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

Northern Vietnam as Borderland

As the “cradle of Vietnamese civilization,” the Red River Delta has often been considered a heartland. Yet, the Red River Delta and its surrounding mid- and uplands have, like Xing An in Shellen Wu's module, often been cast as a contested borderland. Those invoking such a space imagined northern Vietnam in a regional geography that has referenced the immediately surrounding areas, including southern China. They also viewed northern Vietnam as part of larger commercialized and militarized spaces. Thus, northern Vietnam has been seen as either a core or a periphery, depending on the questions being asked and the interest of the viewer.

During the period of French colonization, Đại Nam was divided into Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin and formed part of French Indochina. The name Tonkin was mistakenly derived from an older name for Hanoi, Đông Kinh (東京) or eastern capital, and erroneously equated with the Vietnamese term Đàng Ngoài (the northern region of Vietnam). This newly created political unit was incorporated in a French imperial world. French commercial and imperial concerns continued to be interested in northern Vietnam's potential access to the markets of China. Here is a French map from 1894 showing Indochina's waterway connections to southern China.

The following map shows the work of the commission sent by the French to delimit the border between China and “Annam.” Although this map does not give information about the people living in this borderland, by the early twentieth century, other French maps were filled with ethnographic knowledge. A 1905 map of the military territories that ringed the delta showed the presence of non-Việt ethnicities such as the Hmong and Tai and implied that they could be used to control both the border and the delta.

The following 1931 map shows some of the battles of the Sino-French war of 1884 and 1885. This map is included at the end of an essay on painting created after this war by Chinese artists and presented to the Qing Emperor. Note how this map only shows northern Vietnam, symbolically severing it from the Chinese context of the war.

Another depiction of northern Vietnam's military and commercial connection with southern China comes from the Asia Pacific War. When French Indochina was incorporated into maps of the Japanese empire. 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.

Finally, ethnic groups living in the uplands surrounding the Red River Delta had their own, non-cartographic, ways of mapping the highlands between Southeast Asia and China. The following map is from the perspective of someone from the Hmong ethnic group. It names “Mien” (Myanmar), Laos, and the Hmong territory of the uplands, presumably including northern Vietnam.

And finally consider a Google map perspective of someone looking east from the uplands towards the Tonkin Gulf.

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Mapping Invasion: Vietnamese Responses to Biological Warfare During the First Indochina War
This module analyzes Vietnamese responses to the French military's possible use of biological warfare during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Beginning in 1952, the Việt Minh, the anti-colonial popular front forces led by Ho Chi Minh, collected reports of French airplanes releasing powders, worm-infested leaflets, and other strange substances over Việt Minh-controlled territory in and around the Red River Delta. These reports assumed that the strange substances were biological weapons, including insects and microbes meant either to sicken or kill humans directly or to infect plants and animals and threaten the Vietnamese food supply. Such reports lasted until at least the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.
This module argues that Vietnamese responses to biological warfare were inherently spatial. They depended, for example, on mapping information gathered from dispersed sources, from conferences held in China to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with a political geography of civilizations, regions, and nation-states, an emotional geography of fear, and a medical geography that linked airplanes, environments, microbes, and humans. Unpacking the (non) event of biological warfare shows, in turn, how responses to biological weapons had complicated effects on Vietnamese spatial imaginaries. From a Vietnamese perspective, germ warfare helped place northern Vietnam in reconfigured Sinosphere and borderland relationships and created newer nationalist and revolutionary worlds. In other words, this period shows a mix of old and new maps being used to understand new hybrid environments of microbial, human, and machine movement.
To make maps useful for combatting biological warfare, the Việt Minh had to understand conditions in local places at specific moments. Moving from generalized knowledge about the Sinosphere to specific knowledge about places in the Red River Delta took hard work. This module seeks to trace and, in a limited way, reproduce the labor needed to map the mobilities and immobilities of invasion. In other words, the structure of this module mimics the movement from general to specific, and old to new, and the intellectual and physical labor needed to make such a move. Such a structure encourages users to reflect on how historical actors moved between scales that were different in quantity and in quality, shifting between different geographic scales—global, regional, national, and local—and different types of maps—civilizational, emotional, and biogeographical. In other words, this module examines what certain Vietnamese thought about biological warfare and to explain what those actors thought with and how these structures changed over time.
This module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path A is called “Learning from the Korean War.” It encourages users to explores communist charges of biological warfare in North Korea and northeast China leveled against the United States military. It examines notes from a Vietnamese delegation to an international conference about biological warfare along with Chinese posters produced as part of a patriotic hygiene movement. A side path shows how northern Vietnam has been incorporated into various spatial imaginaries. Path B is called “Surveying Northern Vietnam.” It encourages users to explore biological warfare in northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Drawing from reports of the Committee to Prevent Germs, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. A side path explores the life of one of the committee's leaders, the famous Vietnamese medical doctor Tôn Thất Tùng. Finally, this path offers a Google map of a few suspected incidents of biological weapons use drawn from the committee's work and other Việt Minh reports. Path C is called “Preparing for Biological Warfare.” Such efforts included included producing and distributing a pamphlet meant to popularize knowledge about the history of American and Japanese use of biological weapons. This pamphlet sought to mobilize domestic Vietnamese audiences to fight. It aimed as well to show international audiences the Vietnamese connections to the communist revolutions that had taken place in China and Korea. Finally, the Việt Minh organized a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement modeled on the Chinese Patriotic Hygiene Movement.
Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
Surveying Northern Vietnam
In a now largely forgotten episode of the First Indochina War (1946-1954), the Việt Minh charged the French with the use of biological weapons after similar allegations had been made against the US military in North Korea and northeast China. This path explores the work the Việt Minh did to map knowledge of imperialistic germ warfare onto Northern Vietnam. See Christopher Goscha's, Phi Van Nguyen's, and Simon Abdela's on-line resource for a historical dictionary of the First Indochina War.
Mapping is a way to bound local space in a particular time. In response to fears of biological warfare, Vietnamese leaders sought to map emotional geographies of fear through surveys of countryside. Such mapping drew on older Sinosphere, borderland, and national geographies as well as newer aerial geographies.
First consider the Việt Minh's investigations of biological warfare through its Committee to Prevent Germs. You can also explore a side path that looks at the life and work of one of the Committee's leaders, Tôn Thất Tùng. Then, look at the rural surveys conducted by the Việt Minh and consider what their results tell us about germ warfare in northern Vietnam and rural society of the 1950s more generally.
As you read through this path, keep the following questions in mind:
What was it like to be on the receiving end of germ warfare? How did experts and lay people in Vietnam react to being the target of alleged biological weapon? How did Vietnamese scientists, politicians, and citizens seek to mitigate the effects of biological warfare (real and imagined)?

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