French Indochina

French Indochina was France's Southeast Asian federation from 1887 to 1954, five lands under one governor general at Hanoi. The conquest began with Saigon's fall in 1859 and ran through black flag wars, mandarins' resistance and the Sino French war that took Tonkin in 1885; in 1887 Paris proclaimed the Indochinese Union over Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia, adding Laos in 1893 after gunboats stared down Siam at Paknam. Paul Doumer, the builder governor, taxed rice wine and opium into railways, the Hanoi opera and the rue Paul Bert, running the colony as a company that paid. Rubber plantations, coal mines and rice deltas enriched Paris and starved villages; mandarins became clerks, scholars became revolutionaries. Japan marched in in 1940 and kept the French administration as its clerk; the 1945 famine killed two million; Ho Chi Minh declared independence that September in Hanoi. France reconquered the south and fought eight years; Giap's artillery closed the Dien Bien Phu valley in May 1954, and Geneva divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, ending the Union and beginning the wars that would consume the next twenty years.