Event

Please note that this event has been cancelled

On May Day 1930, the third day of the fourth month in the Year of the Horse, what would become a violent anti-colonial rebellion, broke out in the north-central Vietnamese provinces of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh. The unrest spread south to the province of Quảng Ngãi and as far as Saigon. It took several months for the French administration to suppress the uprising by deploying the Foreign Legion and bombing the rebels from the air. By the time the rebellion was quelled in 1931, the French had killed more than 1,700 Vietnamese, while only a single Frenchman died. Scholars, such as James C. Scott, have argued that the Great Depression pushed cultivators already living on the margins of subsistence to take up arms. Others, such as Ngô Vĩnh Long and Huỳnh Kim Khánh, have argued that the newly formed Indochinese Communist Party was decisive in organising the rebellion. In this talk, I will argue that the Nghệ-Tĩnh Uprísing, as it has become known, emerged instead from the machinations of the clandestne New Vietnam Revolutionary Party [Tân Việt Cách Mạng Đảng], which had secretly established a mass base in the provinces of northern Annam. I draw on a broad range of archival sources but make special use of recently published diaries, memoirs, and oral-history interviews. In this talk, I outline the alchemy of a rebellion that rocked French Indochina during the Year of the Horse and decimated the Indochinese Communist Party for years to come.

Haydon Cherry teaches the history of modern Southeast Asia at Northwestern University. His first book, Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City (2019) was a social and economic history of the urban poor in Saigon during the first decades of the twentieth century. That book argued that the intra-Asian rice trade, dominated by trade with the south China littoral, profoundly shaped the lives of the poor in the city. It focused on the entwined stories of a prostitute, a Chinese migrant labourer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a dissolute Frenchman whose itineraries took them all to Saigon. In the Year of the Horse derives from a broader study, A Pebble in the Eastern Sea, which examines the life and times of Đào Duy Anh (1904-1988), the most important Vietnamese scholar of the twentieth century. The Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Institute for Asian Studies, among other organisations, have all supported this research.