In a now largely forgotten episode of the First Indochina War, the Việt Minh charged the French with the use of biological weapons after similar allegations had been made against the US military in North Korea and China. This path explores how the Việt Minh mapped knowledge of imperialistic germ warfare onto Northern Vietnam. 

Mapping was a way to bound local space in a particular time. In response to fears of biological warfare, Vietnamese leaders sought to map emotional geographies of care through surveys of countryside, human mobility, and the possibilities and dangers it might bring. Such mapping drew on older Sinosphere, borderland, and national geographies as well as newer geographies of flight. During the colonial era, airplanes were a source of mobility, and terror, as they were used to map Indochina as well as to rain bombs down on those protesting colonial injustice. During the 1940s, airplanes potentially transported deadly microbes. Moreover, airplanes and microbes resulted in compounding mobilities—mobilities whose velocity and outcomes were augmented, unpredictable, and threatening.

First consider the Việt Minh's investigations of biological warfare through its Committee to Prevent Microbes. You can also explore a side path that looks at the life and work of one of the Committee's leaders, Ton That Tung. Then, look at the rural surveys conducted by the Việt Minh and consider what their results tell us about germ warfare in northern Vietnam and rural society of the 1950s more generally.

Show Viet Bac, Viet Minh hospital?

Show maps of First Indochina War, fighting?

Such political geographies show the connections that Vietnam had with the socialist world.