About The Book
Searching for the Sources of the Irrawaddy is the report of an overland trip from Hanoi to Calcutta through an area that was identified as containing the sources of the Irrawaddy River as well as those of some of the other great rivers of Indochina. The expedition was under the leadership of Prince Henri d'Orléans and the author, a geographer, was one of his two French compan-ions. The book elaborates on the trade routes of the region and on the various tribesmen living in the localities they passed through. Tibet and the Salween River Valley are, besides the Upper Mekong Valley which was then unex-plored by Westerners, among the new territories described by this French expedition. Numerous new species of monkeys, birds, and other animals and plants were collected. The main contribution of this travelogue, however, lies in the geographical work of the author and in the determination of the location of the sources of the Irrawaddy River. A companion volume by the leader of the expedition, Prince Henri d'Orléans, is also available from White Lotus Press: From Tonkin to India by the Sources of the Irrawaddy (January 1895-January 1896)
Introduction
The account below is the report of a scientific mission undertaken by Prince Henri d'Orléans in which the author participated and, indeed, of which he was the geographer. Emile Roux, a lieutenant of the French Navy independently wrote this report on the arduous journey in the northern regions of Burma and Tibet which took place from January 1895 until January 1896 and during which the sources of the Irrawaddy were discovered. The report appeared in April 1897 in the French magazine Le Tour du Monde. Prince Henri d'Orléans was to publish his account with different views altogether sometime in 1897. A translation was published under the title From Tonkin to India by the Sources of the Irawadi-January '95-Janu-ary '96 by the prestigious Methuen & Co. in 1898. This report in fact relies entirely on Roux's work for geographic data and maps and an exten-sive appendix entitled List and Discussion of Scientific Observations was attached to the English edition. As it is entirely Roux's work, the first appendix of the prince's book is reprinted at the end of this book. The prince's report is presented in a companion volume under its origi-nal title and includes the second appendix which was the prince's own work, with the help of experts, on biological and linguistic observations made during the journey. It includes the description of a new species of gibbon, appropriately christened Hylobates Henrici by E. de Pousargues who made the diagnosis. This description, however, was a little doubtful as compared to known species of the genus Hylobates. Not surprisingly for an unexplored area and an ambitious prince, four new birds were also discovered; the bestowed names of two of which honoured the prince and one the geographer. The third member of the expedition, drafted ad hoc in the first days of the expedition because the original third member had died prematurely, thus escaping the privations of the journey, Pierre Briffaut (also written Briffaud, because these are French reports and hence one cannot expect consistency) was deemed unworthy to lend his name to a new species since he was a well-to-do but untitled colon. Instead, we are given the name Chrysomitris ambigua n. sp. for the fourth new species-although it is not clear whether we are dealing here with another doubtful diagnosis or with other ambiguities experienced on the journey. There are also accounts of substantial parts of the exploration that were undertaken by Roux alone, in his attempt to get to the bottom of the geo-graphic enigma of the sources of the Irrawaddy. Roux also explains what was known before those exuberant days when the expedition's members finally pinned down the location of this river's sources (see Chapter 5 for his systematic review of earlier expeditions). Tibet then, as now, was a political issue in its own right and even here Roux does not shun blunt speaking because he was a man without qualms when it came to reporting the truth His truth, as so often with French travellers whose enthusi-asm was ill suited to the indolence the result of decades of oppression-of the wild tribes, is often punctuated by strongly expressed and colourfully argued opinions in the vein of 'the lazy native'. In the process, the reader learns a lot about the origins of the Lissou (today often written as Liso) and gets to know the various other tribes with more or less Chinese origins but (since this is a French report) the spelling of the tribes' names is diffi-cult to match with present day usage. Naturally due respect is paid to the vanguard of the civilising actions of the French, i.e. French missionary work. It would be fair to admit that Roux makes an effort to all the other names used to designate these tribes in any of the seven languages that, at one point, were needed to form a chain of translations to negotiate pas-sage.
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