When entering Noyant, the visitor can have the sensation of being projected more than 5,000 kilometers from France, towards the east, in the heart of Vietnam. Clothing, food, worship, all Asian cultural elements are gathered in this small village, thanks to half of the population originally from Vietnam.
The rather unusual story of Noyant begins in 1954 with the fall of Diên Biên Phuh. French troops from Indochina must then fall back. France is beaten. The government of Mendès-France being unable to back down any longer, two months later signed the Geneva agreements.
Indochina is no more and gives way to the two Vietnamese who, both of them, have nothing to do with the former colonists. The flight of the French must therefore be organized, including in the direction of the mother country. The fate of Noyant then intersects with this episode in the history of France when during the winter of 1955, this small village saw the disembarkation of several hundred French repatriated from Indochina.
Noyant, a small town in the Queune basin, far from the conflict and the dead, was at that time a village deserted by miners. The economic crisis is deep and the small town is slowly dying. The people of Noyant are therefore ready to receive en masse these French citizens with slanted eyes and dark skin.
Descendants of native French people, married to Vietnamese, they are called Gouchard or Martini and have never seen France. They will then have to acclimatize to the country and rebuild a new life, far from Saigon, Hanoi or Halong Bay. Placed in a reception center as soon as they arrive, they quickly become the owner of a small house in the city of Corons, and, little by little, the "Chinese" of Noyant pass from the object of curiosity to the status of citizens.
Today, the Vietnamese community still lives in Noyant and even if their children have gone to Paris, Clermont-Ferrand or Lyon, it still constitutes half of the village's population. The minors' quarter became the Cité de la Brosse. The facades were redone and a pagoda and its famous Buddha were erected. A gigantic Buddha, several meters high, now sits on the edge of the houses, between the so characteristic meadows of the Bourbonnais bocage and the old mine. An unusual construction which, almost fifty years after the arrival of the refugees, stands as a formidable proof of mutual acceptance.
The former Noyant has been able to adapt to the new arrivals and the latter have given a certain dynamism to the town. This village of 900 inhabitants now houses a restaurant and a shop exclusively for Asian products, two places of worship located barely a kilometer away (church and pagoda), inscriptions in French and Vietnamese on some public buildings.
A mixture has therefore settled here, in the heart of Bourbonnais. Here, everyone knows each other and meets around a plate of spring rolls sprinkled with a "good old" Saint-Pourçain!
