This module examines 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, 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 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. After the end of the First Indochina War, the Việt Minh for the most part dropped discussion of biological warfare until the 1960s, when the South Vietnamese and American militaries verifiably employed tear gas, herbicides, and other chemicals against communist insurgents and the broader populations in the Republic of Vietnam. While looking back we can be fairly certain that biological warfare did not take place, this was by no means evident at the time. Việt Minh leaders took the threat of biological weapons very seriously and were not merely faking charges for propaganda purposes.

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 Beijing to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with the political geography of civilizations, regions, and nation-states, the emotional geography of care, and the biophysical geography of disease that linked airplanes, environments, microbes, and humans. Unpacking the (non) event of biological warfare shows how responses to biological weapons had complicated effects on Vietnamese spatial imaginaries. Such responses both reactivated older Sinosphere relationships and created newer nationalist and communist-based worlds. In other words, this period shows a mix of old and new maps being used to understand new forms 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 in time. Moving from generalized, well-established knowledge about the Sinosphere to specific, new knowledge about places in the Red River Delta took hard work. This module seeks to trace and, in a limited way, reproduce the work needed to map the mobilities of biological invasion. In other words, the structure of this module mimics the movement from general to specific, and the hard work needed to do so. 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 biological.

This module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path A is called "Learning in the Sinosphere." It encourages users to explores communist charges of biological warfare in North Korea and northeast China leveled against the United States military at the beginning of the Korean War. It examines Chinese posters produced during the Korean War along with notes from a Vietnamese delegation to an international conference about US biological warfare. This path provides background to the development of biological weapons and shows how germ warfare in a renewed Sinosphere was viewed from Vietnam. Path B encourages users to explore biological warfare in the Red River Delta during the First Indochina War. Starting with a map of suspected instances of biological weapons use in northern Vietnam drawn from Việt Minh reports, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. The Việt Minh response included forming the Committee to Prevent Microbes and this path explores the work of this committee. It also explores the life and work of one of its leaders, the famous Vietnamese medical doctor Tôn Thất Tùng. Path C explores the efforts to counter biological warfare. These efforts included mobilizing a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement modeled on the Chinese Patriotic Hygiene Movement. They also included distributing a pamphlet produced by the Việt Minh meant to popularize knowledge about the history of American and Japanese use of biological warfare. This pamphlet sought to motivate domestic Vietnamese audiences to fight. It also aimed to show international audiences the Vietnamese connections to the communist revolutions that had taken place in China and Korea.