Introduction
Vietnam emerged as a southern extension of the great civilization of China for 1,000 years, and then went its own way for a millennium, evolving into a distinct, cultivated and powerful East–Southeast Asian hybrid whose human and technological resources eventually led to the domination of all its neighbours to the south. A legendary, nationalistic account of the history, whose exotic narratives are recorded here as they are known to all modern Vietnamese, was constructed to enhance a national identity centuries after the separation from the great northern power at the end of the first millennium. The legend underplays Chinese influence and asserts a prehistoric Việt identity long suppressed by a foreign occupier. The thin historical data from the prehistoric period does little to support this view. What we recognize today as the vivid and distinct Vietnamese life and culture was at every level and in every field the result of a fusion of the formidable civilization of the great East Asian Central Kingdom with a vigorous, indigenous, but historically hardly recorded Metal Age culture of the Red River Delta.
The current and pervasive nationalist reading of the history of the Việt people covering 4,000 years of prehistory is mentioned periodic- ally in our narrative as a legendary account. It then assesses the depth of Chinese influence on many aspects of Vietnamese life and supports recent scholarly claims that situate the key period of fusion of Chinese and indigenous language into the distinctive hybrid Vietnamese to the end of the first milliennium. Finally it evaluates the new colours taken on by the young dragon that straddled East and Southeast Asia cultures, as it descended and absorbed Cham and Khmer cultures and French colonialism.
The core of the Vietnamese language was forged by some 40 gener- ations of city-dwelling Han-Tang Chinese speakers who gradually created a provincial Chinese dialect which, after the state’s links with the giant neighbour loosened into independent vassalage, encompassed a full merger with the autochthonous Mon-Khmer language of the coastal plain. Thus the bilingualism of the first millennium turned into a single, recognizably Vietnamese language, written in a demotic Chinese script called chữ Nôm. China had a parallel relationship with the people of the Korean peninsula in the north, who separated from the centre at the fall of Han China in the third century. Vietnam and Korea hang like jewelled pendants from the central mainland mass – exotic, beautifully different but dependent.
One of China’s most precious gifts was written history in the form of dynastic annals, which form an illuminated core narrative richer than in Vietnam’s neighbours. They were of course written under pressure at court, but the writers often show themselves to be a trained body of highly cultivated thinkers capable of judging events with perspicuity. The strongest counter to this annalistic Vietnamese account is the Chinese state records of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, which were written under similar and even greater pressures. With limited evidence from other sources, any account of the first millennium of the Common Era must strike a balance between these two accounts. Other documents that bear on Vietnam’s complex geographical, ethnic and cultural past are scattered in Chinese, French, Russian and Japanese texts as well as in the texts inscribed in stone in the temples of ancient Champa and Cambodia. There is also the dense narrative of legend that winds its way around the documentable history. We have aimed to give them all due weight and in particular focused on the still under-researched Việt annals.
‘Bốn ngàn năm văn hiến’ – 4,000 years of cultural development is a national slogan that over-interprets the flimsy archaeological evidence, which shows instead a mix of peoples we could not yet identify as Vietnamese occupying the northern part of Vietnam for much longer than that. The popular and scholarly claims to cultural homogeneity in this remote era are a backward revision of the data in the search for national identity.
Humans have populated the high ground north of the Red River for many thousands of years. Evidence of a Hòa Bình culture, named after the province where archaeologists made their finds, overlaps with that of Bắc Sơn, dated to 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and centred on the moun- tains close to the modern Chinese border. The evidence left in caves by these cultures includes used tools for sophisticated manufacture and agriculture. They were hunter-gatherers as well as agriculturalists and they made decorated ceramics and were spinning cotton and weaving textiles.
Later, in the Đông Sơn era considered to extend from 700 bce to 100 bce, they perfected the piece-mould casting of large engraved drums – skills they shared with southern China and Yunnan – that were to find great favour in communities throughout early island Southeast Asia. The Đông Sơn drums were named after the location of the first find in 1924. They appear to have become the most prized object in chieftain exchange and royal burial on the mainland and down through the islands of modern Indonesia. The drums are cast in one piece and superbly dec- orated with a sun-star and boats carrying men with high feathered headdresses, and they were all made in Vietnam south of the Red River. No other high technology product achieved such a wide distribution across the mainland peninsula and the Malay Archipelago. The function of the drum remains largely mysterious but as well as status and alliance, they may have facilitated and transmitted basic calendrical or monsoonal navigational skills that empowered their owners with participation in the crucial maritime trade. Taylor considers the modern Vietnamese claim to direct linkage back to Đông Sơn ‘an exuberant use of evidence’.1 The Đông Sơn era ended after Han China first sent its armies into southern China, and in the culmination of a slow expansion further south, Han general Lu Bode in 111 bce pushed across the mountainous border into Nan Yue (‘Nam Việt’ in Vietnamese) with an army of 100,000 men, supported by warships in the gulf, to extend the Han territories further south. The new Han province was an accorded three Việt prefectures of Giao Chỉ, Cửu Chân and Nhật Nam.
While the north acquired Han culture, further down the coastal plain a long chain of settlements emerged that the Chinese first called Lin-yi and which the inhabitants eventually called Champa. Such riverine ports were settled by ship-borne migrants probably from Borneo. In the world before the rise of rice-based agricultural empires, these migrants from the islands grew prosperous through their maritime skills and support for the growing maritime trade between China, India and the Arab and European worlds. Although they never congealed into a single state, the networked Cham ports accumulated wealth from shipping forest goods and supplying commercial fleets with fresh water and supplies. They were soon building huge brick temple towers on a scale grander than their neighbours. The Cham towers still dot central Vietnam’s coastal strip. We trace the end of what some historians call the thousand-year miracle of islanders surviving on the Indochinese mainland in a fatal alliance with the burgeoning Cambodian Empire across the mountains at Angkor. The Khmer-Cham alliance repeatedly attacked the newly independent Buddhist state of the Việt. When Cambodia declined under less ambitious rulers, the Chams were exposed to the superior technology of the Việt and were set on a gradual but eventually total decline as the hybrid dragon descended.
The astonishing ethnic and cultural diversity of modern Vietnam is the result of the powerful young hybrid dragon of the northern delta gradually discovering its powers in the second millennium, in first defen- sive then expansionist battle mode against the neighbouring Cham and Cambodian peoples. The long drive south was partly accomplished by adventurous Việt kings and partly at a lower level by pioneering fishermen-farmers who exploited local advantages within declining Cham polities.
The usually courteous relationship with China was rent by repeated Mongol invasions in the late thirteenth century. Chinese settlers from Fujian established a Chinese-based literati culture in the south that grew powerful from the expanding Chinese external trade and eventually weakened the Buddhist dynasty in Thăng Long (Hanoi). One of these southern factions seems to have colluded with the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Mongol horses suffered in the tropical climate and the management of a new, high technology Chinese fleet was finally humiliated in astute river ambushes that produced a new generation of Việt heroes with reputations that thrive today. But the Mongol defeat came at a high cost as the war must have damaged the water management systems, for many decades of crop failures and starvation followed.
Protracted civil war, rebellions and endless dynastic conflicts gravely unsettled the fifteenth–eighteenth centuries. During a notable twenty- year interlude early in the fifteenth century the expansive new Ming dynasty looked beyond its borders and attempted a return to Han- and Tang-scale sovereignty. Within a generation they invaded Đại Việt on the pretext of restoring a Trần heir and sinicized Việt society in fully fledged Confucian mould. A new class of Việt bureaucrats or ‘literati’ was schooled to run detailed administrative systems in fifteen phủ. Identity papers were issued to all and people registers controlled taxation as well as mining, forestry and pearl-diving duties. Chinese clothing and long pigtails were imposed. The Ming army was pushed out when lesser emperors took the throne and the victor Lê Lợi became another Việt national hero. The Chinese came back briefly in the sixteenth century under the Mạc, but that was the last time.
The remnant Cham cities suffered as the Vietnamese pursued their Nam tiến (movement south) that was to divide the state into two rival Việt cultures that European missionaries would identify as Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south. Christianity and French aris- tocrats scattered by the revolution in France made quick inroads in this contested period and they directly assisted the formation of the new and final Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945) at the new capital of Huế in central Vietnam. The Nguyễn flourished, aided by French technology, but by 1885 the French had taken total political control. The resultant road, rail, electrical and plantation infrastructure was the envy of Asia. The deep engagement with French colonial values and technology (followed by the more recent freedom and entrepreneurial flair of the American presence), added another cultural layer that differentiated the more con- servative and classical but also more rigid north of Vietnam from the warmth and risk-prone conviviality of the south.
The Second World War collusion between the leaders of the Vichy colony and the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere proved a disaster that the Free French subsequently failed to master and France left Vietnam after military humiliation at the mountain battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.
The socialist north, created by the Geneva Conference and led by Le Duan’s labour party with poet Hồ Chí Minh as international figure- head, would wage another twenty years of war before achieving total power and independence. After Geneva a million Catholics and non- Catholics headed south rather than live under communism. The new socialist-nationalists in the north went back to war because the post- war American superpower, having blocked the ‘Yellow Peril’ in Korea, intervened when it foresaw a chain of dominoes collapsing from Vietnam through Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and maybe California. But the American will broke in the nightly televized Tết Offensive of 1968 and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger negotiated a ‘decent interval’ for the Americans to withdraw. After the hasty departure the false peace soon collapsed and the north swept to victory in 1975. A massive exodus of ‘boat people’ in small vessels broke through the bolted doors of the new communist state, which soon reduced the ‘jewel of the orient’ to one of the poorest countries on earth. Only in the late 1980s did Vietnam open its doors with a post-Mao development model for socialist-capitalism, which unleashed the entrepreneurial culture of the south that is powering today’s rising economic tiger.
More information: Vu Hong Lien and Peter D. Sharrock (2014), Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger: A history of Vietnam, Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk, www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
