Word: cochin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...weeks, the monsoon rain drummed on the roof of the two-story European-style house which stood (significantly) between Saigon's French and native quarters. Within, tiny (4 ft. 11 in.) Dr. Nguyen Van Thinh, President of Cochin China's Provisional Government, pondered his troubles in the sticky gloom...
Before he would join France's projected Indo-Chinese Federation, Ho demanded: 1) Viet Nam's right to manage its own foreign affairs without interference by the Federation; 2) annexation of Cochin-China, an adjoining province (almost one-third the size of Viet Nam), which wants to be a separate member of the Federation. The French, who had agreed to all other Viet Nam demands, said no. Ho walked out of the conference, and while his guerrillas continued to kill French soldiers almost daily, holed up in his flower-littered suite at Paris' swank Royal Monceau Hotel...
Recently, France's good friend, Annamite Emperor Bao Dai (a topflight ping-pong player), formed a government of Viet Minh leaders who promptly ousted Bao Dai. New ruler of Annam, Tonkin and Cochin China was cagy, tuberculous Russian-speaking Premier Ho Chin Minh (known a generation ago around the Paris Peace Conference as Nguyen-Ai-Quoc). Followers of Communist Ho Chin Minh insulted and cowed the French in Saigon, tore down the World War I memorial, flung earth from the Verdun battlefield into the Saigon River...
Within the territory still nominally under her rule, France saw the fabric of control disintegrating. Native uprisings, inspired partly by Japanese but mostly by bitter hatred of the French, were rampant in Tonkin, Cochin-China and Cambodia. Even among native troops bloody clashes occurred between Moroccan legionaries and Indo-Chinese. Native bands with equipment abandoned by fleeing Annamite soldiers had become a formidable menace as guerrillas. Upon growing chaos in Indo-China rested the blessing of Japan...
Ninety-eight per cent of the new rubber the U. S. uses (grand total: 600,000 long tons in 1939) now comes from Malaya, Cochin China, the Dutch and British East Indies, other Far Eastern plantation areas...