JEWEL OF ORIENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 October 1940, Page 9

JEWEL OF ORIENT

STORY OF INDOCHINA COUNTRY OF RICH RESOURCES. FRANCE’S EASTERN POSSESSION. With France’s submission to her enemy in the West, Oriental eyes are turning to her possessions in the East — above all to the richest jewel in her colonial crown, the great fivefold col-ony-protectorate of Indo-China. Now immensely quickened by France's misfortunes, the interest of French Indo-China’s neighbours in its future fate is not difficult to understand. A country of rich natural resources, its mines and plantations furnish important supplies of raw materials for industry. Its lowlands and river deltas, watered and fed by two great rivers, which flow down from the wooded highlands in the north—extension of the vast mountain system of Tibet—are among the most fertile agricultural country in Asia. And it is one of the rice granaries of the East. But there is more to it than natural wealth. Indo-China occupies an important strategic position in the Oriental world. At the tip of the long, narrow peninsula, which springs south from neighbouring Thailand (.Siam), is Sing- ( apore, the British fortress that guards the Strait of Malacca, the narrow highway between Malaya and Sumatra, to China and Japan. Along the Chinese coast to the east is Hong Kong. Burma shirts the northwestern frontier of French Indo-China. Not far away across the China Sea arc Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. A desirable possession in itself, this French possession could be an important base for a nation with acquisitive dreams in that world of islands and other possessions round about it. ROMANTIC STORY. The story of France in Indo-China is a romantic one. It goes back to the eighteenth century and the reign of Louis XVI, that monarch of tragic destiny who was the Revolution’s most spectacular victim. It was a French missionary bishop who first turned his countrymen’s eyes toward this corner of the tropic world and promoted relations between the King of Annam and his own Bourbon ruler. The old Annamese empire has successfully resisted Chinese attempts to overrun it, but it was decaying when the French appeared on the scene. All the same, if was not till 1862, after a series of local wars, that any large section of the country became French. In that year Cochin-China, one of the five sections which make up French IndoChina. was ceded to France by the King of Annam. It is the only portion that is a French colony, represented in the French Parliament by a deputy. The others are protectorates. In 1863 a protectorate was established over the kingdom of Cambodia. In 1884 this rule was extended to the kingdom of Annam and its vice-royal-ty. Tongking, Laos, the largest of the five sections, became a protectorate in 1893. A sixth section, Kwang-Chau-Wan, was leased from China in 1898. Altogether these territories make up an area of 285,000 square miles—onefifth larger than France itself—with a population of more than 23 million of whom only 30,000 are French. FINE COLONISERS. In this decaying land the French have been a vitalising influence. They are fine colonitrers, as anyone who has seen their admirable world in North Africa knows. They have developed the country while respecting its native customs and institutions. “The King of Cambodia still rules at Pnom-Penh and the Emperor of Annam at Hue, in all the pomp and majesty that characterised their ancestors.” wrote an English visitor some time ago. Like the young Sultan of Morocco, the Emperor Bao-Dai has had a French education. His wife was brought up in a Parisian convent. When they visited France last year they were received with all the pomp and circumstance which the French have been careful to preserve around them at home. Again, as in North Africa, the French have been careful to foster the native arts and to preserve the great monuments of the past. French Indo-China — Cambodia, to be precise—possesses one of the greatest monuments of antiquity in the world in the marvellous remains of the once royal and holy city of Angkor. 1 Not Egypt, not India, not Mexico or Java, possesses anything really comparable to this astounding aggregation of an architectural golden age of the past. Angkor dates from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. The great Buddhist temple of Angkor Vat, the supreme monument of ancient Cambodian art. with a facade 500 yards wide, dates from the later period. Tangled in the jungle growth of centuries of neglect when the French arrived—-a monument to French sagacity and artistic genius as well as to the art of Cambodia. Work is still proceeding at Angkor, where the frontiers of the jungle have been pushed back to reveal one of the most inspiring achievements of Oriental culture. IMPRESSIVE PAST. Land of an impressive past, enshrining in its jungle hills one of the holy places.of Buddha, French Indo-China’s future "hangs in the balance. Siamese nationalists some time age loudly called for the cession of Cambodia to them by France. The Siamese Government has been under the influence of a pro-Fascist group for some years, and the army has been in the hands of Japanese and German instructors, charged with its modernisation. To meet these threats the land forces, reported to be 30.000. were increased by a division of 20.000 Annamite riflemen some time ago. To the naval forces —already considerable, apparently, as France massed 16 French warships in the Bay of Kwang-Chow when the Japanese attacked Canton—have been added a submarine flotilla and several light, fast cruisers. New air squadrons were also added to the defence forces, and plans were made to transform the Bay of Camranh into a big naval base. What will be the fate of this country, home of an ancient civilisation, meet-ing-ground of Chinese philosophy and of Indian religious thought, where the new ideas of the modern world are fermenting today as elsewhere, whether it be East or West? The answer to that question lies round the corner. It is not a question to which the answer will easily be found, perhaps. Other than Oriental eyes are fixed today on Saigon and its picturesque land.