The Birth of Vietnamese Anticolonial Bases in Asia (1885–1925)

 The Birth of Vietnamese Anticolonial Bases in Asia (1885–1925)

If we could resurrect Dang Thuc Hua from his Ban Chik grave and ask him in an imaginary interview why he had dedicated so much of his life to working in Siam, he would undoubtedly begin by citing the heroic struggle he and his partisans had led to regain Vietnam’s lost independence. He would surely review the actions of such well-known patriotic figures as Phan Dinh Phung, Pham Hong Thai, and Phan Boi Chau. Yet if we were to press him for more details of his own revolutionary career, our conversation would quickly turn to an in-depth discussion of the Vietnamese populations living in northeastern Siam and, to a lesser degree, southern China. Hua would tell us a little of his brief travels to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and southern China. But it was Siam that he knew best: above all Bangkok, Phichit, Udon Thani, and Nakhon Phanom. This is where ancient patterns of immigration had concentrated Vietnamese communities in Siam. And this is where our story of the regional context of Vietnamese revolution must begin: on the ground.

EARLY VIETNAMESE OVERIAND AND MARITIME EMIGRATION TO SEAM 

Coastal Emigration towards Southeastern Siam 

Vietnamese have been living in the Kingdom of Siam longer than many might think. One of the first indications of Vietnamese presence appears in a map of Ayuthia published in 1691 by a Frenchman named Simon de la Loulakre. In this map. we see a series of foreign 'camps. (mu ban in Thai) situated along the canals surrounding the ancient capital of Ayurhia. The Cochin•Chinese camp lies to the southwest of the royal grounds, next to the quarters of the Chinese, Portuguese. Malay and Peguan. It is hard to know precisely how many Vietnamese lived there in the 17th century. When French missionaries arrived in Ayuthia in 1662, some counted around 100 Cochin-Chinese families. Others noted less. While several young Tonkinese converts from the northern Trinh state soon joined their southern colleagues already there, the Cochin-Chinese constituted the majority Given that 40 or so Cochin-Chinese converted to Christianity in the 1660s, it is likely that there were at least a dozen or so Cochin-Chinese families and a handful of Tonkinese catechists living in Ayuthia in the 17th century. Christian or not, most of these Vietnamese made their living as small-scale traders. transporting goods between southern central Vietnam and Siam. Others inter-preted for European traders, worked as their slaves, navigated ships for the Starnes' Royal Navy or served various local courts as messengers and spies. This ad) Vietnamese emigration to Ayuthia ended temporarily in 1688, however. when  the Siamese King was dethroned, the French expelled and the Christians thrown in prison.' The number of Vietnamese Catholics would grow considerably in the early 18th century, when French missionaries used them to rebuild the mission in Siam. But this, too, was short-lived. In 1765, Burmese invasions put an end to the mission in Ayuthia. Any remaining Vietnamese sought refuge among Vietnamese fishermen living in the predominantly Christian colonies near Chantaboun in southeastern Siam.2 The 19th century saw the Vietnamese on the move again. A European traveller noted as early as 1826 that Cochin-Chinese merchants trading in Bangkok stopped over on the Siamese island of Koh Si Chang where they had built a temple.3 In 1872, the French consulate in Siam tells us that 54 small Vietnamese barges (barques) entered the port of Bangkok carrying a total freight of 20,150 piculs.4 Roger Garreau, a French interpreter who wrote an invaluable study of Vietnamese communities in Siam in 1916, reported that since the mid-19th century Vietnamese had been increasing their presence in all the major coastal entrepôts scattered across the Gulf of Siam from Rach Gia to Chanthaburi. He observed that Vietnamese immigrants worked there as fishermen and small traders. They dominated the commerce of the islands of Phu Quoc and Koh Kong, where they made a living supplying Bangkok’s markets with fresh fish and fruits. Others, caught in violent storms, were carried as far away as Nakhon Srithammarat and Singapore.5

Trade was not the only thing bringing Vietnamese to Siam. More emigrants had begun to take this coastal route to escape social and political dislocation in Vietnam at the end of the 18th century. The majority were southern sailors and soldiers who, in the midst of civil unrest during the Tay Son rebellion (1771–1802), followed or were forcibly moved by Nguyen Phuc Anh to Siam in the mid-1780s. There, the young Nguyen inheritor began rebuilding his forces and strengthening his regional and international alliances. Accompanying him were 300 mandarins and officers. Stragglers and soldiers followed, bringing the total number of Vietnamese exiles in Siam to around 1,000. The Siamese King Rama I (r. 1782–1809) allowed Nguyen Anh and his men to live in areas such as Samsen and Bangpho, now part of the greater Bangkok metropolitan area.

In 1802, with the help of troops supplied by Rama I and junks and arms from English, French, Portuguese, and Chinese merchants, Nguyen Anh broke the Tay Son leaders' hold on the southern delta, brought the civil war to an end, unified the country, and proclaimed himself Emperor of Vietnam under the title of Gia Long (r. 1802–20). Yet if many Vietnamese officers had left Siam to fight on Nguyen Anh’s behalf against the Tay Son, a large number of his troops stayed. Of them, many married Siamese women and took jobs working for the Siamese monarch. Indeed, during the 19th century, the Siamese King filled some of his most effective combat units with men of non-Thai ethnic stock, mainly Vietnamese, Khmer, Mon, and Lao. Others worked as small traders, police officers, doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats. Over time, through intermarriage, many of the offspring of these immigrants were assimilated into Siamese society.

With Vietnam unified, another group of Vietnamese newcomers trickled into southeastern Siamese territories during the mid-19th century, as the Siamese and Vietnamese Courts resumed their longstanding rivalry for influence over Cambodia. These arrivals usually included prisoners-of-war captured by Siamese armies in Cambodia and southern Vietnam. According to a French missionary, after an attack on southern Vietnam in 1833, the Siamese brought back ‘several thousand’ Cochin-Chinese, of whom 1,500 were Christians. The Siamese King allowed them to build a new church, Saint Xavier, in another camp known as ‘Ban Yuan’, (the ‘Vietnamese Village’). (Rebuilt, it still exists near the National Library in Bangkok today.) A French census indicated that as of 1887, 5,000 Vietnamese lived in Bangkok, half of whom were Christian. The Vietnamese Catholics in Chantaboun represented 3,000 of a total population of 5,000–6,000. Many had fled the religious persecutions of Emperors Minh Mang (r. 1820-41), Thieu Tri (r. 1841-47) and Tu Duc (r. 1848-83). Mo-could be found in the ports of Trat, Chantaboun Songkhram, where they worked as fishermen and lumbelfen honburi and Sam Catholics were not the only religious,immigrants in Siam. Vietnamese Buddhists settled in Nang Loen village or 'Xom Kinh' (Vietnamese village) Located along the Kut Mai canal, not far from the Siamese royal grounds today Nang Loen boasted hundreds of Vietnamese adherents at the turn of the century. many of whom were married to Siamese or were the offspring of mixed marriages themselves. Of the 12 governing monks, two were expatriates from Indochina, 1] After World War II, this temple (and its senior Vietnamese monk) would serve at the headquarters for the Viet Minh's arms trade in Southeast Asia (see Chapter 5). By the turn of the century, this coastal Vietnamese immigration moved inwards along the Chao Phraya River. A few kilometres north of Samsen, for example, immigrants established a larger village at Ban Pho. By 1916, it reportedly had more than 1,000 denizens. Further north, not far from the royal palace of Bang Pa In, Vietnamese Catholics formed a mission of 400 on the island of Koh Yai, while 700 to 800 others moved into neighbouring Bang Pli Na, and yet another 300 went further to stake a claim in the village of Chao Chet. Following the Chao Phraya's canals, another 300 Vietnamese built homes where their pre-decessors had resided in the 17th century: Ayuthia. These waterways eventually carried them to the major commercial entrepôt of Paknampho, where Catholic fishermen built homes on an island at the confluence of the Mae Ping and Yom Rivers, which the Siamese called 'Koh Yuan' or the 'Vietnamese island'. From there, the intrepid took the Krabin River further upstream to build homes in Pachin and Nakhon Nayok, where there were more than 500 inhabitants by 1916. Over time, Vietnamese families even found their way northwestwards, up the Nan River, to settle in the province of Phichit situated west of the Petchabun Range in central Siam. There, we shall see, Vietnamese revenSicera begin building one of their most important Southeast Asian bases outside Vietnam.

Overland Vietnamese Emigration towards Northeastern Siam

Meanwhile, to the northeast, an upper Indochinese route had begun bringing Vietnamese émigrés to northeastern Siam from central Vietnam. Increasing demographic pressures in central Vietnam and the emergence of trading routes across the Annamese Cordillera since at least the 17th century account for these movements. The most important path linked the market of Nakhon Phanom along the Mekong to the port of Vinh. A second trail ran from Hanoi to the Mekong by way of Dien Bien Phu and Luang Prabang. According to members of the famous Pavie Mission sent to Laos in the late 19th century, central Vietnamese traders dominated commerce on the left bank of the Mekong running across the Annamese Cordillera to Vinh, while the Chinese ran Bangkok’s trade with the Khorat plateau. The Siamese Court supported these Chinese merchants in order to channel towards the capital [of Bangkok] those regional products that had previously been flowing entirely to Annam . To this end, one Siame ureaucrat had allegedly prohibited 'for a long time already the sale of buffalos to Annamese merchants'. The Pavie Mission claimed that central Vietnames traders bought pigs and buffaloes in Mekong markets in exchange for 'Sa Nhon (amonum hirsutum), a medicinal plant used by the Chinese.15 In the wake af these traders was a growing number of poor. Most came from the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh and tended to settle in parallel areas near the upper Mekong towns of Nakhon Phanom, Nong Khai, Nong Saen and Tha Uthen. Ja 1890, the Pavie Mission noted a Vietnamese community in Tha Uthen, whose inhabitants had been driven there by famine in central Vietnam '18 or 19 years ago'. In 1899, a French diplomat based in Nakhon Phanom had estimated the number of Vietnamese fleeing there from famine at around 400. In 1916, Garreau noted the existence of numerous Vietnamese in Sakon Nakhon, who had been living there 'for more than a century and who facilitate the arrival of more immigrants from Annam'. Near Roi Et, the Vietnamese allegedly dominated the local market. By the 1910s, the increasing number of unemployed Vietnamese would provide the local authorities with the manual labour needed for expanded urban and road development.  

As in southeastern Siam, mixed with the traders and the jobless were numerous Catholic exiles, who had crossed the Annamese Chain to escape persecution in the 19th century. As of 1916, a small Catholic Vietnamese community lived in Tha Hae, a village located near the Mekong River. Thabo, nother small village across from Vientiane, was home to around 2,000 Christians. Opposite Thakhek, in Nong Saen, around 100 Vietnamese Catholic families prospered. Even the Governor of Nong Khai, Phra Borihan, surprised Garreau with his mastery of the Vietnamese language. He was a Christian from Samsen. 

Together all of these late 17th -, 18th- and 19th-century Vietnamese émigrés and their descendants constituted what 20th century Vietnamese would call the 'old Vietnamese residents'(Viet kieu cu) or the 'yuan kao' in Siamese, suggesting that many of them had actually been assimilated into Siamese society by the turn of the century. 16 This is also one of the reasons why it is difficult to determine the exact number of ethnic Vietnamese emigrants in Siam. If we can rely on the census conducted by the French Consulate General in Bangkok in 1887, there were 5,000 Vietnamese in Bangkok; 1,200 in Chantaboun; 400 in Ayuthia; 1,000 in the area of Nakhon Phanom and Sakon Nakhon; and 700 elsewhere.17 In 1916, Roger Garreau would count 3,000 Vietnamese in Chantaboun; 1,000 at Nang Loen; 400 at Koh Yai; 300 at Ayuthia; 200-300 at Paknampho; and more than 500 at Nakhon Nayok. His numbers for the Vietnamese in the northeast are higher than the 1887 census, reflecting perhaps the arrival of a newer wave of Vietnamese immigrants following the French occupation of northern Vietnam by 1885.  What is harder to pinpoint is to what degree these western Vietnamese movements across the peninsula were linked to larger patterns of Chinese immigration throughout Southeast Asia. For example, it is possible that the Vietnamese presence along the coast of the Gulf of Siam to Chantaboun and Bangkok was facilitated by the Chinese junk trade between Siam and southern China. Garreau noted in his reports that Vietnamese emigrants had used Chinese trading vessels to move westwards (though he does not tell us who or how many). The maritime nature of Chinese immigration to Southeast Asia may have left the central Vietnamese in a favourable position to dominate the overland routes to upper northeast Siam and Laos. According to William Skinner, in 1904 Chinese immigrants in northeast Siam numbered around 6,950 - only 1.7 per cent of the total number of Chinese immigrants in Siam, whereas Chinese émigrés in lower Siam accounted for 59.8 per cent of the total.  

New Immigration along Old Lines

Vietnamese anticolonialists fleeing their country would benefit directly from these pre-existing patterns of Vietnamese immigration into Siam. This newer wave of immigrants occurred in response to French colonial expansion into eastern Vietnam at the end of the 19th century. Unlike their predecessors, their motives for emigrating were less economic or religious than political. During the 19th century, the brittle state of Vietnamese political institutions had left the Nguyen empire vulnerable to French firepower. Encouraged by dreams of wealth in southern China and given a pretext for intervention because of the Nguyen Court's persecution of French Catholic missionaries and their followers, the French began to seize territory in Vietnam in the 1850s, capturing Saigon in 1859 and establishing a colony in southern Vietnam (Cochin-China) and a protectorate over Cambodia by 1863. By 1885, the French had established protectorates over Tonkin and Annam and reached an agreement with China whereby the Ch'ing Court agreed to end its tributary relationship with Vietnam, to pull its troops out of northern Vietnam, and to end its support of the Vietnamese resistance. With the Chinese momentarily out of the way and the deltas occupied, the French turned their attention to destroying stubborn Vietnamese resistance in the highlands and expanding their empire westwards into Laos. In 1885, the young Emperor, Ham Nghi, fled to the hills where a number of scholar-patriots were holed up. In that same year, the 'Save the King Edict' (Can Vuong) was proclaimed, calling for resistance against the French and appealing to scholars, in particular, to lead the fight. Some Vietnamese mandarins chose to work with the French. Others resigned their positions in the bureaucracy and returned to their native villages to lead a life of seclusion. Those who opposed the French took to mountainous regions in northern and western Vietnam, where they set up bases in remote jungle areas, particularly in western Nghe An, Ha Tinh and Quang Binh provinces as well as in eastern Laos. Overwhelmed by French firepower, it did not take them long to figure out that to the west, in Siam, were pockets of Vietnamese émigrés who could act as vital rearguards.  

Those who fled west across the Mekong River included a number of staunchly anti-French leaders and their families. The majority was from the northern central Vietnamese provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh (shortened Vietnamese to Nghe-Tinh). Although a few may have moved on to live in Bangkok area, 21 most chose to reside in regions along the Mekong River, in the Siamese provinces parallel to upper central Vietnam, such as Nong Khai, Nakhe Phanom, Udon Thani, Sakhon Nakhon and perhaps Ubon Ratchathani,22 Lik- their predecessors, they took jobs as farmers, barbers, carpenters, bricklayers and construction workers. 23 One of Phan Dinh Phung's close lieutenants, Neo Quang, fed to Siam at this time. 24 As we shall see, his children would play an important role in organising Vietnamese communist networks in Asia well into the 1930s.

To the south, a larger intake of Vietnamese occurred because of stipulations in the 1893 Franco-Siamese Treaty. Since the early 1890s, the French had been working to force King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910) to part with his claims over Cambodian and Lao territories. Fearing a fate similar to Vietnam's, the Siamese Court considered fighting the French for control of the territories, but in the end did not have the wherewithal to undertake such action. Following a naval clash at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River in 1893 (more commonly known as the 'Paknam Incident'), the Court agreed to French territorial demands. Under the terms of the October 1893 Franco-Siamese Treaty, the Siamese relinquished claims to most of Laos east of the Mekong River. About a decade later, the Siamese turned over the enclaves of Luang Prabang and Pakse in another treaty, followed by yet a third in 1907, in which Bangkok abandoned claims to the rice-rich provinces of Battambang, Siemreap and Sisiphon in Cambodia.

What is less known is that the 1893 treaty allowed the French to occupythe present-day southeastern Thai city of Chantaboun pending implementation of the treaty. During the French occupation, colonial administrators brought in a sizeable (though undetermined) number of Vietnamese to fill bureaucratic positions. Ten years later, after Chantaboun reverted to the Siamese, many of these Vietnamese chose to remain there with the permission of the Siamese authorities. In another clause of the same treaty, Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians could use their legal status of sujet français to 'circulate' within 25 kilometres of the Siamese border. Changes also allowed some French protégés to work or reside in Siam, with the only requirement being a poll tax of 4 baht each year.25 Because of these privileges, as well as increased construction projects in northeast Siam from the 1910s, a considerable, though still indeterminate, number of central Vietnamese crossed into northeastern Siam.26 The lack of reliable statistics prevents us from reaching any sort of firm conclusion about the total number of Vietnamese in Siam by the 1920s. From the available contemporary studies, though, it seems safe to say that by the outbreak of World War II the total Vietnamese population in Siam was somewhere in the range of 20,000-30,000, with the former number no doubtmuch closer to the truth than the latter. 

NEW PATTERNS IN VIETNAMESE-SIAMESE RELATIONS

If traditional Vietnamese rulers had found their world turned upside-down by the French, things were also changing for their Siamese counterparts. Indeed, long before the French finished carving out their Indochinese colonial state, Siamese officials understood, perhaps earlier than their Nguyen counterparts, that the traditional framework of peninsular inter-state relations was being fundamentally challenged by the Europeans. While Siamese Court figures may have found some solace in knowing that the French colonisation of what was becoming 'Indochina' had neutralised a rival Vietnamese state, statesmen like Prince Damrong were certainly not happy to see how this same French project was partitioning off large parts of Laos and Cambodia from Siam's traditional influence. In the space of a few short treaties, Siamese leaders found themselves on the outside of French Indochina looking in, as the French went about connecting Laos and Cambodia more closely to Vietnam through expanded road, canal and rail projects. Although colonialism never prevented Lao and Khmer monks from crossing the western border to study in northeastern pagoda schools or to go on to Bangkok for higher ecclesiastical training (see Chapter 2), the French none the less changed the nature of the game by recasting traditional diplomatic relations in terms of the modern nation-state - in this case an Indochinese, not a Vietnamese or Cambodian one. In short, Cambodia and Laos could not be simultaneously linked to both French Indochina and Siam, at least not in public. Short of war, Siamese leaders had to accept on paper that Laos and Cambodia now belonged to a new, if badly defined, colonial state called the Indochinese Union. One thing was very clear though: the French now administered the diplomatic relations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This does not mean that the Siamese forgot about their neighbours or that Europeans somehow anaesthetised traditional intra-Asian contacts during the colonial period. The Europeans did, however, oblige the Siamese Court to adopt a two-track foreign policy towards its Indochinese neighbours. And this was new. As long as the French were strong, Bangkok's leaders publicly acknowledged the existence of an Indochinese state in diplomatic, economic and security terms. In private, though, they simultaneously fostered highly secret contacts with Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian anticolonialists opposed to that very Indochinese construction. Some might call this opportunistic. But depending on how one looks at it, it is also possible that we might have an example of how Siamese leaders at the turn of the century were caught berween the reality of a new, militarily backed French Indochinese state and an equally real remembrance of a precolonial peninsular order which they did not want to lose or which they wanted to re-invent in their own favour. We shall return to this question in Chapter 3.

What concerns us here is that opposition to the creation of French Indochina was obviously what brought Siamese and Vietnamese anticolonialist together behind closed doors. By colonising Vietnam and taking' territories claimed by the Siamese monarchy in western Laos and Cambodia at the turn of the century, the French facilitated the emergence of a shared sense of hostility for this new Indochinese state. Thus, whenever French power waned, the Siamese increased their aid to Vietnamese anticolonialists. This was particularly effective when the latter were operating within the very territories contested by the Siamese and the French along the Mekong. Conversely, playing Siamese hostility towards the French became a hallmark of Vietnam's unofficial, anticolonialAsian diplomacy until 1951 (see Chapter 8).

SIAM AND THE CAN VUONG MOVEMENT

Although the first generation of Vietnamese anticolonialists, those of the Can Vuong movement, never developed strong bases in or garnered much support from Siam, they recognised none the less that local Siamese leaders could be allies. The scholar-patriot, Phan Dinh Phung (1847-96), was one of the first to single out the importance of Siam as a potential source of aid. A native of Ha Tinh province and a leading figure in the Can Vuong movement, Phung left the Nguyen Court in the 1880s to fight the French from mountain bases in the western parts of Nghe-Tinh provinces. With the French in control of Vietnamese deltas and doing so with superior weaponry, Phung focused on the two peripheral countries located just beyond Indochina: China and Siam.

A good Court scholar, Phung had no doubt read enough of the imperial annals to remember how Gia Long had successfully used his Siamese bases to procure war matériel. He had also compiled a historical geography of Vietnam in 1883.28 The problem was that the favourable regional and international cir- cumstances that had helped the Nguyen King defeat the Tay Son in the late 18th century no longer existed in the late 19th. Holed up in the Annamese Cordillera and outgunned by a vastly superior French Navy, Phung lacked Gia Long's access to the sea. Moreover, for local and international reasons, there were no Chinese, English, Portuguese or Dutch arms dealers or diplomats willing to help a rag-tag team of Vietnamese against the French. Because of China's problems with the West, Phung explained to his followers, the Vietnamese could no longer rely on the Ch'ing Court for support. However, Phan Dinh Phung did have access to Gia Long's ancient route to northeastern Siam. Remembering a sister of Gia Long who had married Rama I years earlier (in reality she probably did not), Phung suggested that the Siamese Court might be an alternative source of aid. The idea was simple. Phung needed access to Siam to feed an extremely primitive resistance economy he and his followers had initiated in the hills of western Nghe-Tinh and eastern Laos. There, Phung levied taxes on land and silver among the local populations. Lacking anything resembling foreign exchange, he exported cinnamon bark to the lowlands in exchange for the iron and brass needed in the Can Vuong's rudimentary arms workshops. Around 1886, Phung' arms makers succeeded in producing around 350 'home-made' guns based on western rifle models.30 However they were in obvious need of gunpowder and ammunition. Although Phung may have spent some time in Siam himself,31 a young woman by the name of Co Tam served as his chief arms buyer there in Tha Uthen, where a large Vietnamese community was located. Her activities may not have been unrelated to the weapons being shipped into Laos by the Siamese Army in 1890. In one case, the Siamese reportedly transferred 90 cases of arms from Bangkok to Luang Prabang, containing 1,000 Austrian repeating-rifles.

To import weapons, Phung instructed his partisans to establish a secret route across Laos to connect Can Vuong bases in the Nghe-Tinh highlands to upper northeastern Siam. One known route originated from the mountains of Vu Quang in western central Vietnam.33 Phung may have formed this path around 1888, for one militant active in Siam says that her father was involved in establishing secret trails between Siam and central Vietnam at this time. Historian David Marr has shown that during this period a Vietnamese command base existed in Vu Quang.34 Having captured the Can Vuong's leading partisans running this overland Mekong track, the French learned in 1898 that Phan Dinh Phung had been relying on a longstanding Vietnamese merchant from Nakhon Phanom to run the movement's external commerce and to levy taxes on local rice-producing villages.

Phung's central Vietnamese forces were not the only ones fleeing to Siam. Southern Can Vuong leaders, such as Truong Cong Dinh and Phan Thanh Ton (the son of Phan Thanh Gian), sent their remaining forces across Cambodia and lower Laos in order to regroup in make-shift bases around Ubon Thani and Sisaket, areas in lower eastern Siam. There they may have succeeded in securing the protection of the Siamese King himself.36 Few of these southerners, however, stayed. They probably ran into opposition among Catholic émigrés in eastern and southeastern Siam, who had been allied with French missionaries since the 17th century. This may explain why, from the outset of the colonial period, revolutionary immigration to Siam was concentrated in upper northeastern Siam, where there were fewer pro-French Catholics (see Chapter 2).

To Siamese officials, these Vietnamese militants fleeing westwards towards the Mekong could serve their interests in opposing French territorial expansion westwards. In the late 1880s, Siamese military forces went so far as to lend a hand to Can Vuong forces working out of the mountainous regions near Huong Son, Vu Quang and Dien Bien Phu, areas controlled by Phan Dinh Phung's partisans. The Siamese Army provided some arms to the Can Vuong movement at this time and met with Phan Dinh Phung's partisans.37 During armed altercations with French units around Huong Son in 1885 and 1886, Phung's adherents were allegedly 'cooperating and coordinating their activities clock With Siamese military forces.38 Worried about French designs on Black Tai minors areas in northwestern Tonkin, King Chulalongkorn dispatched a military expeditie to this region between 1885 and 1887 to bring order to his Lao tributary stata and among the Tai-speaking peoples in Sipsongchuthal. In late 1885, ch. Siamese military force crossed the present-day border between Laos and Vietnan and entered into the plains of Dien Bien Phu, as the French were moving toward. Son La and Lai Chau. Siamese forces would have thus been in a favourable position to lend a hand to Can Vuong militants whom we know were in this area 39 An unidentified upland resistance leader drew upon the anti-French views of Siamese General Phaya Suris, stationed in the Dien Bien Phu area at this time 40 But this military cooperation was extremely limited. In the end, the quantity of arms purchased in Siam or shipped by Co Tam to central Vietnam probably amounted to a total of four or five small shipments of rifles, gunpowder or casting iron, all of which ground to a sudden halt when the arms dealer mysteriously disappeared in the Laotian jungle.41 Moreover, any combined victories over the French were short-lived. Neither the Siamese nor the Vietnamese were in a position in the 1880s to take on the French Army.

Nevertheless, these contacts underscored the re-emerging strategic importance of Siam as an overland opening to Southeast Asia for the Vietnamese When Phung's death in 1896 brought an end to the Can Vuong movement, his anticolonial partisans followed mainland routes and longstanding patterns of Vietnamese immigration to Siam, where they set up camp.  

While Hoang Hoa Tham (De Tham), another Vietnamese anticolonialist working out of northwestern Vietnam, would hold out for a few more years, Phan Dinh Phung's death seriously eroded the ability of anticolonialists to maintain anything resembling a viable resistance 'government' on Vietnamese territory, Access to the outside now became crucial to keeping the idea of a counter state alive.

BUILDING AN INDOCHINESE STATE ON THE INSIDE

Yet in order to understand how revolutionaries went about constructing their anticolonial bases in Siam (and southern China), it is important here to consider first, if only briefly, what the French were doing so well on the inside to keep them on the outside. The two were intertwined. By the turn of the century, Vietnamese and Siamese anticolonialists agreed on one thing: 'French Indochina' was slowly but surely taking on a political, economic and spatial life of its own. This is not to say that the French created Indochina overnight, or that precolonial links necessarily gave way without a fight. On the contrary. The dismantling of the Dai Nam empire and the emergence of French Indochina took time. Once admirals had militarily subordinated traditional peninsular empires, principalities, and tribes to French sovereignty, administrators had to organise vast territories covering much of the eastern part of what we call mainland Southeast Asia today. To plant the French flag was one thing, but to rule over millions of people of diverse ethnic, cultural, political and religious backgrounds was quite another. The French had to give shape to an amorphous kaleidoscope of peoples. They began by negotiating an end to Vietnam's traditional pattern of relations with Siam and China, while simultaneously carving out the borders of the new colonial state. It was only in 1887 that the word 'Indochinese Union' appeared on paper.43 And it was only in 1907, as noted, that French cartographers, diplomats and military officers actually finalised the major geographical outlines of this union through treaties with the Siamese Court. A border between western Indochina and Siam had now been established to complement the Franco-Chinese Treaty of 1884, which had delimited most of Indochina's northern border.  

On the inside, France's colonial expansion in Asia was contingent upon associating the Vietnamese with their Indochinese project. The Vietnamese were needed to fill low-level, but functionally important bureaucratic positions in the administration and as manual labourers in the formation of Indochina's backbone: the roads, railways and bridges of a modern infrastructure and the mines and rubber plantations of a modern Indochinese industry. Rather than stopping age-old Vietnamese demographic movements, the French did their best to harness them for their own interests. Faced with serious overpopulation problems in Tonkin and northern Annam, for example, the French began shipping Tonkinese labourers to southern Indochina to clear the jungle and to work on rubber plantations in Cochin-China and Cambodia.

In Cambodia, new roads and improved river transports between Cochin-China and Cambodia helped the Vietnamese population grow from 79,050 in 1911 to 140,220 in 1921.45 In the mid-1920s, three new roads linked Laos to northern Vietnam, thereby allowing for easier transportation of Vietnamese miners and civil servants westwards to Thakhek, Savannakhet and Vientiane. If there were only 3,400 Vietnamese in Laos in 1912, by 1925 the number had reached 14,000. By 1932, it was at 22,600.46 Employed mostly as civil servants, mechanics, carpenters or miners, the Vietnamese occupied 54 per cent of the posts offered by the colonial administration by the early 1930s. Moreover, in Laos the inner workings of the French Indochinese bureaucratic system concentrated Vietnamese immigration in urban centres along the Mekong River, where the Lao population was lowest but where the French needed the most administrative and construction help. The Vietnamese filled the gap. By 1937 Vietnamese immigration was such that there were 10,200 Vietnamese living in Vientiane, easily outnumbering the 9,000 Lao. The same was true in other towns.  

On the inside, a political alliance was offered to those Vietnamese elites who chose to work with the French in building this new Indochinese state. In opening his famous speech to Vietnamese elites in Hanoi in April 1919,Governor General Albert Sarraut asked his burgeoning Vietnamese audience:

What do we want to do and how must we work together, French andAnnamese, for the good of this wonderful Indochina and for the welfare of her populations? That is after all the goal to be reached, the very onewhich occupies my mind and endlessly haunts my spirit. Together, Sarraut promised, they would advance along the road to political autonomy and eventual independence via a policy of Franco-Annamese collab oration', 

This policy gave rise to some significant reorientations in traditional Vier. famese perceptions of the region. On the one hand, for the Vietnamese allied with the French colonial state on the inside, Laos and Cambodia became unpre cedented Indochinese brothers in a larger, French-led Indochinese family, 50 while Siam and China were largely absent from the scene, even from the colonial text. books. On the other hand, for those Vietnamese opposed to the French colonial project in Indochina (though not necessarily its borders), their Asian journeys tended to be Siamese, Chinese and Japanese in nature. In many ways, the creation of French Indochina created two parallel voyages: one Indochinese, the other extra-Indochinese.

DONG DU AND A REVOLUTIONARY CHAPTER IN VIETNAMESE

IMMIGRATION IN ASIA

This opposition between Indochina and the rest of Asia was very real during the colonial period. No sooner had the French succeeded in destroying most of Phan Dinh Phung's forces inside Indochina than they had to turn their attention to a growing number of scholar-patriots circulating through China, Japan and Siam. As the French Consul General at Hong Kong, Gaston Liebert, reported to the Governor General, Albert Sarraut, in 1913: 

I have observed that since my return to Hong Kong, the principal task of the consulate has consisted of monitoring closely Annamese rebels whose leaders circulate between Siam and Japan, travelling fairly often to Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai. 

Pushed out of Indochina, these Vietnamese had quite naturally taken up the maritime routes out of Vietnam in order to seek political refuge abroad. One of the most important routes led from the port of Haiphong to Hong Kong. From there, militants knew they could make their way on to almost any other place in Asia. By 1916, for example, a combination of 36,000 steamers and junks were passing annually through Hong Kong, transporting around 21 million tons of goods. Bangkok offered similar connections. In 1923-24, 963 ships (not counting Chinese junks) passed through the port of Bangkok to transport teak, silver and rice to markets across the region and world.52 Riding with these cargoes were the men Liebert was charged with tracking. Aware of Hong Kong's central importance, Sarraut had sent him there to study how Vietnamese anticolonialists were building a series of Asian revolutionary connections. Facing Albert Sarraut from abroad was Phan Boi Chau. Born in 1867, Phan Boi Chau was a native of Nghe An province. He had grown up in the midst of the French colonisation of Vietnam and had seen the Can Vuong movement crushed. Steeped in a classical Confucian education, Chau, perhaps more than any other figure of his time, realised that the survival of a precolonial Vietnamese identity was at stake under the French. In 1904 he and other anticolonialists formed the Reformation Association (Duy Tan Hoi). Like the Can Vuong movement before it, this organisation sought to re-establish Vietnam's independence and to drive the French out of Indochina through violent means. It also aimed to promote Western modernisation, but only after having been filtered through Sino-Japanese canals. However, association with the French was not an option in Chau's eyes, at least not at this point. Impressed by Japan's growing military and economic might, and convinced that Asians could stand together against the European 'barbarians', Chau travelled to Tokyo confident that the Japanese would help their smaller Asian brother. The Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 was particularly encouraging for Chau's visions of pan-Asian solidarity. The West was no longer invincible. Once there, Chau understood from his discussions with Japanese and Chinese nationalists that he would have to organise his association much better. Of particular importance was the need to re-train an entire generation of young Vietnamese to prepare them to lead a future, independent Vietnamese nation. To this end, Chau began the famous Dong Du movement - literally, 'Journey to the East'. It was designed to bring students out of Vietnam for study in Japan. The driving idea was to channel the modernising ideas of the West via the East and to train youths in the military arts for the eventual reconquest of the country. Relying on earlier scholar-family contacts, Chau built a recruitment and screening system in all three parts of Vietnam in order to select the best and the brightest. Perhaps taking their cue from overseas Chinese in Vietnam who were helping Sun Yat-sen (and others), Vietnamese entrepreneurs in Indochina covered travel costs and provided start-up funds for the Dong Du, while trusted Chinese junk traders helped Chau smuggle hundreds of students to Hong Kong and then on to Japan. There, Japanese politicians and intellectuals enrolled these youths in various military academies, schools and universities. Nguyen Hai Than (Nguyen Cam Giang), a young man who had travelled with Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh to Japan in 1906, told the French two years later that there were about 500 Vietnamese students in Tokyo and Yokohama at this time. Two hundred were from southern Vietnam; 25 or so came from Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, another 100 were from Nghe-Tinh provinces, while the rest called the north home. 

Unlike his more Westernised counterpart Phan Chu Trinh, Phan Boi Chau was something of a pan-Asianist, stressing the 'same cultural and racial ties'(dong-van dong chung) binding the people of Asia against the Western 'invaders'. In 1907, Chau joined with other Asians in Tokyo to form the Society for East Asian Alliance (Dong-A Dong Minh).54 As he wrote in a letter to Japanese friends in 1905:

Vietnam is not on the European continent, but the Asian one. Vietnam is common to Japan in race, culture, and continental positioning, yet the French gangsters are left to spread their bestial venom without fear. Hence the French are unaware that Asia already has a major power, already has Japan ... Why then has Japan allowed the French to trample over Vietnam without trying to help us? 

Chau got his answer a few years later, when the Japanese made it clear that their relations with the French took precedence over Chau's call for a united Asian response to Western colonialism and pressed the French to change nationalin laws in Indochina in order to put the Japanese on the same level of civilisation the Europeans. 56 In 1909, two years after Japan recognised France's territorial rights in Asia, Chau and many of his students were forced to leave the country in am Japan forced Chau to find a new home for the Don view of Japan's friendly relations with the French.

Deportation from Japan forced Chau to find a new home for the Dong Du. He wrote in his memoir decades later that he 'had to focus on two countries China and Siam'.57 Encouraging Chau's interest in Siam were King Chulalongkorn's travels to Europe, his successful national reforms, his effective relations with the Europeans, as well as his personal interest in Siamese-Vietnamese relations, which, Chau wrote, Chulalongkorn 'considered to be as close as lips and teeth'.58 In mid-1908, shortly after the Siamese Court had been forced by the French to relinquish claims to Cambodian territories and following the French repression of tax revolts in southern Vietnam, Chau arrived in Bangkok for the first time. 59 With the help of a Japanese legal adviser to the Siamese government,60 a meeting was arranged between Phan Boi Chau and Chulalongkorn, who was reported to have been happy to receive the Vietnamese scholar-patriot. Chau claims in his memoir that he subsequently garnered support from ranking officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including the backing of a Siamese prince (an uncle of the King), who agreed to Chau's proposal allowing for his students from Japan to be transferred to Siam. According to Chau, this was done according to the wishes of the Thai King.

Although the arrival of Vietnamese students in Siam from Japan was temporarily delayed by developments in Vietnam and Chau's return to Hong Kong, Chau says that his 1909 trip to Bangkok 'marked the beginning of contact with Siam'. 62 It also shows that King Chulalongkorn, still smarting from the signing of treaties with the French two years earlier, had not cut his ties with the ranking Vietnamese anticolonialist at the time. 

Banished from Japan at this juncture, Dang Thuc Hua, whom we met at the beginning of our book, was one of those to benefit most from the King's sympathetic policy towards Vietnamese exiles. Born into a scholarly family in Nghe An in 1870, Hua came of age during the French conquest of Vietnam. Like Chau, this had a profound impact on him. Hua's grandfather, a counsellor to the Court in Hue, committed suicide upon the French occupation of the city, while his father resigned his post in the civil service and turned in his seals as the young Hua watched from his side.64 In 1900, Hua obtained his 'bachelor' degree (tu fai), but chose to abandon further studies in order to turn his attention to the anticolonial movement. To this end, he contacted scholar- patriots working in Nghe-Tinh provinces and started scraping funds together to help finance students studying in Japan. In 1908, a French crackdown forced Hua to leave Vietnam.65 In that year, at the age of 39, he left in a Chinese junk to join Phan Boi Chau abroad. About a year later, he arrived in Hong Kong with 2,500 piastres for Chau and informed him that the armed 'uprisings' in Vietnam needed more weapons if they were to succeed.

Heeding Hua's advice, Chau dispatched him and another trusted partisan, Dang Tu Kinh, on a mission to Japan. The idea was to channel weapons to Vietnam by way of Siam. Thanks to connections within the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomingtang, better known by its abbreviation, the KMT), Hua and Kinh shipped 500 rifles from Tokyo to Hong Kong for storage until a way could be found to transport them to Vietnam. Learning that the KMT had been using Singapore as a major transit, Chau and Hua travelled there to meet Chen Shunan, Commissioner of the KMT section at Singapore. The latter put them in touch with a Chinese contrabandist who ran junks across the South China Seas. Chau then returned to Bangkok where he held discussions with the King's uncle, who agreed to allow Chau to transport the Hong Kong-based weapons back to Vietnam by way of Siam. The plan fell through, however, when it came up for Cabinet discussion. The Siamese Minister of Foreign Affairs 'strongly opposed' this support of the Vietnamese on the grounds that it would disrupt Franco-Siamese relations if the French ever got wind of it.67 According to Cuong De, the Siamese Court agreed to transport the Vietnamese arms under the misconception that Japan was still aiding the Vietnamese resistance. When Bangkok learned that the Japanese had actually deported Chau, Siamese leaders reversed their decision immediately.68 Disappointed, Chau returned to Hong Kong, 'donated' most of the arms to Sun Yat-sen's brother in the hope of gaining aid later on, and then returned to Bangkok in September 1910 with some 20 arms carefully stowed away.

Despite the major setbacks caused by changes in Japanese and Siamese policies towards the Vietnamese, these arms missions, no matter how small they most certainly were, highlight again the continued efforts of Vietnamese activitists to penetrate an Asian contraband market, this time the seaborne one dominated by the Chinese. In early 1886, for example, the French consulate reported from Singapore that Chinese junk traders continued to export large amounts of matériel de guerre (weaponry) to all of Asia's major ports. In early 1886, 22 junks delivered 52,000 kg of gunpowder to central Vietnam without French authorisation.70 In 1909, the British police arrested a certain Nguyen Quynh Lam on arms-trafficking charges. A trained chemist from Nghe An, this young man was one of Chau's leading weapons makers, having fabricated many of the Party's bombs. One of his preferred return routes to Vietnam was by way

If these arms missions amounted to little in concrete terms, Chaud him entry into the KMT.71movements to Singapore and Siam at this point merit closer attention another reason. Until early 1909, Hong Kong had been Chau's major intermedia- Point between Vietnam and Japan for the transferral of followers, funds and perhaps a few guns and bombs. 72 But one can also ask whether the expansion of Chau's travels to Singapore and Bangkok around 1910 was related to the KMT. growing presence in Southeast Asian port cities and especially among overseas Chinese (Hoa kicu) communities living there at this same time. Since April 1906, the first KMT branch in Southeast Asia had been formed in Singapore by Sun Yat-sen himself. Other branches soon opened among the large overseas Chinese communities in Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Prominent revolutionary leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, Wang Ching-wei and Hu Han-min, travelled and worked frequently in these Southeast Asian sections. In 1908, thanks to their organisational implantation in Singapore, the KMT formed additional branches in various ports of Burma, Siam and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).73 The timing of the formation of the KMT's Southeast Asian branches was directly related to the departure of Sun Yat-sen and his followers from Japan in March 1907. According to Chinese historian Yen Ching Hwang, Japanese hostility led Sun Yat-sen to shift the 'centre of the whole [external] revolutionary movement' from Japan to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. As Yen  Ching Hwang explains:

This shift marked an important change in the history of the Chinese revolution prior to 1911. Singapore and Malaya, as well as Hong Kong, stood out not only as reservoirs of revolutionary revenue, but also as centres of the revolutionary operations ... From March 1907 to the autumn of 1908 (the establishment of the T'ung Meng Hui [KMT] South-East Asian headquarters in Singapore), five major uprisings were staged by the revolutionaries in the Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan provinces ... These uprisings were organized from Hanoi, Singapore and Hong Kong,74

Although it is hard to determine to what degree the Vietnamese were actually moving within these overseas KMT networks, 75 Phan Boi Chau's presence in Japan and his meetings with important KMT leaders during this time would certainly have apprised him of the innerworkings, strategies and geographical tack of Sun Yat-sen's organisational movements in the 'South Seas' (Nanyang).70 We know also that Chau had travelled to Singapore to meet with KMT officials regarding the possibility of smuggling arms to Vietnam. It is possible, even likely, chat Vietnamese revolutionaries decided some time shortly before their expulsion from Japan that they would have to do the same, with the Vietnamese Arnigrés in Siam paralleling the KMT's use of the large overseas Chinese populations in Southeast Asia to launch a revolution on the inside.

What we do know is that from this point the centre of gravity of the Song Du movement also shifted from Japan to°i 'ns two `Kwangs' — Kwangsi and Kwangtung — on the one  closer snedr tand V iseitanma mn. on theeother served as the triangular pillars of an emerging set of Asian resistance bases. According to the French (who were extremely well informed of Chau's movements), Chau's partisans, after they had been expelled from Japan, relocated first to Kwantung province. Once there, they quickly realised that they could sec up camp among the Vietnamese in Siam thanks to the numerous Chinese, German and Japanese steamers making daily trips between Bangkok and the southern Chinese ports of Hong Kong and Swatow.

Having debarked in Bangkok for the third time in 1910, Chau met with the Siamese King's uncle again. Chau explained the situation in Vietnam and expressed the hope that the 'Siamese government would secretly support' the Vietnamese resistance.78 The prince reportedly agreed to this and put Chau in touch with his brother, a Major General in the Siamese infantry. According to Chau's account, the General agreed to his plan for the formation of a Vietnamese village — another ban - which would provide a refuge for those students deported from Japan. The General also approved a plan whereby an appointed Vietnamese representative would be allotted funds by the Siamese of 5 baht per month.

This decision to allow the Vietnamese to live in their own ban adhered to a precolonial Siamese policy we have already seen in the 17th century. French authorities placed one of Chau's camps in the province of Ayuthia and estimated its total population to be around 200 persons.80 In another instance, a ranking Vietnamese militant captured by the French in 1915 explained that a Siamese prince had allocated 100 mau of land to Dang Tu Kink's partisans to cultivate somewhere in Sisaket district, located between Khorat and Ubon Ratchathani.81 The government also arranged for Chau and his supporters to reside in Ban Tham, a village in a fertile agricultural area located on an unnamed river in lower Siam, a four to six day journey from Bangkok.82 While the exact location of Ban Tham, the most important base, remains unclear,83 we know that Chau's partisans were operating at least three different bans between Sisaket and Ban Dong in Phichit province.

At the outset, Ban Tham was less a military camp than an exercise in moral regrouping. After all, from 1908 Phan Boi Chau and his young followers were on the run. Expelled from Japan, they were for the first time without official support and in flagrant opposition to the French colonial state. In the legal terms being applied in Indochina at the time, they were 'outlaws'. Following the tax protests and failed poisoning of French troops in 1908, criminal commissions in Saigon and Hanoi judged many of these scholar-patriots in absentia. Death sentences were pronounced in some cases. Identity cards were issued to monitor closely all Vietnamese entering and exiting Indochina, while the French negotiated legally binding extradition treaties with the Siamese and Chinese governments. 

Along Indochina’s borders, police officials exchanged mug shots of Vietnamese ‘rebels’.

Psychologically, this was no small matter. Some of these patriots, we know, broke and went back to Vietnam to work with the French or to return to their native villages to take up a solitary life cut off from a world spun out of control. Yet for those who did not return to Vietnam, after a certain point of time, there was no real ‘going back’, at least not ‘home’. By 1911 approximately 50 Japanese-deported Vietnamese students were planting paddy in Ban Tham and trying to figure out what they were going to do with the rest of their lives, and trying to figure out what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. Penniless, for one of the first times Vietnamese scholars were engaged in the dirty work of tilling the land, planting crops, and making a living by the fruits of their own labour. The days of a pampered scholastic life were over.

For Phan Boi Chau, though, the Ban Tham experience offered him a chance to reflect on the previous decade and to put pen to paper. It was in Siam that he made some of his first efforts to employ popular Vietnamese literary forms rather than the elite Chinese ones, largely inaccessible to the Vietnamese common man. While Chau did not write in quoc ngu (romanised Vietnamese script), he did experiment with such Vietnamese styles as tuong (Vietnamese drama), cheo (traditional operetta), and tho bon chu (a Vietnamese poetic form). He also wrote three important poems in Siam — Ca Ai Doan (Love of Community Ballad), Ca Ai Chung (Love of Race Ballad), and Ca Ai Quoc (Patriotic Ballad). These poems were later translated into quoc ngu, put to music, and disseminated among the Vietnamese communities in Siam for the next decade.

Meanwhile, in 1910, Prince Cuong De arrived in Siam where he resided for a few months. Unlike the others, he stayed in the Bangkok area with a wealthy Vietnamese named Men La, who reportedly had contacts within the Siamese royal family. Like his Nguyen predecessor Gia Long, Cuong De dreamed of retaking Vietnam by attacking from the Gulf of Siam.

The Birth of Vietnamese Revolutionary Bases in Asia

It did not take long before these Vietnamese circulating between Siam and China, as Liébert put it, turned their attention to building a larger revolutionary system outside Indochina. The year of 1912 was particularly important. Learning of the success of the Chinese revolution in 1911, Chau left Siam to make his way to southern China in the hope of gaining Chinese support for the Vietnamese resistance movement. Once there, he discussed with his colleagues the need to rebuild the movement from the outside and with the aid of the Chinese.

In a meeting in Canton during this year, the Reformation Association (Duy Tan Hoi) was disbanded in favour of creation of a new republican organisation, known as the Vietnam Restoration Association (Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi). Modeled closely on the KMT and administered by Phan Boi Chau and Cuong De, it called for the expulsion of the French and the formation of a democratic republic along the lines of Sun Yat-sen’s government. To Chau, this new Association was considered to be a veritable Vietnamese state in waiting, complete with national ministers, a constitution, and a foreign policy.

Given his earlier contacts with (southern) KMT leaders in Tokyo, Canton, and Singapore, Chau saw southern China as the new revolutionary staging area for Vietnamese militants. Representatives were dispatched to set up bases in Chinese towns just north of Tonkin in Nanning, Tungshing, Poseh, and even as far away as Kunming. As noted at the outset, space and language limitations prevent me from undertaking an in-depth discussion of the Chinese section of the Vietnamese Asian movements at this point. What is important to note here is that, if southern China became the centre of gravity in the outer Indochinese system from 1912, both Phan Boi Chau and Cuong De made a point of incorporating the Siamese leg into the Restoration Society’s overall Asian operations.

Prince Cuong De took over the Siamese section himself, but because of heavy French surveillance, he quickly transferred it to Tran Huu Luc (Nguyen Thu Duong). No doubt taking his cue from the KMT’s successful implantation among the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (including Bangkok), Chau directed Luc to form a subsidiary branch of the Restoration Society among the Vietnamese living in northeast Siam. The Viet kieu, or Vietnamese nationals living abroad as they were coming to be known by 1913, would provide the funds to finance the organisation’s operations. Together with Dang Thuc Hua and Dang Tu Kinh, Luc mustered contacts with Chinese and Vietnamese traders living in the Bangkok area, as well as with prosperous Vietnamese patriots in Cochin-China, including the famous entrepreneur Gilbert Chieu (Tran Chanh Chieu), who had already been helping to pay the Dong Du’s costs.

A trading house doubling as a patriotic association was formed in Bangkok, called the Vietnamese Restoration Trading Company (Nam Hung Thuong Hoi). Inspired by the Restoration Trading Company, this small company generated several thousands of piastres within a few months for Chau’s partisans. Other small, patriotic businesses appeared among Vietnamese and Chinese in Bangkok, while bank accounts were secretly opened in Bangkok, Canton, Hong Kong, and elsewhere to circulate revolutionary funds throughout the region. Meanwhile, militants continued stockpiling garnered throughout the region, circulating them on to small arms caches in secret Bangkok hideaways, circulating them on to small arms caches in southern China, Macao, and Hong Kong. a number of clandestine depots in southern China, Macao and Hong Kong.92 A number of functional, if extremely rudimentary, Asian bases were taking form for the first time since the civil wars of the late 18th century. This early success was due in large part to the ability of Vietnamese anticolonialists to tap pre-existing patterns of Viet and Hoa kieu immigration across the peninsula.

Penetrating the inner chambers of these early revolutionary movements, however, is anything but easy for a (Western) historian writing almost a century later. Sources are hard to locate, given the very secretive nature of these activities. Moreover, ‘revolutionary memoirs’ (hoi ky cach mang) published by Vietnamese communist leaders after 1954 are heavy on heroism, but light on details about the faceless émigrés on whom they relied for their clandestine operations. It is only by way of those liaison agents captured by the French that we get any reasonable idea of what was occurring on the ground. Though not always reliable, these sources confirm that the one thing Phan Boi Chau needed to move the Dong Du and the Restoration Society was a group of underclass Asians, who could navigate a clandestine world alien to his bookish disciples.

Why were they so important? For one thing, Chau and his partisans were now on their own. When young patriots stowed away on a Chinese junk or headed across the Ai Lao Pass by foot for Udon Thani, they were moving into a new and often hostile world. They had no passport, little if any money, few trustworthy friends and little hands-on geographical knowledge of the world beyond the deltas of Vietnam. Coming from bourgeois or scholarly families, most of them had been absorbed in their books for years rather than surviving by their wits from day to day. Unlike the surly Vietnamese agents being vetted and trained by the French Sûreté, most of these young anticolonialists had never learned how to use a map.93 This was accentuated by the fact that contacts did not come easy for Vietnamese intellectuals more at ease, culturally, in the Confucian civilisation of China and Japan than in the more Indianised world of Siam.94 At least in Canton, Hong Kong and Tokyo, these scholars could 'write' (but dam) themselves through difficult situations thanks to their common knowledge of Chinese characters. Things were much harder in Siam, Burma and Malaya, although the large overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia must have facilitated early Vietnamese revolutionary communications in Southeast Asia.

To operate clandestinely, Phan Boi Chau and his partisans had to enter a part of society which they had never really frequented before leaving Vietnam. In a letter written by Chau (and captured by the French) around 1908, he singles out Vietnamese prostitutes, soldiers, robbers, interpreters and boys as key ingredients for building effective revolutionary operations.95 To Chau, Vietnamese soldiers working for the French, especially in southern China, were armed with modern weapons and were thus in a favourable position to turn on the 'enemy'. It was just a matter of reawakening their dormant patriotism and heroic resolve in order to bring these armed men into the revolutionary family. The robbers and brigands were also important, Chau argued, because they 'do not fear death'. While he did not put it as such, Asian criminals could obviously find a new place of honour in Chau's entourage as bodyguards, messengers and assassins for the 'cause'. Instead of being shunned, they would now serve as a violent but useful arm of the patriotic movement.96 As for the prostitutes, Chau cited the case of a woman who succeeded through her trade in obtaining a Russian officer's 'plans and maps of Russia' in order to give them to the Japanese officers'. The implication, of course, was that the Vietnamese prostitute could do the same to the French in service of the national movement.97 If young intellectuals continued to dominate the 'brain' of the resistance movement, Chau quickly turned to the streets and ports to recruit Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants flowing with the high, Chau quickly turned to the streets and ports to recruit Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants flowing with the Europeans through Asia as the boys and sailors on their ships, the secretaries pushing pencils in their bureaux and even as the exotic con gai (concubines) lying in their beds.

These were not just idle words on Chau's part. Within a few years, his partisans had begun tapping pre-existing Vietnamese prostitution rings in Bangkok to camouflage their revolutionary activities. A Vietnamese brothel located in the Bangrak market served as one such relay. Its madame, Nguyen Thi Nho, travelled between Bangkok and Saigon, where she recruited her pensionnaires to work in Siam. Also located in this same area were some of the most important members of Chau's entourage.98 A French spy explained the importance of these Vietnamese prostitutes in Bangkok: 'It is important to monitor them, for it is often in their homes that the rebels find asylum during their travels through Bangkok'.99 In Siam, Chau could also draw upon a constant flow of poor, itinerant Vietnamese émigrés seeking to eke out a better life in the 'west'. In 1916, the French estimated that this 'floating colony' numbered around 400 individuals, who, as one observer wrote, 'come and go from one end of Siam to the other, living from day to day and often dying in misery'.100 While it would be a serious mistake to exaggerate Chau's success among these groups during the colonial period, this social widening of Vietnamese revolutionary organisations on the outside is essential to understanding how Vietnamese leaders formed in Chau's Asian operations would later expand upon his work among the underclassed in Asia on behalf of the Comintern and especially during the war against the French (see Chapters 2 and 5).

Chau could also turn to Chinese bandits to lend him a helping hand. In 1913, for example, he was actively involved in negotiations with Chinese pirates in both southern China and northeastern Siam in an attempt to recruit the necessary manpower for a two-pronged attack on Indochina (see below). Chau's negotiations with the Chinese warlord, Linh Van Phuc, is a good example of how the Vietnamese tried to use such 'outlaw' groups to fill out their ranks. 101 The Viet Minh would later adopt similar tactics in Siam and China (see Chapter 5).

These alliances clearly left an impression on Chau. Reflecting decades later, he dedicated a half page in his memoirs to an illiterate Vietnamese who worked for the French in Hong Kong and who Chau had recruited in Siam in 1910. This Vietnamese brought two of his friends with him. 102 Moved by the patriotism of one of his first liaison agents – a Vietnamese cook - Chau described elsewhere the reversed social geography on the outside as follows: 'Alas! What has happened to our mandarins with their big hats and long tunics when the incarnation of fidelity and zeal today is to be found in our cooks! This event deserves to be noted!' 

But 'in between' Chau needed trustworthy and better educated guides to traffic partisans into and out of Indochina. Here our sources give us a glimpse into what was occurring in Siam through a Vietnamese émigré who went by his Siamese name of Khun Viset (pronounced Khen-vi-set in Vietnamese). Viset had followed Phan Boi Chau to Japan to study in the Dong Du movement. After being expelled from Tokyo, he arrived in Siam around 1910, where he began learning Thai and studying law to become one of Bangkok's best barristers. If we can believe a Vietnamese account, it was the King of Siam himself who had given him his Siamese name, 'Vi-set', was probably the Vietnamese pronunciation of phiset: Thai for 'special' or 'remarkable'. Such contacts with Thai officialdom obviously helped Phan Boi Chau in his base-building endeavours. 105 As a Vietnamese detainee explained Viset's role in the Bangkok organisation:

• When I left Canton for Siam, I was leaping into the unknown. All three of us arrived in Bangkok in March or April 1914. Since we didn't know anyone, I asked an Annamese boy working for a European if he knew whether any of our compatriots were at Bangkok. This boy answered in the affirmative and took me to see Khun Viset (alias Tran Phuc Nam or Tran Giuc Viet), an 'old' Vietnamese who works at Bangkok as a lawyer. I went to see him alone, while my other associates waited for me at a Chinese restaurant. Khun Viset is a 'Viet kieu cu', very hospitable. He receives and lodges all our compatriots arriving in Bangkok, whether they are revolutionaries or not. We stayed with him for a few days and then he helped us get started. I spent around five months with Khun Viset, whose son, Tong Suc... taught me Siamese.  

Outside of his law practice, Khun Viset created a rudimentary network of Vietnamese 'boys' (boi) employed throughout Bangkok in European homes or legations or as sailors working on ships passing through the port of Bangkok. Viset put some of them in charge of receiving and screening militants arriving from abroad. He had two 'boys' working for the Russian and Italian Ministers in Bangkok. Others received and forwarded messages arriving from southern China and Vietnam As a Chinese paper reported in 1912:

• In order to communicate with their partisans in Indochina, these Annamese revolutionaries don't dare confide [their correspondence] to the postal system, fearful that their letter would be opened. They thus address their correspondence to ships and to their comrades working on these boats in petty positions. It is done with such prudence that no one thought that it would be uncovered by the French authorities. 

In a comparative sense, just as the Vietnamese had been increasingly dependent on the Chinese for smuggling arms and men into Vietnam, so too were the Chinese revolutionaries increasingly dependent on the Vietnamese for a safe haven and a conduit to the outside world. In the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established a network of safe houses and printing presses in Bangkok and other parts of Siam. This was facilitated by the presence of a large Chinese community in Siam and the porous nature of the border between Siam and China. The Vietnamese and Chinese revolutionaries in Siam were thus part of a larger Asian revolutionary network that was beginning to take shape in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

The history of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement in the early twentieth century is a complex and fascinating one. It is a story of exile, resistance, and resilience. It is also a story of collaboration and cooperation with other Asian revolutionary movements. The Vietnamese revolutionaries in Siam played a crucial role in the development of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. They provided a safe haven for Vietnamese revolutionaries, raised funds, and recruited new members. They also helped to spread Vietnamese revolutionary ideas throughout Southeast Asia.

The legacy of the Vietnamese revolutionaries in Siam is still felt today. The Vietnamese diaspora in Thailand continues to be a vibrant and influential community. The Vietnamese and Thai governments have also worked to strengthen bilateral relations in recent years. The history of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement in Siam is a reminder of the importance of international solidarity and cooperation in the struggle for national liberation.

In a comparative sense, just as Vietnamese interpreters found themselves in increasingly prestigious positions inside colonial Indochina in view of their indispensable role in translating French language, laws, and culture to the rest of Vietnamese (urban) society, Vietnamese boys, cooks, and sailors working for the resistance on the outside made a big jump up the revolutionary social ladder thanks to their knowledge of the shadier sides of Asian societies and transport systems.

The diversity of Chau's ranks extended even into religious realms. Vietnamese Catholic priests in Bangkok, such as François Co and Emmanuel Kap, were said by the French to play an 'active role' in revolutionary activities in 1913. In another case, the French lamented privately that Prince Cuong De's representative,

In Siam, Tran Huu Luc, continued to elude them because of the shelter Vietnamese Catholics afforded him in the Samsen neighbourhood. Vietnamese Buddhists in the Kok Tao temple did the same. Such neighbourhood of the shelter Chau to pen a fascinating story about a real-life Vietnamese monk named 'Ong Su Rau' (the 'Vegetarian Monk'). Keen on exploiting his knowledge of the region and its non-Confucian cultures, Chau employed him as a liaison agent for running missions between Bangkok and southern Vietnam until Su Rau's capture in the early 1910s.  

Mixed marriages were also important to the running of Asian revolutionary operations. Vietnamese women married to rich Chinese merchants and Vietnamese men married to Siamese women provided Phan Boi Chau's partisans with connections to sympathetic Chinese merchants, friendly loans, patriotic donations, or to other more surreptitious ways of garnering funds in Bangkok and elsewhere. 109 In southern China, for example, Vietnamese women married to Chinese military officers were often key to making contacts among the Chinese KMT factions in Kwangsi and Kwangtung. 110 Moreover, the sons and daughters of all these mixed marriages were almost always bilingual, thus more at ease with the local terrains and cultures. In 1915, one of Phan Boi Chau's liaison agents working at the Hoa kieu-dominated port of Hai Phong, was a Sino-Vietnamese named Wong Sao. 111 Mixed marriages (métissage) were also a conduit by which new ideas entered the Vietnamese revolutionary movement from the exterior. As one French official reflected on the problem of métissage in southern China:

When these rapprochements occur among young people it is quite likely that they trade among them ideas that are capable of converting our [Vietnamese] protégés to subversive ideas and to bestow upon them aspirations of independence and an identification with their brothers of the Asian race. 

There is clearly more to the fascinating question of métissage than simply white European male unions with indigenous Asian women The French were well informed about what was occurring in Phan Boi Chau’s entourage. In a long report to the Minister of the Colonies, Governor General Albert Sarraut captured the seamier side of Chau’s Asian revolutionary world as follows:

Alas! The Indochinese capitals, like those of Europe, have their ‘outer boulevards’ and their ‘hooligans’, a human brine where robbers, procurers, killers in the making (assassins en herbe), or Asians of the worst vices, become enthusiastic volunteers of an army of crime, one from which Phan Boi Chau will be able to recruit his accomplices easily.

According to their own intelligence, by 1912 there were ‘à l’extérieur de l’Indochine’ around 1,000 Vietnamese political émigrés travelling secretly along the maritime and land routes between southern China, Japan and Siam. Sixty were thought to reside in Hong Kong and Kowloon, with over a hundred suspected to be active in Canton and in smaller southern Chinese towns such as Pakhoi Longtcheou, and even as far away as Nanking and Peking. In Siam, at least 400 vagabonds were thought to be susceptible to Chau's influence. A French spy wrote that 'the small Annamese colonies in China and Siam [were] constantly kept in touch by several dedicated agitators who [travelled] incessantly between the two points.

The social and geographical depth of these outer movements help us to understand better how a particularly Asian backdrop began to creep into the imaginations of Phan Boi Chau and his partisans at that time. Chau gives us a story in which his protagonist descends into a fictional hell as a 'vagabond', 'he who knows how to cry' ('nguoi biet khoc'). There, he meets the Asian King of Hell, who is judging those who had sinned against their country. Phan Boi Chau tells us that the King refused to banish these (nationalist) 'sinners' to Siam, India or China, because these were friendly countries, people of the same Asian race, too good for the condemned. Only banishment to Vietnam would inflict the merited suffering. 115 But unlike the dream story Phan Chu Trinh penned in 1907, during which he soars high above the West (phuong tay), 116 Phan Boi Chau's character remains locked below in an Eastern inferno.

What makes Chau's dream trip so noteworthy, though, is not so much its imaginary form (a very common Vietnamese literary device), but how he drew upon specifically Asian examples to drive his point home. It was perhaps a reflection of the things he had heard and seen during his travels in what the Chinese still called the 'South Seas' (Nanvang).

Indeed, the geography of these Asian movements was such that new conceptions of the region began to emerge in anticolonial minds as well. Nowhere was this better seen than in the maps, instructions, diaries and address books seized by the French from Chau's lieutenants. 117 In 1913, for example, the French learned through captured documents that Phan Boi Chau's partisans intended to cover Asia by creating three major geographical zones of action to thwart ever closer French monitoring. The First Zone was under the direction of Hoang Trong Mau, one of Chau's closest and most trusted confidants. It included the region circumscribed by the ports of Hong Kong, Canton, Macao and Tongking. The Second Zone covered Shanghai and Nanning, while the Third Zone (the one that concerns us most here) linked Singapore, Siam and Laos in order to create a corridor on Indochina's western flank. 118 Older terms for the region, such as Ha Chau or Tieu Tay Duong, were being recast in new, if subversive ways in this case. 119 As Phan Boi Chau would sum up his exiled position in Asia in 1917: 'As for us on the outside, we do our utmost in applying ourselves to create a Village Abroad'.  

A FRENCH COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY NETWORK IN ASIA

We cannot grasp the complexity of this 'Asian Village Abroad' without first understanding the French counter-revolutionary system designed to keep it The man behind this was none other than Albert Sarraut, one of the most remarkable Governor Generals ever to reign in Indochina. Worried by the possibility of revolutionary unrest among the Vietnamese following the tax revolts of 1908 and the Chinese revolution of 1911, Sarraut took great interest in finding concrete ways to prevent these 'rebels' from penetrating Indochina. 

He understood that not only were Phan Boi Chau's partisans in a position to procure arms from an Asian contraband market, but they were also in touch with other Asian revolutionaries and the ideas flowing with them. Far from reassured by Chau's expulsion from Japan, Sarraut understood that his entourage would move on to other areas of Asia, above all to Republican China, where they could find sympathy, inspiration and clandestine support. To prevent this, he opened negotiations with a host of southern Chinese political and military officials and discussed the need to control Vietnamese emigration along the Yunnanese railroad so that it could not be channeled Phan Boi Chau's way.   

In the lengthy report Sarraut wrote to the Minister of the Colonies in 1913, he pointed out the gravity of the 'revolts' of 1908 and how subsequent outbreaks of violence were linked to a militant, patriotic tradition that had been pushed to the outside of Indochina, but which would always seek to penetrate Indochina to stir up anticolonial sentiments. 'It comes from the outside', Sarraut emphasised, 'And it comes from faraway in the past.' He noted in turn how these revolutionary movements in Asia had been influenced by anarchist ideas flowing from India and China. 123 In what would become a permanent worry for the French, Sarraut added that the revolutionary movement under Chau's direction was anchored on the northern side of Indochina to the two southern Chinese provinces of Kwangsi and Kwangtung and to Siam on the western Indochinese flank. Sarraut also understood that Vietnamese nationalism was at a crossroads, part of a larger reorientation that was occurring in a rapidly changing Asia confronted by the West. Returning to the tax revolts of 1908, he cited the prescient words of an earlier Governor General to underscore the need to seal off Indochina from its Asian context:

• Situated upon the great Far Eastern highway, complete with its railways penetrating Yunnan and Kwangsi, the others aimed at the western border shared with Siam, complete with its numerous sea lanes that link it to the ports of China, Japan, the Philippines, the Straits, the Dutch possessions and India, French Indochina and its population of twelve million Annamese, curious, troubled and impressionable, will not be able to remain indifferent to the events occurring in this theatre of countries.  

To Sarraut, patriots such as Phan Boi Chau had to be won over  or stopped. They could not be allowed to challenge France's authority from the outside. A 'police service' had to be created to 'defend the Indochinese territory against the elements of the rebellion'. 126 Far from a coincidence, Sarraut was the man behind the creation of the Indochinese political police, that dreaded but remarkably efficient Sûreté indochinoise. Agathe Larcher and   

Patrice Morlat have shown, that the creation of a police network was the natural extension of Sarraut's political thinking, the flipside of his policy of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration on the inside. Or, as he explained to the Minister of Colonies.

To be honest, Minister, I have always held that Indochina had to be

protected against the effects of a revolutionary propaganda whose importance has never escaped me. This could be done through a double action led by the government, one part political, the other part implemented by the police and the military.

On the ‘inside’, Sarraut conceded, he would be ‘liberal and just’ in order

to turn the people away from would-be counter-leaders. But at the same time it was necessary ‘to immunise’ Indochina ‘against the revolutionary virus’ propagated by Phan Boi Chau, Cuong De and their followers on the outside. 

Morlat has shown how sarraut and a handful of others went about creating the Sûreté indochinoise. We need only summarise the major points here in order to grasp how the creation of this invisible wall of surveillance would inform Vietnamese activities on the outside. First, in April 1912, Sarraut's men organised the 'Secret Exterior Police' (Police à l'Extérieur) to track Phan Boi Chau's movements across Asia. Already in reaction to the events in China in 1911, Sarraut had created the Office of Political and Indigenous Affairs (Bureau des Affaires Politiques et Indigènes), while the Political Affairs Office (Bureau des Affaires Politiques) dealt with diplomatic and political relations between Indochina and the neighbouring countries, above all Siam and China. It also dealt with immigration matters. The Office of Indigenous Affairs (Bureau des Affaires Indigènes) handled questions of administration, organisation, taxes and justice within the colony. In 1915, a third service was created, inadequately translated as the General Security Police (Sûreté Générale), which administered laws on foreigners, censorship and the distribution of newspapers and tracts. It also received reports from judicial and administrative offices in the countries of the Far East, and eventually took over immigration affairs throughout the region. In 1922 reforms, combined certain functions within a new rubric translated roughly as the Office of Political Affairs and General Security or Affaires politiques et de la Sûreté générale.

Relying on men of exceptional knowledge of Vietnamese culture and language (some of whom later published erudite monographs for the École Française d'Extrême-Orient), Sarraut created a counter revolutionary intelligence network in Asia to destroy Phan Boi Chau's 'Village Abroad'. As Sarraut defined the goal of the Sûreté à l'extérieur: 'Having above all in its organisational attributions the monitoring of the exterior, the General Government has undertaken the task of covering the regions of China and Siam with a kind of police réseau [network],¹³¹ To this end, the French assembled a select group of Vietnamese agents, commissioned new maps of the Asian region, detailing above all its ports and land and sea routes, and installed sophisticated telegraph and wireless radio stations throughout Asia. 132 Orders were given to watch closely those Vietnamese leaving the ports of Saigon or Haiphong for Hong Kong, Bangkok or Singapore. Overland, intelligence stations and chiefs emerged rapidly in Pakhoi, Longtcheou, Khorat and elsewhere. 133 And in an irony which could not have been lost on Phan Boi Chau, Sarraut's men turned to recruiting Vietnamese sailors, tailors, prostitutes, boys and cooks to run and monitor the routes and ports linking Asia against his Vietnamese competitors for Indochina. 134 For both men, these immigrants in Asia were the key to Chau's capacity to penetrate Indochina and Sarraut's ability to keep him out of there. 135 The Sûreté was much more than Indochinese in its geographical reach. From top to bottom, it was an Asian operation in its own right, if not an international one.

COMPETING ASIAN NETWORKS DURING WORLD WAR I 

The first test of these two opposing operations came at the outbreak of World War I. With the French at war against Germany, Phan Boi Chau and Cuong De decided that the time was right to attack Indochina from the northern and western flanks. Encouraging them in this endeavour was a group of German diplomats and secret agents stationed in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Canton. Without entering into complicated details, Germany sought to support anti-French and anti-British movements in Asia during World War I as part of Berlin's war effort against these two powers on European battlefields. German agents, often working through Chinese intermediaries, entered into secret negotiations with Phan Boi Chau and his partisans concerning the need to plan a two-pronged attack on French Indochina from northeastern Siam and southern China. The German Consul in Hong Kong, a mysterious Mr Voretsch, was the head of this project. He had allegedly placed 100,000 piastres at Phan Boi Chau's disposal in Hong Kong in 1914 in preparation for this attack. 

Since  1913 Cuong De had assigned Tran Huu Luc The Third Zone in  Siam. In July or August 1915, the German and Austrian Consuls in Bangkok summoned Chau's partisans to a series of secret meetings, during which the Germans reiterated their desire to see a Vietnamese attack on Indochina. To this end, they transferred 10,000 Indochinese piastres to Chau's representatives in Siam and promised as much as 300,000 if the Vietnamese succeeded in taking back some provinces'. The Germans advised the Vietnamese to begin their attack from Siam. 139 Much (though not all) of this is confirmed by Chau in his memoirs. By September 1914 the French had reported that Vietnamese militants were transferring 'at least part of their organisation from southern China to Siam'. 

Reassured by this external support, Tran Huu Luc began forming frontier posts along the Siamese-Laotian and the Vietnamese-Laotian frontiers. 141 The idea was to begin building a Western Road (duong tay) to Vietnam via Laos. The Vietnamese populations would provide the necessary housing, money and recruits. French intelligence officers soon learned that Phan Boi Chau had secretly passed through Bangkok in mid-October 1915 before continuing on to Paknampho and as far as Khorat, where he may have met with Tran Huu Luc's partisans concerning the upcoming attack. Shortly after Chau's departure from Siam on 23 December, agents reported the presence of Chinese bandits along the Mekong, near Ban Dong and Nong Khai.

But in the end, Phan Boi Chau's funds remained too small for such a large undertaking and the revolutionary organisation was shaky at best. Communications were rudimentary and largely ineffective against the French technological advantage. 144 Whatever militants may have wanted to do in Siam, results were anything but successful. Anarchism remained their guiding principle, bombs and suicide squads their preferred methods of action. Tran Huu Luc was a hot- headed militant rather than a cool operator. Organisation was haphazard and internal feuds destructive. While there appear to have been some rather small- scale attacks on the French at Pak Hin Boun, Savannakhet and Pakse some time in 1915–16, the envisioned large-scale attack from the outside was a complete and bitter failure. 

To make matters worse, the French succeeded in winning over the Siamese authorities as allies in the Great War. Bowing to French pressure, the Siamese police began crackdowns on Chau's partisans precisely at this time. The Germans could do little, if anything, to help. In mid-1915, betrayed to the French by a rival family clan inside the resistance in Siam, Tran Huu Luc was arrested by the Siamese police in the northeast. 146 Over time, steps were taken by the French to increase the surveillance of the entire Siamese-Indochinese border running some 1,635 kilometres from upper Laos to the Gulf of Siam. By 1915 the French reached an agreement for the formation of a mixed police force along the western Indochinese border to complement the one they had concluded with the Chinese to the north. Sarraut himself took a personal interest in securing an extradition treaty from the Siamese King in order to get Tran Huu Luc back to Vietnam, where he was summarily executed. 147 In the end, even though Chau may have registered some small successes against Sarraut, French intelligence officers and their talented Vietnamese agents made sure these were very small.

My point in detailing the parallel networks of Albert Sarraut and the Sûreté on the one hand and Phan Boi Chau and the Restoration Society on the other is that it is only by situating our discussion within the context of this dual track of 'repression' and 'resistance' on the one hand, and 'Indochina' and the rest of Asia on the other, that we can begin to appreciate the subsequent geographical evolution of Vietnamese activities in Siam and the Asian region as a whole. This, in turn, must be analysed in terms of how anticolonialists had to graft their activities onto pre-existing Vietnamese communities located outside Indochina, extending from northeast Siam to southern China.

REBUILDING THE SIAMESE BASES ( 1918-25)

The man left behind to face the Sûreté's Indochinese wall after the failed uprisings of World War I was not Phan Boi Chau, but Dang Thuc Hua. And his task was not easy. For the most part, Chau's militants had always seen their residence in Siam as a temporary one. Few thought of building long-term bases among the Vietnamese communities. Hua was different in this sense. As early as 1912, he had begun travelling around Siam in an effort to root anticolonial work among the Vietnamese communities. He took the initiative in investigating Vietnamese living conditions, talking with families, and gaining a better understanding of their needs and thinking. 

According to one of his disciples, Hua based his activities on three major goals:

1.the need to maintain links to patriots inside Vietnam;

2.to maintain liaisons with revolutionaries in China; and

3.to win over the support of Siamese authorities for the Vietnamese in Siam. 

As early as 1912, Hua had sent a letter to partisans in the Restoration

Society branch in his native village in Nghe An province. In it, he instructed them to send qualified members to work in Siam and money with which to purchase weapons. One of the first to arrive was Hua's niece, Quynh Anh. 150 Arriving in the central Siamese town of Paknampho in 1913, she learned from Hua that this village had become the main headquarters of Vietnamese resistance leaders in Siam. 

However, Hua's successes prior to World War I were limited. At a leadership level, his work was seriously eroded by infighting and an ideological split which manifested itself among anticolonialists based in central Siam during the mid-1910s. After the replacement of the Reformation Association (Duy Tan Hoi) in 1912, disagreements broke out between those who followed the new republican line (Phan Boi Chau) and those who still believed in putting an independent monarch on the throne (Cuong De). According to one source, Hua and a number of other like-minded militants152 espoused the new line of the Restoration Society, while another group who were associated with Dang Tu Kinh153 advocated the continued support of Cuong De's monarchic aspirations. This split was apparently a divisive issue among scholar-patriots in Siam at the time, and may reflect ideological disagreements between Phan Boi Chau and Cuong De. Ideological unity was anything but certain.

The World War I years did not make Hua's work any easier. Hua was dealt his first major blow at the opening of the war when the Siamese closed Ban Tham under French pressure. In late 1914, Hua's training classes in Paknampho had to be moved upriver to a new site in Ban Dong, a small hamlet in Phichit district situated on the bank of the Nan River. There, Hua evidently had the support of a local Siamese prince. 155 By 1917, Bangkok authorities required the Vietnamese to vacate Ban Dong. Desperate, Hua sold the farming camps, gathered Vietnamese to move to another site in the village of Ban Kham. This move was a desperate one, as the new site was far from the major cities and markets of central Siam. 156 Hua and his followers were now truly isolated in the hinterland of Siam.

together some of his students, and left for southern China, where he resided for the next few years. 

In mid-1919, Vo Tung, a young Vietnamese from central Vietnam whom Hua had come to know and trust there, arrived in Ban Dong to begin rebuilding bases among the Vietnamese there. 157 Tung, better known as Khai Hong in Restoration Society circles, had served both in Phan Boi Chau's forces and as an officer in the KMT army before World War I. 158 He explained to Quynh Anh Anh that her uncle would soon returning to Ban Dong to administer a different direction' in Vietnamese activities. 159 Returning to Siam in late 1919, Hua found that most of his prewar work in Siam had disintegrated: there was no leadership, no links to resistance posts in Vietnam, and many patriots had simply lost heart. 160 Hua discussed the sad state of affairs with Dang Tu Kinh, stressing the need to revive activities. During his three years in China, Hua said that he realised that neither the Reformation Association nor the Restoration Society had had any clear goals or appropriate organisational methods. Hua singled out for particular criticism the reliance of the resistance on other countries rather than building an organisation themselves among the Viet kieu. He also broke with the violent line advocated by the majority of the Restoration Society's militants in favour of a more cool-headed approach. In short, Hua returned to Siam more convinced than ever of the need to organise bases. 

To this end, he refocused his attention on those areas in Siam that had dense and relatively prosperous Vietnamese communities and instructed his partisans to propagate greater patriotism; to help families maintain Vietnamese customs and traditions; and to strive to create better living conditions for them as a means of winning their support. From this point, Hua was in full control of Vietnamese anticolonial activities in all of Siam. During a trip to the northeast in late 1919, he dispatched two representatives to Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces to exchange information with and deliver letters concerning the need to establish Siam as both an intermediary point for cadres on the road to China and as a training ground for patriotic youths coming out of Vietnam. That same year he brought 12 youths to the Phichit area to begin training. Indeed, Hua restarted his postwar base building in central Siam, in his Ban Dong camp in Phichit province. His goal was to make this hamlet a model for the subsequent base-building. With the support of local Siamese authorities, his disciples built new houses, planted gardens, raised animals, and produced goods for consumption, sale and trade. There were currently about 20 or 30 youngsters in the training camps all year round. Students read smuggled newspapers and political documents, learned foreign languages, and studied martial arts. By the early 1920s, Ban Dong had become the headquarters of the Vietnamese resistance in Siam and the main political training centre for young revolutionaries there.  

But taking hold of the rest of the large Vietnamese communities scattered across Siam was no easy task. They were scattered from Bangkok northeastwards to Ubon Ratchathani and Nakhon Phanom, even as far as Chiang Mai in the far north. Not all these Vietnamese could speak their mother tongue, and probably saw no reason to do so. Assimilated into the national culture, many felt ‘Siamese’ and were opposed to making sacrifices for principles in which they had no interest, economically, politically or even patriotically. Hua often found the ‘old Vietnamese’ (Viet kieu cu) in the Samsen area of Bangkok and in communities along the southeastern coast unsuitable for his work because they were not always able to speak Vietnamese.¹⁶⁴ Another problem, of course, was that most of these Vietnamese communities in south and southeastern parts of Siam were Catholic. Chau and Hua must have realised that Vietnamese Catholics and revolutionaries in Siam were competing for the same Viet kieu converts. Given that the Christian implantations among the Vietnamese kieu converts. Given dated back to the 17th century, Hua was clearly at a disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, he targeted those Vietnamese who had fled the French in the late 19th century and who were mainly concentrated in upper northeast Siam. This group had remained largely ‘anti-French’, non-Catholic, and consisted of several hundred families. Moreover, given their more recent arrival, they and many of their children still spoke Vietnamese.¹⁶⁵ However, Catholic competition could even pose problems in the northeast. In 1916, Garreau wrote from ‘Thare’ (Tha Bo in Thai) that the 1,000 Christians there had refused to donate money to Phan Boi Chau’s partisans during their fund drives along the Mekong in 1914–15.¹⁶⁶ This was all the more frustrating to anticolonialists, for these Catholic communities tended to be the most prosperous of the Viet kieu in Siam.

The expansion of Hua's post-World War I strategy to northeast Siam thus depended on winning over local Vietnamese support by finding them work, which would in turn generate revolutionary funds. In 1921, Hua devoted his energy to building more cohesive and mutually supportive communities modelled on the Ban Dong 'experiment'. These communities ranged from collections of a few, dispersed Vietnamese families to hamlets, and, in some cases, small villages. 168 In 1922, he paid particular attention to the matter of constructing family relays along the Mekong River in Nakhon Phanom province. They were to act as contact points for revolutionary outposts in central Vietnam and to receive youths coming from Nghe-Tinh provinces. Wat Pa, a hamlet located on the Mekong River outside of the town of Nakhon Phanom, was one of the first. It consisted of 18-20 mainly Buddhist families and was placed under the direction of Ngoet Vinh, a Vietnamese who was fluent in Siamese and reputedly had good connections with local authorities. Vinh also worked among the 100 Catholic Vietnamese families in Nong Saen, who would later support the Viet Minh (see Chapter 8).  

Hua appointed another Vietnamese who had good contacts with the Siamese authorities to set up a base in Ton-Phung, a remote Siamese village located 5 kilometres outside of Nakhon Phanom. Hua then formed another one in Ban May (New Village), a hamlet situated north of Nakhon Phanom. Ban May became an intermediary point connected to outposts in Vietnam. 170 To Sakhon Nakhon, Hua dispatched two partisans. Over the next three years, his men presided over the formation of a separate Vietnamese hamlet outside of this sleepy frontier town. 171 From there, partisans continued developing bases along the road from Sakhon Nakhon to Udon, with considerable success in the villages of Ban Han and Nong Han. On the road from Sakhon Nakhon to Nakhon Phanom, Hua's influence filtered into Thahae and Kusaman. Along the Mekong River families supported Hua in Tha Uthen, Na Kae, That Phanom, Mukdahan and Nong Khai. Kusaman was an intermediate stopover for cadres travelling between Sakhon Nakhon and Nakhon Phanom. Vietnamese hamlets situated in this area were also favourable to Hua's plans, for they were positioned along local roads that facilitated Vietnamese trading activities.  

The administration of these Mekong family relays was problematic, for they were located hundreds of kilometres away from the headquarters in Ban Dong. As a result, Hua sought an intermediary base somewhere between Ban Dong and the Mekong bases. The northeastern provincial capital of Udon was the natural choice. Because of its large, industrious Vietnamese population and this town's position as the political and economic centre of upper northeast Siam - linked by roads to Nakhon Phanom, Sakhon Nakhon and Bangkok - Udon could serve as the revolutionary mid-point. Beginning in 1923, Hua and others began meeting with Vietnamese families there, targeting elders in their conversations, and asking mothers to teach Vietnamese to their children. 173 To attract reluctant families, in 1924 Hua dispatched several of his best members to begin work creating a small Vietnamese hamlet outside of Udon called Nong Bua. The following year he sent carpenters and bricklayers to start construction, and gained permission from Siamese authorities to farm the land. It was only then that 'several' Vietnamese families reportedly began to move to Nong Bua.  

Once Vietnamese families moved into these bases, it was much easier to win their support and control them through propaganda and political reorientation. By 1925 the number of Vietnamese families living in Nong Bua had grown to around 40, and by 1929 the number had reached 100. In 1925 Hua expanded his work to another base called Dong On, located 10 kilometres outside of Udon. 

By 1924, these family bases in the northeast had become relatively stable and a system of meeting and escorting students from central Vietnam to training camps along the Mekong was in place. 176 Activists travelling to Siam were met at receiving points along the Mekong, such as in Ban May, and thereafter taken to holding centres in Nakhon Phanom province until it was clear they were sufficiently reliable patriots. From there, they were moved on to Nong Bua and Dong On for preliminary instruction and language training. Those judged  promising were then transferred to the main base in Ban Dong where they began advanced studies.  

The details of this base-building are important, for they reveal the first attempts by Vietnamese anticolonial leaders – and not just their Catholic counterparts – to make the Mekong Vietnamese a part of what had until then been a largely maritime organisation. In other words, a reorientation towards the large Vietnamese populations in upper northeast Siam was underway by the mid-1920s. Hua had effectively pushed the Dong Du's movements inland by the northeast Siam, to the back of Indochina where Phan Dinh Phung had first sent his emissaries from Nghe An. This shift towards Udon Thani goes a long way to explaining how the revolutionary land link between upper northeastern Siam and the central Vietnamese provinces of Nghe-Tinh came into being by 1925. This is also why a communist militant like Le Manh Trinh can tell us that from 1925 the Siamese route to southern China was most favourable, 'especially for those coming from Nghe An and Ha Tinh'.  

Moreover, this route to upper northeast Siam by 1925 also helps us to understand the increasing number of young radicals traveling to Siam between 1920 and 1925, among whom were such important future revolutionary leaders as Ho Tung Mau, Le Hong Son, Pham Hong Thai, Dang Thai Thuyen, Le Hong Phong and Hoang Van Hoan.179 The timing of this revolutionary link between northern central Vietnam and upper northeast Siam could not have been better, as school strikes and revolutionary unrest inside the country led even more young radicals to look for ways of getting to the outside. While many, perhaps the majority, chose to follow Phan Chu Trinh's voyage to France (Di Tay), there was also a group of young Vietnamese émigrés who continued to follow the itineraries of the Dong Du into Asia, to southern China and northeastern Siam. After World War II, they would occupy leading positions in the Indochinese Communist Party and People's Army. Unlike other French-educated revolutionaries, they felt more at ease speaking in Thai and Chinese.

After residing in Siam for a period of time, Pham Hong Thai, Le Hong Phong, Le Hong Son and Ho Tung Mau traveled to Canton where they had a hand in setting up the Tam Tam Xa (The Heart to Heart Association). This latter organization was soon integrated into a larger revolutionary body known as the Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Mang Dong Chi Hoi (Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League).180 Unbeknownst to the Vietnamese in Siam, they were about to be incorporated into an even larger revolutionary organization with links spanning all of Asia and beyond. At its helm was a man named Nguyen Ai Quoc, a man who had followed Phan Chu Trinh to France in 1911 only to return to southern China in 1925 to take over in Asia where Phan Boi Chau had left off. There, he soon took to improving his Chinese and learning Thai.

1. On early Vietnamese immigration to Siam, see: Christopher E. Goscha, “La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam du XVIIe au XIXe siècle: Vers une perspective péninsulaire” in Nguyen The Anh and Alain Forest, eds, Relations entre sociétés et états: querre et paix en Asie du Sud-Est, Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan, 1998.

2. Goscha, “La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam”.

3. Ibid.

4. Consulat de France à Bangkok, “Mouvement des barques annamites françaises dans le port de Bangkok du 1 janvier 1871 au 1 février 1872”, table, in Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine Amiraux (hereafter, GGI/A], d. 136195, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (hereafter, CAOM). One picul equals about 120-125 lbs.

5. Goscha, “La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam”.

6. Bui Quang Tung, “Contribution à l’étude des colonies vietnamiennes en Thaïlande”, in Le Monde Chinois, CVDCQ, p. 14; Dao Trinh Nhat, France Asie, no. 148 (1958), p. 448, note 6; Le Manh Trinh, CVDCQ, p. 14; Dao Trinh Nhat, Luong Ngoc Quyen va Cuoc Khoi Nghia Thai-Nguyen 1917 [Luong Ngoc Quyen and the ThaiNguyen Uprising of 1917], Saigon: NXB Tan Viet, 1957, pp. 41-42; and Nguyen Tai and Hoang Trung Thuc, “Mot Tam Guong”, p. 54.

7. Hoang Phu Hoa Hue, Su-Ky Nguoi An-Nam cu o nuoc Xiem [Voyage of an Old-Time Vietnamese to Siam], Qui Nhon: Imp. de Qui-Nhon, 1930, pp. 61-64; Peter A. Poole, The Vietnamese in Thailand: A Historical Perspective, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 24-28; Noel Alfred Battye, “The Military Government and Society in Siam, 1868-1910: Politics and Military Reform during the Reign of King Chulalongkorn”, Ithaca, PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1974, p. 20; Tung Lam, Cuoc Doi Cach Mang Cuong De [The Revolutionary Life of Cuong De], Saigon: Ton That Le, 1957, pp. 26, 28; and Dao Trinh Nhat, Luong Ngoc Quyen, Saigon: Tan Viet, n.d., pp. 41-42.   

8. Ian Hodges, "The Testimonies of Vietnamese Prisoners in the Third Reign: An Essay in Thai Historiography," Canberra, Honours thesis, Australian National University, 1987.

9. 9 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916 and Goscha, "La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam."

10. 10 Bui Quang Tung, "Contribution à l'étude des colonies vietnamiennes en Thaïlande," p. 440; "Lettre de M. Roger Garreau au Ministre au Siam," 27 May 1916, in Légation au Siam, M. Extérieurs: Relations avec le Siam, Bangkok, no. 83, 16 September 1916, Indochine [Affaires Extérieures: Relations avec le Siam], and the Maladies, no. 198, 16 September 1916, Indochine [Affaires Extérieures: Relations avec le Siam], ICI, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères [MAE]; Poole, The Vietnamese in Thailand, pp. 27-28; and Charles Maynard, Le second empire en Indo-chine (Siam-Annam-Cambodge), Paris: Société d'Éditions Scientifiques, 1891, pp. 291-92, 358-59.

11 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916. Garreau claims that more than a thousand Vietnamese lived in Nang Loen. This number seems too high.

12 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916.

13 For more on the northern Indochinese immigration and trade, see: Goscha, "La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam."

14 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916; J.-L. de Lanessan, L'Expansion coloniale de la France: étude économique, politique et géographique sur les établissements français d'outre-mer, Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière et Cie., 1886, p. 478; Bui Quang Tung, "Colonies 

 15 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916; Poole, Vietnamese in Thailand, p. 28; Goscha, "La présence vietnamienne au Siam"; and Dong Tung, "Viet Kieu tai Thai Lan" [The Viet Kieu in Thailand], Tap San Su Dia [Journal of History and Geography], (Saigon), no. 16 (October-December 1969), p. 18.

16 "Lettre de Garreau de Korat," 27 May 1916 and Goscha, "La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam."

17 GGIA, d. 13702, CAOM.

18 Cited in Goscha, "La présence vietnamienne au Siam."

19 G.W. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957, table 4, p. 74.

20 On Franco-Vietnamese relations leading up to the colonisation of Cochin-China, see: Yoshiharu Tsuboi, Empire vietnamien face à la France et à la Chine, Paris: Editions l'Harmattan, 1987, pp. 93-95. On the Can Vuong movement, see: David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, pp. 50-76; Nguyen The Anh, Monarchie et fait colonial au Việt-Nam (1875-1925): Le crépuscule d'un ordre traditionnel, Paris: Editions l'Harmattan, 1992, pp. 127-134, 169-173; and Charles Fourniau, Annam-Tonkin (1885-1896): Lettres et paysans vietnamiens face à la conquête coloniale, Paris: Editions l'Harmattan, 1989, pp. 185-252.

21 According to Prince Cuong De, there were around 15,000 Vietnamese living in the Bangkok area. Tung Lam, Cuong De, p. 28. However, this number is far too high for the period.

22 Tung Lam, Cuong De, p. 26; Nguyen Tai, "May Chuyen," p. 30; Nguyen Tai and Hoang Trung Thuc, "Mot Tam Guong," p. 54; Dao Trinh Nhat, Luong Ngoc Quyen, p. 42; and Do Thanh Binh and Nguyen Am, "Quan He Dai Nam-Xiem nua Cuoi The Ky XIX" [Relations between Dai Nam and Siam towards the End of the 19th Century], Nghien Cuu Dong Nam A, no. 2 (1994), pp. 45-46, citing Hoat Dong Viet Kieu Thai [Activities of the Viet Kieu in Thailand] held by the Historical Research Committee of Nghe An province, p. 6.

23 Le Manh Trinh, CVDCQ, p. 15 and Nguyen Tai and Hoang Trung Thuc, "Mot Tam Guong," p. 54.

24 Bui Van Nguyen, "Than Son Ngo Quang," NCLS, no. 143 (March-April 1972), pp. 42-45.

25 During this time, one Siamese baht was equivalent to seven or eight French Indochinese piastres.

26 "Mémoire sur quelques questions se rapportant aux relations internationales entre le Siam et la France sous les traités existants," Paris, 16 May 1896, v. 14, NS, Siam, MAE; Do Thanh Binh and Nguyen Am, "Quan He Dai Nam-Xiem," p. 45; Battye, "Military Government and Society in Siam," p. 365; Khun Sriya Baya, Condition des citoyens et ressortissants français au Siam, d'après les traités franco-siamois, Paris: Société française d'Imprimerie, 1931, pp. 9-63; Le Manh Trinh, CVDCQ, pp. 14-15; and Nguyen Tai and Hoang Trung Thuc, "Mot Tam Guong," p. 54.

27 Poole, Vietnamese in Thailand, p. 30 and Nguyen Tai, "May Chuyen," p. 30. Nguyen Tai says that Hua told him in the late 1920s that in reality the Vietnamese population in Siam did not reach 30,000. Nguyen Tai, "May Chuyen," p. 30.