As the Vietnam War begins, Toulon asks Gallimard to advise American military officials about the disposition of Asian people toward Western military and government power. Toulon, Gallimard’s superior at the embassy, describes the loss of French Indochina as a national embarrassment for France. China was a Communist nation by this time, and invested in helping the Vietnamese partially because independence would lead to the installation of a Communist government in Vietnam. The Chinese government assisted the Vietnamese in their struggle for independence, supplying modern weapons from the Soviet Union that helped the Vietnamese resist the French more effectively. The three nations together were known as French Indochina. By the time the Indochina War ended in 1954, the French had maintained colonies in Vietnam, and the neighboring nations of Laos and Cambodia, for almost seventy years. During this war, Vietnamese military forces under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh successfully fought for independence from the French, who had installed a colonialist government in Vietnam in the late nineteenth century. As a French diplomat living in China in the 1960s, Gallimard lives in the shadow of the Indochina War. Butterfly occur during a time of turmoil in Southeast Asia, as imperialist European nations that had established colonies throughout Southeast Asia were facing threats to their imperial control by native uprisings.
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