Introduction
In the historical formation of modern cities, publishing and journalism have not merely functioned as channels for information transmission or instruments of governance. They have also constituted structural components of urban life, within which practices of reading and writing, knowledge exchange, and participation in the public sphere were organized, sustained, and transformed over time. In colonial cities—where political power, social inequality, and institutional control were strongly entrenched—printed texts nevertheless penetrated everyday life through newspapers, textbooks, serialized novels, and practical publications, thereby shaping modes of social communication, urban memory, and the rhythms of daily life.
Within the historiography of books, printing, and the press, seminal studies have demonstrated that the social impact of print cannot be understood in isolation from the entire operational chain of publishing, including printing technologies, the organization of printing houses and publishing firms, distribution networks, regimes of control, and everyday reading practices (Eisenstein, 1979; Darnton, 1982; Chartier, 1994; Johns, 1998). From these perspectives, print is not a neutral medium for conveying content but a social phenomenon embedded in material infrastructure, markets, power relations, and cultural life. In urban contexts, these elements combine to form a relatively stable print environment in which printed knowledge is continuously and routinely present, shaping patterns of communication, social participation, and collective memory.
At the same time, in contemporary debates on sustainable development, the concept of human sustainability has increasingly been expanded to emphasize a society’s capacity to maintain and reproduce foundational social capabilities, including literacy, access to knowledge, social participation, and adaptive capacity in the face of long-term change (Sen, 1999; Dyllick and Hockerts, 2002; Robeyns, 2017). However, much of the existing scholarship continues to approach human sustainability primarily as a policy objective or a set of modern indicators, while the concrete social and historical mechanisms through which these capacities are formed and sustained in everyday life remain underexplored—particularly in historical and colonial contexts.
This article brings these two strands of scholarship—urban publishing history and studies of human sustainability —into a shared analytical framework by conceptualizing publishing as an urban cultural environment, within which print functioned as a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure, and by treating human sustainability as a historical lens rather than a predefined normative benchmark or measurement tool. Rather than asking whether colonial publishing “contributed to development” in a normative sense, the article examines how publishing operated as an everyday urban knowledge environment through which social capacities were sustained and reproduced over time. The empirical focus is Saigon-Cholon between 1861 and 1939, the largest city in colonial Cochinchina and the earliest administrative, commercial, and publishing center of colonial Vietnam. During this period, printing houses, newspaper offices, publishing firms, bookshops, and distribution networks were densely concentrated, enabling printed texts to become a persistent feature of urban life through official gazettes, commercial newspapers, textbooks, serialized fiction, women’s periodicals, and practical manuals.
Existing studies of Vietnamese colonial-era journalism and publishing have illuminated the role of print in the formation of national consciousness, reformist discourse, and political movements in the early twentieth century (Marr, 1981, 1995; Anderson, 2006; Peycam, 2012; Duong, 2023, 2025; Nguyen, 2015). Yet these approaches have often focused on moments of political intensity or on emblematic publications, while paying less attention to the material conditions and everyday practices that allowed print to operate continuously—despite censorship, publication bans, and entrenched power inequalities.
To address this gap, the present study does not treat publishing merely as an industry or a political instrument but approaches it as a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure— namely, everyday, non-coercive infrastructures that organize repeated encounters with knowledge—texts, information, and practical know-how—through routine practices of production, circulation, and reading—within the urban living environment. From this perspective, print is understood as a social resource that is produced, circulated, received, and accumulated over time through repeated practices embedded in everyday life. This shift in perspective allows the analysis to move from the meanings of individual texts to the operating conditions that made print continuously present in urban social life. Rather than measuring human sustainability through modern indicators, the study employs four analytically tractable indicators grounded in historical sources: literacy, access to print, inclusion and social participation, and the capacity of the print environment to endure and adapt over time (resilience).
Within this analytical framework, human sustainability is operationally defined as the capacity of urban communities to sustain and reproduce foundational social capabilities—reading, access, participation, and adaptation— through social practices associated with print. These capabilities are examined not as normative values but as observable historical outcomes shaped by the concrete mechanisms through which the urban publishing environment functioned.
This article’s contribution is twofold. First, it shifts the analytical focus from individual publications or moments of political intensity to the operating conditions that enabled print to persist as part of everyday urban life—its infrastructures, market routines, distribution practices, and regulatory pressures. Second, by conceptualizing publishing as an urban cultural environment, the study reconceptualizes human sustainability as a historically traceable social process embedded in knowledge infrastructures, rather than as a contemporary policy objective or indicator set.
Accordingly, the central research question of this article is: through which social and historical mechanisms did the print environment of a colonial city contribute to sustaining and reproducing the social capacities that constitute human sustainability? To address this question, the study shifts its focus away from individual publications toward the conditions that enabled print to be produced, circulated, received, and accumulated as a social resource in the urban life of Saigon-Cholon between 1861 and 1939.
The analytical framework of the article is summarized in Fig. 1. In this framework, the urban publishing environment— comprising printing, publishing, distribution, and reading practices—operates as a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure within the colonial city. Through the interaction of four analytical indicators (literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience), this environment contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of foundational human capacities under conditions of institutional control and unequal power relations.
Research Methods
Sources and Scope of the Study
This study draws on three principal groups of sources to reconstruct and analyze the urban print environment of Saigon-Cholon between 1861 and 1939. The objective is to elucidate the social mechanisms through which printed texts were produced, circulated, received, and accumulated as cultural and social resources in urban life.
First, the study examines contemporary newspapers and printed publications, including materials published in quoc ngu, French, and selected Chinese-language materials—primarily newspapers and periodicals produced in Cholon —within the broader Saigon-Cholon urban area. This corpus encompasses a wide range of genres, including official gazettes, daily newspapers, periodicals, serialized novels, textbooks, women’s newspapers, and practical manuals. These publications are not treated solely as textual content but are approached as traces of specific social practices, such as publication rhythms, target readerships, pricing structures, modes of distribution, and readers’ everyday access to print. Rather than conducting close textual readings, the analysis focuses on how material and organizational features—such as publication rhythms, readerships, pricing structures, and distribution practices—reveal the routine operation of print within urban life, thereby enabling the direct tracing of literacy, access, and inclusion as social capacities.
Second, colonial administrative and statistical sources are employed, including decrees and regulations governing the press and publishing, censorship and publication-ban records (where extant), statistical yearbooks, administrative reports, and legal deposit data. These materials are used to establish the institutional framework within which the publishing environment operated and to clarify the scope and forms of colonial intervention in the production, circulation, and preservation of printed texts. Importantly, these sources are not used simply to document control, but to identify how regulatory regimes structured access, continuity, and vulnerability within the print environment. Beyond their regulatory function, these sources also make it possible to observe how knowledge was classified, archived, and preserved over time, thereby providing critical evidence for analyzing access and, in particular, the resilience of the urban print environment (Stoler, 2009).
Third, domestic and international secondary scholarship on the history of printing, journalism, colonial urbanism, and print culture is used as a source of academic reference and comparison. Rather than serving as a standalone narrative, this literature is mobilized analytically to situate empirical findings from Saigon-Cholon within broader debates on print, urban culture, and knowledge infrastructures. This comparative use of scholarship helps avoid isolated or overly localized interpretations of the case study.
In terms of spatial and temporal scope, the study focuses on Saigon-Cholon from 1861 to 1939, spanning the period from the establishment of colonial printing infrastructure to the eve of the major disruptions associated with the Second World War. This timeframe allows for the observation of three major phases in the evolution of the urban print environment: (i) the formation of printing infrastructure and its initial administrative functions; (ii) the expansion of the publishing market and the reading public; and (iii) the intensification of institutional control alongside cycles of adaptation within the print environment.
Table 1 summarizes the main groups of sources, their analytical functions, and their relationships to the analytical indicators employed in the study.
Analytical Design and Conceptual Operations
The study conceptualizes publishing as an urban cultural environment in which material infrastructure, economic organization, regulatory institutions, and social practices interact to enable the everyday operation of print in urban life. This section clarifies how this conceptualization is translated into analytical operations.
The analytical framework of the article is summarized in Fig. 1, in which publishing is approached as an urban cultural environment, while human sustainability is understood as a social-historical process sustained and reproduced through print-related practices.
First, technical infrastructure and productive capacity—including printing technologies, the organization of printing houses, and publication rhythms—are treated as the material foundations of the print environment. Rather than presenting these technical elements as a purely technological history, the analysis focuses on how they generated regularity, scalability, and continuity in the circulation of printed texts across urban space (Eisenstein, 1979).
Second, publishing organization and markets—including publishing houses, advertising, distribution networks, pricing structures, and readers’ access practices—are examined to clarify the social reach of print. This analytical layer is particularly important for tracing the mechanisms of access and inclusion, as it reveals who gained access to print, through which channels, and under what specific socio-economic conditions (Chartier, 1994; Johns, 1998).
Third, discourses and cultural practices of print focus on genres, languages of publication, participating actors, censorship mechanisms, and forms of debate within publishing life. At this analytical level, the study does not privilege ideological content, but examines how genres and participation structured opportunities for engagement within the print environment. At this level, publishing is analyzed as a space of social interaction in which reading and writing practices contributed to the formation of urban memory and residents’ capacities for participation in the public sphere (Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 2008; Peycam, 2012).
To integrate these three analytical layers, the study employs the “communications circuit” model—author, printer, distributor, reader, and control—as a heuristic tool for tracing the social chain through which print operated (Darnton, 1982). Building on this framework, four analytical indicators—literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience—are used as operational tools to transform fragmented historical data into an analysis of social capacities that were sustained and reproduced over time within the urban print environment.
Reliability, Data Triangulation, and Limitations
Because colonial-era press and publishing sources are fragmented and unevenly preserved, the study applies data triangulation across the three source groups: contemporary printed publications, administrative and statistical records, and secondary scholarship. Cross-referencing these sources helps to reduce the biases inherent in any single type of material and enhances the reliability of the analysis.
Gaps in the archival record—such as the absence of complete censorship files or interruptions in certain newspaper series—are not treated solely as technical limitations. Instead, they are approached as traces of a print environment that was continually required to adapt under conditions of institutional control. These gaps are therefore analytically integrated into the examination of resilience, rather than being excluded as mere data deficiencies (Stoler, 2009).
Results and Discussion
Laying the Foundations of the Urban Print Environment (1861–1913)
This section shows how publishing in Saigon-Cholon moved from an administrative tool to an incipient urban cultural environment. It traces four linked mechanisms—information demand, printing infrastructure, publication rhythms, and quoc ngu standardization—through which literacy, access, inclusion, and early resilience became socially reproducible capacities.
The period 1861–1913 can be regarded as the foundational phase of publishing in Saigon-Cholon. During these decades, print initially emerged as a technology and an administrative instrument closely associated with the establishment of the French colonial apparatus in Cochinchina, yet it gradually took shape as an incipient urban cultural environment. Printed texts began to appear with increasing regularity in social life, generating reading-and-writing practices that were repetitive, organized, and progressively socialized. The key development in this period was the emergence of a “rhythm of print”—a patterned temporality of production and circulation—through which literacy, access, inclusion, and early forms of resilience accumulated as social capacities rather than remaining isolated practices.
Colonial Urbanism and the Emergence of Persistent Information Demand
The formation of Saigon-Cholon’s print environment was tightly linked to the urban structure and colonial institutions being established in Cochinchina from the second half of the nineteenth century. As Saigon became the administrative center of French Cochinchina, the city rapidly assumed three key functions: (i) an administrative-military hub, (ii) a commercial entrepôt and port city, and (iii) a multiethnic space of social interaction (Vo and Phan, 2025, pp. 70–71). Within this configuration, the imperatives of administrative governance, economic management, and social control generated a stable demand for the production, circulation, and storage of written texts: decrees, announcements, commercial regulations, taxation schedules, shipping timetables, and legal information needed to be published frequently, consistently, and in a form that could be referenced (Brocheux and Hemery, 2011).
In colonial urban practice, this demand materialized in the repeated appearance of administrative documents, commercial notices, shipping schedules, tariff tables, and urban regulations—texts that required periodic reception and recurrent consultation. As a result, print became anchored in the everyday operations of the city: bureaucracy, commerce, and the regulation of public space. The analytical significance of these texts lies less in their political content than in the demand mechanism they generated, which compelled print to operate at a regular tempo. This regularity created conditions under which literacy could shift from an individual skill to a repetitive social practice that accumulated over time.
By the early twentieth century, rapid demographic growth and intensified port-city commerce reinforced this demand, making the circulation of administrative and commercial information increasingly regular and predictable (Nguyen, 1998; Tran, 2012). These urban rhythms stabilized print as a recurrent social resource rather than an occasional administrative instrument.
Establishing Printing Infrastructure and the Early Socialization of Literacy
A fundamental milestone of this period was the establishment of official printing infrastructure serving the French colonial administration in Cochinchina. By late 1861, the first colonial printing house was founded in Saigon to print official gazettes and administrative documents. This printing house was not merely a technical facility; it functioned as an institutional mechanism that organized the flow of governmental print—from compilation and printing to distribution and archiving (Cultru, 1910, p. 77).
Alongside the colonial printing system, printing establishments organized by Catholic missionaries also emerged early, initially to produce catechisms, prayer books, and missionary materials. A notable example was the Imprimerie de la Mission (Nha in Nha chung), founded in 1865, which quickly became a printing center of considerable scale (Louvet, 1885, pp. 456–457). Although serving religious purposes, these presses expanded the reach of print beyond the administrative sphere and sustained a relatively stable demand for publishing.
Following the decree of 10 September 1870 that permitted freedom of enterprise in printing and bookselling, private printing houses owned by French and Vietnamese actors appeared in increasing numbers during the 1880s and 1890s. According to statistics, by 1913 Saigon-Cholon had roughly twenty active printing houses (Tran et al., 1988, pp. 414–416). The significance of this development lies less in the precise number of establishments than in reaching an infrastructural threshold that enabled print to be produced regularly, at scale, and with increasing predictability. Once print no longer appeared solely in response to administrative “orders” but began to function as a socially predictable circulation flow, encounters with print gradually became a familiar experience of urban life.
From the perspective of human sustainability, the importance of printing infrastructure in this period lies less in the mere count of printing houses than in the infrastructural threshold that enabled reading and writing practices to occur regularly and to become socialized beyond the domains of administration and the Church.
Official Gazettes, Publication Cycles, and the Conditions for Access
The emergence of official gazettes and French-language official newspapers—both serving administrative and regulatory functions—such as Bulletin Officiel de l’Expédition de la Cochinchine (1861), Bulletin officiel de la Cochinchine française (1863), and Courrier de Saigon (1864)—marked the formation of a centralized, periodic information infrastructure associated with colonial governance in Cochinchina (Huynh, 2016; Nguyen, 2016). These publications not only served to announce decrees and administrative information but were also organized according to stable publication cycles (weekly or monthly) and relatively standardized formats.
More specifically, Bulletin officiel de la Cochinchine française was issued on a weekly basis from as early as the 1860s, while other gazettes and administrative publications maintained monthly rhythms in accordance with the administrative and commercial calendars of the port city of Saigon (Huynh, 2016; Do, 2018, p. 20). The establishment of such periodic schedules created a predictable temporality of print circulation—an essential condition for print to be regularly present in urban life rather than appearing sporadically in response to immediate needs.
In practice, from the late nineteenth century, the system of official gazettes and administrative publications in Saigon-Cholon was distributed in conjunction with the colonial government’s mandatory legal-deposit mechanism: one copy was deposited in the Indochina Archives and Library, and another was sent to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF). Together, periodic publication and legal deposit routinized print reception while simultaneously preserving its traces, making early forms of access both repeatable and historically observable.
Analytically, access in this case should not be understood as a legalistic question of whether one did or did not possess “the right to access,” but rather as the capacity for repeated, stable, and temporally predictable access. The rhythm of official gazettes contributed to shifting the reading of print from an act tied to bureaucratic obligation into a socially embedded habit of information reception, laying the groundwork for access as a social capacity within the early urban print environment.
Quoc ngu and the Formation of a Shared Communicative Space: From Literacy to Inclusion
On the basis of an established printing infrastructure and a predictable rhythm of print circulation, a key transformation during the 1860s-1880s was the deployment of publications in quoc ngu. Gia Dinh Bao, first issued on 15 April 1865, is commonly regarded as the first quoc ngu newspaper published in Saigon (Nguyen, 2015; Various authors, 2017). Although initially serving colonial functions of announcement and translation, the newspaper was quickly used by Vietnamese intellectuals as a channel to encourage the learning and adoption of quoc ngu within the community (Bang, 1992).
From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, the appearance of publications such as Thong loai khoa trinh (1888–1889), Phan Yen bao (1898), Nong Co min dam (1901), Luc Tinh Tan Van (1907), and Nam Ky Dia Phan (1908) suggests that quoc ngu publishing gradually moved beyond administrative functions to participate in urban social life (see Table 2). Although subject to strict control and often short-lived, these publications reflected the emergence of a shared communicative channel in the city—one in which information, practical knowledge, and social issues were articulated through a writing system that entailed lower access costs than classical Chinese scripts.
From the perspective of human sustainability, the crucial impact of quoc ngu lay not so much in raising literacy rates in a statistical sense, as in expanding a shared communicative space through which different urban groups could participate in the urban print environment—an early expression of inclusion under colonial conditions. The 1878 decree recognizing quoc ngu as an official script in the Cochinchina colonial administration further reinforced this trend by standardizing the new writing system and integrating it more deeply into urban life (Nguyen, 2016).
Early Commercialization, Institutional Control, and the Emergence of Resilience
From the 1870s, the emergence of commercial printing houses associated with advertising demand and commission-based printing indicates that printing began to operate as an urban economic-cultural space rather than merely an administrative instrument. The case of the Phat Toan printing house (1879), founded by Dinh Thai Son, is often viewed as an early manifestation of indigenous entrepreneurial capacity in printing (Vuong, 2016; Tran, 2016). More broadly, these developments diversified the channels through which print could persist, reducing its dependence on state demand alone.
Institutionally, the French Press Freedom Law of 1881 produced a legal discourse of “freedom,” yet in colonial practice publishing continued to operate under systems of surveillance, warnings, and administrative bans. Within this “partly open, partly closed” configuration, publishing actors were compelled to adjust genres, publication rhythms, and presentational forms in order to maintain the presence of print in social life (Peycam, 2012; Stoler, 2009). It is here that resilience appeared in an incipient form—not as full public freedom, but as the capacity to sustain the circulation of print and associated reading-and-writing practices under conditions of control and asymmetric power relations.
Taken together, this formative phase shows how early urban demand, infrastructural thresholds, and predictable publication rhythms created the conditions under which literacy, access, and inclusion could accumulate, while emerging market logics and institutional control also generated early adaptive capacity.
In sum, the period 1861–1913 marked a transformation of publishing in Saigon-Cholon from an instrument of colonial rule into a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure embedded in urban cultural life. Through the establishment of printing infrastructure, the creation of a predictable rhythm of print circulation, the expansion of a shared communicative channel through quoc ngu, and the formation of early adaptive mechanisms, the urban print environment contributed to the development of foundational social capacities—literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience— that can be traced in historical sources. These foundations also help explain the subsequent acceleration of print after the First World War, when market competition and socio-political debate further thickened the urban cultural environment.
Commercialization and Politicization of the Press as Drivers of the Urban Cultural Environment (1914–1939)
This section argues that commercialization and politicization operated as mutually reinforcing drivers: market logics increased the tempo and reach of print, while political and social debate deepened participation. Together, they strengthened the four capacities used in this study—literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience—under colonial constraints.
The period 1914–1939 marked a structural turning point in the print life of Saigon-Cholon. Before 1914, publishing largely operated within administrative, ecclesiastical, and nascent commercial frameworks. After the First World War, press and publishing entered an accelerated cycle linked to urbanization, market expansion, and the increasingly visible formation of urban public opinion. In this phase, commercialization and politicization did not exclude one another; rather, they functioned as complementary drivers—one increasing the tempo and density of print circulation, the other thickening the social dimensions of public discussion—thereby reinforcing literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience.
Analytically, the 1914–1939 shift can be understood as a transition from an administratively oriented “information cycle” to a market-oriented “attention cycle,” in which reader retention, regular rhythm, and content differentiation became conditions of survival: newspapers had to retain readers through stable publication rhythms, diversified content sections, and close engagement with everyday urban life. This was also the period in which intermediary institutions (printing houses, publishing firms, agencies, and bookshops) matured into a relatively complete communications circuit, enabling print to circulate predictably, repeatedly, and at scale. It was precisely this cycle that enabled literacy to accumulate as a habit of reading, access to be organized as repeated and predictable reach, inclusion to expand across social actors and topics, and resilience to emerge as the capacity to sustain print’s social presence under institutional control.
Urbanization, the Expansion of the Reading Public, and the Social Conditions of the Press Market
After the First World War, the second phase of colonial exploitation accelerated urbanization in Cochinchina. Saigon-Cholon consolidated its position as the largest administrative and commercial center in Indochina and became a major destination for migrants. As Table 3 shows, the total population increased sharply from 271,673 in 1919 to 343,459 in 1924, before contracting during the early 1930s crisis and partially recovering by 1936 (Vo and Phan, 2025; Tran 2012; Gouvernement général de l’Indochine, 1937). Within this shifting demographic landscape, Vietnamese and Chinese residents remained numerically dominant, while the French population grew in absolute terms. These changes expanded the groups integrated into urban life and possessing quoc ngu reading capacity, generating differentiated demand for current affairs, practical knowledge, commerce-related information, and entertainment.
The expansion of the reading public is reflected in press circulation. By the late 1930s, several daily newspapers reached print runs ranging from a few thousand to over ten thousand copies; in 1938, La Dépêche d’Indochine circulated at around 3,500 copies, while the quoc ngu paper Điện Tín reached approximately 10,500 copies (Brocheux and Hemery, 2011). Alongside this growth came a shift in demand structure—from administrative information to a mixed demand encompassing urban news, practical information, entertainment, and consumer culture (advertising). This shift pushed newspapers to track urban rhythms (daily/weekly) and to embed print more deeply in routine social practice.
Within the analytical framework of this article (Fig. 1), the market is not merely an economic background but a mechanism that organizes access: it shapes publication rhythm, print scale, and the degree to which print penetrates urban space (Chartier, 1994; Johns, 1998). Once readership became a condition of survival, repeated access and regular reading were structural requirements rather than incidental outcomes.
Price, Place, and Distribution Networks: The Market as a Mechanism that “Organizes” Access
A salient feature of the press market in this period was the emergence of commercial norms in publishing: publications clearly displayed titles, printers/publishers, distribution addresses, and retail prices. Popular newspapers and books were commonly priced at around 0.50–0.80 piastre. The public display of addresses and prices was not merely a signal of commercialization; it also worked as an access mechanism by directing readers to stable points of entry and by making purchase and reading repeatable practices tied to defined locations and costs.
Price data (Table 4) suggest a relatively stable mass-market band, which helped normalize everyday purchasing and reading as urban routines. At the same time, the “printing house-publishing firm-bookshop/newspaper agent” model shortened intermediary chains, reduced costs, and expanded distribution through bookshops, market stalls, and commercial corridors. Beyond retail markets, subscription channels also stabilized demand and publication rhythms, including subscription catalogues (1929) and periodical subscription lists for Cholon in 1930 (Duong, 2025).
Thickening Literacy Through Urban Rhythms: From Skill to Reading Habit
The press market not only expanded access but also restructured literacy as a social practice. As newspapers appeared regularly on daily or weekly cycles, reading was no longer exclusively tied to formal schooling; it became an urban habit accumulated through repeated exposure to news, classifieds, advertisements, serialized novels, and advice columns (Darnton, 1982; Chartier, 1994). In practice, multi-section newspapers and serial forms encouraged sustained following and incremental learning, allowing literacy to deepen through routine engagement with varied genres of everyday print.
The fact that many publishing firms both printed and distributed materials also enabled flexible reception practices (buying at distribution points, reading at shops, shared reading, or newspaper rental), suggesting that literacy was nurtured in semi-public urban spaces where reading intertwined with social interaction and sharing (Peycam, 2012, p. 122).
Politicization of the Press and the Formation of Urban Public Opinion: Expanding Inclusion Under Stratification
Alongside market expansion, the Saigon-Cholon press diversified along political orientations. In addition to moderate and reformist newspapers, publications critical of social conditions and advocating reforms in education, law, and everyday rights emerged, even as they confronted control and publication bans. Politicization here refers not only to “political content,” but also to the widening of issues that could enter public discussion—from reformist agendas to urban concerns such as cost of living, labor, public morality, education, and the position of the colonized.
Through the press, social issues were brought into public discussion, thereby expanding inclusion—understood as the scope of participation in print-mediated debate under stratification and control (Anderson, 2006; Harvey, 2008). Newspapers oriented toward women and domestic life (later exemplified by Nu Gioi Chung and Phu Nu Tan Van) further indicate that public opinion extended beyond “high politics” into everyday domains, widening inclusion along gendered lines.
Censorship, Publication Bans, and Resilience: Sustaining Print’s Social Presence in a “Partly Open, Partly Closed” Environment
Press activity during 1914–1939 unfolded within a “partly open, partly closed” institutional environment. Although the French Press Law of 1881 provided a legal framework of press freedom, colonial practice relied heavily on warnings, bans, confiscations, and administrative prosecution (Peycam, 2012). Late-1930s decrees illustrate how interventions could swiftly disrupt a newspaper; in October 1939, the Cochinchina Governor banned Yueh Nam Jip Pao and Dong Phuong Tap chi, and suspended Le Peuple and Dan chung ( see Table 5).
Here, resilience is used in a consistent sense: the capacity of the print environment to maintain circulation and associated reading-and-writing practices under recurrent disruption and control. Censorship was therefore not only an external constraint but also a structural parameter that compelled adaptive strategies—changing titles, replacing editors, shifting genres or printing locations, or suspending and later resuming publication. The legal-deposit mechanism produced a further paradox: it served control, yet it also preserved traces of press life, becoming a condition for long-term resilience (Stoler, 2009).
As summarized in Table 5, institutional control not only constrained publishing but also operated as a structural condition that compelled adaptive strategies, through which resilience took shape as the capacity to maintain circulation amid recurrent disruption.
In sum, these adaptive responses were embedded in— and amplified by—the press market and urban public opinion, which jointly restructured Saigon-Cholon’s print environment. Commercialization supplied the operational conditions for repeatable access and routine reading, while politicization widened participation and the range of discussable issues. Resilience thus emerged from the ecosystem’s adaptive responses to institutional control, prefiguring the integrated mechanisms discussed in the following section (see Table 6).
Table 6 synthesizes the article’s core analytical claim by linking commercialization and politicization of the press to the reinforcement of key capacities of human sustainability in colonial Saigon-Cholon. Treated as an integrated urban print ecosystem, these processes stabilized circulation and expanded participation through historically situated interactions among publishers, readers, and regulatory structures. Even coercive mechanisms such as censorship and legal deposit became embedded within this ecosystem, simultaneously constraining and preserving print life, thereby contributing to resilience rather than merely suppressing it.
Publishing as an Urban Cultural Ecosystem: Mechanisms for Sustaining and Reproducing Human Sustainability
This section consolidates the preceding empirical discussion into a coherent set of mechanisms. It does not introduce new evidence; rather, it clarifies how the four indicators operate together through the communications circuit.
Where the preceding sections have clarified the conditions under which the urban print environment emerged and the drivers that thickened press life in the context of post-First World War urbanization, this section directly addresses the article’s central question: through which specific social-historical mechanisms can publishing be understood as a form of soft infrastructure that sustained and reproduced foundational human capacities in a colonial city.
Rather than treating human sustainability as a policy norm or a bundle of modern indicators, the analysis below anchors the concept in four social capacities that can be traced through historical sources: literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience. From this perspective, publishing in Saigon-Cholon is not understood simply as a count of printed items or as the history of a few emblematic newspapers. It is approached as an operating environment in which print entered everyday life, was repeatedly encountered, shared, reused, and accumulated as a social resource under the asymmetric power relations of the colonial context.
Periodicizing the Communications Circuit: Accumulating Literacy and Stabilizing Access
A foundational mechanism of the urban publishing environment was the way commercialization “periodicized” the life cycle of print—from author, printer, publishing firm, and distributor to reader and control mechanisms—thereby enabling print to operate at a regular tempo and on an expandable scale (Darnton, 1982; Chartier, 1994; Johns, 1998). When newspapers and books became tied to retail sales, advertising, and competition for readers, the circulation cycle no longer depended on sporadic waves of administrative announcements but became closely synchronized with daily or weekly urban rhythms.
At an empirically observable level, this mechanism is reflected in practices such as listing retail prices, naming printing houses and distribution addresses, indicating points of purchase, and the proliferation of sales points including bookshops, agencies, and newspaper stalls in markets. Such traces indicate that access was organized as repeated, stable, and temporally predictable reach, rather than as a one-time or incidental encounter with publications. At the same time, literacy was reinforced as social practice: reading newspapers periodically, following serialized fiction, and using practical books shifted reading and writing from individual skills toward urban habits accumulated over time. From the perspective of human sustainability, what matters is not a single moment of “increased literacy rates,” but the repetitive mechanisms through which knowledge capacities were maintained and thickened in everyday life.
Unequal Access and Bridging Mechanisms: From Access to Inclusion
Opportunities for access within the colonial urban print environment were unevenly distributed. Newspaper and book prices, when considered against income levels and living costs, still constituted substantial barriers for working-class groups. Data on living costs in Saigon in the mid-1930s suggest intensifying expenditure pressures—especially for food—during certain periods (Gouvernement général de l’Indochine, 1937). If access were measured solely through purchase and ownership, it would likely be overestimated for a significant segment of the population.
Yet the print environment did not operate only through formal market channels. Alternative access practices— such as shared reading, newspaper rental, reading at bookshops or newspaper stalls, and reading in semi-public spaces—functioned as “bridging” mechanisms that helped overcome economic barriers. Although difficult to quantify directly, these practices can be identified indirectly through contemporary descriptions, urban memoirs, and recurring references in press accounts. Through such bridging mechanisms, access could be converted into inclusion: the capacity of different urban groups to participate in the informational environment and urban public discussion under stratified conditions. From the viewpoint of human sustainability, these informal mechanisms reveal the print environment’s capacity for self-adjustment, sustaining a degree of social inclusiveness even under inequality.
Genre Diversity and a Mass Reading Infrastructure: Lowering Participation Thresholds and Accumulating Urban Memory
A structural feature of publishing in Saigon-Cholon was its high degree of genre diversity. Alongside current-affairs and political newspapers were serialized novels, textbooks, practical handbooks, women’s newspapers, popular cultural publications, and religious prints. Here, genre diversity does not merely indicate content variety; it functioned as a social mechanism that created multiple thresholds of participation, enabling different reader groups to approach print according to their needs, competencies, and available time.
Operationally, popular genres enabled print to penetrate deeply into everyday life, reinforcing literacy as practice and widening inclusion across social strata. At the same time, repeated cycles of publication and reception contributed to the accumulation of urban memory: knowledge, norms, and interpretive frames of urban life were shaped through serialized narratives, advice columns, and thematic social features. From the perspective of human sustainability, urban memory matters as a social resource through which communities sustain capacities for self-understanding, self-organization, and long-term self-adjustment.
Within this structure, women’s newspapers—exemplified by Nu Gioi Chung and Phu Nu Tan Van—provide a particularly important illustration of inclusion expanding along gendered and everyday-life axes. Women’s participation as authors, editors, and active readers not only broadened the readership but also redistributed roles within the communications circuit of print, thereby thickening the social foundations of urban public opinion.
Multilingual, Multi-Channel Structures and Intermediary Institutions: Creating Buffers for Resilience
Resilience within the print environment did not stem solely from the efforts of any single group of actors; rather, it was rooted in the ecosystem’s multilingual and multi-channel structure. In Saigon-Cholon, print operated in parallel through quoc ngu, French, Chinese, and religious channels. This configuration created a structural buffer, whereby the control or disruption of one publishing stream did not necessarily paralyze the entire urban knowledge environment.
Beyond quoc ngu and French-language publishing, Chinese-language newspapers and periodicals constituted an important parallel stream within Saigon-Cholon’s urban print environment. Chinese presses in Cholon served not only the Chinese merchant community but also functioned as semi-autonomous channels of information, commercial communication, and social organization, operating through distinct linguistic networks and readerships (Feng, 2017; Pham, 2022). The coexistence of these Chinese-language publications alongside Vietnamese- and French-language presses reinforced the multilingual and multi-channel structure of the print ecosystem. From the perspective of human sustainability, this plurality generated institutional and communicative buffers that enhanced the resilience of the soft urban knowledge infrastructure under conditions of censorship, political pressure, and market fluctuation.
Equally important was the network of intermediary institutions—printing houses, publishing firms, and distribution outlets—that connected authors to readers and translated printed knowledge into everyday social practice. When confronted with censorship, publication bans, or economic shocks, these institutions enabled the print environment to reconfigure itself flexibly through practices such as changing titles, replacing editors, shifting genres, adjusting publication rhythms, or altering distribution channels. Such adaptive operations allowed print to sustain its social presence and routine use even when specific publications were disrupted. From the perspective of human sustainability, resilience therefore does not equate to full public freedom; rather, it refers to the capacity to maintain the circulation of knowledge, memory, and social practices under unfavorable institutional conditions.
Taken together, publishing in Saigon-Cholon functioned as a print ecosystem embedded within an urban cultural environment, in which print was produced, distributed, shared, and reused as a social resource. This case allows human sustainability to be anchored in mechanisms that are traceable through historical sources: literacy was strengthened through everyday reading and writing habits; access was expanded and stabilized through market organization alongside alternative access channels; inclusion was supported by genre diversity, diversified participation, and semi-public reading spaces; and resilience emerged from multilingual, multi-channel structures and networks of intermediary institutions that enabled the print environment to adapt under conditions of control and volatility.
In this sense, approaching publishing as an urban cultural environment is not only a descriptive move but also an analytical framework for understanding how soft urban knowledge infrastructures contributed to sustaining and reproducing human capacities in a colonial urban context. The key insight from the Saigon-Cholon case is that the social capacities constitutive of human sustainability did not arise by chance or through short-term interventions; they were sustained and reproduced through the long-term operating mechanisms of the urban print environment.
Conclusion
This article approaches publishing in Saigon-Cholon between 1861 and 1939 not merely as a media or cultural sector, but as an urban cultural environment and a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure within social life. From this perspective, it examines how print became embedded in the everyday operations of the city and contributed to sustaining and reproducing foundational human capacities under colonial conditions marked by political, economic, and epistemic asymmetries.
Empirically, the study identifies two continuous yet distinct phases in the development of the Saigon-Cholon print environment. During the formative phase (1861–1913), publishing evolved from an administrative instrument into an incipient urban cultural environment through the establishment of printing infrastructure, the standardization of quoc ngu, and the emergence of regular rhythms of print circulation. In the subsequent phase of acceleration and differentiation (1914–1939), commercialization and political engagement of the press functioned as complementary forces, jointly expanding the scale, tempo, and social depth of the print environment through periodical newspapers, publishing houses, women’s press, and publications closely tied to everyday urban life.
A key empirical insight is the central role of non-overtly political forms of publishing—such as serialized novels, textbooks, women’s newspapers, and practical manuals—in sustaining urban memory and everyday cultural life. These repetitive and socially embedded reading-and-writing practices contributed to the reproduction of social capacities for participation beyond moments of direct political confrontation, and sustained the everyday reproduction of participation, thickening the foundations of the urban public sphere.
Conceptually, the article advances human sustainability as a historical analytical lens rather than a normative category or a set of contemporary indicators. Through four indicators—literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience—it shows that human sustainability can be traced as a social-historical process shaped by long-term interactions among publishing infrastructure, markets, intermediary institutions, control mechanisms, and urban cultural practices. By grounding sustainability in observable historical mechanisms, this framework facilitates interdisciplinary dialogue without retrofitting modern policy metrics onto historical contexts.
Methodologically, the study shifts attention from the content of individual publications to the social conditions that enabled print to be produced, circulated, received, and accumulated over time. Approaching publishing as an urban cultural environment foregrounds processes of repetition, mediation, and accumulation, and opens comparative possibilities with other colonial or semi-colonial cities where print similarly operated as soft infrastructure under unequal power relations.
More broadly, the findings suggest that human sustainability in urban contexts is not sustained solely through political institutions or macroeconomic structures, but through everyday knowledge infrastructures that organize how people encounter information, learn to read, and participate in collective life. In this sense, the significance of the Saigon-Cholon case lies not in its exceptionalism, but in its capacity to illuminate general mechanisms through which urban knowledge environments reproduce foundational human capacities over the long term.
The article also acknowledges limitations arising from fragmented historical sources and the focus on a single urban case. Future research could extend this approach through inter-urban comparison or by examining how digitalization and archiving are reshaping publishing memory and contemporary public spheres. Taken together, linking publishing history with human sustainability research underscores the value of historical inquiry for understanding how media environments—past and present—function as soft infrastructures of urban life. This case underscores that human sustainability was sustained through the long-term operation of everyday knowledge infrastructures embedded in urban life.
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