French Indochina

Sometimes a small, ordinary gesture is enough to feel a history more than a century old rise to the surface. You are sitting on a little plastic stool, at a street corner in Hà Nội, a cà phê sữa đá ("ca fé sua da," iced coffee with condensed milk) in front of you, and beside it a piece of bánh mì ("bang mi"), that sandwich in a crusty baguette. Neither the coffee nor the baguette were here two hundred years ago. They arrived in the luggage of an empire — that of France, which governed this land for roughly three quarters of a century. This period is called French Indochina — in Vietnamese, people speak of the thời Pháp thuộc ("thoï phap thouôk"), "the era of French domination." It is a story made of roads and railways, of villas and rice paddies, but above all of tensions between a power from far away and a people who never stopped wanting to govern themselves.

How a colony is built

The French presence in Vietnam took hold gradually over the second half of the 19th century. After a series of military interventions, France first gained a foothold in the south of the country, then extended its control toward the center and the north. The country was then carved up and reorganized according to the colonizer's logic, under names that would mark the maps of the era:

• Cochinchina (Nam Kỳ, "the Southern country"), around Sài Gòn, became a directly administered colony.
• Annam (Trung Kỳ, "the Central country"), around the imperial city of Huế, remained in theory ruled by the emperor but under protectorate.
• Tonkin (Bắc Kỳ, "the Northern country"), around Hà Nội, was likewise placed under protectorate.

To these three pieces of Vietnam, France added neighboring Laos and Cambodia to form a vast whole: the Indochinese Union, governed from Hà Nội by a governor-general. The word "Indochina" itself expresses the country's position, between the Indian world and the Chinese world — a crossroads of influences.

It is important to remember that Vietnam was not a blank page. It was an old country, with its dynasties, its imperial court, its scholars trained in the classics, its villages organized around the rice paddy and the cult of ancestors. Colonization did not settle onto a void: it layered itself, often brutally, over a civilization already dense and ancient.

What France left in the landscape

To walk today through certain Vietnamese cities is to move through a distant tracing of France. In Hà Nội, the old colonial quarter lines up its buildings with painted shutters, its wide tree-lined avenues, its Opera House inspired by the one in Paris, its brick cathedral. In Đà Lạt, up in the cool highlands, the French built a hill station with half-timbered villas, like a piece of Europe set among the pines. Almost everywhere there survive metal bridges, train stations, covered markets, high schools.

The most everyday legacy is surely the one on the plate and in the cup. Coffee (cà phê) has become a national passion: Vietnam is today one of the world's largest coffee producers, and the ritual of the metal filter, the phin, dripping coffee drop by drop onto a layer of sweet condensed milk, is a pure product of this encounter. The baguette, transformed into bánh mì, has become completely Vietnamese: stuffed with pâté, coriander (rau mùi), pickled carrots, chili, it has become one of the most famous sandwiches on the planet. This legacy also survives in certain words that passed into everyday language, often tied to imported objects — for instance ga (train station, from the French "gare"), xà phòng (soap, from "savon"), or bơ (butter).

Finally there is a quieter but crucial legacy: the rise of quốc ngữ ("kouôk ngu"), the writing of Vietnamese with the Latin alphabet and its accents. This script was not invented during this period — it was developed much earlier by missionaries, including the famous Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes — but it was under the colonial period that it spread widely through schooling and administration, until it replaced the older Chinese-inspired characters. Today every Vietnamese person writes their language in quốc ngữ, which incidentally makes Vietnamese surprisingly approachable to a Western eye. It is one of the paradoxes of this era: a tool born in the colonial context became an instrument of literacy and national pride.

The other side of the picture: exploitation

It would be dishonest to paint only the villas and the cafés. The colony was not built for the well-being of the Vietnamese, but for the profit of the mother country. The colonial economy rested largely on the exploitation of resources and of local labor.

The great rubber plantations (the trees that yield latex), notably in the south, employed workers (the coolies, the term of the time) in very harsh conditions, far from their villages, subject to exhausting labor and severe discipline. The coal mines of the north, around Hạ Long Bay, ran at full capacity for export. The peasants, for their part, bore heavy taxes and monopolies imposed by the administration, notably on salt, alcohol, and opium, whose sale was encouraged to fill the colonial coffers. Much land passed into the hands of large owners, leaving many farmers landless or in debt.

Within this system, a small French-speaking Vietnamese elite could gain a certain education and access to posts, but the great majority of the population remained shut out of the power and the wealth it produced. This deep inequality fed, year after year, a resentment and a thirst for independence that grew ever sharper.

Two cities, two faces of the colony

Nothing tells the story of Indochina better than its two great cities, still legible today. Hà Nội, in the north, was the seat of colonial power, the city of the governor-general: straight avenues lined with flame trees were laid out, ministries were built, a metal bridge spanning the Red River, an opera house, prestigious high schools. Yet the city kept its ancient soul in the 36 streets of the old artisans' quarter, each bearing the name of a trade or a good (Hàng Bạc, "silver street"; Hàng Đào, "silk street"). The colonial and the Vietnamese stood side by side, wall against wall.

Sài Gòn, in the south, was nicknamed by the French "the pearl of the Far East" (hòn ngọc Viễn Đông). It was the city of trade, of rice shipped out through the great port, of wide boulevards, of the red-brick cathedral and the central post office. The air there felt more open, more mercantile, turned toward the vast Mekong delta (Cửu Long, "the nine dragons"), the country's rice basket.

Between the two, an extraordinary railway was built to link north and south, while colonial roads opened up the mountains and the highlands. This infrastructure served first the colonial economy and the shipping of resources to the ports, but it lastingly shaped the geography of the country. To this day, the train that runs along the coast — the "Reunification Express" — follows much of that route from another century.

A rising desire for independence

You cannot understand twentieth-century Vietnam without this fundamental fact: the desire to take its destiny back into its own hands never weakened. All through the colonial period, resistance movements, peasant revolts, circles of intellectuals, and clandestine political parties followed one another. Some dreamed of modernizing the country by drawing on Japan or the West; others turned toward revolutionary ideas.

Out of this ferment emerged a figure destined to change the course of history: Hồ Chí Minh ("Ho Chi Minh"), who traveled abroad for a long time, including in France, before returning to organize the struggle. It was the front he inspired, the Việt Minh ("viet minh"), that would carry the aspiration for independence to its conclusion. The colonial period closed in the middle of the 20th century: after the Second World War, the Japanese occupation, and a long war, the French presence came to an end in 1954. But that is another story — the story of Điện Biên Phủ.

Facing this history squarely

French Indochina is a sensitive subject, and it deserves to be looked at with fairness. It was neither a simple "golden age" in which France brought civilization, as the propaganda of the time claimed, nor a page that could be summed up in a single word. It was a foreign domination, with its share of exploitation and humiliation, which nonetheless left lasting and sometimes cherished traces in daily life: a coffee, a script, some buildings, a few words.

Today the Vietnamese live with this heritage without apparent complex: they sip their cà phê sữa đá, bite into their bánh mì, write their beautiful language in Latin letters, all while being proud of a fully independent country. Perhaps that is the mark of a self-assured people: knowing how to take what is good from a complicated history, without ever forgetting the price that had to be paid to become masters in their own house again.

Vietnamese to remember

• Pháp (phap) — France; French
• thời Pháp thuộc (thoï phap thouôk) — "the era of French domination," the colonial period
• thuộc địa (thouok dia) — the colony
• Đông Dương (dong zuong) — Indochina (literally "the East")
• cà phê (ca fé) — coffee
• cà phê sữa đá (ca fé sua da) — iced coffee with condensed milk
• bánh mì (bang mi) — bread / baguette, and the famous sandwich
• quốc ngữ (kwok ngu) — the writing of Vietnamese in the Latin alphabet
• độc lập (dohp lap) — independence
• Việt Minh (viet minh) — the front fighting for independence
• cao su (cao soo) — rubber (the rubber-tree plantations)
• sưu thuế (soo thway) — colonial forced labor and taxes