George Fetherling - Indochina Now and Then

Author photo by Laura Sawchuk

Copyright George Fetherling, 2012

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Project Editor: Michael Carroll

Copy Editor: Shannon Whibbs

Design: Jesse Hooper

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Fetherling, George

Indochina now and then [electronic resource] / by George Fetherling.

ISBN 978-1-4597-0063-5

Type of computer file: Electronic monograph.
Also issued in print format.

1. Fetherling, George,- --Travel--Indochina. 2. Indochina--Description and travel. 3. Indochina--Colonial influence. 4. French--Indochina. I. Title.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

www.dundurn.com

la mmoire de Dale Singer Fetherling, 19412011

Cover

Photo Insert Part 1

A quiet street in the Old Quarter of colonial Hanoi in 1922. Note the rickshaw passenger wearing a sola topi.

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Frances hold on Indochina began with the acquisition of Saigon, occupied in 1862. These scenes show how thoroughly French the city looked six decades later by which time Cambodia and Laos had also been assimilated.

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In exploring the Mekong River as a possible trade route to China, the French discovered the holy city of Angkor in Cambodia, once the seat of Khmer civilization. In the 1870s, Europeans were transfixed by images of its abandoned temples.

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When the Mekong proved less than perfect as a commercial highway, the French pursued alternative routes in the neighbouring kingdoms of Annam, whose capital was Hu, and Tonkin, farther north, whose seat was Hanoi.

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Postcards of French Indochina, which flourished in the first quarter of the twentieth century, fall into a number of broad categories. Some show native inhabitants going about what seemed their quaint tasks, such as steering a wheelbarrow made of elephant tusks or rolling cigars and cigarettes.

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Also popular were portraits of local worthies not as individuals, but as types, as with these two Annamite gentlemen. Attempts were also made to illustrate the various other social and economic classes, as with this somewhat prosperous Annamite woman (note her European clock) and this Tonkinese man.

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Other postcards called attention to French Indochinas multicultural nature, as when they depicted an ethnic Chinese official in Tonkin, close to the border with China; a Malay in southern Cochinchina; or a group of Japanese dancers in Haiphong.

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The urge to make postcards of French Indochina (and other tropical and subtropical colonies) into what the English called French postcards evidently could not be resisted, as with this popular image of a Lao dancer or the somewhat less prurient one of une tonkinoise . For pedlars of the exotic, a posed scene in an opium den was also de rigueur.