Beautiful Waters was a fairly typical village in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Before the French colonial occupation, about two-thirds of the land was owned by the village.
By 1940, five or six families controlled a third of the land, and so did the poorest 90% of villagers. This meant that most villagers now had to work for the big families.
The enforcers of this change were the colonial police. For the people of Beautiful Waters, French rule meant landlord rule.
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