Imperial Heights

Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-520-27269-9
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 376 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 223 mm x 147 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

Reihe: From Indochina to Vietnam: Revolution and War in a Global Perspective

Intended as a reminder of Europe for soldiers and clerks of the empire, the city of Dalat, located in the hills of Southern Vietnam, was built by the French in an alpine locale that reminded them of home. This book uncovers the strange 100-year history of a colonial city that was conceived as a center of power and has now become a kitsch tourist destination famed for its colonial villas, flower beds, pristine lakes, and pastoral landscapes. Eric T. Jennings finds that from its very beginning, Dalat embodied the paradoxes of colonialism—it was a city of leisure built on the backs of thousands of coolies, a supposed paragon of hygiene that offered only questionable protection from disease, and a new venture into ethnic relations that ultimately backfired. Jennings’ fascinating history opens a new window onto virtually all aspects of French Indochina, from architecture and urban planning to violence, labor, métissage, health and medicine, gender and ethic relations, schooling, religion, comportments, anxieties, and more.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jennings, Eric T.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Escaping Death in the Tropics

2. Murder on the Race for Altitude

3. Health, Altitude, and Climate

4. Early Dalat, 1898–1918

5. Colonial Expectations, Pastimes, Comestibles, Comforts, and Discomforts

6. Situating the “Montagnards”

7. A Functional City? Architecture, Planning, Zoning, and Their Critics

8. The Dalat Palace Hotel

9. Vietnamese Dalat

10. Some Colonial Categories: Children, European Women, and Métis

11. Divine Dalat

12. The Maelstrom, 1940–1945

13. Autonomous Province or Federal Capital?

14. Dalat at War and Peace, 1946–1975

Epilogue

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Eric T. Jennings, Professor of History at the University of Toronto, is the author of Curing the Colonizers, and Vichy in the Tropics.