Grove Koger
There’s something fascinating about obscure, ephemeral countries, just as there’s something fascinating about tiny islands. It’s the lure of the remote, and if you learn about such places and think about them enough, you make them your own. You live in them. And who doesn’t want a country of his or her own? Or a kingdom, for that matter.
Which brings us to French adventurer Marie-Charles David de Mayréna and the Kingdom of Sedang.
Born in 1842 in the French port of Toulon, Mayréna served for a time in a Spahi cavalry regiment in Cochinchina, now southern Vietnam. After his return to France, however, he was forced to flee to avoid prosecution for embezzlement. He eventually turned up in the Dutch East Indies but was expelled within a year of his arrival, apparently for some equally serious offence. Undaunted, the adventurer returned to France with the aim of collecting firearms to be shipped to the rebellious inhabitants of Aceh on the northwestern tip of the island of Sumatra, now part of Indonesia.
How Mayréna finessed the embezzlement charge I haven’t been able to determine. Nor can I turn up any further details about those firearms, but in any case, the wily Frenchman returned to Cochinchina, where he set up a plantation. And for a time, it looked as if his fortunes might be improving. French colonial officials were wary of the intentions of the King of Siam, who had begun to claim land near what they regarded as French territory, and so were persuaded to enlist Mayréna as an agent to negotiate a treaty with the inhabitants of the disputed area.
The French should have been equally wary of their agent, for, true to his checkered past, Mayréna proceeded to establish a kingdom of his own, naming it Sedang after the most populous tribe involved. (Or did he convince the tribes to establish it for him?) There he reigned as Marie the First, installing a woman from nearby Annam as his consort, creating an army, writing a constitution, bestowing titles of nobility left and right, designing a flag, and arranging for the printing of stamps displaying the royal coat of arms. I’ve also read that Mayréna converted to Islam, a move that looks suspiciously opportunistic, as it allowed him to marry several more women.
In any case, French officials eventually forced Mayréna out of Cochinchina, upon which time he took refuge on Tioman Island off the coast of Malaya, where he died on November 11, 1890, from (take your pick) a snake bite, poisoning, or the result of a duel.
As I learned more about Mayréna, I was reminded of the great French writer André Malraux, who traveled in Southeast Asia as an adventurous young man and later published a novel in 1930 based on his experiences—La Voie Royale, or The Royal Way. Sure enough, it seems that Malraux modeled his character Perken on Mayréna, and even devoted another novel to him, although it remains unpublished. In his Anti-Memoirs (1967), Malraux wrote that he had “not forgotten” the adventurer, “whose legend, very much alive in the Indochina of the 1920s, [was] in part at the origin of La Voie Royale.”
If you’d like to subscribe to World Enough, enter your email address below:
And if you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!
World Enough 