French conquest and colonial rule

In 1858 a French and Spanish fleet attacked Đà Nẵng, officially to protect Catholic missionaries. France took Saigon in 1859 and forced the Nguyễn court to cede three southern provinces in 1862; by 1867 all of the south was the French colony of Cochinchina. In 1883–85 France made central Vietnam (Annam) and the north (Tonkin) protectorates, and in 1887 joined them with Cambodia, and later Laos, into French Indochina. The Nguyễn emperors stayed on in Huế as figureheads.^•

The colony was run for profit. French companies opened rubber plantations, where many labourers died, and rice exports from the Mekong Delta soared while many peasants lost their land. State monopolies on salt, alcohol and opium weighed on the poor. A small Vietnamese elite was educated in French schools, and the Romanised script quốc ngữ spread.^•

Resistance took many forms: the scholar Phan Bội Châu’s Japan-inspired movement, Phan Châu Trinh’s call for modernising reform, the nationalist Yên Bái mutiny of 1930, and the Indochinese Communist Party founded that year by Nguyễn Ái Quốc, later known as Hồ Chí Minh. All were harshly repressed. In 1940 Japan occupied Indochina, leaving the French administration in place, and in March 1945 overthrew it.^•

Why it matters today