CHAPTER 6

COLONIAL SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

IN FEBRUARY 1936 there was a semi-final match of the Bédier football tournament in Vientiane, Laos. The mainly Vietnamese Amusporta club was playing the Lao Police Sport. The winners would go on to compete for the championship title. Supporters from the large Vietnamese community were there; but mainly Lao fans filled the stands, including some of the country’s best-known elite and royal family members. Things got ugly when a Vietnamese player carded by the Lao referee protested vehemently, outraging Lao fans. A few punches apparently flew before the Vietnamese forfeited the game and quickly disappeared.

The issue was not over though; it continued in the press for several more weeks. One anonymous Vietnamese spectator wrote in to criticize the Lao referee for bad officiating. He accused certain Lao authorities in the stands of inciting their fans to attack the Vietnamese players, to ‘beat them senseless’ and ‘kill them’. The referee, Thao Bong, shot back that he had done his best to control a very physical match and did not want to ‘deepen the rift already dug by certain of your compatriots between the Annamese and Laotians’. Lao fans, he added, had not appreciated the wild gesticulating one Vietnamese player had demonstrated before them earlier in the match.¹

There was nothing exceptional about this match between the Vietnamese and the Lao. In Cochinchina, football games had become so physical after the First World War that the sporting commission temporarily banned matches between the French and the Vietnamese. But that did not stop teams and their supporters from organizing their own meetings, often with the Vietnamese playing on French teams for lack of players. We know that the Lao Police Sport team was only ‘four-fifths aboriginal’ (i.e. four-fifths Laotian). The rest were certainly Tonkinese, Annamese, or Cochinchinese. In the 1920s, French players even lifted their glasses in Saigon to honor a deceased Vietnamese comrade. Football matches generate racist, nationalist, and violent exchanges; but they can also produce moments of intense personal joy and fraternization. Vietnam, colonial or not, was no exception.

But perhaps more than anything else, this small incident revealed the extent to which an Indochinese-wide colonial state had begun to circulate and connect diverse peoples in ways never dreamed by Minh Mang or his imperial-minded Vietnamese predecessors. Playing against each other in countless unreported matches in Vientiane were ethnic Viet and Lao civil servants, police officers, tax collectors, and of course their children. Vietnamese played with and against Chinese, Indian, and Khmer players throughout the Mekong delta. The French had built the roads connecting Laos and Cambodia to Vietnam, which would move the Vietnamese to Vientiane and Phnom Penh to push pencils. But with increased colonial connections came frictions. When the Lao fans rushed on to the pitch in 1936, the French were preparing a law to slow down Viet immigration to Laos. And just as Lao and Khmer elites demanded control of Viet immigration in their countries, the Vietnamese were trying to end the privileged positions of the Chinese and the Indians in eastern Indochina.

COLONIAL ECONOMY

As new as these Asian movements were, the French did not start with a tabula rasa when they conquered Indochina in the late nineteenth century. In Vietnam, they grafted many of their policies on to pre-existing ones—land registry systems, taxation schemes, opium, alcohol and salt monopolies, corvée practices, and canal, dike, and irrigation networks. Organizing Chinese immigration was certainly no French creation. And while the French amplified Vietnam’s trading relations with Asia, they did not connect Vietnam to the outside world for the first time. The Cham, Highlanders, Viet, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Thai, and Portuguese had already done this. The French did, however, accelerate and expand this process. They invested deeply in their Indochinese colony between 1862 and 1954, and it mattered. Between 1888 and 1918 alone, the metropolis poured 249 million gold francs into industry and mining in Indochina, 128 million into transportation, 75 million into commerce, and 40 million into agricultural development. In so doing, the French initiated important economic and social changes, essential to understanding modern Vietnam.²

Infrastructure and Transports

Infrastructure development is a case in point. The French built on, expanded, and transformed pre-existing infrastructure and roads. They built new ones. The Nguyen had first built the mandarin route in the early nineteenth century to consolidate their administrative hold on a still contested and deeply divided Vietnam. This road circulated civil servants from one end of the country to the other and helped improve commercial exchanges. The French paved it over with the Route Coloniale (RC) no. 1 for much the same reasons. But they went further, by creating a network of asphalted roads and secondary gravel ones linking rural areas to urban centers. They also connected Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia as never before. In 1943, French Indochina boasted 32,000 kilometers of practicable roads, of which 5,700 kilometers were asphalted. Eighteen thousand vehicles, cars, buses, and trucks buzzed down these roads, by the end of the 1930s transporting an estimated forty to fifty million people annually. The image one Frenchman evoked of a bus moving people down the road is a memorable one: ‘It’s like a piece of the local market, a particularly concentrated one, that starts moving down the road: men, women, baskets, pigs, birds, shouts, smells, betel spit. It’s all there, people pouring out of the [bus’s] windows, pressed to its hood and making up its human roof . . .’³

Bourgeois Vietnamese purchased their own cars. Then, as now, automobiles were the visible markers of social success and racial equality with the colonizers. Nguyen Phan Long, a well-known journalist, politician, and landowner, loved to show off his collection of automobiles and travelled widely throughout Indochina in the 1920s. The future novelist Marguerite Duras loved pretty cars too, but she found herself shunned by French students in her high school when they saw her beau behind the wheel—‘Unfortunately Léo was Annamese, despite his wonderful car’. With better transport, modern tourism emerged. And as it did, French, European, Asian, and Vietnamese travelers discovered Indochina’s marvels, including Angkor Wat, thanks in no small part to the Madrolle travel guides they often carried with them. Perceptions of time and space changed as people moved in new ways and at faster speeds. One young Vietnamese civil servant travelling through the highlands in the early 1930s put his finger on something important when he admitted: ‘It’s Annam, but it’s not Annam. I don’t know quite how to explain it. One doesn’t quite feel Annamese in the Highlands’. Perhaps it was because this world had never been so ‘Vietnamese’. The cooler weather of the highlands attracted French settlers and civil servants, who, together with Vietnamese laborers, turned Dalat into a hill station and vacation spot for those seeking shelter from the heat and forests to rest or hunt wild game. Gardens around Dalat also began producing and exporting to all of Vietnam a wide variety of fruits and vegetables previously unknown to the country, such as strawberries.⁴

The emergence of a modern rail system also circulated products and people and connected territories in new ways, but not necessarily in Vietnamese or Indochinese ways. Indeed, French capital investment, colonial strategists, and the Bank of Indochina first laid tracks from Hanoi to Kunming (1901–11) as part of the grand design to create a French sphere of influence in southern China. The French also constructed rail segments in Cambodia, Cochinchina, and Annam. Passenger cars moved millions of people and created a new group of railway workers from whom another communist party secretary would come, Le Duan. While the Thais pushed their railways toward the Mekong in the 1920s in order to pull Lao and Cambodians toward Bangkok, the French relied on their network of roads to bind eastern and western Indochina together. Colonial routes 6 and 13 cut from Hanoi to Saigon via the Mekong valley. To this day, no railroad traverses the Mekong valley.⁵

Fluvial transportation expanded greatly in the Red River and Mekong deltas. In 1881, the River Transport Company for Cochinchina (the Messageries Fluviales de Cochinchine) began operations in the Mekong, offering transport from Saigon-Cholon to Vientiane by the turn of the century. By 1930, this company operated 200 steam-powered longboats (chaloupes). Similar boats and small barges chugged up the Red River to Lao Cai; others passed through secondary branches. In all, in 1928, 2,600 vessels measuring 16 tons or more, 191 longboats, and 21 motorized barges weighing between 50 and 350 tons plied Indochinese waterways and estuaries. By the 1930s, outboard motors propelled vessels at greater speeds, stuffed with all sorts of goods, grains, animals, and people. Meanwhile, along Vietnam’s long coastline (3,260 km), the Chinese junk trade continued moving rice, animals, and people from one place to another, carrying on to Guangzhou and Bangkok. Already in 1864, 25,000 mainly Chinese skippers were operating junks transporting rice from the Mekong delta to hungry mouths in northern Vietnam and southern China. And until the Second World War, Chinese-operated junks along the littoral remained the cheapest and fastest way for moving rice from Cochinchina to Tonkin. The French only connected Hanoi to Saigon by rail in 1936.⁶

The French improved on and expanded the number of Vietnamese canals on which so much of the rice production depended for irrigation and transportation. By 1930, the French had constructed 4,000 km of new canals in the Mekong, improving irrigation and lowering transportation costs. This canal network allowed Chinese merchants in particular to move rice from paddies deep within the delta to their steam-powered mills in Cholon. In the northern and central parts of the country, the French improved upon pre-existing dikes to protect double-cropping rice growing areas against devastating floods and the famines that almost always followed in their wake. New dikes helped protect 115 million hectares of crop-growing land in 1945 (up from 20 million in 1885), while new canals brought water to parched areas of Annam.⁷

The twin cities of Saigon and Cholon had already become the most important Vietnamese port under the Nguyen. While Saigon never became a French Hong Kong, the French dredged and widened its harbor and created a separate deep-water port in Cam Ranh Bay, making it France’s preeminent forward base in East Asia. Maritime routes linked Indochinese ports to the French concession in Shanghai and their establishments in Pondicherry and then on to Marseille via the Suez Canal (opened in 1869). By the end of the 1930s, the rice and rubber trade made Saigon-Cholon France’s sixth most important port, handling a total traffic of 2.1 million tons of merchandise in 1937. The French also transformed Haiphong into a vibrant port, linking it overland to nearby mines and using this northern outlet to connect the Gulf of Tonkin to southern China, thanks to the Yunnanese railway line running to Kunming. These colonial, private, and strategic investments in infrastructure, transportation, and ports contributed greatly to the economic development of Vietnam and its geopolitical importance. It’s no accident that Russian war ships gathered in Cam Ranh Bay before being defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The Japanese would concentrate their ships in the same deep-water port before attacking Southeast Asia in 1942. The Americans stationed the bulk of their naval forces in Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War before the Soviets took over during the Third Indochina War.⁸

Commercial Rice Expansion: Asian Modernity at Work in French Indochina

The rice trade constitutes one of the most important components of the Vietnamese economy to this day. While the colonial infrastructure improvements mentioned above certainly helped make Vietnam the third most important rice exporter in the world after Thailand and Burma before 1940 (and second only to Thailand today), the Chinese and the Vietnamese operated this sector of the economy. The French found it much more convenient and profitable to let Chinese intermediaries continue collecting, milling, and exporting rice grown by mainly Vietnamese farmers in the Mekong delta. After all, the French settlers were a miniscule population of 35,000 individuals. Most of them lived and worked in urban centers and those who lived in the countryside were mainly involved in growing rubber, coffee, and tea. The overwhelming majority of those opening new rice plantations in the south were Vietnamese landowners (many of whom had first gained their land under the Nguyen) and tens of thousands of poor Vietnamese agricultural laborers and newly arrived immigrants hoping to eke out a better living. The opening of more southern land under the French from 1900 and increased demands for agricultural laborers attracted more Vietnamese from the overpopulated north and center, as did the promise of a better future. The French did anything but slow a centuries-old flow of ethnic Viet toward the south. They accelerated it, not least of all by increasing the Vietnamese birth rate via better health care and hygiene. The southern population increased from 2.2 million in 1895 (1.7 million in 1880) to 2.8 million in 1900 and 5.6 million in 1943.⁹

The French taxed the prosperous rice trade and provided financial and technological support to Chinese and Vietnamese merchants and growers. Loans were forthcoming and steam-operated mills rapidly replaced older methods. The amount of land under cultivation increased from 700,000 hectares in 1880 to 1.2 million hectares in 1900, and 2.2 million hectares in 1930. Rice exports increased accordingly from 130,000 tons in 1870 to 1,797,000 tons in 1928, before dropping off to 1 million in the depressed economy of 1933. In northern Vietnam, where there was little more virgin land to open up, the French expanded hydraulic works to water double-cropped fields and expanded the dikes to protect them against flooding. The basic subsistence of the population in Annam and Tonkin depended on these capital investments as well as imports of Cochinchinese rice, as the terrible famine of 1944–5 would demonstrate. The population of Tonkin grew from a total of 6.2 million people in 1886 to almost 10 million in 1943. In Annam, the number grew from 5.5 million in 1911 to 7.2 million in 1943. In all, the Vietnamese population grew from 14.7 million in 1921 to 22.6 million in 1943.¹⁰

Those benefitting from the lucrative rice trade were not those laboring in the fields, but rather the Chinese merchants, Vietnamese landowners, and the colonial state which taxed both. In 1938, big landowners held 45 percent of the Mekong rice land, 42.5 percent went to medium-sized plantations, and small landowners held only 12.5 percent of rice-growing land. Harder to establish is the size of a floating rural labor force; but it surely numbered in tens of thousands. The French did little to stop the concentration of land from being mainly in the hands of wealthy landowners (a pattern which dated from Nguyen times), while metropolitan interests blocked the industrialization of Indochina and the chance to create urban factory jobs to absorb the rural unemployed. The French never seriously considered implementing land reform. Nor did any of the Vietnamese in the Cochinchinese Colonial Council, many of them large landowners like Nguyen Phan Long and Nguyen Van Thinh, see any reason to insist on it. And in the absence of real political parties or a truly representative parliamentary body through which the majority peasant population could elect officials, there was little chance of passing even minor land reform laws.¹¹

The Development of the Colonial Plantation Economy

If Asians dominated the commercial rice economy, the French ran the lucrative rubber plantations. By the turn of the twentieth century, processed rubber, known as latex, was used in the production of a wide variety of commercial products, many of them industrially produced, such as erasers, boots, gloves, conveyor belts, and, increasingly, tires. Brazil was the original home of rubber trees (hevea brasiliensis) until the British got hold of seeds in the 1870s and began growing their own trees in London laboratories and then in their colonies in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. In the early 1890s, French scientists working at the Botanical Gardens in Saigon obtained specimens from the British in Malaya and the Dutch in Indonesia and rapidly confirmed that rubber trees could grow in Cochinchina and Cambodia. Meanwhile, industrial demand for rubber in France increased steadily. The Michelin brothers created their rubber factory there in 1888 and patented the original removable pneumatic tire three years later, first for bicycles and then cars.

Attracted by the growing demand for rubber, private individuals and companies began planting rubber trees near Saigon. Plantations soon emerged throughout the basalt-rich red soil or terres rouges of Cochinchina, Cambodia, and southern Annam, including the surrounding highlands. As world demand for processed rubber increased even more after 1918, metropolitan capital was invested heavily in the development of large French plantations, which by 1930 controlled over 90 percent of the terres rouges. Firms like Michelin, Groupe Rivaud, and the Bank of Indochina held majority stakes in the commercial rubber economy, buying up land, clearing it and investing in the expensive machinery needed to transform raw rubber into latex. The amount of land devoted to rubber production increased from 200 hectares in 1908 to 126,000 hectares in 1940, making French Indochina (by the late 1920s) the third largest rubber exporter after British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. During the boom years of the 1920s, French plantations and the firms invested in them made enormous profits. Michelin owned and operated its own plantation at Phu Do Rieng.¹²

Like the commercial rice economy, the rubber plantations ran on cheap, mainly ethnic Viet sweat. In collaboration with colonial authorities, plantation owners organized the recruiting and transportation of many northern Vietnamese to work on southern plantations. In 1942, some 133,000 mainly ethnic Viet laborers toiled on rubber plantations in Cambodia and Cochinchina. Twelve-hour days were common. Pay was pitifully low and housing conditions miserable. While it is true that infirmaries and health care were introduced to ensure healthy (thus operational) bodies, independent oversight was lacking. Plantation owners tended to be all-powerful. Abuses were legion and death from exhaustion and mistreatment was common. Many workers returned to Annam and Tonkin at the end of their contracts. Others stayed on in the south, while some fled from their bosses at great personal peril. Tran Tu Binh, a dirt-poor Catholic from the north, signed a contract that took him to work in this ‘hell on earth’, the Michelin plantation in the Phu Do Rieng. He later became a top-ranking communist and published a damning, if highly politicized, account of the life of Vietnamese laborers: ‘Oh, it’s easy to go to the rubber and hard to return. Men leave their corpses, women depart as ghosts’.¹³

Other types of plantation crops emerged, too. While the Chinese had long commercialized sugar cane and pepper production in southern Indochina, the French developed coffee production in Tonkin with the introduction of Arabica trees in 1888. From there, the French and a handful of Vietnamese growers spread coffee plants to other areas of the highlands, where they do well to this day. By 1930, Arabica plants dotted over 10,000 hectares of land were producing 1,500 tons of coffee for annual export. By 1940, that number had increased to 2,900 tons, of which 2,000 tons went abroad. The remaining 900 tons went on domestic consumption, as more and more mainly urban Vietnamese took to drinking coffee for the first time. Starting with vigor after the First World War, the French introduced tea plants to the red soils of southern Annam, especially in the Kontum, Pleiku, and Darlac provinces. On the eve of the Second World War, 3,000 hectares of land produced tea leaves. While French and increasingly Vietnamese producers never competed seriously with the Chinese or British at the international level, they nevertheless sold 812 tons of black tea to the metropole and their North African colonies.¹⁴

The French exploited large mineral reserves and coalfields located in northern Indochina. The industrialization of Japan as well as internationally financed coastal enclaves in southern China increased the demand for coal to fire steam-operated plants. The port of Haiphong was located near these fields and coal and minerals moved by train to Haiphong and from there to Asian markets by ship. The Bank of Indochina mobilized much of the investment funds needed to get these capital-intensive commercial enterprises up and running. In 1888, the French Society for Tonkin Coal (Société française des Charbonnages du Tonkin) received a license to exploit the coalfields in Hong Cai and Dong Trieu, joined by the Dong Trieu Coal Council (Charbonnages de Dong Trieu) in 1916. By the early 1900s, French Indochina exported 200,000 tons of coal. This increased to almost two million tons by 1940, making Indochina the biggest coal exporter in Asia after Japanese Manchuria. The French exploited other minerals commercially, including zinc and silver in Tonkin and Laos. Chinese, Viet, and non-Viet highlanders worked as laborers in the coalfields of Tonkin and Laos. The future General Nguyen Binh would recruit his first soldiers from the Tonkin coalfields in mid-1945. Tran Quoc Hoan, the future head of communist Vietnam’s security forces, joined the party while working in Lao silver mines in the early 1930s. The Indochinese mining proletariat tended to be ethnically Viet.¹⁵

An Economic Federation and the Bank of Indochina

Upon conquering all of Vietnam in the 1880s, the French created a centralized state based in Hanoi and referred to it as the Indochinese Union. While this colonial state was a heterogeneous entity in so many ways, on the economic front it was a remarkably integrated customs, monetary, and budgetary union. Paul Doumer empowered the governor general to elaborate and submit one budget for all of Indochina, the General Budget for the Indochinese Union (Budget général de l’Union indochinoise). The colonial state also imposed one common tariff for all of Indochina’s component parts. There were no internal prerogatives or exceptions, not even for Cochinchina. The Indochinese piastre served as the entire colony’s currency from 1885. Separate currencies for ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Cambodia’ did not exist. Only the French could determine the piastre’s exchange rate. With a very brief exception after the First World War, the piastre remained on the silver standard until 1930. With the Great Depression, the government pegged the Indochinese piastre to the French franc at the rate of 1 piastre to 10 francs. But in an extraordinary arrangement, the Bank of Indochina, a private commercial bank, issued the piastre through its own note-issuing mechanism, the Institut d’émission (a mint).

Created in 1875, the BIC worked closely with the French government underwriting the economic and financial development of French Indochina. While the colonial government generated revenues through a variety of taxes, monopolies, and government loans, the Bank of Indochina also provided major capital investment from its investors and consortium banks for the development of the rice, rubber, and mineral sectors in Indochina. If much has been written about the role of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ in the making of the British empire, in Indochina the financial class in France ran the BIC as a privileged consortium, working in alliance with the colonial government, but without having to take orders from it. Besides allowing the Bank of Indochina to issue the piastre, in 1888 the government entrusted its reserve funds to it. The bank charged a 2.5 percent interest fee and also had the right to dip into this fund for short-term speculation. And it did. When the Japanese finally overthrew the French in March 1945, the BIC held 200 million piastres of French Indochina’s money. The Japanese were as careful as the French to respect this bank’s autonomy in order to keep the colony up and running. Even the Vietnamese who took over during the August Revolution left the Bank of Indochina and its reserves in place, which was considered by some to have been a colossal mistake (though it’s uncertain the Japanese would have let Vietnamese revolutionaries get anywhere near this bank, had they tried to take it over).

When the Great Depression struck the world economy and with it, Indochina, the BIC absorbed bankrupt companies, plantations, and real estate through its subsidiaries, the Indochinese Land Bank (Crédit foncier indochinois) and the Indochinese Real Estate Office (Société immobilière indochinoise). The Bank of Indochina had become a formidable financial and real estate powerhouse by the 1930s. The Vietnamese were not the only ones to deplore the BIC’s seemingly unchecked power. Marguerite Duras railed in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea Wall, against the bank’s confiscation of European settler lands and homes. Indeed, the Bank of Indochina made no distinctions based on race in confiscating the property of those who defaulted on loans they had taken out in the golden days of the 1920s. The BIC went on to expand its interests and those of its stockholders through investments in Asia, especially in China, and then across the globe. Supported by a conglomeration of other French banks, in turn supported by the government, the Bank of Indochina became one of France’s biggest banks.

Vietnamese nationalists were well aware of the colonial hold over the economy and the piastre indochinoise in particular. This is why the independent government led by Ho Chi Minh from mid-1945 onward went to such great lengths to issue its own independent currency, the dong. The French, meanwhile, held out tooth and nail against Bao Dai’s efforts to liberate his country’s currency from the French and the BIC (see chapter 10), and attacked Ho Chi Minh’s currency during the Indochina War. The French infuriated their nationalist partners in mid-1953 when the metropolitan government unilaterally decided to devaluate the piastre without consulting them. The French only truly let go of Indochina in December 1955, when they agreed to close the Bank of Indochina’s Institut d’émission and stop printing the Indochinese piastre for good.

COLONIAL SOCIETY

Diversity, Tensions, and Interactions

The Indochinese Union of 1887 turned on a collection of protectorates, colonies, military territories, special urban regimes, and a mindboggling number of legal identities for different peoples, living at different times, in different places of the colonial state. Those residing within the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, for example, were ‘French-protected subjects’ (protégés français), whereas those living in the Cochinchinese colony were ‘French subjects’ (sujets français). The city of Hanoi was a legal colony within the northern protectorate. Much of the northern highlands were separate military zones, administered by French officers, whereas the central highlands excluded ethnic Viet administrators in favor of French and highlander civil servants.

The French added to Indochina’s ethnic diversity by allowing thousands of their citizens to settle, work, and acquire land there. Those Français d’Indochine (French Indochinese), as they increasingly styled themselves, numbered around 35,000 individuals on the eve of the Second World War. In 1940, 17,000 (mainly) French people resided in Saigon, 6,000 in Hanoi, and over 2,000 in Haiphong. The rest lived in smaller Indochinese towns. While French women arrived in greater numbers around 1900, the French colonial population was predominantly masculine. Most of the Français d’Indochine were civil servants or officers in the colonial army. Perhaps a thousand worked in the cities as traders, businessmen, and entrepreneurs. Several thousand were planters, plantation owners, and missionaries scattered across the countryside. Although the French were the smallest ethnic minority in Indochina, they stood at the top of the colonial ladder. Joining them were perhaps a hundred Americans, mainly businessmen, diplomats, and Protestant missionaries. In 1889, the United States appointed a commercial officer to Saigon to represent American interests in Indochina. The British already had one.¹⁶

While the French often relied on nineteenth-century racialist theories to develop their legal categories, they also drew on pre-existing classification systems that had little to do with race and everything to do with the everyday practicalities of ruling diverse peoples. For one, the French maintained the Nguyen dynasty’s congregation system (bang) for administering the large Chinese populations, numbering almost a half a million by the 1920s. This regime required Chinese immigrants to belong to one of the following ‘congregations’ or ‘groups’ which would correspond to their dialect or initial place of residence in southern China—Guangzhou (Canton), Fujian, Hakka, Hainan, and Chaozhou. In 1871, the French adopted and even expanded the congregation system in order to administer other immigrant groups such as the Indians. Rather than collapsing the Chinese identity and making them into ‘Cochinchinese subjects’ (the Chinese were concentrated in the south), the French classified them as ‘Asian foreigners’ (Etrangers asiatiques) in 1864, and again in 1871. Legal Chinese residents could own property, open businesses, and work; but they also paid a much higher tax rate. There was again continuity between the Nguyen and French imperial regimes, with revenue generation being a top priority for both.¹⁷

Like the Chinese, the Japanese had long interacted with Vietnam. In the early seventeenth century, Japanese traders plied the South China Sea, stationing agents in the thriving port city of Hoi An (known then as Faifoo), until Tokugawa leaders restricted such overseas movements. This policy changed in the late nineteenth century when the new Meiji leaders opened up the country, embarked upon rapid industrialization, and allowed their subjects to trade and emigrate. In the late nineteenth century, a few hundred Japanese moved to Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong. Most were prostitutes whose clients were the European soldiers involved in colonial conquest. The First World War changed this, however. Allied with the French against Germany, Tokyo improved its terms of trade and, as it did so, Japanese entrepreneurs, bankers, and businessmen opened offices in Indochina. The first Japanese consulate began operations in Hanoi in 1920. Diplomats immediately ended the prostitution business and focused on promoting commercial interests, with considerable success. And despite persistent fears of the ‘yellow peril’, the French classified the Japanese living in Indochina as ‘Europeans’, based on their ‘civilizational’ parity with the West.¹⁸

Indians from the French enclave of Pondicherry (and Karikala) emigrated to French Indochina. Most were Christians; some were Hindus and Muslims. Having joined the French empire in the late seventeenth century, Pondicherrians were well versed in French administrative practices and located much closer to Indochina than the metropole. Indeed, Pondicherry had served as the main base from which the French attacked Cochinchina in the late 1850s and recruited many Indians to help them supply and feed the Expeditionary Corps. The French considered these Indian subjects to be more reliable than the recently conquered Cochinchinese (whose administrators had largely abandoned their posts) and recruited French-speaking Indians in the 1860s to help run this new French colony in Asia. More Indians arrived in the 1880s, when legal changes (within the French colonial establishments where they dwelled) allowed those from Pondicherry to become fully fledged French citizens much more easily than their Indochinese counterparts. This, in turn, facilitated inter-empire movements toward Indochina, in which French politicians in Cochinchina solicited Pondicherrian French votes (some said bought them) in the Cochinchinese Colonial Council. By the 1920s, as many as 10,000 Indians resided in Indochina.¹⁹

Fluent in French, the Pondicherrians worked as magistrates, customs officials, and tax collectors. A handful served as prison guards to watch over mainly ethnic Viet inmates. Others moved into the police as lower and mid-level agents. Indian merchants, shopkeepers, and moneylenders (often referred to pejoratively as ‘Chettys’ or ‘Chettiars’) also played an important commercial role in the countryside, lending money and serving as pawnbrokers. They thus interacted with the rural populations and did so in the Vietnamese language. Cochinchinese colonial authorities administered the Indians via congregations, but divided them according to their religion (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu), always noting whether they came from French or British India. The idea that the settler community in colonial Vietnam was only French is very misleading.²⁰

Even the colonizing population was not quite as homogenous as one might expect. The French Corsican community administered its own papers, language classes, clubs, and sporting events, much like the Cantonese in Saigon or the Irish and Scottish in the British empire. Through such social activities, they maintained their ties to the Ile de Beauté and promoted a separate sense of a Corsican identity. In all, Indochina counted around 1,500 Corsicans during the interwar period. Like the Pondicherrians, they filled a range of positions in the colonial civil service, working as magistrates, policemen, and wardens. Some were shopkeepers. The Franchini family ran the legendary Hôtel Continental in Saigon until 1975. The French from Brittany and Bordeaux also administered separate associations, bulletins, and thus maintained a sense of their original local identities.²¹

This panoply of colonial identities gave rise to some revealing social encounters in daily life. As one testy Pondicherrian reminded the Corsican judge standing before him in a Saigon courtroom one day: ‘Monsieur, nous étions français cents ans avant vous’—‘Sir, we were French one hundred years before you’. True, but such moments of inter-imperial pride always cut both ways. Vietnamese elite members, for example, resented the privileged position many Pondicherrians (and Chinese) settlers seemed to hold in the colonial world. How could the French accord citizenship to the Indians, but not to the equally enlightened Vietnamese? Racially minded Vietnamese could not believe that the French would allow such a dark-skinned people to rule them, let alone marry their daughters. As one former Indian resident in Saigon later recalled the Vietnamese putting their case to him: ‘The French are the colonizer [sic]. But you are the colonized people like we are. How can you work with them to colonize us?’²²

But the Vietnamese were not always on the losing end of these imperial configurations. In the 1930s, Laotian and Cambodian nationalists asked how the French could use Vietnamese bureaucrats to administer western Indochina like Minh Mang had done in the 1830s? After all, the French had justified their colonization of Cambodia on the grounds that they were ‘saving’ the Khmers from Thai and Vietnamese colonization. Modern Laos’ first nationalist, Prince Phetsarath, rebuked both the French and the Vietnamese in one quip in 1931: ‘First of all, all confidence in French promises fades away and the [idea of the] Indochinese Federation appears to the weakest nations in the [f]ederation like an eye wash designed to allow the Annamese to rule over the others, under the protection of the French flag’. What everyone forgot in making such analogies was that Indochina was an imperial constellation. It turned on precisely such diverse alliances, ethnic heterogeneity, internal colonizations, and social constructions. And where the Vietnamese took the Indians to task for collaborating with the French, the Laotians and Cambodians criticized the Vietnamese for doing the same thing.²³

None of these nationalist objections among France’s colonial subjects, however, stopped interactions from occurring ‘among the races’. People crossed borders one after the other, all the while slipping out of one identity into another, as we all do. Cambodian nationalists may have lamented the continued Vietnamese immigration southward and westward under the French, but King Sihanouk’s father spoke Vietnamese fluently, while the well-known Cambodian nationalist Dap Chhuon had a Vietnamese wife. Mainly masculine immigration from the late nineteenth century among the Chinese, French, Indian, and Vietnamese settlers (in Laos and Cambodia) led to unions with local women. The Franco-Corsican founder of the Hôtel Continental, Mathieu Franchini, married Le Thi Trong from My Tho province. His son defends Corsica’s national identity to this day. The constant flow of European colonial soldiers through the colony from 1858 to 1956 gave rise to a large number of live-in partnerships or concubinage. The Vietnamese word for ‘girl’, con gai, rapidly became in colonial parlance a synonym first for a ‘concubine’, then a ‘prostitute’. And though prostitution proliferated in French Saigon and Hanoi, it was by no means the monopoly of European men or the French colonial army. Nor was the problem of venereal disease, as modern Vietnam’s greatest writer, Vu Trong Phung, demonstrated in a series of riveting publications.²⁴

These relationships produced several thousand Franco-Vietnamese children by the time of the Second World War, referred to in French as Eurasiens or métis, meaning children of mixed descent. Until the 1930s, European colonial society tended to shun those born out of wedlock, most of whom tended to live with their Vietnamese mothers, far from the ‘civilizing’ influence of the French community. Vietnamese social norms, especially in the countryside from whence most of these impoverished women came, were often just as intolerant. The fact that many Eurasiens were born to unknown fathers also meant that they could not obtain French citizenship easily, making their integration into the French settler society all the more difficult. Opposed to the idea of métis children living ‘lost’ among the ‘natives’, private and state-sponsored French welfare societies later tried to change this. They scoured the Indochinese countryside, removing dozens of métis children, sometimes by force, from their Vietnamese mothers and placed them in orphanages, special military academies, and usually bestowed them with French citizenship.²⁵

Eurasiens born of legal unions were usually in a better situation. Not only did they enjoy French citizenship, but they also tended to come from wealthier families, enjoyed higher levels of education, and integrated into the French community much more easily. William Bazé and Henri Chavigny de Lachevrotière, for example, became powerful figures in the settler community, owned property, and ran influential newspapers. Lachevrotière’s father had grown up in Quebec and Martinique; his mother was Tonkinese. He and Bazé were indefatigable defenders of the colonial order and of the Français d’Indochine. Of course some métis went in the opposite direction. Jean Moreau, the son of a colonial bureaucrat, joined the nationalist movement in 1945 and holds full Vietnamese citizenship to this day. Although no official number exists (colonial authorities refused to create a separate ‘métis’ legal category), there were probably around 20,000 Eurasiens living in Indochina on the eve of the Second World War, some classified as ‘French’, others as ‘natives’, scattered throughout the cities and countryside.²⁶

Albeit rarely at the time, French women sometimes married Vietnamese men. The future diplomat-at-large for Ho Chi Minh, Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, married a Parisian medical practitioner, while in 1946 Ho’s Catholic minister of economic affairs, Nguyen Manh Ha, wedded the daughter of a man who was a high-level member of the French Communist Party and a deputy in the National Assembly. These couples met in the metropole. Things were different in Indochina, however, where the French settler community tended to disapprove of such unions, convinced that they threatened the racial hierarchy upon which the colonial order rested. When the French classmates of the future novelist Marguerite Duras learned that she was dating a very wealthy Vietnamese boy named Léo, they ‘definitively distanced themselves from me. Those who frequented me until then dared no more to compromise themselves in my company’. Colonial society was doubly harsh on Duras, whose poor white (petit blanc) family from the countryside placed her at the bottom of the colonial ladder: ‘At the time I knew Léo, we were able to get by and pay the Chettys [Indian moneylenders] by selling them each month our only remaining jewelry and furniture. We did this out of sight’.²⁷

Though hardly studied, inter-Asian unions vastly outnumbered the Franco-Vietnamese ones, as did their métis offspring. And yet there was nothing new about such unions. Almost two thousand years before the French arrived on the scene, Chinese settlers, colonial administrators, and imperial soldiers in the Han Red River delta had married into local families. They and their children played important roles in the making of northern Vietnam and its language. The same was true in the south. The Nguyen lords welcomed those Chinese fleeing the Manchu conquest of the Ming dynasty in 1644. The Vietnamese referred to them as Minh huong (‘Ming loyalists’). One such refugee, Mac Cuu, first established something of an independent kingdom in the Gulf of Thailand, not far from Ha Tien. His Vietnamese wife gave him a son, Mac Thien Tu, who entered the service of the Nguyen lords, integrated his father’s orphaned ‘Ming kingdom’ into the Nguyen empire, and in so doing helped the Vietnamese expand their territorial control further into the Mekong delta at the expense of the Khmers. The Vietnamese colonizers were no more homogeneous in their colonial practices than the Chinese before them or the French after them.

Although Gia Long, upon uniting Vietnam in 1802, divided the Chinese into congregations in order to control and tax them more effectively, he allowed Chinese men to continue marrying Vietnamese women. However, the Nguyen adopted assimilationist policies toward their children, whom they now classified as Minh huong. Upon reaching adulthood, the state required these Sino-Vietnamese children to leave their father’s congregation and live among the Vietnamese population, or, for the time being, in special Minh huong villages. They could not travel to China to study, nor could they dress in Chinese ways. The Nguyen ensured their collaboration by opening the civil service to them and exempting them from military service. Many occupied high-level positions in the southern administration, as Trinh Hoai Duc did. In so doing, he helped integrate the Mekong delta administratively into modern Vietnam.

Sino-Vietnamese marriages continued under the French, who accelerated Chinese immigration. By 1921, Cochinchina was home to 64,500 (declared) Minh huong offspring. A decade later the number reached 73,000, surely an underestimation. The French, however, reversed Nguyen efforts to assimilate Minh huong children into the Vietnamese population. They transformed them instead into Foreign Asians and taxed them accordingly, mainly for economic reasons, not racial ones. With the rise of a Vietnamese merchant class at the turn of the twentieth century, budding entrepreneurs like Bach Thai Buoi challenged Chinese commercial influence in shipbuilding. Bourgeois politicians in the Constitionalist party joined ranks with some of them to organize a boycott of Chinese goods in 1919. Others clamored for the nationalization of these ‘Foreign Asians’ and ‘Minh huong’ into ‘Vietnamese citizens’. Neither request went far. Again, this was a colonial state, not a national one.²⁸

Things were different in China, which had never lost its formal independence and began to assert its national control over the large overseas populations historically concentrated in Southeast Asia. Starting in 1909, the Qing government insisted that any child born of a Chinese father would become, jus sanguinis, a Chinese national, regardless of their place of birth. But it was only in the early 1930s, with the emergence of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek in 1928, that the French finally agreed to sign accords allowing Minh huong children to choose their nationality upon reaching their majority. The French also agreed to re-categorize Chinese ‘nationals’ in Indochina as ‘privileged foreigners’ and to allow the Republic of China to establish consulates in Vietnam. This was a major legal victory for Chinese republicans, but not for the Vietnamese. Although Ho Chi Minh’s government administered Chinese affairs in the territories it controlled during the First Indochina War, the French refused to let their Vietnamese partners do so before 1955.²⁹

Most Sino-Vietnamese marriages occurred between Chinese men and Vietnamese women. Unlike their French counterparts, most (but not all) Chinese settlers learned to speak Vietnamese or grew up bilingual, thereby facilitating interactions with the majority lowland Vietnamese population. Relatively few Vietnamese men married Chinese women. However, Vietnamese men going to China to work on the French-supervised Yunnanese Railway or in French colonial offices in Shanghai and Kunming did. This was also true of several Vietnamese anticolonialists who moved to southern China. Ho Chi Minh married a Chinese woman from Guangzhou during his time in China. And Vietnamese immigration to western Indochina and northeast Thailand also produced mixed unions and métis children. The father of modern Laos, Kaysone Phoumvihane, was the son of a Vietnamese colonial civil servant and a Laotian mother. Prince Souphanouvong married a Vietnamese woman whom he met as a colonial engineer in Annam in the 1930s. Harkening back to the way that marriage practices were used by Dai Viet leaders to forge alliances with the Cham, Khmer, and Lao, Ho would rely on these Indochinese unions to help build associated states in Laos and Cambodia in the late 1940s (and discussed later on in this book).³⁰

The French stamped their presence on cities like Saigon through architecture and urban planning and development. The imposing Palais du Gouverneur (built between 1868 and 75) located on Khoi Nghia Nam Ky Street today was the home of French colonial power until it transferred to Hanoi at the turn of the century. The Bank of Indochina stood in the heart of Saigon, an impressive structure for the time and a testament to its role in building French Indochina. Large avenues soon lined the city, with Rue Catinat (built in 1865) serving as French Saigon’s first major artery. A series of French- and Asian-style buildings, shops, and export-import offices quickly appeared. Provençal villas characterized the residential sector of Saigon (and Hanoi) as the European population and the Vietnamese bourgeoisie expanded. The metropolitan architect, Ernest Hébard, gave colonial Saigon greater coherence, combining French and indigenous architectural forms. Though the lines were never strictly drawn, on the eve of the Second World War, French Saigon consisted of a business center, an administrative sector, the French quarter, a Vietnamese one, and a variety of cultural attractions. The French erected colonial monuments, named streets after famous conquerors, and advertised their goods and services in French newspapers and on Radio Saigon.

In daily life, the Vietnamese continued to converse in their native tongue as multilingual Chinese and Indian vendors shifted effortlessly from one language to another. Storefront windows in Cholon’s Chinatown announced their goods and menus in characters as a cacophony of southern Chinese dialects resonated from one congregational area to another (the different ‘Chinese’ used Cantonese or Vietnamese to communicate among themselves). While several Vietnamese merchants continued to use Chinese characters to advertise their goods, especially those practicing traditional medicine, by the 1930s most were moving to the Romanized script, quoc ngu.

New social classes emerged in French Vietnam. Although the Chinese continued to dominate the commercial class in Vietnam, a handful of Vietnamese entrepreneurs emerged. Like Bach Thai Buoi, Le Phat Vinh and Truong Van Ben challenged Chinese commercial influence in textiles and rice husking, while Le Van Duc created perhaps the first Vietnamese insurance company. French-employed civil servants, lawyers, translators, and teachers acquired equal status with the members of the mandarin elite they had increasingly sidelined. They had a harder time, however, establishing equality with their French counterparts, whose salaries were almost always higher than the ‘native’ ones. No Vietnamese person ever became a commissioner at the provincial level, let alone at the regional one, before 1945. Landlordism increased under the French and, unlike in the past, the landlords moved to the cities. In all, an estimated 9,000 rich Vietnamese—mainly landowners and entrepreneurs—lived in urban Vietnam by 1930. Loosely defined, the urban middle class numbered 920,000 individuals.³¹

The rural poor working in French Saigon and Hanoi had it hardest. Dressed shabbily, they lived in rough quarters inside the city and on its outskirts. Their wages were pitifully low and the French outlawed any sort of organized labor. Most came from the countryside and relied on their rural connections to cope with accidents or loss of employment. Many rural migrants found work on construction sites. Others filled a myriad of back-breaking jobs serving as rickshaw drivers, maids, servants (‘boys’), cooks (‘bep’), waiters, waitresses, and street vendors and sweepers. And yet, the rural poor flooding into shantytowns on the outskirts of Saigon and into the Vietnamese quarters were vital to Saigon’s takeoff in modernization, as well as its ‘Vietnamization’. By the 1930s, a working class had emerged in Vietnam numbering in the hundreds of thousands, most working in urban construction, mining, and on plantations. These workers suffered much more from the economic crisis of 1929 than other classes. And while the Popular Front had introduced some reforms for workers, strikes and trade unions remained illegal.³²

RELIGIOUS VIETNAM

The almost constant state of war over Vietnam during the second half of the twentieth century has understandably focused attention on the post-1945 period on political, diplomatic, and military matters discussed later on in this book. However, missing from this focus on the wars is the vital importance of religions and religious change during the colonial period. Some of them, like Buddhism, Catholicism, and even the ‘political religion’ of Confucianism, have roots deep in the past, as we have seen in earlier chapters. Others, like the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Protestant faiths, were as new to Vietnam as communism.

The secularist-minded Third Republic and many of its highest-ranking colonial administrators in Indochina were as wary of organized religions as their Confucian predecessors and communist successors. Ironically, when it came to ruling the eastern half of Indochina, the French preferred to rely on the Confucian-calibrated civil service, even in Cochinchina, when it suited them. Highly influential and powerful colonial administrators like Pierre Pasquier and Léon Pignon were convinced that Confucianism, above all the monarch and his mandarins, was the key to ‘understanding’ and ruling Vietnam administratively. Confucianism was the ‘real’ Vietnam. Pasquier, who served in Vietnam for over thirty-five years and worked closely with the monarchy in Hue cast Vietnam as a miniature replica of China. He was convinced that the Confucian ‘son of heaven’ in Vietnam resonated from on high right down to village level, could be used to maintain order, and, through the intermediary of the person of the emperor, mobilize peasant support for French rule. He admired and promoted the mandarinal administrative system. It is no accident that the ‘Bao Dai solution’ was the brainchild of this very Confucian French mind. Colonial administrators in Vietnam never attempted to use Mahayana Buddhism, its schools, monastic order, and organizations to administer people and territories as they did Theravada Buddhism in Laos and Cambodia. Nor did they ever come to trust Vietnamese Catholics.³³

Buddhist Vietnam³⁴

Although the French were as distrustful of Buddhism as Minh Mang, they could do little more than he to stop this religion’s growth. Local authorities and police informers kept tabs on religious leaders and attitudes and arrested troublesome monks when things seemed to get out of hand. Ironically, the French also contributed to something of a Buddhist revival during the interwar years through the colonial introduction of modern communications (presses, newspapers, and radios), the construction of better roads and means of transportation, and the expansion of quoc ngu. Combined, this led to an explosion in the number of Buddhist publications (sutras, prayer books, and texts) and their transmission to a larger and increasingly literate audience, not just in the cities but also in the countryside, thanks to expanded primary education. This, in turn, reinforced Vietnamese religious efforts to consolidate, organize, and grow the Buddhist faith.

1. A stylized map of Vietnam, from the reign of Minh Mang.

2. Entrance gate to the Imperial City, Hue, Vietnam.

3. Entrance to the tomb of Minh Mang.

4. Two captured Black Flag militiamen, 1885.

5. Arrival in Saigon of Paul Beau, governor-general of Indochina 1902–7, engraving by Charles Georges Dufresne from Le Petit Journal, November 1902.

6. Man-Tien women at a market, Upper Tonkin, 1902.

8. Inauguration on 6 September 1910 of the memorial to French and Annamese soldiers who died during the 1909 campaign.

9. Exiting the Colonial Exhibition at Vincennes, 1931: Albert Sarraut (left), Bao Dai (center), and Pierre Pasquier (right).

10. Opening of the Colonial Exhibition, Vincennes, 1931. Bao Dai is seated in center.

11. Japanese troops en route to occupy Lang Son, September 1940.

12. Rokuro Suzuki, Japanese Consul.

13. A 1944 official French government brochure on Indochina.

14. A Japanese soldier posts the first proclamation issued by the Allied Control Commission, Saigon, 1945.

15. Vo Nguyen Giap, Jean Sainteny, and General Philippe Leclerc, Hanoi, 17 June 1946.

16. Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh, Battle of Dien Bien Phu, May 1954.

Connections with the Buddhist world outside Indochina also strengthened its renewal inside it. Monks and lay people participated in international congresses and closely followed (through books and papers) Asian efforts to strengthen Buddhism as a spiritual, social, national, and international force. Reform-minded Vietnamese monks were most interested in Chinese efforts to re-tailor Buddhism to the needs of a rapidly changing world. Vietnamese religious leaders devoured Buddhist reformist texts coming from Guangzhou and Shanghai. Highest on their reading list were the writings of the leader of the Buddhist revival movement in China, Taixu (1890–1947). This reformer called for a more human, socially engaged, and modernizing Buddhism. Starting in the 1920s, he urged monks to go toward the people, to tailor Buddhism to their needs, and to those of the nation. The clergy had to energize the church through compassion and social action, he insisted. This could be done through the creation of charitable and relief organizations to help the poor, the orphaned, and the hungry; through the building of religious schools to train novices in the way of the Buddha; and via the establishment of clinics to heal the sick. Reform, Taixu said, also depended on creating a streamlined monastic order, or sangha. Only a modern Church could train, control, and administer such a renewed religion at the national level. He discussed all of this in scores of lectures, books, and articles published in China and among the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.³⁵

Indeed, thanks to Chinese bookstores in Indochina, Vietnamese monks, many of them still quite capable of reading Chinese characters, procured Taixu’s writings and translated scores of Chinese Buddhist publications into quoc ngu. Taixu’s program struck many Vietnamese Buddhists and young reform-minded monks as highly relevant to the situation in Indochina. Monks like Thich Nhat Hanh Do Nam Tu and Thien Chieu embraced Taixu’s ideas and began promoting his reforms in a bid to respond to and make sense of the rapid transformation of Vietnamese society and the chronic suffering in the countryside. They found inspiration and models in Taixu’s seminal text, The Reorganization of the Sangha System (1915). These efforts and others bore fruit during the interwar period, which was symbolized by the establishment of new Buddhist associations: the first for Cochinchina in 1931, the second in Annam a year later, and a third in Tonkin in 1934, each theoretically in charge of provincial chapters. Vietnamese Buddhists developed a host of relief and charity organizations, many of which helped during the great famine of 1944–5. Hundreds of religious schools appeared to train a new generation of monks and nuns in the correct Buddhist canon and practices. Although this restructuring was admittedly easier said than done, by the 1930s a unified and increasingly structured Buddhist Church emerged in Vietnam. Reformers established the Quan Su Temple near the train station in Hanoi, which rapidly became the hub for Buddhism reformism. It is today the home of the Vietnamese National Buddhist Congregation. The French tolerated many of these efforts as long as they remained apolitical, but never had the means in any case to stop their growth locally.³⁶

Women played a particularly important role in the development of Buddhism in twentieth-century Vietnam, as they had earlier. They contributed money and donated land to open new monasteries and schools. Many ran the charity organizations. Buddhist schools trained more nuns than ever before in Vietnamese history. The northern nun, Hue Tam, was an ardent supporter of the Buddhist reform movement. In 1935, Nguyen Thi Hai travelled to India to participate in a major Buddhist congress. The renewal of Buddhism was also linked to wider debates over the role of women in the church and in society and the need to create a national and socially sensitive church. Indeed, the revitalization of Buddhism provided the rural poor with a powerful message of liberation and salvation, making it a sociopolitical force with which to reckon.³⁷

The Hoa Hao and Cao Dai Faiths of the Mekong Delta³⁸

This was particularly true in the Mekong delta, where Buddhist messianism was at its strongest and had long mixed with a tradition of peasant millennialism and mysticism to produce breakaway schools of faith. Besides being a mosaic of peoples, cultures, and religions, the southern delta had also long been a colonial society where the Nguyen had promoted large-scale private landlordism and plantations. The Nguyen accorded concessions to soldiers and loyal elites, who, in return, would help the imperial hub of power, Hue, control these newly conquered territories. However, this concentration of commercial rice land in the hands of the few also meant that peasant landlessness ran high as the population increased and, with it, the potential for social discontent. In the early 1840s, the acting financial commissioner for the province of Vinh Long informed the emperor that 70 to 80 percent of the villagers in his province were landless. If families in the Red River delta could turn to communal lands in times of difficulty and owned more than one half of the available farmland there, such publicly shared lands were largely absent in Cochinchina, and farmers owned only one third of the land in the south.³⁹

Peasant misery existed elsewhere in Vietnam, to be sure, but when hunger became unbearable in the south, spurring local leaders to action, it did so within a unique socio-cultural context. Self-proclaimed holy men often appeared at this time, as they did in Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. Several evoked the name of the Buddha messiah Maitreya in order to rally the famished behind them. This savior would create a new kingdom and put an end to suffering on earth. These ‘millenarian machines’ also mobilized religious support for imminently socio-economic demands—the reduction of taxes, the free sale of agricultural produce, or the cancellation of rural debts. With tens of thousands of desperate peasants standing behind them, they could force the ruling class to listen. In the late 1840s, in the midst of a massive cholera epidemic that killed perhaps as many as a million people, a mystic in the delta, Doan Minh Huyen, initiated a millenarian movement known as the Dao Buu Son Ky Huong (the ‘Way of the Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain’). Huyen cast himself as a living Buddha, a maitreya, sent into the world to end suffering and to bring salvation. Crowds flocked to hear him. Many attributed supernatural powers to him. Others said he could heal the sick. Like the Taiping rebellion threatening to bring down the Qing dynasty in the 1850s to make way for the heavenly kingdom, this Precious Mountain movement worried the court profoundly and pointed up the volatility of the Mekong delta in times of profound socioeconomic crisis.⁴⁰

The French did little to alleviate the landlessness problem in the south, where they expanded the plantation system on an unprecedented scale as discussed above in this chapter. Nor did the southern population remain unchanged. It increased from 1.7 million in 1880 to 4.4 million in 1930. Unsurprisingly, the French also had to confront religious mystics leading revolts and trying to build religious kingdoms on waves of peasant anger surging across the delta. Between 1911 and 1913, a southern mystic, Phan Xich Long, launched an intermittent, millenarian rebellion near Saigon-Cholon. He claimed to be the descendent of the rebel emperor, Ham Nghi, whom the French had shipped out of the country in the late 1880s (see chapter 3). He simultaneously cast himself as the ‘living Buddha’. He and others like him found support among the rural poor, landless peasants, and disgruntled civil servants. The Phan Xich Long rebellion, though easily smashed, served as a warning to the authorities that these millenarian, mystic-minded leaders could mobilize tens of thousands of people. And these ‘living Buddhas’ were not as backward or as fou (‘mad’) as secular colonial, nationalist, and communist elites often painted them. They, too, knew how to tap into modern organizational techniques, print media, and use quoc ngu to spread their message.⁴¹

This was certainly true of the Cao Dai faith, founded by Le Van Trung in 1926. Trung inspired a group of Vietnamese civil servants, landowners, and peasants, who were attracted by his messianic message. The two words ‘Cao Dai’ evoke in Vietnamese the supreme or elevated being, which brings peace, harmony, and salvation to the world. It is called the Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do (which translates officially as the ‘Way of the Highest Power’). This belief system is hierarchically structured and based organizationally on the model of the Roman Catholic Church. A ‘Ho Phap’ (‘pope’) leads the Cao Dai Church, with its ‘Holy See’ based in Tay Ninh province located on the Cambodian border.

Like reformist Buddhism, Cao Dai leaders embraced a progressive program calling for greater equality between men and women, closer relations between the landowning and peasant classes, and the belief that colonization was punishment for failing to follow core Cao Dai teachings now located in a faraway past. Pham Cong Tac, a civil servant in Phnom Penh, resigned his post in 1928 and returned to Tay Ninh, the cradle of the religion, to help Trung run the rapidly expanding faith. Following Trung’s death in 1935, Pham Cong Tac extended his influence and, in 1938, became the movement’s supreme spiritual leader. The Cao Dai faith’s embrace of the mystic and the ritualistic attracted a large following in the south. It also tapped into pre-existing religions inside Vietnam, borrowed from foreign ones, and combined them all into a unique faith symbolized by the left eye of God open within the Cao Dai triangle.

The French closely monitored the rapid development of the Cao Dai faith, worried by its social alliances, politicization, and its ability to garner massive support in the countryside. With extraordinary speed, the Cao Dai Church counted between 500,000 and one million believers, out of a total Cochinchinese population of 4.4 million people. During the Second World War, Pham Cong Tac welcomed the chance to expand the faith thanks to the Japanese occupation and the change in the balance of power this promised. Worried by just such a scenario, the French first incarcerated Pham Cong Tac in Vietnam and then shipped him off to Madagascar. This did not stop the expansion of the faith and, following the Japanese overthrow of the French in March 1945, Cao Dai leaders mobilized their armed militias and entered the fray of nationalist politics when the Japanese capitulated a few months later.

Another faith to emerge in the Mekong delta was that of the Hoa Hao. In July 1939, Huynh Phu So, a nineteen-year-old from the village of Hoa Hao in Chau Doc province, revealed during the course of a mystic experience that he was a Buddhist holy man. His mastery of Buddhist teachings impressed all. His charisma was by all accounts electrifying. Those present spoke of his supernatural powers, serenity, and compassion. Even the meaning of his native village ‘Hoa Hao’—‘conciliation’ or ‘concord’—seemed to confirm the legitimacy of this young man with the piercing eyes and the message he revealed. Two other factors also allowed him to expand what could have remained a localized cult into a major southern faith. Firstly, he could draw upon local Buddhist beliefs and the centuries-old popularity of the Maitreya Buddha to renew the millenarian promise of a coming golden age. Secondly, like Pham Cong Tac, Huynh Phu So could tap into real rural discontent among the landless and unemployed masses, many of whom were looking for a savior and the promise of a better world to help them make it through the difficult economic times of the 1930s.

Huynh Phu So was less interested in building a structured Church like that of the Catholics, Cao Dai, Mahayana Buddhists, or communists. He emphasized rather the pure, spiritual core of Hoa Hao Buddhism (Phat giao Hoa Hao). This also makes it harder to know just how many people joined him. By the time the Japanese started moving into northern Indochina in 1940, the French estimated that Huynh Phu So had several thousand followers concentrated in the provinces of Tan Chau, Chau Doc, and Long Xuyen. The French thought him crazy, and interned the ‘bonze fou’ (mad monk) in a psychiatric ward in Saigon (where he promptly converted his Vietnamese doctor to the faith). What really worried the French were the Japanese, who successfully intercepted So during his transfer to Laos and protected him from French arrest. By March 1945, when French Indochina collapsed under the Japanese, the Hoa Hao faith counted around 100,000 believers, several thousand of whom he had already begun organizing into militias. Unlike the communists, whose failed uprising in 1940 ended in almost complete destruction, the combined Hoa Hao and Cao Dai forces emerged from the Second World War as major politico-military actors, controlling together perhaps as much as 20 percent of the delta’s total population.

Catholic Vietnam⁴²

Vietnamese Catholicism also changed greatly during the colonial period. From the sixteenth century on, seaborne trading routes opened by the Iberians had debarked thousands of European missionaries in Asia. By the late seventeenth century, around 100,000 Vietnamese (mainly concentrated in the north) had converted to Catholicism. These numbers increased slowly over the years as Catholicism spread southward into the Mekong delta with the Nguyen. In 1945, out of a total population of around 30 million people, 1.6 million Vietnamese were Catholics. There were undoubtedly very real problems and mistrust between Catholics and their secular rulers from the time of the sixteenth century onward. As we saw, European missionaries and many Vietnamese Catholics did indeed look to the French for help against Minh Mang’s attack on them.

However, this does not mean that colonial and Catholic interests were identical or that this early collaborative relationship between missionaries and colonizers remained static until 1945. The Vietnamese Church changed greatly between Napoleon III’s conquest of Cochinchina in 1862 and Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of the independence of Vietnam in 1945. The relationship between French missionaries and the French colonial rulers in Indochina also changed. Napoleon III might have been a fervent Catholic (and that’s debatable), but his republican successors were anything of the sort. By the turn of the century, almost all of the French administrators in Indochina were secularist-minded, anticlerical products of the Third Republic. Paul Doumer and many other high-ranking colonial administrators like him were Freemasons. Albert Sarraut was a leading member of the Radical Socialist Party, a Dreyfusard, and an ardent supporter of the laws separating Church and State in France at the turn of the century.

While it would be wrong to conclude that all republican administrators necessarily became the enemies of Catholics in the empire, the alert ones realized upon their arrival overseas how hard it would be to adhere to Léon Gambetta’s warning in 1876 that anticlericalism should not be exported to the empire. Many a zealous republican journalist, educator, lower-ranking officer, and civilian administrator remembered Gambetta best for his call to arms against the French Catholic clergy—‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!’ Rather than seeing the missionaries as allies in building colonial Indochina, many considered them unpatriotic and disloyal. Several were convinced that these Roman Catholic missionaries threatened the Third Republic’s special civilizing mission in Indochina. Colonial officials, police services, and anticlerical journalists kept close tabs on missionary publications, proselytizing efforts, and connections with the Vatican and other Asian Churches, especially in China and the Philippines. French missionaries, most of whom still operated under the Missions étrangères de Paris, realized that they had to keep on good terms with colonial administrators if they were to keep their Church up and running.

The countryside, where the missions had always been most active, was the main site of conflict between the colonial state and the Catholic missions. On several occasions, local administrators concluded that they could not trust some missionaries to serve as the intermediaries for administering faraway territories and peoples. While colonial officials appreciated the impressive knowledge, contacts, and languages the European missionaries could marshal, they just as often doubted their political loyalty. Léopold Sabatier, a dedicated French civil servant working among the Rhadé people in the highlands, intensely distrusted French priests and their Vietnamese faithful. They were, in his view, unfit to administer territories in the highlands. In another instance, one French priest responded to his critics that he had always done his best to spread the republican message into the highlands and in so doing had brought tens of thousands of non-Viet people into the colonial fold. And many French priests did support the colonial project. But when attacked for failing to teach French to their Vietnamese followers, some missionaries lost patience. Standing before the Cochinchinese Colonial Council, one Father Mossard declared: ‘Dare I add that the Vietnamese who know French are, with rare exception, those who love the French the least, who respect them the least, and who, fundamentally, are the most hostile to them?’ Furious, one of the ethnic Viet republicans sitting on the council shot back that this was an attack on ‘all Vietnamese who, like me, received the benefits of French civilization. Monseigneur Mossard clearly is accusing us of being traitors’. Not quite, but the French priest should have held his tongue, for the council revoked his subsidy. As for not teaching French, it had nothing to do with missionary anti-republicanism or insufficient French nationalism. What counted most for religious leaders in Vietnam was spreading the word of God in Vietnamese (and other languages besides French).Buddhists, Cao Daists, Hoa Hao, nationalists, communists, and even Pierre Pasquier understood this.⁴³

However, the colonial republic’s problems with Catholicism came less from the French missionaries than from Vietnamese Catholics and the Vatican in Rome. Like those pursuing other religions, a growing number of Vietnamese Catholics asserted their desire to take control of their Church and grow it on their terms and in their language. The rise of print culture, increased literacy in quoc ngu, and expanding roads and improved transportation facilitated this. Catholic papers, pamphlets, and booklets flourished during the interwar period, mainly printed in quoc ngu. Reinvigorated religious instruction produced a new generation of indigenous priests and nuns, while the expansion of Catholic schools helped spread the faith among the younger generations. Although Vietnamese priests were as a rule hostile to communism, progressive trends in global Catholicism, France, and Indochina led to a more socially conscious, center-left brand of Catholicism as clergy and lay people organized youth, workers, and peasants into associations. And as for other faiths, nationalism was very much a part of this religious transformation of Vietnamese Catholicism. To French dismay, a handful of Vietnamese priests like Father Mai Lao Bang in Nghe An province helped the Vietnamese patriot Phan Boi Chau in the early 1900s organize the dispatch of young men to Japan to study and drive out the French.⁴⁴

The French were equally troubled by their inability to stop Vietnamese Catholics from moving within a wider Roman Catholic world in search of new ideas, models, and sources of international support. Indeed, the Vatican was a real problem for French republicans well into the 1950s. Particularly worrying was Rome’s decision after the First World War to distance the Catholic Church from colonialism. Faced with an increasingly secular Europe, papal strategists concluded that the center of gravity of Catholicism was shifting rapidly toward the non-Western world and with it the future of the Church. Reports of colonial abuses in European empires and the association of European missionaries with Western colonialism convinced religious authorities that it was imperative to indigenize the non-Western Church. Just as worrisome was the rise of communism in a new state spanning all of Eurasia, the Soviet Union. The creation of the Comintern (the Communist International organization) in 1919 which preached a new type of universal secularism reinforced the Vatican’s willingness to change its global tack. And of course the accelerating ‘de-christianization’ of Western Europe only reinforced the Church’s interest in the non-Western world.⁴⁵

The Vatican moved with surprising alacrity. Benedict XV’s 1919 apostolic letter ‘Maximum Illud’ and Pius XI’s 1926 encyclical ‘Rerum Ecclesiae’ authorized the indigenization of the Church in the non-Western world. Rome’s emissaries immediately informed local European missionaries in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere that they should prepare to turn over the Church to the local clergy and support the efforts mentioned above to invigorate a Vietnamese Catholic Church. In Vietnam, this meant the training, designation, and ordination of local bishops. Despite colonial and even European missionary resistance, Rome successfully dispatched an apostolic delegate to Indochina in 1925 to preside over the ‘Vietnamization’ of the Church there. French republican leaders could do little to stop the Vatican. On the one hand, who among them could seriously accuse the Pope of being ‘pro communist’? On the other hand, the Third Republic’s all-out secular assault on the Church’s powers and property in France removed any leverage French leaders might have used to make Rome toe the colonial line. As Rome’s new delegate wrote in the late 1920s: ‘Times having evolved, indigenous priests must be second to none to extend more effectively the kingdom of Christ’.⁴⁶

This is not what French republican colonialists wanted to hear. In effect, the Vatican was implementing a genuine policy of association by letting the Vietnamese run their own Church in collaboration with Rome. This was precisely the type of colonial policy Vietnamese moderates wanted and the French had been promising since the regime of Governer General Paul Beau, but had never implemented. Sarraut had raised hopes enormously after 1918; but nothing tangible had come of French association. While the Catholic Church and its elite remained heavily Eurocentric, sometimes racist, and almost always paternalistic, the Vatican’s indigenous policy trapped French republicans in their own discourse and inertia. French authorities were anything but elated in 1933, when Pope Pius XI ordained Nguyen Ba Tong as its first Vietnamese bishop in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Tong returned to a hero’s welcome in Vietnam. Newspapers splashed his picture on their front pages. Even non-Christian Vietnamese expressed pride in Rome’s decision to trust one of them. As the French ambassador to the Vatican wrote perceptively in a 1933 dispatch, ‘We would have difficulties making the Vatican understand our opposition to the elevation of one of our colonial subjects to ecclesiastic honors and Episcopal functions. We present ourselves voluntarily as the most liberal of colonizers; the expression “indigenous politics” and “politics of association” come from us. How could we justify finding this to be a poor method simply because it is the Vatican that is applying it’? Confronted with massive revolts and the rise of communism in China and Vietnam, colonial authorities watched helplessly as Rome proceeded to indigenize the Vietnamese Catholic Church before their eyes. Ironically, the Pope was better at implementing a form of ‘association’ in Vietnam than the French Third Republic was.⁴⁷

Significantly, support for the indigenization of Catholicism and the application of indigenous rule to Vietnam’s Catholic Church came from influential Catholics at the court in Hue, most notably from Nguyen Huu Bai and Ngo Dinh Kha. Both had accepted collaboration with the French on the understanding that the protectorate treaty would allow the monarchy to continue to administer and reform the country in association with the French, not on orders from them. They were aghast at the way the French had humiliated, dethroned, and exiled the ‘rebel’ emperors Thanh Thai and Duy Tan. While it is unclear to what extent the two things were linked in their minds, Kha and Bai welcomed Rome’s indigenization of the Church and used it to increase pressure on the French to respect the protectorate treaty which allowed indigenous rule via the monarchy. Ngo Dinh Kha had raised his children in this patriotic tradition which had included Catholics as well as Buddhists. Upon the death of Ngo Dinh Kha in 1925, Nguyen Huu Bai took his friend’s sons under his wing, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Thuc. The Ngo brothers grew up in this patriotic milieu, one that was initially for the monarchy and pro association.

The revolts of the early 1930s changed French policy. Caught off guard by massive peasant uprisings and worried by the rise of Soviet-backed Vietnamese communism, Sarraut and Pasquier agreed to let these royalists administer a new government in Annam which would be more in accordance with the protectorate treaty. Pasquier also agreed to let their colonial monarch, Bao Dai, trained in France, return to run a protectorate government in Annam. With Nguyen Huu Bai’s support, Ngo Dinh Diem joined Bao Dai’s government in 1934. However, Pasquier rapidly changed his mind and ended the first Bao Dai solution, when he realized that Bao Dai, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Nguyen Huu Bai were serious about administering indigenous affairs in line with the protectorate treaty. Angered by French bad faith and especially their attack on Bai, Diem resigned while Bao Dai withdrew from public affairs. Although Bai died before he could savor the moment, in 1938 another one of his adopted sons, Ngo Dinh Thuc, became a bishop. Thuc never hid his patriotic views and used the Vatican’s support and policies to prod the French (when he could) to respect indigenous rule properly. More than anything else, the rise of the Ngo brothers in the 1930s symbolized the shift from the royalist patriotism of their fathers to the emergence of a strongly nationalist Catholicism involved in politics, whether the French or other Vietnamese liked it or not.⁴⁸

While this Catholic anticolonialism co-existed uneasily with the simultaneous emergence of Vietnamese communism during the 1930s, Vietnamese Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai supporters, Hoa Hao followers and others shared one thing in common with the communists—the desire to secure the country’s full independence. We should thus not be surprised that they were all elated when Ho Chi Minh stepped before the crowd in Hanoi on 2 September 1945 to declare Vietnam’s independence. On 1 November 1945, one of Vietnam’s rising Catholic stars from Phat Diem, Le Huu Tu, was ordained as a bishop without the interference of colonial administrators or the presence of a single European missionary. Intensely anticolonialist, Le Huu Tu joined Bao Dai and Pham Cong Tac in accepting Ho Chi Minh’s invitation to serve as a supreme advisor to the new national government. Like the communists, Buddhists, Hoa Hao followers, Cao Dai supporters and Catholics were also nationalists.⁴⁹