This book focuses on a region the Vietnamese call by a variety of names, including the Delta of the Nine Dragon River, the Mekong Delta, or simply “the West” (miền Tây). This region, defined by the Mekong River and its tributaries, is one of the great deltas of the world. In the period under discussion in this book, this region extended to the north to the outskirts of Saigon (today’s Hồ Chí Minh City); to the west, it actually extended across the Cambodian-Vietnamese border; and it was bounded to the south and east by the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Mekong Delta in the mid-twentieth century

The Mekong Delta has only recently been fully integrated into Vietnam. Its contested and complex history has shaped it up to the present. Historically, the entire zone from Phnom Penh down to the lower Mekong Delta was a multiethnic zone of contact in which Khmer, Chinese, Malay, Cham, Vietnamese, and assorted others circulated. It was a periphery, far from the core of the Cambodian or Vietnamese polities, a place in between the port, coastal, and sea-oriented “water frontier” and “littoral society” discussed by Li Tana and Charles Wheeler and the plains-oriented “geo-body” discussed by Thongchai Winanchakul.Footnote ¹ It was once a wet, lowlands version of the highlands “Zomia” discussed by Willem Van Schendel and popularized by James Scott.Footnote ²

Before the French, if states desired to control this lightly populated “periphery,” their ambition foundered on lack of adequate state capacity. This history, and the devastating economic and social dislocation of World War II, shaped this region’s response to war.

Today, our cartographic imagination, conditioned by maps demarcating nation-states, places the Mekong Delta in “Vietnam.” So it is; but such “mapping” is deceptive. The delta is not oriented northwards towards the rest of Vietnam: its rivers flow out of Cambodia along a northwest-southeast axis, emptying into the South China Sea. When the water level in the Mekong rises too high, excess water flows back into the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, which acts as a giant catchment basin and moderates the extent of flooding downstream. Canals and streams crisscross this delta, wedged between Vietnam and Cambodia, straddling land and sea.

1.1 Ethnicity, Place, and Space in Historical Perspective

By the end of the seventeenth century, a new political actor entered the far south: the Vietnamese Nguyễn lords. They expanded southwards to Cambodian Prey Nokor (Saigon), and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed further south and west into the Mekong Delta. Cambodian and Vietnamese kingdoms thus collided, mixing together Vietnamese newcomers, Siamese expansionists, remnants of a defeated Cham polity, Ming refugees from the Qing empire, Malay and possibly some Javanese, and longstanding populations of ethnic Khmer. The result was a complex ethnic, religious, linguistic, and political mosaic. Nguyễn rulers worked hard with limited means to consolidate control over this unruly Mekong Delta frontier. They asserted their power over the preexisting populations of Chinese in Mỹ Tho, Sóc Trăng, and Hà Tiên (some of the main areas of settlement), and Cham in Châu Đốc and Tây Ninh. They also moved into lands traditionally claimed by the Cambodian monarchy that were lightly populated by Khmer.

This legacy of contestation would shape the later unraveling of French Indochina during the First Indochina War. For this reason, this chapter pays special attention to the Khmer, who long predated the Vietnamese in the delta. Modern Vietnamese accounts minimize the significance of Khmer sovereignty claims and routinely emphasize that in 1757, Cambodia supposedly ceded their rights to this territory. As one work states, “from 1757 onwards, the entire region from Đồng Nai to Hà Tiên was completely part of Vietnam’s national territory and [this] was recorded clearly on our administrative maps. The border between our country and Cambodia [Chenla] had been demarcated clearly.”Footnote ³ Such is the dominant interpretation in Vietnam.

In fact, the historical record of Cambodian “cession” of territory is quite contested. The term “cession” implies a formal agreement, but none has come to light. In 1904, Étienne Aymonier argued that the cession of Preah Trapeang (Trà Vinh) and Basak (Sóc Trăng) in the mid-eighteenth century, carried out by a contender to the Cambodian throne during an internal Cambodian struggle for power, was virtually forced upon the Cambodians: “the term cession poorly characterizes these incessant [Vietnamese] encroachments, which did not ratify any formal act.” Aymonier prefers the term “usurpation” to describe this process.Footnote ⁴ It is perhaps most accurate to state that in 1757, a Cambodian contender to the Cambodian throne traded away rights to govern peripheral territories and peoples that he did not control, and that the Vietnamese had barely settled, so that he could gain Vietnamese support and seize power at the center of his future realm. Aymonier further argues that immediately after 1758, while most Khmer of the lower Mekong Delta were theoretically subject to Vietnamese rule, “the Khmer still occupied the interior of these vast territories, apparently retained their national leaders, recognized the authority of their own kings, but did not have to submit any less to the influence and power of the Annamite mandarins.”Footnote ⁵

This “cession” was not accepted by many Khmer of the delta. Tạ Chí Đại Trường notes that at the end of the eighteenth century, Nguyễn Ánh, who went on to defeat the Tay Son “rebels” and unite Vietnam, allowed the Khmer of Bassak to rule themselves.Footnote ⁶ Choi Byung Wook concludes that in the late eighteenth century, “the basic policy of the Gia Định regime [i.e. the Vietnamese rulers over the area surrounding Saigon] toward the Khmer people guaranteed the Khmer self-government and co-existence.”Footnote ⁷ Indeed, from the Tây Sơn uprising and rule (1771–1802) through the Lê Văn Khôi rebellion (1833–35), many southerners escaped the tight control of any monarch.

The rule of Emperor Minh Mệnh (also referred to as Ming Mạng) (1820–41), however, marked a turning point in Vietnamese-Khmer relations, as Minh Mệnh pursued a far more aggressive policy towards Cambodia proper. He forced all Khmer in the lower Mekong Delta to adopt the Vietnamese family names Thạch, Sơn, Kim, Lâm, or Danh.Footnote ⁸ Nguyễn actions provoked Khmer animosity and resistance. As Minh Mệnh complained, perhaps about the situation in Cambodia proper:

From the 1820s onwards, the Nguyễn monarchy pushed the Khmer to become loyal subjects by adopting the names, language, clothing, and civilizational practices of the Vietnamese. To Vietnamese rulers, the different customs and beliefs of the Khmer were not an essential barrier to eventual assimilation.Footnote ¹⁰ To borrow David Howell’s formulation for Tokugawa attempts to make the Ainu Japanese, the Nguyễn rulers “were more concerned with exteriority – the visible compliance with norms – than with the internalization of the principles behind these norms.”Footnote ¹¹ The Nguyễn dynasty, however, did not stop at “assimilation lite.” Emperor Minh Mệnh occupied eastern Cambodia from 1835 to 1841. As one Vietnamese source stated, “Now that our country is changing things [in Cambodia] in a significant way and registering [Khmer] households, the day of transforming old [Khmer] customs into Hoa [Vietnamese] has come!”Footnote ¹²

Cambodians deeply resented this occupation. In late 1840, faced with a threat to their continuing existence as a country, they rose up in widespread revolt. French missionary M. Miche wrote that in that year:

Vietnamese annals record an armed force of 2,000 coming down from the Thất Sơn mountains, straddling today’s Cambodia-Vietnam border, to attack Kiên Giang province, where Vietnamese mandarins and inhabitants “fled in fear.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Vietnamese mandarin Nguyễn Công Trứ wrote to the court that “now the Cambodian [Thổ] rebels are rising up all over” in the lower Mekong Delta.Footnote ¹⁵ Khmer living in Hà Tiên, An Giang, Kiên Giang, Sóc Trăng, Trà Vinh, and Vĩnh Long all participated in this revolt, which dragged on into 1843.Footnote ¹⁶

To resolve the dissension, Siam and Vietnam signed a treaty in 1846 that put the Cambodian king Ang Duong back on his throne. The Nguyễn dynasty, overextended and pressured by Siam, finally withdrew from Cambodia. But the damage had been done. Anne Hansen cites a searingly evocative Cambodian memoir from 1848 on the situation:

If Vietnam “lost” its protectorate in eastern Cambodia, it retrenched in order to consolidate its hold on the lower Mekong Delta.

Where, then, was the border between Cambodia and Vietnam? As Vũ Đức Liêm comments, earlier borders on maps had played multiple functions – as defensive frontiers, administrative limits, state borders, and boundaries of Vietnameseness. “Over the nearly one hundred years since five Khmer prefectures were annexed to Hà Tiên in 1755, Vietnamese political boundaries moved westward. Frequent rhetorical shifts between civilizational frontier and state boundary characterized the Nguyễn intervention in Cambodia. Each time the language changed, so did the imagined geography.”Footnote ¹⁸ By 1847, Vietnam had defined for itself an unambiguous state border. Labussière, writing in 1880, stated that it was “barely forty years ago [i.e. around 1840] that the Annamese court finally succeeded in substituting its authority for that of the Cambodian king.”Footnote ¹⁹ Adhémard Leclère has written that after the 1846 treaty, “Cambodians began to flee the provinces that now form part of Cochinchina and that the Yuon [Vietnamese] had annexed in the past. The plots of lands they abandoned were subsequently occupied by Annamite farmers.”Footnote ²⁰ Bitter struggles broke out. Khmer retaliated against dispossession using arson, even murder; the Vietnamese judges, in turn, fined entire villages of Khmer for such acts. In the end, more Khmer fled for Cambodia.Footnote ²¹ Today, we might refer to Nguyễn dynasty actions as “ethnic cleansing.”

The French invasion of Vietnam in 1858 catalyzed “long-simmering” tensions. In 1859, Cham and Khmer communities in the An Giang province border region rose up in rebellion; “by the end of that year it was spreading out of control.”Footnote ²² In 1860, Cambodia invaded An Giang and Hà Tiên.Footnote ²³ Under relentless pressure, the Nguyễn court formally ceded three provinces of southern Vietnam to France in 1862, followed by the three westernmost ones in 1867. This complicated history should drive home the simple point that the Khmer, whether in Cambodia or in the lower Mekong Delta, were still contesting Vietnamese claims to the delta in the 1860s.

The arrival of the French radically transformed the contest between Cambodians and Vietnamese. The French declared Cochinchina a directly ruled colony, and after a series of agreements, the Nguyễn dynasty signed a treaty ceding this region to France. All Vietnamese sovereignty claims over the area were rendered null and void. In contrast, the French made Cambodia a protectorate in 1863. Over twenty years later, as I have stated elsewhere:

In theory, if not in fact, France accepted the Cambodian monarchy’s claim to sovereignty over Cambodia proper. Left unsettled until 1949 was the resolution of Cambodian sovereignty claims over parts of the lower Mekong Delta.

Under French rule, the population of Cambodia and the Mekong Delta underwent transformation. Vietnamese migration to Cambodia and to the lower Mekong Delta shot up. Vietnamese, not Khmer, came to staff much of the French colonial apparatus in Cambodia.Footnote ²⁵ By 1945, roughly 300,000 Vietnamese made Cambodia their home.Footnote ²⁶ The situation in the lower Mekong Delta sharply differed. Chinese emigration to Cochinchina, including the Mekong Delta, surged from the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁷ Vietnamese in-migration to the lower Mekong Delta upended the ethnic balance. If the Khmer probably formed the majority of the delta in the very early nineteenth century, by 1944 they had turned into a small minority in a Vietnamese sea.

While promoting Vietnamese in-migration to the delta, the French reversed the Nguyễn dynasty’s attempt to assimilate the Khmer to Vietnamese norms and civilization. The French were contradictory: even as they saw themselves as “protecting” the Khmer, they packed the ranks of the Cambodian and Cochinchinese administrations disproportionately with French and Vietnamese, and shunted the Khmer into lower-level positions. The French encouraged Cambodians and Vietnamese to stay apart. Writing in 1907, Judge Edgar Mathieu observed “how rare are the marriages between Annamites and Cambodians” in Cochinchina, adding that relations between the two groups were “unfriendly.”Footnote ²⁸ Little had changed forty years later: one 1948 report suggested that one in ten Khmer marriages in the Mekong Delta were with Vietnamese.Footnote ²⁹ The same low rate of Khmer-Vietnamese intermarriage was found on the Cambodian side of the border. Separation between ethnic groups was encouraged by the educational system. In addition to allowing temple schools, the French set up a limited number of Franco-Khmer schools to complement the Franco-Vietnamese ones.

Under the French, the Khmer of the Mekong Delta (the Khmer Krom) strengthened their religious ties to Cambodia. From the 1920s onwards, the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh reached out to the Khmer Krom in Cochinchina, trained their monks, and supplied the populace with printed Khmer materials.Footnote ³⁰ In 1944, the French placed the Mekhon (heads of the Khmer Buddhist sangha in Cochinchina) under “the spiritual authority of the Leaders of the Sects in Cambodia.”Footnote ³¹ These developments encouraged more Khmer Krom to travel: “a new spirit has arisen which makes them more willing to return to their country of origin [sic]. They maintain rather close relations with the Mother Country, and monks in particular regularly take their leave there to improve themselves spiritually, and students travel to Phnom Penh to continue their studies.”Footnote ³²

I close this section with a captivating fragment of the Bangsavatar Basak [Chronicle of Bassac], one unlike the usual Vietnamese narratives. Chandler calls this work “a popular history collected in the 1940s in a Cambodian-speaking area of southern Vietnam”:

Reading these lines, it is clear that the Khmer of the delta once lived far outside the control of the Nguyễn court in remote, even wild, areas. They were only tenuously connected to the Cambodian monarchy. This autonomy and isolation was destroyed as new migrants – Chinese, Vietnamese, then French – refashioned the delta. The long transformation of the Mekong delta would set the stage for the violence of the post-1945 years. But the creation of the superspace of French Indochina, in which no Vietnamese ruled over the Mekong Delta or Cambodia, blocked the final Vietnamese attempt to claim the lower Mekong Delta for an emerging Vietnamese nation. It allowed the Khmer to keep alive their claim to the delta while strengthening ties to Cambodia. The final struggle between Khmer and Vietnamese for the lower Mekong delta, in other words, was put on hold from 1862 to 1945. It would have to be resolved from 1945 onwards.

Figure 1.2 Provinces of southern Vietnam, 1945.

Source: Chris Robinson, 2020. Based on Pierre Gourou, “La population rurale de la Cochinchine,” Annales de géographie 51(285) (1942), 11

1.2 The Mottled Delta in 1945

The Mekong Delta is one of the great rice deltas of the world. It features marshes and forests, plantations and rice fields, mangrove forests and seacoast. While dominated by flat expanses, the region also includes hills, sand dunes, limestone karsts, and small mountains. Some authors divide the delta into coastal, riverine, and mountainous zones. Philip Taylor goes further, dividing the Khmer-settled parts of the Mekong Delta, plus Tây Ninh province, into eight different environmental subregions.Footnote ³⁴ These eight zones cover the area at the core of this book.

Not all of the delta was easily accessible. It was unevenly settled, with densely populated areas mixed with sparsely inhabited ones. The heart of the western Mekong Delta, the “rice basket” centered around the Mekong River and its tributaries, was packed with people: it had a population density of 162 persons per square kilometer in 1942. In contrast, Hà Tiên province was thinly settled, with a population density of only three persons per square kilometer. It was hard to traverse large zones, such as the U Minh Forest/Point of Cà Mau or the Plain of Reeds, with respective densities of only 11 and 6.6 persons per square kilometer.Footnote ³⁵ Those fighting against the French would exploit them as zones of refuge during the war. The U Minh Forest was then a giant tropical wetlands forest, edged with mangroves, bordering the Gulf of Thailand; the densely vegetated Plain of Reeds (with large expanses of tall reeds) was flooded for much of the year. Besides these zones, other areas, such as the tropical forests of Tây Ninh province or the mountains along the Cambodia-Cochinchina border, also offered sanctuary.

Historically, the Khmer had settled the Mekong Delta early, followed by Chinese, Cham, Malays, and others. The Vietnamese had arrived relatively late. By 1945, the Mekong Delta, although approximately 90 percent Vietnamese, was mottled: ethnically, linguistically, politically, religiously, and in terms of place of origin. Traces of earlier settlement patterns remained. While the 350,000 Khmer formed only 6 percent of Cochinchina’s population, they concentrated in the provinces of Trà Vinh (85,000), Rạch Gía (65,000), Sóc Trăng (80,000), and Châu Đốc (45,000).Footnote ³⁶ (Trà Vinh province alone counted 108 Khmer temples in 1948, with 520 resident monks.Footnote ³⁷) Lesser numbers scattered in Bạc Liêu provinces Cẩn Thơ, Rạch Gía, Châu Đốc, and Tây Ninh provinces. Most areas of Khmer settlement were close to branches of the Mekong or canals. This pattern of Khmer concentration would shape the war.

Significant numbers of Chinese (as well as Sino-Khmer and Sino-Vietnamese) lived in the Mekong delta. But who, exactly, were the Chinese? Some delta inhabitants were creole in culture, mixing Chinese, Khmer, and Vietnamese practices. Minh Hương had Sino-Vietnamese ancestry and kept their ties to Chinese culture. Many belonged to Chinese congregations. While most Chinese lived in the main city of Cholon, significant clusters of Chinese lived in the western Mekong Delta provinces of Cần Thơ, Rạch Giá, Sóc Trăng, and Bạc Liêu. Some Chinese, such as those in Mỹ Tho and Hà Tiên, could trace their ancestry back several hundred years to Ming loyalists who fled China with the rise of the Qing dynasty. Chinese aside, other populations existed in much smaller numbers. Small pockets of Cham were found in Tây Ninh and Châu Đốc provinces. Malays were found in and around Châu Đốc.

Ethnic and political diversity aside, the dominant Vietnamese were themselves split on religious lines. Catholic congregations had been established in the delta since the late sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Cao Đài temples were scattered across the region. The Cao Đài embraced a new religion, founded in 1926, drawing on Western spiritism, Chinese secret societies, and Vietnamese practices, and incorporating a broad range of Western, Vietnamese, and East Asian spirits into its pantheon. Perhaps one in five persons in the delta belonged to this religious group by 1945.Footnote ³⁹ The Hòa Hảo was a heterodox branch of Buddhism dating from 1939 with a charismatic leader, Huỳnh Phú Sổ. They comprised somewhere between 200,000 to one million followers.Footnote ⁴⁰ While often portrayed as an exotic sect, the Hòa Hảo actually combined beliefs particular to the western Mekong Delta with a peasant householder orientation found from the earliest days of Buddhism, as well as teachings from the broad salvationist Pure Land tradition that has been one of the major poles of East Asian Buddhism. Added to these religious streams were many other teachings, from Protestantism to Pure Land Householder [Tịnh Độ Cư sĩ] and Strange Scent of the Precious Mountains [Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương]. The delta, in other words, was a religiously dynamic and complex region in 1945. The link between religious allegiances and politics, however, was up for negotiation.

1.3 Economic and Social Uncertainty in the Delta

At the core of the upheaval in the Mekong Delta was its particular economic structure, which was susceptible to exogenous shocks. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the French colonial state “developed” the delta, digging canals, draining marshland, and expanding the area that could be planted with rice and other agricultural commodities. The delta would come to depend on strong export markets in rice to sustain its growing population. In areas settled by Vietnamese the longest, such as those close to the city of Saigon, landholdings were smaller. Even so, a large number of farmers still rented the land they tilled. Areas that had come under recent exploitation, such as the core of the western Mekong Delta today, boasted more large landowners and plantations. Here, plantation owners and other landowners took a higher cut of the harvest from tenants,Footnote ⁴¹ and thus exploited landless renters more. In prosperous times, a large “floating population” of landless laborers could find work, sometimes on the large French, Vietnamese, even Chinese estates; but in downtimes they faced difficulties.Footnote ⁴²

On the eve of World War II, Cochinchina’s economy had recovered from the Great Depression of 1929–30. It was producing, on average, about 3,100,000 tons of rice and exporting half (1,500,000), making it one of the top three rice exporters in the world.Footnote ⁴³ World War II, however, would be transformative. The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia in 1941 and 1942 broke some of the economic bonds that linked the region. Rice-rich Burma, Thailand, and southern Vietnam had once exported to India, Malaya, and central and northern Vietnam. Interregional transportation dropped, and finally came to a halt, when the Americans began air raids on shipping routes and railways after 1943. When war severed these economic links, Bengal and north-central Vietnam suffered major famines, and Malaya endured acute food shortages.Footnote ⁴⁴

As the economy crumbled, economic infrastructure did as well. In September 1945, the journalist André Blanchet noted that “plantations, from which the Japanese had expelled the French on March 9, were abandoned, rubber trees untended, and rail equipment rusted.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Transportation routes had broken down. Railroads had deteriorated. Blanchet observed that “wherever you go in Indochina, whether it be Cochinchina, Phnom Penh, Pakse or Hanoi, [one finds] vast graveyards of cars and trucks.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Few individuals had access to working motorized transport. From 1945 onwards, canals and rivers became the transportation routes of choice in the delta.

Economic degradation during the war hurt rural dwellers. By 1945, Mekong Delta peasants were wearing tattered clothes. They had to scramble to find basic commodities, like salt or lamp oil. To travel long distances, they often walked, as many cars, buses, and trains had broken down, been destroyed, or lacked fuel. Roads and waterways were often in pitiful shape. One Mekong delta farmer complained of the lack of fuel and noted that “no one could buy new clothes, and our old clothes were worn and torn after two or three years. Mosquito nets were used to make outfits for women while men just wore shorts. We also washed sacks to wear as a shirt without sleeves.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Vương Liêm, a boy during World War II from Tập Rèn, Sóc Trăng province, stated that “daily life was essentially one of hardship, there was not enough work to feed oneself, and so one could not get enough clothing, mosquito nets and blankets, pillows, and other things… Soap was seen as a luxury, even though the famous ‘Cô Ba’ soap was sold everywhere.”Footnote ⁴⁸ A communist party history of Tiền Giang province noted that even landlords and administrators had become poor and their clothes were threadbare [xơ xác]. The French Vichy regime fretted about these issues: in February 1942, for example, it censored articles on the difficulty of finding potatoes and on the poor rice harvest in Gò Công province.Footnote ⁴⁹ “Goods were critically short and prices soared,” but the purchasing power of inhabitants was weak: “daily life for people, once difficult, became worse.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In the long run, the decade from 1944 onwards would devastate the export-oriented Mekong Delta far more than the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Depression, lasting from 1931 to 1934 in the South,Footnote ⁵¹ led to social, economic, and political upheavals, with many peasants losing their land and being thrown out of work. Rice exports dropped 46 percent from a peak in 1928 to their nadir in 1931.Footnote ⁵² The period from 1944 to 1954 would be even more calamitous, leading to even more severe contraction of land under cultivation, more joblessness, more depopulation of parts of the delta, far higher levels of migration, and – of course – more violence and more dead. The downturn began at the end of World War II. By 1944, exports from the Mekong Delta, once one of the world’s major rice baskets, had plunged to their lowest level since 1912.Footnote ⁵³ By 1945, with American air attacks, overall exports from Indochina – including rice – had plunged even further, to 1.4 percent of 1940 levels.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the western Mekong Delta in particular, provincial rice cultivation dropped, depending on the province, between 20 and 85 percent in 1945.Footnote ⁵⁵

By 1945, then, delta inhabitants had to cope with dramatic economic shocks. Problems cascaded: with little rice slated for export, less was planted; with less planted, landowners had less need for harvest labor, thereby throwing many landless laborers out of work; in response, some of them turned to banditry, others to politics. The Chinese rice millers had no rice to mill; landowners could not pay off their creditors; moneylenders acquired land they did not want and became cash-poor. This unfolding economic disaster primed rural inhabitants for the political upheavals that followed. Plantations were breeding grounds of discontent, as the landless workers in places such as the LaBatsche plantation (Sóc Trăng province) were pulled into ethnic and political violence.

1.4 Conclusion

By the summer of 1945, the Mekong Delta was under enormous stress. Rice production had plummeted. Thousands of laborers were out of work. Migrants were flowing in and out of the delta, and from the countryside to the cities of the delta. By September, France was sending troops back to the South, promising to retake the colony of Cochinchina that it had lost. The delta was being primed for a massive level of violence. To this priming, and its eventual release, we now turn to understand the fractious August General Uprising of 1945, the spark for the war that followed.