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Sometimes it almost seems as though every French national going out to the colonies (territoires d’outre-mer) and the like, whether for the civil service, the military, or the Catholic Church, or for some business concern such as the Michelin rubber plantations, felt the same urge to send photographic evidence to contacts in Europe, overwhelming them with proof of the region’s beauty and presumed strangeness and barbarity. Evidently such postcards were also exchanged between and among the various French colonies round the world. As an accumulator (collector is too dignified a word) of these early views of Indochina, I made my biggest discovery in a junk store (curio shop sounds way too grand) in Tahiti.

Picture postcards came about, slowly, with the daguerreotype in the middle of the nineteenth century. The British photographer and printer Francis Frith (1822−98) is one person strongly associated with the idea. He specialized in views of Middle Eastern landmarks. Yet in Europe and America, just as by extension in Southeast Asia, such privately produced photographic postcards, as distinct from those issued by government post offices with or without images, became the rage only around 1900, the year that Eastman Kodak introduced the first Brownie cameras. With that invention, anyone could be a photographer, needing only a local printer to become a postcard artist. Of my own accumulation, from which I have chosen sixty to illustrate this little text, the majority seem to come from the first decade of the twentieth century, judging by the postmarks found on some of them. It is important to remember that these were snapshots that Europeans took for their own purposes and that they reflect what Europeans believed they knew about Indochina and wished others to believe. Local populations had different priorities when they caused themselves (rather than permitted themselves) to be photographed. This is one reason such postcards have long been studied by scholars in the field of postcolonial theory.

There was of course a demand for studio portraiture in sophisticated cities such as Hanoi, Hué, and Saigon. In small communities in remote regions, the pretensions of the ruling elites were similar, but the facilities to satisfy them were not always first-rate. According to the city’s official historian, Battambang, western Cambodia, in 1907, had only “one photographer, but lacking electricity, photographs were taken outdoors.” The photographer was Chinese. People engaged him:

to come to their homes to take pictures but the photography apparatus of that time was large and it was difficult to carry up and down. Only the important and wealthy were able to have photographs taken due to the expense. Commoners dared not have their photograph taken because they believed that the camera was able to take human blood and shorten their lives, and they were certain that most of those who had their photograph taken would die a few months later.

The French were not being altogether disingenuous when they maintained that their empire was more than just a giant commercial venture but was also a mission civilisatrice. But the so-called civilizing ran in both directions. The French imposed their own ways of doing things in areas as different as religion, public education, and civil service examinations — in fact, the whole gamut of manners and practices that go together to make up a society. But French linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, curators — scholars of all types — studied and catalogued the cultures they found in the various colonies. They made them widely known and in doing so helped to preserve them even more than they imperilled them. The people who took the photographs in this book must have had baser motives. The images tell us a great deal about how the people in French Indochina dressed, worked, and deported themselves. But they also pander to the timeless appeal of sex and crime.

Postcard makers overlooked few opportunities to manufacture eroticism from the merely exotic. One image likely to be found in any large collection of Cambodian and Lao pictures will show bare-breasted dancers of the classical ballet that is important to those cultures. These were attempts to blur the distinction between French colonial postcards and “French postcards” and thus claim a place in art. The same applied to European postcards of bare-breasted women simply going about their daily labours in African countries, the Netherlands East Indies, Burma, Malaya, the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang, Singapore, and Labuan), Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands in general, and so on. One also sometimes sees bare-breasted Chinese and Japanese women in postcards of the period, but they tend to be posed carefully with a European eye, without much illusion of candidness. As for crime photos, Indochina and other European colonies provided much opportunity to exploit another type of voyeurism by recording whippings, beheadings, and even crucifixions (a specialty in the area near the northern borders of British Burma).

The demand for postcards of Indochina may have reached a peak after the Great War, though certainly it was still in force during the 1920s, when tokens of the Indochinese colonies were quite popular in Paris. The appeal lingered on until the 1930s, when supplanted by more traditional tastes — colourful landmarks or scenes of obvious natural beauty; in other words, postcards like those from everywhere else. That the more exotic and grisly style of postcards began to disappear during the time of greatest civil unrest against the French regime cannot be mere coincidence. In 1917, Ho Chi Minh, having taken up exile in France, began agitating against the French presence in Vietnam. In 1920, he joined the French Communist Party, and then went to study in the Soviet Union before being assigned to the East. In Hong Kong in 1930, he established the Vietnamese Communist Party, followed by more years of study and agitation in various cultures. It wasn’t until 1940, after being away for three decades, that he returned to Vietnam, for he could sense that, with the Second World War underway, the Vichy regime in France would sell out his country to the Japanese. He was right, of course. Where the World War left off, the war against the French colonial system started up. As Charles de Gaulle later said, “It was a dirty business on both sides.” The rest is history — and geography.