Poster, 'French Indochina—Tonkin Delta', Indochina Office of Tourism法屬印度支那旅遊局「法屬印度支那──紅河三角洲」海報
1930
This tourist poster is a reminder of Southeast Asia’s colonial past, specifically of
1930s French Indochina. It depicts a group of female labourers returning from
farmland characterised by lush vegetation and thatched-roof houses, in a scene
that advertises the idyllic landscape of the Tonkin Delta in northern Vietnam.
As a finely illustrated graphic work, the poster can be seen as a romanticised
colonialist construction of Vietnam as Edenic, exotic, and primitive, legitimising
the exploitation of natural and cultural resources in the colony.