Description

MISSIONS PAVIE. / BUREAU TOPOGRAPHIQUE DE L’ETAT-MAJOR DES TROUPES DE L’INDOCHINE (HANOI).

[Hanoi]: [Imprimerie Zincographique du Bureau topographique de l’Etat-Major des troupes de l’Indochine], 1891.

 

In 1887, France declared the creation of the colony of Indochine française, which then comprised all Vietnam and Cambodia. However, France had ambitions to extend its dominion over what would become Laos. Paris considered control of Laos to be necessary so that it could serve as a buffer against Siam and China, two nations that were usually at odds with French interests.

Since the early 18th century, the once great Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang was divided into three parts, being the weak kingdoms of Vientiane and Champasak, which were Siamese puppet states, while the Kingdom of Luang Prabang retained its independence. During the late 19th century, the northern regions of Luang Prabang were constantly threatened by Chinese renegade armies.

Taking over the Lao lands was easier said than done, especially as even the upper regions of Cambodia, the gateway to Laos, were not well known, let alone effectively controlled by the French. Moreover, geographically, most of the Lao lands remained an enigma to Europeans, with its river passages blocked by impassible rapids, while it the rugged, jungle-covered terrain made for difficult travel. Indeed, many reasonable people would likely have considered French efforts to take over the Lao lands to be “Mission Impossible”.

Yet, France would be served by a singular figure, of the type that sometimes appears to uniquely meet a daunting challenge.

August Pavie (1847 – 1925), a diplomat-explorer who was then serving as the French consul in Luang Prabang, was a dazzlingly charismatic eccentric of extraordinary skills and stamina. He instantly mastered even the most difficult ingenious languages, while perfectly learning (and often adopting) local customs, such that some of his colleagues remarked that had “gone native”. He was trusted, and even beloved by Lao and Cambodian stakeholders and managed to somehow make a French imperialist takeover of their lands seem soft and inviting. If it were not for Pavie, there would have been no chance that France would have gained control over Cambodia and Laos, at least not during that era.

Since 1879, and continuing until 1895, Pavie led a series of four audacious exploring expeditions into the interior of Indochina that were collectively known as the ‘Missions Pavie’. All these expeditions were combined diplomatic, espionage, cross-cultural exchange and map-making endeavours that somehow managed to penetrate and scientifically map areas that no European had ever dreamed of visiting due the assumed level of difficulty and danger. Pavie’s success not only lay in his own quirky genius, but in his ability to select the best and brightest officers from the French Army in Indochina, and to draw out their finest efforts, with many of these figures later becoming renowned in their own right.

The First Mission Pavie (1879-85) explored Cambodia and Siam; the Second Mission (1886-9) charted Upper Laos and then the transmontane route to Hanoi; the Third Mission (1889 – 91) ascended the Mekong from Saigon up to Luang Prabang and extensively mapped southern and central Laos; while the Fourth Mission (1894-5) explored the ‘Golden Triangle’ and the Chinese-Laos borderlands. Obviously, only the first three of these expeditions are relevant to the present map, which was published in 1891.

Of the Third Mission Pavie, in addition to is sweeping geographical discoveries, it was notable for producing a diplomatic breakthrough. In 1889, Pavie, who had long cultivated a close relationship with the King of Luang Prabang, convinced him to allow his state to become a French protectorate (Luang Prabang feared encroachment from Siam, as well as attacks by Chinese renegade armies far more than French imperial influence). This marked the first milestone towards the French domination of Laos.

To carry out his Third Mission, Pavie recruited an all-star team of explorer-cartographers, from the ranks of the French Army in Indochina. These figures included Captain Pierre-Paul Cupet (1859-1907), a graduate of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, where he was trained in military surveying. After fighting in Algeria and in the Tonkin Campaign, in 1887 he became a key member of the Franco-Siamese boundary commission. He came to the attention of Pavie, who made him his righthand man during his Third Mission. Subsequently, Cupet returned to France, where he served as a lieutenant colonel of the Zouaves.

Another lead on the mission was Joseph de Malglaive (1862 – 1914), who was likewise an alumnus of the St Cyr, as well as a veteran of combat in Egypt and Tonkin and a skilled mapmaker. An amazing frontier warrior and pathfinder, he was instrumental in providing the Third Mission Pavie with its military muscle. Sadly, Malglaive was killed in action while leading his men as an infantry Lieutenant Colonel on the Western Front during the early days of World War I.

The Present Map in Focus

This monumental map of Indochine française, plus Laos, and adjacent lands, was made in only a handful of examples to serve as a ‘Headquarters Map’ for use by senior French military officers, diplomats and political figures (the present example bears tack marks to the corners, as it was obviously hung upon the wall of an HQ or government bureau), so as to serve as a the blueprint for the imminent French colonial takeover of what would become Laos. Issued in the immediate wake of the Third Mission Pavie (1889 – 1891), it is almost certainly the first printed work to feature the expedition’s great discoveries, such that it literally re-draws the map of much of Laos.

It was published by the recently established Imprimerie Zincographique du Bureau topographique de l’Etat-Major des troupes de l’Indochine, the army’s printing house in Hanoi. It is one of the first maps to come off its press, and printed on 8 large sheets, it is almost certainly its first large-scale production.

The map is attractively rendered in conventional contemporary French style, with tan shading indicating contours of elevations, and blue frosting making the seacoast. Whie the map features a title of elaborate typography, indicative of it having been printed in Hanoi, its technical quality can be described as delightfully crude, at least compared to that of such maps made in Paris.

While the map’s scope encompasses most of Vietnam and Cambodia, its emphasis is upon its groundbreaking charting of Laos, in part due to the Second Mission Pavie (1886 – 1889), but more interestingly because of its successor expedition. Previously, much of southern and central Laos was a Tabula rasa to Europeans. Here, the excessively rugged interior beyond the eastern banks of the Mekong, going up north as far as Luang Prabang, is for the most part richly detailed, marking hundreds of villages, the paths of roads, the courses of many rivers and the general contours of the terrain, all revealed to Westerners for the first time. The empirical nature of the work is supported by the fact that areas that were unexplored by the mission, or that were otherwise unknown, are left blank, while the conjectural courses of rivers uncharted are shown as dashed lines.

Below the title, headed by the line “Membres de la Mission ayant fourni des documents topgraphiques’ [Members of the Mission who provided topographic documents], is a list of the eleven members of the Missions Pavie who contributed to the map (plus, Pavie himself). These figures include Cupet, Malglaive, as well as a pharmacist (to discover the medicinal uses of indigenous plants, and to treat tam embers) and a naturalist (to study Laos’s rich flora and fauna).

The Attribution of Hanoi as the Place of Publication

While the map bears no imprint, nor any remarks as to where it was issued, it was clearly published in Hanoi by the Imprimerie Zincographique du Bureau topographique de l’Etat-Major des troupes de l’Indochine, the printing office of the French army mapmakers stationed in Indochina. This printing house was established in 1890, while prior to that time the Bureau topographique (itself founded in 1886) subcontracted their map publishing needs to Paris, work carried out by either the Service géographique de l’Armée or the private firm of Augustin Challamel (indeed, even after 1890 many of the Bureau’s maps were still made in Paris).
The Imprimerie Zincographique in Hanoi issued maps in only very limited print runs for restricted, high-level official use, and, often, when urgency was required (i.e., when stakeholders in Indochina needed maps to be ‘done stat’, as opposed to waiting for manuscripts to travel Paris to be printed, and then back).

While the Imprimerie Zincographique in Hanoi was provided with a fine equipment and trained staff, it simply could not hope to match the technically stellar production standards of the major Paris printing establishments and, as such, the Hanoi issues, while quite competent, are of a noticeably cruder print quality. For instance, the neatlines along the centre right of the present map do not join properly, while names of many villages are printed in a slightly clumsy way, with overprinting, smudging and the crowding of letters (something almost never seen on map by a top Parisian printer). Yet the Hanoi issues had their own virtues, having a more authentic, handcrafted character, in addition to being closer to history, as maps of Indochina, made in Indochina.

For comparison, please see the, in part, derivative map, the Carte de l’Indo-Chine / Dressée sous les auspices du Ministre des Affaires étrangères & du Sous-sécrétaire d’Etat des Colonies…, published in Paris by Augustin Challamel in 1893 (the technical nature of the printing is markedly different), link courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53248086r

In 1899, the Imprimerie Zincographique was superseded by the significantly upgraded printing establishment of the Service Géographique de l’Indo-Chine (Hanoi), the new ultra-modern and efficient official French mapping bureau in Southeast Asia and the Far East. It soon became one of the leading mapping agencies in Asia, rivalled only by the Survey of India and the Japanese mapping authorities.

A Note on Variants and Rarity

The present map is extremely rare, like all Imprimerie Zincographique (Hanoi) productions. We can trace only 2 institutional examples, both held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Moreover, we are not aware of any sales records for any other examples.

Notably, however, each of the known examples is of its own variant. The example Bibliothèque nationale de France (Shelfmark: GE C-3175 (1-8)) features the main title, but has no scale or subtitle information below. The example Bibliothèque nationale de France (Shelfmark: GE SH 19 PF 1 QUATER DIV 21 P 69) is the same as the former, save that it adds the scale (‘Echelle de 1/1.000.000’) and the line ‘Membres de la Mission ayant fourni des documents topgraphiques’ but does not include the promised list of those names. The present example alters the placement of the title and subtitle information, which is shifted northwards, and includs the scale and ‘‘Membres de la Mission…’, plus, adding the list of the Mission Pavie’s contributing members. Also, a part of the listing information, being an amendment to Pavie’s title (as the ‘Consul “de France”) is added in manuscript, indicative of the fluid nature of map revision and printing at the newly established Imprimerie Zincographique. Otherwise, geographically, all three of the variants seem to be the same.

Epilogue

In 1893, France formally created the French Protectorate of Laos (Protectorat français du Laos), out of Luang Prabang, inventing the term “Laos” to serve as the name of the of country. There then followed a showdown with Siam for control over Vientiane and Champasak, in which France triumphed, taking control of the former in 1899 and the latter in 1904, so creating Laos in its modern form. The King of Luang Prabang was made the technical sovereign of Laos, although ultimate power lay with France.

France made Laos a part of French Indochina; however, unlike in Vietnam and Cambodia, where they sought to maintain tight control, its footprint in Laos was very light. While some notable adventurers and scientists had an intense fascination for the country, the French government and commercial establishment generally considered Laos to be a backwater, the best use of which was simply to act as buffer to protect Vietnam from Siam and China. Amazingly, there were never more than 200 to 400 Frenchmen in Laos at any given time prior to World War II. While the French ‘Administration’ maintained control over things like infrastructure and some social services, most matters of day-to-day governance remained under the auspices of indigenous officials, while Chinese and Vietnamese traders dominated the formal economy.

References: Bibliothèque nationale de France (2 examples): GE C-3175 (1-8) and GE SH 19 PF 1 QUATER DIV 21 P 69; OCLC: 494429108. N.B.: Seemingly not cited in contemporary bibliographies or geographical magazines.