Emperor Bao Dai, Time's Man of the Year 1937, winning against defeated Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek.
Chapter 6: The day Uncle Ho went crazy
After the Yunnan war, emperor Bao Dai had taken advantage of his new prestige, but he ordered a redeployment of the Indochinese troops near the Siamese border, dreading a Siamese rallying to the Japanese sphere...In Huê, the people was waiting for news of the Crown Prince, Bao Long, born in January 1936. The disgraced communist marshals, Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh, were near the Chinese border, repressing the few rebellions in the conquested Southern China. Other Indochinese prominents, in particular the heirs of the noblian families of Laos and Cambodia, were commanding the troops in Indochina.
Bao Long (born 1936) crowned heir to emperor Bao Dai by mandarins
Position of the Indochinese armies (notice the situation near Siamese border and also the expanse of Indochinese empire
Waiting in the wasteland of Ya'An, Ho Chi Minh was furious. His assignation in mountainous Yunnan was obviously an exile with a few troops, far from Huê. The emperor, who he hated, was certainly taking his opponents away...And even, then the hour was at hand, eliminating them! Becoming almost paranoiac, Uncle Ho was searching for a military high note to retrieve the admiration of Indochinese proletariat...And this high note would be the conquest of new territories.
The events in Tibet provocated the anger of the very influent and important buddhist community in Indochina: they were afraid that a communist general could seize the baby Dalai-Lama, one of the spiritual leaders of Asian buddhism (even if the Dalai-Lama fled to British India in the first days of the war, like the Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek, now in exile in London)...And with the Chinese declaration of war, the risks of the rallying of Ho Chi Minh to the communist cause...Several riots begun in major cities, monks self-immolated themselves. The incapacity of Ngo Dinh Diem to resolve the crisis pushed the Emperor to fire him and replace him by a young Cambodian politician, Son Sann (1911-2001). Another declaration of independance towards the French, who placed Diem as Prime Minister, four years ago.
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A monk committing self-immolation in Saigon downtown (it's, in fact, the picture of the famous monk Thích Quảng Đức...As I'm afraid that this picture would be too offensive, please click on the sentence)
Imperial Cabinet after Diem's resignation, May, 30 1937.
After the fall of Lhassa, Tibet was divided between Indochina and Bhutan, creating the Empire of Greater Bhutan. Son Sann declared in the name of the Emperor that Ho Chi Minh was now a renegade and guilty of sedition and using of the Imperial forces to lead a criminal war against a pacifist state and to prepare a communist rebellion. To avoid the death penalty, Ho Chi Minh fled to USSR, where Stalin greeted him as a friend. Bao Dai was happy: his best opponent was now eliminated...If Moscow was not planning something against him...
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Division of Tibet following the Lhassa rendition, on June, 2. The Tibetan government in exile at Bombay was not consulted.
And now for something completely different: the foreign events
On August, 19, 1936, the small Xinjiang Republic acceeded to the Chinese claims and accepted the reunification of the People's Republic of China.
A week after, on August, 26, the British were continuing their slow decolonization: an independant kingdom of Egypt won his independance.
On December, 12, the Spanish civil war ended with the fall of the last Republic stronghold, Barcelona, in Catalonia: Francisco Franco, a pro-German general, became the Caudillo (leader) of the newly Spanish State.
On June, 23, 1937, the Sionist claims over Palestina were listened by the British government: the State of Israel was created, to end more than two thousand years of Diaspora. The persecuted German Jews fled to the new state, even if the Palestinian inhabitants were claiming also their land...
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On December, 2, 1937, a communist revolution seized power in the Balkanic state of Bulgaria. A very strange regime, where the former king Boris III of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha stayed head of state as Boris Saxcoburggothski...