Modern Asian Studies 37, 1 (2003), pp. 159-194.

2003 Cambridge University Press

DOI:10.1017/S0026749X03001057 Printed in the United Kingdom

From Indochine to Indochic: The Lang

Bian/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 of Dalat circa
1925, one is struck by the centrality of an edice around which the entire
European resort seems to have been conceived. Completed in 1922, this
monumental hotel, known at the time as the Lang Bian Palace (since
rebaptized the Dalat Palace Hotel), was designed as a site of colonial
leisure and power at the centre of Indochinas premier site of French
villeggiatura, discovered by Dr Alexandre Yersin in 1893, and earmarked
for development into a hill station by the Governor General of Indochina,
Paul Doumer in 1897-8. According to the geographer Robert Reed, the
Lang Bian Palace function[ed] almost immediately as the nerve center of
proper Western colonial society in the highlands. 1
* I wish to recognize the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for supporting my research in France and Vietnam. My sincere gratitude
to Mr Wilson Fieldhouse, General Manager of the Sotel Dalat Palace Hotel, for
sharing information on his hotel with me, and especially for allowing me to consult
the unpublished work of Bruno Duron, The Dalat Palace: A hotel of the past, today,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 extend
my thanks as well to Mrs Huynh Thi Thanh Xuyen for taking the time to discuss
her, and her familys recollections about the hotel. I am very grateful to Monsieur
Jacques Veysseyre for very kindly allowing me to consult his late fathers papers on
the Palace Hotels partial collapse in 1943. I am indebted to Mme Lucette Vachier
for 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 must
thank 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 comments
of an anonymous reader for Modern Asian Studies. All translations from French are
my own.
1 Robert Reed, From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital: Reections on the Colonial
Origins, Urban Transformation and Environmental Impact of Dalat in Terry Rambo, Robert
Reed, Le Trong Cuc et al., The Challenges of Highland Development in Vietnam (Hawaii:
East-West Center Program on Environment, 1995), p. 51.
0026-749X/03/$7.50$0.10

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Indeed, the monumentalism, modernity, luxury, and location of

the 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. This
ostentatious symbol of French power in the highlands of Vietnam
thus engages with several elds of scholarship, from the emerging
eld of French colonial tourism 2 (which to date has too often
favoured studies of metropolitans voyaging to the coloniesi.e.
Andre Malraux visiting and pillaging Angkorover internal, lateral
tourism in the colonies themselves), to issues of highland develop
ment, relations between highland minorities, ethnic Vietnamese
and French in colonial Indochina, and nally to the everyday life
of colonialism. The Dalat Palace Hotel thus constitutes an utterly
overlooked focal point and fault-line for the identity, status, and
social relations of French colonizers in Indochina. The site of Dalat
itself was variously described by different colonial sources as a kind
of colonial wild West, or a decompression chamber to the tropics,
or nally as a little piece of France in Indochina.
In the last twenty-ve years, a host of studies on urban Apartheidbe
they set in Algiers, Rabat, or Bombayhave underscored the role of urban
planning in perpetuating and normalizing the relationship between
colonizer and colonized. 3 Another body of scholar
2 On French colonial tourism, see Alison Murray, Le tourisme Citroen au Sahara,
1924-1925, Vingtie`me Siecle, Revue dHistoire 68 (October-December 2000): 95-107;
Miriam Kahn, Tahiti Intertwined: Ancestral Land, Tourist Postcard, and Nuclear Test
Site, American Anthropologist 102:1 (2000): 7-26; and Ellen Furlough, A Lesson of
Things: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France forthcoming in a special
issue of French Historical Studies on Travel and Tourism. For recent English-language
studies on tourism in metropolitan France, see amongst others: Ellen Furlough, Making
Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 40:2 (1998): 247-86; Douglas Mackaman, Leisure Settings:
Bourgeois Culture, Medicine and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1998); and Patrick Young, The Consumer as National Subject: Bourgeois
Tourism in the French Third Republic, 1880-1914, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University,
2000.
3 For an excellent overview of much of this literature, see Anthony King, Writing
Colonial 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 Apartheid in
Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and
Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of
Bombay 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 INDOCHIC

161

ship, focusing upon colonial architecture more specically, has sought to

decode European afrmations of power in the colonies, as well as to assess
colonial efforts at integrating fanciful elements of indigenous architecture
into their own, thereby creating a hybrid modernism. 4 To date, however,
much of this work on the trappings of colonialism has, by its very focus on
artifacts and discourses over practices, 5 tended to elide everyday
manifestations of colonial life, home-sickness, rivalry, competition etc.
thereby leading to an overly monolithic portrayal of colonial forms and
normstypied at its paroxysm by the frustrating use of the singular to
refer to the colonial project. By bridging this vast eld of studies of
colonial urbanism and architecture with another approachchampioned
amongst others by Nicholas Thomas and Ann Stolers layered and textured
analyses of complex, conicting, fractured, often dysfunctional, and
certainly pluralized colonialisms 6 this article seeks to understand the
real life of French colonialism in Indochina. To do this, 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 mode`le conquerant? (Paris:
lHarmattan, 1996).
4 See Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britains Raj
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Giles Tillotson, The Tradition of
Indian Architecture. Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989). On hybridity, modernism, and appropriations of indigenous
elements in colonial architecture, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in
French 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 History
31:2 (1996): 373-95.
5
Thomas Metcalf, for example, explicitly sets out to examine how political
authority took shape in stone, and how, in turn, these colonial buildings helped shape the
discourse on empire of the later nineteenth century. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, p. xi.
6
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialisms Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Thomas himself prefers the plural
colonialisms, thereby stressing the locational specics of colonialism. He pleads for a
plural rather than a unitary construction of colonial discourse. Thomas, pp. 9;
51.In 1989, Ann Stoler explicitly leveled the critique that much existing literature overhomogenized and reied a single colonial project: The terms colonial state, colonial
policy, foreign capital, and the white enclave are often used interchangeably, as if they
captured one and the same thing . . . The makers of metropole policy become conated
with its local practioners. Company executives and their clerks appear as a seamless
community of class and colonial interests whose internal discrepencies are seen as
relatively inconsequential, whose divisions are blurred. Ann Laura Stoler, Rethinking
Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 135.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

ingly un-real colonial site, which has become a veritable lieu de me

moire in its own right, to explore the tensions and dynamics behind the
lore of colonial Indochic. Far from being marginal to the cultural politics
of French colonial Indochina, I contend that this site of luxury 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. 7
With so much ink spilled on the Simla model, surprisingly little
attention has been afforded to non-British hill stations (Robert
Reeds study of Banguio stands out as an important exception). 8 By
tracing how French planners sought to adapt, transform, and
improve upon the Simla model to create highland miniature replicas
of France rather than Britain (this down to Dalats 18 degree centi
grade average annual temperature, which was explicitly described as
Mediterranean, in contrast to the outright Nordic 12 degree Celsius
annual average of Simla), 9 this article will shed light on the
uniqueness both of colonial practices in a French hill station, and
French colonial fantasies for highland Vietnam. For the very idea of
constructing a vast and ultra-modern site of villeggiatura on a
remote highland plain was rst and foremost a utopian (or distopian)
fantasy.
7 On the hill stations of the Raj, see Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains. Hill
Stations of the British Raj (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996); Vikram Bhatt,
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 Insel Ceylon
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991); Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia (New
York: Westview, 1998); Pamela Kanwar, The Changing Prole of the Summer Capital of
British India: Simla, 1864-1947, Modern Asian Studies 18:2 (1984): 215-36; Judith
Kenny, Claiming the High Ground: Theories of Imperial Authority and the British Hill
Station in India, Political Geography 1997; Judith Kenny, Constructing an Imperial Hill
Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Syracuse University, 1990); Nora Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal (Chicago:
University of Chicago Geography Department, 1972). For an interesting piece which
combines several of the approaches listed above (colonial architecture, urban apartheids,
hill stations), and which focuses on Africa rather than Asia, see Odile Goerg, From Hill
Station (Freetown) to Dowtown Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and British
Approaches to Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,
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 and
Regional Capital (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 1976).
9
Statistics from circa 1900, drawn from Lam Dong Provincial Library, Dalat, DC
067, p. 313.

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163

But the Dalat Palace Hotel further permits one to trace a signic
ant shift in this regardor at the very least a divide between the
theory and practice of colonial sites of leisure and power. What was
at its outset a painstakingly planned and controlled environment
intended as a sort of colonial tabula rasa, was soon transformed by
a set of factors including triangulations of power between French,
highland minorities and Vietnamese, tensions between different
French colonial agencies, sectors, and agendas, and the dynamics
proper to this particular colonial society itself. Ultimately, when one
pushes the examination of Dalat beyond initial plans for an oasis of
France in the highlands of Indochina, one uncovers more colonial
discord and rivalry than unity of goals; thus, as we shall see, the
various strata of the French colonial administration could never
agree on which should bear the nancial burden of keeping the grand
hotel aoat. Out of the lavish and overarching colonial project of
Dalat that was sketched out around 1897, there thus emerged count
less competing projectsall played out in the crucible of colonial
social life and power that was the Dalat Palace Hotelat once social
club, de facto headquarters of French colonial high society, focal
point of discussions about the role of the French colonial administra
tion, and indeed the ultimate marker of Frenchness. The Lang Bian
Palace Hotel emerged, in other words, as a site where various and
often competing French colonial ambitions, tensions and visions of
Indochina itself were negotiated.

A Colonial Tabula Rasa

The Lang Bian plateau was, by the admission of most colonial ofcials, a
vast experiment, a tabula rasa on which the French sought to socially
engineer a white island in the tropics. 10 To be sure, the French were not
alone in seeking the cooler climes of the highlandsthis well-documented
phenomenon has been aptly labeled the panacea of seeking higher
altitudes. 11 Indeed, the French, and
10 Gwendolyn Wright has described Dalats raison detre as follows: Dalat was to be a
model city, in the sense of a controlled environment, an urbane retreat for the French elite.
In location and in character, the town was far from the heat, the bickering, and the
industrial pollution of Saigon, far from the violence, the rivalries and the crowded streets
of Hanoi. Wright, The Politics of Design, p. 230.
11 Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europes Encounter with the Tropical world in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 28.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Yersin rst among them, self-consciously modeled Dalat upon the

British colonial hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling. 12 But in the
case of the Lang Bian plateau, far more was at stake than the prim
ary, overriding obsession of seeking cooler climesitself rationalized
in terms of disease avoidance. French colons, entrepreneurs, and vaca
tioners also projected a series of fantasies upon the Lang Bian: to
some, it would serve as a French Far-Westa land of opportunity
and of exoticism, inhabited by so-called primitive peoplesLat and
Koho 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 seeking
Pariss approval for Dalats creation at the turn of the century, the
Lang Bians signicance resided in its strategic location, supposedly
outside the scope of Vietnamese inuence. Pennequin wrote to his
Parisian superiors in 1903: our domination in Southern Indochina
will not be complete until we have controlled the highlands [around
Dalat] . . . where the Annamites [read Vietnamese] have never dared
to venture. 14 The purported fears 15 of ethnic Vietnamese towards
the mountainous Lang Bian were a determining factor for this
French General: going where the Vietnamese had supposedly never
dared could not only bolster French prestige, it could also serve as a
potential counterweight to, and the cornerstone of a future alliance
against Vietnamese hegemony over Indochina as a whole. Penne
quin pursued:
12

Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives doutre-mer, Aix-en-Provence,

France (hereafter CAOM), GGI 5967, rapports du Dr Yersin, 1898-9. Yersin report
entitled: Le sanatorium du Lang Bian..
13
Many a parallel was made with the American wild-west. To the journalist
Francois de Tessan, Dalat evoked the broad avenues, open spaces and virgin lands of the
American west. Francois de Tessan, Une station daltitude en Indochine, LIllustration
February 17, 1923, p. 157. Others, like the hunting guide author Lucien Roussel, drew
comparisons between the physical appearance of Lang-Bian highland 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 that Lang Bian was a European
environment appears to have been strengthened by the notion that lowland Vietnamese and the
montagnards considered it a dangerous region. The name given to Lang Bian by the
highland peoples, French colonials pointed out, meant: disinherited or cursed. The
Annamites of the shore are in fact afraid of ascending mountainous countries . . . Libby
Vann, Discovering the Alps in Indochina: European Nature and the French Colonial
Sanatorium of Dalat, 1893-1927. Paper kindly made available to me by its author.

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165

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

Clearly laid out here is an early, machiavellian example of the

French politique des races, which consisted of playing off minorities
against dominant ethnicities in the colonies. 17 From the outset, then,
colonizing the Lang Bian plateau fullled multiple functions against
the Vietnamese. First of all, it allowed the French administration to
create ex nihilo (at least in its eyes) a highland sanitarium where
functionaries and soldiers could nd a salubrious, relaxing, and
intrinsically European environment (a series of reports compared
the Lang Bian to various French microclimates: the Riviera, the
Landes, the Alps, etc.). As a token of its Frenchness, Governor Paul
Doumer reported that Dr Yersin had dubbed the spot Langsa, or
French town in local dialectalthough Yersins own notebooks
show that the site already bore this name when he discovered it. 18
It would later be called Dalata fusion of the Vietnamese words
spring/river and the ethnonym Lat. Secondly, Dalat would serve a
strategic 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 by
Pennequin. From the outset, then, the French strategic and military
objectives at Dalat involved a fascination with non-Vietnamese
Southeast Asian minorities, a desire to thwart Vietnamese domina
tion, and an attempt to create an inherently French space, an island
of home in Southeast Asia. 19
16

Ibid.
On some of the strategies involved in this complex game, see the following
article, which focuses on the highland minorities of Northern Vietnam (Tonkin in
colonial 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.
Yersins travel logs are located at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Archives of the Institut
Pasteur, Fonds Yersin, Box 3, Dossier 13651, Yersin Pays Mo , deuxie`me expedition
(1893), p. 117.
19 For general histories of Dalat in the colonial era, see Wright, The Politics of Design,
pp. 230-3, and Robert Reed, From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital. Also see
Truong Tro (ed.), Dalat, ville daltitude (Ho Chi Minh City: Peoples Committee of Ho
Chi Minh City, 1993); Arnauld Le Brusq, Le Vietnam a` travers larchitecture
17

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Finding European comfort and overcoming homesickness were

thus crucial considerations in the establishment of Dalat. Although
the prime or ofcial motive in the creation of colonial hill stations
was medical, this scientic rationale was systematically enshrouded
in, and indeed indissoluble from social engineering designs, desires
for segregation, and the drive to create what Dane Kennedy has
termed 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 nd, in the highlands of
Annam, Tonkin and even Laos, high and salubrious plateaux upon which
Europeans could nd a vivifying and temperate climate, analogous in a
certain way to that of Southern Europe. . . .The creation of a sanitary sta
tion at Langsa [Dalat], in the same conditions as Simla and Darjeeling were
created by the British in India, will be of prime importance to France in
Indochina. With improved communications, Langsa can become much more
than a site of rest and recovery for tired colons and functionaries, it can
become an important administrative centre, where vital services can be
grouped. . . . 21

Langsa, the French town, epitomized the French colonial administrations

fantasy of nding, nearby, convenient reimmersion into the metropole.
More than this, Doumer foresaw the possibility of planning grand edices
for a future administrative centre on the Lang Bian plateau.
The fantasy of creating a sheltered French micro-universe in the
microclimatic highlands of Indochina was shared by most of the
members of the early Lang Bian exploration missions. Some focused
upon the possibilities of importing or grafting metropolitan fruit and
vegetables on the Lang Bian plateau. Once again, authenticity was
paramount. As Erica Peters has shown, in culinary matters, it was
critical for the French in Indochina to consume the real thing. 22
Thus, a station agricole was established at Dalat at the turn of the
century. The agricultural laboratory soon bore metropolitan fruit. A
1903report reads:
coloniale (Paris: Editions de lAmateur, 1999), pp. 98-108; and Crossette, The Great Hill
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 Vietnam, 18801924 Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, p. 140.

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167

I can state that all French owers ourish here, as you have been able to witness
for yourself . . . French vegetables have also been yielding favorable results . . .
We have now produced the following vegetables, ready to be eaten: potatoes,
cabbage, lettuce, carrots, celery, beats, parsley, sorrel, tomatoes, turnips and
onions. 23

While some focused upon recreating a French fruit and vegetable garden,
others centred their attention upon the future towns overall appearance
and layout. A Captain Bigaud summarized his arguments as follows: With
a railroad, comfortable buildings, paved roads, useful and agreeable
imports of plants, the salubrious Lang Bian plateau could be compared to a
little piece of Francea very passable one at that, and considered a ne
colonial sanitarium. 24 To this ofcer at least, the Dalat experiment
consisted above all of approximating France as closely as possibleeven a
passable replica seemed salutary to homesick colonials.
However, early French residents in Dalat soon bemoaned the isolation
and drudgery of the place. Very quickly, they complained of intense
boredom. 25 What were needed were European leisure infrastructures: a
grand hotel, a rst-class French restaurant, a rowing club, tennis court,
stables and riding facilities etc.as much as markers of the colonial
lifestyle as ways of afrming Frenchness in the back yard of the
Vietnamese, so to speak. The majestic Lang Bian Palace Hotel would offer
all of these amenities and more. It is hardly surprising then, that it emerged
as the linchpin of post-World War I urban plans for Dalat. The city was
literally laid out around its Palace Hotel and its articial lake. The hotels
site at the head of the lake positioned it at the centre of a European
business and administrative quarter, dominating the native quarters, and
serving as a buffer between them and the rows of European villas to the
East. In this sense, the Dalat Palace Hotel emerged out of a realization that
even segregated European spaces and sites in Hanoi or Saigon, epitomized
by the Saigon Theatre or Hanoi Cathedral, even these niches and French
quarters were surrounded by pre-existing and indeed ancient sites of
Vietnamese power. The Lang Bian Palace, conversely, was literally built in
the middle of nowhere (according to the French), in an area peopled by
romanticized primitive ethnicities, and teeming with wild game. The
Lang Bian Palace
23
CAOM GGI 5966, Situation agricole du Lang-Bian; Rapport, Dangkia, le 24
juillet 1903, signed Roux.
24
CAOM GGI 66188, Report by Capitaine Bigaud.
25
Ibid., Rapport du Dr Haueur, Saigon June 4, 1903.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

would offer an oasis and replica of France in these highlandsa

tranquil base from which to explore nearby Lat and Koho villages
or set out on big game expedition. Most importantly, as its title of
Palace suggests, this would be a luxurious establishment, competing
with the poshest colonial hotels of Southeast Asia, be they the Ori
ental Hotel in Bangkok or the Rafes Hotel in Singapore.
The Lang Bian Palace thus fullled the curious dual function of
mediating between the exotic and the familiar: an exotic, primitive
minority setting, and a familiar home base featuring French food
and European luxury.26 In other words, it was a place of multiple
escapes: escape back to France (or the best substitute for it), or an
escape into a dreamed primitive or trophy hunting universe. But of
course, the Palaces customers were rst and foremost escaping the
Vietnamesethey were certainly not avoiding other French people
who concentrated their stays at the hotel in peak seasons or holidays.
Escape thus had its limits: customers sought depaysement while at the
same time remaining rmly rooted in what was by denition a hier
archical, parochial and closed colonial society, that migrated en
masse from Saigon to Dalat on hot spring and summer spells. 27 But
the hotels paradoxes did not end here. The Lang Bian/Dalat Palace
also reected and highlighted a tension between colonial desires for
demesure and luxury on the one hand, and a quite different reality on
the other. This hotel, in short, can serve as a lens through which to
view 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 fantasies
of excess and opulence, triangulations of power with indigenous
populations, tensions within the franctured colonial universe, and
the role of leisure sites in reafrming and reasserting Frenchness in
the tropics.

A Symbol of Colonial Power

British colonial hill stations like Simla or Ootacamund tended to revolve
around individual seats of power, such as the Viceroys 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, stratication and seclusion of French colonial society, see
Charles Meyer, Les Francais en Indochine, 1860-1910 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1985), p.
78.

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169

ence. But in Dalat, the Lang Bian Palace was erected fteen years
before the Governor Generals villa, and dwarfed it in stature. To be
sure, this state of affairs was partly the result of a general scaling
back from the architect Ernest Hebrards outlandish 1922 blueprint
for Dalat, that featured a projected massive administrative quarter
to the Northeast of the main articial lake. The actual relativism of
the Lang Bian Place within such blueprints is difcult to reconstitute
today, because little else of Hebrards visionstarting with the
administrative quarterwas ever realized (and Hebrards master
plans were replaced by Louis-Georges Pineaus a decade later). In a
sense, then, the Lang Bian Palaces 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 was
being touted by many as the future capital of Indochina, where the
French could rule from the heights in a site of their own making
hence Hebrards quintessentially optimistic project. When economic
circumstances changed later that decade, most plans for government
structures in Dalat were scrapped (villa construction, conversely,
continued unabated), leaving the town with a Palace Hotel as its
centrepiece and icon. When the Depression nally receded, only the
Palace Hotel was left as a monumental structure. However, such a
change of fortunes alone cannot explain why the Palace Hotel would
have been built rst: it is striking indeed that this 1922 palace was
erected before a post-ofce, train station, or city halleven before
most of the citys schools (Dalat subsequently became a centre for
learning, especially for French and metis children). Certainly this
sequence must be indicative of the French colonial administrations
priorities. In 1922, the hotel stood quite literally alone in terms of
public edices for the French (see gure 1). This clearly signals the
paramount importance, and indeed the primacy to the French colo
nial administration of a luxury hotel in Dalat. This, in turn, reects
in part the social pretensions and fantasies of elite colonial leisure
and status-seekers, but also the very down-to-earth and mundane
efforts of the colonial administration to save by replacing furloughs
to metropolitan France with shorter vacations in the European com
fort of Dalat.
The Lang Bian Palace opened in March 1922, after Governor General
Long had made several visits to the resort to accelerate and oversee
construction in person. 28 Featuring 38 luxury rooms, the
28

Visite de M. Long a` Dalat, LEcho annamite, July 24, 1920, p. 2.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Figure 1. Date unknown, but certainly from the early 1920s. A view of Dalat showing the
articial lake in its early dimensions, the Lang Bian Palace Hotel (to the left) and in the
distance the tiny native town. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted by permission of the
Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.

establishment boasted the most modern amenities of the time, as well as an

orchestra, tennis courts, its private fruit and vegetable gardens (providing
European ingredients like strawberries, which continue to be grown in
Dalat to this day), a dancing hall, riding facilities (see gure 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. Authors collec
tion.
29
Cornell University Library, Wason Pamphlets (Indochina 51) Les Hotels en
Indochine.

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171

hotel boasted a cinema and offered Jazz concerts. 30 The original

1922personnel list called for three European and sixty-one native
workers, including twelve servers for the restaurant, one Chinese
cook, one patissier, a hair dresser, three chauffeurs, ten coolies, etc.
As for the three Europeans, they would occupy the posts of general
manager, ma tre dhotel and gouvernante. 31 Meals in the restaurant
were simple but resolutely French: potage, grillades, pain, entremets
chauds etc. 32 An emphasis was placed on fresh fruitand not sur
prisingly on French fruits like apples and pears, though litchis and
mangoes were also served. As a nal 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 hotels person
nel, these were described as follows by a 1932 convention: The attire
of domestic personnel must be clean and neat: a white, freshly ironed
outt will be de rigueur for waiters; domestics in contact with visitors
must have a complete mastery of their trade, and speak sufciently
good French. 34
Architecturally, the Palace was inspired by metropolitan French
resort stylesmerging elements of spa towns like Vittel with sea
side architectural elements borrowed from the likes of Cabourg
or Cannes (see gure 3). In his historical fresco of World War II
Indochina, the French novelist Morgan Sporte`s describes the Dalat
Palace Hotels appearance in the following terms: One could have
been on the Riviera, in some elegant seaside resort. This impres
sion was corroborated by the high, white silhouette of the
Palace Hotel (a dead ringer for the Negresco Hotel in Nice). 35
For her part, the architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright
describes the buildings original appearance succinctly: The Palace
Hotel was completed in the rococo style of hotels along the French
Riviera. 36
In 1943, under the Vichyite Governor of Indochina Admiral Jean
30

NA, Petit guide illustre de Dalat (1930), p. 13.

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 the Palace Hotel by
American tycoon Larry Hillblom, provides a compendium of useful sources relating to the
history of the hotel.
32
Ibid., p. 48.
33
National Archives of Vietnam, Archives #1, Hanoi (hereafter VNNA), GGI
5034Cahier des charges pour lexploitation des hotels du groupe de Dalat, p. 14.
34
Ibid., p. 9.
35
Morgan Sporte`s, Tonkinoise (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), p. 197.
36
Wright, The Politics of Design, p. 231.
31

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Figures 3. The Lang Bian Palace Hotel in the 1920s. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted by permission
of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.

Decoux,37 the Lang Bian Palaces rococo facade was replaced by a starker
exterior.38 This modernist exterior was almost certainly inspired by architect
Paul Vesseyres two other Palaces in town Bao Dais and the Governor
Generals, built in 1934 and 1937 respectively, 39 in a style more
reminiscent of a melange of Art Deco and Bauhaus than of n-de-sie`cle
spa rococo. On aesthetic but also political grounds, Governor Decoux
abhorred the rococo art that had proliferated across Indochina during the
great ourish of construction at the turn of the century. The so-called
modernization of the Dalat Palace in 1943 was thus part of a much vaster
campaign to simplify complex lines, and to excise superuous rococo
frivolities. Other examples include the Palace of the Governor of
Cochinchina in Saigon, whose two caryatids were removed under Decoux,
and the famous Saigon theatre, whose ornamental facade (statues, basreliefs
37 On the Vichy period in Indochina, see Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Petains
National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina (Stanford: Stanford
University 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.

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173

etc.), was entirely excised on orders from Decoux. 40 It is interesting to note

than in the last ve years, renovations undertaken on Saigons theatre have
reversed Decouxs modications, and restored its original statutes and basreliefs.

Ethnic Minorities on Display

The visit to nearby Lat or Koho villages, attractions which are still
offered at the Dalat Palace Hotel today, were a staple of the hotel
since its inception. The French fascination with the Lang Bians
highland minorities (whom the French, like the Vietnamese, grouped
under the offensive rubric Mo meaning savage), should be dis
tinguished from their relationship with ethnic Vietnamese in the
highlands. In the mountains, the French considered the Vietnamese
(or Annamites as they called them) to be colonizers like them 41or
at the very least auxiliaries to colonization. As for the ethnic minorit
ies, they were often hired as hunting guides. A tangible legacy of
this practice is a 1930 French/highland minority pocket dictionary
teaching the French to chastise Koho guides for laziness, or the
French hunter to bark at his guide: come here, go away, dig a
ditch, or be quiet! 42
French visitors to the hotel felt simultaneously attracted and repelled by
the highland minority presence. The attraction resided in romanticized
images of simple, hardy highland peoples leading a rustic, ethnologically
fascinating existence just beyond the walls of the Palace. As gure ve
suggests, in the 1920s a minority village stood only a few hundred meters
away from the Lang Bian Palace. The Palaces managers, and Indochinese
tourism agencies, played the card of the noble Mo in a magazine add
which ran in 1926 and 1927in Extreme-Asie. The add juxtaposed a small
caption representing the opulent Palace Hotel with a larger image of a
muscular highland minority man poised to spear a wild beast. Behind him,
a
40 On the changes to the Saigon theatre, see Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre,
September 23, 1943; on the alterations to the Palace of the Governor General of
Cochinchina, see Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, January 27, 1944.
41 This argument is presented by Roussel, amongst others. Roussel, La chasse en
Indochine, p. 62.
42 Bibliothe`que nationale, Paris. 8X 18618. RP Jean Cassaigne, Petit Manuel de Conversation
courante en langue Mo (Koho et Chau Sore) a` lusage des Planteurs, Chasseurs, Touristes, Region Djiring,
Dalat (Saigon: Imprimerie de la mission, 1930).

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Figure 4. Lang Bian Palace, Dalatan advertisement in the magazine Extreme-Asie, May
1927.

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175

Figure 5. Lang Bian, panorama de Dalat pris de lHotelLang Bian, view of Dalat taken from
the hotel. Card dated October 4, 1924. Authors collection.

minority woman looks on, half covered by the forest canopy (see gure 4).
This advertisement is reminiscent of stereotypical nineteenth-century
representations of erce native Americans, and might just as easily been
used to sell a lodge at Yosemite or Banff.
Of course, touting highland minorities as erce warriors was a
potentially perilous marketing strategy. In his article published in the
widely circulated metropolitan French magazine LIllustration, Francois
de Tessan reassured potential visitors to Dalat and its Palace Hotel that the
local minorities had been completely pacied and that the age of heroic
conquest is over. We have . . . entered into the age of progress. 43 The
delicate balancing act used to market Dalats ethnographic appeal thus
consisted of piquing colonial curiosity in muscled, tanned, wild haired,
wide eyed [warriors], 44 while simultaneously reassuring the everyday
traveler of their complete harmlessness, stressing that minority tribes now
constituted attractions, not threats. Making the montagnards (as the
French called all highland minorities in Indochina) appear either too
threatening or too peaceful could ruin the fantasy in either direction.
43
44

De Tessan, Une station daltitude en Indochine, p. 158.

Ibid.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

However, the noble savage did not always draw travelers. For
those preferring a replica of France over a fanciful far-west (note
that a kitschy far-western theme-park can be found at one of Dalats
lakes to this day), the highland minority presence was irritating at
best. Witness the following postcard, written to a friend in the Paris
suburb of St Cloud by a woman visiting the Lang Bian Place Hotel
on October 4, 1924. The image on the card, entitled panorama from
the Hotel, shows several minority peoplescantily clad by European
standardsand a minority village in the background (see gure 5;
one can also make out several colonial villas, recently strategically
built on the hills). On the ip side, this female traveler, no doubt a
resident of Saigon suffering from the ennui so many French women
experienced in Indochina, 45 wrote:
Dear Nicette, I am sending you a card of Indochinas convalescence site,
which is a far cry from Vichy, especially with its inhabitants whose attire
leaves a little something to be desired. Nevertheless, there are two
handsome hotels, a theatre, cinema, dancing hall, tennis court, and so on.
The air is reputedly good here in the mountains of Southern Annam. Lets
face it, its not worth St Cloud either, but then again, neither is Saigon.
Yours . . . . 46

This travelers narrative shifts from a focus on the scant clothing of local
minorities, to an unfavorable comparison with Vichy, and later St Cloud.
Betraying her parochialism (St Cloudcentrism) and homesickness, the
author explicitly complains that Dalat is not enough of a French clone; in
this instance, highland minorities stand in the way of the travelers fantasy
of reintegrating the motherland in the highlands 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 the perceived
starkness of Lat and Koho houses. Certainly, the Dalat Palace served as a
poignant reminder of Frenchnessa social landmark that guaranteed that
the French would resist any temptation of going native. This principle
was crystallized by a 1944 cartoon
45 The boredom of French women in Indochina was recounted inamongst other
sourcesGeorge Grosliers colonial novel, Le retour a` largile, in which one of the main
characters, Raymonde, complains constantly of boredom while her husband cheats on her
with a Cambodian mistress. See George Groslier, Le retour a` largile (Pondichery:
Kailash Editions, original edition 1928, republished 1996), p . 102.
46 Postcard purchased by the author.

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177

Figure 6. Inversions vestimentaires ou du danger de la baignade aux environs de Dalat (histoire

vecue)Sartorial inversions or the dangers of bathing around Dalat (a true story).
Indochine, July 13, 1944.

claiming to recount a true story (gure 6). 47 The four captions show two
French men letting their guard down as they go for a swim; two members
of a local minority proceed to steal their clothes in a classic gag, and an
equally classic inversion of European and primitive trappings. In the nal
scene, the two French men are reduced to returning in highland native garb
to the Lang Bian Palace Hotel erected here into a monument to
whiteness and civilization. The two unfortunate swimmers look forlorn,
bearing the sartorial stigma of nativeness, while the two minority people
walk back to their nearby village wearing pith helmetsthe markers of
colonial status par excellence. Here the Lang Bian Palaces very presence
as a social marker literally shames these two Europeans. And it is precisely
because of the Lang Bian Palace that this anecdote is a nightmare come
true for them. It is not the act of losing ones clothes, so much as the return
to European high societyembodied by the Palace
47 Humour dalatois: inversions vestimentaires ou du danger de la baignade aux
environs de Dalat (histoire vecue) Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre, July 13, 1944.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

that creates this powerful sense of ridicule. The hotel thus provided a relational
standard or norm by which to measure ones Frenchness in the highlands.

The Place of the Vietnamese

As Michael Vann has shown, the relationship between French colonial and
Indochinese societies was strained to the limits by the question of servants. For
the French, having a retinue of indigenous servants was of course a mark of
power, and one of the advantages of the colonies as it were. According to
Vann, the servantthough a necessity and indeed a token of status within the
colonial hierarchy was paradoxically a source of constant anxiety for the
French, as a potential enemy within the household. 48 This fear of servants who
could communicate secretly in their own tongue, who had access to the French
private sphere, and could indeed access and shift between both Vietnamese and
French registers, served to reinforce French racist stereotypes towards the
Vietnamese, whom the French generally portrayed as venal and
duplicitous. 49
At the Lang Bian Place Hotel, such fears were crystallized in a rumour
which I have been unable to conrm through primary written sources. The
rumour, described by a French guide book to Vietnam (one that usually
relies upon local informants), 50 and conrmed by individual conversations
I had in Dalat, 51 holds that a Communist ring operated out of the Lang Bian
Palaces kitchen in the early 1930s. Though the actual existence of this
Communist cell remains in question, let me echo here Luise Whites
argument that rumour in and of itself can speak volumes, especially in a
colonial context. 52 This story may reveal a French hyper-sensitivity to their
preserved realm, inltrated as it seemed by Vietnamese personnel, and
this in an areaLang Bianthat the French had chosen in no small
48 In the words of Michael Vann, The existence of the Other in the home put the
colonial on edge. Michael Vann, White City on the Red River: Race, Power and Culture
in French Colonial Hanoi, 1872-1954, Ph.D. thesis, University of California 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 conrmation 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).

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179

part because the Vietnamese were absent from it. Indeed, some sixty
Vietnamese worked at the hotel, a gure to be contrasted to the
establishments six European employees, or its thirty-eight rooms for that
matter. The facile and stereotypical association of Vietnamese covert
political subversion (to be distinguished from the French stereotype of
highland minorities as straight-forward, frank, and simple) could well be
behind this urban legend. Conversely, if one were to read this account as
historically accuratewhich would not be surprising in itself, save for the
absence of any written records in the many les I consulted on the hotel
it would reveal an interesting degree of political militancy amongst the
personnel of the elite hotel, catering to the colonys wealthiest patrons.
If fears of Vietnamese servants and Communist subversion were
perennial concerns for the French in Dalat, this is not to suggest
that the highland resort remained a playground for the French alone.
Vietnamese elites soon found their place side by side with the French
colonial plutocracy. Emperor Bao Dai took a liking to the highland
town, and held banquets at the Lang Bian Palace. 53 As Bruce Lock
hart has suggested, Bao Dais predilection for Dalat in itself reveals
more than his legendary passion for hunting and diversions: it
implies that the emperor felt estranged from his capital Hueand
even more so from his future capital by default, Saigon. 54 This aliena
tion drew him to a Europeanized highland resort, whose urban layout
was arguably more segregated than any other Indochinese city, and
where his palace stood atop a hill overlooking the European and
administrative quarters.

Clientele
Throughout the hotels colonial existence, its managers and the
Indochinese tourism agency made concerted efforts to woo foreign visitors
to Dalats Palace Hotel. An English-language brochure from
1933advertised: the Lang-Biang Palace and the Grand Hotel de Dalat . . .
offer every modern comfort, and diversion, including concerts, tennis, golf,
walking tours and motor excursions. The sports
Duron, The Dalat Palace, p. 105.
Bruce Lockhart, Monarchy and Decolonization in Indochina, paper delivered at the
International Workshop on Decolonization and Transformation in Southeast Asia,
Singapore, February 19, 2001, p. 17.
53
54

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

man will nd plenty of game, large and small, in the nearby hills. 55
Rich adventurers and big game hunters were particularly targeted
for attention. Maurice Rondet-Saint, the head of the Ligue maritime
coloniale, remarked upon the prominent place of hunting in Indochi
nese tourism, noting that some 50 million piastres a year were spent
by big-game hunters in Indochina. Stressing that Europeans could
kill two birds with one stone, Rondet-Saint repeated the balancing
act of selling the Palace Hotel as an embodiment of both the exotic
and the familiar: In the mountains of Annam, at Dalat, there is a
sanitarium where Europeans who cannot spend their holidays in
Europe come to refresh and reinvigorate themselves in the pure and
healthy mountain air. It so happens that Dalat and its Palace are
also in the heart of hunting country. 56 This passage underscores the
diverse makeup of the Palaces clientele: while some customers were
wealthy 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 pinpointed
the Palace Hotels problematic marketing position: as a resort for
those who could not afford to return to Europe, colonial Dalat
dened its identity in part as a cheap substitute for France. With
wealthy colonials heading back to France at the earliest possible
occasion, this left Dalat with middle-ranking administrators, the vast
majority of whom could not afford Palace prices. In the early 1930s,
the Lang Bian Palace Hotel cost 6 piastres a night, while the towns
lesser hotels charged a mere 1.20 and 1.75 piastres, to give a sense
of scale. 57
The Lang Bian Palace was already caught in a price gap, itself the
reection of an expectation gap: the hotel offered a replica of Europe at
European prices, when those who could only afford replicas of France
could not pay European rates in the rst place. To compound the problem,
the proliferation of villas in Dalat between 1922 and 1945meant that the
ultra-elite courted by the Lang Bian Palace already possessed cottages of
their own in Dalatthemselves styled to resemble regional architecture of
the Landes, Brittany, Savoy or the Basque country. 58 In 1929, the Governor
General of Indochina synthesized the marketing conundrum of the Lang
Bian Palace
55

Reprinted in Extreme-Asie, December 1933, p. 370.

CAOM, Residence Superieure dAnnam, 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 daltitude, 112-16.
56

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181

Hotel. He wrote to his colleague in Cochinchina that the Palace

Hotel failed to answer the needs of the modest clientele of colons
and functionaries with limited budgets, who are in many ways the
most interested in Dalat, for they are the most tired, and hence most
in need of reinvigoration. 59 Thus, the projected increase in the Lang
Bian Palaces size from 32 to 100 rooms 60 by adjoining an annex
building, later dubbed Hotel du Parcfailed to address the problem
of middle-class leisure. The Palace, it seemed, reected more the
colonial dream of grandiose standing than the reality of colonial
budgets.

Troubled Beginnings
Several factors suggest that the Lang Bian Palaces beginnings in
1922were somewhat rocky. Because the rail line to Dalat was not
yet completed in 1922, construction materials had to be carted for
long stretches on foot by cooliesat great physical cost, no doubt.
But the French administration drew nancial, rather than humanit
arian lessons from this. In 1923,the Governor of Indochina
explained bluntly to the Minister of the Colonies: The exorbitant
prices incurred to build the Lang Bian Palace ...led to the
adjourning of any further construction [in Dalat] until the comple
tion of the rail line. 61 The hotel, it seemed, had left a legacy of near
scal ruin, so costly had it proven to build a palace in the remote
central highlands of Vietnam. In turn, the resulting freeze on con
struction in Dalat bred discontentsometimes directed pointedly at
the extravagance of the Lang Bian Palace. A 1923 article in the
Moniteur dIndochine complained that the administration had neg
lected all other hotels in Indochina, at the expense of the grandiose
Lang Bian Palace project. This costly hotel, whose price tag the
author estimated at six million piastres, had left the administration
content, so long as it was inaugurated and kept open some fteen
days or so. 62
Other sources corroborate this hint of early difculties for the Palace.
Throughout its colonial history, regulations stipulated that
59
COAM, Residence Superieure dAnnam, 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 dIndochine, February 24, 1923.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

the hotel should have either a French ma tre dhotel or a French head cook on
hand. 63 In France in 1920 Mr Desanti, the very rst (and short-lived)
manager of the Lang Bian Palace, recruited a chef from Pau in
Southwestern France. This chef, Henri Passiot, signed a threeyear contract
to serve as head chef of the Lang Bian Palace starting on January 1, 1923.
This cuisinier cum war veteran and amputee proceeded to sue the Lang
Bian Palace Hotel and Mr Desanti when the establishment failed to open
on schedule in 1921. In October 1921,seeing that the hotels interior was
far from completed, Passiot sued Desanti, who in turn sued the
Government General of Indochina. 64 Passiot led for his 25,000 franc
salary for 1923, plus 1000 piastres for housing and food, as well as travel
expenses to Indochina and back to Pau for himself and his wife.
In-ghting and recrimination within the insular French colonial
community of Dalat also led to a series of technical catastrophes shortly
after the Hotels opening in 1922. In a livid letter dated March 12, 1923,
the Commissary delegated to Dalat by the Governor General wrote to
Hanoi concerning insubordination, incompetence and bickeringall of this
stemming from a problem with the plumbing of the Lang Bian Palace
Hotel. The head of Dalats engineering team, Mr Jumeau, was bluntly
accused of insolence toward the hotels second manager, Mr Frasseto, and
toward Commissaire Garnier himself. Garnier speculated that Jumeaus
bitterness and stalling in conducting plumbing repairs came from having
been publicly rebuked by Garnier in the Cafe of the new Palace Hotel.
The fact of having been publicly scolded in the most public of places
indeed in the towns only equivalent of a colonial club (the likes of which
Orwell describes in Burmese Days), was thus identied as grounds not just
for shame, but for professional vendetta. Whatever the engineers motives,
Garnier bemoaned, his de facto work-to-rule campaign was having terrible
consequences; Garnier and Frasseto had complained regularly of plumbing
leaks since January, and by mid March the leaks persisted, now threatening
to leave permanent damage. As for Jumeaus rebuttal that paid customers
occupying rooms had prevented him from making repairs, Garnier replied
that the handful of customers in the hotel would not have opposed being
inconvenienced, had they been told of the urgent necessity for these
repairs.
63
VNNA, GGI 5034, Cahier des Charges pour lexploitation des hotels du groupe
de Dalat, p. 9.
64
See CAOM GGI 38218 for all information regarding Passiot and his lawsuit.

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183

Already, the colonial administration reported low occupancy, coupled

with bitter recriminations between agencies of local government (in
this case between the Governor Generals representative, and the
head of the Travaux publics). The nal straw, wrote Garnier, was
that Jumeau had still not installed a fence around the hotels
grounds. As a result, animals still came to graze on hotel property,
a clear impediment to the establishments desire to be considered a
Riviera 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 Palaces
long-delayed opening in 1922, French Indochina was rattled by a
series of economic crises, starting in 1928 with a free-fall in the
value 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 Lang
Bian Palace Hotel. Annam covered part of the bill for the Palace,
the remainder being paid by the Governor General in Hanoi, as well
as by a private consortium known as the Societe anonyme des Grands
Hotels indochinois, that went bankrupt in 1930. 67 The main bone of
contention derived from Dalats geographical situation within the
kingdom of Annam. While Annam footed much of the costs of the
Palace, it was readily apparent that the luxury establishment catered
primarily to the wealthy elites in Saigon and the rest of Cochinchina,
which never contributed a cent to its upkeep. Thus, on December
22,1927,at the rst sign of broader nancial troubles in Indochina,
the Resident Superieur dAnnam announced that he was suspending
payment to the Lang Bian Palace. By May of the following year, the
Resident Superieur dAnnam justied his decision to the Governor
General in Hanoi. New arguments were advanced, while the main
theme of injustice was repeated:
65 All information in this paragraph comes from CAOM GGI, 46407, Garnier to
Inspecteur des Travaux Publics Hanoi, March 12, 1923.
66
Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hemery, Indochine, la colonisation ambigue (Paris: la
Decouverte, 1995), pp. 260-3.
67
Duron, The Dalat Palace, p. 97.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

It is paradoxical to pay a subvention of 24,000.00 piastres to the Lang Bian

Palace, while at the same time paying a subsidy of 6,000.00 piastres to
the Desanti Hotel which competes with it. I should add that I have never
understood 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, while
most of the clientele of these indebted hotels consists of high bureaucrats,
colons, or industrialists from Cochinchina and Cambodia. I therefore insist
respectfully, but rmly, Mister Governor General, that starting January 1,
1929the Lang Bian Palaces subsidy be paid by the Governor General and
not Annam. 68

Clearly articulated here was the idea of geopolitical injustice, the

notion that wealthy Saigonese were disproportionately beneting
from Annams subsidies, and that the government should not keep
all of Dalats hotels aoat in the rst place. Competition and capital
ism, the mantra of most colons in this lucrative colony (lucrative for
some), never seemed to take root in the world of Dalats hotels,
situated as they were in an articial bubble of highland leisure.
By the 1930s the Hotels title of Palace cost it dearly in a time
of budgetary restraints. Indochinas Inspector of Finances singled out
the Palace as a symbol of waste and excess; the grandeur which had
been the establishments selling point in the 1920s was now held
against it. In a December 1931 missive, the Inspector of Finances
argued:
In countries all around the world, ministers of nance are proclaiming that
the state must reduce spending. It is therefore not the time to consider
subsidizing a Palace, by denition a sumptuous and frivolous spending par
excellence. I am fully aware that this means that the Lang Bian Palace will
have to close. And since the Hotel du Parc is not open yet, only the Desanti
Hotel will be left running. This will no doubt be regrettable, but beggars
cant be choosers. The Governor Generals ofce is in no position to pay
holidays for Saigonese who themselves are in no position right now to afford
a stay in Dalat. 69

As the Depression hit Indochina, the Dalat Palace Hotel was increasingly
castigated as a white elephant by the administration, and its manager
portrayed as out of touch with, and insensitive to, the scal belt-tightening
required around the world at the time.
The hotels 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 dAnnam to Gouverneur General
dIndochine, May 14, 1928.
69
CAOM, GGI 59875, Inspecteur des nances to Gouverneur General,
December 8, 1931.

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185

have seriously underestimated the administrations desire to close

his luxury establishment. At the very time of the inspectors report,
Feraudy was clamouring to the administration for new silverware.
And when the Governor Generals ofce suggested short-term solu
tions like the elimination of the hotels orchestra, an indignant
Feraudy responded that he had already slashed his own salary by
50%and that of his employees by 20%. Reducing or eliminating the
orchestra, he retorted, was out of the question if he was to maintain
the hotels standing. 70 This document, which made its way to Hanoi,
is covered in marginalia, red exclamation marks especially, from
administrators clearly dismissive of Feraudys concerns about his
hotels prestige and standing at the height of the Depression. It
seems apparent that Feraudy and the administration were speaking
different languages: Feraudys rhetoric revolved around standing,
minimum service to maintain such a standing, and the gov
ernmnents imperative to defend colonial luxury. Reducing the
orchestra, or laying off some of the establishments sixty-ve
employees, he wrote, was tantamount to stripping the hotels rank.
Only Feraudy, it seemed, had remained faithful to the vision of this
hotel not as an economically viable resort, but as a marker of status
and prestige. The goal of the Lang Bian Palace, in this view, had
more 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 French
colonial administrators, planners and architects for whom aesthetic
and power considerations systematically superseded practical ones
(to give an example, Dalat was only connected to the rest of Indo
china by rail in 1932). 71
Feraudy would soon lock horns with another level of administra
tion. In September 1931, the Mayor of Dalat, facing a nancial
crunch of his own, complained of paying 300 to 700 piastres per
month to light the Lang Bian Palace at night. The Mayor was
incensed by Feraudys constant quip that he need save the reputa
tion and prestige of the Palace by illuminating it at nighta burden
that was allegedly single-handedly ruining Dalats municipal
budget. 72
CAOM, GGI 59875, Feraudy to Mayor of Dalat, August 2, 1931.
the extension of the rail line to Dalat, see David Del Testa, Imperial
Corridor: Association, Transportation and Power in French Colonial Indochina, Science,
Technology and Society 4:2 (1999): 344.
72 CAOM, GGI 59875, Resident Mayor, letter of September 6, 1931.
70

71 On

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

The mayor of Dalat and Feraudy also clashed over the hotels very function.
They were at odds over both the Palaces mission and its market. The level of
vitriol contained in their correspondence suggests that petty rivalries so common
in closed colonial circles were rampant in Dalat. Thus, in March 1933, the
mayor wrote to the Governor General of Indochina:
Mr Feraudys tenure as manager expires on June 30 1933; the running of the Lang
Bian Palace, as it presently stands, leads to monthly losses usually in excess of
2,000 piastres, and this in spite of a subvention of 1,000 piastres. This situation is
not surprising: it is the result of the special rapports between Mr Feraudy and the
clientele he deigns to accept in his Palace. On several occasions, I have received
complaints from customers who, after having been the victims of haughtiness, or
even insolence on the part of the manager, vowed never to return to the Palace. 73

The mayor atly accused Feraudy of driving away customers, attributing

this situation to Feraudys own conception of the hotel as a preserve of the
elite. In the fractured and hierarchical colonial system, the Lang Bian
Palace had emerged not as the playground for all Europeans in Indochina,
but as the domaine reserve of a minute elite, described by one source as
Indochinas grands pontesor bigwigs. 74 Intimidation, haughtiness or
whatever other character traits the mayor saw in Feraudy, were no doubt
radiated by the manager so as to maintain the hotels standinga perennial
obsession which completely superseded economic viability. No doubt in
the world of 1930s French customer relations, Feraudys distance and
haughtiness would actually have been perceived as desirable attributes by
the cre`me de la creme of French colonial society. In Indochina, of course,
an already hierarchical French social universe was bent and distorted to a
paroxysm. Here, after all, the veneer of equality in liberty, equality and
fraternity was absent, while a correspondingly distorted and inated sense
of self-importance seemed de rigueur, no doubt stoked by the presence of
cohorts of servants, boys and con-ga s. 75
Duron, The Dalat Palace, p. 105.
The Lang-Bian Hotel was reserved for our big-wigs recalls Gilbert David in
Chroniques secre`tes de lIndochine (Paris: LHarmattan, 1994), p. 149. Note that serious
doubts have emerged about this books claims regarding political events and conspiracies
in particular; but there is little reason to doubt the authenticity of its descriptions of Dalat
in colonial times.
75 Long before any historian, Vietnamese and French contemporaries alike, recognized
this phenomenon. In his famous Proce`s de la colonisation francaise, Ho Chi Minh wrote:
In the colonies, if one has a white skin, one belongs to the aristocracy:
73
74

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187

For all of his purported haughtiness, Feraudy was certainly resourceful

and determined to maintain his establishment. As a way of generating
funds, he proposed the establishment of a casino, tied to the hotel. This
was in reality a formulation of an earlier plan, dating back to the creation
of the Lang Bian Palace, which called for the creation of a casino within
easy walking distance of the Palace Hotel. 76 In September 1935, Feraudy
revived this idea, arguing:
Having been asked from many quarters to give Dalat (the most beautiful highland
resort in East Asia) a Casino that will be required one day or another any way to
aid its development, and its appeal on a par with French mountain resorts, [I am
studying the possibility of] forming a company to build and run . . . a Dalat
Municipal Casino. 77

Feraudy explicitly compared Dalat to French mountain resorts like

Chamonix, noting that only a casino stood between the two. Feraudy also
broached the question of who would be allowed to gamble: we would add
Asian gambling in the same conditions as [European gaming]. 78 Here,
Feraudy treaded on thin ice. As Erica Peters shows in her analysis of
gambling in colonial Indochina, French colonizers portrayed the
Vietnamese as innately compulsive gamblers, and decried gambling as a
local hydra. But, Peters suggests, French positions were in reality more
ambivalent, given the place of gambling in French society. What most
shocked colonial mores, she argues, was the possibility of Europeans and
Vietnamese gambling side by side. 79 And this of course was precisely the
Pandoras box that Feraudy had opened. In his highly disapproving letter to
the governor general, Dalats mayor pointed to two reasons to turn down
this proposed casino: rst it seemed typical of Feraudys megalomania,
and second, 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 European
customs ofcers has at least one servant, a boy who, quite often, is a maid of all
work. Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works Volume II (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing,
1961),p. 53. Likewise a character in George Grosliers 1928 colonial novel Le retour
` largile argued: The conquered populations who surround (the French functionary) a
in servitude only inate the vanity of colonial society and put it on a pedestal: a
warrant ofcer or a customs agent becomes a high lord surrounded by a thousand
coolies. Groslier, p. 133.
76
Lam Dong Provincial Library, Dalat (DC 253) Dalat, Le nouveau plan: dis
positions generales, LEveil 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.

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ERI C T . J ENNINGS

After the Governor Generals rejection of the casino project on October 11,
1935, Feraudys options for continuing to run the Lang Bian Palace were
seriously reduced. 81
Already by the summer of 1931, Feraudy was no longer pleading
for silverware, new plumbing, or the maintaining of his orchestra as
he had in the past, but quite simply for his hotel to remain open. He
implored the Governor General in Hanoi: Should you consider the
temporary closure of the Lang Bian Palace, then ve European
employees (not counting myself) and sixty natives would be left job
less. 82 The following January, the Grands Magasins de Dalat, a
luxury boutique rented out by the hotel, and located between the
Lang Bian Palace and the Hotel du Parc, led for bankruptcy. 83
Faced with mounting losses, a less frequented hotel, and an irate
administration, Feraudy nally agreed in April 1932 that the Lang
Bian Palace would close from 1934 to 1937; the date of 1934 was
chosen, for it marked the estimated opening date for the Palaces
twin hotel, the Hotel du Parc. 84 Thus at least one luxury hotel would
remain 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 of
both hotels in the 1930s, and faced with the harsh reality of needing
to furnish two hotels with the materiel for only one, Feraudy
relented, and accepted the principle that rolling closures could occur
in one hotel or the other, depending on demand. 85 Still, Feraudy had
to resist several creative attempts by the administration to convert
or decommission the Lang Bian Palace altogether. In 1932, he sent
a strongly worded reply to the Government General, rejecting a plan
to transform the Lang Bian Palace into a government building.
According to this scheme, the Hotel du Parc would have remained a
functioning hotel, while the Palace would have been handed over to
the administration. Feraudy replied:
To substitute the Dalat Palace with its annex [the Hotel du Parc] . . . would be a
dreadful mistake. This would leave Dalat with only two hotelsof economy
category. And the hotel which represents [Dalats] main attrac
81

Ibid., p. 130.
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 lexploitation des hotels du groupe
de Dalat, p. 1.
85
Duron, The Dalat Palace, p. 6.
82

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189

tion, based on its location, its offerings, its celebrations and social life, in short Dalats
main selling point, would disappear, leaving a vacuum that would hamper the citys
development.86

Feraudys response once again underscores the centrality of the Lang

Bian Palace to Dalats function as a site of French leisure and power.
The series of conicts around the Palace in the 1930s attest to its
tenuous position as a symbol of luxury, grandeur and excess on the
one hand, and its status as a publicly run establishment on the other.
Moreover, this disjunction between colonial fantasy and economic
reality betrays the social ambitions of a colonial society that so
valued a Palace in its highland playground, but soon realized that
this Indochinese dream was unattainable for all save the colonys
plutocracy.

Things Fall Apart

On March 6, 1943, the grand covered staircase entry to the Dalat Palace
Hotel abruptly collapsed, killing three Vietnamese workers two male
masons and a woman coolie by the name of Ngo. Paul Veysseyre, the
architect called upon by Dalats judge to lead a technical inquiry, held no
punches in his report. The tragic collapse was a direct result of shoddy
workmanship during the rush to renovate the hotel, he argued. One can
deduce that the rush involved renovating the establishment in accordance
with the aesthetic revolution promoted by the Vichyite Admiral Decoux
by introducing more right-angles and straight lines, and eliminating
baroque frivolities. The new, massive, no-nonsense entrance had just been
erected in January of that year, with nishing touches made some two
weeks before the accident. Veysseyre deduced that the accident resulted
from three main causes: calculation errors on the actual weight of the huge
concrete slab covering the entrance; the insufcient time given to the
concrete to set; and the irrational use of materials like brick to support
heavier concrete. The consequence, he wrote to the judge, was the collapse
of 80 tons of concrete on the Vietnamese workers 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.

190

ERI C T . J ENNINGS

thetic of the projected grand entrance, his tone suggests reproval of this as well.
The collapse of 1943 in many ways repeated previous conicts and
recriminations over the hotel, but rather than resulting in plumbing failure,
clashes with the mayor, or hotel closures, it ended in tragic loss of life, and
doubtless in serious bitterness on the part of the families of the deceased. 87
In fact, some of the workers had recently refused to continue the
renovation because they had warned that the slab in question had already
begun to slump some time before the accident. Negligence at the centrepoint of French colonial 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 abruptly
toppled by the Japanese coup de force of March 9, 1945. 88 Several
memoirs from this era permit us to glimpse the Dalat Palace hotels
symbolic place in the abrupt unseating of French highland domin
ance. In late March, the Japanese forcibly evacuated some 3,000
French colons and administrators from Dalat. A week later, the
remaining 600 or so Europeans in Dalat were rounded up in the Cite
Jean Decoux, 89 a model housing project in the Northern part of Dalat
recently erected by Vichys proconsul in Indochina. The Japanese
occupiers, meanwhile, claimed the choicest of Dalats villas for them
selves, and Japanese ofcers selected the Dalat Palace Hotel for their
headquarters. Marius Borel, a self-described old colonialist with
decades of experience as an agriculturist in Indochina, recalls being
terried by the Japanese ofcer he crossed in the halls of the Lang
Bian Palace Hotel:
I found myself in the great hall of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel, where I saw the
Japanese ofcer who had [previously] come to requisition our cars at Dankia. He
was leaving an ofce which gave onto the hall. He recognized me, and came to
me with his hand outstretched. I could only return the gesture. This did not
prevent a French observer from saying: I would rather have spat in my hand than
given it to him. Thats easy to say when one
87 All of the information in this paragraph comes from the report by Paul Veysseyre,
architect: Effondrement de la descent a` couvert du Lang Bian Palace, le samedi 6mars
1943; rapport dexpert. Paul Veysseyre papers (generously made available to 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 gures and dates are drawn from the unpublished memoirs of Louis
Salles, former principal of the Lycee Yersin in Dalat (Found in Mr Veysseyres
papers).

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191

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

The inversion of power was as palpable as it was complete. In the span

of a month, the hotel had been transformed from the preserve of
French colonial high society into a site where the French were not
merely 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 of
collaboration and resistance). In the coming months, as the French
community was entrenched in the Cite Decoux redoubt, only a small
liaison committee, which communicated in English with the Japanese,
was allowed even to set foot in the Dalat Palace Hotel. And near the
end of the Japanese occupation, at a time when the Viet-Minh were
beginning to assassinate prominent French and Japanese gures in
Dalat, and when the French feared openly that the Viet-Minh had
poisoned French water supplies, Borel relates simply that Mr Feraudy,
the standing manager of the Hotel, died abruptly on November 19,
1945. 91 The French remaining in Dalat no doubt considered Feraudys
death, the cordoning off of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel, and its requisi
tion by the Japanese military, as not merely a series of tragic setbacks
and humiliations, but also a veritable set of inversions and Asian
appropriations of power, over what had once been a bastion of French
ness in Indochina. A new, temporarily empowered player had been
added 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 1993he
embarked upon an ambitious and costly restoration project for it (see
gures 7A and 7B for views of the hotel today). 92 Robert Templers
trenchant analysis of Hillbloms motivations and achievements is
worth quoting:
90

Marius Borel, Souvenirs dun vieux colonialiste (Borel, Rodez, 1963), p. 282.
Ibid., pp. 292-5.
See Adam Schwarz, Beaches and Sand Traps, Far-Eastern Economic Review, 159
(February 29, 1996), p. 41.
91
92

192

ERI C T . J ENNINGS

Figures 7 A and B. The Dalat Palace Hotel today. Top: a room on the hotels second oor. Bottom:
a view of the hotels facade, taken from the gardens. Photographs by the author (March 2001).

FROM INDOCHINE TO INDOCHIC

193

[In the early 1990s, the Dalat Palace Hotel] was remade to evoke a time of
brilliantined hair, Vuitton trunks and tennis whites all set in the luminous and
mythical landscape of Indochine, a place as distant from the realities of French
colonialism as it was from contemporary Vietnam. The original hotel had never
taken off, indeed the grand building overlooking the towns lake was a mirror of
the economic dreams and failures of French colonialism in Indochina. 93

Certainly the original hotel had reected at once colonial dreams of

grandeur, the contradictory objectives of its various promoters, and
the fractures of a French colonial society torn between adulating and
loathing the hotel. But Templers main point is that the historical
realities of the original hotels struggles to attract clients were of
little interest to Hillblom. In the eary 1990s, the American bil
lionaire (once at the helm of the DHL courier empire) invested some
$40million into re-opening the Dalat Palace Hotel, that had lan
guished since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
The results of Hillbloms restoration are at once fanciful and his
torically consistent: consistent because the Palaces more reasonably
priced twin, the Hotel du Parc (today the Novotel Dalat) continues
to attract a more diverse (including an emerging Vietnamese middle
classin stark contrast to the Dalat Palace) and larger clientele
than its agship partner. Consistent also because of the Palaces
Westernnessdown to the wood-burning replaces whose necessity
at Dalat never ceased to draw wonder and nostalgia from homesick
colons. The more fanciful side has to do with the nature of renovations
itself, which transformed a rather plain dining room seen in old
photos of the hotel, into a grand restaurant which it arguably had never
been before.
In many respects then, the latest incarnation of the hotel actually far
outshines the original in its luxury. This new luxury is of course rooted in a
wistful vision of Indochinea vision which conjures up the lmic 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 on colonial
nostalgia surrounding the hotel at Dalats sister hill station of Bokor, in Cambodia.
Edwards argues: In eclipsing the carnage of Bokors construction with the glitter of hotel
ballrooms, Muller falls prey to the Indo-Chic syndrome recently identied by the
literary critic Panivong Norindr. . . .Excised from their historical context, these totems of
lost empire invent new memories. Colonialism is remade as a romantic interlude where a
happy time was had by allexcept, of course, 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.

194

ERI C T . J ENNINGS

legend encapsulated by Marguerite Duras; to some extent, each represents the

ip side of an Indochic phenomenon94 which is beginning to draw French
tourists to Vietnam in droves, through tours organized by the Maison de
lIndochine in Paris. And the appeal of Indochic has begun to extend well
beyond the French-speaking world. Take for instance this glowing report of
the Dalat Palace Hotel by an American 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, it should be this
one. The empty corridors seem to echo with ghosts from the days when dressing
for dinner was de rigueur and ballrooms came alive every Saturday with full
orchestra. 95

The hitch, of course, is that many of the Western tourists visiting Vietnam
in the past decade have done so on early Durasian rather than Deneuvian
budgets. And budget guides for backpackers suggest visiting the hotel,
rather than actually staying in it.
Finally, it should be underscored that in spite of the illusion of
staticness, the Dalat Palaces trappings and meanings have signic
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 in
the Indochinese interior. Over the course of its colonial existence, it
was decried by some in the administration as a colonial white ele
phant (prone to leaks, budget decits, and collapses), and defended
by its backers as the ultimate marker of Frenchness and prestige in
Indochina. As if to underscore this role, the Japanese quickly took
hold of this colonial symbol after March 1945, appropriating it and
relegating the French to a gated community far aeld. And by the
1990s the Dalat Palace Hotel had become a living experiment in Doi
Moi and Market Leninism, an attempt at reinvesting in the central
highlands of Vietnam, and an ambitious gamble at drawing high-end
tourism, 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 University
Press, 1996).
95 Derek Maitland and Jill Goeler (eds), Travelers Companion: Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia (Connecticut: the Globe Pequot Press, 1999), p. 40.

Figure 1. Date unknown, but certainly from the early 1920s. A view of Dalat showing
the artificial lake in its early dimensions, the Lang Bian Palace Hotel (to the
left) and in the distance the tiny native town. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted by
permission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.

Figure 2. Postcard, dated January 5, 1928. This card shows one of the leisure activities
available to hotel customers. Note the extensive hotel grounds. Authors collection.

Figures 3. The Lang Bian Palace Hotel in the 1920s. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted
by permission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.

Figure 4. Lang Bian Palace, Dalatan advertisement in the magazine Extreme-Asie,

May 1927.

Figure 5. Lang Bian, panorama de Dalat pris de lHotelLang Bian, view of Dalat
taken from the hotel. Card dated October 4, 1924. Authors collection.

Figure 6. Inversions vestimentaires ou du danger de la baignade aux environs de

Dalat (histoire vecue)Sartorial inversions or the dangers of bathing around
Dalat (a true story). Indochine, July 13, 1944.

Figures 7 A and B. The Dalat Palace Hotel today. Top: a room on the hotels second
floor. Bottom: a view of the hotels facade, taken from the gardens. Photographs by
the author (March 2001).