This page was created by Michitake Aso. 

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

The Red River Delta in Military Geographies

The following French colonial maps published in 1886 shows several things. First, French knowledge of the Red River Delta was limited. French conquest of the Nguyen imperial court, and control over central and northern Vietnam, was only completed in 1885. The blank area around the delta was unknown and simply left blank. Second, physical geography was of keen interest, hence the topographic map. Third, this was a commercial map, both in the sense that it was for sale and in the sense that it depicted the Red River Delta in French imperial geographies of commerce. The inset shows the links of the Red River Delta to the rest of Indochina, and eventually, France.



The Red River Delta was a commercialized and militarized space. These geographies, especially the militarized, played a key role shaping fears of biological warfare during the 1st Indochina War. As with earlier Sinosphere maps, French commercial and imperial concerns were interested in connections to Southern China as well, though for different reasons. Here is a map from 1894 showing Indochina's waterway connections to southern China.

By the early twentieth century, the blank spaces around the delta had been filled with ethnographic knowledge relevant to military control of the delta. The following 1905 map of the military territories that ring the delta shows the presence of ethnic minorities and suggests how they can be used for military alliances.



A third depiction of the Red River Delta's military and commercial connection with southern China comes from the Asia Pacific War. The following map comes from a 1940s Japanese publication aimed at school children showing French Indochina and China. This map emphasizes the waterways and railroad connections linking China to Hanoi and to points further south.



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