The Enduring Significance of a French Soldier’s Amateur Preservation of Vietnamese Heritage The 50th anniversary of Vietnamese reunification that ended Western meddling and the irony of a colonialist’s gift

April 30, 2025, marks the 50^th anniversary of—according to one’s point of view—the reunification of Vietnam or the fall of Saigon. That day in 1975 was the end of what the Americans call the Vietnam War, and the Vietnamese call the American war. For Vietnam, it was also the end to more than a century of colonialist meddling, colonizing rule, and imperialist control.

Looking at my shelf of books on Vietnam, I was reminded of the odd case of Henri Oger.

Oger was a French colonial soldier, stationed in Hanoi in the first decade of the twentieth century, who did something extraordinary: He took it upon himself to create a massive, two-volume book about the daily life and work of the Vietnamese, illustrated with some 4,200 line drawings that he commissioned from Vietnamese “draftsmen” and arranged to have cut into wooden blocks by Vietnamese engravers, then printed on handmade paper from a nearby village.

Duck herder from Oger’s book. (Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

The drawings show figures performing religious rites, harvesting crops, collecting fertilizer, trapping fish, taking pigs to market, herding ducks, building haystacks, snaring a porcupine, making soy sauce and fish sauce, feasting, tiling roofs, giving birth, racing boats, performing traditional medicine, reading mandarin exam questions, and celebrating Tet. There are little illustrations of eyeglasses, the long nails of a Confucian scholar, a dog-washing apparatus, lamps, statues, ink pots, looms, musical instruments, tombstones. Occupations are pictured: goldsmith, painter, sculptor, night-soil collector, lacquer worker, grave digger.

The project is so daft it is touching: an attempt at nothing less than a comprehensive visual catalog of the entire material culture and socio-familial life of the Vietnamese as they were then, an attempt initiated by a young man in the colonizing machinery meant to drag the Vietnamese into a Western conception of modernity. Few of the names of the Vietnamese who worked on the project with Henri Oger were recorded, but they include Nguyen Van Dang, Nguyen Van Giai, Pham Van Thieu, and Pham (Trong) Hai.

Oger’s book is called, in translation, General Introduction to the Study of the Mechanics and Crafts of the Annamites. (Annam was a French protectorate in central Vietnam, but Westerners often referred to all Vietnamese as Annamites.) This amateur ethnographic project was so removed from Oger’s actual duties, and so far outside the scope of the colonial administration’s interests, that only 60 copies were printed, and the book was never copyrighted, legally registered in France, or deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I first read a brief description of Oger’s book, years ago, in an appendix of the excellent Viet Nam: Tradition and Change (Ohio University Press, 2016), by Huu Ngoc. [TCR does not have typographical rendering support for diacritical marks in Vietnamese.] The appendix is written by Olivier Tessier, a scholar at École française d’Étreme-Orient (EFEO), a research institute and perhaps the oldest Western publisher of scholarly pieces on east Asia. EFEO had reprinted the Oger book in 2009, in limited quantities, with additional texts included for context, and cleaned-up images.

The appendix includes about 180 of the thousands of images in the original. They are beautiful, interesting, comic, and sometimes mysterious. With Tessier’s permission I used a few in a journal I edited then, my main interest, but I was struck by Tessier’s explanation that there were only seven-and-a-half copies of the original printing known to exist, in libraries around the world.

To my surprise, Tessier says in the appendix that Southern Illinois University Carbondale has one of the few copies in the US. (The other institutions are UC, Berkeley; Cornell; and Johns Hopkins.)

SIUC was the proximate cause of my birth in Saigon at the start of the American war, and I supposed that the then-president of the university might have brought back a copy of Oger’s book from one of his globe-hopping trips to Asia. The acquisition would make a fine story, I thought, if the details could be discovered.

In honor of Vietnam’s 50^th anniversary of freedom from colonialism and its inheritors, I drove down to SIUC to have a look at the full, original set of images in Oger’s astonishing book of northern Vietnamese life in 1908-09, when Hanoi was the capital of Vietnam, as it is now.

•  •  •

A postcard photograph of old Hanoi, during Henri Oger’s time as a French colonial soldier stationed there. (Public domain)

I got crushed, a little. SIUC’s original is apparently no longer in the university’s special collections, or was never there. Matt Gorzalski, University Archivist, who has helped me patiently with other projects, brought me what they do have—hardbound photocopies of the original’s pages. I asked about the possibility the original was misfiled (unlikely, he explained), and where it might be now if it had been, say, in the former president’s university home after it was acquired (no way of knowing).

Matt set me up with file folders containing several years’ worth of library newsletters that listed some new acquisitions, in hopes of knowing how it came in, but Oger’s book was not mentioned. Matt also let me look through folders with materials from the short-lived Center for Vietnamese Studies at SIUC, which closed in the early 1970s after accusations of CIA involvement. These included bibliographies of books and periodicals held by the Center, but Oger was not listed there either.

It was a curatorial mystery—to me, anyway—and I tried hard, in consideration for Matt, not to imitate Robert Downey as Sherlock Holmes by steepling my fingers and muttering intensely, “Most…engaging,” as I asked a few more general questions about the process of finding missing resources in a collection. Matt, I think, did not consider it missing. Later, Tessier could not tell me how he and his co-author knew that SIUC had one of the handful of originals in the world.

So I cracked on, intent at least to look at every image in the full copy. That took time, and an intensity of experience built as I looked in—past the years; at culture, technology, and lifestyle; and by way of several layers of media buildup (sketch, woodcut, printing, annotation, photocopying). The strangeness of the images, the intensity and mass of them, was a little overwhelming, like a visit to too many ancient temples on a visit to another country. I was reminded of a time my son felt faint in the local antique mall, another kind of miscellany; we had thought it might be from dust allergy, mold, or stale air, but maybe it was a malady of history. In any case, my afternoon in the archive reinforced the accomplishment of Oger and his Vietnamese collaborators.

Later I would pull up contemporary photos online from northern Vietnam, some of them held in EFEO’s archive or sold as postcards to European tourists. Shown were the Hanoi opera house as Oger knew it, the new steel bridge over the Red River, street scenes, even processes portrayed in the Oger book as line drawings. These were interesting, even a corrective to a notion that the Oger book encouraged, about an intact agrarian and mandarin society. But the photos—made with Western technology and presumably a Western eye behind the aperture—are not just different. They do not have the same power as the woodblock prints, which are wonderful on their own or with short descriptions of what was being portrayed.

There was something familiar about the images too, beyond their views of domestic life and affection, and I finally found my reference, intended without irony or diminution: the “Busytown” books of Richard Scarry, which have sold 300 million copies in 30 languages to delighted children through several generations.

A plate from Oger’s book. (Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

Artist Chris Ware, writing in the Yale Review, calls them “a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked. […] A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a…family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, ‘Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.’”

Ware says Scarry’s “free pencil style” with its “clean, pencil-line, doodle-like drawings…seemed living and alive, if not to live on the very page itself.” Some of Scarry’s work “plied the icon-lexicographical approach of images-as-words,” and throughout its “dictionary-like visual presentation paired with lightly slapstick situations…just enough innocent mayhem…to hint at a darker side of things…” All this applies to the Oger illustrations.

Ware also discovered “a decidedly un-American tone” in the books—not anti-American, he says, but, “a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized.” (Scarry lived abroad for many years.)

General Introduction to the Study of the Mechanics and Crafts of the Annamites feels a bit like an adult version of that.

•  •  •

Olivier Tessier sent me a PDF this month of the first of three volumes of the EFEO edition (2009) of the Oger book. It is printed, handily, in English as well as the original French, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

(I eventually got all three hardbound EFEO volumes with all 4,000+ images by interlibrary loan and lugged them across the WashU campus while holding an umbrella and a latte; they are wrist-busters. I cannot find a copy of the EFEO edition [printed in 2,000 copies and 1,000 DVD versions] for sale anywhere. The Library of Congress has 120 plates from the original 1908-09 book online.)

What is revealed of Oger and his project in the EFEO edition—in his own writing (1908), in a brief biography (1970) by Pierre Huard, and a preface (2009) by Olivier Tessier and Phillippe Le Failler—is humanizing, which is to say not always great but offering many hints of understanding.

Henri Oger was born in western France in 1885, got his bachelor’s degree “without distinction,” then enrolled at Paris’ École pratique des hautes études and studied with Louis Finot, a French archeologist and an early director of EFEO, which was founded in 1900. Oger did two years of military service “at his own request” in Hanoi, 1908-1909.

Detail from Oger’s book. (Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

His life is mostly a blank now, so there are mysteries of intent. He graduated from the École Coloniale in 1909, was made an administrator in the Indo-China civil service, was “certified in the Annamite language and Chinese characters,” but in 1914 returned to France and a year later had to be “made to return to Vietnam.” He was hospitalized several times there, supposedly from overwork as both administrator and amateur researcher—probably actually malaria or other disease—and returned again to France in 1919. He “seems to have lived in Spain after February 1932,” Huard says. He married at an unknown date, “but later on no one had heard about him again, and he was considered as missing [ie, dead from presumably natural causes] in 1936.” He never returned to Vietnam after 1920.

Tessier and le Failler add context in their preface. Oger was the same age, when he arrived in Vietnam, as Tonkin, the northern French protectorate where he served. “The colonial power was softening…as though it were not the successor to the prior century’s brutal conquest,” the authors say, but violent nationalist resistance was brewing again.

“[T]he mass of peasants in the Red River Delta, seven million people, stooped to drag from the soil harvests frequently too small to guarantee subsistence,” they say. Hanoi was inhabited by merchants, artisans, “starched and self-important” colonial civil servants, “adventurers and entrepreneurs…outcasts from society, disinherited aristocrats, dreamers and thrill-seekers of every sort.” The largely male population frequented the race track, absinthe bars, dance halls, “’flagrant’ houses,” and opium dens. What is more, Tessier and le Failler say, “[T]he French faithfully reproduced…metropolitan political cleaves, even amplifying them,” so that, for example, the “power of the Freemasons clashed with that of the archdiocese….” It was “a climate of somewhat self-defeating provincial torpor….”

Oger attached himself to a mentor named Jean Ajalbert, 20 years older and in France an early Dreyfus supporter, “impressionist poet, lawyer and journalist…close to…anarchist circles,” who in Hanoi became a novelist, polemicist, and “untiring critic of colonial excesses.”

Ajalbert, it might be said wryly, taught Oger everything he knew about ticking off his society and being left underappreciated. As early as their first acquaintance in Paris, Ajalbert “nudged” Oger in the direction of the “Maison de Tous” movement, based on the system of free public libraries in the US, places where classless people could “be at liberty to develop physically, morally, and intellectually” through “egalitarian utopianist” ideals. Oger got himself in trouble proselytizing this in Vietnam, “caus[ing] deep anxiety at the highest level of the colonial apparatus….”

By the end of his time as a junior colonial administrator, Tessier and le Failler say, Oger “was treated as a fraud and accused of plagiarism,” who “neglected his [official] tasks, irritated a succession of superiors…inclined to judge him unusable as a bureaucrat,” and was “reprimanded for the high opinion he had of himself and his scientific knowledge.” He “was not acknowledged” as a researcher. In his own writing he is hilariously self-pitying about this.

Ajalbert published Oger early on, in the Tonkin newspaper he edited, work that Tessier and le Failler call “meager drawing[s], with…short explanation[s] of [local material culture] object[s]” that “reveal only summary knowledge of the subject.”

“In a word,” they say, “a good observer, Henri Oger knew how to describe things, but lacking rigor, explained nothing.”

Ouch. On the other hand, this explains some of the charm, even art, of Oger’s future book. Tessier and le Failler responsibly try to drag his General Introduction to the Study of the Mechanics and Crafts of the Annamites back to the realm of social science, the study of material culture, cultural technology, ethnography, by adding contemporary photos in their preface to what Oger asked Vietnamese artists to portray, and by explaining the processes in industrial terms, as with a long section on papermaking.

But even they have to admit, in the first lines of their edition, “The reader is first of all drawn in by the aesthetic quality of its drawings and engravings…which make it a true work of art. The simplicity of the line, the rigor of the graphics, the painstaking care taken by the artist to capture the daily gestures and attitudes of the ordinary folk of Hanoi and its surrounding areas: all these elements convey a deep humanity [that] hints at the fact that the confrontation between the colonialist and the colonized, as unbalanced as it was, sometimes aroused a real interest and sincere curiosity in one another’s culture. Certain broad-minded people, on both sides, looked for ways to bridge the gap between the two worlds which had been closed off from each other….

“It is this spirit of reciprocal curiosity that we need to continue to develop, so that cultural diversity…does not simply end at a juxtaposition…but is reinforced by a mutually fruitful dialogue.”

Oger, Huard says, “essentially…used his service in the army and civil service to satisfy a limitless curiosity in all areas, linguistic as well as literary, regarding the Vietnamese as much as the Europeans living in Vietnam.” His “scientific libido[!] expressed itself in varied ways and numerous projects, always begun, then most often lost,” Huard admits but adds that Oger’s assessment of his own work—that it “was preceded by no-one’s”—was “very accurate.”

Some of that was accident. The higgledy-piggledy jumble of the illustrations in the book was the result of Oger not understanding that the engraved woodcuts he paid for (with subscription funds) would not run through one of the few conventional printing presses in the region, especially after the wood had swelled and warped in the humid climate. In its way, this jumble was anti-bureaucratic, anti-labelling, anti-categorization, and anti-narrative.

Detail from Oger’s book. (Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

“This miscellaneous assembly, whether voluntary or imposed by technical constraints,” Tessier and le Failler say, “in no way hinders their accessibility; indeed, it faithfully reflects the diversity of a colorful, abundant folk culture nourished by an ingeniousness which seems without limit. […] If the work is a powerful machine for winding back the years, the atmosphere of profound humanity which it reconstructs remains palpable today.”

“[B]etter than photographs, it captures numbers of gestures and techniques that the acceleration of historic change in contemporary Vietnam has made disappear,” Huard says.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Oger’s book is that it was completed largely by the Vietnamese. Its subjects—the people, work, play, ceremonies, processes, and tools of Hanoi and the Delta—are almost all Vietnamese. So were its “draftsmen,” artisan engravers, papermakers, printers, and presumably book binders.

It is hard to know Oger’s role and influence beyond raising money and hiring people for the project; suggesting subjects he wanted illustrated; and having control of (very) brief explanations of them. But when I looked through all 4,000+ drawings that afternoon at SIUC, I had a strong feeling that Oger—even if by a kind of blundering or neglect—escaped some of the ethical problems of, say, Edward Curtis and his The North American Indian project.

That is, in the large bank of illustrations, in my view the reason for being of the book, Oger mostly just presents the images. In his written introduction, on the other hand, his consciousness is often split.

He acknowledges in his writing, for example, the “very special” papers made in villages outside Hanoi’s gates, which are dedicated to the ancient craft in the guild tradition. He deems these handmade papers superior to European ones in several ways and says they are capable of “endur[ing] a hundred years in a country where the brutality of the climate and insects spare nothing.” He admits, “Our arrival in this country and the establishment of Franco-Annamite training have delivered a heavy blow to this industry.”

But he cannot help himself from saying, two lines later, “One has to regret that a French industrialist doesn’t pop up to upgrade, for little expense, the tools [and methods and products] of this group. [H]e could undertake with an experienced workforce the production of cardboard boxes and cardboard for which the market is assured in Europe and even the Far East.”

Oger—despite many justifications for “man of his time” criticisms—created a massive trove of remembrance for the Vietnamese and a cultural presence for others. It is no small accomplishment and deserves wider notice. Time wants us to become nameless, dissolved, and when we look at what survives of us—an aunt’s oval photo on her tomb; a 25,000-year old Venus figurine; a fragment of bone flute made from a cave bear femur perhaps 43,000 years ago—all we can hope for is that the artifact does us some sort of justice in its representation. If one is looking for utility in art, here is something.

Oger’s book is one of those artifacts. It is in fact nearly the opposite of the colonialist story, from which the Vietnamese are celebrating 50 years of freedom.