Chapter 55In Annam and Tonkin, and in the Bai d'AlongIN ANNAM UND TONGKING UND IN DER BAI DALONG
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
From Saigon I wanted to cast at least a fleeting glance at Annam, the age-old empire, and at Tonkin. So I travelled by coastal steamer past the loveliest wooded mountains, northward up the gulf, as far as Tourane. There I landed, which was fairly difficult, and took rooms in a highly questionable hotel. The next day I went, partly across an arm of the sea in a dreadful sampan, partly by rail, to the famous marble grottoes1. These are enormous natural caves in sheer marble crags which rise quite abruptly out of a long sandbank hard by the sea beach. The most singular thing imaginable.
All these giant grottoes now, deep underground, lit by a bluish pale spark of daylight glimmering in from above, the Annamites have transformed into churches, or rather temples. In every recess stand altars, Buddhas, bunches of flowers. In the largest grotto I painted. I spent a whole day in this twilight world, diving from one grotto into the next, clambering along narrow goat-tracks, wading deep in the sand. Then I was seized with horror, and fled. For a few days more I drove in the rickshaw through the strange country, past the old “Tiam towers2” out of Annam's earliest time. Then one of the gentlemen to whom I had been recommended said I ought to go down to Hué, the capital, not by rail but over the “Col des nuages,” which has a sort of Chinese wall at the top.
No sooner said than done.
At midnight we set off. A very strange drive by moonlight, through all the sleeping Annamite villages. My companion was armed to the teeth. Every few moments he stopped the rickshaw and asked whether we heard nothing. When I was safely across I learned that a great deal of predatory game, tigers especially, roamed about here. We met none. Up at the most extraordinary crenellated giant wall3, where we arrived at sunrise according to programme, the view was veiled; but later a well-nigh unearthly prospect opened out, over the whole gulf of Hué, in a wide arc, upon immeasurable forests! Through the most tropical of jungles with flowering creepers — I have not seen it finer even in Java — we went on to the nearest railway station. There our ways parted. I travelled on to Hué. A great city, like an old Chinese one, on the “perfumed river,” of immeasurable extent. My hotel, the only French one, was half fallen in; I lay in my bed under builder's rubble and planks.
At the résident supérieur's4, where I delivered my letter of recommendation, I found only his wife. A charming creature. She at once put a motor car at my disposal, invited me to table daily, and later even wanted me to move in with her and stay a fortnight longer, to take part in the great annual popular festivals. Stupidly, I did not do it. For want of time. Later I have often regretted it. The résident supérieur in Indochina is like a prince. Madame came from Laos and told me a great deal about the “golden Buddha hall,” her ballroom out there.
So now I drove, now I went racing from early till late by motor car through the old fairy-tale city, and looked at the imperial palace with its overwhelming Chinese treasures, all the curious, genuinely Chinese temples which nevertheless bore a strongly Annamite stamp of their own; visited too a rich Annamite family, who very nearly fed me to death.
But the crown of it all were the imperial tombs. Without Madame Mahé's motor car and the Resident's boat I should certainly never have got there. It was a strangely beautiful journey, for hours along the green banks of the “perfumed river.”
But these mausoleums! I was in three different grave-parks, of the most enormous extent, with gigantic trees and many half-decaying separate temples, in which all the precious things the dead great man had possessed in his lifetime stood stored up. One would have had to look at it for days. And the killing melancholy that brooded over it all! Longest of all I lingered at the most recent grave-buildings, those of the Emperor Tü-Dük5. There too I found a wonderful motif to paint. Finer dragon-winged golden tiles I have seen nowhere. Everywhere were woods of the orange-scented frangipani trees, which in India are called temple trees, and whose scent can drive one out of one's senses. I heard later that the beautiful Madame Mahé was in the middle of a divorce from her husband, the résident supérieur — over a junior official with whom she first danced the tango and then held orgies in Tü-Dük's garden. Perhaps only the scent of the frangipani was to blame for that too.
From Hué I travelled on by rail to Haiphong, the burgeoning coastal town. From there it went northward along the red river to Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin. All of it I could only see fleetingly. Fairy-tale beautiful they appear to me in memory, all those countless pagodas and temples. The jade temple, in the middle of the lake, with its picturesque bridge, one of the most charming.
And the paper village! In which every Annamite is a paper manufacturer, for along the river everything is dried in the clay.
There too, thanks to my connections, I had a splendid carriage at my disposal. Most charming of all to me was the improvised visit to the yamen of the former governor. A more magnificent Annamite home I never saw. Already in the forecourt all the porcelain tubs with little golden-orange trees. The old couple, in gold and crimson mandarin robes, were surrounded by such an abundance of the costliest old Chinese craftwork that one's head swam.
From Haiphong I actually managed to have a small steamer granted me free of charge for a two days' voyage in the famous Bai d'Along6, the Tonkinese archipelago. That truly was like the fulfilment of fairy-tale dreams. A charming yacht, for two days awaiting my faintest sign, in a bay swarming with a thousand fantastically shaped rock islands. I painted in the stalactite grotto “des merveilles” and in front of a few quite particularly madly shaped little rock islets. In the “Galerie,” a long subterranean passage, the Chinese smugglers used to carry on their business. Words can never exhaust the magic of the Bai d'Along.
But for all these enjoyed beauties and wonders I had to pay again. I boarded a small German steamer for Hongkong. But the Gulf of Tonkin is not notorious for nothing. Such a hurricane got up that the little ship could go no further and put in at the pig island of Hainan. Thousands of pigs, in a state of the most extreme seasickness, were just then being loaded. Sight and smell mocked all description.
I myself, however, was transhipped to a larger English steamer. On that occasion I escaped with my life by a hair — half dead I got aboard.
At Hongkong I rested for two days and revelled in the beauty of the “Peak,” its indescribable view. Then I travelled, by way of Nagasaki, straight to Yokohama. There I stayed a fortnight and kept a reunion with my favourite places in Tokyo, Kamakura (and its Daibuts) and the holy island of Enoshima. But on this same holy island a Japanese sprang at my throat7. It was probably an act of revenge, because I had not wanted to take him as a guide. In the lonely camellia garden, red with blossom, he resolved upon the deed. The good man did not know, of course, that I knew every path and byway here and wanted to be alone. So he did not understand my “stiff-neckedness.” I screamed with all my might; people came, and he evaporated. This “murderous assault” went the rounds of the entire Asiatic and European press. Never have I seen the “Fuji” more luminous than on that day. The plum blossom had just begun.8
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the famous marble grottoes — The Marble Mountains south of Tourane, and her description of them is exact down to the geology. Ngũ Hành Sơn, the Mountains of the Five Elements, are five limestone and marble outcrops that stand up out of flat coastal sand a few miles south of Đà Nẵng — which the French called Tourane — with nothing between them and the sea. They are hollow: a system of caverns worked into Buddhist shrines over centuries, several of them lit only by shafts broken through the rock overhead, so that a single pale beam falls into the dark on the altars. The largest, Huyền Không, is still the most photographed cave in Vietnam for exactly the effect she paints in. The marble was quarried out of these hills for a thousand years, which is why the village at their foot carves stone to this day.
- ↑Tiam towers — Not a misprint but a lost people: the Cham towers, and she is nearly right about their age and quite wrong about whose they are. The brick sanctuary towers scattered along this coast belong to Champa, the Hindu and later Muslim kingdom of the Cham, which held central Vietnam for more than a thousand years before the Vietnamese pushed south and destroyed it in the fifteenth century. They are indeed the oldest monuments in the country she is calling Annam, so "out of Annam's earliest time" is right in date and wrong in nation: the Cham are a separate people, still present in Vietnam and Cambodia today, and the towers are not Annamite work at all. The French had begun to see this by 1912: Henri Parmentier's inventory of Cham monuments for the École française d'Extrême-Orient was appearing in these very years, and the sculpture gathered off these sites became the Cham museum at Tourane.
- ↑the most extraordinary crenellated giant wall — The Hải Vân Pass and its gate-fort — a real frontier, and the tigers were real too. Col des Nuages is the French for Hải Vân, the Pass of the Ocean Clouds, where the mountains come down to the sea between Đà Nẵng and Huế. The wall she is standing on is Hải Vân Quan, the fortified gate built across the summit by the Emperor Minh Mạng in 1826, whose tablet calls it "the most magnificent pass under heaven"; the pass itself had been the border between Đại Việt and Champa for centuries, and it still divides the country's weather, warm to the south, wet and cool to the north. Her armed companion stopping the rickshaw to listen was not being theatrical: the Hải Vân forest was tiger country well into the twentieth century, and travellers over it went in company and by daylight if they could. She went at midnight, by moonlight, to be at the top for sunrise.
- ↑At the résident supérieur's — This is Georges Mahé, and putting a name to him dates the chapter to the month — and turns the rest of it into something considerably darker than she knew. Georges Marie Joseph Mahé was Résident supérieur of Annam from 1 January 1912 to 15 May 1913, and that short tenure is now the hardest date in this whole leg of the journey: she cannot have been at Hué before January 1912, which fits everything chapters 52 and 53 established, and cannot have been there after the spring of 1913. What ended his tenure was the affair of the tombs. Told in confidence that treasure lay hidden near the tomb of the Emperor Tự Đức, Mahé applied to the Governor-General, Albert Sarraut, for leave to dig inside the sacred enclosure; Sarraut refused him. He went ahead regardless, extracted an authorization from the Annamite ministers, and had the tomb opened. The Annamite court and public were outraged, the scandal broke over him, and it finished him in Annam. Hold that against the paragraphs that follow. The crown of her stay was a day at the imperial tombs, made possible by Madame Mahé's motor car and the Resident's own boat; she lingered longest at Tự Đức's; and within a year of her visit her host had that tomb dug open looking for gold.
- ↑those of the Emperor Tü-Dük — Tự Đức, and of all the tombs on that river she picked the one whose story the next twelve months would complete. Tự Đức reigned from 1848 to 1883, longer than any other Nguyễn emperor, and lost the country: the French took Cochinchina under him and the protectorate followed within months of his death. Childless, probably from smallpox, he composed his own funerary inscription because there was no son to write it, and he built this park thirty years before he needed it and lived in it — a walled valley with a lake, a boat pavilion, a theatre and a hunting island, where he wrote poetry and had himself rowed about. He is not, in fact, buried in the tomb that bears his name: the real grave was hidden, and the two hundred men who dug it are said to have been beheaded on their return so that nobody would know where. That is the legend Georges Mahé went digging into. It is also, exactly, the enclosure that this paragraph says Madame Mahé was using for her assignations. Two scandals, one garden, and Preuschen was standing in it with an easel between them.
- ↑the famous Bai d'Along — Hạ Long Bay, and she got the run of it for two days with a steamer to herself, at nobody's expense. The bay of some two thousand limestone towers rising sheer out of the Gulf of Tonkin was already the showpiece of French Indochina by 1912; the French spelled it Baie d'Along and had charted, named and lit it, and the Grotte des Merveilles she painted in is Hang Đầu Gỗ, a three-chambered cavern hung with stalactites which they had christened the cave of marvels. The smugglers' Galerie is the kind of detail no guidebook keeps: these islands were the classic ground for junks running contraband between southern China and Tonkin, and the caves gave them cover no revenue cutter could search. What she does not say, and what makes the two days remarkable, is that a woman travelling alone talked the Haiphong administration into lending her a government steamer and crew for nothing — the same trick as Madame Mahé's motor car, worked on strangers.
- ↑a Japanese sprang at my throat — She says it made the newspapers of two continents, which would date the whole eastern leg to the day — and no notice of it has been found. This is the most checkable claim in Part Three and so far the most stubborn. A German painter of some notoriety assaulted on Enoshima, reported "through the entire Asiatic and European press," should sit in the Japan Weekly Mail or the Japan Times and be picked up from there by the German papers within the month; searching has turned up nothing yet. It is worth pursuing, because it would fix a date on a chapter that badly needs one, and because the incident as she tells it is oddly one-sided: an unhired guide follows a lone foreign woman into an empty garden and goes for her throat, and she calls him "the good man," blames the misunderstanding on her own wish to be alone, and gives the whole affair four sentences and a pair of ironical quotation marks around the word murder.
- ↑The plum blossom had just begun. — The last line of the chapter, and it looked unplaceable until the next chapter produced a date that nothing can argue with. Plum, ume, is the first blossom of the Japanese year: at Yokohama it opens in February and is done well before the cherry. Read forward, though, and the difficulty dissolves. Chapter 56 has her at sea between Japan and Honolulu when the wireless brings the news of the Titanic, which went down on 15 April 1912 — so she left Yokohama in the middle of that month, and the fortnight she spent there began at the end of March. A plum blossom just beginning is late for the end of March and not impossible; what is impossible is the two full months at Angkor she claims in chapter 54, which cannot be fitted between a Colombo stop at the start of February and a Japanese spring. That stay is almost certainly rounded up in memory fourteen years later. The other end of this chapter is nailed down independently: Georges Mahé took up his post at Hué on 1 January 1912, so Annam cannot be earlier than that.