handled leeches tenderly when they fastened on them in the rice-paddies. A monk once reproved me for crushing a cockroach underfoot, with the warning that this might have been my grandfather in reincarnation. Villages obliged to live by fishing got round moral objections by ‘rescuing the fish from drowning’, and it was agreed that if they subsequently happened to die there could be no harm in consuming their flesh. All along the banks of the Mekong one saw the live fish laid out for sale, tied with decorative ribbons, often fanned by conscientious sellers, occasionally even solaced by the music of a bamboo flute.

  Even in the gently melancholic Autumn of those days there were guerrillas in the jungles and mountains, who had gone there to take up arms against the French, but they caused little inconvenience to the pacific traveller. The Issarak (freedom fighters), as they were called, went into action with guitars slung on their back, involving themselves in not particularly bloody clashes, reminiscent of the ceremonial wars between Italian city states, when a day of battle might produce a single casualty. Travelling along jungle trails in areas known to be under Issarak control, I was careful to restrict such movement to the hours of the afternoon, when they could be relied upon to be taking their siesta. At the lengthy festival of the New Year, the fight was called off, and everybody went home for a week or so to worship at the ancestral shrines, engage in ritual gambling, feed the monks, and to sleep.

  Later the real war was unleashed, to be conducted in secret by radio through the US Embassy in Pnom Penh. South Vietnam was already a wasteland, deluged by high-explosives, poisons and fire. Mr Kissinger had said that the dominoes were falling, so now it was the turn of Cambodia and Laos, delivered to the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East. It consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survived even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.

  What could these people have suffered to have transformed the sons and brothers of General des Essars’ reluctant conscripts, formed in the ambulatories of monasteries rather than on the barracks’ square, into those terrible and implacable warriors who flocked to the standards of the Khmer Rouge?

  © Norman Lewis 1982

  Background

  INDO-CHINA lies immediately to the south of China proper and to the east of Burma and Siam. On a world-map it is no more than a coastal strip, swelling o
ut at its base – the rump of Eastern Asia. It is purely a political entity; originally the French colonial possessions corresponding to the conquered Empire of Annam, and its tributaries. This temporary union is in the process of dissolution.

  The Indo-Chinese countries contain the scattered remnants of as many races as those of Europe, but they are inextricably jumbled up in a jigsaw of racial islands and enclaves, from which only three nations emerge: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Of the total population of twenty-five million, seventeen million are Vietnamese. The Cambodians and Laotians are peoples in monastic retirement; non-participants, as followers of a contemplative and renunciatory religion, in the march of progress. The population of the whole of Indo-China is concentrated in a few fertile valleys and deltas, leaving the greater part of the country unpopulated, jungle-covered, and looking much the same as China itself must have looked several thousand years ago, before the deforestation began. The interior is neither completely mapped, nor completely explored. It abounds with game: elephants, tigers, deer and many kinds of cattle, which, having known only hunters armed with crossbows, may be closely approached and slaughtered with the greatest ease from cars on the jungle tracks.

  Pacification of the Moïs of Central and Southern Vietnam – those bow and arrow tribes which in the early part of the last century were believed to be the only human beings with tails – was only undertaken in 1934. Certain tribes of the remote interior have not yet submitted to French authority.

  The early history of Indo-China is that of primitive aboriginals – Mongolians in the north and Malayo-Polynesians in the south – coming respectively under the influences of their great civilised neighbours, the Chinese and the Indians. From the latter union two brilliant and neurotic civilisations were created: those of the Khmers and the Chams. Both of them, after much precocious accomplishment, overtaxed their strength in wars, and collapsed. The Chams were first compressed and then absorbed by the southward movement of conquerors from China – the Vietnamese; while the remnants of the Khmers, listless and degenerate, were crowded back by the same people to the Siamese frontier. Scrupulous Vietnamese peasants still burn paper rent for the benefit of the spirits of long-vanished peoples, whose land they now possess.

  The first Europeans to arrive in Indo-China – the missionaries and traders officially classified by the Vietnamese authorities as ‘red-haired barbarians’ – were dazzled by the people’s virtues and enchanted by their hospitality. ‘Whereas all the other Eastern Nations,’ said the Jesuit Borri, writing in 1622, ‘looking upon the Europeans as a profane people, do naturally abhor them, and therefore fly from us when first we come among them: In Cochin-China it falls out just contrary: for they strive who shall be nearest us, ask a thousand Questions, invite us to eat with them, and in short use all manner of Courtesie with much Familiarity and Respect … This loving and easie Disposition is the Cause of much Concord among them, they all treating one another as familiarly as if they were Brothers, or of the same Family … and it would be look’d upon as a most vile action, if one Man eating any thing, tho’ never so little, should not share it with all about him, giving every one about him a bit.’

  Borri and his successors, however, soon found causes for criticism. As a sign apparently that something was Rotten in the State, the devil frequently manifested himself, under horrific forms. Once called out with crosses, Agnus Deis and relics to confront him, Borri was only a matter of instants too late and saw three prints of his feet ‘above two spans long, with the Marks of a Cock’s Talons and Spurs’. The laws, too, were shockingly severe. Men and women received sound thrashings in the streets for slight breaches of good manners and then knelt to thank the mandarin who had ordered the punishment. A high official found guilty of delaying the presentation of a petition to the Divine Emperor was beheaded on the spot. But in other ways there was a barbarous penal insufficiency, of which the newcomers were equally unable to approve. The maximum prison sentence was three years, which, if the prisoner had aged parents to look after, could be served under some kind of parole system at home; while thieves who pleaded dire necessity were sometimes pardoned.

  It was to correct these moral weaknesses that proselytising pressure was brought to bear, and when the Vietnamese showed themselves intractable, the principle of religious tolerance was imposed by force of arms. In 1858, after a gradual extension of their influence over fifty years, the French began the outright conquest of the country. The annexation of Vietnam – at that time known as Annam – was followed by requests from Cambodia and Laos to be taken under French protection. The Cambodians’ decision is said to have been much influenced by the French assurance that they would be allowed in future to keep for themselves all the white elephants they captured – animals of peculiar sanctity which previously they had been obliged to surrender to the Vietnamese Emperor.

  During the last war the Japanese were allowed to occupy Indo-China without opposition, and the French collaborated with them until March 1945. At that time, after observing the success of allied arms in the West, the Japanese decided to intern the French authorities and to set up a puppet Vietnamese state headed by the Emperor Bao-Dai. This government collapsed with the defeat of Japan and was replaced by a purely nationalist one, the Viet-Minh, headed by Ho-Chi-Minh. The Emperor Bao-Dai abdicated and, after remaining for a short time as ‘adviser’ to the Ho-Chi-Minh Government, finally left the country. Shortly after, a French expeditionary corps disembarked at Saigon, and the present war began.

  After five years of fighting the French have re-occupied most of the large towns, the major part of the Tonkinese rice-growing delta in the north, and about half that of Cochin-China, in the south. The Viet-Minh control about four-fifths of Vietnam and the coastline of Cambodia, by which the free passage of arms is assured between Siam and their Southern Army, in Cochin-China. Although the strength of the army of the Viet-Minh is unknown it is believed to amount approximately to 100,000 men, and to be slightly numerically inferior to the French forces which oppose it. It is increased by an incalculable number of partisans who are to all intents and purposes inoffensive peasants during the daytime hours. The Viet-Minh is well supplied with small arms and automatic weapons, mostly purchased in Siam and the Philippines and has recently obtained up-to-date artillery from China.

  In 1949 ‘independence within the French Union’ was granted to the three countries of Indo-China, and the ex-Emperor Bao-Dai, recalled from self-imposed exile, was created head of the French-sponsored Vietnamese State. It is now apparent that this move has not been successful in its intended effect, which was to rally Vietnamese dissidents under the banner of the Emperor, and thus put an end to the war.

  After four years of virtual stalemate, the military situation is again fluid. Viet-Minh leaders assured me in the spring of 1950 that by the autumn of that year they would launch an all-out offensive in an attempt to drive the French from the country before the rains broke in June 1951. When, in January 1951, the proofs of this book were being corrected, the promised offensive was already four months old, and in the north the Viet-Minh, having occupied most of Tonkin, were closing in on Hanoi. It seems certain that before the book appears further important changes will have taken place.

  CHAPTER 1

  Saigon and the Vietnamese

  IN 1949, a curtain which had been raised for the first time hardly more than fifty years ago in China, came down again for a change of scene. Low-grade clerks in air and shipping offices all over the world were given piles of leaflets and told to stamp the word ‘suspended’ over such place names as Shanghai, Canton and Kunming. Later they used the ‘service discontinued’ stamp. If you had wanted to go to China it was too late. You would have to content yourself with reading books about it, and that was as much of the old, unregenerate China as you would ever know. At this moment the scene shifters were busy, and they might be a long time over their job. When the curtain went up again it would be upon something as unrecognisable to an old China hand as to Marco Polo. And when this day came you had a feeling that curious travellers might find themselves restricted to state-conducted tours, admiring the marvels of reconstruction – the phoenix in concrete.