Great Hanoi Rat Massacre

Paul Bert street (now Tràng Tiền Street), an example of the French renovation of Hanoi.

France formally assumed control of Hanoi in 1882, occupying the city after the failure of the Treaty of Saigon. However, the region of Tonkin was not fully pacified until as late as 1896.[4][5] The French colonised Eastern Indochina (present day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) in several stages to gain backdoor access to the wealth of China through its market, specifically the French sought a river route to the Chinese province of Yunnan, which at the time was imagined as "El Dorado with silk instead of gold".[6]

Prior to the establishment of the French protectorate of Tonkin, the city of Hanoi was a collection of 36 streets, each of these streets was devoted to a specific craft as well as several temples and pagodas spread around the settlement.[7] Furthermore, the city of Hanoi also possessed a citadel and fort, these were ironically constructed in 1803 (the year after the Nguyễn dynasty was established by the Gia Long Emperor) with the assistance of French military engineers that were trained in the Vauban tradition of fortification.[8] However, the French viewed Hanoi as a dirty, squalid, ramshackle collection of villages. So they sought to transform it into a French-style city worthy of being the seat of one of the colonial possessions of the French Empire.[8] This process began with the arrival of French administrators in the 1880s, namely Paul Bert in 1886, really set off the Gallicisation of the city. Large areas of Hanoi, including most of the old citadel as well many temples, were demolished to make way for the new French-style buildings that would become the core of the new city. Most notable among these new constructions were St. Joseph's Cathedral[9] and the Lanessan Hospital.[8]

In 1897 Paul Doumer had been appointed Governor-General of French Indochina after he was briefly the French Minister of Finance (1895–1896) when he tried without success to introduce an income tax.[10] Under his leadership, the old Hanoi would be transformed into a completely different city and the transformation went into overdrive.[10] As Doumer planned on making Hanoi the new capital of the Union of Indochina he insisted that it should also look the part.[10] To fulfil this plan, a new palace for the residence of the Governor-General of French Indochina was constructed (which serves today as Vietnam's Presidential Palace). Large parts of Hanoi were cleared to make room for the new French-style inner city that was filled with broad tree-lined boulevards, colonial-style villas, and well-tended gardens.[10] This new area would be known as the "French Quarter" (Quartier Européen / Khu phố Pháp, today's Ba Đình District), as some visitors would describe it as "a slice of Paris on the other side of the world".[11][10] This area of the city sharply contrasted the cramped, narrow, and chaotic "Native Quarter" (Quartier indigène), where both the indigenous Annamese people and Han Chinese people resided.[10]

In the year 1902 the capital city of French Indochina was moved from Saigon, Cochinchina (present day Ho Chi Minh City) to Hanoi, Tonkin and it remained so until 1945.[12] When Paul Doumer arrived in Hanoi, he launched several major infrastructure projects, such as the Paul Doumer Bridge (now called the Long Biên Bridge), which spanned the 1,700-meter (5,600 ft) width of the Red River, and the Grand Palais d’Expositions which built for the Hanoi Exhibition in 1903.[12] These actions were enacted to make Hanoi a showcase for France's civilising mission in Indochina and to provide the city with the very first electricity network in Asia.[12]

Among the large projects ordered by Paul Doumer was the construction of a massive underground sewage system that would serve both as a symbol of French modernity and keep the "French Quarter" clear of any human waste.[12] As toilets were seen as "a sign of civilisation" Doumer wanted there to be flushable toilets in every French palace.[12] By the time of Paul Doumer's departure in March 1902, over 19 kilometers of sewers had been built underneath Hanoi,[13] the largest concentration of which lay beneath the "French Quarter".[10][12] A smaller section of the sewage system also lay underneath the "Indigenous Quarter" of the city.[10] The new sewer system did help fight Cholera, a disease brought to Hanoi by the French expeditionary forces coming from Algeria.[6]

This large new sewage system also brought with it a new unforeseen problem from the French, rats.[10][12] In the sewers rats found no natural predators and if they would get hungry they could easily penetrate directly into the most luxurious apartments in the city through the "highway" hidden deep beneath human footsteps.[10] This caused major concerns for the French both for hygienic reasons and an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague (or the "Black Death").[10][12] Just a few years earlier in 1894 the famous Alexandre Yersin discovered the Yersinia pestis bacteria that caused the disease and his colleague Paul-Louis Simond linked it to fleas found on rodents.[12][6] Because of the new knowledge about how rats caused the Bubonic Plague the French colonists became very concerned with the situation and quickly wanted to remedy the situation.[12][13]

The third plague pandemic started in 1855 in Yunnan, China during the Qing dynasty period.[14] This episode of bubonic plague spread to all inhabited continents, and ultimately led to more than 12 million deaths in India and China[15] (and perhaps over 15 million worldwide[16]), with at least 10 million killed in India alone, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.[17][16][18]

In 1898 Paul-Louis Simond was in the city of Karachi, Sind, India where, despite limited resources, he was able to demonstrate that fleas transmit the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the agent causing bubonic plague, from rat to rat, and from rat to human.[6]

The third plague pandemic happened at the same time as the French renovation of Hanoi.[6] From Yunnan it spread to Guangzhou and then to Hong Kong. The Bubonic plague then spread from Hong Kong to the British Raj.[6] The United States military brought it to Manila during their invasion of the Philippines at the Asian theatre of the Spanish–American War.[6] In 1899 it struck the Republic of Hawaii,[19][20] where in Honolulu (its capital city) the authorities chose to burn down its Chinatown.[6] Before the Bubonic plague hit the American city of San Francisco[21] its municipal authorities decided to enact a quarantine policy for its Chinatown.[22][6] During the quarantine the municipal authorities discussed enacting a "Honolulu Solution" to prevent the disease from affecting the rest of the city.[23][6]

The global situation became serious for Hanoi when French residents reported an infestation of rats in the French Quarter.[6] It seems that brown rats in Hanoi arrived on ships and trains that came from China where the pandemic started.[6] This invasive species of rats quickly discovered that the new sewers were an ideal ecosystem and quickly took over Hanoi's urban infrastructure, with reports coming out that people had spotted rats climbing up the outflow pipes and later even out of the toilets in French houses.[6] The realisation that these might be plague-carrying cats created a panic among health officials leading to their response to attempt to eradicate the rat infestation before the city would succumb to the pandemic.[6]

In 1995, American historian Michael G. Vann was researching for his doctoral dissertation on the city of Hanoi during French protectorate period in the overseas archives (Centre des Archives Section d’Outre-Mer) in Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône.[6] During his research there he stumbled across one of the more bizarre primary sources that a historian is ever likely to find.[6] Buried deep within the overseas archives Vann found a folder that labelled "Destruction of Hazardous Animals: Rats" concerning pest control.[6] The archived file was a haphazard collection of records from the French government of Indochina detailing the number of rats that were killed on each day and the amount of money that the French had awarded to the rat hunters.[6] The archives included about a hundred of identical forms that would list the number of rats that were reportedly killed between April 1902 and July 1902 in the first and second arrondissements (districts) of Hanoi.[6] Vann noted that while the dossiers recorded hundreds of thousands of rats being killed the numbers inexplicably started to decline, with first a few thousand, then a few hundred, and then only a few dozen before reporting no rat deaths at all on the last page.[6] Vann stated that there was no indication what caused the decline in reported rat deaths anywhere in the dossier.[6]

Michael G. Vann would continue to search for more information in the Centre des Archives Section d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and various collections in Paris.[6]

In the year 1997, Michael G. Vann went to Vietnam to do archival research on the rat massacre for more information on the topic.[10][13] While researching the archives, he attempted to reach into the top drawer of a card catalogue that was dedicated to pre-1954 French-language files, and then suddenly felt the sensation of a rat walking over his hand.[10]

Vann originally published Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre, an Episode in French Colonial History in a journal in 2003.[6] For years he assumed that only "a few dozen colleagues read the piece and kind of forgot about it" until he was approached by the producers of a podcast show called Freakonomics Radio through a phone call that took place in 2012.[6] The producers of Freakonomics Radio asked Vann if he would attend the podcast to illustrate the economic principle of perverse incentives, a concept he was unfamiliar with at the time.[6] After the interview he learned that his article on the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was being cited by a substantial number of economists and business journalists.[6]

In 2018 Micheal G. Vann and comic book artist Liz Clarke published the book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Vietnamese: Cuộc đại thảm sát chuột tại Hà Nội: Đế chế, Dịch bệnh và Sự Hiện đại ở VN thời Pháp thuộc) through the Oxford University Press.[13] The book is a hybrid scholarly volume and graphic novel (long-form comic book).[6] While the bulk of the information contained within the book is the form of an academic work authored by Vann, there are hundreds of pages in comic book format, which were drawn up by Clarke.[6]

In an interview with PV Thanh Niên Vann said "This book is like a love letter I want to send to Hanoi" (Cuốn sách này cũng giống như bức thư tình tôi muốn gửi tới Hà Nội) talking about the hospitality that he received when he visited the city back in 1997.[13] Among his motivations for writing the book he noted that it was a part of his mission is to let Americans know more about the country of city Vietnam, to educate them more about the history of this country with "thousands of years of civilisation", rather than only knowing about it through the Vietnam War.[13] Ivan Franceschini of the Made in China Journal describes the work as being a praiseworthy case study in the history of imperialism, noting that the book delves deep into the racialised economic inequalities of empire.[6] Franceschini further notes that it explores the idea of colonisation as a form of modernisation, while also discussing the creation of a radical power differential between "the West and the rest" created by industrial capitalism.[6]

Vann describes his choice to make half the book in comic book format as way to reach a larger audience as he noted "that Oxford had this series that takes unusual and quirky historical research and puts it into comic form" and he found the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre to also be a "quirky story".[6] Furthermore, Michael G. Vann felt that the topics discussed in the book would be presented in a better way if they were in an illustrated format as he wanted to visually showcase the differences between the Vietnamese and French neighbourhoods of Hanoi.[6]

For researching the topic Vann went on multiple trips to Hanoi between 1997 and 2014.[6]

Michael G. Vann says that the rats themselves are one of the main characters in his book, describing them as the "totem animal of modernity".[6] While he took inspiration from Art Spiegelman's Maus for the rats, he refused to anthropomorphise them.[6]

Vann also included themes in the book about racism (including sinophobia) and after learning that Dr. Sun Yat-Sen resided in Hanoi during the time of these events he included him in the book, both because he wanted to illustrate sinophobia and because he was also a graduate of the ʻIolani School in Honolulu.[6]