Imagined Ancestors of the Vietnamese Geo-Body

In the wake of the events of May–July 2014, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued a directive to “enhance the collection, evaluation, publication, and use of documents, maps, and publications related to Vietnam's maritime and island sovereignty” (Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications 2014). One result was an exhibition that opened in Phu Quoc in December 2014 entitled “Vietnam's Hoang Sa [Paracels] and Truong Sa [Spratlys]—The historical and legal evidence.” The exhibition was organized by the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications and featured “materials, documents, exhibits, publications and almost 100 maps [contributed] by both local and international researchers and scholars” (Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications 2014). One of the centerpieces of the exhibition was a reproduction of Map 106 from Volume 2 of Philippe Vandermaelen's 1827 Atlas universel. The map, labeled “Cochinchina” (a term used in Europe at the time for what are today parts of central and southern Vietnam), shows the outline of Vietnam's central coast, along with shallows and a handful of atolls marked “Paracels.” As the Ministry website puts it, this “priceless document” was important not only for scholars and researchers, but also was “legal proof of Vietnamese sovereignty over Hoang Sa and Truong Sa” (Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications 2014).

Despite the Ministry's claims, the map nonetheless presents several problems. First, the Spratlys are not included on any of the detailed maps; instead the archipelago appears only as an unnamed (and unclaimed) feature on the much smaller-scale “Map of the whole of Asia.” Second, in this case “Cochinchina” is used simply as the title of a particular map within a series, and does not imply sovereignty over the spaces the map describes. Instead, sovereign spaces like the coastline of Cochinchina are outlined—as any elementary school student of geography would know—in color. In Map 110 of Volume 2, for example, the island of Poulo Condor (Con Son) off Vietnam's southern coast is a sovereign space, outlined in green. By contrast, the Paracels are drawn in black and white, unclaimed, at least for Vandermaelen, by any polity. Meanwhile, to the south, islands off Vietnam's coast, together with the rest of what is today southern Vietnam, are represented as part of the Kingdom of Cambodia (Vandermaelen Reference Vandermaelen1827, vol. 2, map 110). Taken as a whole, the atlas may do more to support Cambodia's irredentist claims to the entire lower Mekong region than it does to bolster Vietnam's assertion of sovereignty over the Paracels and Spratlys. We are thus left with the puzzle of why Vietnam's Ministry of Information would use such a problematic document as part of a case to prove that the disputed archipelagos form part of the nation's territory.

The answer may have something to do with the unique role modern maps play in helping us imagine national spaces, a power that premodern maps do not possess. While by the early 1800s Vietnamese cartographers had begun to adopt many of the conventions of modern mapmaking, nevertheless even the 1839 Dai Nam toan do (Complete map of Dai Nam) remains largely inaccessible to a modern viewer. Although the map features fairly accurate and recognizable representations of coastlines and river systems, and even the Paracels and perhaps the Spratlys (Samuels Reference Samuels1982, 50n35; Whitmore Reference Whitmore, Harley and Woodward1994, 503), its affective power is undermined by its orientation: following Vietnamese and Chinese convention, the map is oriented with West, rather than North, at the top. At the same time, cartographic conventions did not yet permit the visual representation of state sovereignty; for example, there is nothing to distinguish visually China's Hainan Island from the archipelagos to the south. Moreover the map's use of Sino-Vietnamese characters rather than the modern Vietnamese alphabet makes the map illegible to most Vietnamese today. By contrast, Vandermaelen's (Reference Vandermaelen1827) atlas is one of the first cartographic representations of Vietnam and its spatial relationship to the Paracels that is scientifically accurate, legible, and immediately recognizable to a modern audience.

The decision by the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications to use such a problematic text should thus be seen as a measure of the power of modern maps not just to represent, but also to create and sustain the modern nation. Drawing on work by Foucault and Derrida, beginning in the 1980s scholars began to question assumptions that maps were objective representations of reality, and instead to focus on the ways maps could be simultaneously the product and producer of power (Anderson Reference Anderson2006; Harley Reference Harley1989; Pickles Reference Pickles, Barnes and Duncan1991; Wood Reference Wood1992). A key technique in this process of interrogation was the reconstruction of the historical, social, and political contexts in which maps were situated, or to use J. B. Harley's (Reference Harley1987) apt turn of phrase, to see maps as having biographies.

In his influential 1994 work Siam Mapped, Thongchai Winichakul explored the role of maps and mapping in the formation of a Siamese nation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the interior spaces of Siam, as with other polities in the region, was largely unmapped and a national community as yet largely unimagined. The processes of surveying and mapping begun after Mongkut ascended the throne in 1851 not only revealed the geography of the country's interior, but also anticipated and created a new “geo-body,” or spatial understanding of the nation that transcended and eventually superseded earlier forms of knowledge and belonging. In Thongchai's narrative, mapping preceded military and administrative control: modern maps effectively compelled the nation to actualize its representation of itself through a process of internal colonization. Over time, the geo-body was naturalized and maps came to operate as “meta-signs” saturated with meanings independent of the nation's actual territoriality. In the case of Siam, maps were used to demonstrate the existence of a much larger Thai polity in history, creating a narrative of territorial loss and the cruel dismemberment of the historical geo-body by the European colonial powers.

Maps produced in Vietnam today use a range of techniques to inscribe the archipelagos of the South China Sea within a national geo-body. A typical administrative map, for example, labels what many would call the Southern or South China Sea the “Eastern Sea” (Bien Dong), literally placing Vietnam at the map's center (Nha Xuat Ban Ban Do 2008). The Philippines, whose claims encompass most of the Spratly archipelago, is reduced to a tiny presence at the map's lower left margin. Users are informed that the Paracels and Spratlys are administered by Da Nang City and Khanh Hoa Province, respectively. And to further underscore the inclusion of the two archipelagos within the imagined space of Vietnam, rhumb lines plot a course between each of them and a port on the Vietnamese coast. In the case of the Paracels, occupied by Chinese troops since a deadly battle in 1974, the line describes a journey that cannot presently be completed.

Popular representations of the Vietnamese geo-body engage in even more creative reconfigurations of space and politics. A map produced by Nestlé as part of a 2008 campaign for its “Café Viet” instant coffee shows the archipelagos as grossly magnified and resituated just off the Vietnamese landmass, with the whole floating eerily against a black background, devoid of any geographical or political context (Nestlé 2008). Maps like these make it possible for Vietnamese publics to imagine the spaces of the South China Sea as integral parts of the national body, and in so doing helped spark the events of May–July 2014. Depending on the outcome of the dispute, these maps may someday form part of a narrative of national defense, territorial loss, or something else entirely. But while we may not know the futures of these maps, we can at least attempt to recover their pasts.

Between Subject and Sovereignty in the South China Sea

The most likely place to look for the ancestors of today's maps of Vietnam would be the colonial period (Lee Reference Leng1986; Thongchai Reference Winichakul1994). The period after 1850 in Southeast Asia saw the intersection of new techniques of surveying and representing space with the expansion and consolidation of political control by the region's rulers. These administrations might be explicitly colonial, as with Britain or France, or more implicitly, as was the case with Siam. In Siam Mapped, Thongchai describes the mutual and interrelated processes of surveying, war, diplomacy, and administration that ultimately resulted in the borders of Siam, Burma, Malaya, and Indochina. Yet while French administrators were keenly interested in delineating Indochina's borders with Siam, Burma, and China, they had little concern for the far-off spaces of the South China Sea. For most officials for most of the colonial period, the Paracels and Spratlys simply did not form part of French Indochina. Even as late as 1931, for example, maps of French Indochina published by the French administration did not include the archipelagos (Gouvernement Général 1931). Maps like those in the popular Nouvel atlas Larousse followed the government's lead in omitting the Paracels and Spratlys from the map of French Indochina (Abensour Reference Abensour1924; Ecole Universelle 1931).

They cannot really be blamed for the omission. In many ways, the French simply took up preexisting conceptions of the Paracels and Spratlys. Instead of spaces of sovereignty, the archipelagos had for centuries been conceived as, at best, markers on trade routes or, at worst, spaces of danger and dread. A Chinese text from 1275 offers a glimpse of how mariners viewed the passage that awaited them after leaving the ports of southern China:

As well as zones to be avoided, however, the archipelagos could also be conceived as markers on maritime routes in the South China Sea. The traditional “inner” route, for example, would see ships sail from ports in southern China, through the passage between Hainan Island and the northernmost features of the Paracels, and then to the Vietnamese coast and beyond. Ships taking the more direct but dangerous “outer” route would skirt the Paracels and Spratlys to the east and then proceed south-southwest to the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The corridor between the Paracels and Pratas Islands in turn was the gateway for traffic between southern China and the islands of the Philippines.

Moreover, as uninhabited spaces, the archipelagos were difficult to integrate within precolonial geopolitical orthodoxies that situated sovereignty in subjects and spirits rather than spaces (Ungar Reference Ungar, Marr and Milner1986; Whitmore Reference Whitmore, Taylor and Whitmore1995). For centuries, sailors from the lands that ring the South China Sea had used the lull between the monsoons to journey to the archipelagos in search of fish, turtles, shells, and the remains of wrecked ships. In his Phu bien tap luc (Miscellaneous records on the pacification of the frontiers), the Vietnamese official Le Quy Don (1726–84) described how companies of men from present-day Quang Ngai Province would embark on an expedition to the Paracels in the first lunar month of each year. After journeying for three days and three nights in small fishing boats, they would reach the islands, where they would spend the next seven months catching birds and fish, collecting sea products, and salvaging any ships wrecked on the islands. In his account, Le Quy Don also notes the proximity of Hainan Island in present-day China and the friendly encounters that would occur between sailors from the two communities when they crossed paths in the archipelago. Last, he related how, upon returning to land in the eighth month, members of the company were required to go directly to the Nguyen capital in present-day Hue, where they turned over the goods they had salvaged to the court before being allowed to sell the sea products they had collected (Le Quy Don Reference Don1972, 210–12). While parts of the passage are frequently cited as proof of Vietnamese sovereignty, read in its entirety it shows instead the persistence of overlapping sovereignties defined not in terms of territory but rather in terms of a sovereign's ability to control people and collect taxes. Sovereignty was located not in space, but rather in subjects.

Early French maps simply reproduced these conceptions of the South China Sea and its archipelagos. A map published by the French naval cartography service in 1871, nine years after the French had established the colony of Cochinchina in the southern part of present-day Vietnam, makes no attempt to delineate borders between polities (Depot des Cartes et Plans de la Marine 1871). In large part, the omission reflects how the detailed surveys necessary to establish territorial borders had yet to be undertaken. Yet it also reflects continuities in ways of imagining space and authority. The way a later user highlighted key ports on the map underlines the concern of both its makers and its users with voyages, movement, and trade. Instead of linking the archipelagos of the South China Sea to the colony of Cochinchina or to the future French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, the map instead traces the traditional maritime routes between Singapore and Hong Kong (marked “Ordinary route to go to and return from Hong Kong with the favorable monsoon,” or “Recommended route to travel to Hong Kong during the northeast monsoon”). The islands and reefs are spaces to be avoided, and the Spratly archipelago is marked with an explicit warning that the area “has not been surveyed and abounds in dangers. Ships should not enter this space.” Despite the advent of French rule and the use of new technologies of surveying and representing, colonial and precolonial imaginings of the South China Sea would remain essentially indistinguishable for another fifty years.

It was only in the 1920s that the imagined space of Indochina began, haltingly and incompletely, to encompass the spaces of the South China Sea. After an early and unrealized proposal to construct a lighthouse in the Paracels in 1899, it would take more than two decades before elements of the colonial state once again took an interest in the archipelagos. In March 1925, the governor of the colony of Cochinchina, apparently on his own initiative, placed the Spratlys under the administration of the province of Baria (Chemillier-Gendreau Reference Chemillier-Gendreau2000, 37; Tønneson Reference Tønnesson2006, 4). Only in late 1927, however, did central authorities attempt to evaluate the state of French claims to the Spratlys. The results were far from clear. Writing to the Minister of Colonies on December 24, 1927, Governor General Pasquier concluded, “It would seem that France has never voiced any claim to these islands, which belong more logically to the Indonesian archipelago rather than the Indochinese peninsula” (quoted in Chemillier-Gendreau Reference Chemillier-Gendreau2000, 106).

Only one year later, however, external and internal developments conspired to begin a slow transformation in official attitudes. In early 1928, a joint initiative of the Kuomintang and Canton governments saw the formation of a commission in Canton to study the issue of the Paracels. After a brief expedition to the archipelagos, it recommended that the national government assert its sovereignty over the archipelagos and commence a program of economic development (Samuels Reference Samuels1982, 58). Meanwhile, in Indochina industrialists were petitioning the government for permission to exploit the archipelago's guano deposits. The combination of the two provides some of the context for Pasquier's change in heart. Invoking the new Chinese interest in the Paracels, on December 17, 1928, he wrote to the Minister of Colonies that “it is therefore time for us to take the initiative and to assert rights which appear to be recognized both in historical documents and by geographical realities” (quoted in Chemillier-Gendreau Reference Chemillier-Gendreau2000, 107).

Over the next decade, the colonial state began haltingly to realize this new geographical reality and to integrate both the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos within the spaces of French Indochina. The French used two different legal bases for their claims. Their sovereignty over the Paracels, they argued, stemmed from the historical claims of their Vietnamese protégés. With the Spratlys, on the other hand, they invoked the principle of terra nullius (a term taken from Roman law meaning “land belonging to no one”). Their assertion of sovereignty would thus involve a public theatre of ceremonies and declarations intended to establish “original ownership” of the territories before an international audience. On June 15, 1929, Pasquier requested the French Navy to organize a mission to take formal possession, and on April 13 of the following year, the crew of the Navy ship la Malicieuse raised the French flag on Spratly Island. More than five months elapsed, however, before the government issued a communiqué notifying other great powers of the act. The calm season of 1933 saw an even more elaborate display, when the officers and sailors of a small fleet of three vessels carried out ceremonies on six islands of the Spratly archipelago: Spratly Island, Amboyna Cay, Itu-Aba, Loaita, Thitu Island, and Les Deux Isles (North Danger Reef).

Nevertheless, five years would pass before the French established a permanent presence in the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos. In part, France's hesitation stemmed from the contested nature of its claims. The British had claims over Spratly Island—itself named after the Captain of the British ship that had “discovered” it in 1843—and Amboyna Cay dating to the late 1800s, and the French declarations of 1930 and 1933 provoked a muted diplomatic response from London. The Japanese and Chinese also contested the French claims to both archipelagos (Nguyen Hong Thao Reference Thao2012, 186; Tønnesson Reference Tønnesson2006, 6–7). The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and renewed reports of a Japanese presence in the archipelagos no doubt played a role in the French decision in 1938 to set up permanent installations on Woody and Pattle islands in the Paracels and Itu Aba in the Spratlys. Given that the French in both archipelagos were met by Japanese forces—the small French mission on Woody Island, for example, found itself sharing the island with 150 Japanese soldiers—French control, whether in law or in fact, was far from clear.

In 1938, Gaëtan Fouquet began an article on the Paracels in the popular French weekly Vu with the question “Who do they belong to? The French? The Chinese?” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1938). The small inset map accompanying the article left the question unanswered, simply confirming the archipelago's remoteness from both French Indochina and Chinese Hainan. In his efforts to answer the question, the French journalist and photographer talked his way onto a fishing junk bound for the Paracels from southern Hainan. After describing the archipelago's sinister past as a site of countless shipwrecks, its rumored position in opium and human trafficking networks that linked Indochina to China, and the way the Sino-Japanese War now seemed to enhance the archipelago's strategic potential, Fouquet ended the article by writing, “[S]o it is that in the light of war, the Paracels, which have never served the least purpose, which we have voluntarily left to our neighbors, which we have more or less erased from the map, suddenly take on a new value” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1938, 911). Yet for the researchers at Indochina's Institute of Oceanography, the archipelago was of great value, and already occupied a central position on their maps.

Institutionalizing Marine Science

The Oceanographic Institute of Indochina has its origin in a 1919 proposal for the creation of a service of fisheries and oceans under the auspices of the Scientific Institute of Indochina then recently founded in Saigon. The idea was taken up and expanded, and in 1922 the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina came into being. The Institute's original name underlines the pressure its researchers faced to reconcile the pursuit of “pure” knowledge with its practical application. Originally conceived as a simple service of the Indochinese central government, in 1929 it was established as an autonomous institution under the joint patronage of the French Academy of Colonial Science and the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of France, and funded by a generous subvention of 220,000 piasters annually from the Indochinese General Budget (Krempf Reference Krempf1929a, 9; Reference Krempf1930, 4, 9).

Empire provided much of the context for the Institute's creation. The Institute's activities complemented the Navy's hydrographic service, and its personnel—including two future directors, Pierre Chevey and Raoul Serène—frequently began their careers as Navy scientists. Colonial economic development, or mise en valeur, also played a role. The creation of the Institute coincided with a period of renewed interest in the economic potential of France's colonies, with private investors providing increased capital and public figures like Albert Sarraut, who served as Governor General of Indochina and later as Minister of Colonies, proposing rationalized plans for their economic development (Sasges Reference Sasges2015). Last, the Institute was part of an effort to reestablish faith in the colonizers’ mission civilisatrice, a faith badly shaken by the horrors of the recent war in Europe. Institutions like the Scientific Institute of Indochina, the astronomical observatory in the Netherlands East Indies, and the series of Pacific Scientific Congresses held after 1920 served as highly visible evidence of the colonial regimes’ commitment to bringing progress to their subjects through science and international cooperation (Goss Reference Goss2009; Pyenson Reference Pyenson1993).

The foundation of the Institute also reflected developments in the field of marine science. While the origins of modern oceanography are often traced to the British Challenger expedition of 1872–76, French marine science also has a long and distinguished history dating back to the foundation of the Navy's cartographic service in 1720 (Chapuis Reference Chapuis1999; Deacon, Rice, and Summerhayes Reference Deacon, Rice and Summerhayes2001). Particularly after the turn of the century, marine science became increasingly professionalized and institutionalized, with universities in places like Edinburgh becoming centers for training and research. Independent institutions funded by private donors like the Scripps Institution in the United States (1903) and the Paris Oceanographic Institute (1906) also proliferated after 1900. Finally, the interwar period featured a number of internationalist initiatives like the Pacific Science Association (1920) and its Committee on the Oceanography of the Pacific (1926), intended to promote exchange, coordinate international research projects, and strengthen conservation efforts in the region (Akami Reference Akami and Herren2014; Bowen and Bowen Reference Bowen and Bowen2002; Vaughan et al. Reference Vaughan1937). The Indochinese Oceanographic Institute's activities in the 1920s and 1930s were thus part of the larger growth and consolidation of marine science.

One subject of special interest to early marine scientists was coral. When Charles Darwin set sail on the second voyage of the Beagle in 1831, the expedition's objectives included the study of a coral atoll, and his publication of the seminal The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842 was to spark an interest in reef science that would last a century. In many ways, this interest simply reflected the need of seafaring cultures throughout history to locate and avoid navigational hazards, given a powerful additional impulse by imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth century. The initial leadership of the field by British scientists and their eclipse after the turn of the century by Americans, for example, mirrors shifting imperial fortunes and the United States’ increasing interests in the spaces of the Caribbean and the Pacific where coral abounded. Yet the new science was driven not only by the age-old necessity to locate reefs but also by the need to understand them as living organisms in order to predict how their formation and development might pose hazards to navigation in the future. This made the debate that developed after 1870 between Darwin and Alexander Agassiz over their conflicting theories of reef genesis a particularly important one. Finally, while the boom in coral research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by a complex array of imperialist, scientific, and careerist motives, it also reflected the romance of these colorful formations rising from azure tropical waters. For early generations of marine scientists like Darwin or Charles Yonge, who in 1928 went from dissecting oysters in a cold laboratory in Plymouth to leading the Great Barrier Reef Expedition, these exotic structures must have been held a special fascination (B. Morton Reference Morton1992; Yonge Reference Yonge1930).

Knowing the Archipelagos

The French were not the only ones to carry out surveys of the South China Sea archipelagos. British ships began to perform systematic surveys beginning in the 1840s, and between 1881 and 1883 detailed surveys of the Paracels by two German Navy vessels resulted in charts that were quickly adopted by both the British and French navies (Hancox and Prescott Reference Hancox and Prescott1995, 34, 36). After a lull in the first years of the twentieth century, survey activity in the South China Sea picked up again, with British, French, U.S., and Japanese surveyors all operating in the Spratlys and Paracels in the 1920s. As military tensions increased in the 1930s, survey activities by the British, American, and Japanese navies increased markedly (Hancox and Prescott Reference Hancox and Prescott1995, 37–38). Yet while the French and their Naval Oceanographic Service certainly participated in this project of naval charting, thanks to the missions of the Oceanographic Institute they were the only power in the region to engage in a sustained scientific exploration of the same spaces. As to why they did so, the answer can be found in the career of an obscure French scientist named Armand Krempf.

Krempf was born in 1879 in a small provincial town on the cold and stormy Bay of Biscay in northwestern France. After training as a zoologist at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris, his first placement was with a scientific mission to the Somali coast in 1903. It was here that he first encountered the tropical coral that was to be the object of his life's work. The following year he was appointed to the newly created Scientific Mission of Indochina, founded in 1902 with the goal of cataloguing and studying the natural wealth of the new colony. After the mission was disbanded in 1908, Krempf remained in Indochina and found employment at the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang on the coast of south central Vietnam, where he carried out research on topics ranging from Ficus elastica to locusts to fish sauce (Garnier Reference Garnier1921). The bulk of his research, however, was focused on Nha Trang Bay's abundant coral formations. In 1917 he was granted leave to return to Paris and undertake work on a doctoral dissertation on the development of coral, which he completed in 1920.

It would not appear that Krempf was a particularly gifted researcher. His theories on the development of coral reefs have disappeared without a trace (Krempf Reference Krempf1927a), and his former colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, eminent scientists like Alexandre Yersin and Emile Roux, seemed relieved to be rid of him (Roux Reference Roux1920; Yersin Reference Yersin1920). Yet Krempf was without a doubt a canny scientific entrepreneur, capitalizing on international interest in coral, mobilizing networks of supporters in both the scientific and political worlds, and engaging in relentless self-promotion. One result was a research institute that, unlike many short-lived colonial initiatives, has survived to this day. Another result was the Institute's focus on reef science and on the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos.

This is not to say the Institute engaged only in coral research. Krempf and his successors faced continual demands for “applied research” and “practical applications.” Much of their research on coastal and inland fisheries was of immediate practical benefit. The Institute, for example, played an important role in seeing off a proposal to log the submerged forests of Cambodia's Tonle Sap, a plan that would have decimated the lake's rich freshwater fishery (Krempf Reference Krempf1926a, 11–12; Reference Krempf1929a, 35). Other research, however, was decidedly less significant. Krempf and his successors never tired of promoting their research on the production of fish sauce, for example, despite the fact that it had already been superseded by the work of scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Saigon (Lemarie Reference Lemarie1921). Meanwhile, Krempf's efforts to convince local consumers to eat his experimental fish products—first a kind of fish protein flour, then an appetizing-sounding fish jelly—while well-meaning nevertheless verge on the comical (Chevey Reference Chevey1931a, 31; Krempf Reference Krempf1929a, 37–38). Yet they were all part of justifying the Institute's continued funding before a skeptical local audience. Particularly as budgets shrank in the 1930s and the Institute came under fire both in the local press and in consultative bodies like the Great Council of Economic and Financial Interests of Indochina, its directors were compelled to emphasize above all the immediate economic benefits of their work.

While fish sauce may have worked to justify their work to local audiences, Krempf turned to reef science to engage with larger scientific networks. Capitalizing on his access to the coral reefs of Nha Trang, by the time he received his doctorate in 1920 Krempf had transformed himself from an underpaid technician on the margins of empire into one of the leading French researchers in the field. Then, thanks to intensive lobbying by members of the Parisian scientific establishment, he was able to secure the directorship of the new Oceanographic and Fisheries Service, and to site its impressive new facilities at his research site in Nha Trang Bay (Chevalier Reference Chevalier1920; Delage Reference Delage1920). Yet Krempf already had his sights set on a new research site 300 kilometers to the east, where the archipelagos of the South China Sea offered the chance to study the formation of corals in an environment free from the effects of coastal sedimentation.

Krempf's professional commitment to coral research was to shape the activities of the Oceanographic Institute for more than a decade. Altogether the de Lanessan made five voyages to the archipelagos before the Depression and a lack of funds curtailed its activities, and personnel from the Institute would accompany the various missions to the Paracels or Spratlys in 1930, 1933, 1937, and 1938. This research orientation was not obviously determined by either economics or politics. It was only after the ship's first two voyages to the archipelagos that a French company expressed interest in exploiting their phosphate deposits, and it would take a third voyage before men like Pasquier began, even hesitatingly, to envision the archipelagos as part of an Indochinese space. Nor is it likely the archipelagos would have occupied such a prominent place in the Institute's research agenda had Chevey—who was more interested in cataloguing Indochina's fish—been its founder and first director. Instead, the voyages of the de Lanessan and the expanded Indochinese geo-body they helped define were determined by the research agenda of a long-forgotten French marine scientist.

In fact, the results of the Institute's research in the Paracels and Spratlys provided no immediate rationale for an assertion of French sovereignty. None of the Institute's reports makes any mention of meeting Vietnamese in the archipelagos, whether as inhabitants or as fishermen. As for hopes the archipelagos would prove rich fishing grounds suitable for modern industrial exploitation, they were quickly dashed. Surveys and soundings confirmed what mariners had marked on their charts for years: the archipelago was indeed “dangerous grounds.” Moreover, the jumble of coral on the seabed made trawling impossible with contemporary equipment. Even the de Lanessan's specially reinforced nets were shredded in a matter of minutes. “From the point of view of the practice of industrial fishing with trawling nets,” Krempf wrote, the result was “a complete contra-indication” (Krempf Reference Krempf1926b, 10).

For a time, the archipelagos’ guano deposits provoked interest. After initial surveys of the deposits on different islands, in 1931 the de Lanessan departed once again for the Paracels, this time accompanied by Maurice Clerget, a mining engineer with the New Phosphates Company of Tonkin. After analysis, Clerget estimated the archipelago's reserves at three to four million cubic meters of phosphates, or around three million tons. On Roberts Island alone, he estimated reserves at 600,000 tons, which at the time would have met Indochina's demand for chemical fertilizer for twenty years (Clerget Reference Clerget1932, 14). Nevertheless, weather and treacherous seas would make commercial exploitation difficult. Clerget was obviously dubious about its prospects, sketching out a limited, seasonal exploitation with minimal capital investment. And with prices for fertilizers depressed by the economic crisis, he was forced to fall back on paternalism and an implicit appeal for state subsidies to make the project viable. “The desire to manage our patrimony as would a good father compels us to give back to the Indochinese soil those very fertilizers it loses each year” (Clerget Reference Clerget1932, 17).

Yet even if there had been an economic motive to assert sovereignty, French claims would have been complicated by the presence of Chinese and Japanese in the Paracels and Spratlys. Chinese sailing junks plying the route between Hainan and Singapore would use the lull between the monsoons to fish and capture turtles (Krempf Reference Krempf1926b, 9). Meanwhile, motorized ships operating from Japanese-occupied Taiwan carried out a more industrial exploitation of its fisheries (Chevey Reference Chevey1931a, 25). As for Spratly Island, when the sailors and officers on la Malicieuse arrived to assert French sovereignty in 1930, much of the information about their new territory came from the members of a small colony of Chinese fishermen (Krempf Reference Krempf1930, 27).

The history of the exploitation of phosphate deposits in the two archipelagos was even more troublesome for any future French claims. An Osaka-based company with branches in Taiwan, the Southern Prosperity Industries Company, had been mining phosphates in the Paracels since at least 1919. By the time the French arrived, the company had ceased operations and its unused stocks were being exploited by enterprising Chinese from Hainan. Nevertheless, the abandoned operations on Roberts and Woody Islands—the latter included offices, dormitories, farms, a power plant, a foundry, a railway track, and a 1,250-foot iron jetty—testified to the depth of the Japanese presence (Samuels Reference Samuels1982, 57–59). Similarly, in 1930, the Chinese fishermen living on Spratly Island explained that the large swaths of denuded land that covered the island were the result of an earlier Japanese mining operation (Chevey Reference Chevey1933, 9–10; Krempf Reference Krempf1930, 27).

The problem with “knowing” the archipelagos of the South China Sea was that the Institute's research revealed myriad ways of using, understanding, and claiming the spaces by multiple different actors. Moreover, the Institute's research seemed to confirm that the archipelagos were of little economic value. Thus the true value of the Paracels, Krempf and his colleagues argued, lay not in their economic potential but rather in the unique opportunity they offered to study coral reef formation and tectonic plate activities in the region (Krempf Reference Krempf1926b, 10). It was this scientific value that provided the primary rationale for the voyages of the de Lanessan in the 1920s and 1930s. And through the process of representing and disseminating this research through the media of scholarly publications and presentations as well as the popular press, and above all in charts and maps, the Paracels and Spratlys slowly began to form part of the imaginary space called French Indochina.

Inscribing the Archipelagos on an Indochinese Map

Scientific publications played an important role in effecting this change in how Indochina was imagined. Krempf's book on the formation of coral reefs was the second in the Institute's publication series, and was followed by a more specific work on the embryology of anthozoas. Delacour and Jabouille (Reference Delacour and Jabouille1930) soon published on the birds of the Paracels, Clerget (Reference Clerget1932) on phosphates, and Chevey (Reference Chevey1936) on their water temperature. The Institute's researchers also made efforts to bring their research to wider audiences. For example, in November 1933, the Institute organized a conference on the reefs and islands of the South China Sea at the Society of Geography of Hanoi and the following year Chevey published a general survey of the two archipelagos in the Bulletin de la Societe des Etudes Indochinoises. Later, while on leave in Europe in 1937, he presented a summary of the Institute's work in the South China Sea at the Oceanographic Institute of Paris and held a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne on the Indochinese continental plate (Chevey Reference Chevey1937, 17).

Participation in scholarly conferences like the Pan-Pacific Science Congresses served to normalize French sovereignty over the archipelagos before international audiences. At the fourth Congress in Java in May 1929, Krempf presented a total of three papers—one of his own and two on behalf of other members of the Institute—and his work on the development of coral reefs figured prominently in a survey of the field presented by Thomas Wayland Vaughan, the director of the Scripps Institution in San Diego. After the conference, Vaughan rearranged his schedule to visit Nha Trang and would do so again in 1933. As Krempf reported proudly to his patrons, “The relations of the Oceanographic Service's personnel with the scientific institutions of neighboring countries have developed very rapidly this year and in a manner particularly beneficial to its moral standing and renown” (Krempf Reference Krempf1929a, 10).

Research on the South Sea and its archipelagos continued to occupy a central place in publications and presentations by the Institute's researchers through the end of the 1930s. At the fifth Pan-Pacific Science Congress in Canada in 1933, Krempf presented the first of the Institute's papers to be translated into English, one on the currents of the South China Sea, and the other on the “continental shelf of French Indo-China and the relationship which formerly existed between Indo-China and the East Indies” (Krempf and Chevey Reference Krempf and Chevey1934a, Reference Krempf and Chevey1934b). Despite Krempf's retirement as director in 1933, a research agenda focused on coral continued to define the Institute and its participation in international scientific activities. At the 1936 Conference of the International Association for Physical Oceanography in Edinburgh, the new director Chevey presented two papers: one by Krempf on using coral to determine historical sea levels, another his own work on the temperatures and salinity of waters in the South China Sea (Chevey Reference Chevey1937, 19–20). The cumulative effect of this scientific production was to assert a sort of ownership before an international audience of scholars and to extend the borders of French Indochina far into the spaces of the South China Sea.

An important means of establishing this ownership was to represent the archipelagos as spaces in need of French protection. Early on, the Institute developed a language of fisheries protection that reflected both the underlying rationale of the French “protectorates” over its Indochinese territories and the Institute's mission of promoting the sustainable growth of their fishing industries. Already by 1926 the Institute was advocating the extension of Indochina's maritime territorial limits, prompted by the Institute's research on the rich but fragile seasonal fishing banks off the coasts of southern and central Vietnam (Krempf Reference Krempf1927b, 14). The Institute cited particularly the threat of the Japanese fishing fleets, whose unregulated operations off the Malayan coast had already devastated local fish stocks, and pointed to the practice of dynamite fishing often employed around coral reefs where trawling was impossible. “The day when the Japanese, already very skilled fishermen, and who have undergone in their own country complete programs of study at a fisheries institute, want to exploit our waters, it will be for them little more than a game, but a game that will play out to the direct and immediate damage of local fishermen and without affording us the least means of protecting them in the absence of relevant legislation.” Particularly given the de Lanessan's recent encounter with a Japanese fishing trawler in the Paracels, Chevey pointed out, “the time has now come to create along the entire length of our coastline a legal protection zone over its fishing banks” (Chevey Reference Chevey1931a, 23–25).

An important moment in this process of assimilating the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos was their visual integration within the mapped space of Indochina. In many ways, the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris can be seen as the apogee of Western, and particularly French colonialism (Hodeir Reference Hodeir1991; P. Morton Reference Morton2000). Indochina played a central role, with a scale replica of Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat, for example, simultaneously celebrating Indochinese culture and France's mission to know, to protect, and even to reproduce that culture for global consumption. Yet while symbolic representations of Indochina had begun to coalesce around an imagery of exoticized local women and “lost” cultures like the Khmer and the Cham, the precise contours of its geo-body remained fluid. French representations of Indochina at the time, whether in popular geographies and atlases or even in materials produced by the Government of Indochina, did not yet include the Paracels or the Spratlys (Abensour Reference Abensour1924; Ecole Universelle 1931; Gouvernement Général 1931). Nevertheless, the archipelagos featured prominently in the Oceanographic Institute's contribution to the Exposition: a series of large-scale color maps (Chevey Reference Chevey1931a, 21).

In all, the Institute produced four maps of Indochina for the Exposition: one representing its fishing banks, one its coral, one the contours of its continental shelf, and another tracing the de Lanessan's voyages between 1925 and 1929. The maps of Indochina's fishing banks and its coral was in large measure a popular, visual counterpart to the dozens of conference papers and scholarly papers the Institute would publish on the fish and coral of Nha Trang Bay and the South China Sea archipelagos. The color bathymetric chart, on the other hand, was an implicit argument for the existence of an “Indochinese continental plate” whose eastern boundaries were formed by the distant Paracels. And the final map, charting the stations of the de Lanessan and its repeated visits to the archipelagos, served to create a space of French movement that stretched from the Gulf of Tonkin in the north, along the disputed archipelagos to the coasts of Java and Borneo, and into the Gulf of Siam. For the de Lanessan had never, in fact, ventured beyond the Paracels and Spratlys into the eastern regions of the South China Sea (Chevey Reference Chevey1931b; Krempf Reference Krempf1929b, 17). The tracing and retracing of its journeys on the map thus conceptually linked the archipelagos to Indochina and inscribed them as boundaries of a French authority that was as much scientific as it was political.

Over time, the expanded Indochinese geo-body described on the Institute's 1931 maps began to enter the popular imagination. An early convert was the Hanoi journalist Henri Cucherousset. After the initial voyages of the de Lanessan had prompted renewed interest in the archipelagos’ guano deposits, he began advocating their annexation in his newspaper L’Eveil économique (Economic awakening) (Cucherousset Reference Cucherousset1929, Reference Cucherousset1931a, Reference Cucherousset1931b, Reference Cucherousset1932). By 1933, articles with titles like “The Paracel Islands” or “The Paracels: An infinitely small part of our colonial possessions” were appearing in the metropolitan press (Saix Reference Saix1933; Sauvaire Reference Sauvaire1933; Vivielle Reference Vivielle1933). Popular visual representations also began to change: along with the text of a conference he presented at the Mutual Education Society of Hanoi in 1934, Cucherousset included a map featuring the Paracels marked as “Annamite [i.e., Vietnamese] possession under Chinese occupation” (Cucherousset Reference Cucherousset1934).

Only in 1937 did the French administration begin to actualize this vision of an expanded Indochinese geo-body by filling in administratively the spaces that the Oceanographic Institute had first traced on a map. Yet with no Indochinese subjects to be administered and minimal resources to be developed, science would continue to play a central role in this process of spatial becoming. In October 1937, a mission led jointly by the engineer Julien Gauthier and the newly appointed director of the Oceanographic Institute, Raoul Serène, set out for the Paracels aboard three ships (L'Illustration 1938). While Serène continued his research and the crew of the Astrolabe resumed their hydrographic surveys, Gauthier and his team constructed a small, unmanned lighthouse on Pattle Island and investigated sites for the construction of weather and radio stations the following year. Meanwhile, at the Indochinese Weather Observatory just south of Hai Phong, the scientist and future government Minister Nguyen Xien trained the teams of weather observers who would man the lonely outposts of French science. In late 1938, the meteorological stations on Woody and Itu Aba Islands came into operation, with Pattle Island's radio station permitting the broadcasting of daily weather reports to the Observatory at Hai Phong. Thus at precisely the same time the Japanese were sending troops to the archipelagos, the French were sending scientists. Both kinds of claims live on in the way the South China Sea is imagined in the present.

The South China Sea Reimagined

Maps matter in Vietnam today. I once donated several hundred English-language books on Vietnam to a local university. A few days later, after a series of increasingly frantic phone calls from university administrators, I found myself in a back room of the university library, together with a Vietnamese colleague, using markers to black out portions of any map that failed to include the Paracels and Spratlys as Vietnamese territory. When in doubt, we simply redacted entire maps. “Disputed territories” would not suffice; it was Vietnamese sovereignty or nothing. Yet textual references to the dispute were fine. It was maps, my colleague and his superiors feared, that would be the special target of shadowy censors in the Ministry of Public Security. As this episode makes clear, the Paracels and Spratlys have become politically and emotionally charged markers of the limits of the national body, and modern maps have become a privileged site for its representation.

It has not always been the case. The idea of oceanic sovereignty was not part of Vietnam's political tradition, and whatever claims Vietnamese polities may have made to the archipelagos of the South China Sea in the precolonial period, they were impossible to represent graphically on the maps produced by Vietnamese cartographers. For most of the colonial period that saw the surveying and delineating of the region's borders, the spaces of the South China Sea simply did not figure on the maps of French Indochina. Yet in the late colonial period, the Paracels and Spratlys did begin to appear on French maps as spaces to be known, described, administered, and protected. By 1938, the archipelagos had finally begun to form part of the Indochinese geo-body. This geo-body was taken up and reconfigured after 1945 in the independent states of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Nevertheless, the place of the Paracels and Spratlys within the sovereign spaces of Vietnam was complicated by war and by the existence of two sovereign Vietnams. Only after 1975 and reunification would Vietnamese representations of the national territory—whether produced by the National Map Publishing House or the marketing department at Nestlé—uniformly and unequivocally include the archipelagos of the South China Sea.

This article has argued that the origin of today's maps can be traced to the work of the Indochinese Institute of Oceanography in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1931, the Institute produced a series of four large-scale color maps for display at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris that summarized the work of its researchers. These maps resulted from a convergence of cartographic and scientific practice. Their detailed surveys, accurate projections, carefully plotted stations, and color-coded contours all served to enhance and confirm the maps’ authority and objectivity. The effect was to link an array of tiny dots in the ocean with the larger Indochinese geo-body and to inscribe the entire space as suitable for French research, control, protection, and development. If these absent maps were ever found, Vietnamese viewers would recognize them instantly as representations of the Vietnamese geo-body.

The maps’ discursive power rested not just in the way they represented graphically a new and expanded Indochinese space, but also on scientific practice carried out over countless hours at sea and on land, in conference halls and journal articles. Between 1925 and 1939, researchers from the Oceanographic Institute made eight voyages to the archipelagos. In terms of sovereignty, their findings were ambiguous. The economic potential of the islands was minimal, and French territorial claims were undermined by prior inhabitation and exploitation by both Japanese and Chinese nationals. Yet, unlike the Chinese and Japanese, the French were there to study, to understand, and to protect. When they finally moved to actualize their claims to sovereignty in 1937, the French would do so not with troops but with a lighthouse and with weather observation stations that would link the archipelagos to a global community of meteorologists and scientists. Scientific practice served to inscribe the Spratlys and Paracels on the map of French Indochina, and in turn scientific discourse would shape the way the French moved to establish control over the archipelagos.

By recreating the biography of these lost maps, this article is a reminder of how complex and contingent the process of making maps—and imagining nations—can be. We can never know for sure what Indochina—and the Vietnamese geo-body that has succeeded it—might have looked like had Armand Krempf been a specialist in freshwater fisheries rather than a coral scientist. It might have looked very different. Yet even if the Vietnamese geo-body had turned out exactly the same, the maps created by the Oceanographic Institute and the scientific research were still an important part of a process of convincing audiences, whether administrators or civilians, in the metropole or the colony, to include the Paracels and the Spratlys within the imagined spaces of Indochina—quite literally to put the archipelagos on the map. Today, the conceptual inheritors of these absent colonial-era maps make use of the same powerful cartographic techniques to represent the national geo-body to Vietnamese publics.

The legacy of the Indochinese Institute of Oceanography lives on in other ways as well. The website of the Institute's successor, today's Vietnamese Institute of Oceanography, proclaims proudly—if somewhat inaccurately—that it was founded in 1922 with the aim of surveying the region's “natural conditions and biological resources including fishing, in the South China Sea, including the two archipelagos of Hoang Sa (Paracels) and Truong Sa (Spratly)” (Vietnamese National Institute of Oceanography 2015).Footnote ² Photos of the French radio station and the lighthouse on Pattle Island are displayed proudly in exhibitions like the one in Phu Quoc, and can be found anywhere from the prime minister's official website to online news articles with titles like “Just arrived in Indochina, France already declared the Paracels belonged to Vietnam” (Nguyen Tan Dung Reference Dung2014; Tran Quang Reference Quang2012).

An even more remarkable photo from the colonial period can be found at the Da Nang Municipal Museum. In the center of the photo, an official in khakis and solar topee salutes stiffly while around him a small group of French and Vietnamese stand more or less at attention. The photo is labeled “Franco-Vietnamese troops salute the flag on Hoang Sa.” Whether the figures are soldiers is far from clear, but their civilian dress would suggest otherwise. Exactly what flag they are saluting is left unstated. And significantly, the caption collocates “Phap-Viet” (Franco-Vietnamese) together with the formal “quan doi” (army, military, troops) rather than the more informal “linh” (soldiers, troops), or the pejorative “linh/quan nguy” (puppet troops) commonly used to describe colonial era militias. Even assuming the figures are indeed military personnel, in just a few years these “Franco-Vietnamese troops” would be locked in deadly battle with the founders of the same state that now claims the archipelagos. Yet in the case of the Paracels and the Spratlys, at least, the state is willing to embrace its colonial past.

There are other ways the Institute's legacy might be integrated within national narratives. After independence, Vietnam's Institute of Oceanography continued to pursue a program of research, conservation, and engagement with international scientific networks and institutions. Between 1959 and 1961, for example, the Institute participated in the joint American-Thai-Vietnamese “Naga Expedition” to the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, where the expedition's research vessel, the RV Stranger, traced routes that mirrored the de Lanessan's thirty years earlier (Faughn Reference Faughn1974). Since the end of the war and the beginning of the Doi moi (Renovation) period of reform, research activities and opportunities for international cooperation have expanded dramatically. One project, the Joint Oceanographic Marine Scientific Research Expedition in the South China Sea (JOMSRE-SCS), originally conceived in 1996 as a modest confidence-building exercise between Vietnam and the Philippines, developed into an important means for promoting the protection of the region's vital marine ecology. At the conference that concluded JOMSRE's first phase in 2007, scientists from the two countries recommended that the disputed waters of the South China Sea be formally designated as a transnational marine park (Encomienda Reference Encomienda, Shicun and Nong2014).

Sadly, a second phase of JOMSRE that would have included China and other ASEAN countries was never realized, and the initiative has been largely forgotten in the face of the unilateral initiatives that culminated in the events of May–July 2014. Yet rather than respond by constructing questionable genealogies of the national geo-body or turning Franco-Vietnamese meteorologists into soldiers, Vietnam might be better served by embracing a real and unique legacy of scientific research, international cooperation, and environmental conservation in the South China Sea. Doing so could allow Vietnamese publics to develop a more resilient image of their national territory, one based not just on lines on a map, but on a more sustainable vision of how the nation might interact with the land and water, flora and fauna, and disparate national aspirations those lines enclose. The result might be an important step in solving the seemingly insoluble dispute in the South China Sea.