The arrival of French colonialism was marked by the appearance of more protest poetry against both the colonial masters and the mandarinate class who supported them. The poetry was written in Chinese, Nôm or quốc ngữ characters and used poetic forms derived from the classical Chinese forms or, more frequently, the popular Vietnamese lục-bát (6-8) form. Protest about taxation was a common complaint, as in this example extracted from a much longer poem:
…
Tax on rice, vegetables; tax on paddy; tax on cotton Tax on silk; tax on iron; tax on bronze
Tax on birds; tax on fish throughout the three regions Nobody can enumerate all the various kinds of taxes The most stunning tax is on defecation
1 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, ed. An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries, translated by Huỳnh Sanh Thông. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.
Translation by Huỳnh Sanh Thông. The form of this verse is based on the Chinese lü-shih formal verse form but later poetry uses other Vietnamese forms. This matter is raised further in Chapter 5.
2 See, for example, Nguyễn Bình Phương, Nguyễn Tiến Hải, Nguyễn Hứu Qúy and Đặng Việt Thủy, eds. Việt Nam - Thơ Chiến Tranh (Một phần Lịch sử Việt Nam qua thơ) (Tuyển). Hanoi: NXB Quân đội Nhân
It is too painful to talk about all these things ...3
Other poems addressed the loss of the soul of the nation, such as the long poem Chiều hồn nước (“Appeal to the Soul of the Nation”) written by the 15-year old Phạm Tất Đắc (1909- 1935), which begins:
Twenty-five million children and adults, men and women For four thousand years, we descend from the Hong Bang4
We have homes, where have they vanished We have a country, why is it now lost O Heaven!
…5
Published poetry, and other general literary activity, was a part of the protest against colonialism until the censorship imposed during the Second World War but folk poetry continued to be created and recited in the countryside and many examples are shown and discussed further in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 following.
The French took Vietnam by force of arms and were consequently met with armed resistance from the very start. In their occupation of Vietnam, they were constantly troubled by what the colonial administration referred to as “pirates” and “bandits” – groups of fighters whose aim was to at least disrupt, if not end, French dominance and that would, in present-day Vietnam, be more likely to be described as “independence fighters” or “patriots”. The situation in the 1880s was further complicated by the “poor
performance” (from the French perspective) of the Vietnamese Imperial Government installed by the French colonial authorities with its capital in Huế, and by the Franco- Chinese war (1884-1885). The character of the resistance and the motivations of the fighters were initially largely unknown to the French colonial authorities, but some information was gleaned from European missionaries who were living in the countryside.
3 Truong Buu Lam. Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931. Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2000, p. 88.
4 Refers to the (probably mythical) dynasty of the “18” Hùng kings who ruled over Đại Việt (Vietnam) from
2879 BCE to 258 BCE. See Truong Buu Lam, Colonialism Experienced, p 232, Hà Văn Thư and Trần Hồng Đức. A Brief Chronology of Vietnam's History. Hanoi: NXB Thế Giới, 2000, pp. 3-5 and Hà Văn Thư and Trần Hồng Đưc. Tóm tắt Niên biểu Lịch sử Việt Nam, 12th edition. Hà Nội: NXB Văn hóa-Thông tin, 2005.
5 Pham Tat Dac (1926). “An Appeal to the Soul of the Nation”, Document 11, in Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931, pp. 228-233, edited by Truong Buu Lam. Ann Arbor: The
For example, a French administrator named Miribel,6 working in the Hưng Yên region and
writing in the late nineteenth Century, found that some of the “bandit leaders” were not merely opportunistic thieves. He described his experiences:
Tan Thuat and Cu Duc were the apostles. They visited the villages, got the notables together and inspired fervent patriotism in the hearts of everyone. Both these men were completely selfless and showed the greatest gentleness toward their fellow man. They preached resistance against the foreigner but tried to win over their partisans through persuasion rather than by terror.7
Dr Édouard Hocquard, a French medical doctor serving with the French troops in Tonkin in 1884 and 1885, the years of the Franco-Chinese war, was aware that the colonial administration did not have a good understanding of their native subjects and that there was a need to develop a deeper understanding into the political and social situation in Indochina. He knew that the French colonisers were having difficulty in winning the trust of the Vietnamese leaders (he uses the French term, Annamese, for what we now call Vietnamese), and in discussing the need to control the “bandits” and “pirates”, he writes:
...in particular we need to be able to count on the Annamese officials, but the latter, despite their wonderful declarations of faith and their
protestations of interest, are in their hearts completely hostile to us.8
Much of the resistance of the early period originated from scholars (the văn thân), the men of letters who were trained in classical Chinese and who lived and taught in the villages, and their “preaching” of resistance was not at all organised on a large scale in the way that later actors were able to achieve and which is the subject of study in later
chapters. Much of the resistance also came from the upper levels of the French-controlled Royal Vietnamese administration and was aimed at discrediting the French in the eyes of the populace. Édouard Hocquard writes further:
6 This is probably the far-sighted Artus de Miribel who later became the Administrator for Hải Dương
province. See Van Nguyen-Marshall. “The Moral Economy of Colonialism: Subsistence and Famine Relief in French Indo-China, 1906-1917”, The International History Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (Jun, 2005): 237-258, p. 253.
7 Quoted in Nguyen Khac Vien (1964). “Water, Rice and Men”, in Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam, pp.
75-126, edited by David Marr and Jayne Werner. Berkeley: Indochina Resource Center, 1974, p. 109.
8 Dr. Édouard Hocquard. War and Peace in Hanoi and Tonkin: A Field Report of the Franco-Chinese War and on Customs and Beliefs of the Vietnamese (1884-1885), Translated by Walter E. J. Tips. (Originally
published: Trente Mois au Tonkin, in Le Tour du Monde, Vols 57-61, 1888-91, Paris). Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1999, p. 482.
The Annamese officals are encouraged to act like this by the government of Hué; Thuong, the Regent … has, with the men of letters of all categories acting as intermediaries, engaged in a silent battle against our government with the objective not only of stopping us by all means possible from bringing peace to the country, but especially of discrediting us in the eyes of the people by showing them our powerlessness.9
This sullen silent resistance sometimes broke out into demonstrations but was more commonly expressed in written form, often as essays, stories and poetry.
Most of the written material produced during the early part of the 20th Century was not
written to be tuyên truyền (propaganda) as such, but it was certainly aimed at mobilising people to think and work towards an end to colonialism. Some of the works produced comprised aspirational proclamations and the like from organisations hoping for political power. Truong Buu Lam has collected some examples of statements produced in the period from the early 1900s to the 1930s from organised groups and individuals.10 In 1912
Hoàng Trọng Mậu (1874-1916, Nghệ An) wrote a proclamation for an association seeking the “restoration of Vietnam”11 and in 1917 there was a small rebellion, in the form of a
mutiny, in Thái Nguyên province and a proclamation announcing “a new nation that will last for thousands more years” was issued by the rebels.12 Political parties in the 1920s and
early 1930 also issued their proclamations; the Vietnamese Party for Independence,13 the
Nationalist Party of Vietnam14 and the Communist Party15 all released documents in the
form of calls to the French colonial authorities, the “people” or as manifestos. All of these documents call for an end to colonialism, for the French to go home, and for Vietnam to become independent, although not all of them have a vision as to what an independent Vietnam would look like. The material that was produced in this early period is a
9 Hocquard War and Peace in Hanoi and Tonkin, p. 483.
10 See Truong Buu Lam. Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931. Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2000, pp. 105-298.
11 Hoang Trong Mau (1912). “Proclamation of the Association for the Restoration of Vietnam”, Document 5,
in Colonialism Experienced, pp. 162-164, edited by Truong Buu Lam.
12 “The Thai Nguyen Uprising: Proclamation” (1917). Document 8, in Colonialism Experienced, pp. 186-189,
edited by Truong Buu Lam.
13 “The Vietnamese Party for Independence: Memorandum to the French Minister of Colonies” (1927).
Document 13, in Colonialism Experienced, pp. 238-247, edited by Truong Buu Lam.
14 “The Nationalist Party of Vietnam (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang): Proclamation to the People” (1927).
Document 14, in Colonialism Experienced, pp. 248-250, edited by Truong Buu Lam.
15 Tran Phu (1930). “The Political Theses of the Indochinese Communist Party”, Document 19, in Colonialism Experienced, pp. 280-291, edited by Truong Buu Lam.
precursor to the tuyên truyền of the 1930s and the much more sophisticated tuyên truyền which began to appear in the 1940s.