Cholon's urban evolution, 1879-1930: State, Locals, and Trans-locals

Abstract

Cholon from 1879 until the early 1930s was a port-town with its own separate Municipality under French rule. Once the French amalgamated Cholon with Saigon, it has only survived as the colloquial name for districts 5 and 6 in Vietnam's largest metropolitan area, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Nevertheless, since the 1930s it has still taken time for its distinctive character to be leached out. In a bid to retrieve Cholon's lost history, this study profiles its evolution as a separate port town, and how the Cochinchinese government in Saigon and the local Municipal Government administered it. After detailing Cholon's raw site, the changes to its situation in Maritime East Asia, and the transformed pre-colonial semi-urban site, this task is pursued by using the triangle of interactions between three actors: the state, the local population and the trans-local population. This triangular framework provides the basis for analysing the town's transformation at four points in time: 1880, 1896, 1913, and 1930. This cross-sectional analysis reveals constant negotiations between non-state actors and state actors in Cholon's local affairs. The central state saw Cholon as economically important, but too 'foreign' to be fully absorbed into the colonial enterprise. This perception kept the central state from imposing its total dominance over municipal affairs. The study argues that a weak central governance allowed Cholon's non-state actors the autonomy and obscurity to build the town in a way that often bypassed Cochinchina's Colonial Council in Saigon. Cholon experienced accelerated growth when the Municipal Government recognised and enabled the enduring pattern of opaque community leadership by non-state actors to function within the urban area. These actors comprised a mixture of trans-local and local groups and networks. Cholon's society sustained an enduring tradition of strong self-governance, connections to wider non-local networks, and entrepreneurialism that drove the economy of French Cochinchina. Moreover, its history provides a vivid account of lived experiences in a port-town, whose waterborne way-of-life was pressured to change by the imperative of land-focused colonial urbanisation.