Word: bao
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...River of Perfumes, to the forbidden city of Hué, over the walls of the Red City and into the white dragon-eaved Palace. There, last week, among his jazz records, his ping-pong tables, his radio and his detective stories, it found and smote that gloomy youth, Bao Dai, hereditary Emperor of Annam, Son of Heaven, Absolute Master and Father and Mother of his People-and French puppet. Too bored to look sullen. Bao Dai spent his life from 9 to 19 in Europe, where he had let himself be crammed with a good French education and good French...
...woman is allowed to look on Annam's Emperor sitting under the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in the Throne Room. But the palace has other rooms for the parties Bao Dai dearly loves. To one such party lately went a pretty 18-year-old girl from French Cochin-China to the south. She was a commoner, daughter of a well-born Chinese ex-Governor and her name was Marie Nguyen Hu Hao. She, too, had been edu-cated in Europe, in a convent near Paris. She liked detective stories and jazz and was ready...
...Paris, to which the French brought him when he was nine years old, jolly little Bao Dai tried his best to learn everything, mastered modern languages and mathematics, took tennis lessons from Henri Cochet, learned from stern French cavalry tutors to jump a horse. In the end His Majesty came to excel at ping pong...
When his father died in 1925 the French returned Bao Dai to Hue, crowned him in 1926, appointed a Regent and rushed him back to a town house in Paris where he played more ping pong, rounded out his magnificent collection of phonograph disks. Last week he disappeared with finality into the Forbidden City where (etiquet decrees) the Emperor of Annam must live invisible to his subjects, remote, mysterious, awesome...
Also invisible is the Young Annamite Party, driven into hiding by the French. Much like the Turkish Revolutionists in 1918. the Young Annamites of today demand proclamation of an Annamite Republic. They refer contemptuously to Ping Pong Player Bao Dai as a "French Emperor" and are not above hatching bomb plots against French Governor Pierre Pasquier who has had several narrow escapes...