Lewis - A dragon apparent : travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

Index

T HE 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 Mos, 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 Da, 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 worlds 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.