Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  Tonkin was colonized by China in ancient times, and in the nineteenth century it still looked northwards; what we call Annam and Cochinchina had evolved separately during centuries of conflict with Cham and Khmer peoples from the west. The whole country was unified by King Gia Long only in 1802, while still acknowledging a formal allegiance to the Dragon Throne in Beijing. So long as face was preserved by obsequious courtesy and regular tribute, the Chinese court was unconcerned about internal affairs in a country whose people they regarded as uncouth (at home, the Annamese monarch styled himself an emperor; to the Chinese, he was emphatically a mere king). Many Cantonese had emigrated to form discrete communities that dominated commercial life in towns all over Vietnam, and Annamese culture and forms of administration had been modelled on those of China since ancient times. Authority devolved from the monarch’s court through a classically educated mandarin class who, with their hordes of scribes, formed a distinct elite of ‘the lettered’ ranged in many gradations of prestige and wealth. The introverted mandarin class did not provide the population with much practical executive leadership, and its surface of formal state authority concealed conspiratorial patterns of local rivalries, alliances and client obligations. In an outwardly rigid society, power and status were in fact fluid and negotiable over the longer term.

  Vietnam’s lowland population was overwhelmingly rural, spread out amid paddy fields along the waterways in innumerable small, virtually self-sufficient villages living on their twice-yearly rice harvests. Gia Long’s reforms in the early nineteenth century had virtually destroyed the former feudal landowning class in the countryside, so there were no large land holdings. Wealthy merchants were found only in the cities; over most of the country there was little internal trade above local artisan level, so there was only a rudimentary cash economy. The only real roads were the main north – south ‘Mandarin Road’ to China and a few tributaries linking it to the larger towns, and most travel and movement of goods was by the many rivers and canals. Life was Confucian, centred on family and village, and comforted by the rituals of a relaxed Buddhism merged with Taoism and ancestor-worship; every community had both its little Buddhist pagoda and its shrine to the ancestral spirits. After 2,000 years of dynastic civil wars and intermittent struggles for liberation from China, the Vietnamese people had learned innate habits of secrecy and concealment. In times of upheaval the peasantry were preyed upon by pitiless bandits, but in the deltas the main threat to their lives and livelihood came from periodic floods that wiped out the harvest and caused widespread famine. Their most resented burden was not the rice-taxes but the system of forced labour obligations (corvées, in the French term) administered through local mandarins, by which all public works were carried out.

  The jungle hills around the edges of the Tonkin delta were inhabited by minority tribes of many ethnic origins; these were typically tough, self-reliant highlanders, and formal Annamese or Chinese authority was almost irrelevant to their lives. Throughout Vietnam lowlanders regarded all mountainous regions with dread, as the haunts of bandits, tigers, disease and evil spirits, and in at least three respects their fears were well-founded.

  THE FIRST EUROPEAN TRADERS who landed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proved to have less staying-power than the Catholic missionaries, who made significant numbers of converts.17 In 1787 the passionate engagement of Father Pierre Pigneau de Béhaine in Cochinchina led him to befriend a young refugee southern prince, Nguyen Anh. Béhaine negotiated limited French help for his protegé – a few ships, cannon, and engineers to supervise the building of forts – in return for trade concessions, mainly at Da Nang (Tourane). Béhaine’s judgement of character was sound; Nguyen Anh later fought his way to power over the whole country, and his sovereignty as King Gia Long was recognized by China in 1804. However, this energetic and centralizing reformer had the intelligence to keep the French at polite arm’s length. After his death in 1820 his successors turned violently against their Christian converts, and French missionaries were periodically martyred.

  Eventually, since Napoleon III counted upon the support of the Church at home, in late 1858 Admiral Rigault de Genouilly was ordered to occupy Da Nang as a reprisal against King Tu Duc for the recent execution of several missionaries. This proved impractical, but in February 1859 Rigault fought his way into Saigon and installed a garrison that managed to hold out under a fitful siege until Admiral Charner landed a stronger force in February 1861. The French then expanded their grip to include several other cities in the Mekong delta. In 1862 Tu Duc’s most pressing concern was a rebellion led by a pretender in Tonkin, and that June he signed the Treaty of Saigon, ceding to France the southern capital and the three provinces that lay east of the Mekong. In 1867 the French simply annexed the other three provinces of Cochinchina; guerrilla war grumbled on, but thereafter the Navy governors in Saigon maintained an uneasy peace with Tu Duc’s court at Hué.18

  By this time Tonkin was being ravaged by the overspill from the catastrophic series of uprisings in China against the Manchu Ching dynasty collectively known as the Taiping Rebellion (1851 – 66). As Manchu armies harried their southern provinces, a plague of assorted freebooters crossed the mountains, and reduced to chaos most of the country between Lang Son in the north-eastern hills and Son Tay on the middle Red river. Tu Duc’s appeals belatedly brought Chinese troops to garrison some towns, but the medicine proved almost as painful as the disease. This state of anarchy both frustrated and attracted the French, because Tonkin was potentially more than just another rice-basket like the cul-de-sac of Cochinchina. In 1867 it was established that the upper Red river in Tonkin was actually one and the same as the Hoti river of Yunnan. The Opium Wars of the 1840s – 50s, and the mortgaging of the Ching dynasty to Western powers during the Taiping Rebellion, had opened China’s eastern ports and great rivers to almost unrestricted commercial exploitation. However, direct access from the south into Yunnan – currently in the hands of Muslim rebels, and known to be rich in mineral resources – held out to either the British from Burma or the French from Cochinchina the prospect of a client trading partner independent of Beijing.

  While the prize was alluring, the obstacles were many. To bring French boats all the way upriver from Haiphong on the Gulf of Tonkin to Manghao in Yunnan would depend on securing the simultaneous agreement of King Tu Duc’s court in Hué, his mandarins in the northern capital at Hanoi, his de jure overlords in Beijing, Chinese governors in Yunnan, and whoever might currently be in de facto control of the chaotic upper Red river bad-lands – a daunting house of cards for any European to build. Even on those rare occasions when clarity rather than an elegant vagueness was the desired object, negotiation with Chinese or Annamese officials (who always had varying agendas of their own) had a rich potential for misunderstanding that went far beyond the real difficulties of translation. By May 1883, the attempts of various impatient Frenchmen to gain access to Yunnan had detonated a number of unintended consequences.

  THERE WAS A SHARP DISTINCTION between the legal authority of both the Chinese and Annamese governments and their discontinuous physical ability to control events in their wild borderlands. Regional governors exercised stewardship in their monarch’s name with wavering degrees of honesty and efficiency, but provided that the necessary outward forms of respect were observed then both court and regional mandarins were usually pragmatic enough to accommodate themselves to the realities on the ground. Those realities involved, as often as not, reaching mutually satisfactory agreements with local strongmen whom neither monarch nor governor had the military resources to suppress.

  Although the Taiping Rebellion had devastated huge areas of central China, the original outbreak had occurred among the misty mountains of Guangxi in the far south, across the Tonkin border from Cao Bang and Lang Son. As Manchu authority was restored in Guangxi in the mid-1860s, a brigand named Liu Yung-fu – a junior boss in a gang known as the Yellow Flags – led a few hundred men south to seek his fortune, under a black f
lag that he had seen in a dream.19 He eventually built a stockade on the Red river opposite Son Tay; instead of simply marauding, however, he hired out his services to the local governor, turned against his original Yellow Flag chief, and received from Hué an honorary commission as an Annamese government officer. He later moved up the Red river, controlling and ‘taxing’ the stretch between Hung Hoa and the Yunnan border at Lao Cai, where further co-operation with a Manchu general earned him a parallel commission in the Chinese Army. By 1873 his cunning, ruthlessness and instinctive grasp of the unspoken rules had earned this bandit chief the letters patent that transformed him into a general and a man of status with two governments. From China he received payment and rifles for his Black Flag followers, whom he organized into battalions and companies and ruled with a merciless discipline.20

  At Hanoi, in December 1873, the arrogance of a merchant-adventurer named Jean Dupuis and the violent impetuosity of a naval officer, Francis Garnier, had created a confrontation over navigation rights on the Red river between the Annamese court and Admiral Dupré, the French governor in Cochinchina. By the time the shooting stopped many Tonkinese had died, fighting both against and (in the case of Christian converts) alongside a company of French marsouins; but the Black Flags – employed for lack of other reliable troops by the Annamese governor Prince Hoang – were parading the heads of Lieutenants Garnier and Balny d’Avricourt around the Delta villages.

  A line was ostensibly drawn under the affair in March 1874, when a treaty was signed between the French and King Tu Duc’s government; Garnier was written off as a hothead who had exceeded orders, and the French withdrew from Tonkin except for a lightly guarded consulate in the Hanoi ‘concession’. The treaty formally recognized French rule over the whole of Cochinchina; but it also promised French help to Hué against any attack, and declared Annamese independence from all foreign powers. These clauses had fateful consequences: in French, but certainly not in Annamese or Chinese eyes, they both gave a pretext for French armed intervention in Tonkin at some future time, and withdrew recognition of Chinese suzerainty over Tonkin and Annam. The treaty also opened the Red river to trade, but – to France’s growing frustration – that clause remained in practical abeyance, since Liu’s Black Flags (enjoying increased prestige and recruitment, thanks to the head of Francis Garnier) physically controlled the upper reaches.21

  DIPLOMATIC FENCING CONTINUED for years between Saigon and Hué, and between Paris and Beijing (now ruled by the iron-willed Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi). King Tu Duc was in an impossible position: with Tonkin overrun by marauders, he was trying to maintain his authority without military resources, while simultaneously satisfying two external powers. France continually escalated its demands, and China, while expecting obedience without being able to provide protection, was sponsoring the Black Flags who stood in the way of French access to Yunnan.

  The election of the Ferry and Gambetta governments in 1881 – 3 unchained the frustration of the Yunnan enthusiasts, and the civilian governor of Cochinchina, Le Myre de Vilers, secured the endorsement of Paris for an attempt to resolve the impasse over the Red river. He would pressure Hué to accept a limited French expedition specifically against the Black Flags; this would ostensibly be acting on Tu Duc’s behalf, in a broad interpretation of the 1874 treaty clause promising French help against the king’s enemies. Accordingly, Le Myre despatched to Hanoi two gunboats and 230 Naval Infantry under Captain Henri Rivière, whose orders were to reinforce the 100-man consulate guard, and to carry out a police action against the Black Flags and any other ‘pirates’ blocking river traffic.

  The French always used this term, partly for reasons of public relations, partly because the Chinese and other freebooters lived mainly by preying on trade up and down the rivers and coastal sea lanes. No single English word seems to describe their actual character precisely, since Liu Yung-fu’s relationship with the Hué government was always ambiguous. His Black Flags were essentially mercenary soldiers who received pay and ammunition from China, nominally to act on behalf of Hué but actually beyond the control of the Annamese court. Liu exploited the areas he occupied like a robber baron (as did the otherwise lethargic Chinese regular garrisons that the governor of Guangxi had planted in north-eastern towns). Villages were looted and taxed, men were forced to build forts and work the fields for their occupiers, and women were carried off for Chinese slave-markets. The smaller groups that infested the Delta were simple bandits, who emerged briefly from their hideouts to pillage and kill. It is estimated that by 1882 as many as 80,000 freebooters and outlaws of all kinds were at large in Tonkin, since many men from the communities destroyed during these years of anarchy had little choice but to turn bandit themselves. During the 1870s, some up-country regions had become virtually depopulated.

  HENRI RIVIÈRE WAS A PUBLISHED POET and novelist with ambitions for election to the Académie Française. However, five years previously this burly middle-aged Norman had also played a leading part in crushing a jungle rebellion in New Caledonia, and it was that less nuanced side of his character that responded to the icy reception he received from the mandarins at the Hanoi Citadel on 2 April 1882 .22 When another 250 marsouins arrived upriver on 24 April he presented the Annamese with an impossible ultimatum and only a few hours in which to consider it, and the next day he repeated Garnier’s impetuosity. He, too, shelled and assaulted the Citadel, capturing it within a couple of hours and inflicting hugely disproportionate casualties. There were furious protests, shocked disclaimers, and a great deal of undercover diplomacy, but Rivière stayed in the Citadel under the tricolour flag. There were no immediate Annamese reprisals; the Black Flags were the only other credible force in Tonkin, and Liu Yung-fu played hard to get (first with the Annamese Prince Hoang, and later with a hawkish Chinese mandarin, Tang Ching-sung) in order to extract better terms.

  When President Grévy called upon Jules Ferry to form a second government in February 1883, the prime minister halted the Foreign Ministry’s conciliatory talks with Beijing (which was anyway preoccupied by Japanese aggression in Korea). Reinforced to about 1,250 Naval Troops plus local Christian auxiliaries, Captain Rivière was emboldened, on 27 March, to take the city of Nam Dinh by storm. In his absence the small garrison left in Hanoi held off a surprise attack by both Black Flags and Chinese Guangxi regulars from a garrison at Bac Ninh. At Son Tay, the Chinese mandarin Tang urged the Black Flag chief Liu to gather all his men and any willing locals to attack the French invaders, with the blessings of both governments. Liu sent insulting messages to Rivière, daring him to come out and fight, and on 19 May 1883 the French commander obliged him, personally leading 450 troops north out of Hanoi on the road for Son Tay, along a causeway through the paddy fields.

  They had only marched a few hundred yards when they fell into an ambush near the Paper Bridge – almost exactly where Garnier had lost his head ten years previously. By the time the French made good their escape 50 had been killed – including Henri Rivière – and 76 wounded, and French heads pickled in brine were exhibited to enthusiastic crowds for months thereafter. A French offer to ransom Rivière’s corpse was unfortunately misinterpreted by the Black Flags, who hacked it to bits, under the impression that each of them could claim a separate bounty for his own gobbet of flesh.23

  IN DEATH, CAPTAIN RIVIÈRE had served his prime minister’s purpose admirably, and ‘Ferry le Tonkinois’ rode the tide of public indignation. Without dissent, the Chamber voted his government the funds for an expedition ‘to avenge France’s glorious children’, and the first 3,000 reinforcements were soon heading east of Suez. While they were still at sea, in July 1883, King Tu Duc died, leaving a child as his designated successor. The dominant figures on the regency council, Nguyen Van Tuong and Ton That Thuyet, were determined to thwart France; while sending urgent orders to mandarins throughout the country to resist any French advance, they substituted an elder prince, to rule as King Hiep Hoa.24

  On 16 August 1883 the French envoy Harmand deliv
ered an ultimatum to Hué calling for national surrender within 48 hours; in the absence of a response, Admiral Courbet’s warships destroyed the forts at the mouth of the Perfume river, marsouins were landed, and on 25 August representatives of King Hiep Hoa signed a draft treaty accepting a French protectorate over Annam. France was to take over all dealings with China; all Chinese troops must withdraw from Tonkin; French troops would be solely responsible for expelling the Black Flags, and for ensuring the safety of French navigation on the Red river; and French officials installed in the major cities would supervise government finances. The king was allowed to retain some measure of autonomy in lesser Annam – the central provinces of the country – but he would be hemmed in by French rule over Tonkin and Cochinchina. Further pressure to sign had simultaneously been applied by 1,500 Navy troops shipped up from Saigon under General Bouet, although attempts on 15 August and 1 September to bundle the Black Flags out of Son Tay failed before the unexpectedly solid defensive works.

  For both Paris and Beijing the situation had to be considered with an eye to wider international sensitivities; France was the stronger by far, but the other Western powers had all invested heavily in China. Unilateral French operations on the Chinese mainland were out of the question, and a naval war along the Chinese coast would infuriate Britain, Germany and the United States. While different factions in both the Quai d’Orsay and the Chinese court argued about how strong a line it was wise to take – with some murmuring about a possible demarcation agreement to share Tonkin – the late summer of 1883 saw a military stalemate in the paddy fields. The Black Flags, Chinese garrisons, bandit gangs, and locals stirred up by the regents continued to destabilize the Delta, waging guerrilla warfare wherever opportunity offered.25