In 1897, the new Governor-General of Indochina, Paul Dwmer, arrived in Hanoi.

Back then, Vietnam was still French Indochina, and the French were over there, Frenching things up and being colonial every which way,

pumping in baguettes and Parisian architecture and whatnot. Although Dwmer was an imperialist

subjecting Vietnam to the Wheel of distant France. He was nonetheless a spirited

renovated and he took his charge of Indochina seriously. He decided to modernize and

spruce up Hanoi, which was objectively filthy.

At the time of his arrival, Hanoi had no sewer system,

just a sprawling mass of open-air drainage troughs

people defecated in.

Not sure if you've ever used a Boy Scout

Lutrine or not, but I feel confident in saying I would not enjoy

living in a large metropolis entirely dependent on bed-pans and open-air

lit train technology. The ambitious new Governor General implemented an infrastructure program

constructing eight miles of sewer tunnels beneath the city to hygienically dispose of waste.

They were a big success.

Nobody was wistful of the days before Hanoi had an underground

sewer, let alone flushable toilets. But the new sewer system came with one major drawback. Rats. Rats proliferated in those tunnels eating awful

and breeding then spreading aggressively throughout the city. Hanoi had solved its problem with sewage, but now it had a rat problem.

You can never fully get rid of rats, of course, but you still want to keep their numbers

respectively low, low enough that you don't see them when you're

visiting a restaurant or have to worry about accidentally bringing back the Bubonic plague.

In response to the rodent upsurge, the colonial administration hired a team of Vietnamese people to become professional

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