Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'french'
Viewing articles tagged 'french'
5 articles
The French arrive, 1876–1929
We let the French in. Most of our villages received them, between 1891 and 1899, as men who had come alone, who promised protection against the Lao and Siamese raiders from the west, and who had just taken the coast from the power that had taken it from us. The reasoning was not naive, and for a while it held. What we got over the next thirty ye...
The "Kingdom of the Sedang," 1888
On June 3, 1888, at the village of Kon Gung on the Poko north of Kon Tum, the chiefs of several Sedang villages signed a constitution that made a Frenchman their king. The Kingdom of the Sedang lasted about two years, issued stamps, medals and a flag, and is usually told as a comic episode in the life of an adventurer. It is worth telling from o...
The slave raids
At Stung Treng in the last century of the trade a person from our highlands sold for three or four bars of silver. The Lao word for us, Kha, means servant or slave. The Frenchman who wrote both of those things down in 1898 added a third sentence about us that we reproduce here because of what it shows about the men who came to abolish the traffi...
N’Trang Lơng and the Mnong resistance
For twenty-one years, from the burning of a French post in May 1912 to the arrival of the army’s road in 1933, the Mnong of the Plateau des Herbes, the grass hills where Cambodia, Cochinchina and Annam met, held the French out of their country. Their leader was Pa Trang Loeung, whom the Vietnamese write N’Trang Lơng: a koragn, a village mediator...
The first war in the highlands, 1946–1954
Between 1946 and 1954 France and the Viet Minh fought over our country, and both made our people the same offer: a country of our own, in return for soldiers. France gave the offer a name, a flag and two ordinances, and raised thirteen battalions of our men. The Viet Minh raised units of their own among us and promised autonomy. Our men fought o...
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