French Indochina
TerritoryWikipedia
386
MENTIONS
73
EPISODES
73
PODCASTS
Search complete. 386 mentions across 73 episodes found for "French Indochina".
Oct 15, 2026
Aaron MahnkeHOST
It was rats.
Aaron MahnkeHOST
At the time, Vietnam was part of French Indochina.
Aaron MahnkeHOST
Governor-General Paul Doumer wanted Hanoi to become a monument to French superiority, and so he built imposing government buildings, wide boulevards, fancy villas, and miles of new sewers.
Aaron MahnkeHOST
But the improvements were not shared equally.
speaker_0NARRATOR
But his temperament did not fit the laboratory.
speaker_0NARRATOR
In 1890, he left Paris to serve as a ship's doctor for the Messageries Maritimes line, sailing the Saigon-Haiphong routes, living between the sea and Indochina.
speaker_0NARRATOR
That was why when plague erupted in Hong Kong, the man France sent was not some senior professor of the Institute, but a doctor who already knew the roads of Asia.
speaker_0NARRATOR
After the discovery of 1894, he moved to French Indochina, founded the Pasteur Institute of Nha Trang in 1895, and stayed there for the rest of his life.
speaker_0NARRATOR
In Nha Trang, he prepared anti-plague serum, planted forests of cinchona trees for the quinine to treat malaria, and studied the rubber tree.
speaker_0NARRATOR
In 1893, he had been the first European to explore the Langbian Plateau and the one who proposed the area as a hill resort.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Humanity's first plague vaccine was born in the middle of a burning pandemic without any properly constituted clinical trial in a way modern medicine would never be permitted to repeat.
speaker_0NARRATOR
The second branch was serum.
Richie AllenHOST
That's amazing.
Gerald CelenteGUEST
You know why? Those dirty Japs invaded French Indochina.
Richie AllenHOST
That's right.
Gerald CelenteGUEST
French Indochina? You mean Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and you're calling it French Indochina? We're in Morocco, we're in Algeria, we're in about 22 countries.
Gerald CelenteGUEST
The United States, the, the, uh, French, the Dutch East Indies, oh, the Dutch are in Indonesia doing the same thing the French are, and, and the Great Britain, where the sun never sets on the British Empire, slaughtering people all over the world, they cut off 88% of Japanese oil, cut off three-quarters of their trade, global trade, and stole all their money.
Gerald CelenteGUEST
I can't understand why they bombed Pearl Harbor a couple of months later.
AlistairNARRATOR
It is a country in which imperialism has worked great good and wrought great evil, in which economic imperialism and humanitarian imperialism have been clearly enough revealed, often in conflict, in which imperialism has created what may prove to be, unless wisely dealt with, its own nemesis, a native nationalism.
AlistairNARRATOR
Subsection French Admirals in Indochina There is a map of Indochina comprising Siam, Cambodia, Cochin China, Annam, Laos, Tonkin, and the Malay States on page 313.
AlistairNARRATOR
French empire builders of the 18th century had India almost within their grasp, only to lose it to England.
AlistairNARRATOR
But French imperialists of the 19th century sought and found compensation, relatively small compensation, in the great peninsula which juts down east of India.
8 MINS LATER
AlistairNARRATOR
French imperialists hope, of course, that this situation will be changed.
AlistairNARRATOR
France must use more rice.
AlistairNARRATOR
Indochina must produce large quantities of cotton and other raw materials for French industry.
AlistairNARRATOR
In the meantime, this empire, for which French taxpayers have so generously poured out their francs and French sailors their blood, is about 14th in the list of the customers of France.
AlistairNARRATOR
In the meantime this empire, for which French taxpayers have so generously poured out their francs, and French sailors their blood, is about 14th in the list of the customers of France.
AlistairNARRATOR
Subsection Burma and Siam It is time that we turned, as the French did, toward the kingdom of Siam, west of French Indochina, and toward the kingdom of Burma, west of Siam.
AlistairNARRATOR
In the early 1880s King Thabor of Burma was favorably inclined toward the French and gave them the right to build a railway from Tonkin to Mandalay and establish a bank and exploit ruby mines.
AlistairNARRATOR
Apparently he was endeavoring to play the French off against the British, who were, in India, closer and therefore more dangerous neighbors.
AlistairNARRATOR
On the material side, many readers might expect to find Siam far outdistanced by the neighboring lands, which have been so zealously developed by European governments.
AlistairNARRATOR
The facts are rather surprising.
AlistairNARRATOR
Siam exports and imports more, much more, per capita than either French Indochina or British India.
AlistairNARRATOR
She has more railway per capita than either, but less per square mile than India.
Tony RobinsonNARRATOR
For decades, he led the Vietnamese nationalist movement, but it would be the turmoil of World War II that presented Ho with the opportunity he needed.
Tony RobinsonNARRATOR
When France was defeated by Germany in 1940, Japanese forces quickly invaded Vietnam, known at the time as French Indochina.
Tony RobinsonNARRATOR
In response, Ho established the League for the Independence of Vietnam, known more commonly as the Viet Minh.
Tony RobinsonNARRATOR
The Viet Minh took advantage of the retreating Japanese in 19-
AlistairNARRATOR
It is a country in which imperialism has worked great good and wrought great evil, in which economic imperialism and humanitarian imperialism have been clearly enough revealed often in conflict, in which imperialism has created what may prove to be, unless wisely dealt with, its own nemesis, a native nationalism.
AlistairNARRATOR
Subsection: French Admirals in Indochina.
AlistairNARRATOR
There is a map of Indochina comprising Siam, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Annam, Laos, Tonkin, and the Malay States on page three hundred and thirteen.
AlistairNARRATOR
French empire builders of the eighteenth century had India almost within their grasp, only to lose it to England.
AlistairNARRATOR
But French imperialists of the nineteenth century sought and found compensation, relatively small compensation, in the great peninsula which juts down east of India.
8 MINS LATER
AlistairNARRATOR
French imperialists hope, of course, that this situation will be changed.
AlistairNARRATOR
France must use more rice.
AlistairNARRATOR
Indochina must produce large quantities of cotton and other raw materials for French industry.
Olivia Kate MenziesHOST
Like, it basically can be described in one sentence.
Olivia Kate MenziesHOST
It's sort of a semi-autobiographical, semi-fictionalized version of an affair that the author, Duras, had when she was young in French Vietnam, French Indochina, in the 20s.
Olivia Kate MenziesHOST
Mm-hmm.
Olivia Kate MenziesHOST
When she was a young teenager, sort of 15, she had an affair with a much older 30-ish year old Chinese man.
AlistairNARRATOR
The facts are rather surprising.
AlistairNARRATOR
Siam exports and imports more, much more, per capita than either French Indochina or British India.
AlistairNARRATOR
She has more railway per capita than either, but less per square mile than India.
AlistairNARRATOR
These again are crude measurements, but it is not easy to find accurate indices of progress.
AlistairNARRATOR
And it should never be forgotten that the masses in all three countries are incredibly poor tillers of the soil, who do not ride much on railways, who do not find themselves enriched as commerce grows, who do not send telegrams to their friends.
AlistairNARRATOR
They will share only very gradually in whatever progress is made.
AlistairNARRATOR
The point here, however, is that even according to the conventional measures of material and educational development, independent Siam with its foreign advisors and shrewd royal family has marked superiority over French Indochina and in some respects over British India.
AlistairNARRATOR
End of section two.
Bill CrossGUEST
Well, it's really about stuff in your World War II stash that maybe you're getting bored of.
Bill CrossGUEST
How can you adapt it to French Indochina? Because there were really two Vietnam Wars.
Bill CrossGUEST
There was one between the French and the Vietnamese, and then the one between us and the Vietnamese.
Bill CrossGUEST
And the French were just using all kinds of cast-offs.
63 more episodes mention French Indochina.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.