Technology and Empire: A Colonial Narrative of the Construction of the Tonkin–Yunnan Railway

ABSTRACT

The Tonkin–Yunnan railway constituted a significant piece of transport infrastructure of the French colonial empire in Asia. The 848-kilometer railroad was a technical achievement that took ten years to complete (1900–1910) at the cost of thousands of lives. Albert Marie, a young French engineer, worked on the construction of the Chinese section of the railway over a three-year period, from August 1904 to May 1907. Through the letters he sent to his family and the photographs he took during his assignment, vignettes of everyday life in the expatriate community and the local population, as well as of the daunting work on the construction sites in a hostile physical environment, are narrated in a very candid manner. The hardworking, ambitious, and (at times) bewildered engineer, like many of his contemporary fellow countrymen, was hopeful about French rule in parts of mainland Southeast Asia and southwestern China in the early twentieth century. Technology, in particular, was believed to be the instrument of civilization and modernity that would drive France's imperial expansion in the region and elsewhere; in 1907, Albert Marie left Yunnan to work on another daunting colonial railroad project, the Constantinople–Baghdad line.

Keywords:

• Tonkin–Yunnan Railway
• French Indochina
• mise en valeur policy

Acknowledgments

This article has its origins in a research project entitled “A Social History of The Rail Line From Kunming-Lao Cai-Haiphong” led by Stan B-H Tan Tangbau, whom I would like to thank for his comments on an earlier draft. I wish to express my gratitude to Elisabeth Locard and Odile Bernard, who are both descendants of Albert Marie's (Odile Bernard's maternal grandmother was Albert Marie's sister, Marguerite) for providing biographical details and for their generous assistance in this project. I would like to extend my thanks to Russell H.K. Heng for his invaluable help in sorting out the photographs, and to the ISEAS library for granting me permission to reproduce some of the photographs from this collection.

Funding

Research for this article was funded in part by a SEASREP (Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program)–Toyota Foundation Grant for Comparative and Collaborative Research. No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Vatthana Pholsena is an Associate Professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History and Identity (Cornell University Press, 2006) and coeditor, with Oliver Tappe, of Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (Singapore University Press, 2013). Her current research examines everyday life and social memory of the aftermath of the Vietnam War in cold war Southeast Asia.

Notes

¹Bruguière 1963, 47–48, 50.

²The death of Doudart de Lagrée, the expedition's leader, in Yunnan on 12 March 1868 prematurely ended the exploration. Garnier was killed a few years later in Tonkin in December 1873.

³Osborne 2000, 75. For accounts of the French Mekong expeditions in the second half of the nineteenth century, see also Garnier 1985 (1873); Pavie 1901, 1906.

⁴Bruguière 1963, 41–43. The British also considered the construction of a railroad linking Bhamo (on the Sino–Burmese border) to Canton. However, on 2 December 1901, Lord Curzon announced in Rangoon that Great Britain would not undertake a line from Burma to Yunnan.

⁵The French senate overwhelmingly approved Paul Doumer's proposal on Christmas Day in 1898, thanks in part to lobbying by powerful industrial organizations, in particular, the Comité des forges, “an organization of deputies who represented districts with important mining and metallurgical interests” (Del Testa 2001, 43, 46). However, the French Metropolitan banks showed much less enthusiasm vis-à-vis his transportation infrastructure plans in Indochina and Yunnan, to such an extent that a few of them pulled out in the course of the project (e.g., the Crédit Lyonnais), while others (e.g., Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas) reduced their participation to a “symbolic” level. See Fourniau et al. 1999, 193; Bruguière 1963, 140–144.

⁶Brocheux and Hémery 1994, 74.

⁷Ibid., 75.

⁸Stuart-Fox 1997, 32.

⁹Del Testa 2001, 28.

¹⁰“ … construire des chemins de fer de pénétration partout où nous aurons le moyen de le faire. Nous arriverons ainsi à drainer vers le Tonkin tout le commerce chinois qu'on y peut attirer, et, à supposer que le total en soit faible, nous aurons fait du moins une œuvre politique d'un puissant intérêt pour la France.” Quoted from Fourniau et al. 1999, 184.

¹¹The term comes from the title of a book authored by Lord Charles Beresford, The Break-Up of China, published in 1899. In reality, China's humiliation did not extend to any loss of territory, though some areas were effectively brought under foreign control via concessions or leaseholds.

¹²His first letters to his family, written on board ship, are not dated. The sea journey from Marseille to Saigon usually took three to four weeks. Marie arrived in Saigon on 22 June 2004.

¹³Del Testa 2001, 120. See also Wright 1997, 322–345.

¹⁴Paninvong 1996, 5. The concept of mise en valeur was multifaceted. As the keystone of French colonial strategy, the ideology and its set of policies must be understood concomitantly as an economic program, a moral justification for exploitation, and a discourse of legitimation for France's so-called protective and benevolent rule in these territories of Southeast Asia. In a sophisticated demonstration, Susan Bayly shows that from the late nineteenth century, metropolitan and colonial scholarly circles shared similar concerns over racial and civilizational degeneration in French colonies. Most interestingly, those sentiments of disquiet were soon turned into a discourse of legitimation for the French presence in Indochina (Bayly 2000, 581–622). On the part of France, mise en valeur was also regarded as an act of cultural rescue, protection, and revitalization of the ancient civilizations that once ruled their colonial territories.

¹⁵Del Testa 2001, 197, 132.

¹⁶Bhabha 1997, 153.

¹⁷As Fanny Colonna has argued for French educational policy in colonial Algeria, the criterion of an “excellent” student was not to be “taken for a Frenchman,” but rather for one's ability to function as a balanced intermediary, neither too removed from Kabyle society nor too close to French norms, Colonna 1997, 346–370.

¹⁸Lécorché 1950, 69.

¹⁹Hulot 1990, 33–34.

²⁰See the topographical map by Henri Lartilleux, in ibid., 34.

²¹Lécorché 1950, 57.

²²In quotations from Albert Marie's letters, I use his transliteration of place names, in each case followed in brackets by the more common contemporary transliteration.

²³Translation by Jack Cambria.

²⁴Stoler 2002, 1.

²⁵Ibid., 6.

²⁶Del Testa 2001, 195.

²⁷The 464–km line was divided between sections of an average length of 46 km each. These sections were supervised by a lead engineer, who was seconded by a deputy chief and several lot chiefs.

²⁸I have been unable to find the contemporary transliteration for the names of these two places.

²⁹Vérignon 1946, 8.

³⁰Hulot 1990, 37.

³¹Rousseau 2014, 10.

³²Bruguière 1963, 59; Fourniau et al. 1999, 198.

³³Rousseau 2014, 11

³⁴Ibid.