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By Andrew Forbes

By the mid-19th century two distinct quarters of Hanoi, the Old City in the east and the Citadel to the west, were already long established and thriving. Yet it would take a third element, the French colonial quarter, to transform old Thang Long into modern Hanoi and create, in the process, the loveliest capital city in Southeast Asia.

France had been involving itself in Vietnam's affairs, albeit in an indecisive and intermittent fashion, for more than two centuries. Initially the motivation was twofold, the propagation of Christianity – specifically the Catholic Church – and profit through trade, especially in spices. In fact, both were closely linked. In 1627 a young French Jesuit, Alexandre de Rhodes, arrived in Hanoi and was permitted temporarily to stay by Trinh Trang, the ruling Trinh Lord (1623-57). Initially Trinh Trang seems to have welcomed de Rhodes, who brought with him an elaborate clock and a gilded tome on mathematics as presents from France. Within two years he had outworn his welcome, however – seemingly his preaching against the ‘evils of polygamy' had distressed the imperial concubines, who saw their position threatened by the incomprehensible customs of this new religion. Nevertheless, during the two years he stayed in Hanoi, de Rhodes (who kept careful records) made 6,700 Vietnamese converts, including 18 nobles. Vietnam was already on its way to becoming the second most Catholic country in Asia after the Philippines.

Determined to continue his propagation of the Christian faith in Vietnam, de Rhodes returned to France where he sought support from both the religious and commercial establishments. To win over the former he portrayed Vietnam as a land ripe for conversion, while he wooed the latter with tales of Vietnam's great wealth and potential, a land where ‘even the fishermen weave nets from silk'. Rhodes died in 1660, but just four years later the Vatican accepted his missionary programme, while in the same year – through no coincidence – the French East India Company was created. France almost acquired a territorial foothold in Vietnam at the time of the Tay Son Rebellion (1772­–1802) when a French priest called Pigneau de Béhaine adopted the cause of the last Nguyen Lord, Nguyen Anh, who would later become the Emperor Gia Long. In exchange for French assistance against the Tay Son, Nguyen Anh promised to cede the port of Tourane and the Con Dao Archipelago to France, as well as to grant exclusive commercial rights for France throughout the country. Fortunately, for Gia Long this came to nothing, as French indecisiveness at home was followed by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and Vietnam was (at least temporarily) forgotten.

Things were to change in the mid-19th century, however. To the missionary zeal of the Catholic Church and the desire for trade not just with Vietnam, but beyond to southern China, was added the hubris of empire. A French philosopher, Charles Renouvier, sought to justify overseas expansion by promoting the idea of a mission civilisatrice or “civilising mission” to spread French culture and ideals to benighted foreigners – like the Vietnamese, for example, who, under the bitterly anti-Christian ruler Tu Duc just happened to be persecuting local Catholics and executing foreign priests at this time. Denouncing native converts as “poor idiots seduced by priests”, Tu Duc decreed that they should be branded on the left check with the characters ta dao or “heretic”, while European missionaries were to be drowned and Vietnamese priests cut in half lengthwise. A bounty in silver was offered for their capture.

It did not take the French long to react. Indeed, Tu Duc provided the French “forward party” that sought territorial expansion in Asia with a perfect excuse. Most of the initial action took place in central Vietnam, where the French seized the port of Tourane – now Danang – in 1858, and in southern Vietnam, where they took possession of Saigon a year later. In 1862, Tu Duc was forced to cede much of the area around Saigon to France, and to pay a substantial indemnity. Five years later France took over the remainder of the Mekong Delta, making the whole of southern Vietnam into the French Colony of Cochinchina.

Hanoi's turn came in 1872 when Jean Dupuis, a French adventurer and arms merchant, sailed down the Red River from Yunnan and occupied part of Hanoi. The Saigon authorities despatched a dashing young officer called Francis Garnier ostensibly to evict Dupuis, but Garnier – who happened to be an enthusiastic proponent of the mission civilisatrice and an arch imperialist – joined with Dupuis and seized the Hanoi Citadel. Within three weeks, Garnier's forces had extended their control over the entire region between Hanoi and the Gulf of Tonkin, including the port of Haiphong and the city of Nam Dinh. Back at the Imperial Palace in Hue, Emperor Tu Duc was understandably beside himself with fury. He immediately sent messengers north to his relative, Prince Hoang, the Nguyen military commander in Tonkin, ordering the expulsion of Garnier and authorising a substantial bounty in gold for every Frenchman killed.

Tonkin was in a state of chaos at this time. The Qing Dynasty in neighbouring China had recently, and at great expense, suppressed no fewer than three major rebellions against their rule – the Taiping, the Nian and the Yunnanese Muslim ­– and bands of defeated rebels, ordinary bandits, and bounty hunters loyal to the Qing had descended on Tonkin. Here they were dubbed “Flag Gangs” because of the different coloured standards they carried. There were Red, Yellow and Striped Flag Gangs, but the most powerful of all were the Black Flag mercenaries under the redoubtable leadership of their bandit-general Liu Yongfu. As soon as Liu learned of the bounty offered by Tu Duc for French heads, he led his forces towards the Hanoi Citadel and engaged the French. Garnier, who was clearly courageous but also foolhardy, led a bayonet-charge against the Black Flags but tripped over and was speared and decapitated. The Black Flags quickly departed with the heads of Garnier and several of his companions, apparently keen to collect the promised bounty. Certainly the Black Flags were aware that they had killed the French commander, but beyond this Liu Yongfu (knowing nothing of the founding of the Third Republic in 1870) apparently believed that Garnier was the son-in-law of Emperor Napoleon III. The Black Flag leader took a jewelled watch from Garnier's body that contained a picture of the officer's young wife. For the rest of his days Liu would proudly show off this likeness of the “French Emperor's daughter” he and his followers had widowed!

A skirmish had been lost, but a legend was born. Dupuis, who was not hurt, helped recover the mutilated corpses and reported: “There is nothing so horrible as these bodies without a head. There they lie, stretched out on straw. M. Garnier's clothes are in ribbons; his body is covered with wounds made by swords and spears. His chest has been cut open and his heart removed. Both hands are clenched. For the last time, I press his poor frozen right hand and swear that he will be avenged.” In such ways imperial mythology is made. Garnier had acted without the sanction of the French government in his seizure of Hanoi and raids across Tonkin, but the manner of his death, and the way it was reported, made him a hero at home. It also made further French intervention in the region inevitable.

Initially, between 1875 and 1882, French control over Hanoi was limited to a concessionary area to the south of the Old City and the Citadel that would eventually become part of the district known to the Vietnamese as Khu Pho Tay or ‘The Westerners Quarter'. In 1883, acting on the pretext of pacifying the north and driving out the remnants of the Chinese “Flag Gangs”, French forces under Captain Henri Rivière – this time with French government approval – reoccupied the Hanoi Citadel and began their conquest of Tonkin (though scattered resistance would continue for many years). In July 1883, the aged emperor Tu Duc died ‘with curses against the invader on his lips', according to a court communiqué. One month later, taking advantage of Tu Duc's death, France compelled the court at Hue to recognise French control over all Vietnam, which would henceforth be divided into three territories – the Protectorates of Tonkin in the north and of Annam in the centre, as well as the Colony of Cochinchina in the south.

In 1887 Hanoi, already the capital of the French Protectorate of Tonkin, was made capital of French Indochina, an area which would eventually include all the territories of modern-day Laos and Cambodia, as well as the port city of Guangzhouwan (now Zhanjiang) in the neighbouring Chinese province of Guangdong. The French lost no time in remaking Hanoi as the centre of their Southeast Asian Empire, for the city was intended both as a colonial administrative capital and as a showcase for French power and culture.

Starting in 1883, most of the citadel erected by Gia Long at the beginning of the 19th century was torn down and replaced by colonial barracks and military depots, while a wide new road was driven southeast to connect the diminished citadel with the French concessionary area by the Red River. Called after the first colonial governor, Paul Bert (and since renamed Trang Tien), this road marks the heart of the former French Quarter,  a series of four broad boulevards built south of the Old City to connect with the Red River dike in the east. Here, and around Hoan Kiem Lake that separates the area from the Old City to the north, the French built a series of grand colonial buildings including St Joseph's Cathedral, the Metropole Hotel, the History Museum – in a hybrid style considered indochinoise – and, most notably, the Hanoi Opera House. Further to the west, other fine colonial buildings were erected, including the Palace of Justice and, especially, the Governor-General's Palace, now the Presidential Palace.

To house the growing number of European bureaucrats and civil servants who arrived in Hanoi to administer the Indochinese territories, numerous French-style villas were built, complete with shutters and gable roofs, some quite grand in the west of the French Quarter, others less so further to the south. The writer Crosby Garstin visited in 1928 and noted, somewhat deprecatingly: “the villas are pure French, making no concessions to climate, and were it not for palms, bougainvillaea, etc., they might be standing in some pleasant outskirt of Paris – Neuilly for instance.” Yet it is this very French quality, set unexpectedly amidst rivers and lakes in a tropical setting, and so closely juxtaposed with the bustling, unchanged Old City, perhaps the most traditional urban environment surviving in Southeast Asia today, that give Hanoi its extraordinary charm.

Fortunately the city centre suffered relatively little physical destruction during the long years of war between the Japanese invasion of 1941 and the final American withdrawal in 1975, though its people suffered a great deal. Political considerations and world opinion ensured that, while bombed, Hanoi in no way sustained the same levels of damage as cities like Vinh and Nam Dinh, or even Haiphong. After the establishment of the communist regime in 1954, Hanoi was also fortunate in a strange way to be poor enough to escape the worst excesses of Soviet-style architecture, though – especially around Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum and Ba Dinh Square – some unreservedly ugly Socialist buildings were erected. Instead, rather like Havana, the lovely and historic capital of Vietnam's long-term socialist ally Cuba, the city was left to decay and crumble through decades of austerity, until doi moi and the politics of free market reform began, ever so gradually, to be introduced after 1986. Today Hanoi is a long way ahead of Havana in terms of restoration and renewal, but both cities are architectural treasure-troves that, when properly restored, should bring future growth and prosperity to their people.

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Text by Andrew Forbes; Photos by Pictures From History - © CPA Media