Word: tonkin
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...them will eventually be assigned new land. Among these anti-Communist refugees were 10,000 soldiers of a special type. They looked no different from the other Vietnamese peasants, but they were the remnants of one of the last real church armies in the world: the fighting Catholics of Tonkin, led by round, shrewd Bishop Thaddeus...
...Must Fight." No man in Indo-China was more an uncontested ruler than Bishop Tu, a French-schooled Vietnamese and a onetime Trappist monk. His flock was half a million farmers who lived in the rich Tonkin coastal area. Le Huu Tu dotted his little theocracy with schools, seminaries, orphanages, and cathedral-sized churches. He walked a tricky tightrope of diplomacy, between the Viet Minh revolutionists, the Vietnamese loyalists and the French colonials...
...later, the embattled Catholics of the Tonkin area gave a better account of themselves, fighting with the kind of religious fervor so often theoretically invoked in the West as the answer to the fanatic fervor of the Communists...
...somber stillness dropped over the paddies of Tonkin, and an anxious peace settled over the world. For the first time in almost a quarter of a century,*there was no large-scale war on the planet. But it was a tenuous peace, bought at a dreadful price...
...Viet Nam nation is a recent French consolidation of three ancient provinces: Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China. The Chinese ruled Tonkin and northern Annam for more than the 1,000 years, until they were expelled in the 10th century by native Annamites who were themselves of part-Chinese stock. About 150 years ago, the Annamites split into warring factions, and French missionnaires and traders moved in along the coast. By 1802, the French were strong enough to install a puppet king on the imperial throne of Annam; by 1870, the French army was ashore to protect French interests...