Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/172

European intercourse with all the lands of the great Indo- Chinese Peninsula, from the coming of the British and Dutch East India Companies to 1826 in the case of Burma and Siam, to the date of the active interference of France in the case of Cochin-China, Kambodia, Annam and Tongking, to the eve of British expansion in the Na- tive States in the case of the Malay Peninsula,--has been necessitated, not because it adds very materially to our information on the subject of the exploration of these countries, but because it is from these periods that the most important part of our story begins. The establishment of European supremacy, or at any rate the wide extension of European influence, were necessary preliminaries to the great task of exploring the Hinterland of Indo-China which had been kept jealously closed to white men from the early days of the seventeenth century when the whole of the East not yet learned be- gun to fear and suspect her invaders. The true explora- tion of Burma dates from the appointment of a British Resident to Ava after the first Burmese war; that of Siam was a work left for accomplishment to the last quarter of the nineteenth century; the interior of the Malay Peninsula was almost entirely unknown when Pêrak and Sĕlângor were placed under British protec- tion in the early seventies of the last century; while the valley of the Mekong was first revealed to Europeans with some fulness of detail by the De Lagrée-Garnier expedition of 1866-1868. It is with the last named jour- ney, as being at once the most important and in many respects the most interesting, that we shall now deal.