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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2020
Three archival photographs recently made public by the French National Library depict men associated with an event taking place in colonial Laos around 1920. However, upon examination of the pictures and textual sources, combined with contemporaneous documents, it turns out that the pictures are actually from Tonkin (colonial northern Vietnam) and may depict Batchai (Pa Chay Vue) a celebrated Hmong messiah in 1918 when he met with colonial authorities in an ultimate negotiation attempt before launching a four-year rebellion. Batchai famously led a violent revolt against Tai and French power in Tonkin and Laos between 1918 and 1921, which has been documented in French military reports. No photograph has ever been found of the rebel leader and his supporters and this find in itself would be of significance, especially for the Hmong diaspora in the West for whom Pa Chay Vue has achieved near-mythical status as a major folk hero. This article examines whether or not this is him; but beyond the simple task of identification, it proposes interpretations for the events that suggest a more complex affair than French military archives have ever been willing to tell, including the hypothesis of an administrative cover up.
1 P. Lefèvre-Pontalis ‘Notes sur quelques populations du nord de l'Indo-Chine’, Journal asiatique, 1st series (1892); Trần Văn Giáp, Lưu Vĩnh Phúc: Tướng Cờ Đen, Một quân thân Thái Bình Thiên Quốc kháng Pháp trên đất Việt-Nam [Liu Yongfu: Black Flag general and soldier of the Taping Heavenly Kingdom fighting France in Vietnam] (Hanoi, 1958); McAleavy, H., Black Flags in Vietnam (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Failler, P. Le, ‘The Đèo family of Lai Châu: traditional power and unconventional practices’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 6, 2 (2011), pp. 42–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, B. C., Imperial Bandits. Outlaws Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (Seattle, 2017)Google Scholar; Lentz, C. C., Contested Territory: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article benefitted greatly from the contributions of Christian Lentz, Philippe Messier, Pierre Petit, and Sarah Turner, research assistant Simon Bilodeau, Hmong friends and research assistants Shu, Lan, Lan, and Chom, and several Hmong elders in Sa Pa District, Vietnam. JRAS anonymous referees also deserve to be mentioned.
2 As in: ANOM RST 56485 ‘Soulèvement des Meo. Arrestation à Dòng Van et relégation à l'Ile de la Table puis à Quang-Yèn de Chiong Mi Tchang dit Hùng-Mè-Giang, prétendant roi des Meo (1912–1914)’. Other similar reports are mentioned later in this article.
3 Poisson, E., ‘Unhealthy Air of the Mountains: Kinh and Ethnic Minority Rule on the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century’, in On the Borders of State Power: Frontiers in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, (ed.) Gainsborough, M. (London, 2007), pp. 12–24Google Scholar; Salemink, O. (ed.), Viet Nam's Cultural Diversity: Approaches to Preservation (Paris, 2001)Google Scholar.
4 Ginzburg, C., ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, in Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches form History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, (eds.) Renders, H. and De Haan, B. (Leiden, 2014), pp. 139–166Google Scholar. Vansina, J. M., Oral tradition as History. (Madison, 1985)Google Scholar.
5 Stoler, A. L., Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009)Google Scholar.
6 Edwards, E., ‘Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image’, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012), pp. 221–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 In this article, all the translations from French are mine.
8 Accessed 3 January 2019.
10 Accessed 3 January 2019.
11 Known also in the literature as Ba Cai, Bachai, Batchaï, Bachay, Ba-Tchay, Pachai, Pa Chay, Patchai, or Patchay, the name is most of the time written without the surname Vue (pronounced as in French vu, or German wü). To be correctly pronounced in the Hmong tonal language, it transcribes into the Romanised Popular Alphabet as Paj Cai Vwj. However, for an English-speaking readership, the more manageable ‘Pa Chay Vue’ is used here.
12 Mottin, J., Contes et légendes hmong blanc [Tales and Legends of the White Hmong] (Bangkok, 1980)Google Scholar.
13 I. Alleton, ‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine et du Viêt-Nam: La révolte du ‘Fou’ (1918–1922) [Hmong at the Borders of China and Vietnam: The ‘Mad’ Man's Rebellion]’, in L'histoire de l'Asie du Sud-Est: révoltes, réformes, revolutions [History of Southeast Asia: Uprisings, Reforms, and Revolutions], (ed.) P. Brocheux (Lille, 1981), pp. 31–46.
14 Gunn, G. C., ‘Shamans and Rebels: the Batchai (Meo) Rebellion of Northern Laos and North-West Vietnam (1918–1921)’, Journal of the Siam Society 74 (1986), pp. 107–121Google Scholar.
15 C. Culas, Le messianisme hmong aux XIXe et XXe siècles. La dynamique religieuse comme instrument politique [Hmong Messianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Religious Dynamics as a Political Instrument] (Paris, 2005).
16 Lee, M. N., Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The quest for legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960 (Madison, 2015)Google Scholar.
17 In particular, the Mi Chang Xiong rebellion of 1910–1912 (See Culas, Le messianisme hmong, pp. 106–114; Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 91–153).
18 ‘Messiah’ does not refer here to a Judeo-Christian notion but to an endogenous animist concept, although no word in Hmong language equates exactly the sense of the English language term. See Culas, Le messianisme hmong.
19 Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 134–138.
20 ‘The West’ is a handy shorthand widely used in the Hmong diaspora to refer to countries of the Global North where roughly five per cent of them have found refuge during and after the First and Second Indochina Wars. See Tapp, N., The Impossibility of Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora (Berlin, 2010)Google Scholar.
21 Albert, T., On to New Orleans! Louisiana's Historic 1811 Slave Revolt (New Orleans, 1996)Google Scholar; Daniel, R., American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.
22 See Michaud, J., ‘French military ethnography in colonial upper Tonkin (northern Vietnam), 1897–1904’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8, 4 (2013), pp. 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Identity of informants is protected in accordance with the American Anthropological Association's Principles of Professional Responsibility of 2012. http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/
24 Map of ‘Station d'altitude de Cha-Pa: Syndicat d'Initiative de Chapa’, in Livret-guide de la station d'altitude de Chapa (Hanoi, 1924). https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5844449w/f16.image
25 ANOM RST 342, Construction d'un hôtel de la Résidence à Chapa (1912).
26 The only higher-ranking administrative seat in Chapa, the Résidence Supérieure villa was only built in 1922, thus after the event (ANOM RST 13926 [VNA Hanoi], Villa pour Mr le Résident Supérieur, plan d'ensemble (19 May 1922). It is unclear when the Gendarmerie, the civilian police headquarters, also a seat of colonial power inside our target zone, was built but it is unlikely to be before the civilian use of the hill station had officially started in the early 1920s.
27 See Diguet, É., Les Montagnards du Tonkin [The Montagnards of Tonkin] (Paris, 1908)Google Scholar; Savina, F.-M., Histoire des Miao [History of the Miao] (Hong Kong, 1924)Google Scholar. Confirmed by Syndicat d'initiative de Chapa, Livret-guide de la station d'altitude de Chapa (Hanoi, 1924).
28 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Agence_Meurisse (accessed 26 January 2019).
29 The use of glass plates for this set is stated in the BNF record. This at a time when plastic film had already become the popular choice and high-quality cut films for professional photographers had made their appearance. Traditional glass plates, however, remained the preference of many professional photographers.
30 Christopher, P., ‘Camerawork as Technical Practice in Colonial India’, in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, (eds.) Bennett, T. and Joyce, P. (London, 2010), pp. 145–170Google Scholar.
31 For a similar demonstration, see John, P., ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, in Photographies East. The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, (ed.) Morris, R. C. (Durham N.C., 2009), pp. 9–56Google Scholar.
32 For guidelines on image composition, see Rose, G., ‘Chapter Four’, in Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th edition (London, 2016)Google Scholar.
33 Morris, Photographies East.
34 Pinney, ‘Camerawork as Technical Practice’.
35 Alleton, ‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine’; Gunn, ‘Shamans and Rebels’; and Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom.
36 As seen in Mottin, Contes et légendes; and Culas, Le messianisme hmong.
37 See Culas, Le messianisme hmong.
38 See fn. 2 (above).
39 In Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 134–138.
40 General Puypéroux, Histoire militaire de l'Indochine des débuts à nos jours (janvier 1922) [Military History of Indochina from the Beginning Until Our Days (January 1922)] (Hanoi-Haiphong, 1922), n.p., in Alleton, ‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine’, p. 41.
41 In Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, p. 108.
42 Referenced as: “Angeli. « Rapport du Colonel Angeli, Directeur des Opérations du Haut-Laos, au Général Commandant Supérieur des Troupes de l'Indochine, au Sujet des Opérations Entreprises dans le Haut-Laos contre les Meos, » May 25, 1920 (SHAT Vincennes)”, SHAT standing for Service historique de l'armée de terre [Historical Service of Armed Forces], re-named Service historique de la Défense (SHD) in 2012.
43 Michaud, J., ‘Incidental’ Ethnographers. French Catholic Missions on the Frontier of Tonkin and Yunnan, 1880–1930 (Leiden and Boston, 2007), pp. 167–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, p. 138.
45 Savina, Histoire des Miao, p. 237. This short Appendix to his book was also published as: F.-M. Savina, ‘Considérations sur la Révolte des Miao (1918–1921)’, L’Éveil économique de l'Indochine 373, pp. 9–12.
46 Savina was soon to be commissioned by the French colonial authorities to move to Laos and act as a cultural expert in the crushing of the Pa Chay Vue rebellion there (Savina, Histoire des Miao, p. 236).
47 Ibid.
48 Ta Phin is still today a joint Hmong Leng and Yao commune a few kilometres northeast of Sa Pa town; it figures on the map in Figure 5 as a trail destination in the top right portion (spelled Ta Phing). It is mentioned namely as the source of the ‘Ba-Tchay’ unrest in the folder ANOM GGI 26046 titled: ‘Rapport du Colonel Maillard a.s. des opérations militaires dans la province de Son La contre les Meos [Report of Colonel Maillard concerning military operations in the province of Son La against the Meo]’, though not in this precise report. There are three other documents in that folder, one of them a four-page report written on 2 May 1919 by Division General Leblois, Chief of Staff for Indochina, and addressed to the Governor General of Indochina, the French Minister of Colonies, and the French Minister of War, a most impressive list of recipients. General Leblois mentions on p. 1, “… the turmoil caused amongst the Méo by the Ba-Tchay sorcerer, so-called King of the Méo, that was quickly tamed in the region of Ta-Phin (Fourth Military Territory) in July 1918 before resurfacing by the end of October in the Dien-Bien-Phu area” (accessed and photographed at ANOM in May 2019). However, interviews that I held in October-November 2019 in Ta Phin, using the three pictures (which in themselves raised great curiosity among all viewers), reveal that there were and are no families of the Vue clan in that village, while the name Pa Chay Vue was claimed to be unknown to anyone to whom we spoke. Instead, of all the communes in the vicinity of Sa Pa where Hmong Leng can be found, informants interviewed in my presence through Hmong research assistants concur that the Vue only live in the Ta Giang Phin commune, 11 kilometres to the northwest of Ta Phin. Thus, proximity in geography and similarity in names between Ta Phin and Ta Giang Phin could have led to a mistake in Leblois’ report. Moreover, preliminary interviews conducted in similar circumstances in Ta Giang Phin in November 2019 confirmed the presence there of several households of the Vue clan dating back to at least one century; but here again, none declared having ever heard of Pa Chay Vue or his rebellion, including Vue informants. These preliminary oral history queries are inconclusive as this silence or absence of traces left in the local oral record may suggest that the rebel leader was not from these villages, but just as well suggest that this lapse may be consistent with the general lack of interest (or extreme caution?) by Hmong villagers around Sa Pa for remembering ancient events.
49 Savina, quoted in Culas, Le messianisme hmong, p. 115, including the two bracketed add-ons. Despite a vigorous search over decades, I have not been able to find this crucial report by Savina. In the course of his book, Culas (Le messianisme hmong, p. 256) locates it as “CAOM 26046, 1922”, while in the bibliography, it is listed as a reference with different dates: “Savina, F.-M., 1920, Rapport politique sur la révolte des Méo du Tonkin et du Laos, 1918–1920. Xieng Khouang (Laos), 23 April 1920, [manuscrit confidentiel non-publié]”. Alleton (‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine’, p. 92) also quotes from “A.O.M. 26046. 14.3.19” and “A.O.M. 26046. 19.8.22”, likely the same folder to which Culas referred. However, both Culas and Alleton omitted referencing the collection to which the document belonged (RST, RSTNF, or GGI), making locating it hazardous. As of my last visit to AOM (later renamed CAOM and now, ANOM) on 20 May 2019, the only document fitting is GGI 26046—standing for Gouvernement Général de l'Indochine, in charge of all security and military affairs—dated 1918–1919, not 1922. As I mentioned above, this folder does contain four relevant military reports though nothing penned by Savina. For added certainty, a manual search through the large box containing GGI documents from 26010 to 26093 did not yield it either. Finding this central report would be a high priority in order to further this discussion but, in the meantime, despite this absence, we have no reason to doubt the word of the two scholars who quoted from it.
50 This would be consistent with Savina being explicitly fond of ‘his’ Hmong as stated in many of his publications. He is known to have attempted to soften colonial vindication against Hmong rebels once Pa Chay Vue had been killed and the rebellion crushed in Laos in 1921–2.
51 Michaud, J., ‘French Missionary Expansion in Colonial Upper-Tonkin’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, 2 (2004), pp. 287–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 On a peripheral matter, the fact that Savina confidently states that he knew Pa Chay Vue ‘perfectly’ (“que je connais parfaitement”) underlines a high degree of familiarity. It is shown elsewhere that Savina had probably been living in or around Chapa for a lengthy period sometime between 1911 and 1918. Before that, he had been chiefly based in the Clear River sector in the Third Military Territory (today Hà Giang province), Michaud, ‘Incidental' Ethnographers, p. 173; also stated by Savina himself in Histoire des Miao, p. 237. In this way, he could have been in contact with Pa Chay Vue and/or his kin. This adds weight to the likelihood that Pa Chay Vue was a Hmong Leng native of the Chapa region instead of the Dien Bien Phu area as proposed by Puypéroux above and by Gunn (‘Shamans and Rebels’, p. 114), the latter opinion based on imprecise French colonial sources and one very late Hmong account from 1974 by Txooj Tsawb Yab, quoted in Culas (Le messianisme hmong, p. 119); see also Mottin, Contes et légendes; and Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 133–152).
53 ANOM GGI 26046, ‘Rapport du Colonel Maillard’, quoted above.
54 And somehow, the French National Library seemed to concur—for a short while. Between the moment I first consulted their Gallica repository in January 2019 and six months later, the initial caption accompanying Picture three had intriguingly morphed from “La révolte des Méos [en Indochine française (Laos)]: grand chef Méo” into “La révolte des Méos [en Indochine française (Laos)]: Pa Chay Vue, grand chef Méo”. Then, in November 2019, it had been changed again into: “La révolte des Méos [en Indochine française (Tonkin)]: chef Méo”. No explanation is given to justify these rapid alterations in such an august repository. As an intriguing quirk of retroaction, might these relate to the fact that this article manuscript started circulating to journals and assessors in January 2019?
55 Edwards, E., ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology 25, 2 (2014), p. 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Tucker, J., Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore, 2005)Google Scholar, and Rose, G., ‘Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher’, Journal of Historical Geography 26, 4 (2000), pp. 555–571CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 As summarised by Mai Na Lee, “The lack of data on Pa Chay may simply be because not all French records have been unveiled yet. F. M. Savina very likely kept a journal that is awaiting discovery” (Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, p. 138). My several visits to the Missions étrangères de Paris headquarters in Paris made between 2002 and 2007 yielded very little about François-Marie Savina. No journal of his was kept (or shown) there. A long shot, yet worth considering, would be to inquire from his descendants in Brittany, in and around the village of Mahalon (Finistère), where he grew up and to where he returned briefly in 1933, possibly taking documents back with him (Michaud, ‘Incidental’ Ethnographers, p. 180).
57 Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 136, 138.
58 Details in General Leblois 1919 report, but also following Alleton, ‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine’, p. 34; and Gunn, ‘Shamans and Rebels’, p. 114.
59 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Trundle, C. and Kaplonski, C., ‘Tracing the Political Lives of Archival Documents’, History and Anthropology 2, 4 (2011), pp. 407–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Surrounding our set of seven photographs, the Gallica entry for MEU 80818 is a photograph of a memorial day in Suresne, France, just after the First World War, while 80800 to 80810 yield pictures of France-focused written documents instead of portraits.
61 In Alleton, ‘Les Hmong aux confins de La Chine’, p. 37; see also Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, pp. 119–120.
62 On a Facebook page “Pachay Vue from 1917 to 1922”, which uses a fragment of Picture 3 as its profile, a 2016 post states that a colleague of the post's author also on the staff at Fresno State University is related to Pa Chay Vue: “KaoLy Yang. Your cousin Vaj Yig Vwj has lot of answers …I wish he will write a book that answers all your questions. Send him your questions, he is Paj Cai's descent”, https://fr-fr.facebook.com/Pachay-Vue-from-1917-to-1922-576403592522141/ (accessed December 2018).
63 In this final section, I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers who made rich suggestions.
64 Stocking, G. W. Jr. (ed), Colonial Situations. Essays on the Conceptualisation of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison, 1991)Google Scholar; Michaud, J., ‘French Missionary Expansion in Colonial Upper-Tonkin’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, 2 (2004), pp. 287–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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