[Illustration: Endpaper]
[Illustration: Century VAGABOND BOOKS of TRAVEL]
EAST OF SIAM
[Illustration: There was a young lady of Laos]
EAST OF SIAM
_Ramblings in the five divisions of French Indo-China_
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Roving through
Southern China,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” “Four Months Afoot in
Spain,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS
OUT-OF-THE-WAY PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR
GROSSET & DUNLAP
_Publishers_ :: :: _New York_
By arrangement with the D. Appleton-Century Company
Copyright, 1926, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
TO
THE HOSPITABLE FRENCH COLONIALS
PROLOGUE
Those of us who had the good fortune to take part in that great
adventure known as the World War can scarcely have failed to notice,
among the many kinds of French colonial troops, some little men in khaki
and brass-topped mushroom hats, most of them with black teeth. It was
not until five years after the Comedy of Versailles that my perpetual
wandering over the face of the globe brought me to the land from which
they came—Annam, “Kingdom of the Eminent South.” There was not only the
motive of satisfying, by seeing them at home, the curiosity raised by
these little brown men in the French army; as far back as I can remember
I had felt inquisitive toward that strangely shaped spot on the map,
that slender country which drips like a stalactite of candle-grease down
from the southeast corner of China.
Besides, during all my two years of roving about the once Celestial
Empire I heard frequently of the wonders of the ruins of Angkor in
Cambodia. So one day in early January, a propitious season, I dropped
down to Saïgon, visited those astounding remnants of the past, and
returned overland all the way to Canton. Later, toward the end of April,
I brought my family to Hanoï for a month of Parisian change on the way
to Yünnanfu, and took advantage of the opportunity to journey through
Laos, largest, most interesting, and least known of the five divisions
of France’s Indo-Chinese empire. So in the end I traveled not merely the
length and breadth of Annam but saw all five parts of that
dumb-bell-shaped land east of Siam which the French consider their most
important colony in the Far East.
So unusual was my luck during those travels that only my overwhelming
modesty has kept me from entitling this unpretentious tale of them
“Hobnobbing with Kings”; and so very interesting a trip was it to me
personally that in the face of my hard-earned knowledge that our ever
more herd-minded general public is as fearful of the unknown and the
unfamiliar as the most superstitious of wild tribes, and would much
rather read of the deeply tourist-trodden streets of Rome and Paris, I
have insisted on performing this unassuming task.
Those two well separated months were more than a mere vacation from
Chinese travel. To jaunt through French Indo-China is to see a sample of
what China itself would probably be under European control, white-man
rule—were any nation powerful enough to accomplish that many times
larger task—as Formosa suggests what it might be under the Japanese. I
hope I have at least made it clear that Indo-China is not in any sense
China, but the living line of division between two ancient and very
different masses of Oriental civilization, even as its name signifies.
HARRY A. FRANCK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I EQUATORWARD 3
II ON INTO CAMBODIA 28
III THE JUNGLE-GUARDED RUINS OF ANGKOR 46
IV THE CAMBODIANS AT HOME 74
V NORTHWARD FROM SAÏGON 86
VI THROUGH ANNAM TO ITS CAPITAL 103
VII MAROONED IN HUÉ 124
VIII AN IMPERIAL HAPPY NEW YEAR 147
IX THE PEOPLE OF THE EMINENT SOUTH 166
X HURRYING ON TO THE NORTHERN CAPITAL 185
XI HANOÏ AND THE TONKIN 201
XII THE FRENCH IN INDO-CHINA 219
XIII OVER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAOS 244
XIV EN PANNE! 260
XV DOWN-STREAM TO LUANG PRABANG 278
XVI KNIGHTED IN THE KINGDOM OF THE DIVINE BUDDHA 296
XVII SPEEDING SOUTHWARD 323
XVIII VIENTIANE AND BACK TO HANOÏ 347
ILLUSTRATIONS
There was a young lady of Laos _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Cholon architecture is neither exactly French nor
Chinese 18
A funeral procession in Cholon, Chinese suburb of Saïgon 18
A decreasing form of conveyance in Cochinchina 19
Unlike China proper, great sections of Indo-China are
covered with magnificent virgin jungle-forests 19
One may still crawl about Angkor by elephant, though
Fords are much more à la mode 82
Buddhist priests took their saffron-clad ease in the
shade along the great moat of Angkor-Vat, beyond the
tourist bungalows in the background 82
A rural Cambodian family at home 83
Motor-buses link together the railways of Indo-China,
crossing broad sandy river-banks on strips of woven
bamboo splints 98
In Annam prisoners working in the streets wear a light
remnant of the old neck-torturing Chinese _canque_ 98
In the “Marble Mountains” are many grottoes, some of
them elaborately fitted up as temples 99
An Annamese summoning a ferry from across one of the
many rivers which still offer no bridges to
automobiles 99
An Annamese girl, chaperoned by her small brother, sells
her wares in the market-place of Hué 114
When it rains in Annam, as it does on every provocation,
a simple straw raincoat covers either sex among the
masses 114
Like the southern Chinese the Annamese are expert
boatmen because they learn their calling long before
they reach the dignity of clothing 115
Swinging in the village squares is a favorite diversion
of the Annamese populace during the lunar New Year’s
season 115
Overlooking, from his flagpole, the palaces of the
emperor of Annam 130
China itself cannot outdo the old bronze urns before the
main palace of the Annamese emperor 130
The throne-room of the emperor of Annam, on the
afternoon before the New Year’s ceremony 131
The waterfront of Hué, capital of Annam, offers a
contrast between its native craft and the French
bridge 146
Once a visitor surreptitiously snapped this glimpse of
the mandarins of Annam kowtowing before their emperor
on New Year’s Day 146
The scores of homes of mandarins within the “citadel” of
Hué were all richly decorated for the lunar New Year 147
Inside the “citadel” and near the sumptuous palaces of
the emperor of Annam are the perhaps more comfortable
homes of his humble subjects 147
An Annamese mandarin all dressed up for his New Year’s
honors to his emperor; his servant behind 162
Servants of the mandarins carry home after the ceremony
the ancient Ming accoutrements of their masters 162
Emperor Khai-dinh of Annam on his French-supported
throne 163
Some of the most effective of Annamese tombs are covered
with pictures and designs made of broken porcelain
dishes set in cement 163
With each new year the Annamese clear of vegetation the
graves of their ancestors, back to remote generations 194
I asked a living caretaker to fill the place of one of
these of stone which guard the entrance to a royal
tomb of Annam 194
In the heart of Hanoï, northern capital of French
Indo-China, stands a delightfully picturesque lake of
goodly dimensions 195
Annamese girls hold Sunday morning flower-market at this
corner of the city-girdled lake of Hanoï 195
The ladies of Annam lose any claim they have to beauty
when they open their mouths on black-enameled teeth 210
Thi-ba, who did her best as guardian of our children,
was equally set against bobbed hair and skirts 210
For days one may steam in and out among the fantastic
rock islands of the Bay of Along 211
Tropical vegetation sometimes commandeers sustenance on
the rock peaks 211
The women of Tonkin combine hat, sunshade, and umbrella
in one unwieldy contraption 258
The Muong women wear little above the waist, except the
loads they carry 258
The guard turned out to greet my companion, the
_résident_ of Vinh, at the first village on the way to
Laos 259
The Muong chief of our noonday village came in state,
bringing eggs and native fire-water 259
The chief sport of the mountain-dwelling Miao of Laos is
the making of assorted neck-rings of silver dollars
that might better be spent for shirting 274
The Miao woman of Laos take no back seat for their men 275
A Kha woman of the semi-wild tribe that is said to be
the aboriginal race of mountainous Laos 275
Wind-sieved rice is the principal food of the rural
inhabitants of Luang Prabang 306
With a silk scarf worn loosely over a shoulder the women
of Luang Prabang capital are more coquettish than
their waistless sisters of the country districts 306
The palace of the king of Luang Prabang sits placidly on
the bank of the upper Mekong 307
The king turned out his chief dancing-girls and masked
male entertainers for my approval 307
Knighted in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha 322
Two royal elephants saw me off from the palace, the
youngster showing a desire to make me depart on the
run 323
A Miao woman on her travels carries bed and food 323
A Kha home in the mountains of Luang Prabang 338
Grandfather and grandmother of the primitive Khas tend
the children while the intermediate generation seeks
the family livelihood in the hills 338
Wherever his habitat, the water-buffalo is happiest when
immersed to the nostrils in a mud-hole 339
One group of the many Laosian carriers who bore my few
belongings across Luang Prabang 339
This ancient monument in Vientiane, French capital of
Laos, is the most curious remnant of its regal days 354
A door of a ruined palace or temple of Vientiane 354
Within the ruined temple the Buddhas sit, in the
infinitely patient attitude of the East, crumbling
away under the rains and disappearing beneath the
encroaching jungle 355
Though the French have brought automobiles to Vientiane,
this ancient form of conveyance still predominates 355
EAST OF SIAM
CHAPTER I
EQUATORWARD
One of my jaunts up-country in Kwangtung Province dragged, and I missed
the French liner at Hong Kong. Luckily the _Panama Maru_, bound on one
of the trips around the world that bring her back to her home berth in
Kobe every seven months, also made Saïgon her next stop. We sailed early
in the afternoon of one of those brilliant days that double the blue
intensity of Hong Kong harbor. The Japanese freighter served no free
wine with her meals and had none of that interior ornateness that
suggests the Paris Opéra gone to sea. But perhaps for that very reason
she was more successfully mopped and dusted; and the Nipponese
atmosphere aboard was more interesting than the cosmopolitan scent of
the fortnightly Messageries steamer to Marseilles. True, she made barely
ten knots an hour. But the French could hardly have served better food;
the two “boys” were unspoiled, and Captain Ichikawa was a friendly
little soul, even inviting me to make free of the chart-room. The quiet,
all but noiseless, efficiency of his crew was a startling contrast to
the incessantly shrieking chaos of Chinese craft. The three or four
first-class cabins opened abruptly upon the dining-room rather than upon
the deck; yet even the baby in one of them was Japanese, like everything
and everybody on board except myself, and seemed never to cry. A lone
Japanese would certainly not have been more courteously treated on an
American boat than was the sole non-Nipponese being on this.
It is often said that the Japanese are not individualistic in
personality. There were certainly as many types as passengers, however,
gathered about our table. The energetic son of Tokyo, now in business in
Saïgon, who shared my cabin, was tall and handsome, as agreeable a
companion in cramped quarters as any American man of commerce, and he
spoke both French and English perfectly. On the other hand the
peanut-headed undersized youth across the table looked and acted like
the “nut” his cranium suggested. Then there was a medical graduate going
out, with the assistance of the mikado’s government, to practise upon
the Japanese laborers on the coffee plantations of São Paulo—who one
evening managed to tell me in near-English that he had read, both in my
tongue and his own, all the published plays of Eugene O’Neill. He would
give much to see them played, he added, but had never seen a Western
drama on the stage. The two women who sometimes graced our board were as
different as were the quiet brown and gorgeous-figured red kimonos they
respectively wore on such occasions. Even the half-dozen officers
rounding out the tri-daily gathering were divided by as distinct lines
of demarcation as are their colleagues of any nationality.
Gently we rolled southward, with a drift to the west, over a
densely blue tropical sea. It grew too warm, first in our
open-on-the-dining-room cabins, then on the deck itself. Summer
curtains and awnings appeared; electric fans took up their duties
once more, and in one cabin at least spun all the night through.
The third morning brought one of those lazy perfect days when
loafing in a deck-chair seems the nearest tangible approach to
heaven. We sighted the coast of Annam that afternoon, hazy, almost
mountainous, apparently as treeless as China itself, and had it
always in sight thereafter, a lighthouse winking at us all through
the evening. If possible the weather was even more peerless on the
fourth day; the sea, flat as a floor, blue as if saturated with
indigo, was covered with light ripples that made it look like a
vast piece of watered silk.
Unfortunately it had not turned tropical quickly enough to save one of
our fellow-passengers. A youngster who had taken pneumonia during the
crossing from Japan to the coast of China died during the third night.
Another child had gone the same way, two days out of Nagasaki, and many
in the general quarters below the main-deck still had heavy colds. This
boy of three had been the only son of one of the score of families going
out third-class to Brazil. The funeral, at which the captain personally
requested my presence, took place on the fourth evening. Most of the
passengers and such of the crew as could be spared stood about a kind of
altar improvised on the poop. First the captain, then others stepped up
and bowed low before this, repeating some sort of litany that ended with
the sprinkling of incense. Last of all came the parents, to go
impersonally through the same ceremony. They did not weep, though their
drawn faces showed that they had given way in private to grief to which
it would be bad Japanese form to yield in public. The Buddhist service
was as simple as it was quiet, wholly un-Chinese, without a sob or a
loud voice, even as the little box wrapped in the flag of the rising sun
floated away astern in the moonlight. It was as much that atmosphere of
the uselessness of giving way to the inevitable, I think, as the fact
that I had left behind in Canton a three-year-old son of my own, which
made me so depressed that I was still pacing the deck at midnight.
By that time we had anchored at the mouth of the Mekong, near a
lighthouse. Off again at dawn, I sat, after a last salt bath, wearing
the few garments that Japanese custom permits, in a delicious tropical
morning breeze as the steamer made its way up a tide-water river with
dead-flat banks of low, apparently uninhabited jungle stretching as far
away as could be seen in any direction. The stream was as wide as the
misnamed Pearl River at Canton, but clean and blue, flecked here and
there with a tiny boat top-heavy with its clean-white pointed sail; and
it wound so constantly all the fifty miles from the mouth to Saïgon that
we headed again and again to every point of the compass. The low jungled
banks gave way to brown plains with patches of palms, low thatch houses,
and what looked like haystacks scattered far and wide. The inevitable
Socony plant appeared, and some distance beyond we ran down at last the
flat evasive town, the steeples of which had betrayed its location, now
to port, now to starboard, again over our stern, like the ears of some
startled jack-rabbit trying in vain to dodge its pursuers.
There was a reminder of Martinique about the already sweltering city
half seen beyond a wharf dotted with white helmets. I had rather
expected to be called upon as interpreter, but the fat,
bored-with-the-tropics French doctor who sweated up the steep gang-plank
knew some English, though he spoke it more laboriously than did our
captain and several of my fellow-passengers. There was something amusing
in seeing these people of two nations which have no overwhelming love
for us of the English-speaking races forced to use our tongue in their
intercourse. In his perpetually bored way the port doctor was very
insistent that every Japanese on board show proof of a recent
vaccination, though only my cabin-mate was landing; but when I began to
do likewise he waved me politely aside and took my word for it in a way
that implied that as a Caucasian I was in a class by myself. An equally
courteous, if less bored, official pocketed my passport and gave me the
freedom of the half-way station between Hong Kong and Singapore.
Before the dock lay behind me I regretted the habitual lack of foresight
that had led me to bring only an extra winter suit instead of half a
dozen white ones, and was praising the superior wisdom of the thoughtful
wife in Canton who had insisted on my taking along a tropical helmet in
January. Luckily other travelers seem to be in the habit of misjudging
the winter climate of Saïgon, and Chinese tailors at the foot of the
principal street are used to correcting such oversights in a hurry.
Though it was Sunday they promised me a _complet_ or two of duck within
two days, at twelve _piastres_ each—and while I am on the subject let me
mention that the piastre of Indo-China is equal to the “Mex” dollar of
Hong Kong and China, averaging a little more than half our own, and not
given to fluctuating with the franc.
The Rue Catinat, grilling now beneath the late morning sun, drew me
inland. Mingled with its all too plain evidence of propinquity to the
equator was that of a considerable relationship to Paris. Between
window-displays that might have come almost intact from the Rue de la
Paix, black and brown fellows in red fezzes, locally known as
Malabars, squatted in booths raised well above the narrow
sidewalks—money-changers, sellers of tobacco, and the like. Here and
there a Hindu merchant stared out into the white light of the gently
yet perspiringly mounting street. Here Sunday was no British Sabbath.
Annamese waiters bustled about the marble tables of hotel cafés well
peopled with white men and women instantly recognizable as French.
Business as usual seemed to be the motto of all but the most important
establishments. Yet even the diaphanously clad Oriental strollers of
various origins shuffled along in the narrow streak of shade before
one row of shop-fronts.
Saïgon’s main street flowed out before long into a sun-stewed square
with a cathedral trebly hot in its red brick garb. The view from its
tower across the well streeted city, almost forested above the section
of wharves and commerce, would have been worth a less perspiring climb.
Farther on, the American to whom I had a letter lived in simple bachelor
splendor in a low house of thick walls and disproportionately large
rooms. Languid with long tropical residence, this former captain in the
Philippine constabulary who now represented our great oil corporation
seemed to recognize no pastime except the lolling in a reclining-chair
with a cold drink within easy reach. I am no suitable companion in the
consumption of British whisky—that could be had in this stronghold of
its French rivals only by something closely resembling smuggling—and I
drifted down toward the port again.
All Saïgon sizzled now in noonday repose. Not merely on Sunday, I later
learned, are all offices, all shops except those of the heat-impervious
Orientals, closed from eleven until two for the daily siesta. One of the
shocks due the rare hurried business man or tourist from the West who
drifts into Saïgon is to find it virtually dead daily from the early
French lunch-hour until the sun nears the western tree-tops. Here and
there an enervated rickshaw-man dragged his empty vehicle slowly behind
him. A few dozing Hindus, a fez-wearer or two asleep with open eyes on
his haunches among his wares, were visible in the unbroken rows of
shops. Heaps of coolies reposed under the trees of other streets, under
raised porches, their thin legs tangled together, open-mouthed like dead
fish. Otherwise the streets were empty; not a European was outdoors. All
the governing race were asleep in the breeze of electric fans, such
garments as they still wore pasted to their bodies. Had one of them
spied me wandering the streets at this hour I should no doubt have been
taken for mad.
The new-comer soon finds that he too is better for his siesta, and that
there is nothing to be gained in going without it, for there is little
that he can do and no one whom he can see. No wonder the white residents
all seemed tropicalized, if I may coin a word greatly needed in any
attempt to describe life in Saïgon. Two or three hours of broken nap,
and they must get up again, wearier than ever, spirits and body alike
languid and stiff; for work or its substitute begins anew. One by one
each leaves his house, jumps into a rickshaw with burning cushions, and
goes to shut himself up once more in office or shop. There only the
tropically experienced and the well-to-do can manage a comfortable
coolness in which those not used to the equator as a close neighbor can
either think or work. The streets begin again to swarm with
_pousse-pousses_—for in spite of the all too evident fact that it is
pulled the French insist on calling the rickshaw a “push-push,” perhaps
in memory of the converted baby-carriage from which this now widespread
vehicle was fashioned. Thinner, more washed-out in appearance than more
northerly men of their laborious calling, the pullers nevertheless
charge madly down upon every possible client, just as in China. But here
they are more orderly, a trifle cleaner perhaps, with an air of being
kept closely within bounds by foreign rules as well as by the climate.
Less cheery than their Chinese prototypes, they seem more optimistic.
The rickshaw-man of Indo-China holds out both hands at the end of his
run, as if expecting such a fortune for his services to one of the
dominant race that one hand would not hold it. But his optimism rarely
materializes, and no dispute with one of the race that rules over his
land seems to be worth the effort in such a climate.
Meanwhile, unable to adapt myself so quickly to the do-nothing of
tropical midday, I had wandered to the end of the town. It was the same
old France, even this far afield—outwardly imposing buildings generously
adorned with plump naked females in stone, and within, dusty bureaucracy
where the buying of a postage-stamp is a transaction, with much
bookkeeping involved. Saïgon is in theory the capital of all Indo-China,
though in practice the governors-general have all preferred somewhat
more northerly Hanoï. Their palace here, like the cathedral, the Postes
et Télégraphes, the Municipal Theater, and all the other examples of
elaborate French architecture misplaced in the tropics, is set off in
its grass-covered square at the end of some broad avenue. Palatial
European residences with an atmosphere of lavishness emphasize the
conspicuous scarcity of native buildings, whether towers, temples,
ancient gates or palaces, or high-class dwellings. For that matter the
native residents seem few, at least until one reaches the outskirts,
though Saïgon was an important center before the French came.
Farther out are big brick barracks, where young French soldiers
conscious of no color-line mingle freely with colonial troops ranging
from black Malgaches to pale-yellow Annamese. Wide tree-lined roads lead
on to the Botanical Gardens, in which men and women Parisian in dress
and manners drive or stroll in the semi-coolness of evening; and just
across the arroyo bounding it on the farther side is the bush—jungle and
thatched huts and primitive living, where one glimpses hammocks in
hovels of faded thatch on bare ground among banana-plants that carry the
mind back to rural tropical South America.
European health used to be so bad in Saïgon that French residents often
had the experience of playing baccarat with a friend one evening and
accompanying him next morning to Bangkok—not the capital of Siam but the
Saïgon cemetery for foreigners, popularly so-called among them from the
street that leads to it. The story is still told of a misinformed French
journalist in France who was moved to protest at the extravagance of
sending all the dead to Siam, “in order not to alarm the population.”
To-day conditions are better, as healthful as could be expected for
wine-drinkers in an equatorial country. But the French seem less at home
here than the Annamese in their black two-piece garments, shiny as
oil-cloth, their wooden clogs scraping noisily on the cement sidewalks,
on the stone-faced roadways beyond, splotched with the red saliva of
this race of betel-nut chewers. Their hair, usually in topknots that
peer from beneath black band-turbans, the black-enameled teeth they
consider so becoming, and the betel-nut that drips blood-red over their
lips they have in common with their more wealthy compatriots in coats of
transparent black gauze over light-colored gowns.
With sunset comes the great French rite, _l’apéritif_. Men in fresh
white and women in their best summer frocks gather on the terrace—in
other words most of the public sidewalk, with slight respect for
pedestrians—of the Hôtel Continental, a scene suggesting the Café de la
Paix of Paris in a tropical setting. The awnings are trussed up, and the
night life, the chief life of Saïgon, at least of the visible variety,
grows with the evening. The very common-sense custom of the European men
in going bareheaded after sunset is a delightful relief from the heavy
sweat-begetting cork helmet. All the Frenchman’s comforts of home, from
creamy curaçao of oil-like texture to rich green _absinthe frappée_, are
trotted forth by Annamese “boys” in white gowns, topped by their
inevitable band-turban, jet-black as the coarse hair most of them wear
in a Psyche knot. All manner of French colonial types join the
appetite-seeking throng—the anemic rounder, the sturdy colonist in his
black shovel-beard, the humped bureaucrat in his pince-nez. Rare indeed
is the man who is not accompanied by at least one member of the fair sex
who could have come from nowhere but France, garb, manner, and all, in
spite of her pallor and reduced vivacity born of tropical residence.
As a hostelry the Continental was full. But one of the most agreeable
surprises about Indo-China, at least to the man who comes there from
wandering in China itself, is the number of its hotels with all the
comforts of Paris. They are very French hotels indeed, from the menu to
the thrifty eagle-eyed madame behind the bottle-flanked zinc counter,
even though the midday _déjeuner_ cannot of course be served out on the
sidewalk. Rooms may be spacious or small, but they are always furnished
with a big double bed, symbol of the Frenchman’s horror of sleeping
alone. This is unfailingly flanked by the _bidet_, in enameled tin on
loose wooden legs or of the latest bath-tub style. Bath-tubs themselves
are rare, but in a land where perspiration drips at every crook of a
finger the shower-baths, often in a cement-paved corner of the room
itself, are alone worth the price of admission. All this and more I
found at exceedingly reasonable rates at the Hôtel de la Rotonde, just
across the street from the starting-place of the biweekly steamer to
Pnom Penh.
Autobuses leave Saïgon in various directions; toy-like French
automobiles may be had for the hiring. Where the former, and sometimes
the latter, leave off, one may descend to thatch-topped carts behind
humped cattle, or climb into queer little vehicles something like the
jaunting-cars of Ireland. The well-to-do natives of Cochinchina seem
still to prefer the _malabar_, a horse-drawn box on four wheels, so
named from the Indian immigrants who appear to have brought it with
them. The bus ride to Thudam disclosed an industrial school where the
old Annamese arts that show signs of dying out, such as inlaying
furniture and bric-a-brac with mother-of-pearl, are being retaught under
French principals. Annamese boys of the working class are recommended to
it by the village elders and are paid a bit while learning. In such
matters as these, and the good roads leading to them, French rule is
visibly an advantage. The rather dusty ride out to the Falls of Trian is
also one of those worth while among the radiating routes covering little
Cochinchina. On almost any of them mangosteen trees stand forth to make
one’s mouth water, though it has never been my luck, thanks to
persistent off seasons, to taste this untransportable vegetable
ice-cream, reputed the finest fruit in captivity.
Smallest and oldest of the five divisions of French Indo-China,
Cochinchina is the only colony among them. The others are
“protectorates,” though the difference is hardly visible to the naked
eye. But at least its strictly colonial status simplifies the task of
its governor. He came from Mauritius and was part negro, according to
the official propagandist for more tourists who insisted on taking me to
call on him. I should hardly have suspected it in his cool and deeply
shaded offices, and certainly not from a later glimpse in more social
circles of his beautiful French wife of queenly dignity. A colonial
governor ranks high in the matrimonial market of France, whatever his
complexion. But if I fancied there was no color prejudice in this motley
dependency I was disabused by the secret scorn my companion expressed,
as we left the palace, for the African strain in the superior to whom he
had been so deferential in official intercourse, though he himself
seemed to go out of his way to mention his own Annamese wife and
half-caste children. To each nationality its peculiar point of view.
Trains, trolleys, autobuses, automobiles, rickshaws, _malabars_, and
boats, not to mention pedestrians, ply constantly between Saïgon and
Cholon, its rich Chinese suburb. Tiresomely Chinese in many of its
details, this wealthy city testifies to French tutelage. Instead of
shoulder-wide streets garnished with roaming pigs and untended garbage,
there are good pavements, and a modern water-supply in place of the
bucket-brigades from river or mud-hole. Still no Elysium, it is
immaculate compared to China proper. Here live Chinese who own costly
automobiles; here diamonds and other valuable jewelry are widely worn in
public; here where it is safe to indulge such inclination under foreign
rule, is altered the impression one carries away from the bandit- and
soldier-ridden old empire to the north, that the Celestials are the
antithesis of the Hindus in this matter of personal adornment. In every
shop, whether of a grocer or a seller of porcelains, of medicines or of
silks, there is a mighty heaping up of wares, and six clerks where we
would have one. Among them an old man fat and cheery of aspect as the
Laughing Buddha at the entrance to Chinese temples, naked except for
thin cotton trousers and slippers, sits manipulating the balls of his
calculating-board. Flat, dry, lacquered ducks, transparent at the edges,
hang along cords like bats taking their day’s repose. Pigs blown up like
their toy counterparts of rubber, lie at their ease, polished and
hairless, with outstretched legs, grinning their deathly grin at the
passing throng. Now and again a funeral goes by, gaudy and noisy as if
the chief actor were among the graves of his ancestors, but more richly
ornate and lacking the usual tawdriness, like the town itself compared
to old China. But those who have been there then say that the time to
see Cholon is during the week of Têt, as the lunar New Year is called in
Indo-China, when the canvas and cardboard dragon is promenaded through
the streets, opening his enormous maw and twisting his long disgusting
body, in which a score of sweating coolies are hidden.
In Indo-China one seldom speaks of going to the grocery; it is rather,
“I am going to the Chinaman’s.” The Annamese, and still more so the
other races that make up the native population, are lazy, or at least
languid as merchants, and the Chinese get the business and the riches.
To speak of retail commerce is to mean the Chinese, and in larger
matters they are by no means outsiders. For a hundred and fifty years
they have been installed at Cholon, and from there they have spread over
all Cochinchina, all Indo-China for that matter. They arrive thin and in
rags, and leave, if at all, fat and placid; and as fast as they get rich
other gaunt wretches take their places at the foot of the ladder. It is
as if they were being perpetually passed through a fattening-machine;
and if some of them have no luck, lack sufficient cuteness, there is the
recompense of opium to make a plank as comfortable as a rich man’s bed.
More or less respected by the people they feed upon, they are discreetly
or insolently superior to them, depending on their individual status of
the moment. Formerly they made great fortunes quickly in rice. That way
is hampered now, because the government sends out rice quotations that
reach even the peasants. But still they get rich. So greatly are they
the gainers that Indo-China has been called a “Chinese colony
administered by Frenchmen.” Economically the Celestial is master of the
country; his activity, his intelligence in business affairs, his
commercial cleverness, his very temperament would make him so, even
without the great advantages of a population given to gambling and
gifted with a lack of forethought that make for usury at high rates.
Thirty-six per cent is legal interest even in the French courts of
Indo-China, and the wily Chinese often gets everything merely for
lending ten piastres—land, house, furniture, sometimes the whole family
as slaves.
A gambling game known as “the thirty-six animals” sweeps through all the
villages, especially of Cambodia, like _o bicho_ in Brazil. In Cambodia,
as in Siam, as in China, slavery has been legally abolished, but it
continues to flourish. In the old days the work of the slave for debt
covered only the interest; it never paid the principal and set him free.
To-day the peasant who borrows in a lean year or after a bad wager may
hope that at least his children will get out of the meshes of the
spider-faced Chinese lender.
Even from the political point of view the Chinese are a privileged class
in Indo-China. Though they have no diplomatic representatives of their
own, they virtually have the rights of extraterritoriality under the
protection of the French. Every Chinese in the colony must belong to a
_congrégation_, a kind of association that is responsible to the state
for all its members, civilly and pecuniarily. Each man between the ages
of eighteen and sixty pays a tax of from 6.60 to 200 piastres, depending
on the category to which he belongs. There are six of these categories,
with bankers and merchants in the highest class and coolies in the
lowest. Though they pay this to the “congregation,” it really goes to
the government. This is no bright French idea, but was the lot of all
Chinese living in Annam long before the French came. Besides this
varying head-tax there is a “prestation tax”—whatever that may be—of
from two to fifty piastres a year; and any Chinese who wishes to travel
beyond the town in which he is registered must pay for a
_laisser-passer_, good for two weeks and twice renewable, so that those
who are always traveling contribute considerably to the government
during the year. Women, children, the sick, and men over sixty pay only
a yearly tax of one piastre, and may travel when and where they wish;
but even the son of a Chinese by an Annamese woman, and born in the
colony, remains a Chinese and must belong to some “congregation.”
The Chinese of Cholon and of Indo-China in general rarely speak a word
of Annamese or of French and of course no English; nor for that matter
do they speak Chinese, for they all come from the southern coastal
country where dialects reign. Canton, Amoy, Swatow, and Hainan furnish
the chief “congregations.” Such intriguing names as Hai Chin and Hung
Long Tom are to be seen on their shop signs. Except for the Cantonese,
who usually bring wives with them, nearly all these happily expatriated
Celestials take temporary native wives, usually Annamese. But they
_never_—the italics are those of a French writer—leave temporary wife
and children behind without assuring their livelihood. The same cannot
be said of the French in Indo-China—nor, the French might retort, of
Americans in the Philippines.
If I had come too early to see Cholon in the throes of the Chinese New
Year, at least I was just in time to attend the most important annual
celebration of another alien group that fattens on the native
population. Every January the Chettys, a Hindu caste of bankers and
usurers to be found in all the ports of the Far East, give a great fête
in honor of their protectress, the Goddess Souppramanya. It was the most
barbaric spectacle I have ever seen in many years of globe-trotting. In
the evening all Indians of this class in Saïgon, from mere street-booth
money-changers to big bankers, enveloped themselves in their
curtain-like muslin costume, with a spongy towel about the neck, and
formed a procession to their temple in the Rue Ohier. This Pagode des
Chettys—one must get used to the French way of saying _pagode_ for
temple and _tour_ for pagoda—is rich and elaborate for its setting,
though only mildly so compared to such structures in India. The contrast
between its ornamental tower and the _défense d’afficher_ signs lavished
upon its bright pink walls is not likely to escape even the languid
passer-by lolling in his _pousse-pousse_.
[Illustration: Cholon architecture is neither exactly French nor
Chinese]
[Illustration: A funeral procession in Cholon, Chinese suburb of Saïgon]
[Illustration: A decreasing form of conveyance in Cochinchina]
[Illustration: Unlike China proper, great sections of Indo-China are
covered with magnificent virgin jungle-forests]
Unlike what would have happened in India, here there seemed to be no
objection to my presence; the worshipers in fact gave me subtle hints
that they were rather pleased at my attention, though the stern watchman
at the door waved away natives of the colony. There may have been great
inner meaning, plethoras of mysticism quite beyond my simple ken, in the
ensuing ceremony, but to me it was rather a shock to know that what are
popularly accepted as our fellow-Aryans could be so crassly
superstitious. Yet such things no doubt are all a matter of degree and
inherited point of view; the unfamiliar always has a hint of the
grotesque, even of the hideous.
Great Hindu bankers naturally wear many diamonds; otherwise these
overfed worshipers were only in white flowing loin-cloths, some with a
fold of cheese-cloth over one shoulder. With three fingers each further
prepared himself by smearing on his forehead, his flabby arms, and the
hairy chest that attested his Aryan blood, whitish stuff mixed by
low-caste members of his race from cow-dung and other ingredients. Hindu
musicians supplied an absolutely unbroken caterwauling splendidly in
keeping with the rest of the insane ceremony. One of them in particular
should easily have won the world record for long-windedness. For a full
hour, if not indeed much longer, he kept his cheeks blown out to their
capacity without an instant of interlude, thereby keeping a barbaric
kind of fife miauling without cessation and at the same time beating a
drum incessantly with his fingers.
One by one the fat, bediamonded, all but naked bankers stood before the
opened shrine, itself a vision of untold riches, sometimes singly,
sometimes in small groups, and with their hands high above their heads
shook and twisted and contorted themselves like madmen suffering the
extremes of torture. The object of these revolting attempts of all too
solid flesh to resemble a snake in the throes of pain or anger were, as
nearly as I could gather, to deceive the goddess into the belief that
the worshipers were acutely suffering at sight of her divine splendor,
or that they were ready to suffer any agony in her honor. One by one
they threw themselves on the cement pavement laid in small brightly
colored squares and writhed and squirmed, twisting their heads fiercely
from side to side, rolling over and over, in a way to make mere
groveling a pastime, the sweat of torture and of an equatorial climate
pouring from their brown bodies until the floor was wet beneath them.
The paunchiest creature of them all, his fingers covered with diamonds
large enough, in the vernacular of the day, to choke a horse, his
dough-like face riddled with the marks of smallpox, doubly repulsive
with his great hairy naked paunch, went through contortions nauseating
to the hardiest stomach. His voluntary convulsions suggested that he was
the chief of the caste, as his diamonds implied that he was the leader
in successful usury. If only our bankers and money-lenders had to do
some such penance annually instead of merely going to church weekly in a
silk hat and a limousine!
At length their divinity, Souppramanya, which like any American worthy
of attention looked easily worth the million repute and her incredibly
bejeweled appearance credit her with, was taken down from her niche. A
dozen men in loin-cloths carried the idol to her silver chariot; two
great cream-colored sacred bulls, or, more exactly, steers, wearing
fancily embroidered robes over their single humps, were led forth from
their sumptuous stables within the temple, and the second phase of the
ceremony began. Between two rows of torches, surrounded by oriflammes,
sacred parasols in gay colors, and inexhaustible musicians, the
extravagant equipage of the goddess set out around the walled inclosure
of the altar. Huger than water-buffaloes of the fields, their sleek
fawn-colored hides shining, their expression that of their human
prototypes haughty with generations of adulation, the sacred cattle trod
slowly at the head of the worshipers, their spoiled-aristocrat dignity
unruffled by the frequent slipping of their silver shoes on the smooth
hard pavement, or at the sometimes painful pulling at the cords attached
to their perforated nostrils. Sacred as they were, such coercion by
their idolizers was evidently necessary to keep them in order, and this
they endured as if even sacred beings were not wholly free from the pull
of circumstances. Behind, surrounded by a milling throng of naked
smeared Hindu men and boys writhing with religious fervor, came the
martyr without whom the ceremony would be in vain. He had prayed and
fasted for a week in order to be able to endure his suffering. Lances
pricking his feet, an enormous pin thrust through his tongue, he drew a
little chariot fastened to him by traces ending in silver hooks that dug
deeply into his flesh. His eyes twisted in their orbits, foam driveled
from his lips, a figure horrible to behold, urged on by the clamors of
the frenzied money-lenders, who now and then still threw themselves in
abject contortions on the pavement. The crowd jostled and pitilessly
crowded upon a second martyr, who had transformed himself into a
pincushion, with needles and pins sticking out of his flesh in every
direction. It was an astonishing as well as a revolting spectacle, a
vision of fanatical India such as I had never seen in India itself,
doubly surprising because of the freedom with which we two white men and
a Frenchwoman were allowed to mingle with the worshipers.
Two, three, four times the barbaric procession made the circuit of the
temple. A curious noise that seemed to come from within the chariot
puzzled me, until I managed to crowd closely enough to discover that the
ambulating altar contained a little motor which lighted it with
electricity! The gaunt Hindu in charge of this howled and writhed with
the others; but in a fold of his loin-cloth bulged two or three
electric-light bulbs to replace those that might burn out.
Then quickly the whole performance subsided. The regal-mannered steers
were led back to their stalls; the swollen cheeks of the musicians
deflated in a final piercing yowl; the goddess was carried back to her
permanent throne. In a twinkling the frenzied bankers returned to the
placid every-day behavior of their calling, and went to squat on the
floor in a raised place too sacred for ordinary beings, where low-caste
Indians began to pass trays of food among them. This consisted mainly of
cocoanuts cut in two and filled with bananas, red fruits, and several
unrecognizable forms of Hindu delicacies. The hairy-paunched favorites
of fortune helped themselves more than generously; the small fry, and
the children scattered among them, got only handsful of sticky rice,
carelessly tossed to them by the servers.
This spectacle was repeated every evening for ten days. It was very easy
to guess what might have befallen those who had dared to wear such
diamonds or publicly parade such idols in China, or for that matter in
our own expensively policed land. Here no fear of robbery seemed to
trouble the pious Chettys, most opulent of the thousands of castes of
India. All the evening there had hovered near me a man from Pondicherry,
that tiny patch of India still ruled by the French. Dressed in the
tailored garb of Europeans in the tropics, his decidedly Aryan features
merely a glossy brown instead of white, speaking perfect French, he
seemed far removed from the men of his race who writhed on the floor in
their diamonds and loin-cloths. The ceremony was evidently commonplace
to him, for he showed no surprise even at the height of it. His fervor
seemed to be political rather than religious, and like many a man of
color in the French colonies he was almost boisterously Francophil. A
dozen times during the evening his voice rose high enough above the
fanatical tumult to assure me in as many ways of expressing it that
India would be the happiest land on earth if only France rather than
England held it.
The ease with which I got permission to visit the Saïgon establishment
where opium is prepared for sale implied that the French made no secret,
whether or not they saw anything wrong in it, of their official
sponsoring of this traffic. Opium is a government monopoly in
Indo-China, with a similar establishment in Tonkin to the north. In a
big airy room of armory-like ceiling, a hundred or more feet long and
half as wide, a score of Annamese were at work. What with the heat of
caldrons and of the climate, and the sickeningly sweetish smell of the
drug, their labor with heavy ladles was no sinecure. In fact the whole
personnel works only three hours out of the twenty-four, eighteen hours
a week. The poppy-juice comes from India—at the northern establishment
especially southwestern China now supplies great quantities, but this is
of course not officially admitted—in balls of the size of a cocoanut, or
resembling still more closely the Brazil-nut in its native state, for
the shell is nearly an inch thick—but made of leaves. These leaves are
eventually sold to the natives, who chew them with their betel-nut, no
doubt getting some opium-like effect from the soaking of poppy-juice.
The brown jelly-like substance inside is dumped into huge brass pans
over fires and ladled constantly as it boils, sweat running literally in
streams from the workers. When it has cooled and been well kneaded the
resultant dough is placed in other such pans and rubbed down into a
concave cake two or three inches thick. This in turn is placed upside
down over a very hot charcoal brazier, and every minute or two a workman
peels off a skin of the thickness of leather and throws it into still
another pan. When all the cake has been skinned away, the leather-like
layers in the new pan are treated with water, for they would otherwise
be brittle as glass, and are worked again into a very brown dough which
gradually swells to fill the pan. Handfuls of specially prepared
interior of bamboos, soft and resembling vermicelli, are then thrust
into the mass, and brown water runs slowly from these through cloth
filters into buckets. Only this liquid is of any value, the residue
being thrown away, useless even as fertilizer.
Reduced to a semiliquid form once more, this final product is placed in
iron barrels, a single one of which is worth twenty thousand piastres.
The stuff may now be sold at any time, though if possible it is allowed
to settle six months or more, for like wine and marriage the longer it
is kept the better it becomes. Then in the form of a paste closely
resembling russet shoe-blacking it is put up in tins of five, ten,
twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred grams each. The first retails at
barely two piastres, so that every rickshaw-man and errand-boy may
afford it; the largest, at twenty-five. The de luxe opium is put up in
purple boxes, a special mark on the very best of them indicating that
they are reserved for the king of Cambodia. Great quantities of this
best purple variety are sent to the old Cambodian sovereign each
December, as the Christmas present of the government. His royal
colleague, the emperor of Annam, is supplied from the Hanoï
establishment. The ordinary tins, with no marks upon them except a
cryptic number, are placed in heavy wooden boxes simply marked
“Benares”—other code names distinguishing the better grades—and go out
in great loads to all parts of the colony. The stuff is sold in these
tins to any one who can pay for it, in every little _débit_
distinguished by an “O.R.,” for “Opium Régie” on signs similar to those
indicating authority to retail for the French tobacco monopoly. What
with government preparation, license fees, and the like, the drug brings
an enormous profit to the government; that is, to France.
The official who took it upon himself to get me started right in my
sight-seeing called the opium monopoly “the shame of Indo-China”; and
some other French residents felt, or professed to feel, the same way
about it. But even he insisted that if it were not thus openly sold and
regulated the people would smuggle it in; and if it were prohibited
entirely there would be a revolution! So there would be, though perhaps
not in just the sense the speaker meant to imply.
We all know that France takes a somewhat different view of “vices” than
do we of the English-speaking races. The French attitude seems to be,
let vice flourish and abound, that each may learn to save himself from
temptation, or decide for himself how much indulgence he can allow
without serious personal harm. There are hints that this may perhaps be
as effective in the end as our own growing custom of forcible
suppression. Even in novels based on life in Indo-China the French
attitude toward opium seems to be about what ours as a nation is toward
tobacco. Many, some say three fourths, of the eighteen thousand French
in the colony smoke opium, as do most of the various indigenous races,
many Chinese, and some Hindu residents. There are not a few French
residents of the better class who contend that it does no great harm.
Among the natives, men with the opium habit are treated with indulgence,
but the women “never” smoke it; any who did so would be considered the
lowest of human creatures. On the whole the Japanese seem to have
handled the problem better in Formosa, for they at least strive to keep
their own people free from the habit, and are systematically reducing
consumption within their own territory, rather than trying to increase
it. The smoking of opium, a Chinese importation, was not a common vice
in Indo-China, unless perhaps among the Annamese, before the French
came. In Cambodia and among some of the other gentler races that make up
the protected federation, market-days and big gatherings are needed to
overcome the inertia toward the habit even to-day. But the government
forces it upon the people for the benefit of the treasury; and the
development of obligatory military service has spread it everywhere.
Lists of villages are sent out by diligent functionaries with the
information that they are not consuming their pro rata of opium, just as
great business houses in other lands protest to their agents that such
and such territory should take more of their goods, and local officials
are told to urge shopkeepers with the “O.R.” license to add to their
stocks and push them over the counter.
The opium monopoly in Indo-China is by no means airtight. In Laos there
are many Miao who grow the poppy up in their hills far inland, and as
they can get little more than half as much for their product from the
French monopoly officials as from the Chinese constantly engaged in
illicit opium traffic, only a fraction of that grown and really sold by
the Miao is ever reckoned in government reports. The Chinese smugglers
have their own _pirogues_, slender swift boats for the inland rivers,
and with these they are constantly getting opium out of the country,
mainly by way of Siam. Luang Prabang reports only eight hundred thousand
piastres’ worth of opium a year, yet every one knows that far more is
smuggled out of that kingdom than is sold to the government monopoly,
and so easily that customs officers are kept on the Laos-Siam and
Laos-China frontiers chiefly for appearance’s sake.