In this post, will provide some information to understand Vietnam Historical, it’s good to know before start birding trip in Vietnam [update – 10/2022].

Origins of the Vietnamese people

Relatively little is known about the origins of the Vietnamese. They first appeared in history as the so-called “Lac” peoples, who lived in the Red River delta region, in what is now northern Vietnam. Some scholars have suggested that the Lac were closely related to other peoples, known as the Viet (called the Yue by the Chinese), who inhabited the coastal region of East Asia from the Yangtze River to the Red River delta during the 1st millennium BCE.

Others have questioned this view, noting that modern-day Vietnamese share many cultural and linguistic traits with other non-Chinese peoples living in neighbouring areas of Southeast Asia.

Linguistic research, which offers a relatively reliable way of distinguishing the various ethnic groups of Southeast Asia, supports the mixed ethnic and cultural provenance of the Vietnamese people. Modern linguistics places the origin of Vietnamese in the Austronesian language group on the basis of similarities in morphology and consonant clusters. It is largely this linguistic link that has led scholars to speculate that Austronesians formed at least a part of the Lac population.

However, like Tai, Vietnamese evolved away from the Austronesian language group as it acquired tones as part of its phonemic structure. This may have been the consequence of interaction with Chinese languages, to which Vietnamese (again, like Tai) bears some similarity of tones, but it is also possible that elements of tonality and grammar might have been adopted directly from Tai. From the monotonic Mon-Khmer language family, Vietnamese derived its fundamental structure and many of its basic words. Early script—as well as much political, literary, philosophical, and technical vocabulary—again trace to the Chinese, who at that time were more culturally advanced than the peoples of the Red River delta.

Ethnographic study also reveals the degree to which ancient Vietnamese culture combined elements found among many other peoples within the region. Totemism, animism, tattooing, the chewing of betel nuts, teeth blackening, and many marriage rituals and seasonal festivals indicate the relationship between the Vietnamese and the neighbouring peoples in Southeast Asia. Although Chinese civilization later became the main force in shaping Vietnamese culture, the failure of the Chinese to assimilate the Vietnamese people underscores the fact that strong elements of an authentic local culture must have emerged in the Red River valley long before China established its millennium of rule over Vietnam.

Legends and early history of Vietnam

Legendary kingdoms

According to legend, the first ruler of the Vietnamese people was King De Minh, a descendant of a mythical Chinese ruler who was the father of Chinese agriculture. De Minh and an immortal fairy of the mountains produced Kinh Duong, ruler of the Land of Red Demons, who married the daughter of the Dragon Lord of the Sea. Their son, Lac Long Quan (“Dragon Lord of Lac”), was, according to legend, the first truly Vietnamese king.

To make peace with the Chinese, Lac Long Quan married Au Co, a Chinese immortal, who bore him 100 eggs, from which sprang 100 sons. Later, the king and queen separated; Au Co moved with 50 of her sons into the mountains, and Lac Long Quan kept the other 50 sons and continued to rule over the lowlands. Lac Long Quan’s eldest son succeeded him as the first of the Hung (or Hong Bang) kings (vuong) of Vietnam’s first dynasty; as such, he is regarded as the founder of the Vietnamese nation.

This legend and other related legends, most of which received their literary form only after 1200 CE, describe in mythical terms the fusion, conflicts, and separation of peoples from the north and south and of peoples from the mountains and the coastal lowlands. The legends show the immortals as mountain dwellers, while the people along the coast are descendants of the dragon lords—a division found in many legends throughout Southeast Asia.

The retreat of Au Co and 50 of her sons into the mountains may well be a mythical record of the separation into distinct groups of the proto-Vietnamese in the Red River delta. Those who left the lowlands could be the ancestors of the Muong, who still live in the hills surrounding the delta and are the only ethnic minority of Vietnam closely related in language and customs to the Vietnamese.

According to legend, the Hung dynasty had 18 kings, each of whom ruled for about 150 years. Their country, called Van Lang (“Land of the Tattooed Men”), is said to have included not only the Red River delta but also much of southern China.

The last of the Hung kings was overthrown in 258 or 257 BCE by a neighbouring warlord, Thuc Phan, who invaded and conquered Van Lang, united it with his kingdom, and called the new state Au Lac, which he then ruled under the name An Duong. Au Lac existed only until 207 BCE, when it was incorporated by a former Chinese general, Trieu Da (Chao T’o in Chinese), into the kingdom of Nam Viet (Nan Yue in Chinese).

Nam Viet

This kingdom covered much of southern China and was ruled by Trieu Da from his capital near the present site of Guangzhou (Canton). Its population consisted chiefly of the Viet who had earlier been driven by the Chinese from their kingdoms south of the Yangtze River.

Trieu Da, after ending Chinese domination and killing all officials loyal to the Chinese emperor, adopted the customs of the Viet and made himself the ruler of a vast non-Chinese empire. After it had incorporated Au Lac, Nam Viet included not only the Red River delta but also the coastal lands as far south as modern-day Da Nang. The end of Au Lac in 207 BCE marks the end of Vietnamese legend and the beginning of Vietnamese history, as recorded in Chinese historical annals.

After almost 100 years of diplomatic and military duels between the Han dynasty of China and Trieu Da and his successors, Nam Viet was conquered (111 BCE) by the Chinese under the Han emperor Wudi. Thus, the territories occupied by the ancestors of the Vietnamese fell under Chinese rule. Nam Viet was divided into nine military districts with Chinese names, the three southernmost of which, later called Giao Chau, covered the northern half of what is now Vietnam.

Early society

When China extended its rule over Vietnam, the people of the Red River delta were in transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age, although some stone implements were also still in use. These ancestors of the Vietnamese were already experienced at cultivating rice. They had learned how to irrigate their rice fields by using the waters from rivers that were backed up by the tides.

Plows and water buffalo were still unknown (the land was prepared for cultivation with polished stone hoes), but the proto-Vietnamese are thought to have been able to produce two rice crops annually. They supplemented their diet by fishing and hunting. Their weapons were mainly bows and arrows; the bronze heads of their arrows often were dipped in poison to facilitate killing such larger animals as elephants, whose tusks were traded for iron from China.

The social organization of the early Vietnamese, before Chinese rule, was hierarchical, forming a kind of feudal society that until the mid-20th century existed among the Tai and Muong minority populations of northern Vietnam. Power was held by tribal chiefs at the head of one or several communities.

These chiefs were civil, religious, and military leaders, and their power was hereditary; they were large landowners who kept the mass of the people in virtual serfdom. At the head of this aristocracy stood the king, probably the most powerful of the tribal chiefs.

Archaeological work and, to a lesser extent, ancient Chinese records have revealed that religion was characterized by propitiation of numerous supernatural beings and spirits. Some spirits were those of dangerous animals; while others were those of deceased rulers or other important persons. A great religious festival, almost a carnival, was held at the beginning of spring and was marked by abandon and promiscuity.

In all these respects, the inhabitants of the Red River delta, prior to their subjugation by the Chinese, showed numerous affinities with most of the people of mainland and insular Southeast Asia. It was not until several centuries after the imposition of Chinese rule that the Vietnamese developed more distinct ethnic characteristics.

Vietnam under Chinese rule

The history of the Vietnamese people during more than a millennium under Chinese rule reveals an evolution toward national identity, which apparently came about as the result of two related developments. The first of these was the introduction into the Red River delta of the more advanced civilization of China, including technical and administrative innovations and the more sophisticated level of Chinese learning, which made the Vietnamese the most advanced people of mainland Southeast Asia.

This process was abetted by the efforts of Chinese governors to achieve complete Sinicization through the imposition of Chinese language, culture, customs, and political institutions. The second development during this period was the Vietnamese people’s resistance to total assimilation and their use, at the same time, of the benefits of Chinese civilization in their struggle against Chinese political rule.

Soon after extending their domination over what is now northern Vietnam, the Chinese constructed roads, waterways, and harbours to improve access to the region and to ensure that they maintained administrative and military control over it. They improved local agriculture by introducing better methods of irrigation as well as metal plows and draft animals.

They brought with them new tools and weapons, advanced forms of pottery, and new mining techniques. For more than a century after annexing Nam Viet, however, the Chinese refrained from interfering with local administration. In the province of Giao Chau, one of the administrative units into which the Han Chinese rulers had divided the Vietnamese kingdom, local hereditary lords exercised control over the peasant population, just as they had while part of Nam Viet. Thus, although Vietnamese territory was divided into military districts headed by Chinese governors, it remained, in fact, a leniently governed Chinese protectorate.

This form of government changed in the 1st century CE, when an energetic governor realized that the continuing rule of the local Viet lords over the population was an obstacle to Sinicization. The desire to exploit the fertile Red River delta and its mountainous backcountry was certainly one reason why the expansionist Han dynasty wanted to hold on to Vietnam: there were vast forests and precious metals in the mountains, pearls in the sea, elephants with tusks of ivory, and a peasantry that could be taxed and recruited for forced labour.

China’s main interest in controlling the Red River delta, however, was to use it as a stopover for ships engaged in the Han dynasty’s nascent maritime trade with the East Indies (i.e., present-day Indonesia), India, and even the Middle East. Vessels from many countries with which China developed commercial relations docked at the harbours along the Vietnamese coast, not only bringing new goods but also establishing contacts with a wider world and thus promoting the development of the country.

In this process, which began early in the 1st century CE, economic, political, and cultural functions emerged that the hereditary local lords were unable to discharge—another reason why direct rule by Chinese officials became increasingly important.

As in all regions conquered by the Chinese during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–221 CE, with a brief interruption in 8–23 CE), the establishment of direct Chinese rule was accompanied by efforts to transform the people of the Red River delta into Chinese. Local customs were suppressed, and Chinese customs, rites, and institutions were imposed by force.

Daoist and Confucian teachings were pressed upon the local people, together with instruction in the Chinese language; even Chinese clothing and hairstyles became obligatory. Many of these elements of Chinese civilization were readily integrated into the indigenous local culture and ultimately benefited the Vietnamese people, but Sinicization never succeeded in reconciling them, especially their leaders, with Chinese political domination. Even the educated Vietnamese who knew Chinese and wrote only in Chinese continued to use the local spoken language.

The first major rebellion against Chinese rule broke out in 40 CE, led by the Trung sisters. Trung Trac was a noblewoman whose husband, a tribal lord, had been executed by the Chinese. She and her sister, Trung Nhi, gathered together the tribal chiefs and their armed followers, attacked and overwhelmed the Chinese strongholds, and had themselves proclaimed queens of an independent Vietnamese kingdom.

Three years later a powerful army sent by the Han emperor reestablished Chinese rule; the local aristocracy was deprived of all power, Vietnam was given a centralized Chinese administration, and Sinicization was resumed with increased intensity. The Trung sisters were apparently put to death by their conquerors.

Chinese rule, although challenged several more times, remained secure so long as China itself was effectively controlled by its own emperors. When the T’ang dynasty (618–907) went into decline in the early 10th century, a series of uprisings broke out in Vietnam, which led in 939 to the restoration of Vietnamese independence.

The first period of independence

The Ly dynasty

Ngo Quyen, a Vietnamese commander who defeated the Chinese in 939, became the first head of the new independent Vietnamese province. For more than a half century, however, independence brought neither peace nor political stability. In the early 11th century, the Vietnamese province was finally unified under a centralized administration by Ly Thai To, the founder of the Ly dynasty (sometimes called the Later Ly dynasty; 1009–1225).

The Ly rulers established their capital at Thang Long (Hanoi), in the heart of the Red River delta, modernized the agricultural system, and in 1076 replaced the divisive local lords with a system of administrative officials trained in a civil service institute based on the Chinese model.

Although the new kingdom, now called Dai Viet (replacing the Chinese name, Annam), made considerable political, economic, and cultural progress, it soon encountered problems with its neighbours to the south. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Dai Viet fought several wars against the Islamic, Indianized kingdom of Champa on the central coast. It also clashed with the Khmer (Cambodian) empire, with its capital at Angkor, then the greatest power in mainland Southeast Asia.

The Tran dynasty

By the time of its conflicts with Champa and the Khmer, the Ly dynasty was already in decline. It was succeeded, after a period of civil strife, by a new dynasty called the Tran, which reigned from 1225 to 1400. For most of their rule, the Tran kings pursued the same policies that had made the country strong under the Ly. The Tran rulers continued to clash with Champa, but they were also able to maintain several periods of peaceful coexistence.

The primary challenge to the independence of Da Viet, however, came from the north. The Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, which had come to power in China in 1279, sent armies estimated at more than 300,000 soldiers to restore the Red River delta to Chinese rule.

The Tran resisted stubbornly and were eventually able to drive out the invaders. The general who commanded the Vietnamese forces, Tran Hung Dao, is still venerated as one of the great heroes of Vietnamese history.

The drain of these wars on Dai Viet’s resources, together with the declining vigour of its rulers, precipitated a deep economic and social crisis and led to the overthrow of the Tran dynasty in 1400. The deposed Tran ruler appealed to China to help him regain the throne.

China, by then ruled by emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), seized this opportunity to invade Dai Viet again in 1407. The Ming rulers reestablished direct Chinese administrationand resumed the assimilation policies begun by their predecessors. Dai Viet became Annam once more.

Expansion, division, and reunification

By the beginning of the 15th century, any attempt to force the Vietnamese people to become Chinese served only to strengthen their nationalist sentiments and their determination to throw off the Chinese yoke. Le Loi, a wealthy landowner in the province of Thanh Hoa, located south of the Red River delta, launched a movement of national resistance in 1418; after a 10-year struggle, the Chinese were forced to withdraw.

Le Loi, who shortly thereafter declared himself emperor under the name of Le Thai To, became the founder of the third great Vietnamese dynasty, the Later Le (sometimes simply referred to as the Le). Although the rulers of the Later Le were no longer in power after 1600, they nominally headed the kingdom until 1788.

The Later Le dynasty

Like the better rulers of the Ly and Tran dynasties, Le Thai To and some of his successors introduced many reforms. They gave Dai Viet a highly sophisticated legal code; promoted art, literature, and education; advanced agriculture; protected communal lands against the greed of large landowners; and even enforced a general redistribution of land among the entire population at the expense of the large landowners.

The problem of landlessness remained acute, however, because of population increases and the limited amount of land available in the north. The lack of land was one of the reasons rulers during the Le dynasty pursued a policy of territorial expansion, which was aimed initially at driving the Chams (of Champa) from the small but fertile deltas to the south.

Most of Champa was conquered in 1471 under the leadership of Le Thanh Tong (ruled 1460–97). Soldiers in the advancing Vietnamese army settled in newly established villages from Da Nang to the neighbourhood of Nha Trang, in what became the first great Vietnamese push to the south.

The elimination of Champa was followed by incursions into the Cambodian territory of the Mekong River delta, which the declining Khmer empire was no longer able to defend. Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) became Vietnamese shortly before 1700, and the rest of the south followed during the next 60 years. With the exception of the southern province of Soc Trang, which was not annexed until 1840, Vietnam had reached its present size by 1757.

The extension of Dai Viet to the south, ultimately reaching a length of some 1,000 miles (1,600 km), altered the historical evolution of the Vietnam. Before the conquest of Champa at the end of the 15th century, Dai Viet’s chief characteristic had been the existence of a strong central power at the head of a unified administration. The Vietnamese kingdom was subsequently divided twice during the next 150 years, and its partitioned governments were in each case at war with each other for decades.

Two divisions of Dai Viet

The first and shorter division of the country occurred soon after the elimination of Champa. The Mac family, led by Mac Dang Dung, the governor of Thang Long (Hanoi), made themselves masters of Dai Viet in 1527. The deposed Le rulers and the generals loyal to them regained control of the lands south of the Red River delta in 1545, but only after nearly 50 years of civil war were they able to reconquer Thang Long and the north.

Of much longer duration and greater historical significance was the second division of Dai Viet, which occurred about 1620, when the noble Nguyen family, who had governed the country’s growing southern provinces from Hue since 1558, rejected Thang Long’s suzerainty. After the country was reunited following its first division, the Le monarchs in Thang Long were rulers in name only; all real power was in the hands of the Trinh family, who had made themselves hereditary princes in charge of the government.

For 50 years the Trinh rulers tried in vain to regain control of the southern half of the kingdom by military means. The failure of their last campaign in 1673 was followed by a 100-year truce, during which both the Nguyen and the Trinh paid lip service to Vietnamese unity under the Le dynasty but maintained separate governments in the two halves of the country.

Unity was reestablished only after a 30-year period of revolution, political chaos, and civil war (1772–1802). Although the revolution started in the south, it was directed against the ruling houses of both south and north. It was led by three brothers, whose name in history—Tay Son—was that of their native village.

The Tay Sons overthrew the southern regime in 1777 and killed the ruling family. While the Tay Sons waged war against the north, one member of the southern royal family—Nguyen Anh, who had escaped the massacre—regained control of Saigon and the deep south in 1778, but he was driven out again by the Tay Sons in 1783.

When the Tay Sons also defeated the Trinh in 1786 and occupied Thang Long, Dai Viet was briefly reunited under Tay Son rule. In 1788 the Chinese tried to exploit the Vietnamese crisis, but the Tay Son rulers—who had abolished the Later Le dynasty—were able to defeat the Chinese invaders.

During that same year, however, Nguyen Anh succeeded, with French military assistance, in occupying Saigon and the Mekong delta. In a series of campaigns that lasted 14 years, Nguyen Anh defeated the Tay Sons and gained control of the entire kingdom. When Hue and Thang Long fell to his armies in 1802, he proclaimed himself emperor, under the name Gia Long, of a reunited Da Viet, which he renamed Vietnam.

State and society in precolonial Vietnam

The rule of Gia Long and his successors until the conquest of Vietnam by France in the late 19th century brought no innovations in the organization of the state, the basic character of which had already been firmly established by the Ly emperors during the 11th century. The Ly rulers had successfully fought the revival of local feudalism, which was rooted in the powers exercised by tribal chiefs before the coming of the Chinese.

From the 11th century, Dai Viet remained a centralized kingdom headed by a monarch whose absolute powers were said to derive from a mandate from heaven—one aspect of the thoroughly Confucian character of the Vietnamese state. The Ly rulers, following the Chinese model, established a fixed hierarchy with a ranking system of nine grades for all public officials. 

Mandarins assigned to civil and military positions were appointed by the emperor and were responsible only to him. All mandarins—those at the very top at the imperial court as well as those in the lowest ranks of the provincial and local administration—were recruited and assigned to one of the nine grades in the official hierarchy in only one way: through civil service examinations taken after years of study.

As a rule, only the wealthy could spend the time required for these studies. Nevertheless, except in periods of dynastic decline when offices were sometimes for sale, the road to positions of power was through scholarship, not wealth.

The concept of a division of powers was alien to the precolonial rulers. The emperor, with the help of high court mandarins, was not only the supreme lawmaker and head of all civil and military institutions but also the dispenser of justice in both criminal and civil cases, and he delegated his powers to the hierarchy of mandarins in the provinces and villages.

Even public functions of a religious character were the sole prerogative of the emperor and his representatives at the lower levels of the administration. No military caste ever exercised control over the state, no religious hierarchy existed outside the mandarins, and no aristocracy with political influence was allowed to arise. Titles of nobility, bestowed as honours, were not hereditary.

The economic policies of the great Vietnamese dynasties also favoured the maintenance of imperial and mandarin power. Through the 900 years of independence, from the end of Chinese domination until the beginning of French colonial rule, the Vietnamese economy remained almost exclusively agricultural.

Artisan and fishing villages existed, and there was some mining; but the mass of people were engaged in the cultivation of rice, and neither domestic nor international trade was systematically promoted. No property-owning middle class of merchants ever threatened the authority of the scholar mandarins, and the rising power of great landowners was periodically diminished through the redistribution of land. 

Gia Long and his successor, Minh Mang, actually abolished all huge landholdings during the first half of the 19th century. Theoretically, the emperor owned all the land, and it was by imperial decree that the settlers on newly conquered territories received their plots in the villages that sprang up from the Red River delta south to the Mekong delta.

Vietnam’s rigid absolutism was limited to a certain extent by the importance given to the family in accordance with the Confucian concept that the family is the basic unit of civilized society; submission to the authority of the family head thus was the foremost moral obligation of every citizen, even more important than obedience to the ruler.

The autocratic character of society was also eased slightly by the limited authority granted to the village administration; local affairs were handled by a council of notables elected, as a rule, from the more prosperous or otherwise prominent citizens.

Among the duties of these notables were the enforcement of law, the conscription of army and forced-labour recruits, and the assessment of taxes. Next to devotion to family, loyalty to the village was the duty of every Vietnamese.

Western penetration of Vietnam

In 1516 Portuguese adventurers arriving by sea inaugurated the era of Western penetration of Vietnam. They were followed in 1527 by Dominican missionaries, and eight years later a Portuguese port and trading centre were established at Faifo (modern Hoi An), south of present-day Da Nang.

More Portuguese missionaries arrived later in the 16th century, and they were followed by other Europeans. The best-known of these was the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, who completed a transcription of the Vietnamese language into Roman script that later was adopted by modern Vietnamese as their official writing system, Quoc-ngu (“national language”).

By the end of the 17th century, however, the two rival Vietnamese domains (under the Nguyen family in the south, and the Trinh family in the north) had lost interest in maintaining relations with European countries; the only window left open to the West was at Faifo, where the Portuguese retained a trading mission.

For decades the French had tried without success to retain some influence in the area. Only at the end of the 18th century was a missionary named Pigneau de Béhaine able to restore a French presence by assisting Nguyen Anh in wresting control of Dai Viet from the Tay Sons.

Upon becoming emperor, however, Nguyen Anh (now Gia Long) did not favour Christianity. Under his strongly anti-Western successor, Minh Mang (ruled 1820–41), all French advisers were dismissed, while seven French missionaries and an unknown number of Vietnamese Christians were executed.

After 1840 French Roman Catholic interests openly demanded military intervention to prevent the persecution of missionaries. In 1847 the French took reprisals against Vietnam for expelling additional missionaries, but 10 years passed before Paris prepared a military expedition against Vietnam.

The conquest of Vietnam by France

The decision to invade Vietnam was made by Napoleon III in July 1857. It was the result not only of missionary propaganda but also, after 1850, of the upsurge of French capitalism, which generated the need for overseas markets and the desire for a larger French share of the Asian territories conquered by the West.

The naval commander in East Asia, Rigault de Genouilly, long an advocate of French military action against Vietnam, was ordered to attack the harbour and city of Tourane (Da Nang) and to turn it into a French military base.

Genouilly arrived at Tourane in August 1858 with 14 vessels and 2,500 men; the French stormed the harbour defenses on September 1 and occupied the town a day later. Genouilly soon recognized, however, that he could make no further progress around Tourane and decided to attack Saigon. Leaving a small garrison behind to hold Tourane, he sailed southward in February 1859 and seized Saigon two weeks later.

Vietnamese resistance prevented the French from advancing beyond Saigon, and it took French troops, under new command, until 1861 to occupy the three adjacent provinces. The Vietnamese, unable to mount effective resistance to the invaders and their advanced weapons, concluded a peace treaty in June 1862, which ceded the conquered territories to France. Five years later additional territories in the south were placed under French rule. The entire colony was named Cochinchina.

It had taken the French slightly more than eight years to make themselves masters of Cochinchina (a protectorate already had been imposed on Cambodia in 1863). It took them 16 more years to extend their control over the rest of the country.

They made a first attempt to enter the Red River delta in 1873, after a French naval officer and explorer named Francis Garnier had shown, in a hazardous expedition, that the Mekong River could not serve as a trade route into southwestern China. Garnier had some support from the French governor of Cochinchina, but when he was killed in a battle with Chinese pirates near Hanoi, the attempt to conquer the north collapsed.

Within a decade, France had returned to the challenge. In April 1882, with the blessing of Paris, the administration at Saigon sent a force of 250 men to Hanoi under Capt. Henri Rivière. When Rivière was killed in a skirmish, Paris moved to impose its rule by force over the entire Red River delta. In August 1883 the Vietnamese court signed a treaty that turned northern Vietnam (named Tonkin by the French) and central Vietnam (named Annam, based on an early Chinese name for the region) into French protectorates.

Ten years later the French annexed Laos and added it to the so-called Indochinese Union, which the French created in 1887. The union consisted of the colony of Cochinchina and the four protectorates of Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos.

Colonial Vietnam

French administration

The French now moved to impose a Western-style administration on their colonial territories and to open them to economic exploitation. Under Gov.-Gen. Paul Doumer, who arrived in 1897, French rule was imposed directly at all levels of administration, leaving the Vietnamese bureaucracy without any real power. Even Vietnamese emperors were deposed at will and replaced by others willing to serve the French.

All important positions within the bureaucracy were staffed with officials imported from France; even in the 1930s, after several periods of reforms and concessions to local nationalist sentiment, Vietnamese officials were employed only in minor positions and at very low salaries, and the country was still administered along the lines laid down by Doumer.

Doumer’s economic and social policies also determined, for the entire period of French rule, the development of French Indochina, as the colony became known in the 20th century. The railroads, highways, harbours, bridges, canals, and other public works built by the French were almost all started under Doumer, whose aim was a rapid and systematic exploitation of Indochina’s potential wealth for the benefit of France; Vietnam was to become a source of raw materials and a market for tariff-protected goods produced by French industries.

The exploitation of natural resources for direct export was the chief purpose of all French investments, with rice, coal, rare minerals, and later also rubber as the main products. Doumer and his successors up to the eve of World War II were not interested in promoting industry there, the development of which was limited to the production of goods for immediate local consumption.

Among these enterprises—located chiefly in Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong (the outport for Hanoi)—were breweries, distilleries, small sugar refineries, rice and paper mills, and glass and cement factories. The greatest industrial establishment was a textile factory at Nam Dinh, which employed more than 5,000 workers. The total number of workers employed by all industries and mines in Vietnam was some 100,000 in 1930. Because the aim of all investments was not the systematic economic development of the colony but the attainment of immediate high returns for investors, only a small fraction of the profits was reinvested.

Effects of French colonial rule

Whatever economic progress Vietnam made under the French after 1900 benefited only the French and the small class of wealthy Vietnamese created by the colonial regime. The masses of the Vietnamese people were deprived of such benefits by the social policies inaugurated by Doumer and maintained even by his more liberal successors, such as Paul Beau (1902–07), Albert Sarraut (1911–14 and 1917–19), and Alexandre Varenne (1925–28).

Through the construction of irrigation works, chiefly in the Mekong delta, the area of land devoted to rice cultivation quadrupled between 1880 and 1930. During the same period, however, the individual peasant’s rice consumption decreased without the substitution of other foods. The new lands were not distributed among the landless and the peasants but were sold to the highest bidder or given away at nominal prices to Vietnamese collaborators and French speculators.

These policies created a new class of Vietnamese landlords and a class of landless tenants who worked the fields of the landlords for rents of up to 60 percent of the crop, which was sold by the landlords at the Saigon export market. The mounting export figures for rice resulted not only from the increase in cultivable land but also from the growing exploitation of the peasantry.

The peasants who owned their land were rarely better off than the landless tenants. The peasants’ share of the price of rice sold at the Saigon export market was less than 25 percent. Peasants continually lost their land to the large owners because they were unable to repay loans given them by the landlords and other moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates.

As a result, the large landowners of Cochinchina (less than 3 percent of the total number of landowners) owned 45 percent of the land, while the small peasants (who accounted for about 70 percent of the owners) owned only about 15 percent of the land. The number of landless families in Vietnam before World War II was estimated at half of the population.

The peasants’ share of the crop—after the landlords, the moneylenders, and the middlemen (mostly Chinese) between producer and exporter had taken their share—was still more drastically reduced by the direct and indirect taxes the French had imposed to finance their ambitious program of public works.

Other ways of making the Vietnamese pay for the projects undertaken for the benefit of the French were the recruitment of forced labour for public works and the absence of any protection against exploitation in the mines and rubber plantations, although the scandalous working conditions, the low salaries, and the lack of medical care were frequently attacked in the French Chamber of Deputies in Paris. The mild social legislation decreed in the late 1920s was never adequately enforced.

Apologists for the colonial regime claimed that French rule led to vast improvements in medical care, education, transport, and communications. The statistics kept by the French, however, appear to cast doubt on such assertions. In 1939, for example, no more than 15 percent of all school-age children received any kind of schooling, and about 80 percent of the population was illiterate, in contrast to precolonial times when the majority of the people possessed some degree of literacy.

With its more than 20 million inhabitants in 1939, Vietnam had but one university, with fewer than 700 students. Only a small number of Vietnamese children were admitted to the lycées (secondary schools) for the children of the French. Medical care was well organized for the French in the cities, but in 1939 there were only 2 physicians for every 100,000 Vietnamese, compared with 76 per 100,000 in Japan and 25 per 100,000 in the Philippines.

Two other aspects of French colonial policy are significant when considering the attitude of the Vietnamese people, especially their educated minority, toward the colonial regime: one was the absence of any kind of civil liberties for the native population, and the other was the exclusion of the Vietnamese from the modern sector of the economy, especially industry and trade.

Not only were rubber plantations, mines, and industrial enterprises in foreign hands—French, where the business was substantial, and Chinese at the lower levels—but all other business was as well, from local trade to the great export-import houses.

The social consequence of this policy was that, apart from the landlords, no property-owning indigenous middle class developed in colonial Vietnam. Thus, capitalism appeared to the Vietnamese to be a part of foreign rule; this view, together with the lack of any Vietnamese participation in government, profoundly influenced the nature and orientation of the national resistance movements.

Movements of national liberation

The anticolonial movement in Vietnam can be said to have started with the establishment of French rule. Many local officials of Cochinchina refused to collaborate with the French. Some led guerrilla groups, composed of the remnants of the defeated armies, in attacks on French outposts. A much broader resistance movement developed in Annam in 1885, led by the great scholar Phan Dinh Phung, whose rebellion collapsed only after his death in 1895.

The main characteristic of the national movement during this first phase of resistance, however, was its political orientation toward the past. Filled with ideas of precolonial Vietnam, its leaders wanted to be rid of the French in order to reestablish the old imperial order. Because this aspiration had little meaning for the generation that came to maturity after 1900, this first stage of anticolonial resistance did not survive the death of its leader.

Modern nationalism

A new national movement arose in the early 20th century. Its most prominent spokesman was Phan Boi Chau, with whose rise the old traditionalist opposition gave way to a modern nationalist leadership that rejected French rule but not Western ideas, science, and technology. In 1905 Chau went to Japan. His plan, mildly encouraged by some Japanese statesmen, was to free Vietnam with Japanese help.

Chau smuggled hundreds of young Vietnamese into Japan, where they studied the sciences and underwent training for clandestine organization, political propaganda, and terrorist action. Inspired by Chau’s writings, nationalist intellectuals in Hanoi opened the Free School of Tonkin in 1907, which soon became a centre of anti-French agitation and consequently was suppressed after a few months. Also, under the inspiration and guidance of Chau’s followers, mass demonstrations demanding a reduction of high taxes took place in many cities in 1908.

Hundreds of demonstrators and suspected organizers were arrested—some were condemned to death, while others were sent to Con Son (Poulo Condore) Island in the South China Sea, which the French turned into a penal camp for Vietnamese nationalists.

Phan Boi Chau went to China in 1910, where a revolution had broken out against the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. There he set up a republican government-in-exile to attract the support of nationalist groups. After the French arranged his arrest and imprisonment in China (1914–17), however, his movement began to decline. In 1925 Chau was seized by French agents in Shanghai and brought back to Vietnam for trial; he died under house arrest in 1940.

After World War I the movement for national liberation intensified. A number of prominent intellectuals sought to achieve reforms by obtaining political concessions from the colonial regime through collaboration with the French.

The failure of such reformist efforts led to a revival of clandestine and revolutionary groups, especially in Annam and Tonkin; among these was the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, founded in 1927 and usually referred to as the VNQDD).

The VNQDD preached terrorist action and penetrated the garrisons of indigenous troops with a plan to oust the French in a military uprising. On the night of February 9–10, 1930, the troops of one garrison in Tonkin killed their French officers, but they were overwhelmed a day later and summarily executed.

A wave of repression followed that took hundreds of lives and sent thousands to prison camps. The VNQDD was virtually destroyed, and for the next 15 years it existed mainly as a group of exiles in China supported by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).

Vietnamese communism

The year 1930 was important in the history of Vietnam for yet another reason. Five years earlier, a new figure, destined to become the most prominent leader in the national movement, had appeared on the scene as an expatriate revolutionary in South China. He was Nguyen Ai Quoc, better known by his later pseudonym of Ho Chi Minh. In June 1925 Ho Chi Minh had founded the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam, the predecessor of the Indochinese Communist Party.

Ho Chi Minh had left Vietnam as a young seaman in 1911 and traveled widely before settling in Paris in 1917. He joined the Communist Party of France in 1920 and later spent several years in Moscow and China in the service of the international communist movement.

After making his Revolutionary Youth League the most influential of all clandestine resistance groups, he succeeded in early 1930 in forming the Vietnamese Communist Party—from late 1930 called the Indochinese Communist Party—from a number of competing communist organizations.

In May of that year the communists exploited conditions of near starvation over large areas of central Vietnam by staging a broad peasant uprising, during which numerous Vietnamese officials and many landlords were killed, and “Soviet” administrations were set up in several provinces of Annam. It took the French until the spring of 1931 to suppress this movement and, in an unparalleled wave of terror, to reestablish control.

Unlike the dispersed and disoriented leadership of the VNQDD and some smaller nationalist groups, the Indochinese Communist Party recovered quickly from the setback of 1931, relying on cadres trained in the Soviet Union and China.

After 1936, when the French extended some political freedoms to the colonies, the party skillfully exploited all opportunities for the creation of legal front organizations, through which it extended its influence among intellectuals, workers, and peasants. When political freedoms were again curtailed at the outbreak of World War II, the Communist Party, now a well-disciplined organization, was forced back into hiding.

World War II and independence

For five years during World War II, Indochina was a French-administered possession of Japan. On September 22, 1940, Jean Decoux, the French governor-general appointed by the Vichy government after the fall of France to the Nazis, concluded an agreement with the Japanese that permitted the stationing of 30,000 Japanese troops in Indochina and the use of all major Vietnamese airports by the Japanese military. The agreement made Indochina the most important staging area for all Japanese military operations in Southeast Asia.

The French administration cooperated with the Japanese occupation forces and was ousted only toward the end of the war (in March 1945), when the Japanese began to fear that the French forces might turn against them as defeat approached. After the French had been disarmed, Bao Dai, the last French-appointed emperor of Vietnam, was allowed to proclaim the independence of his country and to appoint a Vietnamese national government at Hue; however, all real power remained in the hands of the Japanese military commanders.

Meanwhile, in May 1941, at Ho Chi Minh’s urging, the Communist Party formed a broad nationalist alliance under its leadership called the League for the Independence of Vietnam, which subsequently became known as the Viet Minh. Ho, returning to China to seek assistance, was arrested and imprisoned there by the Nationalist government.

After his release he returned to Vietnam and began to cooperate with Allied forces by providing information on Japanese troop movements in Indochina. At the same time, he sought recognition of the Viet Minh as the legitimate representative of Vietnamese nationalist aspirations. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the communist-led Viet Minh ordered a general uprising, and, with no one organized to oppose them, they were able to seize power in Hanoi. Bao Dai, the Vietnamese emperor, abdicated a few days later and declared his fealty to the newly proclaimed Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The Communist Party had clearly gained the upper hand in its struggle to outmaneuver its disorganized rivals, such as the noncommunist VNQDD. The French, however, were determined to restore their colonial presence in Indochina and, with the aid of British occupation forces, seized control of Cochinchina. Thus, at the beginning of 1946, there were two Vietnams: a communist north and a noncommunist south.

References:

Osborne, M. Edgeworth , Duiker, . William J. , Turley, . William S. , Jamieson, . Neil L. , Buttinger, . Joseph and Hickey, . Gerald C. (2022, August 16). Vietnam. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/place/Vietnam