Paradise Lost

As the capital of French colonialism in Indo-China, Saigon nurtured some of Asia's fanciest fleshpots. Among them: an elegant bordello called the Dai La Thien (Paradise), with 300 silken-clad girls who entertained in mirrored cubicles; the Grand Monde gambling establishment, which earned enough to pay $10,000 a day .

in taxes; Madame Paula's satin-draped opium parlor, where a pipe cost 75 piasters (against 5 at lower-class establishments), and the customers ranged in rank up to diplomats and generals.

To Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, this sort of thing was an offense both to his religious principles (he is Roman Catholic) and to Viet Nam's dignity. Last January he closed down the Grand Monde and the rest of the city's public gambling joints.

Progressively thereafter, he ordered the city's nightclubs to close at 2 a.m., regulated the striptease trade to extinction, and ordered the swimming pool at the Cercle Sportif, Asia's leading parade ground for bikinis, to close through the dry season.

Next, his police moved on the 500-odd opium dens in South Viet Nam, and in closing them down, undertook a campaign to rehabilitate some 20,000 addicts. Thousands of confiscated bamboo pipes--kindled by stacks of pornographic literature --were burned in Saigon's central marketplace, and antivice dragon dancers whirled through the streets. Madame Paula turned up working in a pastry shop.

Next came the brothels, but with somewhat less success. As police entered the Dai La Thien and the Pare aux Buffles (Stockyard), a lower-class emporium with a mere 200 population, scores of girls scrambled to safety over back walls. In some other places, indignant Foreign Legion and Vietnamese troops stood off the cops with rifles, and opposition from the military generally was so strong that Diem later exempted field brothels from the ban.

The bulk of the city's 2,000 licensed prostitutes simply vanished--back to their families, to nearby Cambodia, or to emergency havens provided by rich customers (who paid the madams up to 10,000 piasters for the privilege). But the back of the racket nevertheless was broken. Last week Diem's police began stripping the Dai La Thien of its mirrors and nude murals, to convert it into a school for ex-prostitutes, teaching them such trades as sewing and nursing. To discourage girls from reverting to their old trade, police announced that customers caught patronizing them would be jailed until their wives applied for their release.

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