Here be dragons – European exploration of Southeast Asia

Here be dragons

As our Unexplored, The Far North tour of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam suggests, a vast swathe of mountainous, northern Southeast Asia was, until relatively recently, a large ‘here be dragons’ style blank on the maps. While famous European explorers such as Livingstone, Burton, Stanley, et al were, for better or worse, filling in cartographical gaps in the heart of the African continent, a handful of adventurous – and generally heavily-bearded – French chaps were planning to do the same for remoter areas of Indochina.

While European (initially mainly Portuguese followed by Dutch) contacts with Siam, the stub of the ancient Khmer kingdom and the ports of Annam had been established way back, and British colonial rule had been imposed on Burma from the early part of the 19th century, knowledge of mainland Southeast Asia was very much restricted to Rangoon, Mandalay, Ayutthaya and coastal towns of what is today Vietnam. The rugged uplands of Shan State, far northern Thailand, Laos and Vietnam remained – as we said – a large, unknown, here be dragons blank on the maps.

Indeed, these regions were to a large extent equally little known to the former imperial courts in Mandalay, Ayutthaya and Hue and Siamese kings and Nguyen emperors had no reason or desire to venture into such wild and dangerous terrain.

Eccentric Scottish explorer James Scott’s late 19th-century travels in far-flung northeastern Burma are brilliantly described in Andrew Marshall’s ‘The Trouser People‘ (including an account of how the explorer and part-time goalkeeper taught football to the ferocious, head-hunting Wa), while translations of illustrated travelogues by French adventurers such as Auguste Pavie, Francis Garnier and Henri Mouhot can be found in the excellent White Lotus collection. (The latter’s grave can still be seen today just outside of Luang Prabang in Laos.)

While aiming to extend France’s control and possessions, a principal stated purpose was to discover a practical transport and communications route into China. Under the auspices of the Mekong Commission, Garnier, De Lagree and later Louis Delaporte set out to chart the upper course of the Mekong River. Hopes of a navigable route were soon dashed by the discovery of a series of major falls and rapids, including the Khone Phapaeng Falls, in what is today known as Lao’s 4,000 Islands, so attention was switched to the promising Red River, which led northwest from Hanoi. However, in the latter part of the 19th century, a major issue in these remote regions of what are today northern Laos and northwestern Vietnam was not so much, here be dragons, but rather, here be the Black Flag and Yellow Flag bandits. In a direct parallel to what would happen a hundred years later in the infamous Golden Triangle, with the KMT and Khun Sa’s Shan State Army, the region was under the control of heavily armed and ferocious bandits. (See Bradley Camp Davis’s excellent Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands.)

Fuelled at least in part by the opium trade, this motley crew of tribal bandits, Chinese mercenaries and Vietnamese rebels did sporadically assist both the Imperial Chinese and Annamite forces during conflict with the French, although without European firepower, it’s difficult to see how else these powerful bandit armies would eventually have been subdued. (The aforementioned Garnier was killed by Black Flag soldiers during an 1873 attack on Hanoi.)

French dominance wasn’t to last long and after the catastrophic defeat by General Giap’s Vietminh forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1953, they adopted the better part of valour and slunk off home. The very remote valley of Dien Bien Phu lies in far northwestern Vietnam, close to the present-day border with Laos, so while a key ‘here be dragons’ site in the 1850s, by the 1950s it was more a case of ‘here be dudes in black pyjamas with AK47s’.

Although the epicentre shifted slightly westwards across the mountains to what became known as the Golden Triangle of northern Thailand, northeastern Burma and northwestern Laos, the situation during the 1960s to 1980s was uncannily similar. (Albeit for somewhat different geopolitical reasons.) The competing Black and Yellow Flag forces were replaced by Khun Sa’s Shan State Army and their rivals in the opium trade, the KMT. The KMT or Kuomintang, were Chinese nationalist forces who fled Yunnan after defeat in the Chinese civil war by Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Army. Most had been airlifted to Formosa/Taiwan, although several regiments, along with their camp followers, escaped by land over the border into Laos and Burma. They eventually made their way through the mountains to northern Thailand, and after some rather dubious deals with the Thai government, were allowed to settle on some of the remoter hilltops. Elements of the 93rd Division famously settled in Chiang Rai’s Mae Salong, where their descendants remain to this day, but other units settled in numerous remote villages right across Mae Hong Son, Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai Provinces. (The Secret Army – Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle is a great read on this subject.)

The presence of these rabidly anti-communist veterans along the border at a time when the war in Indochina was in full flow was obviously something of a fortuitous plus for the Thai government and their US allies. A blind eye was conveniently turned to the opium trade (which was ensuring funding and arms), and in exchange for assisting the Thai military in their struggle against communist insurgents, they were largely left to their own devices. (See also the classic Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy.)

Their Shan rivals were coming from a slightly different angle and claimed that their involvement in the opium trade was a necessary evil in order to fund their independence struggle from the Burmese. Leader Khun Sa was thus seen as either a valiant independence fighter or a drug-fuelled warlord, depending upon your point of view. Conveniently, they were certainly no friends of the communist forces either. Interestingly, while running battles over the opium trade ensued between the KMT and Khun Sa for a lengthy period, the latter’s base at Hin Taek was a mere 10 kilometres as the crow flies from the 93rd Division in Mae Salong. (His former HQ is actually now open as a museum, albeit certainly one of the remotest and least visited museums in Thailand.)

With the help of their KMT allies, the Thai military finally defeated the homegrown CPT (Communist Party of Thailand) movement in the late 80s and early 90s by which time, with the war in Indochina long finished, both the KMT and Shan State Army, with their not very subtle involvement in the opium trade, were becoming something of an embarrassment. With the encouragement and material assistance of the US, the Thai government was encouraged to put an end to the situation and bring those lawless, remote regions under control. Most of the original KMT soldiers were long gone, ageing Khun Sa had conveniently opted for ‘voluntary’ retirement and poppy fields were destroyed with the help of US-supplied helicopters and M16s.

Roads were built, villages brought into the grid and crop replacement schemes promoted to provide legal alternatives to opium. The mountainous areas were, of course, highly picturesque, so today boutique coffee shops, opium museums and eco-resorts replace blanks or ‘here be dragons’ on Google maps and poppy fields have been replaced by oolong tea plantations and cherry orchards.

While Dien Bien Phu is still very remote, Vietnam’s Sapa and Bac Ha fill up every weekend with well-heeled Hanoi families, north Lao’s Luang Prabang and the Plain of Jars are well-known World Heritage destinations and Chiang Rai vendors tout Golden Triangle or opium t-shirts to coach loads of visitors. So, no more blanks on the map and no more here be dragons, but bear in mind these changes are all surprisingly recent ones.