Charles-Édouard Hocquard (1853-1911) was a French military doctor, photographer and explorer (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-%C3%89douard_Hocquard).
As an army doctor he worked in Vietnam in the years 1884 - 1885, when the French army was battling the Chinese who had invaded North Vietnam. In those years the north of Vietnam was called Tonkin, the middle part was Annam, and the South was called Cochinchine. The Vietnamese were commonly called Annamite, or Annamese.
Hocquard wrote about his stay in Tonkin in "Trente mois au Tonkin" ("Thirty months in Tonkin"), in the biannual periodical Le Tour du Monde in 1889 and 1890, after which a book was published in 1892 with the title "Une Campagne au Tonkin" by Hachette Publishers in Paris. Almost a century later a translation in English was published by White Lotus Press, Bangkok, in 1975, under the title "War and Peace in Hanoi and Tonkin : a field report of the Franco-Chinese War and on customs and beliefs of the Vietnamese (1884-1885)". I advise to read the English version with caution, as Walter E.J. Tipps' translation is questionable.
I compared several of my translations of paragraphs on Annamite theater and music with Tipps's and there are mistakes and inaccuracies in Tipps' translations.
All these publications were richly illustrated by engravings made after the original photographs. Not only does Hocquard write a detailed report on the French military campaign, but he also makes plenty of ethnographical observations. And he made hundreds of photographs; wherever he went he took his camera with him. Actually, he had it carried: "The next morning I cross the river (...) followed by a boy who carried my photograph camera." (Hocquard 1975: 573).
Publisher Henry Cremnitz from Paris published Hocquard's photographs, which could be printed to order, or in an album.
Several of his photographs, namely those that deal with music and theatre, are of particular interest to me.
This engraving (by Thiriat) of an ensemble of musicians, captioned "orchestre improvisé", "improvised orchestra", is found on p. 145 of the 1892 edition. Hocquard writes (my translation):
"It was impossible for us to close our eyes during the night: our coolies were too close to us. They cooked, played, sung, without stopping for a single moment to sleep. The day had barely dawned when they came to give us an aubade with bizarre instruments, recruited from the village. We had to get up; it was an infernal noise. While two of them were strumming with a kind of three-stringed guitar; another scraped on a small violin, and a fourth played with all his might on a large bronze gong which gave low and prolonged vibrations (which sounded) like bellowing. Our boys wanted to do their part in the concert, one played the flute; another castanets, while a third blew his lungs out in a kind of conch made from a large shell. Everyone played on their own without worrying about their neighbor; it was a terrible pandemonium."
This is a photo of the improvised orchestra, it can be found in the Gallica digital library at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84430552/f19.item
From Hocquard's writing we can deduce that this photo was taken on 9 April 1884 in Dong-läu.
The postures of the musicians in the photo differ slightly from the postures in the engraving. Hocquard took two photos one after the other and gave one to Thiriat to make an engraving of. Here's the photo, that the engraving was made from. I found it in an album of Hocquard photos on the Flickr page of Manhhai.
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In 1889 another French orientalist, Jules Silvestre (1841 - 1918), published "L'Empire d'Annam et le peuple Annamite " (The Annam Empire and the Annamite people), which was based for the most part upon a series of (anonymous) columns in 1875 and 1876 in the daily newspaper Courrier de Saigon titled "L'apercu sur la geographie, les productions, l'industrie, les moeurs, et les coutumes du royaume d'Annam" ("Overview of the geography, productions, industry, morals, and customs of the kingdom of Annam"), which was later to be the subtitle of Silvestre's book. Silvestre spent a total of 25 years in Cochinchine, during the last years of which (1884-1886) he was the French main administrator.
A (condensed) version of Silvestre's book appeared in 1890 in three issues of the magazine Globus, Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde ("Illustrated Magazine for Regional and Ethnographic Studies "), band LVIII, no.'s 17, 18, 19, titled "Sitten und Gebräuche der Annamiten" ("Manners and customs of the Annamites"), with respectively 6, 7, and 8 illustrations.
This was curious, as Silvestre's book didn't contain any illustrations. Where did the Globus illustrations come from?
It appeared that Globus was using the engravings from Hocquard's travel episodes published in Le Tour du Monde in 1889 and 1890, without Globus mentioning the source.
Bernard Kleikamp © 20240220
