Article

Indo-China

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Indo-China

Scope and Historical Definition

“Indo-China” in the literature of the Straits and Malayan Branches of the Royal Asiatic Society denotes the mainland territory stretching from the southern coast of China to the Mekong Delta, encompassing the modern states of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the western portions of Thailand and Myanmar. The term was not a fixed political designation but a geographical and civilisational one, applied to the region as a whole and, in specific contexts, to particular sub-regions such as Cochin-China (southern Vietnam) or the Siamese-Lao frontier interior. The Society’s literature treats the region as a zone of overlapping political, linguistic, and commercial influences, where the Mon-Annam peoples, the Khmer, the Siamese, and later the French colonial administration each left distinct imprints on the landscape and its populations.

The earliest substantive treatment in the Society’s pages is C. Otto Blagden’s 1894 comparative linguistic study, which frames the Malay Peninsula as an “outlying province” of the Indo-Chinese mainland, “closely connected as they are in geographical position but widely sundered at the present day in regard to the ethnological and philological characteristics of the greater part of their inhabitants” [1, p. 23]. Blagden’s formulation captures the central tension that runs through the Society’s literature on the region: Indo-China is simultaneously a source of ancient civilisational influence radiating outward and a space of ongoing political contestation among European powers.

Linguistic and Ethnological Connections

The most sustained investigation of Indo-China’s relationship to the Malay world in the Society’s literature is Blagden’s 1894 paper, which argues that the dialects of the Peninsula’s aboriginal tribes preserve a substantial layer of Mon-Annam vocabulary testifying to a former period of political dominion by a Mon-Annam race over the Peninsula before the Malay migration [1, pp. 21–24]. Blagden’s comparative vocabulary spans approximately one hundred lexical items across eight semantic categories—body, animals, plants, inanimate objects, qualities, actions, and numerals—with correspondences drawn from Mon (Peguan), Khmer (Cambojan), and up to fourteen “uncivilized” Indo-Chinese dialects including Ka, Chong, Samre, Por, Cuoi, Phnong, Stieng, and Prou [1, pp. 28–40].

A particularly significant finding concerns the Johor dialect recorded by Miklucho-Maclay, which possesses a numeral series extending to seven that matches the Peguan (Mon) system rather than either old or modern Khmer, suggesting that the Peninsular Mon-Annam element predates the divergence between the two branches [1, pp. 48–49]. Blagden identifies the lower Menam valley as the most probable source region for this element, given its geographical position between the Mon and Khmer language fields and its ease of access to the Peninsula [1, p. 50]. He further notes that the Sakai dialects share the Mon-Annam syntactical structure (subject–verb–object), while the Negrito Semang dialects follow a different order (genitive before noun; object before verb), indicating that the two groups experienced the Indo-Chinese influence through different mechanisms [1, pp. 43–44].

Blagden corroborates his linguistic evidence with Chinese dynastic records. The Liang dynasty chronicle (A.D. 502–556) records “Tun-Sun” as a peninsula over a thousand li in extent, with five kings acknowledging the supremacy of Fu-nan [1, p. 50]. Moura’s account, drawing on Chinese sources, states that in 627 A.D. the King of Chon-lap (Camboja) united Fu-nan under his authority, and by c. 650 A.D. had incorporated states “towards the isthmus of the Malay Peninsula” [1, p. 52]. Blagden concludes that the Mon-Annam races, who in the early centuries of the Christian era were the dominant peoples of Southern Indo-China and the main channel through which Hindu civilization and Buddhism were communicated to the Burmese and Siamese, extended their influence as far south as the Malay Peninsula [1, pp. 46–47].

A corrigendum issued by Blagden in 1903 corrected approximately thirty typographical and substantive errors in the original paper, the most significant being the replacement of “Papuan” with “Melanesian” in the classification of a language group [2].

Diplomatic and Colonial Encounters

The Society’s literature also documents the repeated failure of British diplomatic engagement with Vietnam, a process that Nicholas Tarling traced systematically in 1966 [3]. Tarling’s article covers the full arc of British attempts to open relations with Vietnam from the Crawfurd mission of 1821–22 to the French seizure of Tourane and Saigon in 1858, arguing that the Nguyen dynasty’s consistent policy of avoiding European entanglement prevented Britain from establishing any meaningful relationship with the country [3, pp. 19–51]. The Crawfurd mission itself, by alerting Minh-mang to the possibility that French influence might provoke British intervention, “put the seal on the Nguyen policy of avoiding all European entanglements whatsoever” [3, p. 5].

Subsequent missions met with consistent rebuff. The Phlegethon visit of 1845, a purely complimentary mission thanking the Emperor for rescuing shipwrecked crews, was met with obstruction at Nha-trang; the Vietnamese insisted on communicating with the British Crown rather than the Governor-General of India, and no capital audience was granted [3, pp. 12–14]. Davis’s 1847 mission, carrying full powers from Queen Victoria, was denied a royal audience at Tourane [3, pp. 16–18]. Wade’s 1855–56 attempt to deliver Bowring’s letter to Hue was rebuffed at the river bar; he was confined to a village hall under armed guard for six days before being extracted by H.M.S. Rattler, and concluded that the country was “exclusive,” “thoroughly despotic,” and commercially unattractive [3, pp. 26–28].

The French attack on Tourane in April 1847, in which Lapierre seized and destroyed Vietnamese junks, led to an edict excluding Europeans and putting a price on missionary heads; Emperor Tu-duc subsequently ended the royal trade to Singapore, and by the mid-1850s no square-rigged Cochin-Chinese vessel was seen at Singapore [3, pp. 15–16]. The joint Franco-Spanish expedition of 1858 seized Tourane in August and subsequently Saigon, creating the nucleus of the future French colony of Cochin-China; the British Government, preoccupied with the Indian Mutiny and the Elgin mission to China, took no countermeasure [3, pp. 31–33]. Tarling notes the paradoxical effect of this development in strengthening British interest in northern Borneo as a counterweight [3, p. 34].

Administrative and Economic Structures

The French colonial administration of Cochin-China generated its own body of literature in the Society’s pages. M. Camouilly, a French colonial administrator, published in 1886 a paper arguing that a comprehensive cadastral survey of the colony would be prohibitively expensive, practically unfinishable, and destructive of the efficient Annamite communal tax-collecting system [4, pp. 273–291]. Camouilly drew on the experience of France’s own cadastral survey, which took over forty years and cost 160 million francs, to argue that a similar undertaking in Cochin-China would never be completed [4, pp. 276–277]. He contended that the existing Annamite commune system already collected land revenue efficiently through collective village liability, governing 1.6 million inhabitants through only 2,450 municipalities without the expense of individual tax collection, litigation, or enforcement [4, pp. 285–286].

Camouilly proposed instead the voluntary application of the Torrens system of title registration, as practised in Australia, to individual holdings whose owners requested it, arguing that Annamite landholders, who currently borrowed at ruinous rates from native moneylenders, would benefit from government-certified titles that could serve as collateral for loans from respectable banking institutions [4, pp. 287–289]. The colony’s rice exports rose from an average of 5,165,000 piculs (1881–82) to 8,538,000 piculs (1883–84), indicating an estimated 152,000 hectares of new cultivation brought under the plough in that period [4, pp. 282–283]. W. E. Maxwell, who translated and introduced the paper for the JSBRAS readership, explicitly noted his own disagreement with Camouilly’s anti-cadastral position while acknowledging the interest of the Torrens proposal [4].

A more granular picture of the Siamese-Lao frontier interior is provided by G. Dabin’s 1885 day-by-day journal of a 48-day overland journey from Bangkok to Ubon in February–March 1884 [5, pp. 103–117]. Dabin, a French Catholic missionary of the Missions Étrangères de Paris, encountered a rudimentary Siamese custom-house system (two men in a leaf hut levying a tax at provincial borders), a provincial governor of Laotian race governing “two or three hundred houses scattered about in the forest,” and multiple Cambodian and Burmese trading caravans moving along the same routes [5, pp. 107–108]. A particularly notable encounter was with a Cambodian mandarin—identified as the son of Phya Anuphat and second mandarin of Siem-rab—travelling with three elephants, two of which were presents for the King of Siam [5, pp. 107–108]. The text also records the presence of a French-built telegraph line running from Saigon to Bangkok, erected in 1884 along a road originally constructed by a Siamese Phya for communication with the Cambodian provinces [5, pp. 106–107].

Dabin devoted a substantial portion of the journal to the ruins of Puthai-saman, which he identified as a Khmer monument comparable to Angkor-vat “on a reduced scale” [5, p. 109]. He provided measured observations of the moat, causeways, sculpted gates, bas-relief walls, and the pyramidal central structure, noting the absence of any mortar or iron in the stonework [5, pp. 110–112].

Religious and Cultural Transformations

Rie Nakamura’s 2000 article examines the historical process by which Islam became established among the Cham people of central Vietnam, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam and Cambodia [6, pp. 55–66]. Nakamura’s central puzzle is why contemporary Cham communities in Vietnam and Cambodia practise two markedly different forms of Islam: the Bani (an indigenized, syncretic form with ancestor veneration, a six-rank priesthood, and weekly rather than daily prayer) in the south central coast of Vietnam, and orthodox Sunni Islam (Shafi’i school) in the Mekong Delta and Cambodia [6, pp. 55–56]. She resolves this by proposing a two-wave model of Muslim contact with Champa. The first wave, beginning as early as the ninth century, comprised Persian, Arab, Indian, and Chinese Muslim merchants who established a significant foreign community in Champa by the eleventh century but did not trigger widespread native conversion [6, pp. 58–59]. The second wave, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the height of Malay Muslim maritime trade, brought Malay proselytizers into direct contact with the Cham population and produced the mass conversion that generated the Bani tradition [6, pp. 60–61].

Two Arabic inscriptions deciphered by Ravaisse in the 1920s confirm a Muslim community in Panduranga (modern Phan Rang/Phan Ri area) by the latter half of the tenth or early eleventh century, indicating a city-like settlement with autonomous foreign inhabitants under Cham royal protection [6, pp. 58–59]. Portuguese missionary accounts from 1665–1678 record that by the 1670s “more than half” of the Cham population, including the king and his court, had converted to Islam, with the Malays explicitly identified as the agents of conversion [6, p. 61]. Nakamura’s 1996 field observation at the Ta San Mosque in Oudong, Cambodia, found Jahed priests whose six-rank hierarchy, ritual names, musical instruments, and use of the Cham script (akhar thrah) were virtually identical to those of the Bani in Vietnam, providing direct ethnographic evidence that the Bani form originated in Champa prior to the refugee migrations [6, pp. 63–64].

Natural History and the Colonial Museum

The Raffles Museum in Singapore functioned as the principal natural history repository for the Straits Settlements and received specimens from across the Malay world and Indochina, making it a natural venue for comparative zoological work of this kind [7]. Dr. R. Hanitsch, Director of the museum, published in 1918 a brief taxonomic note describing a serow (Capricornis sp.) found alive off the Annamese coast in February 1917 [7, pp. 59–65]. The animal was discovered by native fishermen off the peninsula of Phu’ong Mai (approximately 13°30′ N) in Annam, having apparently fallen from the high coastal cliffs; it died three days after capture despite drinking readily but refusing all food [7, p. 57].

Hanitsch’s comparative skull measurements show the Annamite form to be closest to C. s. rodoni from Chamba (Western Himalayas), yet it differs in being narrower across the premaxillae, zygoma, and posterior palate, with longer but narrower nasals and greater frontal height [7, p. 61]. Externally, it does not match rodoni (which has a white breast) nor jamrachi from Darjiling (which has a coal-black forehead and short coat), and it lacks the creamy-white stockings of C. rocherianus from Along Bay, Tonkin, which locality would otherwise suggest [7, pp. 63–64]. Local Annamite knowledge held the animal to be nocturnal, rare, and restricted to mountains; its flesh was considered edible but unlucky, and its horns were valued by Chinese apothecaries for treating nervous diseases [7, p. 57]. The article reflects the broader colonial-era pattern in which European administrators and missionaries in French Indochina collected and forwarded natural history specimens to British institutional repositories, with taxonomic authority remaining largely in London-based hands [7].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on Indo-China reveals a shifting set of priorities across more than a century. The earliest contributions, from the 1880s, are dominated by first-hand travel narratives and administrative reports: Dabin’s missionary journal provides a practical, if unselfconsciously framed, account of the Siamese-Lao frontier interior [5], while Camouilly’s paper on the Cochin-China survey question reflects the administrative preoccupations of the early French colonial period [4]. Both were translated or mediated for a Straits Settlements readership, underscoring the region’s relevance to British commercial and strategic interests in the Straits.

The 1890s saw a turn toward philological and historical reconstruction. Blagden’s 1894 paper, drawing on published vocabularies and a short field collection of Besisi and Mentra words, attempted to revive a line of inquiry first opened by J. R. Logan in the 1850s, which Blagden contended had been neglected or misinterpreted by subsequent scholars [1, pp. 22–23]. The paper was explicitly framed as a preliminary outline intended to stimulate further investigation, and Blagden acknowledged his limitations as a non-specialist philologist [1, pp. 55–56]. The 1903 corrigendum [2] confirms that the paper circulated widely enough to warrant formal correction.

The mid-twentieth century brought a more systematic diplomatic and political analysis. Tarling’s 1966 article, drawing on Foreign Office dispatches, India Office records, and the correspondence of Bowring, Wade, and various Singapore and Hong Kong officials, provided the first systematic account of British-Vietnamese relations in the 1840s–1850s, situating them within the broader framework of British policy in Southeast Asia and the competitive dynamics with France [3, pp. 19–51]. The article extends Alastair Lamb’s 1961 documentary study of earlier British missions (1778–1822) into the post-Crawfurd period [3].

The most recent contribution, Nakamura’s 2000 article, represents a methodological shift toward ethnographic fieldwork combined with archival research. Her 1996 visit to a Jahed mosque at Oudong in Cambodia became the linchpin of her argument, providing direct evidence that challenged Maspero’s earlier hypothesis of conversion in Cambodia and situating Cham Islamization within Reid’s broader framework of the “critical phase” (1550–1650) of religious transformation in Southeast Asia [6, pp. 63–64]. The article draws on her own fieldwork in Vietnam (1993, 1995/6) and Cambodia (1996), supported by the Luce Foundation and Toyota Foundation, as well as on the Paris Foreign Missions archives and the Malay annalistic tradition [6].

Across this arc, the Society’s literature on Indo-China moves from the practical and administrative to the philological and historical, and finally to the ethnographic and historiographical, reflecting both the changing nature of European engagement with the region and the evolving methods of the social sciences.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C.O. Blagden (1894). Early Indo-Chinese influence in the Malay Peninsula, as illustrated by some of the dialects of the aboriginal tribes JSBRAS 27: 21–56. Read on JSTOR
  2. C.O. Blagden (1902). A Malayan element in some of the languages of southern Indo-China JSBRAS 38: 1–17. Read on JSTOR
  3. N. Tarling (1966). British relations with Vietnam, 1822–1858 JMBRAS 39(1): 19–51. Read on JSTOR
  4. M. Camouilly (1886). The survey question in Cochin-China JSBRAS 18: 273–291.
  5. G. Dabin and W.E. Maxwell (1885). A missionary’s journey through Laos from Bangkok to Ubon (.E. Maxwell JSBRAS 15: 103–117.
  6. R. Nakamura (2000). The coming of Islam to Champa JMBRAS 73(1): 55–66. Read on JSTOR
  7. Hanitsch R (1918). On a serow from Annam JSBRAS 78: 59–65.