‘Colonial Circulations’: Vietnamese Youth, Travel, and Empire, 1919–40

Abstract

‘Dear friend, we understand each other, and our hearts beat in unison’ wrote Vu Hien, a young Vietnamese student of medicine at the University of Hanoi to his friend Hoàng Văn Bích, a student at the University of Nancy, France, late in the summer of 1926. ‘My decision is irreversible’, he informed his correspondent, ‘and that is why I have already made all of the necessary arrangements’. The arrangements to which Vu Hien referred involved travel. He planned to discontinue his studies in Hanoi (the main center of the ‘protectorate’ Tonkin and capital of French Indochina), cross the Chinese border clandestinely to reach the leftist stronghold of Canton and then head on to Europe to rejoin his friend in France.1