Sung Tieu

Pre-colonial measurement systems in French Indochina—present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—varied widely depending on regional customs and the specific nature of objects being measured. The most widespread measurement systems, for example, involved cloth rulers (from 0.6 to 0.65 metres), land rulers (from 0.4664 to 0.47 metres), and carpentry rulers (from 0.28 to 0.5 metres).

Prior to the French Revolution, non-metric systems were also pervasive throughout Europe, before being gradually adopted by European countries, mainly in the late-nineteenth century. In French Indochina, Governor-General Paul Doumer’s 1897 conversion of the pre-colonial local measuring systems into their metric counterparts was part of an administrative and cultural integration strategy. To say it another way, it helped authorities take stock of the value of their colonies from North and West Africa to Indochina.

The introduction of the metric system could also be considered a part of a broader “regime of representation.” That is, a systematic way of translating life in Indochina to a common standard that could be grasped by any officer of the colony, be he seated in Hanoi or some 9,000 kilometres away in Paris.

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Thinking of these metrics as a form of colonial representation is to include them alongside colonial “art”: the maps, botanical drawings, landscape paintings, and other recordings of natural history. All of these belong to colonial systems of representation, be they French, British, Portuguese, Dutch, or German.

In his 1950 article, European Vision and the South Pacific, the Australian art historian Bernard Smith argued that ideological biases were inherent to the modes of representation employed to service eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism. For Smith, this was most apparent in representations of “native” peoples. These representations shifting between idealised Arcadian states of nature to grotesque dehumanised subjects, depending on the colonial agenda.

By portraying native peoples as either idyllic, in harmony with nature, or as savage and grotesque, European representations could justify various colonial policies—either as benevolent guardianship or as necessary control over “lesser” cultures. While not specifically focusing on Indochina, Smith draws attention to the ideology inherent in colonial regimes of representation, including the role of art in expressing them. What it makes explicit is art's role in serving an ideologically dominant class and—in the colonial context—instituting a racial hierarchy between settler and colonised.

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Doumer’s implementation of the metric system in Indochina was no exception to the broader patterns of colonial administration. However, unlike other measures that might have had symbolic implications, this policy directly contributed to the tangible, material exploitation of the Indochinese people and their resources.

The pre-colonial standard of measurement for land, the điền xích or the thước đo đất (ruler for measuring land), was not simply replaced but altered. Instead of representing 0.47 metres it was rounded to down to 0.40 metres, in effect producing 14.89% surplus for the French and enacting a widespread loss for Indochina on every count. This not only converted the French colonial assets into neat, comprehensible statistics but also exaggerated them in favour of the colonial administrators.

A practical example of this was the inflation of taxes on land belonging to the Indochinese peasantry by measuring more điền xích units on each plot of land.

It also aided in representing the land in numbers intelligible to French colonial industry, thereby aiding in the transformation of the land into an asset of the brutal plantation economy that predominately produced tea, coffee, and rubber.

—Excerpt from Nicholas Tammens’ text '737,000 km2', accompanying Sung Tieu’s exhibition 'Perfect Standard'