Publications

Publications

Ouvrages

Ouvrages

Hanoi. City of the Rising Dragon.
Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002, 187 p.
with G. Boudarel (1926-2003), foreword by William J. Duiker,
translated by Claire Duiker

Hanoi. City of the Rising Dragon.
Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002, 187 p.
with G. Boudarel (1926-2003), foreword by William J. Duiker,
translated by Claire Duiker

§ A City which Remembers

• Introduction
• The city under the Waters
• A city of Legend
• Temples: The Guardians of History
• Invasion upon Invasion
• Homage to Henri Rivière
• Rural City or Urban Village
• Street Life in Hanoi: the phuong
• The Spirit of the Streets
• Villages and Labyrinths
• The City and its Cuisine
• Rituals of the Table
• Pho
• Flowering of Poets and Novelists
• Ong Do
• The Intellectual Nguyen Tuong Tam
• The Women of Hanoi
• Secret Loves
• Giac mo hoi huong [The Dream of the Return]
• Vu Bang and The Twelve Nostalgias

Invasion upon Invasion

Throughout its history Hanoi has been plagued by foreign invasions and was ravaged by bitter power struggles between the 13^th and 19^th centuries: the Mongols invaded twice in the 13^th century (1285 and 1287) before being definitively pushed back by the Tran, who won a decisive naval victory on the river Bach Dang ⁷; the Chams made two incursions towards the end of the 14^th century; then it was the Ming in 1406, and finally the French who took power in 1882. Once the colonial authorities were well established, they razed the citadel which had been rebuilt only fifty years earlier. The Imperial City was thus reduced to a simple watchtower (cot co). Such actions incurred the lasting enmity of the local inhabitants: “Hanoi is not a holy land in the religious sense of the term, but a sacred land,” wrote Nguyen Tuan, “Any foreigner who offends it must pay for it with his life” ⁸.

Francis Garnier and Henri Rivière were two Frenchmen who paid with their lives for their transgressions. Garnier, a young French military officer who seized Hanoi with a small detachment in the early 1870s, was killed in a skirmish with Vietnamese forces on the Bridge of Paper. Ten years later, during a second assault of the city, Henri Rivière met the same fate in the same place. But the fate of the citadel’s defenders was not any less dramatic: Hoang Dieu and Nguyen Tri Phuong both committed suicide before the advancing colonial French forces. The event was memorialized in a poem by an anonymous author.

“Homage” to Henri Rivière ⁹

I remember him
He had curly hair
He had a long nose
He whistled for his dog
His home was decorated with bottles
In his garden, he grew nothing but grass
He came to the village of Mat Do
To fight the Black Flags ¹⁰
In order to restore tranquility to the people
Who would have thought they would cut his head off?
And take it with them
Leaving his body there
We obey the decisions of the court . . .
To venerate you: a diet of bananas
A round of alcohol, a basket of eggs
Bon appétit, Sir
Let nothing trouble your tranquility
What misery is your lot!
Shit on them!

Notes