Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of The Vietnamese Revolution, 1885-1954

Christopher E. Goscha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136106903
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Christopher Goscha resituates the Vietnamese revolution and war against the French into its Asian context. Breaking with nationalist and colonial historiographies which have largely locked Vietnam into 'Indochinese' or 'Nation-state' straightjackets, Goscha takes Thailand as his point of departure for exploring how the Vietnamese revolution was intimately linked to Asia between the birth of the 'Save the King Movement' in 1885 and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. But his study is more than just a political history. Goscha brings geography to bear on his subject with a passion. While he considers the little-known political movements of such well-known faces as Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh across Southeast Asia, the author takes us into the complex Asian networks stretching from northeastern Thailand and the port of Bangkok to southern China and Hong Kong - and beyond. There, we see how Ho and Chau drew upon an invisible army of Vietnamese and Chinese traders, criminals, prostitutes, sailors and above all the thousands of emigres living in Vietnamese communities in Thailand.

CHAPTER 1

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 OVERLAND AND MARITIME EMIGRATION TO SIAM

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 a Vietnamese presence appears in a map of Ayuthia published in 1691 by a Frenchman named Simon de la Loubère. In this map, we see a series of foreign ‘camps’ (mu ban in Thai) situated along the canals surrounding the ancient capital of Ayuthia. 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 interpreted for European traders, worked as their slaves, navigated ships for the Siamese Royal Navy or served various local courts as messengers and spies. This early Vietnamese emigration to Ayuthia ended temporarily in 1688, however, when the Siamese King was dethroned, the French expelled and the Christians thrown in prison.¹

Figure 2: Ayuthia and the Cochin-Chinese Quarter, 17th Century

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 Chantaboun. 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 emigres 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.⁶

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.⁷

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.⁸ 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 5,000–6,000.⁹ Many had fled the religious persecutions of Emperors Minh Mang (r. 1820–41), Thieu Tri (r. 1841–47) and Tu Duc (r. 1848–83). More could be found in the ports of Trat, Chantaboun, Rayong, Chonburi and Samut Songkhram, where they worked as fishermen and lumbermen.¹⁰

Figure 3: Vietnamese Catholic Tombstone (C. Goscha 1996)

Figure 4: Entry to Ban Yuan, Bangkok (C. Goscha 1996)

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.¹¹ After World War II, this temple (and its senior Vietnamese monk) would serve as 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 predecessors 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 1916.¹² 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 revolutionaries would 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 Siamese bureaucrat had allegedly prohibited ‘for a long time already’ the sale of buffaloes to ‘Annamese merchants’. The Pavie Mission claimed that central Vietnamese traders bought pigs and buffaloes in Mekong markets in exchange for ‘Sa Nhon’ (amonum hirsutum), a medicinal plant used by the Chinese.¹³ In the wake of 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. In 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.¹⁴

Map 2: Vietnamese Emigration to Siam (17th–20th Centuries)

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, another 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.¹⁵

Together all of these late 17th-, 18th- a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Terms
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Birth of Vietnamese Anticolonial Bases in Asia (1885–1925)
• 2 The Regional Networks of Vietnamese Communism (1925–1939)
• 3 Thai Break (1940–45)
• 4 Building Indochinese Links to Thailand (1945–46)
• 5 The Southeast Asian Commercial Networks of the DRV (1946–51)
• 6 The DRV’s Non-Communist Vision of Southeast Asia (1945–48)
• 7 Reviving the ICP’s Southeast Asian Revolutionary Networks (1948–50)
• 8 The Cold War and the Closing of the Western Front (1950–54)
• Conclusion
• Biographical Sketches of Major Figures
• References
• Index