Dalat hotel Jennings

Modern Asian Studies 37, 1 (2003), pp. 159–194. 2003 Cambridge University PressDOI:10.1017/S0026749X03001057 Printed in the United Kingdom

From Indochine to Indochic: The LangBian/Dalat Palace Hotel and French Colonial

Leisure, Power and Culture*ERIC T. JENNINGS

University of Toronto

Looking at an early picture of the French colonial hill station ofDalat circa 1925, one is struck by the centrality of an edifice aroundwhich the entire European resort seems to have been conceived.Completed in 1922, this monumental hotel, known at the time asthe Lang Bian Palace (since rebaptized the Dalat Palace Hotel), wasdesigned as a site of colonial leisure and power at the centre of Indo-china’s premier site of French villeggiatura, ‘discovered’ by Dr Alex-andre Yersin in 1893, and earmarked for development into a hillstation by the Governor General of Indochina, Paul Doumer in1897–8. According to the geographer Robert Reed, the Lang BianPalace ‘function[ed] almost immediately as the nerve center ofproper Western colonial society in the highlands.’1

* I wish to recognize the Social Science and Humanities Research Council ofCanada for supporting my research in France and Vietnam. My sincere gratitudeto Mr Wilson Fieldhouse, General Manager of the Sofitel Dalat Palace Hotel, forsharing information on his hotel with me, and especially for allowing me to consultthe unpublished work of Bruno Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace: A hotel of the past, today,’a compilation of primary sources on the Dalat Palace Hotel. I would like to extendmy thanks as well to Mrs Huynh Thi Thanh Xuyen for taking the time to discussher, and her family’s recollections about the hotel. I am very grateful to MonsieurJacques Veysseyre for very kindly allowing me to consult his late father’s papers onthe Palace Hotel’s partial collapse in 1943. I am indebted to Mme Lucette Vachierfor permitting me to access the French Colonial Archives’ holdings on the hotel,some of which are in poor condition and required special handling. In Hanoi, I mustthank Professor Phan Huy Le for helping me gain access to the National Archives#1. Last but not least, I wish to recognize the detailed and most helpful commentsof an anonymous reader for Modern Asian Studies. All translations from French aremy own.

1 Robert Reed, ‘From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital: Reflections on theColonial Origins, Urban Transformation and Environmental Impact of Dalat’ inTerry Rambo, Robert Reed, Le Trong Cuc et al., The Challenges of Highland Developmentin Vietnam (Hawaii: East-West Center Program on Environment, 1995), p. 51.

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Indeed, the monumentalism, modernity, luxury, and location ofthe hotel conspired to make it a conspicuous symbol of French dom-ination over a region which doctors like Alexandre Yersin and admin-istrators like Governor Paul Doumer sought to carve out as a quint-essentially ‘French’ space at the turn of the century. Thisostentatious symbol of French power in the highlands of Vietnamthus engages with several fields of scholarship, from the emergingfield of French colonial tourism2 (which to date has too oftenfavoured studies of metropolitans voyaging to the colonies—i.e.Andre Malraux visiting and pillaging Angkor—over internal, lateraltourism in the colonies themselves), to issues of highland ‘develop-ment’, relations between highland minorities, ethnic Vietnameseand French in colonial Indochina, and finally to the everyday lifeof colonialism. The Dalat Palace Hotel thus constitutes an utterlyoverlooked focal point and fault-line for the identity, status, andsocial relations of French colonizers in Indochina. The site of Dalatitself was variously described by different colonial sources as a kindof colonial ‘wild West,’ or a ‘decompression chamber to the tropics,’or finally as a little piece of France in Indochina.In the last twenty-five years, a host of studies on ‘urban Apart-

heid’—be they set in Algiers, Rabat, or Bombay—have underscoredthe role of urban planning in perpetuating and normalizing the rela-tionship between colonizer and colonized.3 Another body of scholar-

2 On French colonial tourism, see Alison Murray, ‘Le tourisme Citroen auSahara, 1924–1925’, Vingtieme Siecle, Revue d’Histoire 68 (October–December 2000):95–107; Miriam Kahn, ‘Tahiti Intertwined: Ancestral Land, Tourist Postcard, andNuclear Test Site’, American Anthropologist 102:1 (2000): 7–26; and Ellen Furlough,‘A Lesson of Things: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France’ forth-coming in a special issue of French Historical Studies on ‘Travel and Tourism.’ Forrecent English-language studies on tourism in metropolitan France, see amongstothers: Ellen Furlough, ‘Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culturein France, 1930’s to 1970’s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40:2 (1998):247–86; Douglas Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine and the Spain Modern France (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Patrick Young,‘The Consumer as National Subject: Bourgeois Tourism in the French Third Repub-lic, 1880–1914’, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2000.

3 For an excellent overview of much of this literature, see Anthony King, ‘WritingColonial Space’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37:3 (July 1995): 541–54.For case studies of ‘urban Apartheids’ see Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheidin Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Zeynep Celik, Urban Formsand Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning ofBombay City, 1855–1875 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); Anthony King,Colonial Urban Development. Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Rouledge,1976); Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and

FROM INDOCHINE TO INDOCH IC 161

ship, focusing upon colonial architecture more specifically, hassought to decode European affirmations of power in the colonies, aswell as to assess colonial efforts at integrating fanciful elements ofindigenous architecture into their own, thereby creating a hybridmodernism.4 To date, however, much of this work on the trappingsof colonialism has, by its very focus on artifacts and discourses overpractices,5 tended to elide everyday manifestations of colonial life,home-sickness, rivalry, competition etc.—thereby leading to anoverly monolithic portrayal of colonial forms and norms—typified atits paroxysm by the frustrating use of the singular to refer to thecolonial project. By bridging this vast field of studies of colonial urb-anism and architecture with another approach—championedamongst others by Nicholas Thomas and Ann Stoler’s layered andtextured analyses of complex, conflicting, fractured, often dysfunc-tional, and certainly pluralized colonialisms6—this article seeks tounderstand the ‘real life’ of French colonialism in Indochina. To dothis, I have deliberately chosen an almost mythical and hence seem-

Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Odile Goerg, La ville europeenne outre-mers: un modele conquerant? (Paris:l’Harmattan, 1996).

4 See Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Giles Tillotson, The Tradition ofIndian Architecture. Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1989). On hybridity, modernism, and appropriations of indigenouselements in colonial architecture, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design inFrench Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Paul Rabi-now, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press,1989), and Krystyna Von Henneberg, ‘Imperial Uncertainties: Architectural Syn-cretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya’, Journal of Contemporary History31:2 (1996): 373–95.

5 Thomas Metcalf, for example, explicitly sets out to examine ‘how politicalauthority took shape in stone, and how, in turn, these colonial buildings helpedshape the discourse on empire of the later nineteenth century.’ Metcalf, An ImperialVision, p. xi.

6 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Thomas himself prefers the plural‘colonialisms’, thereby stressing the locational specifics of colonialism. He pleads fora ‘plural rather than a unitary construction of colonial discourse.’ Thomas, pp. 9;51. In 1989, Ann Stoler explicitly leveled the critique that much existing literatureover-homogenized and reified a single ‘colonial project’: ‘The terms colonial state,colonial policy, foreign capital, and the white enclave are often used interchangeably, asif they captured one and the same thing . . . The makers of metropole policy becomeconflated with its local practioners. Company executives and their clerks appear asa seamless community of class and colonial interests whose internal discrepenciesare seen as relatively inconsequential, whose divisions are blurred.’ Ann LauraStoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundar-ies of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 135.


ingly ‘un-real’ colonial site, which has become a veritable lieu dememoire in its own right, to explore the tensions and dynamics behindthe lore of colonial Indochic. Far from being marginal to the ‘culturalpolitics’ of French colonial Indochina, I contend that this site ofluxury lay at its very centre.Finally, a third body of literature, dominated mostly by geo-

graphers, has examined the colonial hill stations of the British Raj.7With so much ink spilled on the Simla model, surprisingly littleattention has been afforded to non-British hill stations (RobertReed’s study of Banguio stands out as an important exception).8 Bytracing how French planners sought to adapt, transform, andimprove upon the Simla model to create highland miniature replicasof France rather than Britain (this down to Dalat’s 18 degree centi-grade average annual temperature, which was explicitly described asMediterranean, in contrast to the outright ‘Nordic’ 12 degree Celsiusannual average of Simla),9 this article will shed light on theuniqueness both of colonial practices in a French hill station, andFrench colonial fantasies for highland Vietnam. For the very idea ofconstructing a vast and ultra-modern site of villeggiatura on aremote highland plain was first and foremost a utopian (or distopian)fantasy.

7 On the hill stations of the Raj, see Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains. HillStations of the British Raj (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996); VikramBhatt, Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1997);Raja Bhasin, Simla, the Summer Capital of British India (London: Penguin, 1992);Monika Buhrlein, Nuwara Eliya: Hill Station und Zentraler Ort im Hochland der InselCeylon (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991); Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations ofAsia (New York: Westview, 1998); Pamela Kanwar, ‘The Changing Profile of theSummer Capital of British India: Simla, 1864–1947’, Modern Asian Studies 18:2(1984): 215–36; Judith Kenny, ‘Claiming the High Ground: Theories of ImperialAuthority and the British Hill Station in India’, Political Geography 1997; JudithKenny, ‘Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of BritishAuthority in Ootacamund’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1990); NoraMitchell, The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal (Chicago: University of Chicago Geo-graphy Department, 1972). For an interesting piece which combines several of theapproaches listed above (colonial architecture, urban apartheids, hill stations), andwhich focuses on Africa rather than Asia, see Odile Goerg, ‘From Hill Station(Freetown) to Dowtown Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and BritishApproaches to Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the TwentiethCentury’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 32:1 (1998): 1–31.

8 Robert Reed, City of Pines; The Origins of Baguio as a Colonial Hill Station andRegional Capital (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 1976).

9 Statistics from circa 1900, drawn from Lam Dong Provincial Library, Dalat, DC067, p. 313.


But the Dalat Palace Hotel further permits one to trace a signific-ant shift in this regard—or at the very least a divide between thetheory and practice of colonial sites of leisure and power. What wasat its outset a painstakingly planned and controlled environmentintended as a sort of colonial tabula rasa, was soon transformed bya set of factors including triangulations of power between French,highland minorities and Vietnamese, tensions between differentFrench colonial agencies, sectors, and agendas, and the dynamicsproper to this particular colonial society itself. Ultimately, when onepushes the examination of Dalat beyond initial plans for an oasis ofFrance in the highlands of Indochina, one uncovers more colonialdiscord and rivalry than unity of goals; thus, as we shall see, thevarious strata of the French colonial administration could neveragree on which should bear the financial burden of keeping the grandhotel afloat. Out of the lavish and overarching colonial project ofDalat that was sketched out around 1897, there thus emerged count-less competing projects—all played out in the crucible of colonialsocial life and power that was the Dalat Palace Hotel—at once socialclub, de facto headquarters of French colonial high society, focalpoint of discussions about the role of the French colonial administra-tion, and indeed the ultimate marker of ‘Frenchness’. The Lang BianPalace Hotel emerged, in other words, as a site where various andoften competing French colonial ambitions, tensions and visions ofIndochina itself were negotiated.

A Colonial Tabula Rasa

The Lang Bian plateau was, by the admission of most colonial offi-cials, a vast experiment, a tabula rasa on which the French sought tosocially engineer a ‘white island’ in the tropics.10 To be sure, theFrench were not alone in seeking the cooler climes of the high-lands—this well-documented phenomenon has been aptly labeled‘the panacea of seeking higher altitudes.’11 Indeed, the French, and

10 Gwendolyn Wright has described Dalat’s raison d’etre as follows: ‘Dalat was tobe a model city, in the sense of a controlled environment, an urbane retreat for theFrench elite. In location and in character, the town was far from the heat, thebickering, and the industrial pollution of Saigon, far from the violence, the rivalriesand the crowded streets of Hanoi.’ Wright, The Politics of Design, p. 230.

11 Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical world in theNineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 28.


Yersin first among them, self-consciously modeled Dalat upon theBritish colonial hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling.12 But in thecase of the Lang Bian plateau, far more was at stake than the prim-ary, overriding obsession of seeking cooler climes—itself rationalizedin terms of disease avoidance. French colons, entrepreneurs, and vaca-tioners also projected a series of fantasies upon the Lang Bian: tosome, it would serve as a French ‘Far-West’—a land of opportunityand of exoticism, inhabited by so-called ‘primitive’ peoples—Lat andKoho highland minority groups whom the French ceaselessly com-pared to North American aboriginals.13 To others in the military,including General Pennequin who was instrumental in seekingParis’s approval for Dalat’s creation at the turn of the century, theLang Bian’s significance resided in its strategic location, supposedlyoutside the scope of Vietnamese influence. Pennequin wrote to hisParisian superiors in 1903: ‘our domination in Southern Indochinawill not be complete until we have controlled the highlands [aroundDalat] . . . where the Annamites [read Vietnamese] have never daredto venture.’14 The purported fears15 of ethnic Vietnamese towardsthe mountainous Lang Bian were a determining factor for thisFrench General: going where the Vietnamese had supposedly neverdared could not only bolster French prestige, it could also serve as apotential counterweight to, and the cornerstone of a future allianceagainst Vietnamese ‘hegemony’ over Indochina as a whole. Penne-quin pursued:

12 Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence,France (hereafter CAOM), GGI 5967, rapports du Dr Yersin, 1898–9. Yersin reportentitled: ‘Le sanatorium du Lang Bian.’.

13 Many a parallel was made with the American ‘wild-west’. To the journalistFrancois de Tessan, Dalat evoked the broad avenues, open spaces and ‘virgin lands’of the American west. Francois de Tessan, ‘Une station d’altitude en Indochine’,L’Illustration February 17, 1923, p. 157. Others, like the hunting guide authorLucien Roussel, drew comparisons between the physical appearance of Lang-Bianhighland minorities on the one hand, and native Americans on the other hand.Lucien Roussel, La chasse en Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1913), p. 66.

14 CAOM, GGI 66188, Pennequin reports, 1903–4.15 Anthropologist Libby Vann has argued that these purported fears were used

by the French to claim the Lang Bian for themselves. She writes: ‘Th[e] notion thatLang Bian was a European environment appears to have been strengthened by thenotion that lowland Vietnamese and the montagnards considered it a dangerousregion. The name given to Lang Bian by the highland peoples, French colonialspointed out, meant: ‘disinherited or cursed. The Annamites of the shore are in factafraid of ascending mountainous countries . . ’. Libby Vann, ‘Discovering the Alpsin Indochina: European Nature and the French Colonial Sanatorium of Dalat,1893–1927.’ Paper kindly made available to me by its author.


Our Indochinese colony contains only strictly speaking the countries ofAnnam and Cambodia; Laos is a reserve for the future . . . All of the peoplesof these regions are of different races, but all of them are more assimilablethan are the Annamites. No doubt one day they will form a counterweightto Annam. The main problem is that they are isolated . . . A railroad to theLang Bian would be a first step towards ending this isolation.16

Clearly laid out here is an early, machiavellian example of theFrench politique des races, which consisted of playing off minoritiesagainst dominant ethnicities in the colonies.17 From the outset, then,colonizing the Lang Bian plateau fulfilled multiple functions againstthe Vietnamese. First of all, it allowed the French administration tocreate ex nihilo (at least in its eyes) a highland sanitarium wherefunctionaries and soldiers could find a salubrious, relaxing, andintrinsically ‘European’ environment (a series of reports comparedthe Lang Bian to various French microclimates: the Riviera, theLandes, the Alps, etc.). As a token of its ‘Frenchness’, Governor PaulDoumer reported that Dr Yersin had dubbed the spot ‘Langsa,’ or‘French town’ in local dialect—although Yersin’s own notebooksshow that the site already bore this name when he ‘discovered’ it.18It would later be called Dalat—a fusion of the Vietnamese words‘spring/river’ and the ethnonym Lat. Secondly, Dalat would serve astrategic function as the keystone of a future alliance of Khmer, Lao,and highland peoples (Lat, Hmong, etc.) against the ethnic Vietna-mese, considered ‘unassimilable’ and antithetical to the French byPennequin. From the outset, then, the French strategic and militaryobjectives at Dalat involved a fascination with non-VietnameseSoutheast Asian minorities, a desire to thwart Vietnamese ‘domina-tion’, and an attempt to create an inherently French space, an islandof home in Southeast Asia.19

16 Ibid.17 On some of the strategies involved in this complex game, see the following

article, which focuses on the highland minorities of Northern Vietnam (Tonkin incolonial times): Jean Michaud, ‘The Montagnards and the State in Northern Viet-nam from 1802 to 1975: a historical overview’, Ethnohistory 47:2 (Spring 2000):345–9.

18 CAOM GGI 5969, Gouverneur General Doumer to Ministre des Colonies,April 18, 1898. Yersin’s travel logs are located at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.Archives of the Institut Pasteur, Fonds Yersin, Box 3, Dossier 13651, ‘Yersin PaysMoı, deuxieme expedition’ (1893), p. 117.

19 For general histories of Dalat in the colonial era, see Wright, The Politics ofDesign, pp. 230–3, and Robert Reed, ‘From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital’.Also see Truong Tro (ed.), Dalat, ville d’altitude (Ho Chi Minh City: People’s Commit-tee of Ho Chi Minh City, 1993); Arnauld Le Brusq, Le Vietnam a travers l’architecture


Finding ‘European comfort’ and overcoming homesickness werethus crucial considerations in the establishment of Dalat. Althoughthe prime or official motive in the creation of colonial hill stationswas medical, this scientific rationale was systematically enshroudedin, and indeed indissoluble from social engineering designs, desiresfor segregation, and the drive to create what Dane Kennedy hastermed highland ‘pinnacles of power.’20 In 1898, the Governor Gen-eral of Indochina, and future President of France, Paul Doumer,reported the prime objectives of the Lang Bian exploration expedi-tions as follows:Ever since I arrived in Indochina, I sought to find, in the highlands ofAnnam, Tonkin and even Laos, high and salubrious plateaux upon whichEuropeans could find a vivifying and temperate climate, analogous in acertain way to that of Southern Europe. . . . The creation of a sanitary sta-tion at Langsa [Dalat], in the same conditions as Simla and Darjeeling werecreated by the British in India, will be of prime importance to France inIndochina. With improved communications, Langsa can become much morethan a site of rest and recovery for tired colons and functionaries, it canbecome an important administrative centre, where vital services can begrouped. . . .21

Langsa, the ‘French town,’ epitomized the French colonial adminis-tration’s fantasy of finding, nearby, convenient reimmersion into themetropole. More than this, Doumer foresaw the possibility of plan-ning grand edifices for a future administrative centre on the LangBian plateau.The fantasy of creating a sheltered French micro-universe in the

microclimatic highlands of Indochina was shared by most of themembers of the early Lang Bian exploration missions. Some focusedupon the possibilities of importing or grafting metropolitan fruit andvegetables on the Lang Bian plateau. Once again, authenticity wasparamount. As Erica Peters has shown, in culinary matters, it wascritical for the French in Indochina to consume ‘the real thing.’22Thus, a station agricole was established at Dalat at the turn of thecentury. The agricultural laboratory soon bore metropolitan fruit. A1903 report reads:

coloniale (Paris: Editions de l’Amateur, 1999), pp. 98–108; and Crossette, The GreatHill Stations of Asia, pp. 207–19.

20 Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p. 147.21 CAOM GGI 5969, Governor Doumer to Minister of the Colonies, April 18,

1898.22 Erica Peters, ‘Negotiating Power through Everyday Practices in French Viet-

nam, 1880–1924’ Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, p. 140.


I can state that all French flowers flourish here, as you have been able towitness for yourself . . . French vegetables have also been yielding favorableresults . . . We have now produced the following vegetables, ready to beeaten: potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, celery, beats, parsley, sorrel,tomatoes, turnips and onions.23

While some focused upon recreating a French fruit and vegetablegarden, others centred their attention upon the future town’s overallappearance and layout. A Captain Bigaud summarized his argu-ments as follows: ‘With a railroad, comfortable buildings, pavedroads, useful and agreeable imports of plants, the salubrious LangBian plateau could be compared to a ‘‘little piece of France’’—a verypassable one at that, and considered a fine colonial sanitarium.’24To this officer at least, the Dalat experiment consisted above all ofapproximating France as closely as possible—even a ‘passable’ rep-lica seemed salutary to homesick colonials.However, early French residents in Dalat soon bemoaned the isola-

tion and drudgery of the place. Very quickly, they complained ofintense boredom.25 What were needed were European leisure infra-structures: a grand hotel, a first-class French restaurant, a rowingclub, tennis court, stables and riding facilities etc.—as much asmarkers of the colonial lifestyle as ways of affirming Frenchness inthe ‘back yard’ of the Vietnamese, so to speak. The majestic LangBian Palace Hotel would offer all of these amenities and more. It ishardly surprising then, that it emerged as the linchpin of post-WorldWar I urban plans for Dalat. The city was literally laid out aroundits Palace Hotel and its artificial lake. The hotel’s site at the headof the lake positioned it at the centre of a European business andadministrative quarter, dominating the ‘native quarters’, and servingas a buffer between them and the rows of European villas to theEast. In this sense, the Dalat Palace Hotel emerged out of a realiza-tion that even segregated European spaces and sites in Hanoi orSaigon, epitomized by the Saigon Theatre or Hanoi Cathedral, eventhese niches and French quarters were surrounded by pre-existingand indeed ancient sites of Vietnamese power. The Lang BianPalace, conversely, was literally built in the middle of nowhere(according to the French), in an area peopled by romanticized ‘prim-itive’ ethnicities, and teeming with wild game. The Lang Bian Palace

23 CAOM GGI 5966, ‘Situation agricole du Lang-Bian; Rapport, Dangkia, le 24juillet 1903, signed Roux.

24 CAOM GGI 66188, Report by Capitaine Bigaud.25 Ibid., Rapport du Dr Haueur, Saigon June 4, 1903.


would offer an oasis and replica of France in these highlands—atranquil base from which to ‘explore’ nearby Lat and Koho villagesor set out on big game expedition. Most importantly, as its title ofPalace suggests, this would be a luxurious establishment, competingwith the poshest colonial hotels of Southeast Asia, be they the Ori-ental Hotel in Bangkok or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.The Lang Bian Palace thus fulfilled the curious dual function of

mediating between the exotic and the familiar: an exotic, ‘primitive’minority setting, and a familiar home base featuring French foodand European luxury.26 In other words, it was a place of multipleescapes: escape back to France (or the best substitute for it), or anescape into a dreamed ‘primitive’ or trophy hunting universe. But ofcourse, the Palace’s customers were first and foremost escaping theVietnamese—they were certainly not avoiding other French peoplewho concentrated their stays at the hotel in peak seasons or holidays.Escape thus had its limits: customers sought depaysement while at thesame time remaining firmly rooted in what was by definition a hier-archical, parochial and closed colonial society, that migrated enmasse from Saigon to Dalat on hot spring and summer spells.27 Butthe hotel’s paradoxes did not end here. The Lang Bian/Dalat Palacealso reflected and highlighted a tension between colonial desires fordemesure and luxury on the one hand, and a quite different reality onthe other. This hotel, in short, can serve as a lens through which toview issues of power, colonial politics and colonial identity in Indo-china. In the case of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel, no elaborate decod-ing or deconstruction is needed to discern French colonial fantasiesof excess and opulence, triangulations of power with indigenouspopulations, tensions within the franctured colonial universe, andthe role of leisure sites in reaffirming and reasserting Frenchness inthe tropics.

A Symbol of Colonial Power

British colonial hill stations like Simla or Ootacamund tended torevolve around individual seats of power, such as the Viceroy’s resid-

26 On the importance of ‘eating French’ to the French colonial identity in Indo-china, see Peters, ‘Negotiating Power’, pp. 138–206.

27 On the rigidity, stratification and seclusion of French colonial society, seeCharles Meyer, Les Francais en Indochine, 1860–1910 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), p.78.


ence. But in Dalat, the Lang Bian Palace was erected fifteen yearsbefore the Governor General’s villa, and dwarfed it in stature. To besure, this state of affairs was partly the result of a general scalingback from the architect Ernest Hebrard’s outlandish 1922 blueprintfor Dalat, that featured a projected massive administrative quarterto the Northeast of the main artificial lake. The actual relativism ofthe Lang Bian Place within such blueprints is difficult to reconstitutetoday, because little else of Hebrard’s vision—starting with theadministrative quarter—was ever realized (and Hebrard’s masterplans were replaced by Louis-Georges Pineau’s a decade later). In asense, then, the Lang Bian Palace’s colossality and seeming incom-mensurability with the rest of Dalat in 1922 stems from its construc-tion date: at the height of an economic boom in 1922, Dalat wasbeing touted by many as the future capital of Indochina, where theFrench could rule from the heights in a site of their own making—hence Hebrard’s quintessentially optimistic project. When economiccircumstances changed later that decade, most plans for governmentstructures in Dalat were scrapped (villa construction, conversely,continued unabated), leaving the town with a Palace Hotel as itscentrepiece and icon. When the Depression finally receded, only thePalace Hotel was left as a monumental structure. However, such achange of fortunes alone cannot explain why the Palace Hotel wouldhave been built first: it is striking indeed that this 1922 palace waserected before a post-office, train station, or city hall—even beforemost of the city’s schools (Dalat subsequently became a centre forlearning, especially for French and metis children). Certainly thissequence must be indicative of the French colonial administration’spriorities. In 1922, the hotel stood quite literally alone in terms ofpublic edifices for the French (see figure 1). This clearly signals theparamount importance, and indeed the primacy to the French colo-nial administration of a luxury hotel in Dalat. This, in turn, reflectsin part the social pretensions and fantasies of elite colonial leisureand status-seekers, but also the very down-to-earth and mundaneefforts of the colonial administration to save by replacing furloughsto metropolitan France with shorter vacations in the European com-fort of Dalat.The Lang Bian Palace opened in March 1922, after Governor Gen-

eral Long had made several visits to the resort to accelerate andoversee construction in person.28 Featuring 38 luxury rooms, the

28 ‘Visite de M. Long a Dalat’, L’Echo annamite, July 24, 1920, p. 2.


Figure 1. Date unknown, but certainly from the early 1920s. A view of Dalat show-ing the artificial lake in its early dimensions, the Lang Bian Palace Hotel (to theleft) and in the distance the tiny ‘native town.’ CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted bypermission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer.

establishment boasted the most modern amenities of the time, aswell as an orchestra, tennis courts, its private fruit and vegetablegardens (providing ‘European’ ingredients like strawberries, whichcontinue to be grown in Dalat to this day), a dancing hall, ridingfacilities (see figure 2), and a gastronomic restaurant.29 By 1930, the

Figure 2. Postcard, dated January 5, 1928. This card shows one of the leisure activit-ies available to hotel customers. Note the extensive hotel grounds. Author’s collec-tion.

29 Cornell University Library, Wason Pamphlets (Indochina 51) Les Hotels enIndochine.


hotel boasted a cinema and offered Jazz concerts.30 The original1922 personnel list called for three European and sixty-one ‘nativeworkers’, including twelve servers for the restaurant, one Chinesecook, one patissier, a hair dresser, three chauffeurs, ten coolies, etc.As for the three Europeans, they would occupy the posts of generalmanager, maıtre d’hotel and gouvernante.31 Meals in the restaurantwere simple but resolutely French: ‘potage, grillades, pain, entremetschauds’ etc.32 An emphasis was placed on fresh fruit—and not sur-prisingly on French fruits like apples and pears, though litchis andmangoes were also served. As a final mark of French culinary authen-ticity, hotel guidelines stipulated that butter, and never grease,would be used for cooking.33 As for the uniforms of the hotel’s person-nel, these were described as follows by a 1932 convention: ‘The attireof domestic personnel must be clean and neat: a white, freshly ironedoutfit will be de rigueur for waiters; domestics in contact with visitorsmust have a complete mastery of their trade, and speak sufficientlygood French.’34Architecturally, the Palace was inspired by metropolitan French

resort styles—merging elements of spa towns like Vittel with sea-side architectural elements borrowed from the likes of Cabourgor Cannes (see figure 3). In his historical fresco of World War IIIndochina, the French novelist Morgan Sportes describes the DalatPalace Hotel’s appearance in the following terms: ‘One could havebeen on the Riviera, in some elegant seaside resort. This impres-sion was corroborated by the high, white silhouette of thePalace Hotel (a dead ringer for the Negresco Hotel in Nice).’35For her part, the architectural historian Gwendolyn Wrightdescribes the building’s original appearance succinctly: ‘The PalaceHotel was completed in the rococo style of hotels along the FrenchRiviera.’36In 1943, under the Vichyite Governor of Indochina Admiral Jean

30 NA, Petit guide illustre de Dalat (1930), p. 13.31 Bruno Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace: A Hotel of the Past, Today,’ p. 47. In this

unpublished manuscript Bruno Duron, commissioned to trace the history of thePalace Hotel by American tycoon Larry Hillblom, provides a compendium of usefulsources relating to the history of the hotel.

32 Ibid., p. 48.33 National Archives of Vietnam, Archives #1, Hanoi (hereafter VNNA), GGI

5034 ‘Cahier des charges pour l’exploitation des hotels du groupe de Dalat,’ p. 14.34 Ibid., p. 9.35 Morgan Sportes, Tonkinoise (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), p. 197.36 Wright, The Politics of Design, p. 231.


Figures 3. The Lang Bian Palace Hotel in the 1920s. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprintedby permission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer.

Decoux,37 the Lang Bian Palace’s rococo facade was replaced by astarker exterior.38 This modernist exterior was almost certainlyinspired by architect Paul Vesseyre’s two other ‘Palaces’ in town—Bao Dai’s and the Governor General’s, built in 1934 and 1937respectively,39 in a style more reminiscent of a melange of Art Decoand Bauhaus than of fin-de-siecle spa rococo. On aesthetic but alsopolitical grounds, Governor Decoux abhorred the rococo art that hadproliferated across Indochina during the great flourish of construc-tion at the turn of the century. The so-called modernization of theDalat Palace in 1943 was thus part of a much vaster campaign tosimplify complex lines, and to excise ‘superfluous’ rococo frivolities.Other examples include the Palace of the Governor of Cochinchinain Saigon, whose two caryatids were removed under Decoux, and thefamous Saigon theatre, whose ornamental facade (statues, bas-reliefs

37 On the Vichy period in Indochina, see Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Petain’sNational Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina (Stanford: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 2001), pp. 130–98.

38 These renovations are shown in Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, February 11,1943.

39 See Le Brusq, Le Vietnam, pp. 101–10.


etc.), was entirely excised on orders from Decoux.40 It is interestingto note than in the last five years, renovations undertaken on Sai-gon’s theatre have reversed Decoux’s modifications, and restored itsoriginal statutes and bas-reliefs.

Ethnic Minorities on Display

The visit to nearby Lat or Koho villages, attractions which are stilloffered at the Dalat Palace Hotel today, were a staple of the hotelsince its inception. The French fascination with the Lang Bian’shighland minorities (whom the French, like the Vietnamese, groupedunder the offensive rubric ‘Moı’—meaning ‘savage’), should be dis-tinguished from their relationship with ethnic Vietnamese in thehighlands. In the mountains, the French considered the Vietnamese(or Annamites as they called them) to be colonizers like them41—orat the very least auxiliaries to colonization. As for the ethnic minorit-ies, they were often hired as hunting guides. A tangible legacy ofthis practice is a 1930 French/highland minority pocket dictionary—teaching the French to chastise Koho guides for laziness, or theFrench hunter to bark at his guide: ‘come here,’ ‘go away,’ ‘dig aditch,’ or ‘be quiet!’42French visitors to the hotel felt simultaneously attracted and

repelled by the highland minority presence. The attraction residedin romanticized images of simple, hardy highland peoples leading arustic, ethnologically fascinating existence just beyond the walls ofthe Palace. As figure five suggests, in the 1920s a minority villagestood only a few hundred meters away from the Lang Bian Palace.The Palace’s managers, and Indochinese tourism agencies, playedthe card of the ‘noble Moı’ in a magazine add which ran in 1926 and1927 in Extreme-Asie. The add juxtaposed a small caption repres-enting the opulent Palace Hotel with a larger image of a muscularhighland minority man poised to spear a wild beast. Behind him, a

40 On the changes to the Saigon theatre, see Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, Sep-tember 23, 1943; on the alterations to the Palace of the Governor General ofCochinchina, see Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, January 27, 1944.

41 This argument is presented by Roussel, amongst others. Roussel, La chasse enIndochine, p. 62.

42 Bibliotheque nationale, Paris. 8X 18618. RP Jean Cassaigne, Petit Manuel deConversation courante en langue Moı (Koho et Chau Sore) a l’usage des Planteurs, Chasseurs,Touristes, Region Djiring, Dalat (Saigon: Imprimerie de la mission, 1930).


Figure 4. ‘Lang Bian Palace, Dalat’—an advertisement in the magazine Extreme-Asie,May 1927.


Figure 5. ‘Lang Bian, panorama de Dalat pris de l’Hotel’—‘Lang Bian, view of Dalattaken from the hotel.’ Card dated October 4, 1924. Author’s collection.

minority woman looks on, half covered by the forest canopy (seefigure 4). This advertisement is reminiscent of stereotypical nine-teenth-century representations of fierce native Americans, and mightjust as easily been used to sell a lodge at Yosemite or Banff.Of course, touting highland minorities as fierce warriors was a

potentially perilous marketing strategy. In his article published inthe widely circulated metropolitan French magazine L’Illustration,Francois de Tessan reassured potential visitors to Dalat and itsPalace Hotel that the local minorities had been completely ‘pacified’and that the ‘age of heroic conquest is over. We have . . . enteredinto the age of progress.’43 The delicate balancing act used to marketDalat’s ethnographic appeal thus consisted of piquing colonial curios-ity in ‘muscled, tanned, wild haired, wide eyed [warriors],’44 whilesimultaneously reassuring the everyday traveler of their completeharmlessness, stressing that minority tribes now constituted attrac-tions, not threats. Making the ‘montagnards’ (as the French calledall highland minorities in Indochina) appear either too threateningor too peaceful could ruin the fantasy in either direction.

43 De Tessan, ‘Une station d’altitude en Indochine’, p. 158.44 Ibid.


However, the ‘noble savage’ did not always draw travelers. Forthose preferring a replica of France over a fanciful ‘far-west’ (notethat a kitschy far-western theme-park can be found at one of Dalat’slakes to this day), the highland minority presence was irritating atbest. Witness the following postcard, written to a friend in the Parissuburb of St Cloud by a woman visiting the Lang Bian Place Hotelon October 4, 1924. The image on the card, entitled ‘panorama fromthe Hotel,’ shows several minority people—scantily clad by Europeanstandards—and a minority village in the background (see figure 5;one can also make out several colonial villas, recently strategicallybuilt on the hills). On the flip side, this female traveler, no doubt aresident of Saigon suffering from the ennui so many French womenexperienced in Indochina,45 wrote:Dear Nicette, I am sending you a card of Indochina’s convalescence site,which is a far cry from Vichy, especially with its inhabitants whose attireleaves a little something to be desired. Nevertheless, there are twohandsome hotels, a theatre, cinema, dancing hall, tennis court, and so on.The air is reputedly good here in the mountains of Southern Annam. Let’sface it, it’s not worth St Cloud either, but then again, neither is Saigon.Yours . . . .46

This traveler’s narrative shifts from a focus on the scant clothing oflocal minorities, to an unfavorable comparison with Vichy, and laterSt Cloud. Betraying her parochialism (St Cloudcentrism) and home-sickness, the author explicitly complains that Dalat is not enough ofa French clone; in this instance, highland minorities stand in theway of the traveler’s fantasy of reintegrating the motherland in thehighlands of Southern Indochina.Meanwhile, visitors more curious about local inhabitants could set

out on ‘ethnographic visits’ to minority villages. To these tourists,the opulence of the Dalat Palace was no doubt contrasted to theperceived starkness of Lat and Koho houses. Certainly, the DalatPalace served as a poignant reminder of Frenchness—a social land-mark that guaranteed that the French would resist any temptationof ‘going native’. This principle was crystallized by a 1944 cartoon

45 The boredom of French women in Indochina was recounted in—amongst othersources—George Groslier’s colonial novel, Le retour a l’argile, in which one of themain characters, Raymonde, complains constantly of boredom while her husbandcheats on her with a Cambodian mistress. See George Groslier, Le retour a l’argile(Pondichery: Kailash Editions, original edition 1928, republished 1996), p . 102.

46 Postcard purchased by the author.


Figure 6. ‘Inversions vestimentaires ou du danger de la baignade aux environs deDalat (histoire vecue)’—‘Sartorial inversions or the dangers of bathing aroundDalat (a true story).’ Indochine, July 13, 1944.

claiming to recount a true story (figure 6).47 The four captions showtwo French men letting their guard down as they go for a swim; twomembers of a local minority proceed to steal their clothes in a classicgag, and an equally classic inversion of European and ‘primitive’trappings. In the final scene, the two French men are reduced toreturning in highland native garb to the Lang Bian Palace Hotel—erected here into a monument to whiteness and ‘civilization’. Thetwo unfortunate swimmers look forlorn, bearing the sartorial stigmaof nativeness, while the two minority people walk back to theirnearby village wearing pith helmets—the markers of colonial statuspar excellence. Here the Lang Bian Palace’s very presence as a socialmarker literally shames these two Europeans. And it is preciselybecause of the Lang Bian Palace that this anecdote is a nightmarecome true for them. It is not the act of losing one’s clothes, so muchas the return to European high society—embodied by the Palace—

47 ‘Humour dalatois: inversions vestimentaires ou du danger de la baignade auxenvirons de Dalat (histoire vecue)’ Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, July 13, 1944.


that creates this powerful sense of ridicule. The hotel thus provideda relational standard or norm by which to measure one’s Frenchnessin the highlands.

The Place of the Vietnamese

As Michael Vann has shown, the relationship between French colo-nial and Indochinese societies was strained to the limits by the ques-tion of servants. For the French, having a retinue of indigenous ser-vants was of course a mark of power, and one of the ‘advantages ofthe colonies’ as it were. According to Vann, the servant—though anecessity and indeed a token of status within the colonial hierarchy—was paradoxically a source of constant anxiety for the French, as apotential enemy within the household.48 This fear of servants whocould communicate ‘secretly’ in their own tongue, who had access tothe French private sphere, and could indeed access and shift betweenboth Vietnamese and French registers, served to reinforce Frenchracist stereotypes towards the Vietnamese, whom the French gener-ally portrayed as venal and duplicitous.49At the Lang Bian Place Hotel, such fears were crystallized in a

rumour which I have been unable to confirm through primary writtensources. The rumour, described by a French guide book to Vietnam(one that usually relies upon local informants),50 and confirmed byindividual conversations I had in Dalat,51 holds that a Communistring operated out of the Lang Bian Palace’s kitchen in the early1930s. Though the actual existence of this Communist cell remainsin question, let me echo here Luise White’s argument that rumourin and of itself can speak volumes, especially in a colonial context.52This story may reveal a French hyper-sensitivity to their preservedrealm, ‘infiltrated’ as it seemed by Vietnamese personnel, and thisin an area—Lang Bian—that the French had chosen in no small

48 In the words of Michael Vann, ‘The existence of the Other in the home putthe colonial on edge.’ Michael Vann, ‘White City on the Red River: Race, Powerand Culture in French Colonial Hanoi, 1872–1954’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cali-fornia Santa Cruz, 1999, p. 553.

49 Ibid., p. 550.50 NA Le Guide du Routard, Vietnam (Paris: Hachette, 1999), p. 309.51 The most reliable confirmation came from Mrs Huynh Thi Thanh Xuyen who

works at the hotel, and whose father did as well.52 Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).


part because the Vietnamese were absent from it. Indeed, some sixtyVietnamese worked at the hotel, a figure to be contrasted to theestablishment’s six European employees, or its thirty-eight rooms forthat matter. The facile and stereotypical association of Vietnamese =covert political subversion (to be distinguished from the French ste-reotype of highland minorities as straight-forward, frank, andsimple) could well be behind this urban legend. Conversely, if onewere to read this account as historically accurate—which would notbe surprising in itself, save for the absence of any written records inthe many files I consulted on the hotel—it would reveal an interest-ing degree of political militancy amongst the personnel of the elitehotel, catering to the colony’s wealthiest patrons.If fears of Vietnamese servants and Communist subversion were

perennial concerns for the French in Dalat, this is not to suggestthat the highland resort remained a playground for the French alone.Vietnamese elites soon found their place side by side with the Frenchcolonial plutocracy. Emperor Bao Dai took a liking to the highlandtown, and held banquets at the Lang Bian Palace.53 As Bruce Lock-hart has suggested, Bao Dai’s predilection for Dalat in itself revealsmore than his legendary passion for hunting and diversions: itimplies that the emperor felt estranged from his capital Hue—andeven more so from his future capital by default, Saigon.54 This aliena-tion drew him to a Europeanized highland resort, whose urban layoutwas arguably more segregated than any other Indochinese city, andwhere his palace stood atop a hill overlooking the European andadministrative quarters.

Clientele

Throughout the hotel’s colonial existence, its managers and theIndochinese tourism agency made concerted efforts to woo foreignvisitors to Dalat’s Palace Hotel. An English-language brochure from1933 advertised: ‘the Lang-Biang Palace and the Grand Hotel deDalat . . . offer every modern comfort, and diversion, including con-certs, tennis, golf, walking tours and motor excursions. The sports-

53 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 105.54 Bruce Lockhart, ‘Monarchy and Decolonization in Indochina,’ paper delivered

at the International Workshop on ‘Decolonization and Transformation in SoutheastAsia,’ Singapore, February 19, 2001, p. 17.


man will find plenty of game, large and small, in the nearby hills.’55Rich adventurers and big game hunters were particularly targetedfor attention. Maurice Rondet-Saint, the head of the Ligue maritimecoloniale, remarked upon the prominent place of hunting in Indochi-nese tourism, noting that some 50 million piastres a year were spentby big-game hunters in Indochina. Stressing that Europeans couldkill two birds with one stone, Rondet-Saint repeated the balancingact of selling the Palace Hotel as an embodiment of both the exoticand the familiar: ‘In the mountains of Annam, at Dalat, there is asanitarium where Europeans who cannot spend their holidays inEurope come to refresh and reinvigorate themselves in the pure andhealthy mountain air. It so happens that Dalat and its Palace arealso in the heart of hunting country.’56 This passage underscores thediverse makeup of the Palace’s clientele: while some customers werewealthy outsiders visiting Indochina to bring home big game tro-phies, others were high-ranking administrators on furlough or long-weekend visits. Unwittingly, Rondet-Saint may also have pinpointedthe Palace Hotel’s problematic marketing position: as a resort forthose who could not afford to return to Europe, colonial Dalatdefined its identity in part as a ‘cheap substitute’ for France. Withwealthy colonials heading back to France at the earliest possibleoccasion, this left Dalat with middle-ranking administrators, the vastmajority of whom could not afford Palace prices. In the early 1930s,the Lang Bian Palace Hotel cost 6 piastres a night, while the town’s‘lesser hotels’ charged a mere 1.20 and 1.75 piastres, to give a senseof scale.57The Lang Bian Palace was already caught in a price gap, itself the

reflection of an expectation gap: the hotel offered a replica of Europeat European prices, when those who could only afford replicas ofFrance could not pay European rates in the first place. To compoundthe problem, the proliferation of villas in Dalat between 1922 and1945 meant that the ultra-elite courted by the Lang Bian Palacealready possessed cottages of their own in Dalat—themselves styledto resemble regional architecture of the Landes, Brittany, Savoy orthe Basque country.58 In 1929, the Governor General of Indochinasynthesized the marketing conundrum of the Lang Bian Palace

55 Reprinted in Extreme-Asie, December 1933, p. 370.56 CAOM, Residence Superieure d’Annam, L5, dossier entitled ‘articles de presse

concernant le tourisme.’57 Les Hotels en Indochine, op. cit.58 On these villas, see Truong Tro, Dalat, ville d’altitude, 112–16.


Hotel. He wrote to his colleague in Cochinchina that the PalaceHotel failed to answer the needs of the ‘modest clientele of colonsand functionaries with limited budgets, who are in many ways themost interested in Dalat, for they are the most tired, and hence mostin need of reinvigoration.’59 Thus, the projected increase in the LangBian Palace’s size from 32 to 100 rooms60—by adjoining an annexbuilding, later dubbed Hotel du Parc—failed to address the problemof middle-class leisure. The Palace, it seemed, reflected more thecolonial dream of grandiose standing than the reality of colonialbudgets.

Troubled Beginnings

Several factors suggest that the Lang Bian Palace’s beginnings in1922 were somewhat rocky. Because the rail line to Dalat was notyet completed in 1922, construction materials had to be carted forlong stretches on foot by ‘coolies’—at great physical cost, no doubt.But the French administration drew financial, rather than humanit-arian lessons from this. In 1923, the Governor of Indochinaexplained bluntly to the Minister of the Colonies: ‘The exorbitantprices incurred to build the Lang Bian Palace . . . led to theadjourning of any further construction [in Dalat] until the comple-tion of the rail line.’61 The hotel, it seemed, had left a legacy of nearfiscal ruin, so costly had it proven to build a palace in the remotecentral highlands of Vietnam. In turn, the resulting freeze on con-struction in Dalat bred discontent—sometimes directed pointedly atthe extravagance of the Lang Bian Palace. A 1923 article in theMoniteur d’Indochine complained that the administration had neg-lected all other hotels in Indochina, at the expense of the grandioseLang Bian Palace project. This ‘costly’ hotel, whose price tag theauthor estimated at six million piastres, ‘had left the administrationcontent, so long as it was inaugurated and kept open some fifteendays or so.’62Other sources corroborate this hint of early difficulties for the

Palace. Throughout its colonial history, regulations stipulated that59 COAM, Residence Superieure d’Annam, L4 Governor General to Governor of

Cochinchina, June 29, 1929.60 Ibid.61 CAOM, GGI 46407, Governor of Indochina to Minister of the Colonies, August

8, 1923.62 ‘Le tourisme en Indochine’, Le Moniteur d’Indochine, February 24, 1923.


the hotel should have either a French maıtre d’hotel or a French headcook on hand.63 In France in 1920 Mr Desanti, the very first (andshort-lived) manager of the Lang Bian Palace, recruited a chef fromPau in Southwestern France. This chef, Henri Passiot, signed a three-year contract to serve as head chef of the Lang Bian Palace startingon January 1, 1923. This cuisinier cum war veteran and amputeeproceeded to sue the Lang Bian Palace Hotel and Mr Desanti whenthe establishment failed to open on schedule in 1921. In October1921, seeing that the hotel’s interior was far from completed, Passiotsued Desanti, who in turn sued the Government General of Indo-china.64 Passiot filed for his 25,000 franc salary for 1923, plus 1000piastres for housing and food, as well as travel expenses to Indochinaand back to Pau for himself and his wife.In-fighting and recrimination within the insular French colonial

community of Dalat also led to a series of technical catastrophesshortly after the Hotel’s opening in 1922. In a livid letter datedMarch 12, 1923, the Commissary delegated to Dalat by the Gov-ernor General wrote to Hanoi concerning insubordination, incompet-ence and bickering—all of this stemming from a problem with theplumbing of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel. The head of Dalat’s engin-eering team, Mr Jumeau, was bluntly accused of insolence towardthe hotel’s second manager, Mr Frasseto, and toward CommissaireGarnier himself. Garnier speculated that Jumeau’s bitterness andstalling in conducting plumbing repairs came from having been pub-licly rebuked by Garnier in the Cafe of the new Palace Hotel. The factof having been publicly scolded in the most public of places—indeedin the town’s only equivalent of a colonial club (the likes of whichOrwell describes in Burmese Days), was thus identified as grounds notjust for shame, but for professional vendetta. Whatever the engin-eer’s motives, Garnier bemoaned, his de facto work-to-rule campaignwas having terrible consequences; Garnier and Frasseto had com-plained regularly of plumbing leaks since January, and by mid Marchthe leaks persisted, now threatening to leave permanent damage.As for Jumeau’s rebuttal that paid customers occupying rooms hadprevented him from making repairs, Garnier replied that ‘the hand-ful of customers in the hotel would not have opposed being inconveni-enced, had they been told of the urgent necessity for these repairs.’

63 VNNA, GGI 5034, Cahier des Charges pour l’exploitation des hotels du groupede Dalat, p. 9.

64 See CAOM GGI 38218 for all information regarding Passiot and his lawsuit.


Already, the colonial administration reported low occupancy, coupledwith bitter recriminations between agencies of local government (inthis case between the Governor General’s representative, and thehead of the Travaux publics). The final straw, wrote Garnier, wasthat Jumeau had still not installed a fence around the hotel’sgrounds. As a result, animals still came to graze on hotel property,a clear impediment to the establishment’s desire to be considered aRiviera Palace.65

Contested Luxury

Furthermore, in the colonial era, the Lang Bian Palace Hotel suf-fered both from poor timing, and from its status as a semi-public,then wholly public luxury establishment. Shortly after the Palace’slong-delayed opening in 1922, French Indochina was rattled by aseries of economic crises, starting in 1928 with a free-fall in thevalue of rubber,66 and culminating in an all-out depression by 1934—in line of course with a global Depression by then. Already in 1927,serious rows emerged over public subventions allocated to the LangBian Palace Hotel. Annam covered part of the bill for the Palace,the remainder being paid by the Governor General in Hanoi, as wellas by a private consortium known as the Societe anonyme des GrandsHotels indochinois, that went bankrupt in 1930.67 The main bone ofcontention derived from Dalat’s geographical situation within thekingdom of Annam. While Annam footed much of the costs of thePalace, it was readily apparent that the luxury establishment cateredprimarily to the wealthy elites in Saigon and the rest of Cochinchina,which never contributed a cent to its upkeep. Thus, on December22, 1927, at the first sign of broader financial troubles in Indochina,the Resident Superieur d’Annam announced that he was suspendingpayment to the Lang Bian Palace. By May of the following year, theResident Superieur d’Annam justified his decision to the GovernorGeneral in Hanoi. New arguments were advanced, while the maintheme of injustice was repeated:

65 All information in this paragraph comes from CAOM GGI, 46407, Garnier toInspecteur des Travaux Publics Hanoi, March 12, 1923.

66 Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hemery, Indochine, la colonisation ambigue (Paris: laDecouverte, 1995), pp. 260–3.

67 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 97.


It is paradoxical to pay a subvention of 24,000.00 piastres to the Lang BianPalace, while at the same time paying a subsidy of 6,000.00 piastres tothe Desanti Hotel which competes with it. I should add that I have neverunderstood how Annam stood to gain from paying for the Lang Bian Palace.A stay in Dalat is accessible only to a small privileged elite in Annam, whilemost of the clientele of these indebted hotels consists of high bureaucrats,colons, or industrialists from Cochinchina and Cambodia. I therefore insistrespectfully, but firmly, Mister Governor General, that starting January 1,1929 the Lang Bian Palace’s subsidy be paid by the Governor General andnot Annam.68

Clearly articulated here was the idea of geopolitical injustice, thenotion that wealthy Saigonese were disproportionately benefitingfrom Annam’s subsidies, and that the government should not keepall of Dalat’s hotels afloat in the first place. Competition and capital-ism, the mantra of most colons in this lucrative colony (lucrative forsome), never seemed to take root in the world of Dalat’s hotels,situated as they were in an artificial bubble of highland leisure.By the 1930s the Hotel’s title of ‘Palace’ cost it dearly in a time

of budgetary restraints. Indochina’s Inspector of Finances singled outthe Palace as a symbol of waste and excess; the grandeur which hadbeen the establishment’s selling point in the 1920s was now heldagainst it. In a December 1931 missive, the Inspector of Financesargued:In countries all around the world, ministers of finance are proclaiming thatthe state must reduce spending. It is therefore not the time to considersubsidizing a Palace, by definition a sumptuous and frivolous spending parexcellence. I am fully aware that this means that the Lang Bian Palace willhave to close. And since the Hotel du Parc is not open yet, only the DesantiHotel will be left running. This will no doubt be regrettable, but beggarscan’t be choosers. The Governor General’s office is in no position to payholidays for Saigonese who themselves are in no position right now to afforda stay in Dalat.69

As the Depression hit Indochina, the Dalat Palace Hotel was increas-ingly castigated as a white elephant by the administration, and itsmanager portrayed as out of touch with, and insensitive to, the fiscalbelt-tightening required around the world at the time.The hotel’s manager in the 1930s, Edouard Feraudy, an Italian

with years of experience in the hotel sector in Indochina, appears to

68 VNNA, GGI 5014, Resident Superieur d’Annam to Gouverneur Generald’Indochine, May 14, 1928.

69 CAOM, GGI 59875, Inspecteur des finances to Gouverneur General,December 8, 1931.


have seriously underestimated the administration’s desire to closehis luxury establishment. At the very time of the inspector’s report,Feraudy was clamouring to the administration for new silverware.And when the Governor General’s office suggested short-term solu-tions like the elimination of the hotel’s orchestra, an indignantFeraudy responded that he had already slashed his own salary by50% and that of his employees by 20%. Reducing or eliminating theorchestra, he retorted, was out of the question if he was to maintainthe hotel’s standing.70 This document, which made its way to Hanoi,is covered in marginalia, red exclamation marks especially, fromadministrators clearly dismissive of Feraudy’s concerns about hishotel’s ‘prestige’ and ‘standing’ at the height of the Depression. Itseems apparent that Feraudy and the administration were speakingdifferent languages: Feraudy’s rhetoric revolved around standing,‘minimum service’ to maintain such a standing, and the gov-ernmnent’s imperative to defend colonial luxury. Reducing theorchestra, or laying off some of the establishment’s sixty-fiveemployees, he wrote, was tantamount to ‘stripping the hotel’s rank.’Only Feraudy, it seemed, had remained faithful to the vision of thishotel not as an economically viable resort, but as a marker of statusand prestige. The goal of the Lang Bian Palace, in this view, hadmore to do with the challenge of building a luxury palace in the‘outback’, than it did with any capitalist venture. In this sense too,the Palace Hotel encapsulates the delusions of grandeur of Frenchcolonial administrators, planners and architects for whom aestheticand power considerations systematically superseded practical ones(to give an example, Dalat was only connected to the rest of Indo-china by rail in 1932).71Feraudy would soon lock horns with another level of administra-

tion. In September 1931, the Mayor of Dalat, facing a financialcrunch of his own, complained of paying 300 to 700 piastres permonth to light the Lang Bian Palace at night. The Mayor wasincensed by Feraudy’s constant quip that he need ‘save the reputa-tion and prestige of the Palace’ by illuminating it at night—a burdenthat was allegedly single-handedly ruining Dalat’s municipalbudget.72

70 CAOM, GGI 59875, Feraudy to Mayor of Dalat, August 2, 1931.71 On the extension of the rail line to Dalat, see David Del Testa, ‘Imperial

Corridor: Association, Transportation and Power in French Colonial Indochina’, Sci-ence, Technology and Society 4:2 (1999): 344.

72 CAOM, GGI 59875, Resident Mayor, letter of September 6, 1931.


The mayor of Dalat and Feraudy also clashed over the hotel’s veryfunction. They were at odds over both the Palace’s mission and itsmarket. The level of vitriol contained in their correspondence sug-gests that petty rivalries so common in closed colonial circles wererampant in Dalat. Thus, in March 1933, the mayor wrote to theGovernor General of Indochina:Mr Feraudy’s tenure as manager expires on June 30 1933; the running ofthe Lang Bian Palace, as it presently stands, leads to monthly losses usuallyin excess of 2,000 piastres, and this in spite of a subvention of 1,000piastres. This situation is not surprising: it is the result of the special rap-ports between Mr Feraudy and the clientele he deigns to accept in hisPalace. On several occasions, I have received complaints from customerswho, after having been the victims of haughtiness, or even insolence on thepart of the manager, vowed never to return to the Palace.73

The mayor flatly accused Feraudy of driving away customers, attrib-uting this situation to Feraudy’s own conception of the hotel as apreserve of the elite. In the fractured and hierarchical colonialsystem, the Lang Bian Palace had emerged not as the playgroundfor all Europeans in Indochina, but as the domaine reserve of a minuteelite, described by one source as Indochina’s ‘grands pontes’—or big-wigs.74 Intimidation, haughtiness or whatever other character traitsthe mayor saw in Feraudy, were no doubt radiated by the managerso as to maintain the hotel’s standing—a perennial obsession whichcompletely superseded economic viability. No doubt in the world of1930s French customer relations, Feraudy’s distance and ‘haughti-ness’ would actually have been perceived as desirable attributes bythe creme de la creme of French colonial society. In Indochina, of course,an already hierarchical French social universe was bent and distortedto a paroxysm. Here, after all, the veneer of ‘equality’ in ‘liberty,equality and fraternity’ was absent, while a correspondingly distortedand inflated sense of self-importance seemed de rigueur, no doubtstoked by the presence of cohorts of servants, ‘boys’ and ‘con-gaıs’.75

73 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 105.74 ‘The Lang-Bian Hotel was reserved for our big-wigs’ recalls Gilbert David in

Chroniques secretes de l’Indochine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), p. 149. Note that seriousdoubts have emerged about this book’s claims regarding political events and con-spiracies in particular; but there is little reason to doubt the authenticity of itsdescriptions of Dalat in colonial times.

75 Long before any historian, Vietnamese and French contemporaries alike,recognized this phenomenon. In his famous Proces de la colonisation francaise, Ho ChiMinh wrote: ‘In the colonies, if one has a white skin, one belongs to the aristocracy:


For all of his purported haughtiness, Feraudy was certainlyresourceful and determined to maintain his establishment. As a wayof generating funds, he proposed the establishment of a casino, tiedto the hotel. This was in reality a formulation of an earlier plan,dating back to the creation of the Lang Bian Palace, which called forthe creation of a casino within easy walking distance of the PalaceHotel.76 In September 1935, Feraudy revived this idea, arguing:Having been asked from many quarters to give Dalat (the most beautifulhighland resort in East Asia) a Casino that will be required one day oranother any way to aid its development, and its appeal on a par with Frenchmountain resorts, [I am studying the possibility of] forming a company tobuild and run . . . a Dalat Municipal Casino.77

Feraudy explicitly compared Dalat to French mountain resorts likeChamonix, noting that only a casino stood between the two. Feraudyalso broached the question of who would be allowed to gamble: ‘wewould add Asian gambling in the same conditions as [Europeangaming].’78 Here, Feraudy treaded on thin ice. As Erica Peters showsin her analysis of gambling in colonial Indochina, French colonizersportrayed the Vietnamese as innately compulsive gamblers, anddecried gambling as a local hydra. But, Peters suggests, French posi-tions were in reality more ambivalent, given the place of gamblingin French society. What most shocked colonial mores, she argues,was the possibility of Europeans and Vietnamese gambling side byside.79 And this of course was precisely the Pandora’s box thatFeraudy had opened. In his highly disapproving letter to the governorgeneral, Dalat’s mayor pointed to two reasons to turn down this pro-posed casino: first it seemed typical of Feraudy’s ‘megalomania,’ andsecond, it presented ‘a moral dimension which you alone can judge.’80

one is of a superior race. In order to maintain his social status, the least of Europeancustoms officers has at least one servant, a ‘boy’ who, quite often, is a maid of allwork.’ Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works Volume II (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing,1961), p. 53. Likewise a character in George Groslier’s 1928 colonial novel Le retoura l’argile argued: ‘The conquered populations who surround (the French functionary)in servitude only inflate the vanity of colonial society and put it on a pedestal: awarrant officer or a customs agent becomes a high lord surrounded by a thousandcoolies.’ Groslier, p. 133.

76 Lam Dong Provincial Library, Dalat (DC 253) ‘Dalat, Le nouveau plan: dis-positions generales’, L’Eveil economique, no date.

77 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 126.78 Ibid.79 Peters, ‘Negotiating Power’, pp. 207–64.80 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 128.


After the Governor General’s rejection of the casino project onOctober 11, 1935, Feraudy’s options for continuing to run the LangBian Palace were seriously reduced.81Already by the summer of 1931, Feraudy was no longer pleading

for silverware, new plumbing, or the maintaining of his orchestra ashe had in the past, but quite simply for his hotel to remain open. Heimplored the Governor General in Hanoi: ‘Should you consider thetemporary closure of the Lang Bian Palace, then five Europeanemployees (not counting myself) and sixty natives would be left job-less.’82 The following January, the Grands Magasins de Dalat, aluxury boutique rented out by the hotel, and located between theLang Bian Palace and the Hotel du Parc, filed for bankruptcy.83Faced with mounting losses, a less frequented hotel, and an irateadministration, Feraudy finally agreed in April 1932 that the LangBian Palace would close from 1934 to 1937; the date of 1934 waschosen, for it marked the estimated opening date for the Palace’stwin hotel, the Hotel du Parc.84 Thus at least one luxury hotel wouldremain open for vacationers, even in harsh economic times.Closing one of the two twin hotels was constantly advanced as a

possibility to cut costs. Seeking to stave off the complete closure ofboth hotels in the 1930s, and faced with the harsh reality of needingto furnish two hotels with the materiel for only one, Feraudyrelented, and accepted the principle that rolling closures could occurin one hotel or the other, depending on demand.85 Still, Feraudy hadto resist several creative attempts by the administration to convertor decommission the Lang Bian Palace altogether. In 1932, he senta strongly worded reply to the Government General, rejecting a planto transform the Lang Bian Palace into a government building.According to this scheme, the Hotel du Parc would have remained afunctioning hotel, while the Palace would have been handed over tothe administration. Feraudy replied:To substitute the Dalat Palace with its annex [the Hotel du Parc] . . . wouldbe a dreadful mistake. This would leave Dalat with only two hotels—ofeconomy category. And the hotel which represents [Dalat’s] main attrac-

81 Ibid., p. 130.82 CAOM, GGI 59875, Feraudy to Governor General, July 4, 1931.83 CAOM, GGI 59873, Mr Courtinat to the mayor of Dalat, January 21, 1932.84 VNNA, GGI 5034, ‘Cahier des charges pour l’exploitation des hotels du groupe

de Dalat’, p. 1.85 Duron, ‘The Dalat Palace’, p. 6.


tion, based on its location, its offerings, its celebrations and social life, inshort Dalat’s main selling point, would disappear, leaving a vacuum thatwould hamper the city’s development.86

Feraudy’s response once again underscores the centrality of the LangBian Palace to Dalat’s function as a site of French leisure and power.The series of conflicts around the Palace in the 1930s attest to itstenuous position as a symbol of luxury, grandeur and excess on theone hand, and its status as a publicly run establishment on the other.Moreover, this disjunction between colonial fantasy and economicreality betrays the social ambitions of a colonial society that sovalued a Palace in its highland playground, but soon realized thatthis ‘Indochinese dream’ was unattainable for all save the colony’splutocracy.

Things Fall Apart

On March 6, 1943, the grand covered staircase entry to the DalatPalace Hotel abruptly collapsed, killing three Vietnamese workers—two male masons and a woman ‘coolie’ by the name of Ngo. PaulVeysseyre, the architect called upon by Dalat’s judge to lead a tech-nical inquiry, held no punches in his report. The tragic collapse wasa direct result of shoddy workmanship during the rush to renovatethe hotel, he argued. One can deduce that the rush involved renovat-ing the establishment in accordance with the aesthetic revolutionpromoted by the Vichyite Admiral Decoux—by introducing moreright-angles and straight lines, and eliminating baroque frivolities.The new, massive, no-nonsense entrance had just been erected inJanuary of that year, with finishing touches made some two weeksbefore the accident. Veysseyre deduced that the accident resultedfrom three main causes: calculation errors on the actual weight ofthe huge concrete slab covering the entrance; the insufficient timegiven to the concrete to set; and the ‘irrational’ use of materials likebrick to support heavier concrete. The consequence, he wrote to thejudge, was the collapse of 80 tons of concrete on the Vietnameseworkers who had been labouring on this embellishment project.Although Veysseyre noted that it was not his place to judge the aes-

86 Ibid., p. 67.


thetic of the projected grand entrance, his tone suggests reproval ofthis as well. The collapse of 1943 in many ways repeated previousconflicts and recriminations over the hotel, but rather than resultingin plumbing failure, clashes with the mayor, or hotel closures, itended in tragic loss of life, and doubtless in serious bitterness on thepart of the families of the deceased.87 In fact, some of the workershad recently refused to continue the renovation because they hadwarned that the slab in question had already begun to slump sometime before the accident. Negligence at the centre-point of Frenchcolonial Dalat was a serious allegation indeed.Just as the Dalat Palace hotel recovered from its partial physical

collapse, the entire universe of French colonialism was abruptlytoppled by the Japanese coup de force of March 9, 1945.88 Severalmemoirs from this era permit us to glimpse the Dalat Palace hotel’ssymbolic place in the abrupt unseating of French highland domin-ance. In late March, the Japanese forcibly evacuated some 3,000French colons and administrators from Dalat. A week later, theremaining 600 or so Europeans in Dalat were rounded up in the CiteJean Decoux,89 a model housing project in the Northern part of Dalatrecently erected by Vichy’s proconsul in Indochina. The Japaneseoccupiers, meanwhile, claimed the choicest of Dalat’s villas for them-selves, and Japanese officers selected the Dalat Palace Hotel for theirheadquarters. Marius Borel, a self-described ‘old colonialist’ withdecades of experience as an agriculturist in Indochina, recalls beingterrified by the Japanese officer he crossed in the halls of the LangBian Palace Hotel:I found myself in the great hall of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel, where I sawthe Japanese officer who had [previously] come to requisition our cars atDankia. He was leaving an office which gave onto the hall. He recognizedme, and came to me with his hand outstretched. I could only return thegesture. This did not prevent a French observer from saying: ‘I would ratherhave spat in my hand than given it to him.’ That’s easy to say when one

87 All of the information in this paragraph comes from the report by Paul Veysse-yre, architect: ‘Effondrement de la descent a couvert du Lang Bian Palace, le samedi6 mars 1943; rapport d’expert.’ Paul Veysseyre papers (generously made availableto me by his son Jacques Veysseyre).

88 On the topic of the Japanese coup de force, see David Marr, Vietnam 1945(Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1995).

89 These figures and dates are drawn from the unpublished memoirs of LouisSalles, former principal of the Lycee Yersin in Dalat (Found in Mr Veysseyre’spapers).


has nothing to fear, but when one has a family and personal stakes, it ispreferable in my opinion, to be polite . . .90

The inversion of power was as palpable as it was complete. In the spanof a month, the hotel had been transformed from the preserve ofFrench colonial high society into a site where the French were notmerely on edge, but actually outsiders (note as well that far from rally-ing the French together, this passage suggests that the Japanese occu-pation exacerbated pre-existing tensions by raising divisive issues ofcollaboration and resistance). In the coming months, as the Frenchcommunity was entrenched in the Cite Decoux redoubt, only a smallliaison committee, which communicated in English with the Japanese,was allowed even to set foot in the Dalat Palace Hotel. And near theend of the Japanese occupation, at a time when the Viet-Minh werebeginning to assassinate prominent French and Japanese figures inDalat, and when the French feared openly that the Viet-Minh hadpoisoned French water supplies, Borel relates simply thatMr Feraudy,the standing manager of the Hotel, died abruptly on November 19,1945.91 The French remaining in Dalat no doubt considered Feraudy’sdeath, the cordoning off of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel, and its requisi-tion by the Japanese military, as not merely a series of tragic setbacksand humiliations, but also a veritable set of inversions and ‘Asianappropriations of power’, over what had once been a bastion of French-ness in Indochina. A new, temporarily empowered player had beenadded to the already complex triangulations between French, Vietna-mese, and Lat and Koho minorities in Dalat.

Renovation and Indochic

In the early 1990s, American tycoon Larry Hillblom became fascin-ated, if not obsessed with the Dalat Palace Hotel. In 1993 heembarked upon an ambitious and costly restoration project for it (seefigures 7A and 7B for views of the hotel today).92 Robert Templer’strenchant analysis of Hillblom’s motivations and achievements isworth quoting:

90 Marius Borel, Souvenirs d’un vieux colonialiste (Borel, Rodez, 1963), p. 282.91 Ibid., pp. 292–5.92 See Adam Schwarz, ‘Beaches and Sand Traps’, Far-Eastern Economic Review, 159

(February 29, 1996), p. 41.


Figures 7 A and B. The Dalat Palace Hotel today. Top: a room on the hotel’s secondfloor. Bottom: a view of the hotel’s facade, taken from the gardens. Photographs bythe author (March 2001).


[In the early 1990s, the Dalat Palace Hotel] was remade to evoke a timeof brilliantined hair, Vuitton trunks and tennis whites all set in the lumin-ous and mythical landscape of ‘Indochine’, a place as distant from the realit-ies of French colonialism as it was from contemporary Vietnam. Theoriginal hotel had never taken off, indeed the grand building overlookingthe town’s lake was a mirror of the economic dreams and failures of Frenchcolonialism in Indochina.93

Certainly the original hotel had reflected at once colonial dreams ofgrandeur, the contradictory objectives of its various promoters, andthe fractures of a French colonial society torn between adulating andloathing the hotel. But Templer’s main point is that the historicalrealities of the original hotel’s struggles to attract clients were oflittle interest to Hillblom. In the eary 1990s, the American bil-lionaire (once at the helm of the DHL courier empire) invested some$40 million into re-opening the Dalat Palace Hotel, that had lan-guished since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.The results of Hillblom’s restoration are at once fanciful and his-

torically consistent: consistent because the Palace’s more reasonablypriced twin, the Hotel du Parc (today the Novotel Dalat) continuesto attract a more diverse (including an emerging Vietnamese middleclass—in stark contrast to the Dalat Palace) and larger clientelethan its flagship partner. Consistent also because of the Palace’sWesternness—down to the wood-burning fireplaces whose necessityat Dalat never ceased to draw wonder and nostalgia from homesickcolons. The more fanciful side has to do with the nature of renovationsitself, which transformed a rather plain dining room seen in oldphotos of the hotel, into a grand restaurant which it arguably had neverbeen before.In many respects then, the latest incarnation of the hotel actually

far outshines the original in its luxury. This new luxury is of courserooted in a wistful vision of Indochine—a vision which conjures up thefilmic myth embodied by Catherine Deneuve rather than the starker

93 Robert Templer, Shadows and Wind: a View of Modern Vietnam (London: Penguin,1998), p. 9. A much harsher criticism has been articulated by Penny Edwards oncolonial nostalgia surrounding the hotel at Dalat’s ‘sister hill station’ of Bokor, inCambodia. Edwards argues: ‘In eclipsing the carnage of Bokor’s construction withthe glitter of hotel ballrooms, Muller falls prey to the ‘‘Indo-Chic’’ syndromerecently identified by the literary critic Panivong Norindr. . . . Excised from theirhistorical context, these totems of lost empire invent new memories. Colonialism isremade as a romantic interlude where a happy time was had by all—except, ofcourse, for the victims of bad service at the Bokor Palace Hotel.’ Penny Edwards,‘Tango Dancing in the Blood of Bokor’, Phnom Penh Post, March 27/April 9, 1998.My thanks to David Del Testa for drawing this article to my attention.


legend encapsulated by Marguerite Duras; to some extent, each rep-resents the flip side of an Indochic phenomenon94 which is beginningto draw French tourists to Vietnam in droves, through tours organ-ized by the Maison de l’Indochine in Paris. And the appeal of Indochichas begun to extend well beyond the French-speaking world. Takefor instance this glowing report of the Dalat Palace Hotel by anAmerican guide-book:[The Dalat Palace Hotel is] a truly divine establishment with spacious,elegantly furnished rooms to kill for. If you stay in only one grand hotel, itshould be this one. The empty corridors seem to echo with ghosts from thedays when dressing for dinner was de rigueur and ballrooms came aliveevery Saturday with full orchestra.95

The hitch, of course, is that many of the Western tourists visitingVietnam in the past decade have done so on early Durasian ratherthan Deneuvian budgets. And budget guides for backpackers suggestvisiting the hotel, rather than actually staying in it.Finally, it should be underscored that in spite of the illusion of

staticness, the Dalat Palace’s trappings and meanings have signific-antly shifted over time: at its opening in 1922 it stood as a monu-ment to French colonial power, and a keystone for French plans inthe Indochinese interior. Over the course of its colonial existence, itwas decried by some in the administration as a colonial white ele-phant (prone to leaks, budget deficits, and collapses), and defendedby its backers as the ultimate marker of Frenchness and prestige inIndochina. As if to underscore this role, the Japanese quickly tookhold of this colonial symbol after March 1945, appropriating it andrelegating the French to a ‘gated community’ far afield. And by the1990s the Dalat Palace Hotel had become a living experiment in DoiMoi and Market Leninism, an attempt at reinvesting in the centralhighlands of Vietnam, and an ambitious gamble at drawing high-endtourism, a category which had previously vacationed in Java or Thai-land rather than highland Vietnam.

94 On the Indochic phenomenon, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina:French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Raleigh: Duke UniversityPress, 1996).

95 Derek Maitland and Jill Goeler (eds), Traveler’s Companion: Vietnam, Laos andCambodia (Connecticut: the Globe Pequot Press, 1999), p. 40.

Dalat hotel Jennings

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