PROLOGUE

Those of us who had the good fortune to take part in that great adventure known as the World War can scarcely have failed to notice, among the many kinds of French colonial troops, some little men in khaki and brass-topped mushroom hats, most of them with black teeth. It was not until five years after the Comedy of Versailles that my perpetual wandering over the face of the globe brought me to the land from which they came—Annam, “Kingdom of the Eminent South.” There was not only the motive of satisfying, by seeing them at home, the curiosity raised by these little brown men in the French army; as far back as I can remember I had felt inquisitive toward that strangely shaped spot on the map, that slender country which drips like a stalactite of candle-grease down from the southeast corner of China.

Besides, during all my two years of roving about the once Celestial Empire I heard frequently of the wonders of the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia. So one day in early January, a propitious season, I dropped down to Saïgon, visited those astounding remnants of the past, and returned overland all the way to Canton. Later, toward the end of April, I brought my family to Hanoï for a month of Parisian change on the way to Yünnanfu, and took advantage of the opportunity to journey through Laos, largest, most interesting, and least known of the five divisions of France’s Indo-Chinese empire. So in the end I traveled viiinot merely the length and breadth of Annam but saw all five parts of that dumb-bell-shaped land east of Siam which the French consider their most important colony in the Far East.

So unusual was my luck during those travels that only my overwhelming modesty has kept me from entitling this unpretentious tale of them “Hobnobbing with Kings”; and so very interesting a trip was it to me personally that in the face of my hard-earned knowledge that our ever more herd-minded general public is as fearful of the unknown and the unfamiliar as the most superstitious of wild tribes, and would much rather read of the deeply tourist-trodden streets of Rome and Paris, I have insisted on performing this unassuming task.

Those two well separated months were more than a mere vacation from Chinese travel. To jaunt through French Indo-China is to see a sample of what China itself would probably be under European control, white-man rule—were any nation powerful enough to accomplish that many times larger task—as Formosa suggests what it might be under the Japanese. I hope I have at least made it clear that Indo-China is not in any sense China, but the living line of division between two ancient and very different masses of Oriental civilization, even as its name signifies.

Harry A. Franck.

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