Modern Vietnamese Flag

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Modern Vietnamese Flag
The five points of the star stand for the
farmers, workers, intellectuals, youth and
soldiers. Adopted 1955
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How Did the French Become the Colonial Masters of
Vietnam?
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French Indochina War 1882-1883

• In 1881, China declared sovereignty over Annam or
  Vietnam, sending troops down the Red River to
  occupy its northern region, Tonkin.

• France, under the pretext of protecting their
  Catholic missionaries from Vietnamese cruelty,
  renewed its colonial expansionism in Indochina
  (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), which China
  opposed.

• French captain Henri Laurent Riviere (1827-83)
  was sent with a small force to Tonkin's
  administrative center, Hanoi, to evict the
  Chinese and to subdue the rebel "Black Flag
  Pirates."

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French Indochina War 1882-1883

• He captured the Hanoi fortress, Nam Dinh's coast,
  and the Hon Gay coal mine. During a Vietnamese
  counterattack, Riviere was killed.

• French reinforcements were sent to the area, and
  France obtained a Vietnamese agreement on a
  treaty ceding Tonkin (1882). When China renounced
  the agreement, the French seized Haiphong and
  Hanoi and bombarded the Vietnamese capital of Hue
  (1883).

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French Indochina War 1882-1883

• During the fighting, both sides negotiated and
  finally signed a treaty (August 25, 1883) that
  recognized French protectorates over northern
  Vietnam (Tonkin) (dong kinh eastern capital)
  and central Vietnam (Annam) (an nam peace of
  the south) southern Vietnam (Cochin China) was
  already under French control.

• Ten years later Siam relinquished to the French
  its claims to Laos, which was incorporated into a
  federation known as French Indochina.

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The French instituted one of the most severe of
colonial regimes, with the peasantry ground into
the dirt with draconian taxes (for example,
alcohol was heavily taxed but each village was
forced to buy a certain quota of
government-produced alcohol yearly!). Any sign
of rebellion was savagely crushed, and the
fearsome Sureté (secret police) was apt to drag
off nationalist sympathizers at the slightest
provocation. The island of Poulo Condore (Can
Dao) became the largest prison in Asia.
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Children working in a paper mill in Tonkin
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Palais du Gouverneur, Saigon Cochinchine,
1904 Une Carte Postale
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Pagoda in Hanoi, Tonkin 1930
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A Yunnam woman, 1928 See her shoes!
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But while Indochina may have seemed a paradise to
the Europeans (providing French colonists with
rich pickings from trade in rubber, rice, tea,
coffee and coal), it was very much a hell for
many of the natives.
Some of the native educated class (most of which
worked for the French) became active in
anti-colonial work, which usually resulted in
swift imprisonment or execution, but some of
these men did establish some nationalist
organizations in the country - particularly the
mountainous districts. But many were forced to
flee abroad to preach their beliefs and build up
support. 
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With the fall of France in 1940, Indochina was
internationally isolated, and largely left to her
own devices by the Petain regime. The Japanese,
realising the weakness of the French colony, kept
the French administration in place as a "puppet"
regime, and the French Sureté in particular
clamped down even harder on any sign of
rebellion/dissent in the native population. But
eventually, in 1945, the Japanese took total
control over Indochina.
When the Chinese invaded Tonkin, and the British
took Annam and Cochinchine, the Allies decided to
give Indochina back to the French. The main
problem was what to do with the various
nationalist/communist groups which had fought
against the Japanese, and now wanted their
independence... 
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The main anti-Japanese organization was the
nationalist/communist group controlled by Ho Chi
Minh. This organization was founded in 1941, but
Ho Chi Minh had been active in nationalist and
socialist politics well before that. He was the
Comintern representative in Vietnam in 1930, and
founded the Communist Party of Indochina in 1930.
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After the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII,
Ho pushed for total independence for Vietnam, and
the French held that it was a colony.
Despite fruitless meetings between
representatives of the British occupiers and the
Viet Minh, tension escalated until things came to
a head in November 1946. 
Fighting then broke out between the two sides in
Haiphong, and a truce was called. However,
General Giap then launched a surprise attack on
Hanoi in December and called for a popular rising
against the French. Ho Chi Minh made a similar
broadcast two days later, and fighting erupted
throughout Tonkin. The Indochina War had
started... 
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Who was Ho Chi Minh?
Ho Chi Minh was the figurehead, the emotional
leader, the hero of Vietnam. (Note General
Giap was the man who developed the strategy,
planned the battles, and ultimately defeated
everyone who chose to fight against Vietnam.)
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The youngest of three children, Ho was born
Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in central
Vietnam. The area was indirectly ruled by the
French through a puppet emperor. Its impoverished
peasants, traditional dissidents, opposed
France's presence and Ho's father, a functionary
at the imperial court, manifested his sympathy
for them by quitting his position and becoming an
itinerant teacher .
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Ho was familiar with the lofty French principles
of liberté, égalité, fraternité and yearned to
see them in practice in France. In 1911 he sailed
for Marseilles as a galley boy aboard a passenger
liner.
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In 1919, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign
the treaty ending World War I, and Ho, supposing
that the President's doctrine of
self-determination applied to Asia, donned a
cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a
lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam.
Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French
Communist Party. "It was patriotism, not
communism, that inspired me," he later explained.
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Soon Ho was roaming the earth as a covert agent
for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese journalist or
a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton,
Rangoon or Calcutta--then vanish. Again and
again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a
new place. In 1929 he assembled a few militants
in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese Communist
Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose
calculated to epitomize his moral fiber, but he
had at least two wives or perhaps concubines. One
was a Chinese woman the other was Giap's
sister-in-law, who was guillotined by the French.
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Slipping across the Chinese frontier into
Vietnam--his first return home in three
decades--he urged his disciples to fight both the
Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp,
he founded the Viet Minh, an acronym for the
Vietnam Independence League, from which he
derived his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh--roughly
"Bringer of Light."
There was no flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no
bending of his will. Even as the war increasingly
destroyed the country, he remained committed to
Vietnam's independence. And millions of
Vietnamese fought and died to attain the same
goal.
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Ho died on Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some
six years before his battalions surged into
Saigon. Aspiring to bask in the reflected glory
of his posthumous triumph, his heirs put his
embalmed body on display in a hideous granite
mausoleum copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow.
They violated his final wishes. In his will he
specified that his ashes be buried in urns on
three hilltops in Vietnam, saying, "Not only is
cremation good from the point of view of hygiene,
but it also saves farmland!"
Ho Chi Minh visits a textile factory, 1965
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http//members.lycos.co.uk/Indochine/index.htmlto
p
http//www.teacheroz.com/fire.htm  "We Didn't
Start The Fire" by Billy Joel
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Now you are ready to watch the movie INDOCHINE