THE PEOPLE OF THE EMINENT SOUTH
Of the eighteen to twenty million people of French Indo-China two thirds
are Annamese. That does not mean that Annam has so many inhabitants. The
Annamese are the predominant people of all the lowlands of France’s
Far-Eastern empire, not merely of Annam. Their own land, though nearly
eight hundred miles long, is very narrow, containing barely sixty
thousand square miles, on which between seven and eight million people
manage to wrest subsistence almost entirely from a plain twelve to fifty
miles wide between the mountains and the sea. Naturally they have
gradually overrun the other divisions of Indo-China, submerging the
other races there, just as the tricky, the less pleasing, the more
sophisticated always drive out the naïve and the more lovable on this
sad old globe of ours. Their Chinese religion of ancestor-worship,
requiring every man by hook or crook to leave a son behind him, has of
course much to do with this majority.
As far back as history mentions it, what we now call Indo-China was
under the sway of the Cham, then of the Khmer, tribes of a certain Hindu
culture who subjugated the land and drove the aborigines, if such their
predecessors were, into the mountains. Later they in turn were conquered
by what we now know as the Annamese. One guess is that this dour people
originally came from Tibet or the lower mountains about it. They
themselves say that they once inhabited southwestern China—Yünnan,
Kwangsi, Kwangtung, and Tonkin—at least five thousand years ago. Many of
their customs and physical characteristics bear out this statement, but
they are so mixed with the Cham and the other peoples they found in
their new home that they have many traits not typical of the Mongol
race, and one is every now and then surprised to find a nearly Aryan
nose among them.
Whatever their exact origin, they came down from somewhere to the north
and filled, as tightly as a plump leg fills a stocking, this narrow
strip of plain between the coast and the mountains, pushing back,
killing off, and absorbing the tribes that preceded them. Highlanders to
begin with, perhaps, they have now lived in tropical lowlands and rice
marshes for so many centuries that they have gradually taken on tropical
characteristics; hence it is not at all strange that they are the
weakest and the ugliest of all those reputedly of the Mongolian race.
Hardly of medium height, less vigorous than their neighbors, they are
much like the Chinese, yet in many ways quite different from them also.
They have been known to the Celestials for centuries by the name first
given them when the two peoples came in contact with each other—the
Giao-chi, or “Big Toes.” The noticeable spread of the great toe away
from the others, suggesting mountain-climbing ancestors, is still
conspicuous among them even in this day of French shoes. Though the name
no doubt had its origin in that scornfulness of the Chinese for any race
but their own, in due season the Annamese began to call themselves
Giao-chi also, just as they followed the Chinese example in calling
their country Annam, Land of the Eminent South, or words to that effect.
As I may have said before, the white man’s name “Indo-China” is
particularly fitting; France’s Far-Eastern possession is certainly the
half-way station between the Chinese and the Hindus. The Annamese are no
more really Chinese than are many of the Indian races that are called by
that name, yet they are quite unlike the Hindu-cultured Cambodians and
have nothing in common with the people of Laos, beyond the Annamese
chain, who are akin to the Siamese. In mere physical matters they are
not only smaller but darker than the Chinese, tawny, though less so than
the Cambodians, with flat skulls, faces, and noses, protruding
cheek-bones, and large mouths that are made doubly conspicuous by their
permanently blackened teeth and thick lips swollen with what we miscall
betel-nut.
Thus we have come in leisurely sequence to the most conspicuous, the
most despicable perhaps, certainly the most inexplicable point in the
physical appearance of the Annamese. They have never practised
mutilation of their women in the Chinese manner by binding their feet;
infanticide is reputed to be very rare, if known at all; but about
marriage time, which in Annam is early in life, every Annamese, of
either sex, is expected to have his teeth lacquered black by a process
said to be very painful. Recalling what a dentist can do to us in half
an hour, it is not hard to believe that they suffer during a task that
takes day after day. The lacquering loosens the teeth, but the
_nhoc-nam_, or ground-fish sauce with which every Annamese seasons his
food, tightens them again. The men are not so selfish as to force the
women to go through the beautifying process alone, as in so many lands,
but step up and take the same medicine themselves, so that the mouths of
both sexes resemble rat-holes. Perhaps it is this that makes the
Annamese seem more stupid than the Chinese they in so many other ways
resemble—or perhaps it is merely their southern indolence of manner, or
the circumspection of a subject race as compared to freemen.
Every people has its own style of beauty, however, and to the Annamese a
person is handsome only if his teeth are jet-black. “Any dog can have
white teeth,” say the Annamese, looking disparagingly at Europeans. To
them white teeth are not only ugly but immoral! For the _congaïe_, the
Annamese girl, who has not blackened her teeth, is usually, if not
always, some Frenchman’s darling.
The blackened teeth alone would be bad enough, even if the people of
Annam were not also addicted to a custom common to a large part of
oceanic Asia. Almost all of them chew betel-nut, as we persist in
calling it. It is really the nut of the arec-palm and the leaf of the
betel-vine that often climbs this, mixed with lime to bring out the full
strength of the ingredients. The wand-like arec-palms that rise straight
and soldierly, as if they fancied they served some useful purpose and
were proud of it, are the most conspicuous feature of any Annamese or
Tonkinese village. Whenever a child is born one more of these slender
trees is planted, with a betel-vine beside it, so that in time the
infant also may have its “betel-nut.” Large villages are almost hidden
in arec-palm forests. This tree produces nuts of about the size of a
walnut, in green clusters like a bunch of huge grapes, which grow, like
cocoanuts, just below the leaves. These, sold in the markets, the shops,
everywhere along the highways and the narrow trails, are cut up, wrapped
in a betel-leaf—whence the misnomer “betel-nut,” which does not
exist—smeared with lime, and thrust into the repulsive mouth.
A French colonial who had tried betel-nut once told me that he had a
sudden rush of blood to the head and felt warm and excited all day long.
Like opium, however, it was one of those things I prefer to take on
hearsay. It is strange that in China, land of bad habits, this mild vice
is unknown, unless we count the lower half of now Japanese Formosa. A
few old French colonials get the habit, as they become addicted to
opium, _congaïes_, and other customs of the East; but most of the ruling
race have more respect for at least their outward appearance. The
chemical action of the lime on the other ingredients produces a
blood-red cud, so that betel-nut chewers look as if their disgusting
mouths of apparently decayed teeth were full of blood, as if they were
in the throes of a hemorrhage—and didn’t know it. Some Annamese girls
would be good looking but for this blood-dripping mouth, repulsive even
when closed, for the constant use of betel-nut not only destroys the
gums but leaves the lips permanently swollen. On the other hand the
lacquering of the teeth and the chewing of betel-nut somehow manage to
save the Annamese from toothache, they say, though some of us might
prefer to suffer the pain ourselves rather than pass it on to the
beholder. The chemical action of lacquer and betel-juice in combination
seems to kill the microbes that lead to the dentist’s chair in other
lands, and no wonder; for surely no self-respecting microbe would take
up its habitat in an Annamese mouth.
In Hué and the two capitals alternately graced by the French
governor-general the younger people of the better class show evidence of
beginning to think of leaving off the enameling of their teeth, and even
of abandoning the chewing of betel-nut. But both customs are almost
universal among masses and classes alike wherever Annamese is spoken,
and many, like our rural tobacco-chewers, are proud of the distance they
can project the red saliva. This seems to be a favorite indoor as well
as outdoor sport, for they spit the stuff everywhere, not only
splotching with red every road and street in the land that is not
already red by nature, but even the whitewashed walls of the homes of
mandarins. In hiring an Annamese nurse-maid or cook one must insist that
no betel-nut be used in the house, and even then one’s best things are
likely to become gradually speckled with red.
Though the race as a whole is not noted for its manly beauty, the women
of Annam have a more pleasing appearance to Western eyes than do those
of China—except when they smile. Their expression is more _piquante_, if
you know what I mean. Those who become temporary wives of the French,
and do not blacken the teeth, sometimes do not even chew betel-nut, are
often pleasant to look upon during their younger years. To be sure these
are hand-picked; but almost without exception, irrespective of age, the
women of Annam are slender, sinuous, and graceful, with a sort of
gliding walk, the countrywomen especially very erect, their arms
swinging far behind them, as if they were constantly performing the feat
of balancing their big palm-leaf hats. Many have beautiful hands, small,
thin, and tapering, even though they do the hardest work of carrying and
grubbing in the rice-fields. To Annamese taste the chief points of
female beauty are black teeth, red heels—on bare feet, that is, not on
shoes, as in the case of foot-bound China—and oval faces, in contrast to
the round ones called for by Chinese standards of beauty. Great numbers
of the women of the Eminent South have the longest hair that I—nay, even
my wife—had ever seen, in certain cases reaching well below the knees.
There are those, however, who consider inwardness more important than
outwardness, and for them let us begin by saying that in disposition the
Annamese are less gay, have little of the sense of humor so highly
developed among the Chinese—unless it be that they put on a mask before
the white man. This they do, of course, like any subjugated people, but
one seldom catches them laughing even when they have no suspicion of
being observed—seldom, that is, in comparison with that reservoir of
laughter, the Chinese. A Frenchman tells us that of all the people on
earth the Annamese have the greatest plasticity, are the most sly,
cunning, utilitarian, and the most assimilative—though often
superficially so. They show outward respect to parents and superiors,
but seem to be insincere and incapable of deep devotion—not unnaturally,
one would say, seeing that the race has been subjected for most of the
past two thousand years. Never showing his real thoughts on the surface,
conserving his own personality under all circumstances, the son of Annam
adapts himself, passively resists, triumphs when he seems to be
defeated. Those who know him well credit him with a great love of his
native land, especially of the village where he was born. The French
insist that the Annamese are great thieves, which, with all their
faults, can hardly be said of the Chinese.
During all the centuries that China held Annam enslaved, “like a kept
mistress,” it became Chinese. It took from China its art, its morals,
its writing, its costumes, its customs, its gods; it is so Chinese that
there are still celebrated in the temples of Annam festivals and
formalities that have not taken place in the Celestial Empire for
hundreds of years. Now it is France that rules, and the Annamese have
become French. If Russia had conquered them, asserts a Frenchman, they
would have icons in their homes and sleep on unlighted porcelain stoves.
Either they are naturally copiers or they have found copying the easiest
way in a hot climate; long dominated, they seem to have lost through
evaporation the “pep” of their probably highland ancestors. No doubt
this explains why, although of old it was literary, artistic, responsive
to the most subtle plays of the spirit, Annam never produced a single,
great personal work, a great poet, an original architect, a powerful
moralist, a painter or a sculptor of genius. “The foreign model shines
through everything admirable between the Mekong and the Gulf of Tonkin.”
The Annamese can work at the task in hand with infinite taste and
patience; what he lacks in originality he makes up to a degree in
ingeniousness; but the creative spark seems never to have flashed forth
in him.
I suppose it is this copy-cat characteristic that makes him show no
surprise at the inventions of the West. You cannot startle this ancient
Oriental world with the mechanical marvels of the new. It accepts them,
but it is not astonished. Give the yellow race the telegraph, and they
send telegrams; the phonograph, and they listen; the railroad, and they
buy their tickets and take their seats—granted that there are any left;
the automobile, and a self-confident young man pours in gasoline and
steps on the starter, knowing only that for some reason this makes the
thing go. The force of this people lies in its shrewd plasticity; the
Annamese do not resist, they adapt themselves; they espouse on the
instant the practices and customs of the conqueror. Endowed with an
immeasurable pride, they strive, not to do their best in their own line,
but to imitate their masters, to outdo them in their own field. It is
not because they admire them, one suspects; it is merely to prove that
they are as smart as any one else. Thus Annamese students, with
centuries of memorizing Chinese characters behind them, often outdo in
French even the French youths in their classes.
Though they take so readily to Western inventions, no Annamese will use
a mechanical contrivance if he can do without it. With all the
corkscrews and can-openers in the world within reach of his hand, your
_bep_, or Annamese cook, invariably draws corks and opens cans with his
teeth. In putting fuel on his fire he prefers his hands to a shovel. You
may show him better methods, but he continues to make sure of the
condition of an egg by whirling it on its side; if it is fresh it will
not whirl, according to the _bep_; the older it is the more it will
gyrate, he insists. Try it on your own “strictly fresh” eggs some
winter, ye slaves of the land of cold-storage—and if he is right they
may be whirling still when spring comes.
Though they sometimes eat sharks, the Annamese worship what they call a
whale, really the dolphin or porpoise. According to legend, one of these
acrobats of the sea once got under an emperor’s boat and kept it from
sinking until it could reach shore. Even students in French _lycées_
still believe this yarn, and if one of these “whales” dies and is washed
ashore, it is given honorable burial with much ceremony. The Annamese
worship trees, especially if they are huge, or very old, or of strange
shape; and to propitiate the demons or to win the favors of the good
spirits that inhabit them they put under them little vases of the lime
used with the betel-nut that even spirits are reputed to enjoy. Scores
of these tiny jars may sometimes be seen at the foot of a single tree.
No Annamese will cut down those trees, such as the banyan, that are
especially sacred. The French sometimes have to chop down with their own
fair hands trees that are in the way of civic improvements. At Tourane
two Annamese converts to Christianity were given good wages and all the
wood in a huge tree that was hindering progress, and earned fifty
piastres for two days’ work, fifty times their normal income. Being
Christians, they did not of course care how many trees were cut down.
There are other lands where so effective a superstition would be well
worth entertaining.
The religions of Annam are in the main those of China. Not only “whales”
and trees, but big or queerly shaped rocks, the rat, the silkworm, the
elephant, above all the tiger, which they never mention except by the
honorable title “Ong Kop,” have their worshipers. But the most general
cult is that of their ancestors and of the village genii. The local god
may be some mandarin who ruled the village centuries ago, some native
son who became a great scholar, some former mistress of an emperor who
aided her native town in some crisis; or it may merely be a beggar or an
executed robber, some great calamity after his death having proved that
his spirit must be propitiated, perhaps a new temple built to enthrone
it. In return for all this adoration the village genius is expected to
protect the village from drouth, epidemic, and similar catastrophe.
One can scarcely travel, however rapidly, through Annam without seeing
one of these fêtes to the genius of some village or other. Parades
riotous with color make their way along the narrow dikes, across the
rice-fields, the fantastic costumes mirrored in the flooded sloughs. Not
only do women take no part in the cult of village genii, any more than
they can effectively worship an ancestor, but neither do any of the men
except those village notables who are not in mourning and in whose
family full peace and harmony prevails. I gather that if a wife has
recently run off with a lover or wilfully blackened an eye of her
notable spouse, or if a daughter has eloped during the year with a
Frenchman but without benefit of clergy—though this is perhaps no such
serious matter—the husband or father involved would not be available or
eligible for the rites in honor of the village genius, but would pass
the day in seclusion. An incentive surely to domestic harmony! The
plebes of course have merely the honor of paying the bill, as in any
other part of the globe.
There are many temples in Annam, but the largest of them are small
compared with those of China, and in many details they are distinctly
different. Elephants appear among the decorations; dragons are not so
numerous. The roofs tilt with a longer, almost coquettish, curve; the
tropical climate has given them a more luxurious brown; there is rather
an air of equatorial languor about them. Most of them are better kept
too, as if either the worshipers were more devout or there were better
supervision over the caretakers. But this is perhaps merely another
example of the superiority in cleanliness and order of Annam over China.
Possibly it is due to the presence of the French, who have ruled over
them during the life of almost all those now living, that the Annamese
have a little more conception of the line between filth and its
antithesis than is given to Celestial understanding. Or it may be that
on the whole the people of Annam are less noisome in their personal
habits than their northern neighbors because they are less
poverty-stricken, and because total indifference in sanitary matters is
more swiftly and visibly punished in so tropical a land. At any rate
there is no such slovenliness, no such stench, in the cities of Annam as
beyond the northern border; for one thing they are mostly on the coast,
with water plentiful, and they are small, none of those enormous
conglomerations of humanity to be found in hundreds of places throughout
China.
Gaudily painted little temples, weather-blackened shrines, generally
among trees, pass in constant procession as one hurries through the land
of the Eminent South. Now and again another procession enlivens the
landscape—a long file of people in their gayest robes, most of them
carrying high above their heads the parasols that are usually forbidden
to any but mandarins and foreigners, wending its way along the dikes.
They are on their way to a temple, or taking part in a wedding, perhaps
a funeral, in which latter case they carry with them gay paper
imitations of everything the deceased will need in the after-world, from
automobiles to concubines. Temple festivals are theatrical and musical
entertainments as well as religious ceremonies, even as in our churches.
Probably the mass of the people distinguish no difference. The charming
oasis of the _pagode_, as the French call it, may suddenly have taken on
life in the midst of the rice-fields. The dikes about it are covered
with files of people moving toward it; where there was once a road or
some other open space beside it there is nothing but streets of
makeshift shops that have sprung up overnight. There are improvised
restaurants, women roasting cakes; sellers of rice and _chumchum_, of
sugar-cane and oranges, of arec-nuts and betel-leaves, squat on their
heels near their round flat baskets—a whole village of fortune will have
sprung forth from the soil. The swarming crowd rumbles and clamors and
shrieks with full mouths, for this is the time when they are all
gourmands and when the whole region becomes one great family. Narrow
wooden benches bear rows of customers seated monkey-fashion on their
heels, stuffing themselves with swiftly moving chop-sticks. Every one is
dressed in his best, the villagers with floating black tunics, the
band-turban tight about the forehead, on which it leaves a whitish
streak untouched by the sunshine.
The temple itself, usually deserted, is full of natives, chewing,
spitting, shouting, their wooden sandals clacking. An air of gentle yet
barbaric splendor radiates through the place; religious furniture,
sumptuously carved and painted with lacquer or gold, gleams forth;
parasols, silk banners embroidered with mottoes and attributes and
moralities scintillate in the distilled sunshine. Everywhere, even in
the most distant corners, candles and joss-sticks burn; blue clouds of
incense cover with an impalpable veil the golden faces of the idols; the
altars are loaded with offerings; pasteboard horses, richly caparisoned,
spread their stiff legs. About the ritual vases, the big iron urns in
which incense and paper prayers by the myriad are burned, sacred swans
stand erect on bronze tortoises; every now and again the flame leaps
high in an urn, devouring a package of bars of gold or silver, made of
rice-paper painted white or yellow. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, two
generals pop forth from the wings, their backs a quiver of waving flags,
their lungs roaring forth challenges in a false key. With uplifted
sabers they march upon each other and indulge in what is meant to be a
terrifying pantomime, but nothing more serious comes of it than of most
Chinese battles. Frightful noises resound from their armies following
close behind them—two howling troops of ragged coolies shaking spears
and standards. The stage becomes a whirling chaos of gleaming flags and
shrieking soldiery, in which all visible likeness to a religious
ceremony fades away into pure theatricalism.
I was constantly running across religious celebrations. Sometimes gay
paper boats, their sails all set, were started off down a river to
appease the spirits of the stream. Or it might be at one of those
neglected little temples without door or roof which the slightest
village maintains for its local gods. First the worshipers _lam lie_,
kowtow to the stone or mud tiger at the entrance, a tiger with great
bulging eyes, usually sculptured in deep relief on a stone screen. Then
they go to lay their offerings on the altar—horses made of red paper,
pasteboard gourds containing sticks of incense, rice-paper ingots of
gold and silver. Fire-crackers explode, what the Chinese consider music
howls and shrieks, crowds swarm, the temple flares with decorations in
colored paper. In the front chamber there usually sat a shaven-headed
bonze wearing a golden paper crown and dressed in red, singsonging
Buddhist prayers from a ragged tissue-paper book. Beside and behind him
men were beating drums, large and small, or pieces of bell-metal, of
resonant hardwood, sometimes adding falsetto voices to the uproar.
Countrymen in not too clean garments crowded close on either side, until
men with sticks drove them back, again and again, sometimes by throwing
lighted bunches of fire-crackers into the massed throng. Old women with
sickening black mouths, contrasting unpleasantly with the gay
decorations, seemed to be the chief worshipers. The mandarin in a gauzy
black cloak who kept order knew enough French to tell me that they were
praying for peace, but not enough to specify just what they meant by it.
Another time, elsewhere, strange sounds drew me to a house where men of
professional countenance were playing on flutes, cymbals, tambourines,
or their Oriental equivalents, while the people were lamenting in
discordant voices. A family and its neighbors were praying about the bed
of a sick woman whose body would not cease swelling for all the
medicine-man’s mud plasters. That concert of uproar had lasted since the
night before; it was merely a question of who would tire out first, the
music, the sickness, or the invalid. Before I left, fire-crackers were
thrown about to scare off the evil spirits that were wilfully causing
the illness, and if that did not drive them away the master of
ceremonies was prepared to toss about handfuls of tissue-paper piastres,
in the hope that the covetous devils would leave the body of the sick
woman to fight for the money. If even this should not succeed, the
funeral procession starts with a band, followed by banner-bearers, then
by other ragamuffins carrying in a little paper temple the spirit-tablet
of the deceased, portable tables laden with roast pig and other
delicacies, and finally the gaudy bier, surrounded by howling mourners
trying to call the soul back to earth, perhaps against its wishes.
As there is really no Annamese religion, so there is no Annamese
literature, except the Chinese. Even their spoken tongue seems to be an
ancient Chinese dialect. It is a monosyllabic language, depending on
tones to give different meanings to the same words; and it is so
difficult that those Annamese who know French prefer to converse in that
tongue. A queer language indeed, explosive in pronunciation, so that the
friendliest little chat sounds like a violent quarrel, and until one
gets accustomed to it every conversation seems about to develop into a
fist-fight—or at least its Far-Eastern counterpart, clawing and
scratching. In writing, Chinese characters are used, therefore Annamese,
Japanese, Koreans, Formosans, Chinese of the north or south, can all
converse readily enough on paper; though as they do not pronounce the
characters at all alike the spoken word is of no use among them. Half a
century ago the French Jesuits gave the Annamese a romanized script, and
now thousands read their newspapers in it. In fact the government has
made this alphabetical writing obligatory in the schools, and it is far
more widely spread than a similar effort in China. But it is no such
simple matter as the uninitiated imagine to represent tones by an
extension of accent-marks. With the reform goes the ability to talk to
their neighbors on paper too, and the old classics are being lost to the
younger generation, even as in Korea and Formosa under the Japanese.
Polygamy is still legal in Annam, though for economic reasons it is no
longer usual. It remains a not uncommon practice for the wife who has
tried in vain for eight or ten years to bear her husband a son to put on
an old woman’s bonnet and go out and buy him a second wife. Not a bad
plan, surely an improvement on the extramarital secrecy of the West; it
no doubt makes for a more congenial companionship and incidentally
solves the servant problem, if ever there was one in Annam. Yet the
Annamese wife has a better social position than in most of the Orient.
Speaking of wives, in Annam kissing—except in the not few cases in which
Frenchmen have taught a different style—consists in approaching the nose
to the face of the loved one and sniffing, much as if one were smelling
a flower. The harder one sniffs the more it proves one’s love—which is
sometimes a real test!
Naturally a ditch has dug itself between the younger and the older
generation in Annam. Other customs, other manners, other points of view
have grown up since the rule of despotic emperors changed to the rule of
protective Frenchmen. When the old ancestral altar is replaced by a
chest of drawers topped by a mirror it is not merely a question of
furniture; something has changed in the heart, in the essence of things.
The fathers wish to remain true to the spirit of old Annam; the sons
wish to be “même chose Français.” Observing the two generations side by
side, one has an impression of two different classes, almost two
different races. The dissimilarity shows itself in the slightest matters
of every-day life. Take, for instance, the well-to-do Annamese families
the traveler finds dining in the more or less French hotels along the
main routes of travel. The young people, often dressed entirely in
European garb, their black hair cut in our fashion and glossy with
brilliantine, eat their _tête de veau_ and _poulet rôti_ with ease,
talking and laughing freely, while their constrained, embarrassed, yet
always dignified parents, in their long gowns and the Annamese
head-dress, handle knife and fork in one hand at one time, as if they
were chop-sticks, and hardly succeed in swallowing a mouthful.
Especially in the ports and the larger cities young Annam is growing up
vastly different from his fathers. Far from reading the old classics, he
knows only the _quoc-ngu_, the Annamese language transcribed in our
alphabet, which he even beats out on a typewriter. At Saïgon or Hanoï he
is resplendent with modernism, agitating, scheming, getting rich; but at
Hué he seems to have taken refuge in the legendary past, in tradition,
in the memory of his ancestors. How long even this spacious town on the
banks of the River of Perfumes will remain what it still is, the natural
place of refuge of the exalted spirits of the great princes of other
times, seeking throughout the “protected” kingdom for a place to which
our Western civilization cannot track them, is not hard to guess: just
about the time necessary to finish the railway that is to unite the
Annamese capital with Hanoï on the north and with Saïgon to the south;
the time needed to replace the little hotel-grocery, celebrated among
all the colonials of Indo-China, with the tourists’ palace already
planned; the time it will take to build a few factories in which
fishermen will be the workmen and princes and mandarins the bosses.
Ah, well, the world changes. Not every visitor to Annam can see the
prostrations of the “ten thousand” mandarins at Hué, and soon that
ceremony too may be gone forever. The legendary Annam, the traditional
Asia, is passing away. Roads, the automobile, the telegraph have upset
all the old customs. Old-timers cannot tell a story of the olden days—of
late in the nineteenth century—without sighing, “Ah, in my time ... but
we shall never see that again.” We shall not, of course; yet there is no
just cause to weep at our misfortune in arriving too late in a world
grown too old. There are compensations. Western customs, introduced into
Indo-China, have not destroyed the picturesque; they have merely
transformed it. In the place of the adventurers turned administrators
who, living like little kings far from control, inspired respect in the
natives by tricks akin to sleight-of-hand, surrounded themselves with
_congaïe_ like Oriental sultans in their harems, and dispensed justice
in the shade of a banyan-tree, like some tropical Saint Louis, there is
the Parisian boulevardier, far from his element, watched over by a wife
who will see to it that _congaïe_ become nothing more romantic than
seamstresses and cooks’ assistants. After all, the sedan-chairs that
once crawled along the Mandarin Road by which Chinese officials went and
came among their posts in Annam were no more worth coming to see than
are autobuses, jammed so full of natives that their feet stick out from
both sides of it, _congaïe_ wearing French shoes, an old Annamese
dowager with a modern umbrella under her arm, “boys” with a golden tooth
or two among their black-lacquered ones, bicycles among the baskets on
the roof of the terror-spreading vehicle, an autobus so crowded that it
looks as if the passengers were transporting it, like ants dragging a
dead fly. Come to think of it, there is nothing more amusing about the
myriad old temples of a mummified Far East than about a Buddhist priest
in his saffron robe carrying a fountain-pen and riding a bicycle in his
bare feet. The old _nha-qué_ bound to market with a string of “cash”
over one shoulder may be gone, but in his place there are Annamese
youths, still wearing black band-turbans above their misfit French
clothing, counting out paper piastres behind the bars of the Banque de
l’Indo-China.