Dragon apparent, p.4
Dragon Apparent, page 4
After about thirty-five miles we entered Cao-Daï territory, in which, according to my official guide, complete tranquillity had been restored. His friend said something about bandits and rats, and spat out of the window. I asked why the towers were even closer together and why machine-gunners squatted behind their weapons which were pointed up every side-road. Monsieur Beauvais said there was no harm in making sure, sighed, and brought the subject back again to the amenities of upper-class, rural England.
Our first Cao-Daïst town was Trang-Bang, where a reception had been arranged. There seemed to be thousands of children. For miles around, the countryside must have been combed for them. They had been washed, dressed in their best and lined up beside the road, clutching in one hand their bunches of flowers of the six symbolical colours and giving the fascist salute with the other. The spontaneous acclamations were tremendous and the children, who all looked like jolly, china dolls, were, I am sure, enjoying themselves enormously, without having the faintest idea what it was all about. Monsieur Beauvais seemed much embarrassed by the fascist salute, from which his friend, however, derived grim pleasure.
* * *
The notables of Trang-Bang, dressed in their best formal silks, were on the spot to mix with the visitors. In this country, which owes all its civilisation to China, the best years of one’s life are its concluding decades. The dejection that encroaching age stamps so often in the Western face – the melancholy sense of having outlived one’s usefulness – are replaced here with a complacency of spirit and a prestige that increases automatically with the years. Cao-Daïsm was founded by retired functionaries and professional men, who see to it that no one who is not a grandfather ever manages to get his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. Going up to one of these happy old men, I complimented him on the appearance of the children, who were still cheering and saluting. The old man’s face crinkled in a smile of ineffable wisdom. He explained that it was the result of a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism, he explained, was one of the tenets of the Cao-Daïst faith.
‘Of course, we don’t insist on our converts making a sudden break with their bad habits. We start them off with a meatless day a week and gradually improve them until a full release is attained.’
‘And have all your people attained a full release?’
‘Almost miraculously, yes,’ said the old man delightedly. ‘They turned their backs on the squalid past, almost overnight. Why, even five-year-old children implored their parents never to let them see meat or fish again. It was a wonderful experience.’
We chatted pleasantly for some time. My friend informed me that he was a fourth-grade official of the Cao-Daïst Legislative Corps, a lawyer with the rank of Bishop, and that he expected shortly to be promoted to Inspector-General of the third grade, carrying the dignity of Principal Archbishop. After that the way remained clear to the final attainable splendour, the culmination of all the efforts of his mature years, the rank of Cardinal-Legislator – only five grades removed from the Pope himself. There would be many more austerities to be practised before that glittering goal could be reached, but what did it matter? At his age one could do without almost anything. That was the best of it, the old man pointed out, smiling gleefully. All those abstentions – the renunciation of relations with one’s wife, for instance – they came into force only in the higher grades. The turn of the screw was put on gently, so that by the time you had to give things up for the Kingdom of God, you were pretty well ready to give them up anyway. It was all so humane.
It might have been, but what about the children with all this voluntary abnegation, practised almost as soon as they were out of the cradle? The answer was given by a Cao-Daïst doctor of the ninth grade and a member of the Charity Corps, in which he had reached the rather low rank of fidèle-ardent.
‘We suffer from malnutrition in all its forms,’ he said. ‘Just look at the children, look at the condition of their skins. Covered from head to foot with sores, most of them.’
I told him that those I saw looked the picture of health.
‘Well, naturally,’ the doctor said. ‘You don’t expect them to put the pellagra cases in the front line, do you?’
Beauvais was embarrassed once more, before we left. There was a burst of heavy mortar-fire. Beauvais thought it was miles away and that the wind was carrying the sound in our direction. But there was no wind in Cochin-China – at least while I was there.
* * *
At Tay-Ninh we were first received by the administrator, dressed in a gorgeous old mandarin’s coat of dull blue silk, on which the yellow flowers and medallions were seen rather faintly, like the watermarks on superior stationery. The administrator had a small, aged face which, in the local manner, he kept under conspicuous control. Whenever he smiled, which in the course of his duties he did frequently, he laid bare a row of ivory hearts in the background of his gold-framed teeth. Having welcomed, with unquenchable vitality, each member of the visiting party – a task occupying at least half an hour – he darted away, and reappeared with an amateur ciné-camera with which he exposed a few feet of film on each of the principal French dignitaries. Champagne and biscuits were now served, and as polite interest in one’s surroundings seemed to be encouraged, I wandered through the ground-floor rooms of the administrator’s typically European villa.
The administrator had thought fit to advertise the modernity of his outlook by furnishing his house in Western style. The tables, with their Liberty runners, the chairs, the Indian rugs, the thick, greasy glaze of the pottery, recalled a Tottenham Court Road showroom. But progressive Easterners of this type find it almost impossible to prevent a dash of the local flavour intruding itself into the flat and tasteless ‘good taste’ of their European décor. Even when the interloper is without other merit, I find it at least piquant. In this case the administrator had decorated one of his otherwise impeccable Heal walls with the pictures of the four vices. Here, where the reproduction Van Gogh sunflower should have been, were the stern warnings, to be seen on sale in all Saigon art shops, to the gambler, the drunkard, the opium smoker and the voluptuary. The administrator had probably been taken in because the technical production of these masterpieces was typically Western and curiously photographic in its flat, bluish monochrome. But the subjects themselves, gentle, contemplative almost, and not in the least horrific, were as Vietnamese as pictures of Highland cattle are English. The only detail I can remember of these somnolent transgressions was the fine mosquito-net with which the bed in the last scene was equipped. Vietnam needs a Rowlandson or a Hogarth to deter its sinners. Gin Lane in oriental guise would sell a million copies.
The next item on the programme was a visit to the cathedral, where, according to the description of the ceremonies I read in next day’s paper, His Holiness, Pope Pham-Cong-Tac, whose name means ‘the Sun shining from the South’, awaited us, beneath the golden parasol, attired in his uniform of Grand-Marshal of the Celestial Empire. He was carrying his Marshal’s baton, at the sight of which, according to Cao-Daïst literature, all evil spirits flee in terror.
Physically, the Pope looked hardly able to support the weight of his dignity. He was a tiny, insignificant figure of a man, with an air of irremediable melancholy. His presence was, in any case, overshadowed by the startling architectural details of the cathedral, for the design of which he himself had been responsible.
From a distance this structure could have been dismissed as the monstrous result of a marriage between a pagoda and a Southern baroque church, but at close range the vulgarity of the building was so impressive that mild antipathy gave way to fascinated horror. This cathedral must be the most outrageously vulgar building ever to have been erected with serious intent. It was a palace in candy from a coloured fantasy by Disney; an example of funfair architecture in extreme form. Over the doorway was a grotesquely undignified piece of statuary showing Jesus Christ borne upon the shoulders of Lao Tse and in his turn carrying Confucius and Buddha. They were made to look like Japanese acrobats about to begin their act. Once inside, one expected continually to hear bellowing laughter relayed from some nearby Tunnel of Love. But the question was, what had been Pham-Cong-Tac’s intention in producing a house for this petrified forest of pink dragons, this huggermugger of symbolism, this pawnbroker’s collection of cult objects? Was he consciously catering to the debased and credulous tastes of his flock? Or could it be that visible manifestations of religious energy on the part of men who have lived lives entirely divorced from art must always assume these grotesque forms?
In support of the latter theory it is significant that the founders and directors of this movement were all men who had spent most of their lives in the harness of a profession or in the civil service. To have been successful as they had been in these walks of life would have left them little time to cultivate taste, if they happened to have been born without it. I was interested, subsequently, to note in the ensuing ritual that, although the Governor of South Vietnam kowtowed energetically before the altar, no attempt was made to induce Monsieur Pignon, the High Commissioner, to do so. Profiting by the experiences of even the Emperors of China and Annam with foreign ambassadors, the Cao-Daïsts have recognised the seemingly congenital disinclination of Europeans to performing the kowtow, so that Western converts are excused this form of devotional exercise. Monsieur Pignon did, however, consent to hold lighted joss-sticks between his clasped fingers and incline his head, even if somewhat distantly, before the massed symbols of Lao-Tse, Confucius, Buddha and Jesus Christ.
* * *
The siting of the Cao-Daïst Rome at Tay-Ninh was by no means accidental. A few miles from the town a single symmetrical mountain humps up suddenly from the plain, rising from what must be practically sea-level to 3000 feet. As there is not another hillock for fifty miles in any direction to break the flat and featureless monotony of Cochin-China, this darkly forested plum-pudding silhouette is quite remarkable. In a part of the world where every religion has its sacred mountain, such an eminence is obviously irresistible. Consequently it has been since dimmest antiquity a place of revelation. Its slopes are said to be riddled with caves, both natural and artificial, housing at one time or other the cult objects of numerous sects. It was most unfortunate from my point of view that the holy mountain itself was possessed not by the Cao-Daïsts but the Viet-Minh. This prevented a most interesting visit, although it was in any case improbable that revolutionary iconoclasm had spared the relics of those ancient beliefs.
But there were other survivals of Tay-Ninh’s notable past to be seen in the streets of the town itself; pathetic-looking groups of Chams in the penitents’ robes of the rank and file of the Cao-Daïst faithful. At the end of the Middle Ages the Annamese, moving southwards from China, had overwhelmed, absorbed, digested the brilliant civilisation of Champa. Now only a few particles of that shattered community remained. They were scattered about in a few isolated villages in Cochin-China and Cambodia, and here they had clung to their holy place.
These Chams were aboriginal Malayo-Polynesians, the only group of that race to have accepted the civilisation of Indian colonisers in the remote past. They made a great impression upon Marco Polo, but judging from the account of the Dominican, Gabriel de San Antonio, who visited them in the sixteenth century, there was a nightmarish element in their civilisation. It was brilliant but unbalanced and psychopathic, like that of the Aztecs. The Chams could place themselves in the vanguard of the technical achievement of their day, devise new agricultural methods, undertake vast irrigational projects, encourage the arts and sciences. And yet one half of the racial mind never developed. Stone age beliefs, like grim Easter-Island faces, were always there in the background. On certain days, San Antonio says, they sacrificed over six thousand people, and their gall was collected and sent to the King, who bathed in it to gain immortality.
These degenerate survivors of that glittering, sinister past were Brahmanists or Muslims, or both combined. The metaphysical appetite of South-East Asia is insatiable and its tolerance absolute. The modern Chams find no difficulty in worshipping the Hindu Trinity, the linga, the bull of Siva, a pythoness, Allah – who is believed to have been an eleventh century Cham king – plus Mohammed and a number of uncomprehended words taken from Muslim sacred invocations and regarded as the names of deities, each with its special function. They are inclined to give their children such names as Dog, Cat, Rat to distract from them the attentions of evil spirits. For this reason there were several Cham kings named excrement. One assumes that the Chams will have little difficulty in adding to their already enormous catalogue of rituals and credences those few new ones imposed by the Cao-Daïsts.
* * *
From the newspaper account I learned that on leaving the cathedral, ‘preceded by a unicorn, a dragon and a band playing une marche précipiteuse, escorted by a numerous suite carrying the car of the Buddha, the portraits of Sun-Yat-Sen and Victor Hugo, and the statue of Joan of Arc’, we marched to the Vatican. The streets, said the account, were lined with adepts dressed in togas of red, blue, yellow and white. In the general commotion I must have missed some of this. I should have much enjoyed the processional unicorn, which I failed to see either then or at any other time. I recall, however, the dragon; a fine capering beast which on its hind legs leaped up into the air and tossed its head most desperately to the jerky rhythm of fife and drum. The report failed to mention a guard of honour of the Cao-Daïst army, equipped with well-made wooden imitation rifles. When I mentioned the matter of the toy guns, I was told that it was out of respect for the sanctity of the surroundings.
The Vatican was the administrator’s villa all over again, except that His Holiness had an evident liking for grandmother clocks. Fanned by turkey’s feathers, hosts and guests exchanged lengthy platitudes of goodwill, which at random were broken off for a stroll in the garden, or a visit to the champagne bar, and then renewed without the slightest embarrassment, as if no interruption had taken place.
At the banquet which followed, I sat next to a Cao-Daïst colonel, who informed me, with a secret, knowing smile, that he was head of the secret police of this Universal Religion of the Age of Improved Transport. The meal was vegetarian and although the French visitors had been told that they could order eggs if they wished, no one dared to do so. There were seven courses, six of which were based on soya, which I first mistook for some kind of overstewed and tasteless meat, that had, somehow or other, been served by mistake. The Colonel and I got on very well together and helped each other liberally to soya. Although intoxicants are equally forbidden to the Cao-Daïst faithful, I noticed many of the dignitaries present stretching the point, and the Colonel, himself, had several helpings of red wine, after which he genially discussed the technique of his profession.
On my left was a young man who asked me if I was familiar with the works of Victor Hugo. I nodded, without emphasis, barely remembering the first lines of a poem beginning: Mon père, ce héros au sourire si doux –
‘I am a reincarnation of a member of the poet’s family,’ the young man said. I congratulated him and asked if he also wrote. The modest reply was that he would have considered it an impertinence to do so after the tremendous reputation of his kinsman, who, after all, was generally admitted to be the greatest poet who ever lived. Did I, by the way, realise that the master’s sublimest works had been written after his death, or, as he put it, since disincarnation? My informant then went on to explain that he was the official editor of Victor Hugo’s posthumous work, a task simplified by the fact that only certain of the highest ranking members of the hierarchy were permitted mediumistic contact with such saints as Li-Taï-Pé, Joan of Arc and the poet. All Victor Hugo’s communications were given in verse and this, plus his life’s work, would ultimately form a corpus to be memorised by candidates for high office. Much intrigued by this adaptation of the old Chinese system of literary examinations for the mandarinate, I asked for a sample of the poet’s most recent production and was given the account of the Creation as described in a seance to the ho-phap, or Pope. I reproduce a few lines.
HO-PHAP (referring to Victor Hugo’s use of the word ‘water’ in his description of the creation):
Est-ce bien la forme de l’eau parlée dans la genèse chrétienne?
VICTOR HUGO:
Oui, c’est cette sorte de gaz qu’on appelle hydrogène,
Plus ou moins dense qui fait la partie la plus saine,
Dire que l’Esprit de Dieu nage au-dessus des eaux,
C’est à ce sens qu’il faut comprendre le mot,
Avec son astral qui est de lumière,
Il anime par sa chaleur ces inertes matières,
Une couche d’oxygène produit, se met en action,
Le contact des deux gaz donne une détonation.
– Mais vous avez, Ho-Phap, une crampe à la main,
Renvoyons notre causérie pour demain.
At the very hour when these junketings were in progress at Tay-Ninh, French troops were under fire from Cao-Daïsts in the Province of Mytho, about seventy miles to the south. The French said that the Cao-Daïsts had turned to banditry and that a battle had developed when they had called upon them to give up their arms. The Pope, Pham-Cong-Tac, promptly repudiated all responsibility, pointing out that the insurgents had left his fold and joined one of the eleven schismatic sects that refused to recognise his authority. The schismatic sect can be as politically useful to the Cao-Daïsts as a racial minority elsewhere.
