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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2011
An account based on fieldwork, "The Road to Bd Ra" portrays the settlement of a river valley in Vietnam's northern uplands, and also explores the relationship between settlers and other ethnic groups. A local history approach and emphasis on travel as research perspective are used to examine geographical and administrative processes common to many parts of Vietnam's upland frontier.
1 National Archives of Vietnam Centre No. 1 (NAV1)/Résident Supérieur au Tonkin (RST) 67478, Echinard, Resident in Thái Nguyên, to RST, 8 Nov. 1932.
2 For this information, I am grateful to Dao Hung. Names of other informants, out of respect for their anonymity, are changed. The practice of rendering interview material in italics rather than between quotation marks conveys the overlap implicit between the voices of informants, and my own voice and understanding, impinging through language, field notes and translation. Rather than pretend to an impartial objectivity with regard to my sources, I seek to describe my relationship with them.
3 This is a Vietnamese rendering. I could not find the original French name.
4 French archives name this landlord as Jaillon.
5 See also V. H., “Ðiên tra nho: Mot don Ðiên lon o Thài Nguyen”, Thanh Nghi 83 (16 09. 1944): 850Google Scholar. In the 1990s Nguyen Thi Nam remained a household name locally: she aided the revolution in 1945, and her sons rose high in the Viet Minh army. During land reform, they were demoted; their mother did not survive. One local observed: there were possibly mistakes made at the time. See Tin, Bui, Following Ho Chi Minh (London: Hurst, 1995), p. 28Google Scholar.
6 The SAFCAT owned this land from 1924-35. NAV1/RST 67475, “Mouvement de la colonisation en 1935 (concessions europènnes ègales ou supérieures a 2000 ha)”, Thài Nguyen, 1935.
7 My was from Nong Quang commune (Gia Loc district, Hai Duong). He was 67 at the time of my interviews for this article, all of which were conducted in Thái Nguyên in October 1996.
8 V. H., “Ðiên tra nho: Mot don Ðiên lon”, p. 851.
9 The ancient term for Vietnam's majority population, “Viet”, is used here, as an alternative to the state classification “Kinh”. For discussion of this issue, see Hoa, Diep Dinh, Nguoi Vier a dong bang Bac Bo (Hanoi: Nha xua't ban [NXB] Khoa hoc xa hoi, 2000), pp. 38–42Google Scholar.
10 NAV1/RST 67475, Echinard to RST, 22.2.1936.
11 National Archives of Vietnam Centre No. 3 (NAV3)/ Cue quàn lý nông truòng quóc doanh (CQLNTQD) 69, “Báo cáo tình hình hoat dông cúa các nông truòtig”, 1959. See Khánh, Hoàng Quang, Hông, Lê, and La, Hoàng Ngoc, Can cú dia Viêt Bác (trong cuoc Cách mang tháng 8-1945) (Thái Nguyên: NXB Viêt Bác, 1976), p. 317Google Scholar.
12 63 years old, Khiêm was from Quynh Phu district, Thái Bình.
13 Referring to the climate, he used the expression rùtng thiêng nuôc dôc (“terrifying forest and poisoned water”). This articulated delta people's unfamiliarity with the uplands and fear of water-related disease, probably malaria.
14 Tân Viêt Hoa state farm, Report for the Fatherland Front, Thái Nguyên, 1968.
15 Ibid.
16 NAV3/Bô Lao Dông (BLD) 383, “Báo cáo tình hình anh em miên Nam õ công truòng, nông truòng”, 4 Aug. 1956.
17 The delegates were from Mongolia. “Các doàn dai biêu các nuóc anh em thâm nhiêu noi ó Hà Nôi, tham Diên Biên Phú và nông truòng Tam Dao”, Nhân Dân (10 Sep. 1960): 1.
18 NAV3/BLD 383, “Bào cáo tình hình anh em miên Nam”.
19 This section of the road, with steeply wooded slopes on the left and green fields out to the right, reminded me of the valley where I grew up, in Haslemere, in the English county of Surrey. I later discovered that I was not the first foreigner in Dai Tù to find its landscape reminiscent of home. It was compared to the pastures of Normandy - by Auguste Darles, below - and the rolling hills of the Australian bush - by Salmon, Lorraine, Pig Follows Dog (Hanoi, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), pp. 58–59Google Scholar.
20 These notes were written on the evening of the events described (26 Oct. 1996); they have been edited for presentation here.
21 This planter, Garrigue (“Ga-Ri”, in Vietnamese transliteration), owned 207 hectares in 1945. His plantation does not figure on a 1933 map of European plantations, while landholdings at the nearby village of Trang Làng belonging to one Reynaud are marked. Was Garrigue the same as Hy's “Crippled Owner”? Or was he another amputee victim of the Great War? NAV3/CQLNTQD 122, “Só thóng kê các dôn Ðiên cua Pháp (ghi nâm 1959)” (Hanoi, 1959); NAV1/RST 67475, “Etat nominatif des concessions domaniales accordées à des Francais jusqu'au 31.12.1939”, Thái Nguyên, 10 Jan. 1941.
22 In 1944, she said, Ga-Ri fled; the Vietnamese boss took the land; he was jailed during land reform.
23 The Party Secretary's wife had a vague memory for dates, but her account of the stages of Viêt settlement is accurate. In this she was typical of many older women I met, an excellent informant.
24 She mistook the name here. Her husband confirmed that Ga-Ri owned land at Yên Thuân commune (Yên Lãng canton). The canton (tóng) was an administrative structure embracing a small number of communes. There were four in Yên Lãng: Yên Thân, Yân Thái, Trang Làng and Luc Ba. Bò Ra was a village in Trang Làng commune.
25 Charles Darwin used this expression in reference to place names on maps used during the Beagle voyage; the names were associated with the experience of travelling. Darwin, Charles, Journal of Researches, p. 417Google Scholar; quoted in Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay, p. 68Google Scholar.
26 Rémery, Charles, Notice sur le repeuplement de la moyenne et haute region du Tonkin (Hanoi-Haiphong: IDEO, 1908), p. 2Google Scholar
27 These were the Tày (or Thô), Yao (Dao or Mán), Muòng and Nùng inhabitants of the region. They are now classified among Vietnam's 53 ethnic minorities, which form around 13 per cent of the population. , Rémery, Notice sur le repeuplement, p. 2.Google Scholar For an early ethnography of the region, see , Conrandy, Les provinces du Tonkin: Thái Nguyên (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1904)Google Scholar.
28 NAV1/RST 55348, “Monographic de la province de Thái Nguyên”, 1901.
29 See Echinard, Alfred, Histoire Politique et Militaire de la province de Thái Nguyên, ses forces de police (Hanoi: Imprimerie Trung Bic Tan Van, 1934)Google Scholar.
30 Darles, Auguste, Les possibilités économiques de la province de Thái Nguyên et les conditions de son essor (Hanoi-Haiphong: IDEO, 1917), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.
31 Ibid., pp. 7-8.
32 Ibid., p. 2.
33 Ibid.
34 Gourou articulated this orientalist Self-Other, Mobile-Immobile paradigm: “In short, Tonkin presents the characteristics of a stabilised civilisation in material and aesthetic accord with its natural conditions. Stagnant and retarded civilisation, one might say; and certainly immobility has its defects, but are they much more serious that those which accompany the extreme mobility of European civilisation?” , Gourou, Les paysans du delta, p. 576Google Scholar.
35 Madrolle, Claudius, Indochine du Nord (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1932), p. 109Google Scholar.
36 Cucherousset, Henri, Le Tonkin est-il surpeuplé (Hanoi: Imprimerie Tonkinoise, 1925), p. 26Google Scholar.
37 , Darles, Les possibilités économiques, p. 6Google Scholar.
38 NAV1/GGI 7455, General Inspector of Labour and Colonization to GGI, 1 Aug. 1918.
39 The existence of abandoned fields dated from the nineteenth century, when bands of Chinese and Vietnamese “pirates” and the French invasion made this region unsafe. SeeBó-Chánh, Le, “Notice sur la Province de Thái Nguyên” (Thái Nguyên: unpublished monograph, 1933), p. 17.Google Scholar
40 Tân Cuong, Tân Thành and Thinh Dùe villages were formally established by RST decree of 18 Dec. 1925.
41 , Gourou, Les paysans du delta, p. 203Google Scholar.
42 Legislation included the following decrees: 7 Jun. 1888, allowing individuals to apply for five-hectare “small concessions”; 13 Nov. 1925, reproducing the 1888 legislation; 20 Mar. 1936, allowing entrepreneurs to organize “settlement colonies” grouping several families. For summaries of French migration policy, see Robequain, Charles, The Economic Development of French Indochina (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 59–73Google Scholar; Travail, Bureau International de, Problemes de Travail en indochine. pp. 229–35Google Scholar; Protectorat, Services du, “Activité colonisatrice du Tonkin - Colonisation dans la haute et moyenne region du Tonkin”, Bulletin Economique de l'Indochine (1938): 757–79Google Scholar; NAV1/RST 67470, “Inventaire des terrains libres et fertiles pouvant être réservés à 1'installation des excédents de population du delta”, 7 Jan. 1941.
43 , Echinard was Résident from 1929–1942Google Scholar; his work included the decrees of 8 Jun. 1938, declassifying forest reserve for use as “small concessions” and 5 Dec. 1938, allocating the area between the Công River and Tarn Dao for the same purpose. See NAV1/RST 67485, correspondence, Echinard and the Forestry Service, 1939.
44 NAVl/Résidence de Nam Dinh (RND) 3200, Vũ Úng (Có Bàn village) to Vu Ban district mandarin, Nam Dinh, 4 Sep. 1924.
45 NAV1/RST 67478, Nguyen Van Thjnh, Phó Yên district mandarin, to Thái Nguyên province mandarin, 31 Oct. 1932.
46 Linh, Vũ Ngpc (introduction), Lich sú cách mang tháng tám tinh Bác Thái (Thái Nguyên: Ban nghiên cúu iich súr Dang, ca. 1980), p. 114Google Scholar.
47 NAV1/RST 67498, “Voeu No 37, Vê viêc di dân lên Thái Nguyên”, 1938.
48 Echinard, Alfred, “Notice sur la province de Thái Nguyên” (Thái Nguyên: unpublished monograph, 1932), p. 61Google Scholar.
49 NAV1/RST 67504, “Mouvement de la colonisation à Thái Nguyên”. See NAV1/RST 74430, “Rapport Economique, 1940”; Lotzer, L.E., and Wormser, G., La surpopulation du Tonkin et du Nord-Annam, (Hanoi: IDEO, 1941), p. 118Google Scholar.
50 Hy, Dinh Trong, Viêt Bác 30 nãm chién tranh cách mang (1945-1975) (Hanoi: NXB Quân Dôi Viet Nam, 1990), vol. 1, p. 81Google Scholar.
51 Hy, Dinh Trpng, Viêt Bác 30 nam, vol. 1, p. 134Google Scholar.
52 Bò Ra was in Trang Làng commune, which had 1,320 hectares of free land, enough for 132 settler families. NAV1/RST 67470, “Inventaire des terrains libres et fertiles”, 7 Jan. 1941.
53 Priority destinations for road construction in Thái Nguyên included military rear-base areas, state farms and city suburbs. NAV3/Uy ban ke hoach nhà nuóc (TJBKHNN) 1444, Ministry of Communications and Post to Prime Minister and State Planning Committee, Hanoi, 12 Jul. 1960.
54 Dông, Trinh Van, “Báo cáo tông két công tác khai hoang xây dung vùng kinh tè mói nam 1976-1981” (Thái Nguyên: Bác Thái Agricultural Office, 1982)Google Scholar.
55 The Party Secretary's wife added later that 12 people died in the flood, which came suddenly after heavy rain. Their house was temporarily submerged.
56 This is a typical official presentation, referring here to settlers at Phú Xuyên commune, Dai Tir district. Thu, Doàn, “Ó môt vùng chè”, in Ministry of Labour, 30 nam sir nghiêp di dân khai hoang và xáy dang kinh té mói 1961-1991 (Hanoi: Cue diêu dông lao dông và dân or, 1991), p. 62Google Scholar.
57 Duán, Lê, “Political Report of the Central Committee of the Viet Nam Workers' Party”, 5 Sep. 1960, in Third National Congress of the Viet Nam Workers' Party, Documents, Volume 1 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, ca. 1961), p. 134Google Scholar.
58 Few foreign contemporaries noticed the land clearance programme. An exception was I. A. , Mal'khanova, “The Development of New Agricultural Lands in North Vietnam in 1961-65”, Soviet Geography 9, 10 (10 1970), pp. 828–32Google Scholar.
59 The programme's announcement triggered a movement of unauthorized migrants to Thái Nguyên after new year in 1961, some wanting permanent work, others after seasonal employment. Spontaneous migration was discouraged by residence and identity controls, linked to the state supply system, but was never fully eradicated, even in the 1960s. Since the 1980s free migration o t upland areas has become common, especially to the Central Highlands. NAV3/ BLD 1030, “Báo cáo tình hình nguòi miên xuôi lên Thái Nguyên”, Thái Nguyên, 23 Feb. 1961.
60 Dông, Pham Van, “Bài Ca Tây Bác”, in Tô quôc ta, nhân dân ta, sunghêp ta và nguòi nghê sĩ (Hanoi: Van Hoc, 1969), p. 234Google Scholar.
61 Trang Làng's name changed to Phúc Tho after 1945. Vuong was over 70 years old.
62 This is my reproduction of his sketch.
63 Respectively: “French Owner”, “Child Owner” and “Son Có't Owner”.
64 Fê-Ro is a transliteration of Feraud. Archives note that the Son Cót plantation was owned by Reynaud & Féraud in 1939, and Reynaud & Reynaud in 1940. The second Reynaud was Reynaud's son. , Echinard, Notice sur la province de Thái Nguyên, pp. 66–67Google Scholar; NAV1/RST 67475, “Etat nominatif des concessions domaniales accordées à des François jusqu'au 31.12.1939”, Thái Nguyên, 10 Jan. 1941.
65 He called this land xw. This word was normally describes a whole region - such as Tonkin -but here denoted state-owned land, corresponding to the French term domaine.
66 He was a member of the tông doàn, a canton level defence force.
67 Compare Ba's account with Vuóng's sketch. Ba was 76 years old.
68 Hoài, from Nguyêt Lâm village (Vũ Binh commune, Vũ Thu district, Thái Bình), was 83 years old.
69 Famine caused mass migration in 1944-45. Motoo Furata estimated that 12 per cent of households left his sample village in Tiên Hai district (Thái Binh) to seek survival elsewhere. Of these, 18 households (50 per cent) lost two-thirds or more members in famine-related deaths. Hoai, clearly, was one of the lucky ones. Furata, Motoo, Vietnam no Ichi sonraku ni okeru 1945 nen Kikin no Jittai Taibin-sho Tienhai-ken Tay Luong-mura Luong Phu-buraku ni Kansura Nichi Etsu Godo Chosa (Tokyo: Tokyo University Research Report on History, 1994), vol. 22, p. 159Google Scholar.
70 Phúc Khánh was on low-lying land in the next valley to B6 Ra. Mentioned in a list of early nineteenth century communes, it was the first settlement here and alsofirstto be inundated by the reservoir. The, Duong Thi, and Thoa, Pham Thi, Tên làng xã Viêt Nam dau thé ký XIX (thudc các tinh lù Nghe Tĩnh tró ra) (Hanoi:NXB Khoa hoc xã hôi, 1981), p. 474Google Scholar.
71 Minh was 87 years old, and vague about his origins (probably Tiên Hái district, Thái Bình).
72 The new villages were Doàn Két, Manh Phúc, Phúc Lucrng, Phúc An, Phúc Ninh, Phúc Tién and Phúc Xá.
73 This is not an unusual process of popular renaming and existed in Australia. The village of Major's Creek, where I wrote this article, was officially known as Ellington from its foundation in 1851 until the 1930s, after a Major Ellington. Usage ensured that the popular name, Major's Creek, prevailed. Ellington, as a name for the village, is now unknown. It is used as the name for the pub. Interview with Brian Macdonald (Major's Creek, March 1998).
74 NAV1/RST 67501, RST decree, Hanoi, 16 Sep. 1939.
75 Ibid.
76 I researched no other examples of this naming process in Vietnam, although I heard of some. A tantalizing couple of days before leaving Vietnam, I was told that in Bác Giang province there s i a village named after a French planter, one M. Hardy. Regrettably, I had no time to check this. I did, however, investigate a different example, in Myanmar, where a famous resort, Ngapali beach, s i apparently named after an Italian who missed his home town of Naples (Napoli). In Arakanese “ngapali” is a type of fish. Interview (Thwandwe, Jul. 1997). See Cummings, Joe and Wheeler, Tony, Myanmar (Burma) (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 1996), pp. 374–75Google Scholar.
77 NAV1/RST 42402, Letter from Echinard to RST, 22 Apr. 1930.
78 Readers wishing to know more about Monpezat the man, rather than simply his name, are referred to Gantès, Gilles de, “Coloniaux, gouvemeurs et ministres. L'influence des Français sur l'évolution du pays à l'époque coloniale, 1902-1914” (Paris: Doctorat d'histoire, University of Paris VII, 1994).Google Scholar See also Gantès, Gilles de, “Du rôle des ‘grands hommes’ aux colonies: l'exemple d'Henri de Monpezat en Indochine”, Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer 80, 301 (1993): 585–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar André de Monpezat, managing director of SAFCAT in 1932, was a son of the better-known Henri de Monpezat, who died in 1929.
79 Murzayev overlooks this point in his place name study, and asserts that French names are scarce, as “by the time the French colonization began, a system of place names had already become historically established in the region”. Murzayev, E.M., “The Geographical Names of Vietnam”, Soviet Geography 11, 10 (10 1970): 820.Google ScholarLinh, Vũ Ngoc, Lich si cach mang tháng tárn, p. 108Google Scholar.
80 We may only wonder what associations my Japanesé precursor thought he could find in Bò Rạ.