French Cochinchina

French Cochinchina was a French colony in the far south of Vietnam, covering the Mekong Delta and neighbouring provinces, with its capital at Saigon, today's Ho Chi Minh City. Conquered between 1858 and 1867, it was ruled directly by France, unlike the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, and became part of French Indochina in 1887. It ended in 1949, when it was merged into the State of Vietnam.

In 1858, citing the protection of Catholic missionaries whom the Nguyễn court increasingly saw as a political danger, Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly attacked Tourane, now Da Nang, with Spanish help from the Philippines, and in early 1859 turned on Saigon. The Vietnamese besieged the French there until 1861, when reinforcements pushed out across the delta. The Cochinchina campaign ended with the Treaty of Saigon of 1862, by which the Nguyễn ceded Biên Hòa, Gia Định and Định Tường provinces and the Poulo Condore islands, opened the delta to trade and allowed Catholic worship. In 1867 Admiral Pierre de la Grandière seized the remaining provinces of Châu Đốc, Hà Tiên and Vĩnh Long. In 1871 all these lands were organised into the colony of Cochinchina, and Admiral Dupré became its first governor.

Because Vietnamese mandarins withdrew after the conquest, France governed Cochinchina directly down to the provinces, districts and communes, under a governor who after 1887 answered to the governor-general of Indochina. The colony sent a deputy to the National Assembly in Paris. At first French and Vietnamese defendants were tried under separate legal codes, but Nguyễn law was later abolished and only French law applied. Its European population, the largest in Indochina, peaked at about 16,550 in 1940, mostly in Saigon.

French authorities took land from Vietnamese owners and peasants to expand rice and rubber, and by 1930 the French held over a quarter of the farmland, though large Vietnamese landlords still dominated much of the delta. Rubber planting began in 1907, clearing forests on the fertile "red lands" of the east. Insurgents in 1916 tried to storm Saigon's central prison. By 1930 a quarter of landowners held 80 per cent of the rice land, and over half the rural population were landless. Plantation workers recruited from the north brought the influence of the communist movement of Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, and strikes spread. Between 1930 and 1932 the authorities detained more than 12,000 political prisoners. In 1937 communists and Trotskyists won seats together on Saigon's council, and in November 1940 a communist-led insurrection in the delta was put down.

Japanese troops occupied southern Indochina in July 1941, leaving the French administration in place under supervision until a Japanese coup in March 1945 removed it. On 2 September 1945, in Hanoi, the Viet Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In Saigon, the return of French rule with British help set off a general uprising on 23 September, but by the end of 1945 the Viet Minh had been pushed into the countryside.

On 1 June 1946, while Viet Minh leaders were negotiating in France, a local assembly proclaimed an Autonomous Republic of Cochinchina on the initiative of d'Argenlieu, the High Commissioner, a step that helped bring on the First Indochina War. French settlers and southern autonomists resisted reunion with the rest of Vietnam, arguing that the territory was legally still a colony. After a new territorial assembly with a Vietnamese majority was elected in April 1949, it voted for the merger, which the French National Assembly approved and which took effect on 4 June 1949. The State of Vietnam was then proclaimed under the former emperor Bảo Đại.

Our maps label this territory Cochin China and draw the French colony in 1920, 1930, 1938 and 1945. The earlier Vietnamese state appears on our Đại Việt page, and the area today is part of Vietnam.