Photos

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Bleeding Trees

In 1907, the first French planters brought into Viet Nam the hevea plants that had been developing for rubber. The plants grew well here, creating such fortunes as Michelin's, when the auto industry expanded the demand for rubber tires. In 1939, the profits of the 19 largest rubber plantations in Indochina together were 300 million francs, an enormous sum at the time.

Plant workers called them bloody plants. Most of the then Vietnamese population remained destitute illiterate peasants, tied to their ancestral villages and the whims of their landlords, on whom the French relied to reinforce colonial domination. At the worst point during the economic depression of the 1930s, the peasants reported that the landlords took 10 out of every 11 bags of rice they produced, leaving them to starve. "If they wanted your daughter, they took her. If you couldn't pay your taxes, they beat you to death." Until 1937, the law decreed that peasants owed the state a certain number of days of free labor per year. Such labor had built a railroad the French wanted between Hanoi in the north and Saigon in the south, costing the lives of one third of the Vietnamese laborers working on the project. On the rubber plantations, conditions were so hideous that the 80,000 Vietnamese working there annually had a death rate four times the national average.

Local residents got the usual justifications for colonialism, such as modern education and civilization to a backward country. But in fact, the policy was to keep their colonial subjects uneducated.


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Rubber trees grow best in hot, moist climates. The trees grow straight, 18-20 meters high with smooth bark and dark, shiny leaves. Latex containing rubber flows through the outer wood of the trunk, just under the bark. Workers called “tappers” collect the latex. They cut a shallow groove in the bark about 1 meter from the ground. At the bottom of the cut, a small spout is inserted into the tree, and a cup hangs below it to catch the drops of latex that ooze from the cut. Trees are generally tapped every day for 15 days, then rested for 15 days.

The latex is poured into tanks, and an equal amount of water is added. This liquid is strained to remove dirt. Formic acid is added to make the mixture form solid particles, which rise to the surface to form a crust of rubber. This is fed through rollers to squeeze out the water to make a solid sheet of rubber. This rubber is crude rubber, and is ready to be shipped to factories to be processed in different ways to make many different products.

(Text by ngythanh)

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