Kings of the Mountains

In the late nineteenth century, the distance from Qui Nhon to Kontum – a trip of about two hundred kilometers – was nearly insurmountable. The route most travellers took led from the port town in southern Annam out across a narrow coastal plain of cultivated fields before crossing rivers and gorges, and ascending rocky mountains. ² Then the path leveled out on a high plateau of extreme weather and dense forests where fever, tigers, and unwelcoming local communities intimidated even the hardiest of travellers. Though well within the borders of French-controlled Annam, there was little Vietnamese – and even less French – about these highlands. The region was inhabited almost exclusively by a variety of indigenous groups like the Sedang, the Bahnar, and thejarai, who were both ethnically distinct from the majority Vietnamese population of Annam, and politically independent from the emperor in Hue as well as the French colonial administration. The region was so isolated from the rest of the colony that Frenchmen invoked the Vietnamese name for the area, calling it the Pays Mot- ‘savages’ country’ – and even the missionaries, the only Europeans to live in the region until the early 1900s, referred to their headquarters in Kontum as the ‘Mission des Sauvages’. ³ It was an unlikely focal point for one of the most divisive controversies in the French empire.