Timber and Opium on a Sino-Vietnamese Coal Frontier

• In Event: High-Altitude Commodities in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

During the French colonial period, Dong Trieu highland in northern Vietnam was one of the largest coal mining centers in French Indochina. My presentation explores the complex reality of timber trade and resource management in Dong Trieu during the flurry of coal mining developments in the 1920s. Specifically, it looks at how the French-led large-scale coal mining in Dong Trieu highland both revitalized and disrupted pre-colonial trading networks of timber, opium and other highland commodities that had previously been under the control of highly mobile, small, and connected groups of Chinese, Vietnamese and ethnic Dao loggers and traders living in this highland. My paper pays special attention to forest-dependent communities like those of ethnic Dao people whose practices of logging, swidden agriculture, and cross border movements became the targets of new and more stringent colonial forest laws and security surveillance. While coal mining expansion led to the displacement of the Dao and other indigenous groups in Dong Trieu, many Dao, Vietnamese and Chinese were able to stay and continue their ways of life by relying on their understanding of their local high-altitude terrains and forests, adapting their pre-existing trading networks, and taking advantage of the mining-driven high demand for timber and limits in the French colonial power in this remote, poorly policed, and porous Sino Vietnamese coal frontier.

Author

• Thuy Linh Nguyen, Mount Saint Mary College