French Cochinchina

French Cochinchina was a French colony in southern Vietnam, centred on the Mekong Delta, that existed from 1862 to 1949. France acquired the first three southern provinces under the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, after attacking Saigon in 1859, and added three more provinces in 1867. In 1871 the ceded territories were organised as the colony of Cochinchina, governed directly by a French admiral and later a governor. Saigon was its capital and became the largest European settlement in French Indochina. Unlike the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, Cochinchina was administered as a colony and sent a deputy to the French National Assembly. The colonial economy relied on rice and rubber plantations, built by dispossessing Vietnamese landowners and peasants. In 1887 Cochinchina became a member of the Union of French Indochina. After the Second World War the French reorganised it as the Autonomous Republic of Cochinchina in 1946, and in 1949 merged it into the State of Vietnam.