Jan
30
The Colonial Diasporas and their Displacing Effects on the Traditional Vietnamese Society
What is the essence of the Vietnamese cultural history?
In National Geographic Traveler: Vietnam (2006) by James Sullivan, the motif used for the non-experts to understand Vietnamese history and culture is that of “the smaller dragon.” For more than a thousand years:
China controlled Vietnam as a vassal state, setting the stage for a cultural reorientation that goes right down to the marrow of what it means to be Vietnamese…[to] have absorbed the politics, religion, sociology, and arts of China to refine their own…There are, of course, cultural differences. But after more than 2,000 years of shared history, the similarities, especially to the traveler, remain obvious. [1]
Such perspective is not indicative of the current scholarship on Vietnamese history and culture. However, Sinologists, Indologists, pre-historians, and geographers writing before the mid-1960s did see Vietnam as “the smaller dragon.” These scholars regarded Vietnamese society, along with other Southeast Asian societies, in prehistoric time as having no roots and stuck fast in the stone-age. Such societies, according to French scholar Georges Coedes, “seem to have been lacking in creative genius and showed little aptitude for making progress without stimulus from outside.” [2]
Vietnam was fortunate, however, according to this view. Because it was a meeting ground of cultural influences from China, northern Vietnam became a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional diffusion and migration from an advanced agricultural economy, technology and mercantile activities of China. [3] From such contact, Vietnam entered history and established a centralized state which began to flourish in the early Christian era, whereas the “tribes” of Southeast Asian prehistory did not know how to rule. [4]
From 111 B.C. to 939 Vietnam was annexed to China, but “far from having worn down that invincibility, seems instead to have strengthened it.” It is this spirit of resistance through cohesion and formal structure that has been “the key answer to her historic problems.” [5] Yet, these same observers believed that Vietnamese invincibility has been the result of Chinese influence through a spirit that “combines amazing powers of assimilation.” Illustrative is Henri Maspero’s conclusion on early Vietnamese history:
[If Vietnamese] was able for centuries to resist Chinese aggression…it is indebted to Ma Yuan for this advantage [who defeated the Trung Sisters’ Rebellion in 43 A.D.]..for it was the Chinese conquerer who, in destroying the old political institutions of Tonkin [northern Vietnam], cast this country for good into the stream of Chinese civilization, thereby giving it that strong Chinese reinforcement which allowed it to play the primary role in the history of eastern Indochina since the tenth century. [6]
Thus, areas of northern Vietnam were considered “Sincized” or little China; while areas of southern Vietnam were considered as “Indianized” or little India. At best, historians writing before the mid-1960s like John Cady and Joseph Buttinger held that Southeast Asian civilizations were imported but evolved as individual adaptations. In some cases, the modifications illustrate local genius of the more advanced culture of China and/or India and that is precisely what makes them Indochinese and why the territory may properly be called Indochina. [7]
On the one hand, migration through colonial diasporas have in many ways transformed Vietnam cultural history both in prehistoric and historic times. (For a theoretical discussion about the two types of diasporas in Vietnamese history – that of colonial diaspora and victim diaspora – see Conceptualizing Displacement). On the other hand, the effects of colonial diasporas – the imposition of foreign culture – will depend on the types of aggrandizement that colonists engaged in expanding their control, and of which will be interrelated with the colonized society’s physical size and the durability of its indigenous institutions prior to the external linkages between the colonizers and the colonized. (For a theoretical discussion of the above, see Types of Colonial Rules).
According to recent works by archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists, the colonial diasporas that had direct transformative effects on the traditional Vietnamese society is that of the Austroasiatic agricultural colonists, starting about 3000 to 1000 B.C. The migration of Austroasiatic “agricultural colonists” transformed the semi-/shifting agricultural societies of Australo-Melanesian, cumulating into two periods of Neolithic/Bronze and Iron Ages in northern Vietnam. The cultural significance of this is the solid evidence of a rich and vibrant Vietnamese civilization before Chinese arrival, as well as a proto-Vietnamese language along with cultural traditions that survived, though later they took on external influences through intimate contact with foreign colonial powers.
By the time “the first major imposition of northern influence” arrived, that of Thuc Phan and his Ou Yueh (Au Viet) military personnel, [8] the indigenous Lac society was well established whose physical size must have been considerable and whose language, cultural traditions, and class structures were effectively durable and stable. That is, while Thuc Phan’s army had displaced the Lac society, his reign did not mark any large scale movement of people in sufficient magnitude to account for the origin of a people, [9] or had left any mark on the Vietnamese language. [10]
In fact, the earliest spirit of an indigenous invincibility to resist foreign rule was the Lac lords. Their ability to ‘localize’ and ‘resist’ the colonial imposition of Thuc Phan in 257 B.C. and until the arrival of Ma Yuan in 43 A.D., illustrates more accurately the essence of Vietnamese culture: “displacement but never replacement.” While the earliest name of the Vietnamese people (that of Lac) had been replaced by Viet, the Vietnamese language and particular cultural traditions (such as the belief that the Vietnamese people originated from Lac Long Quan and Au Co) owe its heritage to the ancient Lac society.
The following is a brief outline of the colonial diasporas in and their displacing effects on Vietnamese history: that of Austroasiatic colonial diasporas and Ou Yueh (Au Viet) colonial diaspora; the next online classroom will discuss the Chinese colonial diaporas, French diaspora, and the Japanese diaspora.
Austroasiatic Colonial Diasporas (3000-1000 B.C.)
Native speakers of Vietnamese today can claim descent from “the foundation movements of the major agriculturalist language families of Southeast Asia,” specifically that of Austroasiatic. [11] That is, the Vietnamese language, a Mon-Khmer language of the Austroasiastic family, at least by one reputable opinion, is believed to “derive from the earliest agricultural colonization of mainland Southeast Asia, a process possibly commencing out of southern China about 3000 B.C.” [12] Another reputable opinion is that “it is also possible that Austroasiatic languages were widely dispersed on the mainland of Southeast Asia before the Neolithic Period (also referred to as “the primitive agricultural stage”) and that rice farming was taken up by some of these groups in appropriate habitats from earlier rice cultivators in the north, who may have belonged to the Hmong-Mien language family.” [13]
Notwithstanding, from 11000 B.C. to 3000 B.C., the area of northern Vietnam was settled by societies of Australo-Melanesian hunters and gatherers (also termed the Hoabinhians) and later, by those who practiced simple plant cultivation (also termed the Basconians). Archaeological evidence from these sites suggests that these societies before 3000 B.C. made pottery, grew crops and kept animals. Bone materials from a wide range of mammal species were found, including pig, deer, dog, elephant, rhinoceros and cattle. Perhaps with the exception of pigs and dogs, none of these species appear to have been domesticated. [14] When heavy core tools appeared starting around 8000 B.C., it clearly demonstrated the Australo-Melanesian’s innovation rather than inertia, as the transition from hunting to a greater dependence on plant food began in this region. [15]
There is little doubt, however, that starting about 3000 B.C., the semi-agricultural societies in northern Vietnam were confronted by a major agriculturalist language family of Austroasiatic who were also known for their advancement in rice cultivation, [16] while Australo-Melanesian societies in central/southern Vietnam were confronted by agriculturalist/seafaring language family of Austronesian. The arrival of this agriculturalist language group “displaced” the Austro-Melanesian societies, as is evident by a complete shift to agriculture at least in northern (lowland) Vietnam.
In regard to the purpose and scope of the Austroasiatic migrants’ aggrandizement, evidence supports the theory that demographic conditions in southern China (possibly due to increasingly large and sedentary populations which arise from advancement in agricultural productivity) facilitated their migration. [17] Perhaps because the Australo-Melanesian societies lacked hierarchal or centralized social structures due to the ‘slash and burn’ of their shifting agriculture, they were not able to resist the arrival of the Austroasiatic migrants. If we presume that there were earlier waves of Austroasiatic migrants, then these may have served as linkages that facilitated the spread of Austroasiatic “agricultural colonists into a world peopled by fairly sparse groups of hunters and gatherers.” [18]
This migration process possibly commences out of southern China where, in prehistoric times, the Austroasiatic language family – along with other language groups such the Hmong-Mien, Tai, and Asutonesian – were the early ancestors of this territory before the arrival of Sinitic language family, such as the Sino-Tibetan. [19] The migration of these agriculturalist language families, especially the Austroasiatic and Austonesian, basically carried the proto-languages that gradually and eventually became the major languages of Southeast Asia through the mainland and the islands. [20] Thus, archaeologists and linguists have described southern China in prehistory and early history as geographically and culturally Southeast Asian, although eventually these “southern cultures” underwent “Sinicization.” [21]
From 3000-1000, the area of northern Vietnam experienced the passage of new cultures – that of the more settled agricultural societies with advanced agricultural techniques and of proto-Austroasiatic language. If we presume that the concept of migrations in ancient times “involved a relatively small group of ruling class people, whose mastery of political and military affairs was felt throughout the linguistic and cultural scene,” then we may speculate that there was a longer, slower process of intermarriage and adaptation between Austroasiatic migrants and the Australo-Melanesians (some may have retreated to highlands of northern Vietnam), rather than a total displacement and a wholesale overrunning of the latter. Recent studies support this view in which genetic data in Southeast Asia does not point clearly to the total replacement of the Australo-Melanesians, and that the proto-Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages were doubtlessly localized, by semi-agricultural peoples; [22] moreover, the region’s shared cultural symbols such as betel chewing has been established well before 3000 B.C. [23]
Nevertheless, the migration of Austroasiatic “agricultural colonists” cumulated into two periods of Neolithic/Bronze (as late as 1500, known as the Phung Nguyen culture) and Iron Ages (starting as late as 500 B.C., known as the Dong Son culture) [24] in northern Vietnam. In the former, there is solid evidence for cultivation of rice, along with a broader range of cultural material, such as stone arrowheads and knives, baked clay spindle whorls and bow pellets, and pottery with incised and comb-stamped decoration. [25] Pottery in this period has been considered to be directly ancestral to the pottery of the archaeological Dong-Son society of the first millennium B.C, [26] which gives further support of a cultural continuity throughout the prehistoric occupation of the Red River valley. [27]
The Dong Son culture may have played a large role in the dissemination of bronze-working technology. [28] While is likely that there was constant interaction between southern China region and northern Vietnam (as well as stimulus from the former to the latter) after about 300 B.C., the classical Dong Son drums (also termed Heger I drums) that exemplified the cultural period were likely to have been manufactured in northern Vietnam. [29] The “roots” of the Dong Son culture, whose indigenous development of the bronze style is little beyond doubt, [30] may well extend back to at least 1000 B.C., antedating any significant northern influence. In regard to the social and historical evidence for the Dong-Son period, evidence suggests the existence of a stratified society, perhaps under the rule of a single center, as attested by the textual inference of Van Lang (Kingdom), Hung (field/king/lords), and Lac [field/king/lords] in Chinese historical records, [31] which may have commenced as early as the seventh century B.C. [32]
The cultural significance of Neolithic/Bronze and Iron Ages in northern Vietnam is that the solid consensus that there was a rich and vibrant Vietnamese civilization before Chinese arrival, as well as a proto-Vietnamese language along with cultural traditions that survived, though later they took on external influences through intimate contact with foreign colonial powers both in classical and modern times. The migration of the Austroasiatic “agricultural colonists” could be considered a classic case of cultural diffusion of as well as a direct stimulus to the Australo-Melanesian semi-/shifting agricultural societies in which such diffusion gradually developed into indigenous Vietnamese civilization.
From Chinese historical records (existing only in quotations in later Chinese works between the third and fifth centuries A.D.):
In Kau-tsi [Chiao Chih, northern Vietnam]…when there were neither commanderies nor prefectures [that is prior to Chinese rule], the land was in lak [lac] fields. In these fields the [level of the] water used to rise and fall in accordancewith the [rise and fall of the] tides. The folk who brought these fields into cultivation were called Lak [Lac]. Subsequently, a Lak [Lac] king was instituted and Lak [Lac] lords appointed to govern commanderies and prefectures, [as well as] prefectural officials entitled to bronze zeals and green ribbons [which were symbols of investiture used by Ch’in and Han dynasties]. [33]
Another quotation which appeared later in Chinese sources – though somewhat at variance to the above – described northern Vietnam before Chinese rule as:
Its soil is black and rich…so that these fields are called jiung [hung] fields, and the people [who cultivate them] jiung [hung] folk. There is a chief similarly styled the Jiung [Hung] King, whose aides are also called Jiung [Hung] lords. The territory is apportioned among jiung [hung] officials. [34]
These two different traditions have been conjectured. For example, Henri Maspero has claimed that Hung was an error for Lac and concluded that there never were Hung kings. [35] Others, however, have found occurrences of Hung as a family name and that it is well attested in southwest China that it derives from a Mon-Khmer title of chieftainship. [36] If we were to accept the first tradition, then even a conservation conjecture would be that the “lac field were…the creations of an indigenous folk and consequently shared their ethnic attribution” whose chieftains commanded some form of social power. [37]
Notwithstanding, the word Lac is the earliest recorded name for the Vietnamese people and we can conjecture that Lac existed before 257 B.C. and with the arrival of Thuc Phan (King An Duong), who may have some association with the Ou Yueh/Viet lords, was able to survive by forming the political union of Au Lac (Au is simply the Vietnamese pronunciation of Ou). While the word Lac disappeared when the Trung sisters and more than five thousand of their supporters were beheaded in their revolt against Han rule in 43 A.D., it was the factor that united the legendary Hung kings and the early “northern” influences and domination of Thuc Phan, Chao T’o, and early Han governors.
Meanwhile in central Vietnam, the semi-agricultural peoples and earlier Austroasiatic migrants were confronted by the migration of the Austronesian agricultural/seafaring colonists. Thus, central Vietnam starting by 2000 B.C. was being populated by the Austronesian language family. In particular, the Austronesian Chamic languages probably displaced earlier Austroasiatic languages and have been displaced in turn by Vietnamese expansion down the coast after the release of the latter from Chinese domination in the tenth century A.D. (Bellwood, 1979, 112-113). Though it should not be taken for granted, the amount of connections, contacts, and loosely knit multiethnic confederations among the various cultures located in northern Vietnam, northeastern coastal and central Vietnam. In fact, this would explain why Vietnamese language, a Mon-Khmer language of the Austroasiastic family, has clearly recognizable loans from Austronesian and later developed into a tonal language (likely borrowed from the Tai language group who spread into the region at a later date). Such contact is given visual form in the in the art of the Dong Son bronze drums, where sea birds and amphibians surround boats bearing warriors, revealing a ruling class perspective heavily influenced by Astronesian culture.
Ou Yueh (Au Viet) Colonial Diaspora (258-207 B.C.)
According to the traditional Chinese historiography, the “birth” of Vietnam originated from the refugee population of Yueh, was an ethnical branch of the Chinese race, located along the coast where the Yangtze River enters the sea. In 333 B.C., the state of Yueh was conquered by Ch’u, which was founded by a noble house closely linked with the Chou court (1027-256 B.C.) and was supposedly dispatched from central Yangtze to “colonize” the South. [38] Consequently, the Yueh ruling class migrated southward, to an area which included the lower valley of the Hong River in northern Vietnam, and established small kingdoms and principalities that Chinese historians referred to as the “Hundred Yueh.”
The above Chinese expansion, as noted by John Whitmore, set off disturbances throughout the south in which “one consequence appears to have been the Shu/Thuc [Thuc is Vietnamese for Shu] invasion of the Red River Delta in the third century B.C.” [39] Thuc Phan is the first figure in Vietnamese history documented by historical sources, although much of what we know about his origin and his reign as King An Duong has survived in legendary forms. [40] According to Keith Taylor, Thuc Phan and his family were pushed southward by Chinese expansion, which “surely forced upon them some association with the Ou Yueh lords,” who were located on the frontier of northwestern Vietnam.
The linkage between the Ou Yueh and the Lac society in northern Vietnam was one of military invasion. It is thought that the growing number of dispossessed Ou Lords caused by Chinese expansion created a context in which there was a call to recoup their fortunes by invading their southern neighbor. [41] This call was led by Thuc Phan. According to reliable sources, Thuc Phan invaded northern Vietnam with his army of thirty thousand, where the timing of the military invasion was probably opportunistic; that is, when Lac society was weak.
The arrival of Thuc Phan in the Hong River plain became “the first major imposition of northern influence in historic times” [42] and was “the opening wedge for ‘Yueh’ influence in Hong River Plain.” [43]
In regard to the purpose and scope of Ou Yueh’s aggrandizement, we can speculate that it is dynastic in nature – that is, it probably reflected the personality and was conducted in the name of Thuc Phan. Yet, most of what we know about Thuc Phan is mostly from legendary tales. For example, from the legend of the golden turtle, a golden turtle assisted Thuc Phan in subduing the local spirits so that Thuc Phan could finish his citadel at Co Loa. Before departing, the turtle gave Thuc Phan one of his claws to be used as the trigger of the king’s crossbow, assuring that he could destroy any enemy. By some accounts, this turtle claw symbolizes the military nature of Thuc Phan’s conquest and reign, suggesting his rule was based on force or the threat of force. [44]
However, unlike the Austroasiatic colonial diasporas, the Ou Yueh’s aggrandizement was not a classic case of cultural diffusion and appeared in general not to have direct and stimulus effects on Lac society. That is, the arrival of Ou Yueh lords and military personnel did not mark any large scale of sufficient magnitude to account for the origin of a people. [45] In addition, there is no evidence the Thuc Phan’s arrival left any mark on the Vietnamese language or caused any demographic change. [46] However, Thuc Phan did built a great citadel at Co Loa which was his capital and may contributed to the development of the canal-irrigated rice fields that were present in northern Vietnam before 111 B.C.; as well as a centralized state in which, according to a Chinese census of 2 A.D., over a million people populated northern Vietnam. [47]
Yet, the key reason why Thuc Phan’s arrival did not transform the Lac society was merely the fact that the latter was a well established civilization whose physical size must have been considerable and whose language, cultural traditions, and class structures were effectively durable and stable. This is in the sense that Thuc Phan’s reign was not able to disinherit the Lac society’s language, the Lac lords, or cultural motifs such as tattooing, betel chewing, and oral tradition.
For instance, recent research shows that the initial settlement of Co Loa started about 2000 B.C. Starting about 500 B.C., [48] “there was a move in some lowland river locales, from village autonomy towards centralized chiefdoms, occurring approximately at the same time when the knowledge of iron-working was being established in Southeast Asia and slightly earlier than initial direct contact with Chinese and Indian civilization. [49] The evidence that more than 200 Dong Son style drums have been found throughout the Southeast Asia region suggests that the Lac society was engaging in sophisticated intraregional trade, prior to the infusion of Chinese modes of authority and trading techniques.
Notwithstanding, Thuc Phan’s ensuing conquest produced a fusion of the invading Ou (Au) Yueh lords and the resident Lac lords, thereby forming the kingdom of Au Lac. [50] Thuc Phan was apparently absorbed in the legendary traditions as King An Duong who came from the north and built a great capital but eventually fell prey to stronger forces coming from central China. [51]
But probably the lasting effect of Thuc Phan’s reign is that his arrival, that of the Ou Yueh, in northern Vietnam was utilized by the Chinese traditional historiography to demarcate the origin of the Vietnamese people, and perhaps because of the above simplicity of this, such perspective “still continued to attract attention.” [52]
Although Vietnamese are believed to have originated from the migration of the Yueh, as caused by the growing Chinese expansion in the third century A.D., it is more or less reflective of the ever present reality that the traditional Vietnamese society was displaced by Chinese colonial diasporas starting after the fall of Thuc Phan in 207 B.C.
For example, the word “Viet” is the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Chinese term Yueh, which is employed by Chinese scholars as synonyms of “barbarian.” When the Ch’in dynasty came to power in 222 B.C., it deployed a general, Chao T’o (Trieu Da in Vietnamese) to invade the southern Yueh lands and to establish a Chinese southern state, including conquering Thuc Phan and his Ou Yueh lords. By 207 B.C., Chao T’o created a capital near modern Canton, commanding the Kwantung and Kwangsi Provinces, and the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, and proclaiming himself King of Nan Yueh (Nam Viet).
During Chinese direct conquest of northern Vietnam in 43 A.D., the word Yueh/Viet increasingly came to express the conquered people’s place within the “middle kingdom.” For the Chinese rulers, Yueh/Viet was to be temporary since these people would eventually be civilized and become Chinese. For the Vietnamese, after the beheading of more than five thousand Lac lords who were associates of the Trung Sisters’ rebellion against the Han dynasty in 41 A.D., their name Lac was no longer of account, whereas the name Yueh/Viet carried some weight. [53]
On the one hand, the word Viet connotes displacement and a permanent identity within the Chinese world view, but Viet also is rooted in a conviction not to be Chinese. [54] This conviction will later indicate that, while Vietnamese were displaced, they were never replaced. However, such displacement does require the reconstruction of cultural identity in order to first survive and later, to put back the “place” into displacement.
Although the original Lac society eventually disappeared, there are still traces of their traditions. According to Gerald Hickey, characteristics of the Lac society can still be found today among Vietnam’s highlanders, particularly those speaking Mon Khmer languages. [55]These include the practice of levirate (that is, a man must marry the widow of his childless brother in order to maintain the brother’s line); having special deities associated with agriculture; and having a “dinh” or communal house temple for the guardian sprite of the village. [56]
It has been speculated that the Mon Khmer speakers are linguistically related to the Lac people, but the former chose to retreat to the country’s highlands when the northern forces came to the country. So, if we want to examine the degree that “an indigenous core of ‘Vietnameseness’ survived unscathed through the fire of Chinese domination,” we may look to the Mon Khmer highlanders.
1. Nguyen Dinh Hoa, “An Outline of Vietnamese,” Vietnam Forum, Vol.11, 1988, (p.1-20).
- Is the Vietnamese language genetically related to Chinese?
- What has enabled the Vietnamese language to be “displaced but never replaced”?
- Do you think the Vietnamese language in the Vietnamese diasporic community could be maintained?
- What do Vietnamese legends and early history say about women status?
- What do Confucian values say about women status?
- What does the oral tradition say about women status?
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[1] John Sullivan, National Geographic Traveler: Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006), p.28.
[2] Georges Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Translated by S.B. Cowing, ed. W.F. Vella (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1968), p.13
[3] Such a prevailing view appeared to have disregarded postulations that Southeast Asia could have been a “maker” of history rather than a receiver or a victim. For example, in the early 1950s geographer Carl Sauer hypothesizes that the region should have been a center of plant domestication. See his Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (New York: George Grady Press, 1952).
[4] Georges Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, p.268, 403.
[5] John McAlister and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p.50.
[6] Keith Taylor, “An Evaluation of the Chinese Period in Vietnamese History,” The Journal of Asiatic Studies (Korea University), 23 (1980), p.139.
[7] John Cady, Southeast Asia: Its Historical Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p.4; Joseph Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1958), p.19.
[8] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” p.25.
[9] Ibid., p.17.
[10] Ibid., p.17.
[11] Peter Bellwood, “The Origins and Dispersals of Agricultural Communities in Southeast Asia,” in Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, ed., Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p.22.
[12] Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p.11.
[13] Ibid., p.11.
[14] Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.87.
[15] Miksic, 1995, p.49.
[16] Peter Bellwood, “The Origins and Dispersals of Agricultural Communities,” p.22.
[17] Ibid., p.23.
[18] Ibid., 24.
[19] Ibid., p.21-23.
[20] Ibid., p.22.
[21] Though some still include south China (but not Burma), as a part of mainland Southeast Asia. See Peter Bellwood’s Man’s Conquest of the Pacific.
[22] Peter Bellwood, “The Origins and Dispersals of Agricultural Communities,” p.22.
[23] Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific, p.71
[24] Charles Higham, “Mainland Southeast Asia from the Neolithic to the Iron Age,” in in Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, ed., Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History,p.41.
[25] Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific, p.96.
[26] Ibid., p.96
[27] Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia: From 10,000 B.C. to the Fall of Angkor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.193.
[28] Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific, p.129.
[29] Ibid., p.122.
[30] Bayard, 1980, 106
[31] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), Appendix B; Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), p.67-69.
[32] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, Appendix D.
[33] Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery, p.67
[34] Ibid., p.69
[35] Henri Maspero also concluded that Van Lang was an error for Yeh-Lang, the name of ancient kingdom in Kuei-Chou. Thus, there never was a kingdom of Van Lang.
[36] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, Appendix B.
[37] Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery, p.68.
[38] Blakeley, Barry “The Geography of Chu” in Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, Ed. By constance A. Cook and John S. Major, Honolulu: Hawaii Press, 1999, 10
[39] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” in D.R. SarDesai, Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Los Angeles: Westview Press, 2006), p.25.
[40] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.21.
[41] Ibid., p.20.
[42] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” p.25.
[43] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.17.
[44] Ibid., p.21.
[45] Ibid., p.17.
[46] Ibid., p.17.
[47] Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific, p.125.
[48] Charles Higham, “Mainland Southeast Asia,” p.46.
[49] Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia, p.30
[50] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.20.
[51] Ibid., p.23.
[52] Ibid., Appendix E.
[53] Ibid., p.43.
[54] Ibid., p. xviii.
[55] Gerald Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven: Yale University of Press, 1982), p.62-63.
[56] Georges Coedes, The Making of South East Asia. Translated by H.M. Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p.218.
Jan
24
Theorizing and Conceptualizing Displacement
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2.1 Theorizing and Conceptualizing Displacement in the Vietnamese Context
As noted in the Introduction, we will utilize the motif of displacement to theorize and conceptualize how the current Vietnamese diaspora relates to and/or transcends Vietnam’s migration history and experiences. The advantage of displacement is its numerous operative paradigms – that of a theoretical signifier, a textual strategy, and a lived experience – which will help us to contextualize and to characterize the various forms of diaspora across time and space. For example, displacement as a theoretical signifier will allow us to recognize the historical and political conditions that produce periods in which Vietnamese were displaced both internally and externally from their native culture and society; displacement as a textual strategy will provide us the opportunity to understand why Vietnamese may be “displaced but never replaced” though it remains a source of estrangement; and displacement as a lived experience will help us to conceptualize the relationship between displacement and the reconstruction of identity which is necessary for cultural survival and later, to assert and negotiate cultural and intellectual rights to put back the “place” into displacement.
We will begin with a necessary but brief survey of the concept of displacement and its relation to diaspora. This will ensure that our interpretation of displacement is not based on constructing the shape of the past to shape the present, but rather based on “following directions and messages provided” by the sources. [1] In addition, we will examine different “types of aggrandizement” that colonist powers engaged in expanding their control over colonized societies. This will allow us to outline the historical, political, and international conditions that have produced different types of colonial diasporas of which have had displacing effects on Vietnamese traditional society. Such outline will essentially draw our attention to a central theme in Vietnamese history: that is, Vietnamese as ‘victims,’ ‘localizers,’ and ‘resisters’ of the Chinese, French, and Japanese colonial diasporas; in later a blog, we will outline and analyze the Vietnamese colonial diaporas that had displaced other peoples, cultures, and states, including that of the Cham, Khmer, the former Republic of South Vietnam, and Cambodia.
Defining Displacement and its Relations with Diasporas
In defining displacement, we are fortunate to have Angelika Bammer’s succinct analytical definition: “The separation of people from their native culture either through physical dislocation (as refugees, immigrants, migrants, exiles or expatriates) or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture.” [2] Bammer’s displacement signifies one of the most formative experiences – that of the human condition and conditions of knowledge – in the twentieth century, where over 30 million people were uprooted and forcibly moved as a result of Nazi policies and World War II; [3] overlapping with this is another 60-80 million refugees worldwide who have been cut off from their homelands since the end of the second war. Bammer also draws attention to “people who are not expelled from but displaced within their native culture by processes of external and internal colonization” but of which “no comparable counts or estimates exist.” [4] Though not all those under colonial rule can be said to be displaced. There is more certainty, however, that the cumulative effect of colonial policies in general:
the expropriation of land that often left indigenous peoples with merely a small, and mostly poorer, portion of their own land; the pass laws that controlled and regulated their physical movement; the economic shifts that forced them into the new centers of imperial employment thus creating new patterns of migratory labor; the presence of a foreign ruling power that disappropriated local cultures. [5]
In utilizing displacement as a theoretical signifier, we take liberty in further deconstructing (while remaining within the framework of) Bammer’s definition in two broad categories. The first is emigrants who are physically dislocated either “voluntary” or who are “forced;” that is not due to “colonizing imposition of a foreign culture” per se, but rather by the country’s own internal socioeconomic and political factors. [6] The second is those who are physically dislocated by the “colonizing imposition of a foreign culture,” which results in either their displacement from their native land/culture or their displacement within their native land/culture. [7]
For us, the importance of the above categories is that they assist in defining the concept of diaspora, providing a background in recognizing specifically the victim tradition and the colonial tradition of diaspora.
In the former, the displaced person can be considered a victim if he/she is forcibly and politically removed from (or he/she emigrates in the fear of being politically persecuted if he/she stays in) the native land/culture either by the country’s government or by colonial rule. When this occurs at “noticeable” human scale, such movement entails “the catastrophic origin, the forcible dispersal and the estrangement” of a people, which we term ‘victim diaspora.’ [8] Here, the victim diaspora is a subset of displacement, [9] or separate from the paragon of transnationalism, transmigration, or global capitalism. [10]
In the latter, the “colonizing imposition of a foreign culture” provides us a background to the tradition of the colonial diaspora in which the colonizers are dispersed widely in order to sow their seeds, to expand for and to further their imperial plans. Here, colonial diaspora allows us to recognize the effects of colonial rule on a society where a population is colonized and internally displaced, in which degrees of assimilation to the colonists’ culture, localization, and “creolization,” or resistantance to the colonists’ culture can occur, separate from the external displacement caused by colonial rule. [11]
Epistemologically, the colonial diaspora, or diaspora of active colonization, derives from Greek term diasperien, from dia-, “across” and –sperien, “to sow or scatter seeds.” It was a predominate feature of the Greek diaspora, describing its colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean from 800-600 B.C. For the Greeks, establishing their own diasporas abroad in general connotes a positive experience – expansion through plunder, military conquest, and migration. [12] Such diaspora of active colonization tradition was later followed by the British, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French. [13]
By contrast, the origin of diaspora Jewish experience was marked by the destruction of Jerusalem in 568 B.C., which “created the central folk memory of the negative, victim diaspora tradition, emphasizing in particular the experience of enslavement, exile and displacement.” [14] This victim tradition later experienced by Africans, Armenians, Irish, and Palestinians – connotes afflictions of being isolated, insecure of living in a foreign place, adrift from their roots, and oppressed by an alien ruling class. [15] But we should also note that some groups can take dual or multiple forms, or even change their character over time. [16] As argued by Robert Cohen, victim diaspora, such as the Jews, whose origin can be regarded as such, can have an imperial phase, as is evident in the Zionist colonization of Palestine. [17]
The above, of course, indicates the opposing notions of victim diaspora and colonial diaspora. But rather than trying to resolve the opposing notions, [18] we may gain more by understanding the historical and political conditions that produce the colonial diaspora and victim diaspora, as well as by analyzing the dynamics and tension within and between them. For now, however, let us focus first on the impacts and effects of the colonial diasporas on their colonized societies.
This approach, or textual strategy, will allow us to later see displacement caused by colonial diasporas as one of the central themes in Vietnamese history in both classical and modern periods; in addition, it will also allow us to see Vietnamese as the “aggressors,” having their own colonial diasporas and having displaced other peoples, cultures, and states.
Types of Colonial Rule and their Effects on Displacement
Given that displacement caused by the “colonizing imposition of a foreign culture” by Western powers (hereinafter referred to as western colonial diasporas) had been one of the underlying themes in the twentieth century, we will focus on expansionist factors that help explain, in part, the impacts and effects of western colonial diasporas on their colonized societies, focusing on Asian countries.
We will briefly analyze these expansionist factors and postulate their displacing effects on Asian traditional societies. Our purpose, of course, is to utilize such analysis to detect and outline the various types of colonial rule (hereinafter referred to as colonial diaspora) that have taken form in Vietnam in both the classical and modern periods, as well as the colonial diaspora phases that Vietnam itself has taken on.
Again, we are fortunate to have Frank Darling’s study on the “westernization” or colonization of Asia. [19] His work identifies four “types of aggrandizement” in which western colonial diasporas have engaged in expanding their control to Asian traditional societies: 1) dynastic, 2) economic, 3) ideological, and 4) tutelary.
In short, dynastic aggrandizement is characterized as intensely personal and conducted in the name of the sovereign ruler, although such colonizations have been precarious and uncertain. [20] Economic aggrandizement took place when propensity to expand and acquire overseas colonies was motivated primarily by the desire to promote rapid economic development, which tended to result in a more stable colonial rule than the dynastic. [21] Ideological aggrandizement consisted of the extension of national power into colonial territories by an expansionist regime pursuing the goals of an abstract messianic doctrine but, like the dynastic, it was affected by the shifting political forces within the ruling expansionist regime; [22]and tutelary aggrandizement is characterized as the acquisition of colonial territories for the primary purpose of instructing the indigenous people in selected elements of the culture of the colonial power, which tended to result a relatively moderate and, once established, sought no additional territory. [23] There are, of course, various forms in each of the four types, and that each type is not exclusive; that is, a colonist can pursue numerous types of aggrandizement.
However, of course, the impacts of the purpose and scope in the above types of aggrandizement are interrelated with the geographical factors of the traditional society, such as the strategic location, physical size, and the duration of years of the traditional society. [24] “Where settlement for colonial or military purposes by one power occurred, an ‘imperial [colonial] diaspora’ can be said to have resulted,” as noted by Robert Cohen. [25] However, before any colonial diaspora can take place, there are usually linkages between the colonizer and the colonized. These linkages include military invasions, foreign missionaries, foreign traders, tribute missions, indigenous returnees, political exiles, and foreign communities. [26]
It is important to note that the recognized types of aggrandizement and their linkages have tended to operate within the context of time: unilateral-monopolistic timing (that is, the expansion occurred because of a “power vacuum” that essentially allowed a colonial power to monopolize a particular region and only limited by the available resources and voluntary restraints of that colonial power); and multilateral-competitive timing (that is, when the expansion of a new colonial power is confronted with opposition from one or more competing colonial powers). Of course, some countries were strong enough to prevent these foreign linkages to take full form and, thus, were able to confine a full-blown colonization. [27] But when colonial diasporas do take place, the indigenous population will produce a response, consisting of the reaction and replication of the indigenous people to the colonial impact. Of importance are the cultural, religious, and political systems of the traditional society; these are of significance in terms of its ability to resist or assimilate to the various colonist values and institutions. [28]
Although it will be very limited, the above analytical framework will come to light when we apply it to an actual case: the American colonization of the Philippines.
According to Frank Darling, American colonial policy in the Philippines consisted of tutelary aggrandizement goals, instructing the indigenous people on (but confining them) the formation of indigenous democratic political institutions modeled after those in the United States, which, in turn, involved the establishment of a supplementary American-oriented educational system. [29] The American colonization process tended to be erratic and constrained due to American domestic politics at the time regarding whether the nation should pursue expansionism or isolationism, but, nevertheless, it was the only Western power whose avowed purpose at the outset was its own liquidation. [30] In part, American tutelary aggrandizement was affected by multilateral-competitive timing. That is, the U.S. was pressured to rationalize its acquisition, rather than seeking a territorial extension of its power. [31] This form of timing contributed to the training of indigenous political leaders suitable for democratization in the Philippines. In part, Filipino leaders who took early consultative roles in the exercise of executive authority had produced a profound confidence and intensified the local desire for national independence, which “was one of the most important elements in the entire indigenous response.” [32]
As is evident, the passage of Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 provided a timetable for Philippine independence; in 1936, when the Philippine Commonwealth was created only a few American administrators were employed in educational and technical posts. [33] The idea of an efficient transfer of sovereignty to the Philippines could be traced to the Wilsonian concept of national self-determination promulgated at the end of WWI. In contrast to French rule in Indochina, the American form of colonial rule did prepare and transfer sovereignty to the Philippines via new political institutions modeled on the American constitutional system, and because the central issue was about the timing of national independence the Philippine nationalist movement was never suppressed. [34] Similarly, American social policy consisted of a dual purpose program of secular education to promote democratic norms and values to a mass electorate and to train indigenous elite to maintain a democratic society. In particular, the number of Filipino students who attended public school by 1922 (more than one million) was unprecedented by any Western colonial standard. [35] While the Philippine economy was largely dependent on the U.S. (the American economy consumed 75 percent of the Philippine exports while providing 85 percent of its imports), American economic policy did not uproot the Philippine agrarian economy.
However, at the same time, as argued by Mark Philip Bradley, the American “exceptionalist” colonial approach in the Philippines still “echoed the fundamental beliefs in racialized cultural hierarchies that underlay the broader American encounter with nonwhite peoples at home and abroad.” [36] And, as argued by Glenn May, American colonialism in the Philippines failed to “bring about fundamental change.” [37]
On the one hand, Darling’s comparative analysis may marginalize particular historical inputs as well as long-term displacing effects in order to invent a systematic framework that is able to compare and contrast the highly and multifaceted impacts of, and the indigenous response to, western colonial powers in Asian colonized societies. But for our purposes, such systematic framework will provide us a textual construct to outline the historical, political, and international conditions that have produced different types of colonial diasporas of which have had different displacing effects in Vietnamese history.
Outlining the Colonial Diasporas in Vietnamese History
As we noted earlier, there are two historical traditions of diaspora: that of victim diaspora and colonial diaspora. Here, we will focus on colonial diasporas and their effects on Vietnamese traditional society, the internal displacement of Vietnamese native culture. In the later blogs, we will discuss specific dimensions of displacement caused by colonial diasporas; outline and analyze the Vietnamese colonial diasporas that had displaced other peoples, cultures, and states, including that of the Cham, Khmer, the former Republic of South Vietnam, and Cambodia; and theorize and conceptualize the victim diaspora in Vietnamese history.
For now, we will briefly discuss the colonial diasporas in Vietnamese history, which will essentially draw our attention to a central theme in Vietnamese cultural identity. That is, Vietnamese as ‘victims,’ ‘localizers,’ and ‘resisters’ of the Chinese, French, and Japanese colonial diasporas.
There is today a consensus among Vietnam scholars that the ancestors of the Vietnamese had their own kings and cultural symbols long before the arrival of Chinese colonial powers (or what we will refer to as Chinese colonial diasporas), although when the ancient Vietnamese civilization originated and the degree of indigenous innovation and evolution are not known with certainty; and presumably, according to Keith Taylor, the continued existence of the Vietnamese indigenous civilization “would have been assured even if they had never heard of China.” [38]
Notwithstanding, from the beginning of recorded history in the third century B.C. (when Vietnamese culture and society for the first time were part of a kingdom, Nam Viet, encompassing all of southern China in 207 B.C.), to 939 A.D., Vietnamese culture and society had been thought of as a branch of Chinese civilization and empire who had been blessed with China’s “civilizing” influence. [39] It has even been thought that the reason Vietnamese society “was able for centuries to resist Chinese aggression” while all the neighboring states had become Chinese “was because it was the only one to have been subjected to government by a permanent Chinese administration…[which] gave [Vietnamese] a cohesion and formal structure which its neighbors lacked.” [40]
Conveniently, French intellectual support for its ‘mission civiliatrice’ drew on the observation that Vietnam was once relatively progressive and intelligent due to Chinese cultural influence, but of which had relapsed. Vietnam’s “imitativeness” became nothing more than a somewhat eccentric and stunted extension of China, according to this view. For French historians, after separating from China in 939, the Vietnamese made no progress on Chinese civilization throughout the centuries. Adrien Launay suggested that “the complete absence of progress that the Annamites [Vietnamese] had on Chinese civilization and the neglible development in the arts and sciences, far inferior to that of the Chinese” illustrated that without Chinese domination, “Giao-chi [northern Vietnam] of old times would have rested in savage tribal communities, just like the Muong who live on the frontiers of their country.” [41] By implication, Vietnamese, like other peoples, will “progress only when provided with the necessary stimulus: they require contact with people of a more refined culture.” [42]
However, the Vietnamese, as a result of their experience under Chinese rule, necessarily became expert survival artists. This is illustrated in Ngo Si Lien’s statement of how Vietnamese should respond to constant Chinese aggression:
South [Vietnam] and North [China], when strong or when weak, each has its time. When the North is weak, then we are strong, and when the North is strong, then we become weak; that is how things are. This being so, those who lead the country must train soldiers, repair transport, be prepared for surprise attacks, set up obstacles to defend the borders, use the ideas of a large country with the warriors of a small country…If an invasion is imminent, take words and negotiate, or offer gems and silk as tribute; if this does not succeed, then, though danger flood from every side, man the walls and fight the battles, vowing to resist until death and to die with the fatherland; in that case one need be ashamed of nothing. [43]
In fact, the “rebirth” of Vietnam after its independence was the birth of a spirit of resistance to the universal claims of Chinese power. Keith Talyor summarizes very well the advice of Ngo Si Lien to his fellow countrymen:
Vietnamese independence [will be] the result of commitments made by successive generations…It [will need] the collective decision of a society to risk danger for the sake of preserving its heritage. [44]
Also worthy of note is Ngo Si Lien’s advice on using “the ideas of a large country with the warriors of a small country.” Vietnamese were quite receptive to the intellectual trends in China and though imperfect have been able to reconcile their attraction to Chinese political ideas, social practices, literary fashions and technology with a truly passionate determination to preserve Vietnam’s independence. [45] Moreover, as noted by John Whitmore, there is a “Vietnamese cultural core” that is constant thought shifting entity, where foreign elements and ideologies would be able to graft onto it, but “the important fact is the Vietnamese ability to make any such ‘foreign-ness’ Vietnamese;” [46] thus, Vietnam is not the smaller, eccentric or stunted dragon.
Not unlike the dynastic scholars, Vietnamese intellectuals in the early twentieth century also saw it as their responsibility to fight against French imperialism. In fact, many of these intellectuals began to ask what they could learn from Europe and America. According to many of these scholars, to survive and to modernize, Vietnamese had to produce the talents, skills, and ideas of a Watt, Edison, Kant, and Rousseau, whose ideas were the sources of Western civilization, wealth and power. Some were also conscious and sought the example of Tagore and Ganhdi in overthrowing a western power while still achieving a fusion of eastern and western thoughts. Like Ngo Si Lien, Phan Boi Chau, a prominent scholar at the time, saw the necessity for Vietnamese, particularly women and soldiers, to be trained professionally and vocationally in the western ways in order to achieve modernization and independence from the French, bringing about a desire for progress and adventure, love and trust, virtue and heroism, no obnoxious mandarins, no dissatisfied citizens, no imperfect educational system, no neglected industry and no losing commercial activities. [47] After that, the West “will learn from us,” and that we “shall keep our own way of life,” declared Phan Boi Chau. [48]
However, as observed by John Whitmore, when new foreign elements are integrated to the indigenous’ own context and its own understanding of itself, this “will inevitably be imperfect and may lead to tension and stress within the society.” [49] That is, such fusion – such as Phan Boi Chau’s embrace of the West modernity but not its colonial rule – was completely incompatible to the Vietnamese communist intellectuals’ borrowing of the Marxist-Leninist thoughts, which was initially “set out to replace everything in the Vietnamese tradition” [50] with a significant degree of single-mindedness on rechanneling “people’s loyalties and obligations away from their own parochial interests to the party, revolution, and the collective” via institutional structures, civic rituals, and literacy. [51] This foreshadowed “the two Viet-Nams” of the Vietnam War.
Perhaps, the question for Vietnam, today under a communist regime, is “to ask now and in the future the contribution of Marxist ideology to Vietnamese culture in the same way that we ask it of Buddhism and Confucianism.” [52]
For a brief outline of particular colonial diasporas in and their displacing effects in Vietnamese history, see 3.1 Online Classroom which includes the Austroasiatic Colonial Diasporas (3000-1000 B.C.); Ou Yueh (Au Viet) Colonial Diaspora (257-207 B.C.); Chinese Diasporas (207 B.C. - 939 A.D.); French Colonial Diaspora (1862 -1954); and Japanese Diaspora (1941-1945).
- For a concise sketch of Vietnamese history before French colonization, read: John Whitmore, An Outline of Vietnamese History Before French Conquest, Vietnam Forum, Vol.8, 1986 (p.1-8).
- On the theme that Vietnamese could benefit from Chinese culture without themselves becoming Chinese, and of which also appeared to underlie later experiences with western colonial powers though such adaptation inevitably be imperfect and may lead to tension within the society, read: Alexander Woodside, Vietnamese History: Confucianism, Colonialism, and Independence, Vietnam Forum, Vol.11, 1988, (p.21-48).
- For a comparsion regarding the survival capacity (i.e. adatability/resistance, cohesiveness of societal structures, physical size and geographic location, and the duration of years of the traditional society) of Asian traditional societies in response to western colonist powers, read Frank Darling’s Chapter 4 in his The Westernization of Asia: A Comparative Political Analysis (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979).
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[1] O.W. Wolters, Two Essays on Dai Viet in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), p. ix.
[2] Angelika Bammer, Displacement: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xi.
[3] Ibid, p. xi.
[4] Ibid, p.xi.
[5] Ibid, p. xi-xii.
[6] It should be noted that the task of separating voluntary and involuntary migration is much more difficult in practice. There has also been a growing effort by scholars to differentiate migration cause by man-made disasters and migration cause by natural disasters.
[7] Today, the displaced person in either category who has crossed an international border and who falls under relevant international refugee law instruments maybe considered a refugee, whereas an internal displaced person in the second category is subjected to more tenuous international refugee law protection.
[8] Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p.177.
[9] According to Wanni Anderson and Robert Lee, “the relationship between the tropes of diaspora and transnational social practice can be understood bet as two related but often contradictory aspects or subsets of displacements.” See their Displacement and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p.10.
[10] Other scholars, however, argues diasporas are connected to and frequently marked by the flows of transnationalism, transmigration, and even global capitalism. Therefore, economic migrants or transmigrants can be considered diasporic and can inflect diasporic formulations. For example, many Asia sex workers travel to Japan on tourist visas and never return to their homeland for socioeconomic reasons. These workers become trapped by the pressures of family, nation, and economic necessity. Therefore, they are tied to their homeland via debt, family obligation, and statelessness. See Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), p.11, 13.
[11] Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas, p.66.
[12] Ibid, p.66.
[13] Ibid, p.178.
[14] Robert Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-state: From Victims to Challengers,” International Affairs, Vol.72, No.3 (July, 1996), p.508.
[15] Ibid, 508.
[16] We are also fortunate to have Robert Cohen’s fluid typology of diaspora which consists of victim, labor, trade, imperial and cultural diasporas. We will later analyze this typology in more detail. See Cohen’s Global Diasporas: An Introduction.
[17] Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas, p.179.
[18] In general, this has been resolved by over centuries of advocacy by the victim diaspora’s experiences in which the heart of diaspora’s definition has become to mean a collective trauma of banishment, exile, and the longing to return home. However, Robin Cohen has argued the victim tradition is more complex and diverse. For example, diaspora’s experiences in modern nation-states have resulted in considerable intellectual and economic achievements. By implication, there is a need to transcend the victim tradition. See his Diasporas and the Nation-state: From Victims to Challengers, International Affairs, Vol.72, No.3 (July, 1996), 513.
[19] Frank Darling, The Westernization of Asia: A Comparative Political Analysis (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979).
[20] Ibid, p.105-106.
[21] Ibid, p.106-109.
[22] Ibid, p.109-110.
[23] Ibid, p.110-112.
[24] Ibid., p.79-87.
[25] Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas, p.66.
[26] Frank Darling, Westernization of Asia, p.63-71.
[27] Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas, p.65.
[28] Frank Darling, Westernization of Asia, p.3.
[29] Ibid., p.111.
[30] Ibid., p.111.
[31] Ibid., p.116.
[32] Ibid., p.286.
[33] Ibid., p.287.
[34] Ibid, p.121, 127.
[35] Ibid., p.143.
[36] Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p.6.
[37] Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900-1913 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980).
[38] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. xviii.
[39] Ibid., p. xvii.
[40] Keith Taylor, “An Evaluation of the Chinese Period in Vietnamese History,” The Journal of Asiatic Studies (Korea University), 23 (1980), p.139
[41] Cited in Nhung TuyetTran and Anthony Reid, Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p.6.
[42] Cited in Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.8.
[43] Keith Taylor, Birth of Vietnam, p.301.
[44] Ibid., p.301.
[45] Alexander Woodside, “Vietnamese History: Confucianism, Colonialism and the Struggle for Independence,” The Vietnam Forum, Vol.11 (1986), p.23.
[46] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” in D.R. SarDesai, Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Los Angeles: Westview Press, 2006), p.40.
[47] Chau Boi Phan, “The New Vietnam (1907),” in Truong Buu Lam, Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp.105-123.
[48] Ibid, p.109, 121.
[49] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences,” p.125.
[50] Smith, Viet-Nam and the West, 152, 145.
[51] Malarney, Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam, p.55.
[52] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences,” p.40.
Jan
13
Introduction
Filed Under 2008 | 7 Comments
Introduction
The Global Vietnamese Diaspora Blog
This blog is designed to study the Vietnamese diaspora(s) around the globe, theorizing and conceptualizing the dimensions, the characterizations, and the trajectories of the diasporic Vietnamese community.
To effectively and efficiently theorize and conceptualize the lived experiences of diasporic Vietnamese, the thematic motifs of “displacement” and “memory” are employed.
First, the motif of “displacement” will allow us to compare and contrast the Vietnamese diaspora to other and earlier forms of movement and migration (caused by military conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion) that have long been a part of Vietnam history. And because “displacement” empathically draws attention to the physical, psychological, cultural, and intellectual afflictions, [1] we opportunely have an analytical construct to cross-examine how the Vietnamese diaspora relates to and/or transcends Vietnam’s migration history and experiences.
Meanwhile, the motif of “memory” will provide us the opportunity to read how displaced Vietnamese, both past and present, have maintained their relationships with the collective memory and myth about their birth place. And because the collective Vietnamese memory directs us to a “cultural core” that is a constant though shifting entity, [2] we will be able to characterize in some manner what would count within and which would be considered integral to the “Vietnamese cultural core” across time and space. The Vietnamese “displacement” of its native culture and society – caused by colonization (that of Chinese and French rule) and internal regional division (that of the “two Dai Viets” and the “two Viet-Nams”) – is a consistent theme in the country’s history. Here, “memory” will illustrate how Vietnamese have attempted to preserve but also have elaborated its “culture core” by putting back the “place” into displacement. Yet, at the same time, putting back the “place” has also been underscored by internal debates and conflicts about what that “place” should be. In fact, it is these decolonization and unification/reunification moments that have produced the various forms of exile, including the current diaspora. Meanwhile in the Vietnamese diaspora context, “memory” will be used to conceptualize and delineate the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” in the diaspora. Emphasis will also be given on how the Vietnamese diaspora’s ideological sense of “returning” to and “re-sowing” its seeds in the homeland will play out, given the increased capacity to do so, such as the new international conditions and communication technologies.
Like earlier displaced Vietnamese, today’s diasporic Vietnamese have a “culture core” which is, in part, still unified via “a collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its location, history and achievements”; [3] and who still trace their common identity, language, cultural and religious beliefs and practices to a common ancestry. Yet, because communism is blamed for the separation from the native land and culture, the Vietnamese diaspora has put the “us” and “them” in tension with regard to the current communist regime’s “culture core,” specifically the way it exemplifies and personifies foreign influences and political ideology. Also in tension though more implicit is the diaspora’s construction of its identity in the host country. This has been about the diaspora’s assertions and negotiations of its right to place and space, as well as its cultural and intellectual rights to counter against the host country’s “his-story” that has tended to marginalize the discourse of who can speak and teach what about the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
In both cases, however, there are internal differences and debates within the diasporic Vietnamese community about how to engage Vietnam and how to define its cultural heritage.
In general, the blog will explore and attempt to examine questions including but not limited to:
- How does the current Vietnamese diaspora relate to and/or transcend the country’s migration history and experiences?
- What are the dimensions of the Vietnamese diaspora and are these dimensions “diasporic moments” since diasporic Vietnamese are products of different migration vintages and whose ethnicity is always in a state of flux?
- What are the ways in which Vietnamese construct/reconstruct its “culture core” including home, family, youth, gender roles, and community and anti-communist identities in the diaspora?
- How do problems, practices, realities, voices and visions of Vietnamese community development compare and contrast across and within the various diasporic Vietnamese communities around the world?
- What are the existing links among the various Vietnamese diasporic communities around the globe and do the diasporic Vietnamese media enable or disable these links?
- What are the impacts of the diaspora on the homeland and what are the impacts of opening the homeland to the diaspora?
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[1] Wanni Anderson and Robert Lee, Displacement and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p.11.
[2] John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” in D.R. SarDesai, Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Los Angeles: Westview Press, 2006), p.40.
[3] “A collective memory and myth about the homeland” is one of the common features of a diaspora, as conceptualized by Robert Cohen. See his’s Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p.26.
Jan
2
Reading the Legend of Lac Long Quan and Au Co
Filed Under 2008 | 36 Comments
Reading the Legend of Lac Long Quan and Au Co
As noted by Indigo Williams Willing, Vietnamese history and culture are deeply entrenched with stories of forced migration and kinship separation associated with numerous global diasporas, from legendary tales, to tales of refugees evacuating and escaping their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War. [1]
Indeed, one of the most well-known myths – that of Lac Long Quan and Au Co – is a story of origin and of displacement. The mystical story of Lac Long Quan (“Lord of the Sea”) and Au Co (“Queen of the Mountain”) was recorded in the Linh Nam Chich Quai (“Wonders Plucked from the Dust of Linh-Nam”), an accumulation of lore edited in the fifteenth century. As penned by Vu Quynh who wrote the preface to Linh Nam Chich Quai in 1492:
In ancient times there were not yet books of history to record the facts; therefore nearly all the old affairs have been forgotten and lost. Fortunately, there still exists some items that were not neglected, having been passed down from mouth to ear among the persons of special ability…[and] have been kept in the hearts of the people and inscribed on the tongues of men. [2]
According to this tradition, the Vietnamese people are associated with the Hung kings who ruled the kingdom of Van Lang. The Hung kings claimed descent from Lac Long Quan, a hero who came to the Hong River Plain in what is now northern Vietnam, whose race is of the dragons and who is chief of the watery breed. Lac Long Quan assisted the people of the Hong River Plain by subduing all evil demons in the land and civilizing the people, teaching them to cultivate rice and to wear clothes. Before returning to his home in the sea, he instructed the people to call on him if they were ever in distress.
Eventually, the people of the plain called on Long Quan when a monarch from the north, China, entered the land, and finding it without a king, claimed it for himself. [3] To force this foreign ruler out of the plain, Long Quan outwitted the northern monarch by capturing the king’s wife and taking her on the top of Mount Tan Vien. Not able to retrieve his wife, the northern king departed in despair.
Long Quan lived with Au Co, where a year later, the latter gave birth to one hundred sons. But not long after this, Long Quan returned to the sea. Au Co and her children also wanted to return to the northern kingdom but were not allowed to return by the northern emperor and were left abandoned in the wilderness. Long Quan came quickly after hearing Au Co and the children had been left stranded.
But their differences could not be solved, since Long Quan was a water creature and Au Co was an immortal sprung from the earth. Thus, they separated. Long Quan bade fifty of his sons to follow their mother back to the mountain, while the other half would follow him back to the sea. Before departing, he bade all his sons that: “Whether you go up to the mountains or down to the sea, you shall let one another know if you are in difficulties, and you shall no means desert one another.” [4] The hundred sons agreed.
This legend is remembered by the Vietnamese because they express their earliest identity as a people in which the hundred sons are the ancestors of the Hundred Yueh (Viets). Of whom the bravest and most courageous (who followed Au Co) were selected to become the first of the Hung kings, succeeding Long Quan and ruling over the kingdom, known as Van Lang. And while the hundred sons were physically separated, they were not necessarily divided, according to this tradition.
Myth: Remembering and Elaborating the Past
At best, myths can provide historians insight into what might have happened in prehistoric time. At worst, beliefs about the past based on myths may bear little resemblance to the events that, nevertheless, take on a life and reality of their own. That is, myths can become “facts” which helps to shape the future’s history.
By some accounts, Vietnamese myths were not written down until about the 13th century A.D., a few centuries after Vietnamese independence from Chinese colonial rule (939 A.D.). As noted by Keith Taylor, when Lac Long Quan’s legend was incorporated into Ngo Si Lien’s court history, Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu, in the fifteenth century, this legend was encrusted with elaborations stemming from the cultural currents and public morality of the period. [5] For example, in contrast to Linh Nam Chich Quai, the Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu mentioned Au Co as the northern king’s daughter, simply for moralistic reasons so that Long Quan would not be guilty of taking another man’s wife. In addition, the first of the Hung kings was noted to be one of the sons who followed the father, thus stressing patriarchal values. These elaborations were shaped by Ngo Si Lien’s focus on Confucian ethics in order to stabilize internal conflicts and to encourage court officials to be loyal to the new Le emperor and dynasty (1428-1776), so as to prevent another Chinese invasion; [6] whereas during the Ly (1010-1225 A.D.) and Tran (1225-1400 A.D.) dynasties, the concept of government was based on “the idea of restoring harmonious relationships between rulers and ruled, and between rulers and the supernatural powers” as well as calling on “the pantheon of Vietnamese spirits thought capable of turning their supernatural power against invaders.” [7]
Like other cultures, Vietnamese history and myth have been interdependent. [8] In the fifteenth century, when Tran dynasty was crumbling and the country was experiencing humiliation at the hands of Cham aggressors and Ming invaders, “educated men were searching for new source of national vitality,” searching for “treasures that had been previously ignored and perhaps scorned but that now gave a renewed sense of identity to a people adrift in a stormy sea.” [9]
Thus, a renewed sense of identity may be the underlying value of such myths. Vu Quynh’s preface in Linh Nam Chich Quai makes this clear:
This material, although wonderful, does not reach the point of extravagance, and this literature, although unorthodox, does not reach the point of fantasy; although passed down through an unverified tradition, not being found in the classics, it still has something than can be relied on, namely to warn against evil and to exhort the people to reform, to discard the false and follow the true, thereby encourage public morality. [10]
The above, as noted by other scholars, does not mean that such myths were without historical background. The Vietnamese oral tradition was probably well rooted in prehistoric culture of the people in the Hong River plain and was surely transmitted during the Chinese colonial period, though such tradition perhaps was poorly articulated, and was later elaborated by a Vietnamese ruling class to propagate the prevailing ideas of proper behavior, sometime too zealously. [11] Illustrative of this is Ngo Si Lien’s predating the origin of Vietnamese civilization (via the Hung kings) to 2879 B.C., in order to construct an identity of Vietnamese that was equal if not superior to the mythical emperors of China. [12] This was done by employing a royal genealogy with a northern (China) and a southern branch (Vietnamese), tracing Lac Long Quan’s heredity to the northern imperial branch so as to claim a more ancient lineage for the Hung kings than that of China’s first emperor, Huang Ti. [13] While the northern branch was designed for cultural and political purposes, Keith Taylor notes that the southern branch displays enough geographical and cultural detail to make more plausible the idea that it is based on ancient traditions.
In fact, Hung as the title of a line of kings and the Van Lang kingdom are attested in Chinese (Ch’in and T’ang dynastic) sources. [14] Meanwhile, the word Lac described the paddy fields that were irrigated by taking advantage of the change in the level of the rivers in accordance with the tides, according to the oldest Chinese descriptions of ancient Vietnamese economy and society. [15] Lac then became the earliest recorded name for the Vietnamese people, and of which is the factor that united the legendary Hung kings and the early historical period down to the Trung sisters (43 A.D.) whose father was a Lac lord in the Me Linh area (northwest of Hanoi).
The Displacement in the Lac Long Quan’s Legend
It appears that when direct colonial rule was enforced in northern Vietnam, after the Han dynasty succeeded in putting down the Trung sisters’ rebellion in 43 A.D., Vietnamese and their traditions had to come to terms with their colonial masters. That is, without their traditional ruling class (the Lac) of which more than five thousands were captured and beheaded during and after the rebellion, [16] Vietnamese, those who “collaborated” with the Han rule, most probably shifted their identity to take account of their new position. [17]This means that their oral tradition had to be revised in order for it to culturally survive. An example of such revision is the hundred sons as the ancestors of the Hundred Yueh, as mentioned in the Lac Long Quan’s legend. The word “Viet” is the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Chinese term Yueh, which is employed by Chinese scholars as synonyms of “barbarian.” The Chinese character of Yueh (Viet) when analyzed ideographically means a migratory, hunting people. According to the traditional Chinese historiography, the “birth” of Vietnam originated from the refugee population of Yueh (Viet), located along the coast where the Yangtze River enters the sea and was an ethnical branch of the Chinese race.
The migratory Viet established small kingdoms and principalities that Chinese historians referred to as the “Hundred Yueh” (Viets) in which Nan Yueh (Nam Viet) was at the center. When Ch’in dynasty came to power in 222 B.C., it deployed a general, Chao T’o (Trieu Da in Vietnamese) to invade the southern Yueh lands and to establish a Chinese southern state. In 207 B.C., Chao T’o created a capital near modern Canton, commanding the Kwantung and Kwangsi Provinces, and the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, and proclaiming himself King of Nan Yueh (Nam Viet). In 1802, when Emperor Gia Long of the Nguyen dynasty wanted to rename the newly unified country as Nam Viet, he sought the Chinese emperor’s approval of the name. The Chinese emperor rejected this name because it could conjecture territorial ambitions since Chao T’o’s Nam Viet had included two Chinese provinces. [18] Instead, it was resolved by simply reversing the order of the two words into: Viet Nam.
During Chinese conquest of the south, the word Yueh/Viet became to express the conquered people’s place within the “middle kingdom” but it was to be temporary since these people would eventually be civilized and become Chinese. For the Vietnamese, their name Lac was no longer of account, whereas the name Yueh/Viet carried some weight. [19] Thus, Vietnamese, because of their unceasing displacement, may have shifted some of their traditions to fit within the conceptual world of the Chinese empire and civilization.
This included abandoning the formal use of the name Lac and the use of dragon as the water god instead of the frog (which was found in the ancient Vietnamese Don Son drums). While under Chinese rule for one thousand years, the Vietnamese never abandoned their indigenous traditions and gradually developed a spirit and intelligence capable of resisting Chinese rule. Notwithstanding, the word Viet does connote displacement. That is, Viet expresses a permanent identity within the Chinese world view and one that was not indigenous to the original Lac civilization, and yet, at the same, it is rooted in a conviction not to be Chinese. [20] This implies that Vietnamese were displaced but not replaced and suggests that being displaced is associated with the reconstruction of cultural identity in order to first survive and later, to put back the “place” into displacement.
Rediscovering the “Place” in Displacement
One of the consequences of being displaced within the Chinese empire and civilization is that in most cases the Chinese dynastic histories and related writings are the only sources of information on Vietnam up to the tenth century. Until recently, Chinese historiography still regards the Yueh/Viet peoples, including those occupying northern Vietnam, as branches or ‘brotherly ethnic groups’ of the Chinese race who were civilized solely by the expansion of Ch’in Shih-Huang-Ti and his Han successors. [21] Some still claim that the Yueh inhabitants of prehistoric Vietnam can be literally traced to origins in northern China. [22]
However, by the early 1980s, a new prehistory of northern Vietnam has become increasingly undeniable. Prehistoric northern Vietnam’s culture is now found more or less parallel to rather than a derivative of cultures of northern China, and the former, as an area from 11000-1000 B.C., is of largely independent regional development. [23]For example, around 11000 B.C., northern Vietnam was a key site of the late Hoabinhian cultures, of which most of the cultural evolution was internal rather than a replacement of one culture by a new cultural group.. [24] Evidence suggests that Hoabinhians were hunters. Bone materials from a wide range of mammal species were found, including pig, deer, dog, elephant, rhinoceros and cattle. Perhaps with the exception of pigs and dogs, none of these species appear to have been domesticated.. [25] When heavy core tools appeared starting 8000 B.C., it clearly demonstrated the Hoabinhian’s innovation rather than inertia, as the transition from hunting to a greater dependence on plant food began in this region. [26]
By late third or early second millennium B.C., (a period known as Phung Nguyen culture), northern Vietnam saw evidence for cultivation of rice, along with a broader range of cultural material, such as stone arrowheads and knives, baked clay spindle whorls and bow pellets, and pottery with incised and comb-stamped decoration. [27] Pottery in this period has been considered to be directly ancestral to the pottery of the Dong-Son culture of the first millennium B.C., [28] which gives further support of a cultural continuity throughout the prehistoric occupation of the Red River valley. [29] The roots of the Dong Son culture, whose indigenous development of the bronze style is little beyond doubt, may well extend back to at least 1000 B.C., antedating any significant Chou influence. [30] While the archaeological Phung Nguyen and Dong Son periods may provide the cultural context of the existence of the Hung Kings and its Van Lang kingdom as far back as the second millennium B.C., “there is no doubt that the Chinese encountered a society controlled through paramount chiefs of high status,” according to Charles Higham. [31]
In regard to the people of the Hong River Plain, by 3000-1000 B.C., Vietnamese sites suggest a complex regional division of labor and the existence of loosely knit multiethnic confederations long before Chinese influence was felt in the region. [32] During this period, “a time traveling linguist would have noted a network of languages and dialects of tribal size” such as the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Tai (and later, the Chinese). [33] In fact, this would explain why Vietnamese language, a Mon-Khmer language of the Austroasiastic family, has clearly recognizable loans from Austronesian and later developed into a tonal language that is likely borrowed from the Tai language group.
Interestingly, the movement and changing cultures as noted in the legend of Lac Long Quan can be matched with recent archaeological discoveries. For example, when Lac Long came to Hong River Plain and assisted and civilized the people (before the arrival of the northern king), this probably indicates the contact between Austroasiatic and Austronesian peoples. Lac Long’s chief of the watery breed seems to resemble what is known about Austronesian’s seafaring populations, such as their advanced ship building and navigational techniques. Such contact is given visual form in the in the art of the Dong Son bronze drums, where sea birds and amphibians surround boats bearing warriors, revealing a ruling class perspective heavily influenced by Astronesian culture. Although a tribal size, Astronesian elite may have been a part of the ruling class in the Hong River Plain, it did not disinherit the Austroasiastic culture, which are known to be rice cultivator populations.
Furthermore, when the people of the plain called on Long Quan when a monarch from the north entered their land, this probably indicates the arrival of a non-Chinese Mongolian army of the Western Ou. Keith Taylor suggested that the name Au Co was probably introduced into Lac mythology to symbolize the political union of Au and Lac. That is, the Au Lac kingdom that was established in 257 B.C. by Thuc Phan (King An Duong), which may have some association with the Ou Yueh/Viet lords. This may indicate the first arrival of the Yueh/Viet in northern Vietnam, but there is no evidence the King An Duong’s arrival left any mark on the Vietnamese language or caused any demographic change. [34]
While Vietnamese experience unceasing displacements and reconstructions of their identity by taking on layers of external influences throughout their history, such experiences never supplanted the Vietnamese historical agency, or was able to completely sinicize the indigenous language, village religion, kinship reckoning, sex roles, residence and inheritance tactics, which are still distinct and persistent to this day. [35]
One key reason why Vietnamese have never been disinherited is the ability of the local culture to neutralize a northern threat by appropriating its source of legitimacy, as did Lac Long Quan’s seizing his fore’s wife and making her the mother of his heirs. [36]
As mentioned earlier, the value of the legend of Lac Long Quan and Au Co may not lie in its details, but rather may lie in the understanding the very core of the Vietnamese experience, being displaced but not replaced and the need to reconstruct the cultural identity in order to survive and to put back the “place” in the displacement.
But can both “displacement but not replacement” and “putting back the ‘place’” function across ethnicity and space?
- Why is the author so acknowledgeable about Vietnamese legends and history?
- How did the generation of the author’s father deal with being displaced by French colonial rule?
- How does the author define his “place” during the division between North and South Vietnam in the early days of the Vietnam War
- What is the effect of the Lac Long Quan’s legend on the adopted Vietnamese community?
- Do the adopted Vietnamese post-adoption narratives read like the tale of “rags to riches”?
- What does reclaiming and returning mean to adopted Vietnamese?
[1] Indigo Williams Willing, “The Adopted Vietnamese Community: From Fairy Tales to the Diaspora, Michigan QuarterlyReview 43,4 (Fall 2004), p.649.[2] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p.355.[3] Ibid., p.1.[4] Maurice Durand and Nguyen Tran Huan, An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1985), p.5.[5] Keith Talyor, The Birth of Vietnam, Appendix 0.[6] Yu Insun, “Le Van Huu and Ngo Si Lien: A Comparison of Their Perception of Vietnamese History,” in Nhung TuyetTran and Anthony Reid, ed., Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p.62[7] Keith Taylor, “Chapter 3: The Early Kingdoms,” p.140, 149.[8] However, this is not necessarily appreciated in traditional Western historiography. See Wang Gungwu, Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), p.62.[9] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p. 357.[10] Ibid., p.357.[11] Ibid., p.311.[12] Yu Insun, “Le Van Huu and Ngo Si Lien,” p.62.[13] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, Appendix A.[14] Ibid., Appendix B and C.[15] Ibid., Appendix B.
[18] Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p.120-121.
[19] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.43.
[21] See Xiaorong Han, 2004, 24-25; K.C. Chang’s Archaeology and Chinese Historiography, World Archaeology, 13, 1981; W. Watson, The progress of archaeology in China. In Antiquity and Man (eds) J.D. Evans et al., London: Thames& Hudson, 1981; Chang, 1977; Ho, 1975.
[22] Charles Holcome’s The Genesis of East Asia 221 B.C. – A.D. 907, Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 55.
[23] Meacham, 1977, 155; Chang, 2002
[29] Charles Higham’s The Archaeology of Mainland SEA, 193
[31] Charles Higham’s The Archaeology of Mainland SEA, 193
[32] Bayard, 1984; Higham, 1982; and Davidson, 1979.
[34] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.17
[35] See John Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” in D.R. SarDesai, Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Los Angeles: Westview Press, 2006).
[36] Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p.1.
