CHAPTER 14

VIETNAM FROM BEYOND THE RED RIVER

We must know how to use our military units correctly, so as to send them in large numbers to open land and create new economic zones. These units must consist of many soldiers and fighters who are unshakeable and enthusiastic in their revolutionary spirit and desire to succeed so as to move mountains and dig rivers that will transform these empty regions and deserts into land covered with fertile fields supporting a thriving population.¹

—PRIME MINISTER PHAM VAN DONG, 1977

THE EMPTY LANDS to which Pham Van Dong referred in this 1977 address were the highlands of modern Vietnam. Rising from the Gulf of Tonkin in the northeast, this collection of cragged hills and deep valleys stretches westward, looping around the Red River lowlands as it drops southward down the central coastline before finally vanishing into the Mekong delta. This massif makes up almost half of Vietnam territorially today. It teems with rivers, forests, animals, and some of Vietnam’s most important natural resources (zinc, ore, bauxite, and silver) and plantation crops (rubber, coffee, and tea). It also offers protection. During the First Indochina War, the northern highlands were home to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the site of its historic battle victory over the French in 1954. A few years later, the DRV pushed its supply lines further southward through the central highlands to feed and arm forces fighting the Americans. Without the highlands, there would have been no victory at Dien Bien Phu and no operational Ho Chi Minh Trail. Speaking in 1977, as Vietnamese communists prepared to go to war again over Indochina, Pham Van Dong had good reason to dispatch soldiers into these areas. He erred, however, when he spoke of the highlands as empty places. They were not and the prime minister knew it. He had served there during the 1940s.²

By now, the astute reader will have noticed that the narrative to this point has been a very ‘lowland’ and ‘Viet’-centric one. This history of modern Vietnam began in the Red River delta at the dawn of the first millennium CE to follow a range of lowland Viet kings, settlers, administrators, revolutionaries, missionaries, state-builders, and workers as they made their way south. After the city of Hanoi came that of Hue, followed by Saigon. While the simplicity of the north-to-south take renders it almost irresistible for those trying to order a narrative for Vietnam’s unwieldy past, this standard view comes with serious problems. For one, it is a linear, teleological approach, organized around the inexorable expansion of the Viet people from one delta to another. Scholars inside and outside Vietnam refer to it widely as the Nam Tien (‘Southward Advance’) school of thought. Secondly, this north–south narrative is very ethnocentric. It downplays the importance of the non-Viet peoples who lived in lowland areas of the central coastline and the Mekong delta, most notably the Cham, the Khmer, and the Chinese. It does the same for the highlands, where dozens of non-Viet peoples like the Tai and Jarai constituted the majority populations until the late twentieth century. As we have seen in this book, until recently, there was no one S-like Vietnam running from north to south.³

And this brings us back to the tricky question of Vietnamese colonialism. Advocates of the Southern Advance school tend to celebrate ethnic Viet expansion southward as a sign of strength and vitality. Heroism serves as the favorite trope. Like their Euro-American counterparts, Viet settlers were determined, hardy souls, who, through their blood, sweat, and tears, turned all of these blank spaces into productive fields, brought civilization and modernity to its primitive peoples, and ensured that Vietnam would persevere over its rivals. Missing in this frontier myth is any discussion of how the Viet often took these lands from others, how they conquered people by force, or how the Viet colonizers and the non-Viet colonized also interacted in much more complex ways.

Communist historians in Vietnam today still try to avoid this question altogether, knowing that they created a powerful nationalist myth during the Indochina wars by casting the Viet as the heroic colonized people who threw off the yoke of Western imperialism. Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese communists find it terribly hard to admit that they, too, have been colonizers. Each prefers to extend the idea of a unitary Vietnam far back into the past. Many foreign historians supportive of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s heroic struggle against the French, the Americans, and the Chinese have also conveniently avoided this chapter in modern Vietnam’s history.⁴

This will no longer do. Just as no serious student of American history would accept uncritically Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous ‘frontier thesis’ which cast American history as the unique product of the inexorable expansion of settlers westward, so too should we avoid the Southward Advance version organizing the history of modern Vietnam into one single march from southern China to the Gulf of Thailand. Nor should we avoid Vietnam’s own colonial history because it places the Viet in the role of conqueror instead of the victim of foreign domination. This also means accepting that the Cham, Khmer, Jarai, Rhadé, Bahnar, Tai, Hmong, and others are central, not marginal, to our story. For centuries, they ruled other Vietnams and resisted the making of a colonial Vietnam. So before ending this book, let us return to the past again. But this time let us reset our narrative and chronology by beginning in areas beyond the Red River delta, in the rich world of the highlands, along the central coast, and in the Mekong delta—before the Viet arrived. And then let us consider how the non-Viet peoples resisted and interacted with Viet state-making, including its imperial forms. It is time to let go of Viet exceptionalism and ethnocentrism as much as its French, Chinese, or American variants.⁵

BEFORE THE VIET CAME: THE COASTAL AND HIGHLAND PEOPLES OF VIETNAM

Where Mainland Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean Meet⁶

Some ten thousand years ago, two groups of people each with unique linguistic patterns colonized wide swathes of mainland Southeast Asia—the Austronesians and the Austroasiatics. The Austronesians originated from the island of Taiwan between five and seven thousand years ago. While these peoples had brought agricultural techniques with them from southern China, they also developed sophisticated navigational skills and techniques which allowed them to cross the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean from around the third millennium BCE onward. Their movements were such that by the first millennium BCE, many had reached the coasts of Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Java, Sumatra, Polynesia, and Hawaii. Others ventured westward into the Indian Ocean. Some got as far as Madagascar off the eastern African coast, making the Austronesians the first people to cross the Indian Ocean, long before the Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Europeans.

Over the centuries, these peoples settled down across large swathes of island and mainland Southeast Asia and contributed to building smaller political units, cultures, and languages. Located at the center of these maritime movements was today’s central Vietnam, where Austronesians made landfall sometime before the first millennium CE. Many of them moved into the nearby highlands in search of game, people who eventually became the Jarai, Rhadé, and Raglai. Others, such as the Cham, remained mainly on the coastline, learning to plant rice, fish, and trade. Connections between the high and lowlands continued over time, as did exchanges with the Indian Ocean world. Indeed, it is useful to think of coastal Vietnam as an extension of archipelago Southeast Asia.⁷

To the north, the Austroasiatic family moved overland from today’s India to mainland Southeast Asia by way of southern China. This linguistic group emerged in the Neolithic period around 4,000 years ago. The Austroasiatic peoples were agriculturally oriented. They planted rice and taro as they followed fish-laden streams and rivers from one valley to another. Some of the earliest settled agricultural communities emerged around 2000 BCE inside the deltas of the Red, Mekong, and Chao Phyra rivers which drop down from southern China. These peoples may have initially originated in the Mekong River’s lower branches around 4,000 years ago. They then followed inland waterways westward and northward into the Chao Phraya (Thailand) and Red River (Vietnam) deltas, foraging, fishing, and planting their way along. The Austroasiatics included the Khmer, Bahnar, Sedang, Hre, and others. Even the future ‘Viet’ rulers of the Red River delta heralded from this wider world. In fact, linguists place the Viet language in the proto Mon Khmer subcategory of the Austroasiatic linguistic family. Sinization came later with the extension of the Han empire into the Red River area. The arrival of the Austronesians along the coastline tended to keep the Austroasiatics within inland areas. However, the two linguistic families often mixed as Austronesians migrated into upland areas, especially in the central highlands of Vietnam.

This rapid journey into the depths of time allows us to appreciate the extent to which these peoples had spread throughout upland and lowland parts of Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and southern China and had begun developing their own civilizations and polities. The appearance of a distinctive Austroasiatic style of pottery during the first millennium BCE is a case in point. The production of Dong Son drums is yet another. Although these drums seem to have originated from the Red River valley, attesting to the cultural vitality of this region, they were products of a common cultural core extending into today’s Thailand and the southern Chinese massif discussed in chapter 1. Further to the south, the peoples of Austronesian stock presided over the creation of flourishing commercial centers and civilizations anchored along the coast which ran from central Vietnam to the Gulf of Thailand. During the first millennium CE, the spread of the Iron Age and advances in agricultural techniques allowed new coastal polities such as Oc Eo, Funan, and Sa Huynh to emerge. The ability of these coastal polities to tap into Indian Ocean commercial exchanges extending from the Middle East to the Han empire reinforced their state-building, economic development, and cultural expansion. The demand in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and China for Southeast Asian spices and luxury goods was particularly important. As early as the third century BCE, Chinese annalists wrote of cloves growing in island Southeast Asia, while their Roman counterparts made similar reports some centuries later. Given the vibrancy of the Indian Ocean trade, we should not be surprised that archeologists have unearthed Roman coins in the coastal polity of Oc Eo in today’s southern Vietnam.

Thanks to these early maritime connections, local leaders in central and southern Vietnam not only traded with the Eurasian world, but they also adopted foreign religions and writing systems coming from abroad, adapted them to local spiritual, cultural, and political contexts, and, in doing so, often turned them into something unique. Over the centuries, peoples and leaders in Oc Eo, Funan, and Ha Suynh adopted Hinduism, Mahayana, and then Theravada Buddhism. Sanskrit and Indian Brahmanic-based scripts and inscriptions appeared for the first time as local leaders and clergy developed writing systems to express their spoken languages, ideas, and sacred beliefs. Indian concepts of kingship, astronomy, calendric time, music, and philosophy found clients in these early non-Viet civilizations. And this ‘Indianization’ occurred over centuries, succeeded in some areas, failed in others, but was always tailored to local needs.

This was certainly true of the powerful Khmer leaders who emerged by the end of the first millennium CE. In 802, King Jayavarman II laid the foundations of a mighty Khmer empire based near Tonlé Sap, with the Mekong River feeding it in the rainy season. Thanks to this abundant water supply, Khmer rulers developed an elaborate hydraulic complex in Angkor Wat, capable of irrigating rice plants and thus producing ever-larger amounts of it. This, in turn, supported one of the largest pre-modern urban populations in the world. Khmer rulers also drew their strength from maritime commerce and used combined persuasion and brute force to expand their empire northward into Laos and eastward into the Mekong delta.

Although the Mekong delta, the Vietnamese coastline, and the surrounding highlands were not heavily populated, these were obviously not empty spaces. Nor were they isolated from the wider region and the world. The central Vietnamese coast in particular offered great opportunities to its inhabitants; but it also posed potential threats. After all, if the Han extended their empire into the Red River delta, making it their southern-most province, it was in part because they wanted an opening to the Indian Ocean trade. For one thousand years, the Han empire ruled the Red River valley.

The Linyi and the Cham Coastal States of the Indian Ocean⁸

To the south of China’s Jiaozhi province emerged new non-Viet states, each of which benefitted from its maritime connections to India, China, and the highlands. Over the course of the first millennium, new polities succeeded those of Funan, Ha Suynh, and Oc Eo. By the fourth and fifth centuries, a new confederation of coastal kingdoms collectively known as Linyi emerged south of the Red River delta. Initially based around Hue, this polity’s leaders took full advantage of their maritime position by trading vigorously with the Indian Ocean world. They expanded their trading to include intensive exchanges with their Chinese neighbor, whose growing economic and cultural development offered new opportunities. While Linyi rulers continued to adapt Indian religions and ideas, they also imported Chinese pottery, architectural styles, art, and ideas through China’s Jiaozhi province. The line between ‘East Asia and China’ and ‘Southeast Asia and India’ was never a sharp one in practice.⁹

Cham polities emerged in the Thu Bon Valley, Nha Trang, and Phan Rang. Like the Austronesians before them, the Cham arrived in Vietnam via the sea, possibly from the Philippines. They traded actively with China, India, and the Middle East. They, too, tailored Hinduism and Buddhism to local needs and used Sanskrit to create a writing system for the Cham language, perhaps the first for Southeast Asia. The Linyi and Cham coastal federations co-existed until around the sixth century, when, for reasons that are not clear, the two states melded into one which was increasingly referred to as Champa. Until the eleventh century, and even later, Champa ruled the coast of central Vietnam, from the southern border of China’s Jiaozhi province to the Khmer empire in the Mekong delta. Again, there was no ‘Vietnam’ during the first millennium.

Nor was there ever one unified Cham state or empire. ‘Champa’ was, in reality, an archipelago-like constellation of small, interconnected coastal kingdoms scattered down the central coastline. Over the centuries, these polities divided into five major realms: 1) Indrapura (located in today’s provinces of Quang Binh, Quang Tri, and Thua Thien); 2) Amaravati (in Quang Nam, Quang Ngai province and on the Thu Bon River), 3) Vijaya (Binh Dinh and along the Con River; 4) Panduranga (in Ninh Thuan, Binh Thuan, and along the Dinh River); and 5) Kauthara (Phu Yen, Khanh Hoa, and along the Cai River). They were decentralized kingdoms whose populations gravitated around a charismatic monarch in a specific location. Each kingdom possessed its own religious markers and separate commercial and agricultural activities. Borders were fluid and often overlapped; power was diffuse. Champa, like other neighboring polities at the time, was a collection of small territories, ‘a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas, or “circles of kings”’. Stronger polities could absorb smaller ones, often doing so violently. This federation of small polities had much in common with the coastal states of archipelago Southeast Asia today, such as Majahapit in today’s Indonesia, than the imperially structured Chinese state to the north or the more centralized, mainland ones that would later emerge in the Red River (Dai Viet), Chaophraya (Thailand), and Irrawaddy (Burma) deltas. In fact, the Cham dispatched official delegations to Majahapit, married their children into island royal families, and served as the intermediaries for commercial, cultural, and religious transfers across archipelago Southeast Asia. Malay peoples were also present in Cham courts, ports, and armies.¹⁰

The Cham also interacted with the nearby Austronesian and Austroasiatic peoples living in the highlands—the Rhade, Roglai, Jorai, Bahnar, Hre, and others. The latter provided Cham traders with much-sought-after luxury goods for the Indian Ocean and Chinese markets, such as rhinoceros horns, ivory, cinnamon, and especially aromatic woods. Eaglewood was particularly important. Cham artistic exchanges—sculptures, statues, and steles—spread inward by overland routes and deep into the Indian Ocean islands by sea. At different times, some Cham kings used these connections to extend their political influence far into the massif. Champassak, the name of a central Laotian province today, is suggestive of such ties. Some highlanders even became Cham kings. And thanks to their commercial networks, Cham merchants served as the intermediaries for the export of Red River ceramics into Indian Ocean markets.¹¹

Cham coastal links eventually brought them into contact with another religion coming from the far western border of the Indian Ocean—Islam. Arab traders had long traded with Southeast Asia in spices and aromatic woods. From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward, these traders and the missionaries traveling with them (‘sufis’) began to spread the Islamic religion rapidly through the coastal polities of island Southeast Asia. Sultanates emerged in such places as Majahapit. Linked commercially, culturally, and matrimonially to archipelago courts, the Cham brought Islam to the Vietnamese coast in the fifteenth century. In so doing, they joined the Khmer and their Austronesian predecessors in transforming areas below the Red River into a fascinating religious mosaic combining Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and pre-existing Austronesian animistic beliefs and practices. Meanwhile, in Jiaozhi province, the Chinese introduced characters, Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism, and new cultural practices.¹²

The Rise and Fall of Po Binasor’s Champa¹³

But even the emergence of an independent Dai Viet polity in the eleventh century did not spell the end of the Cham states, the Khmer empire, or the highlands. Nor did it necessarily send the Viet pouring southward to build ‘Vietnam’ in one fell swoop as the Nam Tien myth claims. Despite the impressive efforts of Dai Viet annalists to locate a shared past in the precolonial period, court politics in the newly born Vietnamese state remained highly unstable, as local leaders competed with each other for power and control of military and economic resources. Moreover, the threat of a Chinese return to the region was always real and the Cham and the Khmer were no regional pushovers. Twentieth-century Cham and Khmer nationalists would like us to believe that they were the pacific victims of Vietnamese colonial aggression; but some centuries earlier their leaders had fought each other and neither had any qualms about attacking the nascent Dai Viet state in the north to expand their own empires. Attracted in large part by Champa’s growing trade with Song China (960–1279) discussed in chapter 1, in the late twelfth century the Khmers attacked and occupied Cham territories, setting up their headquarters in the area of Vijaya in Binh Dinh province today. The Cham pushed back and, in 1226, drove out the Khmers, in order to create their own powerbase in Vijaya. The new leaders also took full advantage of the greater Chinese interaction in the Indian Ocean trade to strengthen their own state and finance a large standing army. Following the defeat of the Mongols in China in 1368, the Cham again improved trading and diplomatic relations with China’s new leaders, the commercially and expansionist-minded Ming.

It was in this wider context that a remarkably charismatic Cham king named Po Binasor (Che Bong Nga, in Vietnamese) took power and presided over a golden age in Cham history in the late fourteenth century. Not only did Po unite the various Cham polities under his control, but he also sought to regain lands the Cham had ceded or lost to the Dai Viet. In 1371, with a green light from China, Po drove his armies overland into the Red River delta, landed his warships on the coast, and marched his men on the Dai Viet capital of Hanoi. Cham troops looted Hanoi and burnt the enemy’s palace to the ground as civilians ran for cover. In 1376, Po Binasor struck again, overpowering the Dai Viet forces and this time even killing the country’s king. By the late fourteenth century, the Cham had not only recovered their lands, but they had also pushed their polity into the lower Red River basin and fostered better relations with China in doing so. If the Dai Viet had repelled the Mongol invaders, they nonetheless failed to stop the Cham from sacking their capital, twice.

Although Po Binasor’s violent northern advance shook the young Dai Viet state to its core, the Viet held on and clawed their way back. When the Cham monarch went on the warpath again in 1390, Dai Viet forces counter-attacked, killed Po Binasor in battle, and prepared to press further southward. The only forces stopping them were those of the Chinese, whose commercial interests in the Indian Ocean and its trade remained as real as ever. Admiral Zheng He’s famous armadas taking him to Africa and to the holy city of Mecca started at this time. In 1406, Ming armies occupied the Red River and transformed it once again into an imperial province, while Zheng He’s boats stopped over in Champa. Although the Dai Viet drove the Chinese out once more in 1428 and established the Le dynasty, the country’s new leaders, many of them military men coming from areas along the kingdom’s southern frontier (the Le, Trinh, and Nguyen), were convinced that the survival of their small state depended on its territorial expansion southward down into the coastal lowlands and the opening of new ground for wet-rice production (and relief from over-population) in the Red River delta. Leaders coming from southern Dai Viet also knew that Vijaya (Qui Nhon today) provided the best opening to the lucrative trade of the Indian Ocean world. No one at the time knew where any of this would go; but it was the start of the Dai Viet colonial project that began with the massive Le attack on Champa in 1471.

The Peoples of the Northern Highlands

While Dai Viet expansion focused mainly on the southern coastal lowlands, war, trade, and migration continued to connect the young Red River state to the surrounding massif in the north and its peoples. Over the centuries, new groups of people continued to arrive in the northern highlands from southern China, most notably the peoples of the Tai-Kadai language family. Slash-and-burn agriculture predominated among them, but wet-rice methods were common where valley water was available. Caravan routes crossed the massif, bringing Chinese traders, explorers, missionaries, and eventually imperial armies. Ideas, technologies, and news moved as new opportunities arose for those who would seize them.

Indeed, the Viet were not the only peoples who tried to create their own state when the Tang dynasty collapsed in the tenth century. In the eleventh century, the Tai-speaking Nung people living along both sides of a loosely controlled Sino-Dai Viet frontier found a charismatic leader in the person of Nung Tri Cao. This young man was familiar with Han statecraft, characters, and attracted by the idea of building an independent state. In 1042, he established the Nung kingdom of ‘Great Succession’ in the areas of today’s Cao Bang and Lang Son provinces. Wary of the emergence of a competing kingdom on their northern border, Dai Viet authorities carried him off to Hanoi. Upon his release a few years later, Tri Cao founded the kingdom of the Southern Heavens in 1048 and, when that failed, tried again by forming the kingdom of the Great South in 1052. This time the Chinese imperial army chased him into the Tai area in Yunnan province, where he died. Although Tri Cao’s efforts to carve out a new state like that of the Viet on the edges of the Chinese empire ultimately failed, this eleventh-century man demonstrates the extent to which peoples like the Tai and Nung continued to operate in the loosely controlled highlands and had their own state-building projects. And in implementing them, charismatic leaders like Tri Cao obligated Chinese and Vietnamese leaders to intensify their efforts to control, indeed colonize their highland border areas, even joining forces to do so.¹⁴

More Tai peoples streamed into the Vietnamese highlands in the nineteenth century as Qing rulers in China struggled to hold their gigantic multiethnic empire together (the Qing were themselves Manchus from the northern steppes bordering today’s Russia). Nowhere was this more evident than when Chinese authorities finally smashed the Taiping rebellion that had surged out from its south in the early 1850s and weakened Beijing’s control over its part of the highland world rising out of central Indochina. As the Qing armies marched across the southern provinces in the 1860s, their brutal repression sent tens of thousands of mainly Tai and Hmong peoples into the Nguyen kingdom’s northern massif. These refugees joined the Nung and other highland groups such as the Khmu, Lolo, Yao, and Man. In all, more than thirty groups lived in Vietnam’s northern highlands, operating under their own chiefdoms and confederations and sending tribute at irregular intervals to the Chinese, Vietnamese, and others.

CONFRONTING VIET EMPIRE

As is so often the case in the imperial chapters of world history, the colonized borrow heavily from their former colonizers. The Viet were no exception to this rule. The Ming occupation may have only lasted two short decades (1407–28), but it was a period of intense and rapid military, cultural, and political transfers to the Red River that drew upon a millennium of earlier colonial interactions and structures. The Viet cherished their independence, but they knew their former colonizers intimately and admired them for many things. Little wonder Dai Viet leaders actively sought out Chinese models and technologies: such things could help them prosper and rule. Thanks to the Ming, for example, the Viet obtained some of the most advanced military technology of the time (cannons, gunpowder, and warships). Postcolonial Dai Viet’s leaders also embraced the Chinese bureaucratic model for building and expanding a centralized state capable of recruiting, organizing, and deploying manpower and resources. Chinese statecraft served as a powerful weapon for incorporating and administering Dai Viet’s own newly conquered territories. By willingly entering a China-centered East Asian civilizational world that placed Confucian-minded states (real or imagined) in a superior cultural position vis-à-vis their ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbarian’ neighbors, Dai Viet leaders now had a powerful ideology to justify a mission civilisatrice outside their current borders. And pushing Dai Viet leaders from below were new population pressures, the product of the Red River delta’s rapid agricultural expansion.

In 1470–71, the Le dynasty initiated Vietnam’s first real war of territorial conquest by launching a massive attack on Vijaya. The Vietnamese mobilized their cannons, navy, and three hundred thousand troops to strike a Cham force of 100,000 men (but who lacked a charismatic leader). Nearby Khmer and Chinese courts stood by idly as the Dai Viet seized Vijaya and turned it into the province of Binh Dinh. The meaning of the province’s name was ‘pacified’. The Cham polities of Indrapura, Amaravati, and Vijaya were now Dai Viet. While the fall of Vijaya did not trigger the immediate collapse of the other Cham polities located to the south (Panduranga and Kauthara), from the fifteenth century Viet leaders had all sorts of reasons to continue their imperial project southward.¹⁵

The Cham and the Nguyen Empire-State

However, the Dai Viet state the Le founded in the fifteenth century did not preside over Vietnam’s colonial expansion to the Gulf of Thailand. The rebel Nguyen military lords did. The long civil war that broke out between the Trinh and the Nguyen in the early seventeenth century forced the latter further into the south with their leader in the person of General Nguyen Hoang (discussed in our first chapter). Under constant threat of invasion from the Trinh in the north and with little land on which to stand in the southern part of the same state, Hoang and his descendants recognized that their survival depended on taking the rest of the coast from the Cham, promoting Viet settlements in these lands, and taking control of Cham trade with the Indian Ocean and the central highlands. The Nguyen used the Sino-Vietnamese administrative model their forefathers had borrowed from the Chinese. And like them and others, they compromised with it too and devised all sorts of indirect forms of rule to administer far-flung regions and peoples. Pragmatic colonizers are always the most successful.

The Nguyen state was thus born of recurrent civil war, sustained colonial expansion, and military rule. No sooner had the Trinh and Nguyen gone to war in 1627 than the latter struck southward, against the Cham. In 1653, Kauthara fell to the Nguyen, whose territorial domain now extended from the Hai Van pass to the Phan Rang River. Even the last remaining Cham state, Panduranga, found itself under intense pressure as the Nguyen required its leaders to send tribute to Hue as a sign of its vassalage. This also sent a clear message to the Trinh in Hanoi that the Nguyen were heading up a separate state with an imperial project at its state-making core.¹⁶

As the Nguyen colonial state expanded southward, its leaders focused on the Khmer empire, too. Starting in the late seventeenth century, Hue’s leaders adopted an increasingly aggressive line toward the Khmer court (now located in Phnom Penh) and intervened directly in Cambodian court politics. This was designed mostly to promote Nguyen control over the lower Mekong and to prevent another rapidly emerging state to the west (that of the Thai in the Chao Phraya River valley), from moving into the declining Khmer empire at the Nguyens’ expense. And as the Thais pushed into Cambodia, the Nguyen rapidly expanded into the Mekong delta and the last remaining Cham state blocking their march to the Gulf of Thailand. This is how modern Vietnam’s ‘S’-like form emerged. The Nguyen created it through colonial expansion. In fact, by the late seventeenth century, thousands of Viet settlers had already moved into Panduranga and had no intention of leaving.¹⁷

In 1692, with his back against the wall, Panduranga’s King Po Saut decided to attack the Nguyen forces in order to stop the creation of this ‘S’-shaped state before it was too late. The Nguyen leader, Nguyen Phuc Chu, welcomed such a move, since it provided him with the pretext he needed to conquer the last Cham state and move his army and more settlers into the Mekong. Confident that the Chinese and Khmers would not intervene, the Nguyen overpowered the Cham, abolished the monarchy, and transformed Panduranga into the province of Thuan Thanh. Convinced of their superiority, the Nguyen required the conquered Cham to adopt Vietnamese customs and dress, speak Vietnamese, and adhere to the Sino-Vietnamese bureaucratic and civilizational models.¹⁸

Such harsh measures provoked immediate resistance. Viewed from the Cham point of view, Nguyen colonial expansion meant the end of everything that had been theirs for centuries—a unique coastal confederation with close commercial, cultural, and religious ties to island Southeast Asia, a distinct language with its own writing system, very different ways of dress and conceptions of time and space, as well as unique social organizations, land rights, and fiscal administration. Always pragmatic, the Nguyen switched rapidly to indirect rule. They had neither the military forces necessary to ensure such a harsh occupation nor sufficient administrative organizations and civil servants to control these new territories. The new emperor of the Nguyen, Minh Vuong, transformed Thuan Thanh (Champa) into a protectorate and promoted association rather than assimilation as his colonial policy. Instead of putting ethnic Viet administrators in charge of what was still a majority Cham population, he sought out reliable yet loyal indigenous intermediaries. These go-betweens could work with the Nguyen to win over the support of the Cham people, administer them more effectively, and thereby legitimate Viet colonial rule more effectively. The Nguyen found an invaluable ally in the person of Po Saktiraydaputa, a member of the Cham royal family. Po Saktiraydaputa saw in collaboration with the Nguyen the chance to protect his people, preserve Cham ways, and assert his power over rivals. Minh Vuong made him King of Panduranga.

While this last of the Cham kingdoms was not an independent sovereign state, as a Viet protectorate the Cham did recover considerable local powers. In 1712, for example, the Nguyen allowed Cham courts to judge local affairs and set up a court consisting of both Cham and Viet personnel to deal with affairs involving the Viet settlers. The Cham regained the right to speak their language and practice their religions. They also paid lower taxes. Like the Qing rulers who built Tibetan Buddhist temples in Beijing as they pushed China’s imperial borders deep into central Asia (Tibet became a protectorate in 1751), Minh Vuong openly associated himself with the Cham king and helped to renovate the sacred Cham temple of Thien Pu in Hue while his Nguyen imperial state expanded deeper into Southeast Asia.¹⁹

None of this, however, changed the fact that, having taken Panduranga, the Nguyen were strategically placed to expand their colonial control into the Mekong delta, which they progressively did over the next century. By the early nineteenth century, over one hundred thousand Khmers joined another one hundred thousand Cham as subjects of the Nguyen imperial order. Severed from the Angkorian empire now based in Phnom Penh, Cambodians used the term ‘Khmer Krom’ to refer to themselves, meaning the Khmers living in the ‘lower’ Mekong River valley. Most were wet-rice growers, cattle farmers, and Theravada Buddhists. Many Cham also fled into Khmer Krom areas, Phnom Penh, and island Southeast Asia. Some joined the Malays and, on one occasion in the seventeenth century, successfully convinced a Cambodian king to convert to Islam.²⁰

But changes in the balance of power always change the dynamics of collaborative relationships, as we have repeatedly seen in this book. Nowhere was this more evident here than when the Tay Son rebellion set off another round of Vietnamese civil wars in the late eighteenth century. At the outset, many Cham eagerly joined the Tay Son brothers. In fact, Tay Son (meaning ‘Western Mountains’) was the village where the revolt started. Significantly, it was located in the central highlands and ethnically mixed. One Nguyen rebel had a Bahnar as his second wife. Some have suggested that the Tay Son brothers were the offspring of mixed marriages. It is quite possible. Upon launching their revolt, the oldest of the three, Nguyen Nhac, proclaimed himself ruler in the ruins of Vijaya and claimed to possess a sacred sword like one of those of the highlanders. In any case, the Tay Son uprising was a product of these longstanding interactions between the Viet and non-Viet peoples and between the lowlands and uplands of Vietnam.²¹

As military operations rolled through the Cham heartlands and then spread to all of Vietnam, the balance of power shifted back and forth over three decades. Cham elites and peasants adjusted their loyalties and alliances accordingly in the hope that such strategies would keep them out of harm’s way in the postwar period. Viet belligerents adapted too. Holed up in the south, the new charismatic leader of the Nguyen, Gia Long, carefully stitched together a series of alliances with the Khmer Krom, the local Chinese, various religious groups, and the Cham. In exchange for their collaboration, he promised them all indirect rule, autonomy, and respect for their customs, religions, languages, and local identities. To the Cham, he swore the restoration of the Panduranga monarchy under future protectorate rule. And in 1802, after having victoriously unified all of Vietnam under Nguyen rule, Gia Long made good on his word. He re-established the Panduranga throne and carefully avoided policies that could turn the non-Viet peoples against him. Imperfect as it was, peace largely reigned until the emperor’s death in 1820.²²

Minh Mang and the Rise of Cham Anticolonialism

The same could not be said of his son Minh Mang (1820–41), who intentionally reversed his father’s commitment to indirect imperial rule. Much more Confucian-minded than Gia Long, Minh Mang was obsessed with order and determined to deploy the Sino-Vietnamese bureaucratic model to achieve it. This entailed establishing the unflinching loyalty of his subjects, including the hundreds of thousands of non-Viet ones. If that meant assimilating all of his subjects to his Sino-Vietnamese administrative model, political identity, and common culture under his personal control, then so be it. Although one could argue that what Minh Mang was doing was remarkably modern in terms of rationalizing the state, centralizing power, and homogenizing identity, his harsh application of such policies created a sea of resistance and a wall of non-Viet hate.

In 1832, if not earlier, Minh Mang ordered the dismantling of the protectorate over Panduranga, the abolition of the Cham monarchy and its indigenous administration, and their incorporation into the province of Binh Thuan under a Viet governor named by him. Gone, too, were the Cham courts and mixed-personnel tribunals. The Vietnamese imperial army arrived to ensure order and enforce new labor, tax, and land laws. As we saw in chapter 2, the emperor of the Nguyen also applied the same policies to the Khmer Krom while simultaneously trying to colonize all of Cambodia. The emperor required the Cham and Cambodians to dress like the Vietnamese, eat like the Vietnamese, and learn Vietnamese. Minh Mang actively discouraged (and often prohibited) the practice of Islam, Theravada Buddhism, and Hinduism, judged inferior to Sino-Vietnamese civilization and the Confucian model upon which it turned (in his view).

For the Cham and Cambodians, colonial assimilation not only shattered their political independence for good, but it also threatened their very existence as separate cultural and religious identities. The Cham have left records of the hardship they endured under Vietnamese colonial exploitation. As one voice cried out in the 1830s: ‘The Cham lords were [forced] to abandon [the celebration of their] rites for the ancestors. The lords were made to say that the [Cham] traditions were bad and had to be abandoned and that the Vietnamese traditions were appropriate and had to be followed’. Desolation was real: ‘There is nothing left in front or behind of us. All the things that we used to produce with hard work [have been taken away]. Nothing is left for our subsistence.’ The Nguyen forcibly recruited Cham and Khmer labor to build roads, bridges, and canals, just as they did in Cambodia during the construction of the Vinh Te canal. Colonial corvée was not a French creation. Nor were the French the first to face anticolonial resistance movements.²³

It was in these dire circumstances that a Muslim Cham named Katip Sumat arrived in Pandarunga from Cambodia. He had just returned from Mecca and was determined to help organize a resistance movement against the Vietnamese and spread Islam at the same time. To this end, he organized guerilla forces among the Cham and nearby highlanders and declared jihad (‘holy war’) on the Nguyen infidels. Furious, Minh Mang rushed in his troops, armed local Viet settlers, and called upon both to crush the ‘rebels’ and this foreign faith. Popular support for Katip declined as the army cracked down violently and several Cham elites realized that this man might not have had their interests foremost in his mind. Another Muslim leader, this time a local Cham named Ja Thak, took over and forged alliances with remaining royal family members, a range of highland peoples, and other Viet at odds with Hue (and there were many). But Minh Mang persevered and in early 1835 his army smashed Ja Thak and the rest of the Cham rebels. The result was catastrophic for the Cham, who now became, along with the Khmer Krom, second-class citizens in their own lands. And Thai (not French) intervention in Cambodia at this time may have been the only thing that saved what remained of the Khmer empire from becoming a permanent part of the Vietnamese one.²⁴

Highland Vietnam: The Limits of Colonial Assimilation?²⁵

While Vietnamese colonial expansion had always focused on the lowlands, the Nguyen were as engaged as their predecessors in Hanoi had been with the surrounding highlands—and vice versa. Although the court found it difficult to recruit people willing to work in the highlands, considered by many Viet to be inhospitable and insalubrious places, the Nguyen regularly sent administrators, merchants, and armies into the highlands to explore and survey the area, and also to repress, and tax non-Viet populations whenever possible. In 1697, for example, the Nguyen created the barbarian tax (‘thue Man’). Less than a century later, such taxation generated real hardship, enough to stir highland peoples to revolt under the Tay Son.

The Nguyen intensified their relationships with the central and northern highlands when they unified all of the country at the turn of nineteenth century. Often working through Chinese merchants, Nguyen monarchs traded in cinnamon with Jarai headmen. So lucrative was this commerce that Minh Mang made its production a crown monopoly. Also reinforcing Nguyen interest in the highlands was the expansion of the Thais into Lao territories to the west. In the north, as we saw above, the Qing repression of the Taiping and highlander ‘rebels’ in southern China had sent tens of thousands of Tai and Hmong peoples flowing into northern Vietnam. Joining them were local militias and bandit groups, of which the Black Flags paramilitary forces crossing the Sino-Vietnamese border were important examples (see chapter 2).²⁶

Worried by all of this activity in the borderlands, the Nguyen began collecting information on the upland peoples, their languages, customs, and social organization, at the same time as exploring ways of better administering them. In the northern highlands, the Nguyen improved salaries and offered fast-track promotions to Viet administrators who accepted tough posts in these remote parts of the empire. In the north, the Hue court adapted the Chinese ‘tusi’ system (‘tho ty’ in Vietnamese) in order to rule rugged Tai areas through local hereditary chiefs. For example, Hue authorized the local strongman, Deo Van Tri, to collect taxes, trade in opium, and administer justice locally on the condition that he ensure security in the northwest, forward tax revenues to the court, and maintain his people under Nguyen sovereignty. With roots in the eleventh century, this classic form of indirect rule allowed loyal hereditary chiefs to rule vast territories alongside ethnic Viet imperial administrators. Even the assimilationist-obsessed Minh Mang had to concede in the 1830s that direct rule was impossible in this part of his empire.²⁷

This was also true for the central highlands looking down over Hue, where the Nguyen reinvigorated their tributary relationships as another form of indirect rule. In 1831, Minh Mang applauded the arrival of Jarai emissaries to his court, especially when they solemnly presented him with tribute symbolizing their submission to Nguyen imperial rule. ‘Today’, Minh Mang gushed on one august occasion in the 1830s, ‘enthroned in the royal palace so as to receive tribute from these envoys, I saw with my own eyes that they were properly guarded, and they bowed in the prescribed ceremonial manner’. Nguyen officials sent their emissaries to the Jarai and Rhadé lands to participate in the ‘oath ceremony’ during which, the Nguyen annals tell us, both sides ‘mixed alcohol with clear water, poured it in a vase, and used bamboo tubes to draw it up and drink it’. Performed before hundreds of highland elites, this public ceremony demonstrated lowland Nguyen respect for the highland peoples, while simultaneously confirming Jarai submission to Nguyen imperial sovereignty. The French would re-enact this ceremony for the same reasons. But they did not create it; for they were not the first colonizers in this part of the world.²⁸

The highlanders and the Nguyen also built walls to deal with each other, but not just in oppositional terms. In 1819, the Nguyen dynasty erected a 127-kilometer-long wall in Quang Ngai province to protect them from upland attacks coming from the Hre, while the Hre sought to stop Vietnamese from moving into their territories. However, recent research also shows that the Vietnamese and Hre people built this wall together, and that they did so in part to maintain and provide security for inter-zonal trade and diplomatic relations. Such exchanges had been occurring for centuries between the upland and lowland areas. The ‘wall’ was one site for this. Markets were another. While the balance of power increasingly tilted against the highlanders, the relationships between the two sides were often more complex than we might first imagine.²⁹

FROM IMPERIAL TO NATIONAL ORDERS IN THE HIGHLANDS?

Enter the French Empire

Unsurprisingly, the French faced many of the same problems as their Viet predecessors when it came to incorporating highland territories and peoples into their colonial state, the Indochinese Union. The list is familiar by now: the need to thwart competing powers from moving into the region from the west (the Thais, but also with the British now in the background too), chronic disorder along the Sino-Vietnamese border as the Qing dynasty melted down, an acute lack of knowledge of Indochina’s highlands, and a never-ending shortage of civil servants to rule these vast areas.

The crucial difference between the two imperial projects vis-à-vis the highlands is that by toppling the pre-existing Nguyen empire, the French generated an anticolonialist Viet movement opposed to the colonial order the French wanted to build upon it. Viet royalist elites not only fled abroad to Japan, China, and Thailand, but many also headed into the nearby central highlands. This was the case for the Nguyen court scholars turned patriots, Phan Dinh Phung, Ton That Thuyet, and the boy emperor, Ham Nghi, whom they smuggled out of Hue when the French sacked the imperial capital in 1885. In order to contain the emergence of Vietnamese anticolonialism in the highlands, the French immediately adopted policies to turn the non-Viet peoples against their former overlords and to align them with themselves. This meant replacing Viet imperial administrators in the highlands with French commissioners and a new generation of highlander military and administrative elites. It also meant protecting highlander peoples and cultures from ethnic Viet immigration (although that never worked out so nicely in practice). But French imperial strategies also created new highlander identities, territorial spaces, and interethnic oppositions that had never existed before; but which continue to shape modern Vietnam to this day.

The first Frenchmen to administer people in the central highlands were not colonial officials; they were in fact European Catholic missionaries seeking shelter from Minh Mang’s persecution. Pushed out of the lowlands, these religious men immediately focused on ‘civilizing’ and converting the highland peoples to Christianity. As one French priest wrote in 1830s: ‘[One would have to make men of them first, in order to make Christians of them’. While large-scale conversions of the highlanders came later, these missionaries spread Christianity into the highlands for the first time and in so doing introduced new religious practices, identities, and rituals that mixed with pre-existing beliefs and added to the mosaic discussed above and elsewhere in this book. Missions emerged with their own territorial boundaries, while priests provided another layer of ethnographic knowledge about the non-Viet peoples. The French conquest of Vietnam certainly provided safety for the missionaries and facilitated their work in the highlands. In exchange, military officers and administrators looked to the missionaries to provide them with the information and the help they badly needed to rule in these far-flung areas into which Viet royalists were regrouping and the British, Thais, and Germans were thought to be active.³⁰

Colonial rulers were so desperate in the early years for administrative help that they even turned to a fast-talking, megalomaniac adventurer named Marie-Charles David de Mayréna. In 1885, as the anticolonialist Can Vuong or Save the King movement took off, de Mayréna and a handful of priests jointly organized a confederation of non-Viet peoples in the central highlands of Kontum. The problem, however, was a familiar one—ensuring loyalty. In 1888 French officials were aghast when they learned that instead of remaining as one part of the confederation, de Mayréna had decided instead to create his own new, separate ‘Kingdom of the Sedang’ (its name referred to one of the tribal groups in Kontum). For de Mayréna, his new kingdom was a sovereign, independent state, complete with its own stamps, flag, and customs service. He even declared himself king and made Catholicism his state’s official religion. While colonial authorities quickly ended this most embarrassing experiment in indirect rule (clearly, they had been conned), de Mayréna’s kingdom, like Nung Tri Cao’s before it and others elsewhere, reminded all of the need to take control of the highlands before others did. This fiasco also convinced many French republican officials that they could not trust missionaries. One went so far as to write that the de Mayréna affair showed that French priests wanted to create a ‘free state like that of the Jesuits in Paraguay’. Republicans truly feared this, as mad as Mayréna was.³¹

For the time being, the French depended most on their military and its officers to rule as diplomats cobbled together what, by the early 1900s, became known as French Indochina. Like the Nguyen before them, French administrators created military territories in the northern highlands and Laos. They also transferred highland territories (and borders) back and forth between Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Laos, and Cambodia, searching for the best ways to rule over those whom some had started to call the ‘moï’ peoples. Of Sino-Vietnamese origin, this term referred to peoples who did not share in the East Asian cultural world discussed above. They were the ‘uncivilized’, the ‘barbarians’. In French hands, however, moï became a handy word to refer to the non-Viet central highlanders in Annam in particular, the montagnards, later on, for those who dwelled in the entire massif. In 1931, the central highlands covering parts of northern Cochinchina and Annam counted 600,000 ‘moïs’. Further to the north, in the Tonkin highlands, another 700,000 ‘ethnic minorities’ (‘minorités ethniques’) resided (Tho, Tai, Man, Hmong, Nung, Lolo, and so on). To this tally the French added 312,000 Khmer in the Mekong delta. In all, a population of about 1.7 million non-Viet peoples lived in the highlands of the Annamese Cordillera which ran into the Mekong marshlands.³²

With the arrival of Paul Doumer and the death of Phan Dinh Phung at the turn of the century, the French focused further on consolidating their control over the highlands. True to style, Doumer created new highland provinces for Pleiku, Darlac, and Haut Donnai. Others soon followed. Impressed by what the Nguyen had created, one subordinate reported that it was important to embrace a ‘system of direct rule’ for the central highlands: ‘I will not hide from you that this seems more practical to manage a people as primitive as the Moï’. By ‘direct rule’, however, colonial authorities did not mean ‘assimilation’. Even though Annam was a French protectorate and the French should therefore have been maintaining the pre-existing Nguyen administration and mandarins to rule all of Annam indirectly, including non-Viet areas, this was not desirable in the Annamese highlands because the French did not trust their monarchs or their mandarins there. The French decided instead to withdraw most Viet administrators from the central highlands, and rule themselves through French commissioners, who, in turn, would collaborate with the local headmen like the Jarai leader Khunjanob in Darlac province and Deo Van Tri in the northwestern highlands. Unlike in Laos and Cambodia, where the French relied on ethnic Viet bureaucrats to help them rule, the French largely excluded the Viet from the highland administration.³³

At the same time, French colonialism triggered changes that ran counter to that very isolationist policy. Firstly, they expanded the number of roads crisscrossing Indochina in unprecedented ways. Secondly, French financial groups, investors, and the Bank of Indochina, keen to open more mines and plantations, promoted the economic development of highland areas after the First World War. Rubber, coffee, and tea could grow well in different parts of the entire Vietnamese massif. Thirdly, thanks to better roads, technology, and modern finance, more settlers and companies moved into the area to stake land claims, establish plantations, and blast open new mines. This, in turn, stimulated an unprecedented demand for labor. And when highland peoples balked at joining this new commercial world, settlers never hesitated to bring in ethnic Viet labor instead or to resort to imposing the corvée upon the non-Viet. Viet entrepreneurs also wanted to open up the highlands for similar reasons. Little wonder the patterns of Viet colonialism started to move westward under the French. In 1943, 42,000 ethnic Viet and 5,100 French people resided in the highlands. Although miniscule compared to the larger central highlander population of one million by the Second World War, these Euro-Viet colonialists were the start of an everlarger influx of workers and settlers. Some Viet plantation owners even had an edge over their French counterparts. But such Franco-Vietnamese intrusions into the highlands often triggered violent resistance from the indigenous populations.³⁴

This commercial penetration of the highlands led to another affair that would do much to seal an alliance between colonial officials and highlander elites and stimulate the birth of a separate moï identity. The man at the center of this affair was Léopold Sabatier. Between 1913 and 1926, this professionally trained administrator worked tirelessly from his office in Ban Me Thuot, tending to the Rhadé and other highlanders in Dac Lac province. Unlike de Mayréna, Sabatier’s loyalty to the French colonial state was unshakeable. Particularly close to Pierre Pasquier (the Commissioner of Annam after the First World War), Sabatier understood the importance of the highlanders in the defense of Indochina and in containing Vietnamese nationalism. (In 1916, another Vietnamese emperor, Duy Tan, had tried to escape the role of puppet monarch which the French had imposed upon him by heading for these same hills.) Pasquier and Sabatier also wanted to protect the ‘pristine’ highlanders from the Franco-Viet settlers and the commercial economy they represented. Sabatier’s originality resided in his efforts to bequeath the highlanders a separate identity, but one which was allied with the French. With Pasquier’s backing, he devised and published a romanized Rhadé writing system, presided over the creation of a Rhadé customary law code and justice system, opened Franco-Rhadé schools for thousands of youngsters, recruited men into the French-led colonial army, opened hospitals and introduced modern medicine. He personally participated in the highland oath ceremonies during which he publicly professed his government’s unflinching respect for the highlanders in exchange for their recognition of French sovereignty. Similar efforts were made among the highlanders in the north as well as among the Khmer in Cochinchina whose children attended renovated pagoda schools under French, not Vietnamese, control.³⁵

But Sabatier’s efforts to isolate the highlands landed him in trouble in the 1920s when powerful people with financial interests called for his removal. Most importantly, Sabatier’s tenure coincided with the upswing in the world demand for rubber. As prices soared, financial groups pressed the metropolitan and colonial authorities to open up the highlands to further commercial development: rubber trees grew well in the terres rouges of the central highlands. French and Viet landowners and settlers joined them in calling for Sabatier to be ousted. Despite Pasquier’s efforts to protect his loyal servant, these Franco-Viet groups finally succeeded in dislodging Sabatier from his post in 1926. Once again, the ‘colonizers’ were not always one monolithic bloc, racially or economically. Here, French and Vietnamese settlers had joined forces.

While Euro-Viet settlers may have mocked Sabatier for defending the highlanders, esteem for him ran high within the colonial administration and army. Indeed, his work with the Rhadé served as the blueprint for subsequent administrators keen to contain Vietnamese nationalists and communists and to protect Indochina from external threats. In 1935, in the wake of massive lowland Viet revolts at Yen Bay and Nghe An a few years earlier (see chapter 5), one French general argued strongly in favor of creating an autonomous moï region under the governor general’s guidance. Another emphasized the need ‘to save this race, to disentangle it from all harmful foreign influences through a direct administration, and to tie these tribes to us [. . .] These proud peoples with their spirit of independence will provide us with elite troops, [serve] as safety valves in case of internal insurgency, and [act] as powerful combat units in case of external war’. In the late 1930s, Governor General Jules Brévié insisted that the moï constituted a unique racial group and as such deserved the creation of separate French territorial administration. In 1939, as the Japanese army moved its troops down the southern China coast, Brévié created the General Inspectorate for the Moï Region. And while French-controlled Vietnam was under Japanese occupation, Vichy’s Governor General Jean Decoux solemnly participated in the oath ceremony and tried to transfer the colonial capital to Dalat. Though never officially considered as such, the highland areas constituted collectively a separate French protectorate, one part in the central highlands of Annam, the other concentrated in northwestern Tonkin. Speaking of the central highlands in 1937, a French administrator insisted that there was more to Indochina than Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina: ‘One must, to be entirely accurate, complete this geographical expression [of Indochina] by adding to it a sixth part, that of the pays moï’. And as we shall see, from this ‘sixth part’ a separate highlander identity would emerge.³⁶

Maintaining French Control over the Highlands

As attractive as it was for budding highlander nationalists and strongmen, French protectorate rule placed the people of the massifs in a very dangerous position in 1945, when the Japanese overturned the French colonial state before capitulating to the Allies a few months later. Stepping into the vacuum, Vietnamese nationalists seized power. On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This government immediately decreed laws unifying Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina into one sovereign territory and turning the great majority of those born or residing within ‘Vietnam’s’ borders into ‘Vietnamese citizens’. This included the two million non-Viet people who were living in the highlands. Ho did not recognize French rule there or any other special colonial arrangements. It was, he insisted, simply ‘Vietnamese’.

But the French were not about to relinquish their Indochinese colony or their direct administration of the highlands, not yet. Starting in Saigon in September 1945, they slowly retook their Indochinese colony piece by piece until they had triggered a full-scale war with the DRV in late 1946. The new High Commissioner of Indochina, Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, immediately renewed efforts to turn the central highlands and peoples against Vietnamese nationalists, relying on a veteran group of Indochinese administrators in order to do so. In May 1946, at the very moment he was piecing together the Provisional Government of the Republic of Cochinchina, Thierry d’Argenlieu also presided over the creation of the Highland Populations of Southern Indochina (Populations montagnardes du Sud-Indochinois). Administered by the French, this autonomous territorial domain consisted of the central highland provinces of Annam. Like his predecessors reaching back to the Nguyen, Thierry d’Argenlieu travelled to Ban Me Thuot to take part in the oath ceremony. Democratic Republic of Vietnam officials protested vigorously, insisting that the highlands were Vietnamese; but to no avail.

Significantly, the French were no more willing to cede the upland regions to the Vietnamese government which they themselves sought to build in the form of the Associated State of Vietnam. Although Léon Pignon, the French high commissioner between 1948 and 1950, had allowed for the unification of this Vietnam, his team intentionally attached the operation of the highlands to Bao Dai, convinced that they could control their emperor and, through him, the central massif, as they had done in the past. This is how and why the Crown Domain of the Southern Highlander Country (Domaine de la couronne du pays montagnards du Sud) came to life in 1950. By winning over Bao Dai’s collaboration, the French had devised a method to continue to maintain a separate hold over this militarily important part of Indochina. Although the French nominally recognized Vietnamese sovereignty over the highlands, they maintained a ‘special status’ for the highlands because of ‘special French obligations’. In 1950, immaculately dressed in white suits, Léon Pignon and Bao Dai stepped before two thousand highland chiefs in Ban Me Thuot to participate in the oath ceremony. But everyone knew that France’s longtime Indochina hand, Jean Cousseau, ran the highlands as the ‘special delegate’, not the Vietnamese monarch. The Crown Domain of the Southern Highlander Country thus serves as a case study in Bao Dai’s failure to force the French to decolonize completely, when he could have done so. The Crown Domain was nothing more than a new term for the continuation of the de facto French protectorate over the ‘sixième pays’ of colonial Indochina.

Until 1954, the French continued to support a separate territorial administration, highlander education, language training, and military service. In so doing, the French brought isolated highlanders together like never before. Hundreds of young men coming from across the central massif met each other in the classrooms of the newly opened Collège Sabatier. Many accepted administrative positions outside their native lands, and in so doing developed long-lasting and often unprecedented relationships extending across the hills. Similar things happened in highlander combat units. Marriage across clan lines increased. French and, increasingly, Rhadé began to serve as a common language. Protestant missionaries, mainly American and French, started attracting thousands of converts in the highlands. Their schools and missions circulated highlander youth across tribal lines. And from 1950 onward, the French and Americans promoted special agricultural and infrastructure programs for this area.³⁷

The French extended these policies to the northern massif. Of particular concern was that the transfer of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the northern highlands from late 1946 onward would lead Ho Chi Minh’s administrators to turn the large Tai, Hmong, and Nung populations there against the French. And of course the DRV tried. In February 1946, the French moved troops from southern China (where they had fled the Japanese coup in Indochina in March 1945) into the Tai regions of northwestern Vietnam. With the outbreak of full-scale war later that year, French officials renewed their contacts with Tai clans. Foremost among them was Deo Van Tri, whose son Deo Van Long was now in charge. In 1948, in exchange for Tai loyalty and collaboration against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam administratively and militarily, the French granted the northwest autonomous rule in the form of a Tai federation. Led by Deo Van Long, this federation regrouped the strategically important northwestern provinces of Lai Chau, Phong Tho, and Son La together. Here, too, the French promoted the Tai language, education, military training, and created a new generation of ethnic Tai civil servants. As they had done with the central highland domain, the French connected the Tai Federation to the person of Bao Dai, albeit via French officials once more. Many highlander elites, village headmen and colonially trained civil servants and officers embraced the creation of a wider nationalist identity which was separate from the one ethnic Viet leaders sought to impose. And at war over the destiny of Indochina, opposing Vietnamese states, the French, increasingly backed by the Americans, organized and militarized the massif as never before in its long history. Indeed, French and soon American military officers became heavily invested in working with highland peoples, just as did their Vietnamese enemies.³⁸

Nationalist Strategies and Highlander Autonomy

War mitigated any hard-handed assimilationist moves on the part of Vietnamese communists, at least during the early years of the Indochina conflict. In order to combat the French and their allies, experts in charge of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s newly created highlander affairs bureau carefully respected local traditions, languages, and cultures, and promised autonomy. While Ho’s specialists might not have had either the professional training of someone like Léopold Sabatier, nor could they draw upon a pre-existing Vietnamese-run highland civil service, they were hardly neophytes when it came to knowing the massif. Hounded by the French for years, communists had often taken refuge there, like rebel kings before them. Moreover, the communist organization was, to my knowledge, the only modern political party before 1945 to have shown any real interest in highland peoples and actually opened its doors to them (Catholic and Protestant missions were the only exceptions to this). By the Second World War, some of the most important leaders of the communist party were ethnic Tais from the far north—Hoang Van Thu, Hoang Dinh Giong, and Hoang Van Non. Their multilingualism, local contacts, and knowledge of the highlands on both sides of the Sino-Vietnamese border made them priceless intermediaries for building the party. In 1941, for similar reasons, the communists recruited and promoted a Nung to the highest echelons of what became the People’s Army of Vietnam. His name was Chu Van Tan. Between 1949 and 1954, Tan ran the administrative zone for all of northern Vietnam, demonstrating how people from a so-called ‘ethnic minority’ could rise to the very highest levels of the Vietnamese army, state, and party. It is hard to find such a parallel in Bao Dai’s Vietnam and in any case the French were opposed to precisely this type of national integration. Few non-Viet elite members served in the Nguyen court under the French. The communists would backtrack in the late twentieth century, when relations with communist China melted down, official racism raised its ugly head once more, and loyalties along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier blurred again. In 1979, the Viet majority of the communist party placed General Chu Van Tan under house arrest, far from his family and friends along the Sino-Vietnamese border. The parallel with Nung Tri Cao must have crossed more than one historically informed mind.

Lastly, Vietnamese communists working outside Indochina before 1941 were well versed in internationalist communist forms of rule toward the ‘ethnic minority question’. Lest we forget, the Soviets and Chinese were also the inheritors of pre-existing multi-ethnic empires. During his long stay in Moscow in the 1930s, Ho would have had ample time to study this matter and the federalist ideas communist theorists had devised to rule the USSR. The Indochinese Communist Party sent another ethnic Tai, Hoang Tu Huu, to Moscow to attend the Comintern Congress in 1935. When Ho Chi Minh left Moscow in 1938 to make his way to Vietnam, he travelled overland through the central Asian borderlands of China before making his way into the multiethnic massif that the Yunnan and Guangxi provinces share with Indochina. When he set up the Viet Minh’s base in the Pac Bo caves of Cao Bang province, his success depended on non-Viet collaboration, and this would be the case until 1954. Like Pham Van Dong, Ho knew from personal experience that the highlands were not unpopulated regions.³⁹

Little wonder flexibility characterized communist work among the highlanders. If local non-Viet elites pledged their loyalty to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and refrained from aiding the enemy, the communists were content to operate through them to maintain security, obtain food, and recruit laborers and soldiers. Ho and his lieutenants did their best to immerse themselves in local cultures, organized literacy classes, and tried to learn at least some words in local languages. Ho dressed deliberately in local dress, as a sign of communist sensitivity toward borderland peoples. Ho’s men entered into contact with non-Viet leaders who had suffered under French rule, carefully exploiting, for example, the Deo family’s mistreatment of the Hmong. The DRV avoided imposing onerous taxes, steered clear of cultural assimilation, respected local languages, helped develop French-initiated scripts for them, and, for the time being, delayed land reform and radical social revolution. The communists opened schools for upland children, introduced hygiene and medicines, and trained members of local elites for civil service and military positions, but always treated them as part of the wider ‘Vietnamese family’, within a process focused on national integration.

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s shift to conventional warfare from 1950 onward led both the belligerents to rely ever more heavily on Tai, Hmong, and Nung peoples to supply highland battlefields with recruits, porters, intelligence, and food. The political autonomy the people there enjoyed up to this point began to disappear as the communists mobilized for war in the massifs. And the intensification of the war also brought more Americans into the highlands (although American Protestants had been in Vietnam since the 1920s). The Americans pushed the French hard to build up their special forces in the highlands where they jutted into China’s underbelly, convinced of the threat of a wider communist thrust into Southeast Asia and now also themselves at war with the Chinese in Korea. As during the Second World War and again during the Vietnam War, the Americans wanted to use the geopolitical area of the massif to gather intelligence, harass the communists, create secure zones for the nationalists, and win over the hearts and minds of the uplands people whose lands ran deep into China. (The CIA also supported Tibetan resistance to the Chinese at this time.) Strapped for funds, the French acquiesced and operated two US-backed special forces teams based in the highlands until 1954, the Commando Forces (Service Action) and the Airborne Mobile Commandos Groups (Groupement de commandos mixtes aéroportés). Deo Van Long joined the latter unit, and in so doing further sealed his Tai Federation’s alliance with the French and, indirectly, the Americans.⁴⁰

The Vietnamese and their Chinese advisors went to great lengths to win over Tai support in this strategically vital northwestern part of Vietnam, where the conventional battles of the First Indochina War had culminated at Dien Bien Phu. Moreover, it was the requirements of conventional war that saw the Vietnamese communists incorporate the Tai people into a Vietnamese party-state born of this transition to total war. Dien Bien Phu was first a Tai town before this historic battle between the French and the DRV wiped it from the face of the earth. The upland peoples were anything but marginal to the march of Vietnamese history.⁴¹

STATES OF WAR: THE MAKINGS AND UN-MAKINGS OF HIGHLAND VIETNAM (1954–75)

Communist Autonomy in North Vietnam?⁴²

Following the Geneva Conference agreements, the communist leadership rapidly dismantled what parts of the Tai Federation their armies had not already occupied in the run-up to Dien Bien Phu. The People’s Army of Vietnam and security services tracked down ‘rebel’ leaders who had collaborated with the French, especially those of the Deo family, while many of the most important upland leaders had already evacuated the area along with the French. Deo Van Long was buried in France. Over twenty thousand Nung, Tai, and Hmong emigrated to southern Vietnam. To administer the hundreds of thousands who remained, Vietnamese communists turned to Sino-Soviet federal ideas. In May 1955, for example, Democratic Republic of Vietnam created the ‘Tai–Hmong Autonomous Zone’. In 1956, Hanoi expanded this officially into a larger Northern Vietnam Autonomous Zone covering almost all of the northern massif including over one million multiethnic people. While autonomous rule respected local languages, administration, religions, and cultures, the communists were in charge through their parallel party administration, Viet and loyal non-Viet cadres, their security services, and, if need be, their army. Like Ngo Dinh Diem in the south, Ho Chi Minh’s government also promoted ethnic Viet immigration into the highlands and even implemented land-reform policies which triggered suffering and violent opposition in many areas in the northern highlands. But unlike the situation in the Republic of Vietnam, the communist leadership imposed its rule free of international scrutiny. The Chinese were not going to criticize Hanoi, since Vietnamese communists were often applying their own Maoist methods.

The Geneva ceasefire agreement prevented the DRV from controlling the central highlands, however. In 1954–5, the communists moved several thousand Viet and highlander cadres to the DRV in the north of Vietnam. Things changed when it became clear that there would not be any elections in 1956 (which might have united Vietnam by peaceful means), and civil war broke out once again among the Viet. By 1960, the highlanders in the central massif found themselves in the crossfire as Hanoi infiltrated several thousand cadres back into the central highlands to rebuild bases and a parallel administration below the seventeenth parallel. Communist propaganda focused on Ngo Dinh Diem’s assimilation policies in the highlands and promised autonomous rule to those who joined the ‘righteous struggle’ for national unification. In 1960, the National Liberation Front came to life to serve as the communist party’s new Viet Minh and shadow government in the south. The NLF’s platform promised political autonomy to the highlander peoples, declaring that ‘all nationalities have the right to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or change their customs and habits’. Absent, of course, was any mention of Hanoi’s land reform and less than autonomous rule in the northern massif. In 1961, the National Liberation Front organized a conference for the highland peoples led by Ibih Aleao, a Rhadé leader and NLF member, which promised autonomy. As they had done during the First Indochina conflict, the communists opened new schools for children, promoted health care and hygiene, and trained highlander bureaucrats and officers, sending many to the north for further training.

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam badly needed these highlanders and the cover of their lands to be able to run people and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail into southern Indochina. Indeed, the central highlands played much the same role as had the northwestern Tai zones during the battles leading up to Dien Bien Phu. To ensure the functioning of this supply line and the highland bases, at which more and more troops were arriving, Hanoi renewed its earlier training of ethnic Viet civil servants in highland languages and customs before assigning them to the areas through which the trail, troops, and supplies flowed, including in eastern Laos and northeast Cambodia. These Viet groups of administrators often spoke flawless Rhadé, Bahnar, Khmu, Lao, and Khmer. They worked alongside highlander elites to penetrate into villages to create safe zones and win over popular support. In 1969, DRV cadres working in the highlands were astonished to find that one of theirs had gone native on them since 1946:

At first we thought he was ethnic minority. He was thin, and his skin was dark [. . .] He wore his gray hair twisted into a bun like an onion atop his head. His teeth were filed, and he had a large hole pierced through his earlobe. He wore no shirt but only a loincloth; he carried a small bag on his back and a machete in his hand. I was surprised that he spoke fluent Vietnamese; I soon learned that he was originally from Thai Binh and had joined the march to the south in 1946. He had worked as a cadre organizing the masses during the resistance war against France. When peace was restored in 1954, he received orders to stay in the south and continue his activities undercover. After the Saigon administration promulgated the 10/59 decree he was hunted by this administration and so he escaped to the central highlands. He filed his teeth and pierced his ears, so he could look like the ethnic minority people, thereby avoiding enemy suspicion and also facilitating his organizational work.⁴³

The fascinating account above also reveals a step beyond the oath ceremony toward a new method for winning hearts and minds on the ground.

Non-Communist Assimilation in the Republic of Vietnam

Ngo Dinh Diem was furious when he learned of the French decision to create the Tai Federation in 1948 and the Crown Domain for the central highlands in 1950. In 1955, first as prime minister and then as president of the Republic of Vietnam, Diem began dismantling the French Crown Domain. He replaced French commissioners with Viet provincial and district leaders who were subordinate to the central government in Saigon. He ran the long-established French colonial administrators out of the country, in particular Jean Cousseau. However, like his French predecessors, Diem solemnly performed the oath ceremony in Ban Me Thuot. But things would be different and difficult for the highlanders under this form of Vietnamese rule. For the first time since Minh Mang in the 1830s, they were now dealing with an ethnic Viet leader determined to assimilate them to a Vietnamese order. Indeed, Diem was convinced of the superiority of the Vietnamese civilizational order, of its advanced modernity, and of his right to place these people under central administrative control. On this note in particular, Diem took republicanism very seriously, discarding federal models in order to hold a multiethnic state together. The Ministry of the Interior took over highland affairs. The central government administered highland education, imposed Vietnamese as the common language, and threw out colonial textbooks in favor of a common Vietnamese curriculum. The Collège Sabatier became the Nguyen Du School. Just as importantly, Diem disbanded the remaining French special forces (which were still in charge of groups of highlanders and thus outside Vietnamese control).⁴⁴

Diem also saw a solution in the central highlands below the seventeenth parallel: to transfer there many of the 800,000 northern refugees who had arrived in the south since 1954. They included Catholics and Buddhists, as well as Nung, Hmong, and Tai soldiers and their families. The idea was to relocate as many of them as possible to the highlands’ ‘empty spaces’. Diem promoted a land-development program that allotted five hectares to each migrant family, provided them with tools, and gave them some seed. Many families moved there of their own volition. Others had no choice. By July 1959, fifty-seven land-development centers were in operation in the central highlands, as 44,000 new Viet settlers cleared 11,000 hectares of land for rice, coffee, rubber, and cotton production. While many Vietnamese returned to the lowlands, others remained in the highlands, and from this point onward the resumption of a centuries-old practice of Vietnamese colonial expansion was underway again with no French presence to check it. Moreover, American aid allowed the Vietnamese government to create new roads into the highlands, facilitating yet again the arrival of even more ethnic Vietnamese.⁴⁵

Upland peoples did not remain idle, however. As the French withdrew from Vietnam and Diem asserted control, highlander elites began discussing what to do. Leadership mainly came from among those who had studied in colonial schools and Christian missions, circulated as civil servants, teachers, and health workers under the French, or served in the special forces with the French during the First Indochina War. One of the central highlands’ best-known Rhadé leaders, Y Thih Eban, studied at the Collège Sabatier as a teenager. Once he had finished there, he then worked as an accountant in the Darlac provincial health service before serving as a medical assistant in the French army. Opposed to Diem’s assimilationist policies, in 1955 he and others joined forces to create the Liberation Front of the Highland Peoples (Front de libération des Montagnards). They submitted a petition to President Diem, calling upon him to honor continued highlander autonomy as set out by the provisions of the Crown Domain, to respect their customs and languages, and to protect their lands. While Diem did try to protect their lands from settlers and corrupt officials, his assimilationist policies and support of increased Viet immigration did not reassure. In 1958, as relations deteriorated further, Y Thih Eban joined Y Bham Enuol and Paul Nur (among others) to create the Bajarka movement (the name was an acronym for the Bahnar, Jarai, Rhadé and Khoho peoples). This movement was broadly based and united in its opposition to centralization along Viet lines. It demanded upland autonomy, an end to Viet immigration, and no more cultural assimilation. Diem responded by increasing police surveillance of the movement’s activists, meting out heavy prison sentences to the ‘rebels’, redoubling his assimilationist policies, and dispatching more ethnic Viet officials to run the central massif. Increasingly, Diem regarded the individuals in the Bajarka movement as rebels, whereas this movement’s leaders saw themselves as struggling righteously against a Vietnamese colonial thrust that would end their way of life, like the lowland Cham and Khmers before them.⁴⁶

Tensions boiled over in the early 1960s as civil war intensified and different groups competed for the loyalty of the highlanders. The communists’ shadow government, the National Liberation Front, promised autonomy to the highlanders and brought their own members into its administration and armed forces. The Americans were back, too. And the use of special forces was part of John F. Kennedy’s war on communist-backed guerilla movements like the NLF. Starting in 1961, the CIA and a range of special forces began working with and recruiting highland peoples to gather intelligence on the National Liberation Front, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail connecting the two through the central highlands. In 1962, the CIA presided over its first highlander schools and, more and more, became involved in local affairs and politics. Fighting the communists necessitated it.

Diem’s heavy-handed policies, however, stimulated strong resistance among the Cham and Khmers and undermined American attempts to focus on the communists. Diem closed Khmer religious schools in the delta and prohibited the use of Khmer. In 1960, angry Khmer Krom nationalists created the Liberation Front for Kampuchea Krom (Front de liberation du Kampuchea Krom) first led by Samouk Seng, and then Chau Dara, with the express goal of recovering the territories the Vietnamese had taken from the Khmer empire before the French arrived. Disgruntled Cham found a leader in Colonel Lès Kosem, a Muslim Cham colonel from Cambodia who had presided over the creation of the Liberation front for Champa (Front de libération du Champa). Like the Khmer Krom, he wanted Champa back. Supporting both were high-ranking Cambodian nationalists, including Lon Nol and Norodom Sihanouk, who had deeply resented the French decision in 1949–50 to unite Cochinchina with the rest of Vietnam, instead of returning the lands the Vietnamese imperialists had taken from them. The Cambodians supported Cham and Kampuchea Krom separatists until 1975, hoping to return Cambodia’s territorial size to its former glory.⁴⁷

Things came to a head in the turmoil unleashed by Diem’s assassination in late 1963 and the simultaneous decisions taken by Hanoi and Washington to go to war. In 1964, the Cham and Khmer Krom, with Phnom Penh leaders maneuvering in the background, saw the chance to advance their independence cause by creating the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races (the Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées, better known as FULRO). This front was designed to combine the liberation aspirations and forces of the Khmer Krom, Cham, and highlanders. The problem was that at the outset the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races’s leaders, Lès Kosem and Um Savuth, did not have the official support of the Bajarka movement, whose leaders hesitated between believing post-Diem republican promises of highlander reform and supporting him or pursuing the armed line pushed by the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races. For the latter to work, the Cambodian-based Cham and Khmer Krom badly needed those in the Bajarka movement’s support (and that of the one million highlanders of the central highlands they symbolically represented). In the end, the Bajarka movement split when, in mid-1964, Y Bham Enuol joined the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races, bringing with him a few thousand armed supporters, while others tried to work with new reform-minded Viet leaders taking over in Saigon.

Unsurprisingly, FULRO leaders used the highlanders working in the American special forces to make their first attack—not on the Vietnamese communists, but rather on their fellow Viet soldiers. On 20 September 1964, as Lyndon Johnson prepared the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races fighters attacked the Vietnamese soldiers in a US special forces camp in the highlands, killing several, but carefully refraining from harming any Americans. As a member of FULRO’s armed forces told the American marine he had temporarily disarmed: ‘This is our night! We’re going to kill Vietnamese’. The United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races fighters raised their flag and called for the independence of the highlands. Outraged, Saigon officials feared this revolt would spread and suspected the Americans might play the same divisive game as the French counter-insurgency specialists had during the First Indochina War. The Americans pushed both sides to back down and to keep their eye on the bigger picture—fighting the communists. Things quieted down for the time being, but the FULRO did not disappear, for there was no ignoring the impact on the highlands and its people of centuries of colonial rule, both in its French and Vietnamese variants.⁴⁸

Until 1975, the Republic of Vietnam leadership oscillated between the carrot (reforms) and the stick (repression). Many highlanders welcomed reformism, but others, including Y Bham Enuol and Lès Kosem, retreated into Cambodia to continue harassing the Vietnamese from there. Well into the 1980s, the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races’ hardcore members also rejected communist overtures to negotiate, opposed to all forms of Vietnamese imperialism. Of course, the communists had no intention of letting go of the land the Nguyen had colonized and made part of the present-day Vietnam before the French arrived.⁴⁹

But FULRO’s anticolonial guerilla war was but a smaller chapter in the maelstrom the Vietnam War unleashed on the central highlands. For if Johnson chose to start his war in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, a year later the armed forces of the DRV struck back in Pleiku, in the central highlands where the PAVN had ended the Indochina War in June of 1954. And if the First Indochina War had wreaked havoc across the northern massif, ending in the obliteration of the Tai town of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Second Indochina War would ravage the central highlands in ways no one could have imagined. Of the 80 million liters of herbicides the Americans dropped over Vietnam between 1962 and 1971, much, perhaps more than half of that amount fell over the central highlands through which the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran. From the air, American B-52 bombings devastated the highlands, while Hanoi’s Tet Offensive in 1968 ripped through Ban Me Thuot. By 1972, the wars for Indochina which had started in 1945 had displaced a mind-boggling 85 percent of all the central highland villages. In one instance designed to create a free-strike zone, the Americans forcibly relocated 10,000 Jarai people away from their villages. As one officer involved in this later recalled: ‘We set the houses on fire before the villagers were taken away to show them we meant business’. Vietnamese communist troops engaged in equally brutal methods with similar results. And when the displaced highlanders and Cham returned to claim their homes when the guns fell silent, they found many ethnic Viet there who refused to leave. Indeed, war and the arrival of American troops, many of them stationed in highland areas, attracted ethnic Viet migrants. (The Americans needed all sorts of Vietnamese entrepreneurs, such as suppliers, restaurant owners, and prostitutes to help them house, feed, and entertain its forces.) The number of Viet living in the highlands increased from around 50,000 in 1954 to 450,000 two decades later. But the non-Vietnamese paid a high price during the Vietnam War. An estimated 200,000 highlanders are thought to have perished during the war. The overwhelming majority of them were civilians. Again, the non-Viet people were not on the margins of modern Vietnamese history, but right in the middle of it. They always had been.⁵⁰