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In a period that still seems to me not all that long ago, it was possible to find early postcards from Southeast Asia in the booksellers’ stalls along the Seine in Paris. They usually cost only a few francs (there were no euros in those days). The photos on them were interesting, because, without quite meaning to do so, they revealed a great deal about the indigenous cultures in that part of the world and their struggles with European colonialism. In Amsterdam, I suppose, a person as determined as I used to be could have found picture postcards that Dutch businessmen and administrators had sent back home from what’s now Indonesia. Portobello Road and many other places in London must have hidden British ones that their authors had posted from various places in the empire. Having come of age during the Vietnam War — which, to avoid confusion, I will hereafter refer to as the American War, the way the Vietnamese do — I was interested in those that came from Indochina.

Even the term Indochina is not without confusion. Until recent decades, Indochina was also known as Farther India. Both names referred to the peninsular part of southeastern Asia, the territory east of India and south of China: Burma, Thailand (formerly Siam), Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia (formerly Malaya). These were places that for great stretches of history had not only fought one another almost constantly, but were subject to the cultures of both India and China. Religion naturally occasioned much strife in this region, one which Stan Sesson, an American journalist a hundred years later, perfectly named “the lands of charm and cruelty.” Eventually of course, Hinduism waned in these areas while Buddhism ascended and Islam became the religion of Malaysia and a strong presence in certain other regions.

The era of European colonialism brought the British. They wanted to expand their control of India eastward, across Indochina, until they reached China proper, and then find ways of moving northward into that vast market. The French had a similar goal, but a different strategy. They wished to get a toehold in Cochinchina, the southernmost portion of the three kingdoms of what’s now Vietnam, where the Mekong finally empties into the South China Sea after a journey of five thousand kilometres from the Tibetan Plateau. They reasoned that if they controlled its mouth, they could follow the river straight up through Cambodia and Laos into southern China. When France captured Saigon in 1862, it believed it had the makings of great new entrepôt, a new Shanghai, as many said, that would allow them to dominate the Mekong and make it a commercial artery rivalling the Yangzi in importance. In 1863, they signed a treaty that gave Cambodia the status of a French protectorate. Three years later, a major scientific and commercial expedition was dispatched under Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier. Their report, published in 1873 as Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine, created a sensation in Paris, as it contained the first detailed study of the great “lost” city of Angkor. But their harrowing journey through territory virtually unknown to the West also resulted in the discovery of the Khong Falls on the Cambodia-Laos border, which made steam navigation all the way to China impossible. French plans then shifted to constructing a railway once they had acquired the middle and northern kingdoms of Vietnam: Annam, whose capital was Hué, and Tonkin, whose capital was Hanoi. The plan was never entirely successful, whereas today, the People’s Republic of China is building a high-speed rail system that will run from Kunming, in Yunnan Province, all the way down to Singapore.

France was demoralized at the time by its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and hoped to find solace, and much-needed revenues, in a new wave of colonial acquisition. The problem was the Thais, who controlled much of Laos. This obstacle wasn’t resolved until 1893 when another treaty gave France the land on the east side of the Mekong, while the Thais retained that on the west. Just as in the British Empire, there are colonies and then there are colonies: a heavily stratified system based on the amount of local political autonomy. A territory, a protectorate, a colony, and other fine distinctions — they all meant different things. French Indochina (Indochine française — the term did not become official until 1897) was never technically a part of France itself, as Algeria was. It was a ragged collection of little states, gathered by dubious means. France pledged to hold them together for commercial and political purposes, but was also forced to keep them separate and on unequal footing so as to prevent them from joining forces in an uprising.

The reason why Vietnam is such an easy place for Westerners to explore is that the French approved and accelerated the process by which the Roman alphabet supplanted Chinese characters there, a transition that also underscored the separateness of Vietnam from neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The tactic recalls how, in the days of the African slave trade, whites would often bring together slaves of different linguistic groups, hoping in that way to minimize talk of revolt. Cambodia and Laos have their own scripts derived from Sanskrit and Pali. Both are especially difficult for Westerners to master, however beautiful they may be to look at. (The Khmer script of Cambodia enjoyed somewhat of a vogue in the West when Angelina Jolie had a sample of it tattooed on her lower back.)

The French nationals who went to French Indochina to work, to administer or to save souls were just as diverse and just as predictable as the British who served the nineteenth century’s other great European empire. There is much to be learned about their roles from such excellent and easily translated books as Charles Meyer’s Les Français en Indochine 1860−1910 (1985). And it’s also fascinating to see how often and variously French Indochina popped up in both the serious and popular cultures of France. With what earnestness the readers and cinephiles in the 1950s and 1960s regarded Indochina’s most famous expat artist, Marguerite Duras, a Saigon native. With what amusement Parisians in the 1920s and 1930s listened to Josephine Baker, wearing one of her potassium-rich costumes, sing “La Petite Tonkinoise.”

So it was that following Dien Bien Phu that the reality of “French Indochina” ceased to exist and even the simple words Indochina and Indochine fell into disrepute. When the United States became interested in the area following the French defeat, it carefully adopted the term “Southeast Asia,” a usage that had two advantages: it had a broader geographical meaning, taking in many island nations, and it disguised the assumption that the United States was taking over where the French had left off.