This thesis examines the creation of the spatial identities of Indochina, France, and Hue in Vietnamese print media on travel and mass tourism in early twentieth century. Through the direct experience of travel as well as armchair perceptions via travel stories and ephemera, individuals constructed Indochina, France, and Hue with political, cultural, and gendered meanings. In other words, travel can contribute to the invention of place, shaped through the topophilia or spatial sentiment. Although affective understandings of place can be subjective, this thesis demonstrates how Vietnamese travelers translated their encounters with new places and people through concomitant discourses on modernity, class, nationalism, and urbanism. In this way Indochina, France, and Hue became sites for the expression of new forms of collective identities such as the Vietnamese intelligentsia, middle class, and students.Through an analysis of Vietnamese and French language advertisements, travelogues, and fiction published within Vietnamese print between the 1920s and 1940s, this project seeks to convey the personification of places through both personal experiences and wider socio-cultural debates. Furthermore, as indicated in many textual representations of travel, the process of movement symbolized the catalyst for self-reflection as well as utopic visions for social and political opportunity. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the interrelationship between people and place, such that travelers defined the places of Indochina, France, and Hue, and were also shaped by its rhetoric.
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