In 1902, French colonial officials in Hanoi tried to solve a rat plague by paying a bounty per tail. Enterprising locals began breeding rats or simply cutting off tails and releasing the healthy rodents to breed more “cash.” The city ended up with more tailless rats and even more plague.

#TalesFromTheGrid is about not just one thing at this point. It started as a surreal thought experiment regarding absurdity (AI, algorithms, technology, or rodents who accidentally went to medical school.

Born in that weird, vulnerable moment between being awake and asleep, this set of texts explores dream logic, surrealism, and the absurd. But sometimes, this series features #MoreTrueFacts, which are very real stories about actual recorded human history—like the time we parachuted beavers into Idaho. Welcome to the facts, folks!

#MoreTrueFacts: The Great Hanoi Rat Loophole

The Landscape: The “Perfect” Infrastructure

In the early 1900s, the French colonial government in Hanoi, Vietnam, wanted to modernize the city. They built a massive, state-of-the-art sewer system beneath the French Quarter.

The Unintended Consequence: While the sewers were a marvel of French engineering, they accidentally created a super-highway for rats.
The Predator-Free Zone: The dark, damp, and protected tunnels allowed the rat population to explode, and they soon began emerging into the posh French villas above.

The Tactics: The Bounty System

The colonial government realized their “modern” system was failing. In 1902, they hired a team of professional rat catchers. When that didn’t work, they opened the job to the public with a bounty system.

The Proof of Work: To claim the reward, citizens didn’t have to bring in the whole rat (which would have been a logistical and sanitary nightmare). They only had to bring in the rat’s tail.
The Payout: For every tail handed over, the government paid a small fee.

The “Loophole”: Tail-Less Rats

Government officials soon began noticing a bizarre biological anomaly: live, healthy rats running around the city with no tails.

The Strategy: The citizens realized that if they killed the rat, the “bounty machine” stopped. But if they caught the rat, cut off its tail for the reward, and released it back into the sewer, the rat would survive and breed more rats—creating a permanent, renewable source of income.

The Full “System Crash”: Rat Farming

The deception escalated when the French discovered that some residents had moved beyond the “catch and release” phase.

The Discovery: Health inspectors found established rat farms on the outskirts of Hanoi.
The Innovation: Enterprising citizens were actively breeding and raising thousands of rats specifically to harvest their tails for the colonial bounty.
The Result: The government was literally subsidizing the growth of the very pest they were trying to exterminate.

The Surrender

In a state of absolute defeat, the French government scrapped the bounty system. They realized they had tried to “out-engineer” nature and the local economy, but they had only succeeded in making the rat problem significantly more organized.