Knowing their Places
Deep in the history of Vietnam are not one Joan of Arc but four woman warriors.
For a millennium a Mongolian people had settled northern Vietnam and built a Bronze Age civilization, but in 111 B.C. the Han dynasty of China overran the country and named it Annam, “pacified country,” a name the conquered people resented. The Chinese created administrative districts under military governors while civilian advisers imported Confucian concepts stressing respect for authority. They levied troops and taxes and taught the population Chinese, but failed to assimilate them. Over the centuries the Vietnamese repeatedly challenged the Chinese, and hostility to foreign domination was to be a part of the national psyche.
In contrast to women elsewhere in Asia and Europe, Vietnamese women could inherit land, serve as trustees of ancestral cults, and share their husbands’ property. To avenge the murder of her dissident husband by a Chinese commander, Trung Trac, a titled lady, and her sister Trung Nhi mustered other restive nobles to drive out the Chinese. The Trung sisters were joined by a third woman, Phung Thi Chinh, who in the middle of the battle is said to have given birth and, after strapping the newborn to her back, continued to fight. Their victory was short-lived. Two years later, in A.D. 42, the Chinese crushed the Trung sisters’ independent state and the sisters committed suicide by throwing themselves into a river.
The Chinese model, often imposed with cruel harshness, shaped the Vietnamese people. Ancestor worship and its attendant family structure rooted itself in the popular consciousness together with the solid village structure, the Chinese alphabet, and the begrudging dominion of Mandarins—a caste of nine ranks of public officials, each distinguished by a particular kind of button on the cap—that effectively governed the Middle Kingdom.
Three hundred years after the Trung sisters, another woman launched a revolt against the Chinese. Trieu Au wore golden armor and led a thousand men into battle riding an elephant. Like the Trung sisters and Phung, she was remembered by a temple and, in the late twentieth century, became a national heroine for her words of defiance: “I want to rail against the wind and the tide, kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole land to save the people from slavery, and I refuse to be abused.”
Seven hundred years after the Han invasion, the Annamese succeeded in throwing off direct Chinese rule. After a brief reoccupation by the Chinese Ming dynasty, the Annamese themselves became imperialists and declared war on their neighbors. They defeated the Khmers in the south and extended Annam south to Danang. Although nominally independent, Vietnam remained a tributary state to the Ming dynasty. The Chinese forced Annamese peasants to mine for gold, confiscated Vietnamese literature, compelled schools to teach in Chinese, and issued identity cards to families to control them and to facilitate tax collection.
The next rebel leader was Le Loi. Legend has it that he was a simple fisherman who one day cast his net into a lake only to bring up a sword that made him superhuman. Like the women warriors in their misty past, the Vietnamese would never forget Le Loi. They would compose folksongs and poems in his honor and in future struggles recall his Arthurian legend.
In reality, Le Loi was a wealthy landowner who had served the Chinese before starting his uprising. “Every man on earth,” he said, “should accomplish some great enterprise so that he leaves the sweet scent of his name to later generations.”
Proclaiming himself the prince of pacification, he withdrew to the mountains near his home and rallied relatives, friends, villagers, and even local outlaws, teaching them guerrilla tactics to harass the enemy.
Like the French and the Americans five centuries later, the Chinese occupiers became increasingly insecure as Le Loi’s insurrection spread. They clung to towns, building fixed fortifications and venturing out by day only, their big battalions hugging roads and avoiding the bush. Like their Vietcong descendants, the insurgents knew when to strike and when to fade into the jungle, and how to subordinate military action to winning the hearts and minds of the people. Nguyen Trai, a poet who was Le Loi’s adviser, wrote “Better to conquer hearts than citadels.”
The revolt Le Loi started in 1418 ended in victory ten years later when the Vietnamese, fighting in rain and mud, routed the Chinese in a field near Hanoi. Le Loi established his capital in Hanoi, which he called Dong Kinh and which the Portuguese, when they arrived in search of trade, spelled Tonkin. He distributed land to the poor, rewarded loyal nobles, and set up departments to build dams and irrigation systems to increase the growth of food. Trai sang his praise:
Peace follows war as day follows night.
We have purged our shame for a thousand centuries.
We have regained tranquillity for ten thousand generations.
In 1558, a hundred years after Le Loi had started a golden age, the Le dynasty splintered and two families, the Trinh and the Nguyen, effectively divided the country and fought each other for centuries. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit Vietnam, were followed by the Dutch, French, and English during the seventeenth century. In the late eighteenth century, a Nguyen leader turned to France to bolster his cause, setting the scene for French intervention.
While Indochina—and to a large and humiliating extent China—became colonized, Japan was not. After the jolt of Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 visit, Japan was fortunate enough to have an emperor, Mutsuhito, and a ruling class that realized the country needed to modernize in order to escape creeping colonization. The result was the sweeping social and political reforms of the Meiji (“enlightened rule”) period that started in 1868.
The attitude of Vietnam’s emperor Tu Doc and his Mandarin court in Hanoi, on the other hand, was exactly the opposite: resist the intruder by locking the country into its past and into ultra conservatism. Two years after the French captured Saigon in 1859, Tu Doc ceded to France the three provinces adjacent to Saigon.
It took the French another twenty years to “pacify” the country, but by 1880 the French controlled not only Cochin China but also Annam (as they named the central part of Vietnam) and Tonkin, the name given to the region around Hanoi. By 1887 France had established the Federation of Indochina, comprising Vietnam, Cambodia, and, after 1.893, Laos.
Resistance continued. Phan Boi Chou, a radical monarchist, believed that with Chinese and Japanese help a powerful Vietnamese emperor could prevail over the French. His deputy Phan Chu Trinh, on the other hand, was for a Vietnamese Meiji. To have any future at all, Trinh maintained, Vietnam would have to cooperate with the progressive elements in the colonial power structure as well as with enlightened governments in Paris.
Colonialism never quite had the bracing effect on public opinion in France it did in Britain. No Cecil Rhodes dreamed of making half of Africa part of the empire—and of recovering the United States for the crown—and no Rudyard Kipling sang the glories of the “white man’s burden.” Still, to salve France’s humiliation by Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war that resulted in the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, compensatory attention was focused on overseas enterprises. Commercial interests were captivated by the prospect of new markets abroad and cheap raw materials and maintained that such goals were commensurate with the ideals of the French republic.
There was resistance to overseas expansion at both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives condemned colonialism as adventurous, costly, and essentially futile, while liberals denounced imperialism as contrary to the first credo of the French revolution—peoples’ rights of self-determination. When left-of-center politicians managed to accommodate colonialism as an export of higher ideals, they liked to stress the temporary nature of such undertakings.
Governor-General Paul Bert died in Hanoi in 1886, but during his short tenure he organized France’s “civilizing mission” in the new colonies with a policy of association and the creation of a school system that tried to fuse science and Western values with ancestral learning. By making the French penal code the law of the land, Paul Beau, Bert’s successor, humanized a justice system that required thieves to be beheaded and adulterous women trampled to death by elephants and that people prostrate themselves before dignitaries.
The conquest of Indochina was expensive, and by the time Paul Doumer became governor-general in 1897 the Paris government had decided to make the Federation of Indochina pay for itself. Doumer’s tenure lasted only five years, but it changed everything.
Doumer was a self-made man, a onetime newspaper editor, cabinet secretary, finance minister, and author of a tax reform that had aroused heated arguments. His nomination was partly due to the desire of his enemies to remove him from the political scene in Paris. Not yet forty when he became govenor-general, he centralized the colonial power in his own office and created a vast administration, financed through tariffs and state monopolies on alcohol, salt, and opium, or (as Stanley Karnow would write eighty years later) by essentially transferring “the burden from the French taxpayer to the Vietnamese people, not only saddling them with the cost of supporting their own dominion but also exploiting them in order to gain a fat yield on the colonial investment.”1
The tax levies provoked sporadic violence. When in 1899 a member of the French Geographical Society asked a courtier at the Hue palace whether one should call Annamese who had attacked a French military outpost pirates, political insurgents, or vulgar Mandarins, the caustic answer was “They are taxpayers.”
Traditionally only the Chinese residents of Vietnam had smoked opium, but Doumer built a refinery in Saigon which concocted a blend that burned quickly and encouraged consumption. Vietnamese addiction rose so sharply that opium accounted for one third of the colonial administration’s income. Doumer’s other economic reforms were just as calamitous. Rice was such a lucrative commodity that it spurred land seizures. French speculators and prominent Vietnamese families were so voracious that within twenty years a majority of the country’s peasants were tenants or farmed uneconomical small plots. Landless farmers were employed as cheap labor in rubber—after rice, the second largest export—mining, construction, and other industries.
The political establishment in Paris never stood up to colonial interests, and various Paris governments’ attempts to impose reforms were effectively killed. “Doumer’s economic stewardship brought about powerful and oppressive financial interests, headed by the Banque de L’Indochine, with its triple role of commercial bank, saving and loan institution and issuer of the currency,” French historian André Teulières would write. “Only Paris could counteract this by imposing a representative or democratic body, but it didn’t. As is so often the case, the colonial lobby ended up believing it ruled by divine right. It curbed, when it didn’t outright sabotage, all changes that challenged this pseudo-divine right.”2
The event that buoyed Vietnamese nationalists was Japan’s victory over czarist Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. It was the first-time an Asian nation had defeated a European power, and Phan Boi Chou immediately traveled to Tokyo to meet Japanese political figures and Sun Yat-sen, the American-educated Chinese leader who in 1911 founded the Chinese Republic. In Japan, Phan Boi Chou formed a political organization to agitate among merchants, students, and other middle-class Vietnamese at home and abroad, and helped create an East Asia United League composed of Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Philippine nationalists. His deputy Phan Chu Trinh broke with him over the reliance on Japan. A Mandarin scholar and essentially a moderate, Trinh—of whom André Malraux had first heard when he was interviewed by Victor Golubev—returned to Vietnam and, trusting the instincts of progressive politicians in power in Paris, boldly addressed an open letter to the French government, warning that unless the Vietnamese people could express themselves politically, economically, and socially, upheaval would follow. The abuses of the colonial system, he said, not only humiliated the hearts and minds of the people France was trying to attract; they violated the very ideals France stood for.
This scurrilous epistle, plus Trinh’s backing of a revolt in the central highlands and his decision to open a modern school in Hanoi, had ended with imprisonment and a death sentence. After a few years at the infamous Poulo-Condore penal colony in the South China Sea, Trinh had been exiled to France. To earn a living, he became a photographer in Paris.
More than ninety thousand Indochinese served in the French armed forces or as guest workers in France during World War I (flying ace Georges Guynemer’s copilot was Captain Do Hun Vi). When they returned, they carried with them a new consciousness of the Western world, its positive side and such negatives as the fact that white men could cheerfully murder each other in war.
Some of them also brought back a rudimentary précis of a new driving force: communism. One who stayed was Nguyen That Thanh, a twenty-nine-year-old who, as a seaman, had been dazzled by the sights of New York, and as a cook had worked in London for the renowned chef Georges Auguste Escoffier and met Irish nationalists, Fabian socialists, and Chinese and Indian workers. In Paris, he worked a while as a retouch artist in Trinh’s photo lab. When Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in 1919 for the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Nguyen appealed to the American president to support constitutional government, democratic freedoms, and other reforms for Vietnam.
Nguyen never met Wilson.
Several French socialists, including the future prime minister Léon Blum, however, were impressed by the intense Nguyen. They had him address their convention in Tours in 1920 and applauded when he asked for their help.
His acerbic wit and gift for polemics turned him into a pamphleteer and a writer in L’Humanité, the new French Communist party newspaper, and Le Paria, a journal put out by a group of Asian and African nationalists. “Taxes, forced labor, exploitation; that is the sum total of your civilization,” he wrote. French police became interested in him. One inspector suggested that Albert Sarrault, the former governor-general of Indochina and now minister of colonies, meet him. Sarrault refused, saying Nguyen was merely an alias for Trinh.
A decade later, Nguyen changed his name to Ho Chi Minh.
The atmosphere in Saigon in 1924, when André, Louis, and the ever-faithful Xa arrived from Pnompenh to await the appeal, was a mixture of satisfied languor and, for the Vietnamese majority, creeping anger. The royal houses of Annam, Cambodia, and Laos were left with only a figleaf of authority. Any idea of training the indigenous population for ultimate autonomy was utterly repellant.
Indochina was the most profitable of all French overseas possessions. Enterprising white settlers enjoyed the good life, as did that overwhelming majority of French people—the members of the civil service. Until the world slump in rubber prices, business was healthy and fortunes were quietly being made under the often competent rule of successive governors-general who had really only one iron dictate—that no one rock the boat.
The current governor-general, Martial-Henri Merlin, a former governor in French Africa, was a hardliner who cracked down on any form of native protest following an attempt on his life in Canton. Not that anyone saw the assassination attempt as the writing on the wall.
Indochina was a police state attenuated by tropical torpor, a multiracial society that operated more by explicit permission than implicit consent and contained an amorphous gray area of activities that were never officially approved. As Victor Golubev had told André, the prosperity was, to a large extent, based on the meticulous exploitation of eminently proud and sensible people. More than Cambodians and Laotians, the inhabitants of Vietnam’s lush southern delta were victims of continued land confiscation, but all three ethnic groups were deprived of practically all liberties. Only one native in a thousand, and only in Cochin China, had the right to vote. They were excluded from most economic sectors except in the most menial jobs. Only about one thousand of the seventeen million Indochinese could ever hope for higher education. The University of Hanoi, the only institute of higher learning in Indochina, accepted only one thousand graduate Annamese students a year. A press law enacted under Doumer required preliminary authorization for anything published in quoc-ngu or Chinese. Pesky interference, intimidation, direct and indirect pressures, plus the governor-general’s pleasure effectively muffled the mild French-language dissent.
Education was a prickly issue. The best French minds, often generous and unselfish, espoused the sonorous idea of their country’s mission civilisatrice, while cynics, especially in the higher echelon of colonial administrations, tended to believe that to educate anyone was to create a potential revolutionary.
If a majority of settlers agreed that a strong injection of French culture was probably the best way to prevent native restlessness, it was still surprisingly difficult for an Annamese actually to get an education. Grades from the University of Hanoi were not transferable to schools in France. Annamese who graduated from the Hanoi medical school were not doctors but “health officers.” The departure of Annamese graduates who nevertheless wished to pursue their studies in France (and whose parents could afford to send them) depended on the colonial administration approving their dossiers. And the deciding paper in any young Vietnamese person’s dossier was a police affidavit.
The French civil service had more power than the Mandarins ever had. The requirement that Frenchmen learn Vietnamese as a prerequisite for civil service had proved a failure. A 1910 government survey had revealed that in all of Annam only three Frenchmen were sufficiently fluent in Vietnamese to carry on the complex business of administration. Ironically, while so few French officials spoke the language or could appreciate the outlook of the people they ruled, French Oriental scholars at L’Ècole Française d’Extrême-Orient, established in Hanoi in 1899, carried out the most remarkable research into the Indochinese languages, customs, history, and—as Clara and André had found out—archeology.
To overcome the language barrier, a new native profession had sprung up—the Vietnamese interpreter. Chauffeurs, houseboys, and others who had learned enough French in their work to communicate took up interpreting. Most French administrators felt comfortable with these Vietnamese who “knew their place.” Essential middlemen with shrewd knowledge of the colonial system and its fuzzy edges, these interpreters manipulated the process at the expense of their fellow Vietnamese. They got away with anything. If one of their victims did try to complain to the authorities, how could he or she do it except through the interpreter?
The end of World War I had increased France’s overseas territories in Africa and in the Near East, land taken from Germany and Turkey and administered under a League of Nations trusteeship. Sprawling over four and a half million square miles of territory in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Seas, the French empire had a population of one hundred million, more than twice the number of people in metropolitan France. By the mid-1920s the colonies were providing prestige and economic benefits. They supplied raw materials and, in a world economy sliding toward protectionism at the end of the decade, provided a profitable outlet for capital and for expanding markets.
From his exile in Canton, where he went to avoid French police, Phan Boi Chou might call on the Vietnamese people to revolt. In Saigon, Paul Monin might channel Saigon dockworkers’ discontent into a strike and Trinh (who had been allowed to return from exile in Paris) might call for a national awareness, but the anticolonial resentment was still subterranean.
As Le Paria was being smuggled into the country and read furtively behind closed shutters, so the new ideas were being secretly circulated.
1 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983).
2 André Teulières, L’Indochine: Guerre et Paix (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1985).