CHAPTER 1
IN THE SPRING of 1694, Shilian Dashan, a Buddhist abbot in charge of the Changshou Monastery in the southern Chinese port city of Guangzhou (Canton), received two letters from Vietnam—one from a former disciple now serving as the Dai Viet court’s advisor on Buddhist matters, the other penned by the ruling lord himself, Nguyen Phuc Chu. Since assuming power a few years earlier, the Vietnamese ruler had been trying to bring this highly regarded missionary to Hue to help spread the Buddhist church. Part of it was personal; Chu wanted to believe. Part of it was also designed to legitimate royal power and reinforce Nguyen state-building in a very contested land. To convince the Chinese master of his sincerity, Nguyen Phuc Chu insisted in his missive: ‘I now devote myself to burning incense and meditation’ and ‘humbly beg the master of the Way to change his mind and agree to travel. Only then will our kingdom prosper.’1
It apparently worked, for a year later Dashan and his team of over a hundred people landed in today’s central Vietnam. The Chinese monk immediately set to work, performing the rites making Nguyen Phuc Chu his first Vietnamese disciple, before initiating the royal family, court officials, and various elites into Buddhism. Dashan presided over the establishment of new temples and the renovation of others. He advised court officials and the Nguyen lord on Buddhist doctrine and statecraft, essential to helping the Nguyen make a new Vietnam, independent of the one further north from which it had initially sprung.
Dashan could not have sailed back to China in 1696 without realizing that there was not one ‘Dai Viet’, but in fact two hiding behind that name—one which had been anchored in the Red River delta for centuries and still was, the other moving its way southward past Hue. Based in Guangzhou and having proselytized extensively in Asia, Dashan would have also known how overland and seaborne routes had long connected both of these Vietnams to China, the South Seas, and the Indian Ocean. Chinese traders and monks had been crisscrossing these areas for centuries, spreading Buddhism from India to Korea, Japan, and the Red River lands. Confucianism and Daoism had arrived in these countries through similar channels. And as our Chinese Buddhist missionary returned to his monastery, he would have also known that another group of religious men, Christians, were also hard at work in this part of the world where so many people, routes, and ideas intersected. This is where the story of Vietnam’s past in this chapter begins, in this open zone running between today’s central Vietnam and southern China.
IMPERIAL CONFIGURATIONS
A Mosaic of a Hundred Viet
The area of the Red River delta and the hills that line it from three sides is considered today to be the cradle of Vietnamese civilization, the sacred land from which today’s Vietnam traces its national heritage back for thousands of years. Viewed from above, it’s a beautiful sight to behold: emerging from the cragged reliefs of southern China, the Red River slowly winds its way through a rice-terraced delta, then past the capital of Hanoi before emptying into the Gulf of Tonkin. For thousands of years, the low-lying Red River basin has been home to diverse peoples arriving via the eastern coast and overland from the surrounding hills. Austro-asiatic peoples moving into mainland Southeast Asia by way of southern China are thought to have been among the first to arrive in this area during the Neolithic period (10,000–2,000 BCE). Similar migrations occurred to the west, where three other waterways parallel the Red River’s descent into Southeast Asia—the Irrawaddy crossing Burma into the Andaman Sea, the Chao Phraya flowing through Thailand to the Gulf of Thailand, and the Mekong that winds its way slowly from Tibet to Saigon.
Some of the earliest settled agricultural communities appeared in the Red River plains from around 3,000 BCE as climatic changes began drying parts of what had until then been a very swampy place. As it did, rice cultivation spread in from northern areas in the Yangzi valley. Over time, thanks to the development of dikes and canals, inhabitants began to control flooding and used irrigation for double-cropping. Such intensive, wet-rice agriculture supported larger populations, as did early maritime exchanges with Asia. Dominant families emerged, clans united into tribes, and more complex socio-political institutions evolved. The spread of metal- and bronze-casting technology allowed craftsmen to make agricultural tools, weapons, and a variety of art objects as cloth production flourished.
Peoples inhabiting this area participated in a wider civilization covering large swathes of present-day southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. Archeologists refer to it loosely as the Dong Son culture. Thanks to archeological excavations, radiocarbon dating, and historical linguistics, we know that this civilization thrived roughly between the sixth century BCE and the second century CE, extending from the Red River plains to today’s north-eastern Thailand and northward into southern China’s Yunnan province. Its bronze drums, which one can see on display in the National Museum in Hanoi today, were used for religious and political purposes. These drums, some of which boast pictures of elegant cranes, have come to symbolize Dong Son’s brilliance and, for many, the origins of Vietnamese national identity. While the Vietnamese village of Dong Son, where many of these artifacts have been unearthed, was an important production site in this prehistoric civilization, the fact that peoples living far beyond present-day northern Vietnam produced similar ones during the same era complicates such nationalist claims.2
The Dong Son civilization was home to a vibrant collection of peoples and cultures, but it was not always a pacific region or a unified one. As one group eyed the riches of another, conflicts inevitably arose. Local metal and bronze production meant that weapons were available. Ambitious rulers organized warrior classes to expand their territories and control populations. Local polities rose and fell as small dynasties, tribes, and their strongmen clashed. Indeed, Dong Son drums were often made with war in mind. As far as we know no one ruler ever gained the military upper hand or projected the charismatic force needed to create a single ‘Dong Son federation’ extending from southern China to northern Vietnam. Some scholars have suggested that power was perhaps organized locally around a collection of charismatic military leaders or kings. A local balance of power tended to prevail. Central control would have thus remained diffuse and moved through a multi-centered array of small territories, ‘a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas, or “circles of kings”’, who, in turn, often relied upon a spirit world to legitimate their rule. New research, however, suggests that a powerful, centralized political authority emerged in the third century BCE in Co Loa near Hanoi. A complex of walls, moats, and ramparts supported a surprisingly important urban population for the time. The large amounts of labor needed to build and defend such a center also suggest that Co Loa achieved a high level of political, social, and economic organization that may have allowed it to dominate other Dong Son locations concentrated in the Red River valley.3
The nature of this ancient state formation continued to evolve when the ‘Chinese’ Qin (221–206 BCE) and especially the Han dynasts (206 BCE–220 CE) dominated and then began unifying warring tribes concentrated between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers into a single imperial core state. At the center—between heaven and earth—stood one divine leader, the emperor, equipped with a mandate from heaven. In theory, he ruled the empire through a bureaucratic state and military capable of holding and administering large swathes of multi-ethnic territories. Upon assuming power, Qin and Han emperors soon dispatched their forces southward to conquer new lands. Access to people and resources was essential to perpetuating the imperial state as it expanded from its core area outward. This, in turn, required authorities to devise an array of direct and indirect methods for ruling distant and multi-ethnic lands and peoples.4
Casting themselves as the leaders of a universal empire, Chinese rulers, imperial officers, colonial administrators, and their explorers viewed the peoples they encountered south of the Yangzi (as well as in the Central Asian steppes) with a combination of curiosity, arrogance, disgust, and fear. Like the Romans also hard at work building an empire on the other side of Eurasia, the Han coined a range of terms to describe the inhabitants living beyond their empire’s confines, people they considered to be bereft of superior Han civilization and thus worthy of conquest. The Romans borrowed the Greek term for ‘barbarian’ to distinguish themselves from those living outside the civilizing domain of the empire. Han authorities used the terms yi, man, and others to make sense of those living outside the civilizing confines of the ‘central country’, zhong guo. They also used the characters for ‘beyond’ and ‘across’ to describe those living below the Yangzi. One such term was ‘Yue’ (‘Viet’), meaning ‘those from beyond’. Chinese officials often coupled it with the word for the ‘south’, ‘nan’, to indicate its geographical relationship to the Middle or Central Kingdom, giving us Yue Nan (Viet Nam) or Nan Yue (Nam Viet). The Chinese annals confirm, too, that there was never a single ‘Yue/Viet’ state, but rather a collection of dynastic and tribal polities operating across much of southern China into the Red River basin. Many had fled into this area in 333 BCE when the Qin destroyed an ancient Yue state located along China’s middle-eastern coast. At one point, the Han used the characters Bai Viet or Bach Viet to refer to the ‘Hundred Viet’ tribes located in what they now increasingly viewed as a ‘borderland’ below the Yangzi River.5
ENTER THE CHINESE EMPIRE6
It was during this shifting geopolitical context, as Chinese rulers began incorporating southern lands into their own protean imperial formation, that ‘Vietnam’ enters the Chinese empire and with it the written historical record. Vietnamese writing in the fifteenth century asserted that in 257 BCE, a local king named An Duong Vuong united the Lac Viet and Au Viet tribes into a single polity in the Red River area called Au Lac. It consisted of peoples coming from the delta and its surrounding highlands. While it is likely that An Duong Vuong took control of the Co Loa center located near today’s Hanoi, this early state did not last long. Around 170 BCE, it fell to a rogue Han general based in Guangzhou named Zhao Tuo. Without the consent of the court, he carved out a separate borderland polity and named it the land of the ‘Southern Viet’ (Nam Viet/Nan yue). It included the Co Loa area of the Red River delta as well as parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.7
Zhao Tuo’s regime lasted little longer than its Au Lac predecessor, as Han imperial troops moved in. In 111 BCE, the Han dynasty formally incorporated these southern ‘yi’ lands, consisting of Viet and non-Viet peoples, into their imperial state as a military commandery. Despite a few brief periods of independence, the people of the Red River remained there until the tenth century as China’s frontier province of Jiaozhi (Giao chi in Vietnamese). Initially, Jiaozhi included the Red River delta and much of today’s Guangdong province, the highlands as well as the deltas. In the late fifth century CE, the Chinese reduced the province’s borders to today’s upper Vietnam.8
Control of this southern province was of major concern for the Han. Partly this stemmed from the attraction of its fertile plains and agricultural production; but trade also pulled imperial strategists southward. The Qin and Han had both extended canal building toward the southern coast in order to profit from international commerce coming from the South Seas and the Indian Ocean, what they often combined into one term as the ‘Southern Seas’ or Nanhai. The coast of today’s northern Vietnam provided an excellent opening for trading with Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and as far as the Mediterranean. This attraction of the Southern Seas is worth keeping in mind here and for later periods, for just as the overland Silk Road connecting China to the Roman and Parthian empires drew the Chinese empire deeper into the Central Asian steppes to the north, so too did the Indian Ocean’s markets, peoples, and products pull it southward into the Red River toward Southeast Asia. In 231 CE, a Han administrator in Jiaozhi was categorical about Vietnam’s commercial value, writing to his superiors that agricultural taxes yielded little revenue compared to international trade: ‘This place is famous for precious rarities from afar: pearls, incense, drums, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, tortoise shells, coral, lapis lazuli, parrots, kingfishers, peacocks, rare and abundant treasure enough to satisfy all desires. So it is not necessary to depend on what is received from regular taxes in order to profit the Central Kingdom.’ The Chinese would in turn export highly sought-after products to international customers, including ceramics, tea, and silk.9
Like their Roman and Parthian counterparts, Han imperial armies could be massive and conquest was often brutal, despite the lofty civilizing missions proffered by their emperors. Those ‘barbarians’ who refused to submit to imperial power often paid with their lives. Survivors found themselves jailed, banished, demoted, or homeless. Pragmatic-minded Han authorities realized, however, that such hard-handed methods would get them nowhere in the long run. Blind military conquest and assimilation without a political endgame were costly affairs and only created a sea of hate from which the ‘barbarians’ would recruit their own armies. Perceptive colonial officials also realized that while the empire circulated Han administrators, officers, and settlers to work in the south, their numbers would never be large enough to operate the state effectively at the lower, yet vital levels of the administration in which few spoke Chinese. One Chinese administrator posted to the south bemoaned the gap between colonial theory and practice in a report: ‘Customs are not uniform and languages are mutually unintelligible, so that several interpreters are needed to communicate. . . . If district level officials are appointed, it is the same as if they were not’.10
Located far from the metropolis, many Han authorities had no choice but to accommodate local leaders by offering them a role in the provincial administration. Rather than defeating aristocratic families, warlords, or shamans, compromises were reached and concessions were made. Outside the provincial capital, colonial authorities used pre-colonial administrative structures, kinship networks, and cults to rule indirectly, regardless of the orders they received from on high calling for uniformity and assimilation. Over time, the court eventually opened the doors of the imperial army, administration, and academies to Red River Viet as a way of instilling loyalty, building legitimacy, and ruling effectively.
While resistance to Chinese imperial expansion was real, so was the desire of many Viet to build a better life from within the empire. This was often the case for groups that had been marginalized under pre-existing orders and saw a chance to reassert themselves and their projects in the new balance of power and within the new imperial formation. Well into the twentieth century elite Viets would serve at the highest levels of the Chinese state and army. Equally important, Han cultural, technological, military, and political modernity proved attractive, especially when it could be used to promote local interests, trade, and identities. As a result, over the centuries, a new Sino-Viet or Sinitic elite emerged in the provincial capital near today’s Hanoi, while much less ‘Sinicized’ chieftains and aristocratic families continued to exercise power at the local levels. But without the collaboration of these local Sinitic elites and rural lords who knew the land, the people, and its languages, the Chinese imperial moment would never have lasted a millennium.11
Vietnam achieved a new level of development as a part of China. The foreign trade defended by our Han administrator above continued to drive change. But contrary to what he asserted, so did agriculture. In fact, by the second century CE, agricultural production had developed sufficiently enough to support a population of around one million people. New farming techniques and tools spread along with improved methods of diking and irrigation. Local manufacturing produced glassware from potash for local consumption and export. Bronze drum decorations reveal organized spinning and weaving production, based in part on slave labor. Drum-casting became a lucrative business with Red River manufacturers supplying them to nearby non-Han leaders who often used them as symbols of their local authority. The Chinese court taxed trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, with some of the revenue going to Jiaozhi lords.12
Empires have always served as motors for change. They connect and circulate peoples and move ideas, material cultures, and languages, and not just theirs. They can also serve as a process for accelerating integrative, technological, cultural, and economic change. A thousand years of Chinese rule spread many aspects of Han culture into Jiaozhi. Chinese administrators introduced new notions of law, time, and space (legal codes, calendars, measures, weights, maps, etc.) as well as bureaucratic statecraft, weapons, paper, and a character-based writing system to accompany it. Elite Red River culture changed with the introduction of Chinese-inspired royal architecture, music, art, and culinary practices, including the use of chopsticks. Thousands of Chinese settlers also moved into the delta during the colonial period, bringing with them a collection of new ideas, technologies, and words. Intermarriage was common, as were mixed offspring and bilingualism. Like the Middle English born of the Norman conquest of England in the twelfth century, a similar ‘Middle-Annamese’ arose in colonial Vietnamese towns, allowing many Chinese words to enter the Viet language during that time. The imperial connection also introduced ideas coming from further abroad. From its Indian birthplace in the fifth century BCE, for example, Mahayana Buddhism travelled the Silk Road with traders and missionaries and, through southern China and the coast, entered Vietnamese history through Jiaozhi province. Indian missionaries also visited and more than one Vietnamese monk went abroad for religious study in the native land of the Buddha.13
The Confucian repertoire of enlightened monarchy, good governance, and social harmony also circulated southward. In its simplest form, Confucianism turned on three basic relationships: subjects owed loyalty to the king; sons behaved with piety toward their fathers; and wives expressed submissive fidelity toward their husbands and sons. In theory, this male-dominated family hierarchy served as the bedrock for building an ideal government and harmonious social order. Just as sons submitted to their fathers, so too should subjects loyally serve their ruler. Ancestor veneration—whereby the living performed pious rituals ensuring the proper afterlife of deceased family members and royalty—reinforced this. The Chinese relied on Confucianism to erect centralized bureaucratic states and spread Confucian culture, after centuries of political instability and social disorder. This included the development of a modern civil service and examination system based on merit instead of court, family, aristocratic, or military connections. The importance and utilization of Confucianism ebbed and flowed over time and space. As a repertoire, it was a collection of techniques and guiding principles for regulating state and society.14
What deserves emphasis here, viewed from a comparative world history perspective, is four things. Firstly, despite nationalist claims to the contrary, there is nothing particularly surprising about Vietnam’s entry into and extended participation in the Chinese imperial state. Like the Au Lac Viet peoples facing the Han from the third century BCE onward, Celtic Gaul came under Roman attack in 121 BCE, with Julius Caesar subduing the area in 51 BCE. For half a millennium, the Romans ruled what became ‘France’ as a number of provinces. Like its Chinese counterpart, the Roman empire served as a vehicle through which institutions, laws, architecture, religions, and the Latin-based writing system spread into Gaul and other conquered lands. Not unlike the use of Latin in Europe, Chinese characters became the written language of bureaucratic politics and religious expression in East Asia, including Vietnam. Chinese characters (hanzi) served as the models for the development of writing scripts in Korea (hangul), Japan (kanji), and Vietnam (han tu or chu han). Each word in han tu or Sino-Vietnamese is a Chinese character, but read with a Viet pronunciation. Viet elites also used Chinese characters later to construct an indigenous demotic script, chu nom, adjusted to represent spoken Vietnamese. A millennium of Chinese imperial rule features in the Vietnamese past, just as the Roman empire helped shape French history.15
Secondly, whether in western Eurasia or on its eastern side, such transfers of power never worked out so easily on the ground. Chinese imperial power in Vietnam tended to be channeled through a few, small urban sites and handled by literate Sino-Vietnamese elites living in these administrative hubs. Few imperial channels fed directly into the countryside, where the majority (and largely illiterate) rural population resided. While elites had adopted many Chinese loan words in the ‘Middle-Annamese’ they spoke, the Mon-Khmer Vietnamese language (and others) resonated throughout the rest of the Red River delta. If imperial authorities wanted to reach this part of Vietnam, they had to connect to the pre-existing grid, staffed by local lords familiar with Sinicized ways, but operating in their languages and according to their customs. Located on the outermost rim of the empire, the majority rural population of Red River Vietnam, dominated by a dozen or so aristocratic families, lived in a spiritual realm where they venerated a host of deities and spirits reaching back into the depths of time. It was also a realm into which Buddhism had inserted itself, sometimes seeming as if it had always been there.16
The process of Confucianization certainly began in Vietnam under Chinese rule, but it remained a largely urban, administrative, and elite male experience. Moreover, because urbanization in Jiaozhi remained minimal under Chinese rule, the line between elite and popular religions and cultures was never drawn sharply. They overlapped. Viet elites in Hanoi may have been well versed in the Confucian canon and taken pride in writing Chinese characters, but they were just as often at ease in the composite religious world of Buddhist monks, spirits, genies, and cults. To return to the Eurasian comparison, it was not because the Roman Emperor Constantine backed Christianity in the fourth century or a Frankish tribal leader named Clovis was baptized a century later that all Europeans or Frenchmen suddenly became ‘Christians’. They did not. It took a lot of time. The same is true for ‘Confucian’ East Asia and Vietnam. If anything connected the Vietnamese to China, indeed the rest of Eurasia during this early period, it was this world of spirits, local cults, deities, soothsayers, and millenarian beliefs permeating the lives of elites and commoners alike.17
Thirdly, next to these cultural transfers, stood force. Not all emperors were benevolent father figures. Many used their armies to get what they wanted, regardless of the effects locally. Onerous labor requirements, heavy taxation, and corruption were sources of social discontent and revolt. Colonial culture and statecraft often collided with pre-existing political formations, privileges, cultures, identities, and languages. Resistance broke out often when the Chinese court pursued assimilationist policies or tried to impose direct rule instead of remembering the advantages of accommodation, flexibility, and indirect rule. The Trung sisters have gone down in history for their heroic rebellion between 39–43 CE. Fueling their defiance was the imperial execution of one sister’s husband against the backdrop of unpopular assimilation policies aimed at the local aristocratic class. The arrival of more Han settlers may have also triggered the revolt by removing local elites from positions of power, threatening their social status and landed interests. The Chinese emperor dispatched General Ma Yuan, who smashed the revolt before quelling another just to the north.18
Lastly, imperial rule transformed the colonial elites, both Chinese and Vietnamese. Over the centuries, Chinese settlers, army officers, and administrators who spent long periods of time in the empire’s south married into local families, picked up local languages, traded, and sometimes just wandered about. In so doing, they distanced themselves physically, culturally, even mentally from the imperial center. Han army officers invading the south were shocked to find a former Qin official ‘with his hair in a bun and squatting on the ground’. One Chinese poet in the eighth century opened a poem on life in Vietnam as follows: ‘I have heard it said of Jiaozhi, that southern habits penetrate one’s heart. Winter’s portion is brief; three seasons are partial to a brightly wheeling sun.’ He then mused about how the warlord Zhao Tuo had created an independent southern land a thousand years earlier. Indeed, Chinese settlers, officials, and their offspring could join forces with Viet elites to promote their shared interests, including independence from imperial rule. This tended to occur when the Chinese capital encountered difficulties, allowing rogue officers to take the initiative in the borderlands. Some of these rebels were ‘Chinese’; others were ‘Vietnamese’. Oftentimes they were both. It didn’t really matter. What counted most was their ability to garner local support, often from this spiritual world swirling beneath their feet, in order to transform military force into lasting political change. In 544 CE, with the Chinese court locked in civil violence to the north, a certain Ly Nam De led a rebellion against corrupt imperial rule before creating another Nam Viet kingdom. This Jiaozhi man had long been a magistrate in the Chinese administration, was trained in the Confucian classics, and descended from Chinese settlers. Similar strongmen asserted themselves across the southern confines of the Chinese empire. Nam Viet independence was, in the end, short-lived. In 602 CE, the Chinese re-established control over their coveted maritime province and its agricultural heartland. However, Viet and Sino-Vietnamese elites continued to hold high positions in Chinese Jiaozhi for another three hundred years.19
Independent Dai Viet
Jiaozhi province ultimately left the Chinese empire in the tenth century to become an independent state. A series of intertwined factors explain this key event in Vietnamese history. Firstly, the shattering of the Tang dynasty in 907 (if not earlier) weakened the imperial court’s hold over its distant provinces, allowing local elites or warlords to take things into their own hands. Colonial governors, without clear instructions from above or sufficient military force on the ground, looked on helplessly or ran for cover. Secondly, the attack on the imperial order in the Red River did not come from nomads descending from the Central Asian steppes on the scale of the Mongols and the Manchus who would later seize China. Dissent came from within the colonial order itself, from local military and administrative elites (the two often overlapped) convinced that they could do better without the Tang. In 939, Ngo Quyen, a high-standing prefect and general in Jiaozhi province, took advantage of the disintegration of Tang power to rally his men, beat back an enemy naval attack, and secure the province’s independence. That enemy attack, in fact, came from a very similar state based in Guangzhou whose leaders had declared their independence from the vanishing Tang to create the ‘Great Viet’ in 917 before changing it to the ‘Southern Han’ a year later. Ngo Quyen did not secure national independence from ‘China’, but rather from a sibling rival state in this overland and maritime zone shared by Vietnam and China. Within a century, Ngo Quyen’s men spoke of their own Dai Viet, or ‘Greater Viet’.20
Ngo Quyen also owed his victory to a rapidly changing regional balance of power on his other flanks. As a former general on China’s southern border, he and others like him would have been acutely aware of the rise of a host of neighboring states, several of which had become very powerful over the centuries. To the south, the Khmer and Cham had built expansionist states, whose leaders were not particularly keen on seeing this unprecedented Dai Viet state cut off their lucrative trade with the Chinese, crowd them out of the Indian Ocean market, or even deny them the Red River basin in the event that the Chinese actually packed their bags and left. To the west and northwest, federating Tai (not to be confused with Thai) polities drawing on increasingly large populations and caravan trading routes asserted themselves politically and militarily. In the eighth century, a particularly powerful Tai state emerged in Yunnan province named Nanzhao. When Tang officials threatened its profitable overland trade in horses in exchange for Vietnamese salt (two very important products), Nanzhao troops marched on the Jiaozhi capital in 846, 860, 862, and stayed for two years in 863. The Tang were already in trouble in the south before Ngo Quyen secured independence at the Battle of the Bach Dang River in 938. To the north, the weakening of the imperial hold over non-Han areas in Guanxi had already ushered in a number of chieftains moving toward self-reliance and de facto self-rule. Ngo Quyen clearly had models to emulate. Finally, the importance of Jiaozhi as the main trading port with the Indian Ocean declined under the Tang in favor of areas located further north. All of this would have encouraged local military men, lords, and officials to turn on the empire from the inside, while Tang strategists might have been willing to let it happen.21
In any case, taking power was one thing, holding on to it quite another. Regional powers like the Cham and Khmer continued to pose real threats to the fledgling Viet state and a Chinese counter-attack was always a real possibility. Just as important were a dozen or so Red River lords who had always been there and were not going to sit by idly as Ngo Quyen consolidated his power at their expense. The rapid Tang withdrawal of its military and colonial personnel created a power vacuum which these lords sought to exploit as much as Ngo Quyen. And as is so often the case in times of decolonization, civil war quickly broke out. For half a century, different groups scattered across the plains into the highlands of Jiaozhi. They competed with each other until a certain Ly Thai To emerged victorious and, in 1009, formed a dynasty carrying his family’s name.22
All of these families seeking to transform colonial Jiaozhi province into an independent Dai Viet state faced similar challenges—to what extent does one rely on the pre-existing colonial order and Chinese statecraft to rule independently? Should one create something entirely new or fall back on something that had never disappeared? How does one legitimate and structure a new postcolonial polity ideologically, religiously, and historically? Could one family or one charismatic leader rule a state for more than a generation against local lords who had never really been defeated? Or was it time to use a major world religion like Buddhism to structure, build, and impose a more centralized form of exercising power?23
While early military leaders like Ngo Quyen and Ly Thai To embraced monarchy as their core model, they all had to confront these deeper questions in one form or another. One of the first problems to solve was the question of political legitimation. After all, who could convincingly demonstrate, in 939 or 1009, a direct line of kinship to a royalist past and a founding monarch after a thousand years of Chinese rule and without ancient Viet records available to confirm much? No one. So Dai Viet kings did what so many others in their same positions had been doing from one end of Eurasia to the other. They carved out a mythic past, their past, and connected it to their present and its political needs. The court sent its annalists back in time to find the first rulers. They found them in the person of Co Loa’s An Duong, and then pushed deeper into the depths of time to resurrect the Van Lang, Phung Hung, and Hong Bang monarchs—who may or may not have actually existed. It didn’t matter. Making the myth did.24
Secondly, although the Dai Viet annalists did their best to prune their history of its colonial content, they were nonetheless at ease in Chinese characters, needed Chinese sources to find their past, and used Chinese history to authenticate their own. Indeed, by creating a Vietnamese antiquity on par with the origins of China itself, complete with an array of references to ancient Chinese history, dynasties, and philosophers, Dai Viet monarchs could further reinforce royalist legitimacy, much like medieval kings in Europe who consciously reconnected themselves and their states to the ‘first’ glorious Roman empire. Just as Charlemagne and his successors would cast themselves as the new Romans, Caesars (czars, kaisers, etc.), Vietnamese kings represented themselves as ‘Han’, the leaders of their own ‘middle kingdoms’, and the ‘sons of heaven’ in every way on a par with Chinese culture, statecraft, and, above all, antiquity. The challenge for the Vietnamese (as well as the Japanese and Koreans) was that the Chinese empire, unlike its Roman counterpart, endured; indeed, it is still with us. Once independent, the Gauls and Germans never had to worry about the Romans coming back to challenge their empire-building or heap ridicule on their legitimation stories. In any case, some Viet monarchs would succeed better than others at inventing the past; but there was nothing ‘fake’ about the process. And the fact that Dai Viet annalists invented their traditions in Chinese and based on Chinese sources made it no less authentic than that of their European counterparts using Latin and Roman archives.25
Thirdly, kings needed to tap into the rural cults, deities, heroes, genies, and their ritual circuitry in order to connect and then project their symbolic image to everyone, from elite members to villagers, and back into this eternal past (to which they were, in fact, largely foreigners). Rulers needed the spirits to ‘declare’ their support for the new ruler, or the new monarch needed to impose his story of spiritual support in order to exert control over his new subjects. It was a common political strategy throughout the Chinese empire; Chinese administrators in Jiaozhi had practiced it for centuries and the Vietnamese maintained it. Through dreams, miracles, and prophecies, rulers carefully searched out spirits that could be mobilized and often humanized to support the political cause. Buddhist monks often lent a helping hand, given that they moved through this spiritual realm so effortlessly. Completed in the early fourteenth century, the Departed Spirits of the Viet Realm recounts in one instance how the mythical King Phung Hung had provided the supernatural aid propelling Ngo Quyen and the Viet people to independence in the tenth century. Facing a Chinese attack from the north, Phung Hung revealed in a dream to Ngo Quyen that he should not fear, for ‘I have sent ten thousand regiments of spirit soldiers to strategic places, where they are ready to lie in ambush.’ And so it was. Having defeated the enemy, Ngo Quyen built a great temple and a royal cult in honor of this Phung ancestor. The fourteenth-century account concludes that this ‘had gradually become an old ceremony’, confirming, in fact, its recent invention.26
Creating a monarchy, equipping it with a royalist identity, myths, and ceremonies, and defending it with military power, backed up by spiritual soldiers, did not, however, mean that an operational state necessarily followed. Early Dai Viet did not emerge from a thousand years of Chinese rule fully equipped with a centralized bureaucracy running on a state-of-the-art Confucian motor. The Tang had pulled out the majority of their civil servants and the Chinese had never pushed an ideal Confucian order down to the grassroots level in Jiaozhi in any case. Neither the Ly (1009–1225) nor their successors, the Tran (1225–1400), could get rid of powerful aristocratic or military families that emerged with and drew strength from so much war. Nor could they bend the spiritual world to their political will overnight, despite what they wrote in their books or built as shrines. While both dynasties incorporated Confucian practices inherited from the colonial period, especially in diplomatic relations with China, their states turned on a fragile royalist alliance with the local nobility and the owners of large estates who continued to rule largely as before. Peasants might have become royal subjects instead of colonial ones; but they continued to interact with these local lords and especially the spirits and monks moving around them all. They did not march necessarily in lockstep with the new Ly and Tran rulers whose thrones only really controlled core areas around Hanoi.
Unsurprisingly, some of Dai Viet’s most effective leaders tended to have one foot in the court and the other in the countryside, where Buddhism and the spiritual world had long been mixing. The first Ly king was a Buddhist. Educated in a pagoda school, he knew his religious texts and understood how the clergy operated through a collection of monasteries spread across the land and in collaboration with the surrounding cults and spirits. Upon coming to power, Ly Thai To began elevating Buddhism to an official religion, with the king in charge of the monastic order and working in alliance with its monks to bring in prosperity, the faith, and, hopefully, more effective political and economic control. Vietnamese monks helped him in this endeavor ‘to guard the royal territory’. One such ruler required his subjects to refer to him as an incarnation of the Buddha. Others used Buddhism to create royal cults with ‘gold cast images of King Phan [Brahma] and De Thich [Indra]’ whom the Ly monarch ‘attended in ritual’. These rulers had much in common with their royalist counterparts at work in Cambodia (Angkor), Thailand (Sukhothai), and Burma (Pagan); but such practices were also to be found in China, Japan, and Korea.27
Unsurprisingly, Ly rulers also sought to attract and unify local, preexisting spirits moving across the land and channel them, their rituals, and deities and soothsayers toward the center of political power. In the eleventh century, following a revelation, the Ly king discovered the protective power of the Lady God of the Earth. He ordered the erection of a shrine to her in the capital in order to connect the spiritual realm to his own political base. Lastly, the Ly used inter-state and inter-clan marriages to ensure good diplomatic relations with powerful neighbors and consolidate political control internally. The Ly and Tran invested in agricultural development through the construction of more and better dikes and canals. As a result, the Red River population increased rapidly, thanks to better harvests and a steady and sufficient rice supply.28
While a religiously minded state based on inland agricultural and rapid demographic growth developed around Hanoi, a different tendency emerged in coastal Dai Viet where the commercial take-off of China’s Song Dynasty (960–1279) transformed the Gulf of Tonkin once again into a vibrant commercial hub. The shifting of the Song capital southward to Hangzhou in 1126 in the face of nomadic threats coming from the Eurasian steppes reinforced this. The Song’s robust cultural, intellectual, and commercial activities moved down the coast. And as Chinese trade with the Indian Ocean grew, a multi-ethnic collection of coastal traders moved into Dai Viet and began serving as intermediaries for the export of Chinese ceramics and silks to Cham, Khmer, island Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern markets. Elegant Vietnamese-made ceramics also flourished and found homes deep in the lands of the Indian Ocean. Commercial movements became so intense that the Dai Viet port of Van Don emerged at the center of an array of exchanges going up and down the coast from southern China and Hainan Island to northern Champa’s port near Vijaya in today’s Qui Nhon. Local merchants referred to this area bordering Dai Viet as the Jiaozhi Ocean. Local demand reinforced this commercial activity, which, in turn, attracted more people from China, Champa, and beyond.29
While the Ly monarchy loosely ruled all of the country from around Hanoi, coastal merchants, travelers, and immigrants introduced a host of new ideas, products, and technologies. Cham art found homes in the Ly, Tran, and early Le dynasties. Cham music could move the Ly court deeply: ‘Its sound was so mournful and sorrowful that it brought tears to listeners’ eyes’, wrote one witness. Little wonder. Many were prisoners of war. But Cham Hinduist ideas also found their way into Red River villages, whose populations used them to create their own local cults. Southern Chinese traders and Song political refugees fleeing the thirteenth-century Mongol conquest of China often carried with them their arts, culture, and political ideas, including some very Confucian ones. They also arrived with paper, printing presses, and literati who helped develop such ideas along the coast and found many a local convert at ease in Chinese and literate in classical characters. Zen Buddhism had also extended its roots along the coast. Shilian Dashan, our Chinese monk from Guangzhou, was anything but an exception in the seventeenth century. He was the product of a very maritime Buddhism with roots deep in the past.30
Early Dai Viet thus embodied a dual track in its early independent development: The inland capital of Hanoi ruled over the agricultural plains and mountains, while remaining connected via the Red River to the vibrant seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean. The leaders of a new dynasty, the Tran, arose from this coastal world to rule Dai Viet from Hanoi between 1225 and 1400. They were Buddhists, but they were also well versed in this coastal Song Confucianism. They were themselves the descendants of prosperous Fujian traders and fishermen, who had moved into maritime Dai Viet and intermarried with the Ly family. This alliance was symbolically significant. Not only did it facilitate the Tran acquisition of the Buddhist throne in Hanoi, but it also fused the inland, agriculturally focused Dai Viet with its coastal, outward-looking commercial half. This gave rise to a dynamic state, capable of making the most of its agricultural heartland and its international trade.31
It also made it a coveted land. The Tran had to fight off powerful Cham attacks from the south on several occasions. They then had to join their coastal competitor to repel even stronger Mongol offensives coming by land and sea in the thirteenth century. Lest we forget, the Mongols wanted to extend their massive Eurasian empire running from Persia to China down the Vietnamese coast in order to reach Southeast Asia’s Spice Islands. The Cham and the Vietnamese contained them at the Red River, while the Japanese and the Javanese did so by the sea.32
Like their Burmese and Thai counterparts moving from inland river capitals in Pagan and Sukhothai to ones in the deltas of the Irrawaddy (Rangoon) and Chaophraya (Ayuthia and Bangkok), something similar started to occur under the Tran, who shuttled between Hanoi and their coastal palace. The capital remained in Hanoi, but the Tran nonetheless reoriented it toward the coast. The Song had already moved their capital to the coastal town of Hangzhou. Politically, the Tran also opened a breathing space for more Confucian-minded literati and statesmen who saw in Song Confucianism a more effective way of creating a modern state and civilization than the Buddhist kind some had started to scorn privately. The Tran remained Buddhist believers, but that commitment did not prevent them and many of those working for them from promoting Confucianism as an alternative way of organizing state power and legitimating royalty. Under the Tran, Confucian and Buddhist approaches toward statecraft intermingled and sometimes entered into competition. The question as to which would ultimately prevail was never resolved before the Ming Chinese (1368–1644), having finally overthrown their imperial masters, the Mongols, invaded Vietnam in yet another attempt to grow the Chinese empire.33
Ming and Dai Viet Imperial Projects34
The Ming may have thrown the Mongols out of China in 1368, but they were as determined as their ‘world conquerors’ to push China’s imperial control into Southeast Asia. Not only did they march their armies into Hanoi in 1406 to re-impose Chinese rule, but, like the Mongols, they also sent their soldiers deep into the non-Han highlands crossing Yunnan, into the Tai polities like Lanna, and as far as today’s northern Burma. In these southern highlands spreading across Yunnan, the Ming dusted off the tusi or ‘native chieftan system’ to rule indirectly. And that system of indirect rule for the Tai would extend well into the twentieth century.35
Parallel to their overland thrusts into upper Southeast Asia, the Ming also sent their armadas deep into the Southern Seas, determined to establish a maritime order to their liking. Admiral Zheng He, himself a Muslim from Yunnan, led a series of naval expeditions through the Straits of Malacca, into the Indian Ocean as far as the east African coast and Mecca. To assert control over the spice trade in Southeast Asia, Chinese ships opened fire on Malacca a century before the Portuguese did. The Ming used tribute and trade to further the creation of an informal empire. Backing all of this up were very modern advances in shipbuilding and gunpowder technology. Chinese vessels thus carried commercial goods as well as tens of thousands of troops. Indeed, in the fifteenth century, the Ming armed forces were the most lethal in Asia, equipped with sophisticated cannons, guns, pistols, and grenades. The Europeans were not the only ones seeking to create ‘gunpowder empires’ or the first to bring new forms of modernity, statecraft, and violence to the region. The Chinese were.36
The Vietnamese knew it arguably better than anyone else. Between 1407 and 1428, precisely the time during which the Ming pushed their imperial expansion southward hardest, Dai Viet returned to the Chinese empire as its thirteenth province, essential to further Chinese expansion by land and sea. For better or for worse, this was a watershed in modern Vietnamese history. On the one hand, Ming re-conquest of Dai Viet was militarily harsh and the imposition of direct political rule and cultural assimilation all too real. Upon arriving, the Ming burned Dai Viet books in an attempt to reset the Vietnamese clock to Chinese imperial time. Scores of Chinese bureaucrats debarked to run the province, pushing local leaders out of the way and scorning ‘barbarian’ customs as they did so. Few of these officials could speak Vietnamese and saw no reason to do so. Jiaozhi, in their view, was and should be part of the northern empire.37
The result was predictable: resistance and collaboration. Opposed to such heavy-handed rule and sidelined from power, in 1418 a group led by Le Loi retreated to their southern bases in today’s Thanh Hoa and Nghe An provinces to take up arms against the Chinese occupation. The Ming reaction was swift and brutal: sending in tens of thousands of well-armed troops to crush the resistance. However, as resistance forces captured modern Chinese arms and copied their military science and gunpowder-production techniques (they could read Chinese), Le Loi’s officers began transforming their ragtag forces into an increasingly strong military force. Le Loi’s partisans also began to use Chinese bureaucratic techniques to organize and deploy tens of thousands of their own troops. Under Le Loi’s command, after a decade of war, the Vietnamese drove the Ming out of the country in 1427, in battles that went beyond simple ‘guerilla warfare’. As short as their rule was, the Ming ironically helped the Vietnamese achieve a modern military revolution of their own; one which they turned on the colonizer and would use to build a new state.38
Chinese gunpowder and weapons were not the only things attracting Vietnamese attention. So did the Ming bureaucratic model and the civil service on which it turned. During those twenty years, the Chinese established a host of Confucian-minded schools and training academies. By 1408, the Chinese had already created forty-one sub-prefectures and 208 counties operating along Chinese administrative practices. The Ming burned Vietnamese books, but they also re-introduced the Confucian canon, print technology, and paper, as well as their legal code, and with it notions of statecraft. Collaboration thus appealed to a certain segment of the Dai Viet elite, who could use the Ming texts and methods to promote a very Vietnamese agenda, including a Confucian revolution some had been pushing for from coastal areas for decades.39
This was even true for the anticolonialists. Upon taking back Dai Viet and declaring himself emperor, Le Loi and his successors revamped the Dai Viet state according to the Confucian model. Le Loi and others saw the chance to do what had always escaped their predecessors—establish centralized control over an often unwieldy country. He and his descendants promoted Confucian statecraft through the construction of more academies and schools, the acceleration of the civil service examination program, and the promulgation of a Le law code with Confucian characteristics. New laws reduced the power of aristocrats by reducing private land ownership and assigning control of individual villages to the state. A new fiscal system allowed revenues to go directly to the central government. Provincial administrators took over increasingly from the lords in the countryside, while the Le kept on many of those who had collaborated with the Ming. They needed them and this would help ensure their loyalty.40
Leading the charge would be one of Le Loi’s best-known descendants, Le Thanh Tong (1460–97). This dynamic monarch thoroughly reformed the Confucian examination system and introduced Chinese-derived legal and criminal codes. He established the National College to train a loyal bureaucratic elite who were to be dispatched across the land to spread Confucian norms at grassroots levels by ensuring popular loyalty to this political ideology both in society and within the local bureaucracy. In 1463, he initiated the standard triennial Confucian examination as Buddhism faded from elite politics. To further sideline the Buddhists, the court issued a new pantheon of official heroes for everyone to worship. The idea was to diffuse a state ideology to all levels of society; but controlling the spiritual world would always remain a challenge.41
The Chinese also offered an imperial model. While the Le successfully repulsed Chinese colonization, they borrowed many things from their former overlords in order to build an empire of their own. This included the title of emperor (hoang de), modern military science, gunpowder technology, and a bureaucratic model for organizing territory and people. And by actively participating in the East Asian Confucian world, a ‘Domain of Manifest Civility’, the Vietnamese also acquired a powerful colonial ideology and hierarchical ethnography elevating them to a higher civilizational order. This East Asian civilization separated them from the surrounding, non-Han, uncivilized ‘barbarians’, and in so doing provided them with the justification they needed to conquer others, forgetting conveniently that they themselves had sprung from this barbarian world. This is why, when the Viet conquered, they often claimed to do so in the name of a civilized and superior Han civilization, of which they wanted to be a part. It does not mean that the Viet wanted to ‘be Chinese’. Claiming to spread Han civilization served as a process of colonial legitimation, similar to the Frankish postcolonial ‘barbarians’ in Europe who presented themselves as new Romans, justifying their conquests by claiming to be a part of this superior Roman culture and history. The difference, again, was that Rome had disappeared in Europe, but China remained in Asia. This is why independent Vietnamese rulers could claim to be ‘Han’ and ‘emperors’ as they expanded their imperial state, while the Chinese, annoyed by this Vietnamese refusal to join the ‘real’ Middle Kingdom (their empire), had to ‘de-civilize’ them and reduce them to kings and, sometimes, imperial subjects.42
While building demographic pressures in the Red River delta pushed the nascent Vietnamese empire southward, Dai Viet leaders, like the Mongols and the Chinese, were well aware of the importance of the Indian Ocean trade. Indeed, one of its main hubs was located just south of the newly independent Vietnamese state, in the Cham ports of Qui Nhon and Hoi An. The Cham and Vietnamese had fought each other repeatedly in the past, but this time the Le would not be content to withdraw once victory was achieved. In 1470, in a remarkable edict on Champa, Le Thanh Tong laid out in great, often vitriolic detail why the Vietnamese had to destroy Champa, not just for security reasons, but also as part of a wider civilizing mission in order to ‘[r]espectfully bring the Mandate of Heaven, and do the work of striking and killing those cruel people’! True to his word, one year later, Le imperial armies crushed the Cham in Vijaya, took their port at Qui Nhon, and colonized their lands in today’s central Vietnam. This date symbolized the beginning of an aggressive Vietnamese colonial expansion using state-of-the-art weapons. And the conquest of Vijaya apparently paid off: the export of Vietnamese and Cham ceramics rose dramatically after this date.43
No one knew at the time where it all would end up, but it was quite clear that there was an impetus to move southward down the coast and westward and northwestward into the surrounding massifs from whence the Viet had initially come. In 1479, Le imperial armies struck deep into Tai territories in today’s Laos and northwestern Vietnam, marching through Tran Ninh and Dien Bien Phu, getting as far as Burma before pulling back like the Ming before them. Many imperial soldiers received orders to stay behind to create military farms and garrisons. Soldiers farmed the land and kept it secure at the same time. Tax records show a steady rise in the Viet population in these conquered areas. And like the Ming colonialists they so despised for using brute force so indiscriminately, Dai Viet commanders could do the same. As a Vietnamese report on the conquest of one unfortunate ‘barbarian’ polity reads:
1479: Attacked Bon Man again. The Duke of Ky, Le Niem, served as the general leading an army of 300,000 [. . .] The army went over the pass, the [chief] Cam Cong fled and died. [Our army . . .] burnt their capital, took their garrisons, and burnt their granaries. Before this [attack], Bon Man had 90,000 households; in this operation almost all of them starved or were killed and only 2,000 people remain. They thus surrendered [to us] and Cam Dong, one of their race, was appointed as the Pacification Commissioner, and [Viet] officers were appointed to rule the area. But Cam Dong later rebelled again.
The Vietnamese were colonizers, too.44
Catholic Vietnam
Many were also Catholic. Indeed, our Buddhist master, Shilian Dashan, was not the only missionary working in Vietnam in the late seventeenth century. Traveling on Iberian trading ships, European missionaries had begun debarking in Asia shortly after the Portuguese took Malacca in 1511. The first landed in Vietnam in the early seventeenth century. Most were Jesuits who had fled persecution in Japan, where the new Tokugawa rulers viewed them as threats to their control over a still very contested country. In 1620, the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes joined a small mission in Red River Dai Viet, where he proselytized until his expulsion a decade later. He then moved southward to spread the word.45
To facilitate the spread of Christianity, European missionaries and their Viet partners developed a writing system for transcribing Vietnamese into the Roman alphabet. In 1651, de Rhodes published the first Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary. This early Romanization system—known as quoc ngu or the ‘national language’—became the writing system in twentieth-century Vietnam. But until then, the Vietnamese elite and the missionaries trying to reach them continued to use Chinese characters (han tu) or the indigenized character-based writing system known as chu nom. Like their Buddhist counterparts, Catholic missionaries excelled in learning the majority language of the rural lowlands, Vietnamese. Their success depended on it.46
Catholicism made limited though significant inroads in Vietnamese society. Vietnamese rulers were never able to expel the Christians as effectively as the Tokugawa Japanese had in the seventeenth century. European missionaries moved in and around Vietnam during this time, building country churches and congregations. By the mid-eighteenth century, around 300,000 Vietnamese Catholics lived in the Red River valley, despite the court’s hostility. Numbers were much smaller in the south, never exceeding 15,000 prior to the eighteenth century (and not exceeding 100,000 by the early nineteenth century). Vietnamese Catholics remained a minority of the estimated 7.5 million people living in Vietnam by the late eighteenth century.47
Wars, difficult socio-economic conditions, famine and disease facilitated conversions among the poor. Many peasants turned to Christianity, attracted by its perceived healing powers, the promise of salvation and an afterlife, and its embrace of all souls regardless of social status. Immigrants leaving family and friends behind to carve out new lives on the often-hostile southern frontier found a reassuring sense of solidarity in Catholic communities and churches. Many Christian notions of spirituality and miracles dovetailed with pre-existing beliefs in the supernatural and occult. The cult of the Virgin Mary, for example, found a place among coastal fishermen and sailors in Tonkin, who had long venerated the protecting ‘Mother of the Sea’ (Thien phi). The ethnographically well-informed Jesuit Father Adriano di St Thecla wrote a riveting, if heretical account of the synergy and commonality between European Christianity and indigenous spirit practices and cults in China and Vietnam.48
However, Vietnamese Catholics, like their Buddhist counterparts, were more than a collection of the rural down-and-out. Many a Catholic soldier served in the army. Viet elites, including high-ranking Confucian mandarins, also converted, attracted by Christianity’s moral code and notions of rectitude. One of the court’s sharpest reformist mandarins in the nineteenth century, Nguyen Truong To, was Catholic. And if China’s Shilian Dashan could help Lord Nguyen Phuc Chu grow Buddhism at the turn of the eighteenth century, a remarkable Vietnamese Jesuit, Philiphê Binh, travelled to Lisbon and stayed there for three decades defending Catholicism and the Jesuit order operating in Tonkin. Lastly, the French bishop Pigneau de Béhaine spent much of his adult life evangelizing in Vietnam and helping Chu’s illustrious descendant, Gia Long, regain his country during the eighteenth-century Tay Son wars discussed below. While little came of this in the end, he played an instrumental role in the signing of a treaty between Gia Long and Louis XVI in 1787.49
In short, religions, like empires, are globalizing forces. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Catholicism all emerged within Vietnam via Asian and international connections and in response to local conditions and spiritual needs. And Catholicism also had to interact with that deeper substrate of cults, spirits, diviners, sects, fortune-tellers, and millenarians. But it was not necessarily any more a ‘foreign’ creation than Confucianism. Nor was it ‘French’ or a French colonial importation.50
MILITARY RULE AND SHATTERED SOVEREIGNTIES
The postcolonial confidence, the rapid internal state building, and the imperial expansion that flowed from the Le victory over the Ming in the fifteenth century did not last. The Confucian revolution that was theoretically supposed to create a modern centralized state from the top down had limits in practice. Centuries-old aristocratic families did not surrender easily. Confucianism ebbed and flowed depending on the socioeconomic circumstances, the leaders, and the political conjunctures. Rapid territorial expansion created its own problems as it distanced the court from the periphery and provided new opportunities for the emergence of competing power bases in the borderlands as well as non-Viet anticolonial revolts. Renewed civil wars coupled with never-ending colonial conquests meant that military leaders and their families continued to hold considerable privileges and power, including access to troops, weapons, and alternative loyalties. The Le, the Trinh, and the Nguyen military houses all heralded from the newly colonized lands of the then southern province of Thanh Hoa. The Le in particular had connections to the highlands in Laos and never really made peace with the coastal Dai Viet or trusted the Chinese.
A House Divided Against Itself
Things began to fall apart for the Le in the sixteenth century, when the dynasty’s failure to reinvigorate the monarchy and balance the interests of these powerful military families on which its rule turned led to crisis. In 1527, contested succession to the throne and deepening factionalism saw a military clan from the coastal north, the Mac, make a grab for power. Mac Dang Dung overthrew the Le emperor, declared himself ruler, and created a new dynasty in his name. Opposition from the Le’s two main military backers in the south—the Nguyen and the Trinh clans—was immediate. General Nguyen Kim joined forces with his son-in-law Trinh Kiem to restore the Le by bringing the court to Thanh Hoa. From there, they launched attacks against the Mac, progressively pushing them out of Hanoi and into northern areas around Cao Bang province where the Ming continued to support this deposed royal family.
Sovereignty shattered further when personal ambition got the better of Trinh Kiem, who turned on the forces of his Nguyen ally, Nguyen Kim, when the latter died at the hands of the Mac. The Trinh wanted power. Rather than risk a three-way civil war or put his family at risk, Nguyen Kim’s son, Nguyen Hoang, requested a military transfer to newly conquered areas in Quang Tri. Trinh Kiem gladly obliged, happy to get him out of the capital they had recovered from the Mac. In 1558, Nguyen Hoang and much of his entourage left for the then faraway south—today’s central Vietnam. Three military houses now ruled a divided Vietnam—the Mac along the Sino-Vietnamese border, the Trinh in the Red River delta, and the Nguyen in the southern colonial borderlands. While the Trinh and the Nguyen supported the Le emperor, the Trinh family now pulled the strings. By proclaiming himself ‘king’ (vuong) in 1599, Trinh Kiem’s successor made it clear that this military house had no intention of sharing power. The Trinh used the Le emperor and the associated ritual of emperorship (hoang de) to legitimate their rule, much as the Tokugawa military house had maintained the Japanese emperor upon taking power in 1603. In both countries, the emperor was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner.
Although the Trinh never developed the political equivalent of Tokugawa Japan’s military government, the bakufu, this Viet family ruled through what was in reality a military regime and political culture. Military officials loyal to the Trinh king rather than any kind of Confucian bureaucracy ensured public order and loyalty. The Trinh presided over elaborate military rituals and temples, banners, and oaths of loyalty to maintain order. In 1600, having returned to the north to defeat the Mac for good, Nguyen Hoang acquiesced to the Trinh ascendency, pledged loyalty to the Le emperor, and then returned to the south. While he did not know it at the time, he and his family would go on to build a second Vietnam along the imperial frontier.51
By all accounts, Nguyen Hoang appreciated the beauty of the land he encountered in the south, was seduced by its exoticism, and attracted by the riches it promised to the hard-working soul. The bustling port of Hoi An, its vibrant trade with the Indian Ocean, and the mosaic of local, regional, and international travelers, merchants, and missionaries impressed him. Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Japanese, and Europeans had long visited this ancient trading town the Vietnamese had taken from the Cham. As one eminent scholar has nicely put it, ‘Talent and ability began to count for more than birth and position. This was, in effect, an escape from ancestors, an escape from the past. For Nguyen Hoang, the result was a greater reliance on his own abilities, a shifting of the burden of moral choice from the past to the present’. This man and those putting their faith in him made something of a leap of faith, even if they maintained their ties to the north. They began to imagine a new ‘way of being Vietnamese’, a state of mind from which another southern polity could spring.52
These areas to the south of the Red River delta were not, however, blank spaces. Millions of people lived in the lowland areas embracing the South Seas to the east, the highland massifs just to the west of Hue, and areas extending across the Mekong delta to the Gulf of Thailand. Between 1000 BCE and 200 CE, an impressive Sa Huynh culture had thrived in present-day central and southern Vietnam, paralleling, even interacting with its prehistoric counterpart to the north, the Dong Son civilization. Sa Huynh’s craftsmen produced a wide variety of iron tools, weapons, and ornaments. The kingdoms of Funan and Chenla were the first to create loosely organized mandala-like polities in the Mekong delta (1–9 CE). Whereas the Viet in the north had borrowed Confucianism, Buddhism, and characters from China, the people of Funan in the south tailored Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sanskrit print culture coming from India to local needs. Thanks to the port of Oc Eo in the Mekong province of today’s An Giang province, Funan was at the center of trade routes linking it to the Chinese and Indian Ocean empires.
Other states subsequently emerged in this region. At its apogee in the fourteenth century, the Cambodian empire of Angkor based near the Tonle Sap ruled large swathes of lower mainland Southeast Asia. Cambodian mastery of a sophisticated hydraulic system allowed for increased population growth, urbanization, and sophisticated political formations and extraordinary artistic and architectural achievements. For some, Angkorian civilization marked ‘the largest complex of low-density urban development in the preindustrial world’ with a population of one million people. This vigorous empire certainly mobilized people, promoted Buddhism, and spread Pali- and Sanskrit-based writing systems across areas located between the Chaophraya and Mekong deltas.53
In areas north of the Mekong centered around the port of Hoi An the dynamic kingdoms of Champa emerged in the seventh century, mentioned in passing above and discussed in detail in chapter 14. The Cham ruled territories running roughly from modern Ha Tinh province south to Da Nang, including lowland and upland territories. Cham resources, markets, trade, and populations turned this coastal federation into a prosperous and culturally diverse land. Asian and Middle Eastern traders regularly visited this entrepot. Arab and Persian merchant ships had been trading along the Vietnamese coasts for centuries. These traders plying the Indian Ocean introduced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam to the Cham.54
Along the coast, Ming maritime movements triggered an early wave of Chinese immigrants to the region. And when the Ming ended their maritime expeditions in 1433 and focused their attention on Central Asia, the Japanese increasingly stepped in (while local southern Chinese merchants kept coming). Soon European traders, adventurers, and missionaries were circulating throughout the region, introducing new ideas, products, weapons, and religions. Malay and Arab peoples called this region, bordered by China at one end and India at the other, the ‘lands below the winds’; the Chinese named it the ‘Southern Seas’; the Indians ‘the Golden Peninsula’; and the Europeans imagined the ‘Land beyond the Ganges’ before European geographers called it ‘Indo-China’. Since the Second World War, we now refer to it as ‘Southeast Asia’.55
The Imperial State in a Southern Form
It was in these culturally diverse and populated lands that Nguyen Hoang began building a new imperial state, a continuation of the earlier Le one, but increasingly under autonomous Nguyen control. By the end of the seventeenth century, through the use of superior technology, force, persuasion, and an array of alliances, the Nguyen took over what remained of Champa, transforming it into the new province-protectorate of Thuan Thanh. Much the same happened in the Mekong delta as Nguyen lords extended their rule. Indeed, with the demise of Angkor in the fourteenth century, a new generation of Burmese, Thai, and Viet state-builders all began moving southward into the fertile alluvial basins of the Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, and Mekong rivers, attracted by the agricultural riches and the international trade. Armed with modern military technology, the Thais and the Nguyen rolled back the Khmer empire in the eighteenth century and entered into close contact with each other for the first time in doing so.56
A range of factors pushed and pulled Viet settlers southward. Firstly, the Nguyen lords were military men and the de facto government they crafted and administered was always a very martial one. Like the Le, the Nguyen encouraged their soldiers sent in to conquer new territories to remain there at the head of military colonies. Their families could join them and the Nguyen provided them with land to till upon demobilization. Tens of thousands of prisoners of war also ended up in the south. They provided indentured labor but, with good conduct, regained their liberty, land, and a new future in the south. To promote immigration, Nguyen lords also offered plots of land to poor peasants from the increasingly crowded Red River delta.
To help them, the Nguyen recruited Ming loyalists who had fled the Manchu conquest of China in 1644. Thousands of them sought refuge in Taiwan and the Mekong delta. Around 3,000 Ming loyalists helped the Nguyen lords extend their political and economic control into the area of present-day Saigon, transforming it into the administrative region of Saigon-Gia Dinh in 1698. Further south, another Ming supporter, Mac Cuu, turned the area of Ha Tien in the Gulf of Thailand into a prosperous and semi-autonomous realm. He ended up joining the Nguyen and helped them to incorporate this vibrant commercial and strategic area into their kingdom. These new colonies attracted more Chinese refugees, traders, and immigrants. Intermarriage was common and their children (called Minh huong or ‘those who are loyal to the Ming’) worked in the Nguyen civil service.57
That said, Nguyen colonization of the south did not occur overnight, in one military swoop, or in a single wave of settlers. Viet settlers trickled southward in slow, almost imperceptible movements over long periods of time. This meant that ‘middle grounds’ emerged in conquered Cham and Cambodian lands. Hardly a majority at the outset, Viet immigrants had no choice but to live in Cham towns and villages with the local peoples. Writing in 1644, one Nguyen chronicler reported that areas around Hoi An are ‘all settled by Chams [while] the immigrants [Vietnamese] are still sparse’. As in Jiaozhi, intermarriage, collaboration, and borrowings between the settlers and the indigenous peoples were common. They frequented the same markets. The northern Dai Viet court had long borrowed from the Cham. Lowland Viet settlers and Chinese merchants traded with highlanders such as the Jarai and Hre. If the Vietnamese spread their language, religious practices, and culture, many Viet settlers also adopted Cham agricultural technology, spiritual beliefs, food, and music.58
Nguyen expansion into these areas also necessitated flexibility and compromise. Although violent conquest may have opened new lands and futures for Viet settlers, the Nguyen simply did not have enough soldiers to ensure security all the time and everywhere, or adequate numbers of bureaucrats to rule over such vast and far-flung regions. And they always had to keep a watchful eye on the Trinh to the north. The Nguyen did what so many colonizers do; they adopted indirect forms of colonial rule in the form of protectorates and military territories. They carefully maintained the pre-existing administrations and a collage of non-Viet elites through whom they administered these territories. They struck alliances through intermarriage, showered gifts on those who cooperated, and consciously appropriated Cham shrines, rituals, and deities if it helped them legitimate their rule and attract local support.59
Imperial expansion in Vietnam did not solve internal political competition among Vietnam’s military houses, however. On the contrary, by the eighteenth century, a de facto independent Nguyen imperial polity had emerged in the south, quite different from the one in northern Vietnam from which it had sprung. Vietnamese now called this southern domain ‘Dang Trong’, the ‘inner region’: in contrast to ‘Dang Ngoai’ or the ‘outer region’, meaning the Trinh-run state of Dai Viet in the north. In theory, both regions constituted a greater Dai Viet unitary state with the Trinh military house in charge and the Le emperor serving as a symbol of continued dynastic unity. But the fiction of all of this could last for only so long, as the Nguyen kept building what was in practice a quite separate Dang Trong empire-state running southward from the Gianh River to the Mekong delta with its capital in Hue. In 1613, in his deathbed statement to his son, Nguyen Hoang warned him that if an accord could not be struck with the Trinh, ‘Then you must strive to guard and protect our territories and await a suitable opportunity. Do not forget these, my commands.’60
His descendants did not. In 1620, tensions came to a head between the long-divided military houses when the Nguyen refused to pay taxes to their Trinh masters in Hanoi. This act of fiscal defiance was in fact a declaration of political secession. Civil war followed in 1627, when the Trinh attacked the Nguyen headquarters in Hue. The northern Vietnamese organized seven campaigns against the Nguyen. All of them were failures, with the last ending in 1672. Military stalemate ensued, leading to a century of relative calm as the Nguyen continued building another Vietnam. Indeed, as Nguyen Phuc Chu’s invitation to Shilian Dashan the Buddhist abbot revealed, by the late seventeenth century the Nguyen wanted their own state. Undeterred by Qing China’s refusal to accord diplomatic recognition, Chu cast the first royal seal establishing a Nguyen monarchy in 1709. In 1744, his descendent mounted the newly created royal throne in Hue. This self-assurance confirmed what everyone knew since the start of the civil wars in 1627: two Dai Viets existed. What no one in Hanoi or Hue saw coming was a third force led by three rebel brothers who bolted out of the central Vietnamese highlands, rallied large armies to their cause, and in so doing upended a chronically fragile Vietnamese order. The Nguyen survived, barely, to return to power in 1802. The Trinh and the Le did not.
CIVIL WAR AND THREE VIETNAMS: THE TAY SON REBELLION61
Starting in 1771, three angry brothers rode a wave of socio-economic discontent to power across Vietnam. In so doing, they renewed the simmering civil war between the Trinh and the Nguyen, sparked regional conflicts with the Thais and Chinese, forged unprecedented alliances with Khmers, Chams, and upland peoples, and drew Europeans into the fray for the first time. There had been signs for some time suggesting that all was not well. Unable to establish accurate censuses in regions they administered badly or had only recently colonized, the Nguyen struggled to generate revenues. Foreign trade had declined notably in the 1750s, denying the dynasty one of its main sources of revenues. To compensate, leaders increased taxes, to the point where they became onerous. These fiscal demands extended into the central highlands, spreading socio-economic discontent among non-Viet peoples. As in China, bi-metallism exacerbated rural unrest in Nguyen Vietnam. When Hue could no longer import copper from Chinese and Japanese mines to cast its coins, the Nguyen turned to a cheaper zinc substitute. Not only did they impose this cheaper money on the population for making transactions for rice, but they also demanded that it be accepted and exchanged at parity with copper cash. Unsurprisingly, peasants hoarded rice rather than selling it for depreciating zinc coins. The result was predictable: the overall rice supply available plummeted, prices rose, and hunger began to stalk the kingdom. At the same time, the court increased its demands on commercial farmers in the Mekong delta to produce and send more rice northward. One of the regions hit hardest by these policies was in Quy Nhon, where the Tay Son revolt started.62
Without well-staffed, -trained, and sufficiently paid civil servants, the court was often blind to the anger spreading across the lowlands and into the hills. Faced with high taxes, Cham anticolonialism resurfaced in the Quy Nhon area, near their ancient capital. Underpaid local administrators in the highlands were often tempted by competing alliances, loyalties, and corruption. The teacher of the Tay Son brothers was a former Nguyen administrator with a grudge: he had been reprimanded and demoted by the court, unjustly so, in his eyes. He was arguably the one who sparked the whole fire by urging his former pupils to revolt.
What we do know is that in 1771, in a small village called Tay Son, located in the highlands looking down on the port of Qui Nhon, three Nguyen clan brothers, Nhac, Lu, and Hue, launched a revolt against high taxes and corruption. It spread like wildfire as the Nguyen court scrambled to stop them by calling in the army. The Trinh were delighted to see their arch-rivals under siege and immediately dispatched their own troops to the Gianh Son Pass to put down the rebellion in the name of a unified Dai Viet. In their rush, however, the Trinh forgot their own problems in the Red River, not least of all recurrent bouts of severe famine and equally destabilizing revolts.
Pragmatic, the Tay Son signed a truce with the Trinh to keep them at arms’ length in Hue while the brothers focused their attention on wiping out the Nguyen heading southward into the Mekong delta. The Trinh accepted. They preferred to let the Tay Son destroy the Nguyen so that they could tend to their own problems in the north, confident that they could deal with the Tay Son brothers later. The brothers thus pressed on, forcing Nguyen troops to flee to the Gia Dinh-Saigon region and as far as Bangkok. Fighting went on back and forth in the Mekong delta and the Gulf of Thailand. In a near fatal blow, in 1777 the Tay Son killed the Nguyen monarch and much of his family holed up in the Saigon area. Five years later, the Tay Son massacred some 10,000 Chinese there for supporting the newly crowned prince, Nguyen Phuc Anh, the future Emperor Gia Long, who barely escaped into the Gulf of Thailand and on to Bangkok.
Reassured by their military victories, the Tay Son brothers grew ever bolder. So much so that, in 1778, Nhac proclaimed himself ruler of the Nguyen kingdom. Significantly, he chose as his new capital the Cham city of Vijaya, near Qui Nhon. From this point on in time, there existed three political centers for ‘Vietnam’—that of the Tay Son based in Vijaya, the surviving Nguyen holed up in the Mekong delta, and the Trinh in Hanoi. They all paid lip service to the powerless Le emperor, whose only real function was to reassure the Chinese that the Le were still there and to serve as a symbol of a mythic Dai Viet unity which everyone knew to be a sham.
Having repelled a Thai attack in 1785, the Tay Son brothers finally set their sights on Hanoi. After routing the Trinh army, Nguyen Hue marched victoriously into the Red River in 1786. Here too famine, recession, corruption, and divided loyalties created conditions that helped this Tay Son brother vanquish the second military house of Dai Viet. In 1788, Nguyen Hue declared himself Emperor of Dai Viet, adopting the reign name of Quang Trung and doing away with the Le dynasty. This was too much for the Chinese, who maintained a tributary relationship holding them to protect the Le imperial house. When a Qing army entered the Red River delta to restore the Le, war immediately followed. In a historic victory celebrated to this day, Quang Trung expelled the Chinese and ruled Dai Viet from Hanoi until his death in 1792.
As historic as it was, Tay Son rule did not survive its new emperor. The loss of the dynamic and the militarily gifted Quang Trung as well as infighting within the Tay Son entourage sapped morale and undermined effective governance. Personal rivalries and territorial fragmentation were such that it is impossible to speak of a truly unified Tay Son Vietnam between 1788 and 1792. The brothers fell back on pre-existing, engrained patterns of military rule under the guise of monarchy and tended to divvy up the country into regional fiefdoms.63
They also had a formidable foe in the person of Gia Long, who brought the Nguyen state back from the brink of extinction. Tenacious, this young man had carefully bided his time, building up an impressive array of local and international alliances. Charismatic, he forged close relationships with southern strongmen, religious leaders, the Chinese community, and non-Viet groups. He promised them considerable autonomy and privileges in the postwar era in exchange for their collaboration. He outdid all of his rivals in securing diplomatic and military aid from an array of Asian and European governments, merchants, arms dealers, missionaries, and the like. By the time the Tay Son revolt was running out of steam in the north, Gia Long had assembled an army and navy in the south that rolled its way northward to crush the house of Tay Son for good.
In many ways, the Tay Son revolts remind us of the Taiping rebellion that would roar out of southern China in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the leaders of the ‘Kingdom of Great Peace’ in China, though on a much smaller scale, the Tay Son brothers rode a massive wave of popular discontent, forged pragmatic alliances with non-Viet populations, tapped into religious networks, and worked the social margins of bandits and criminals with great success. Their millenarian promises of a better future attracted massive support. While they disappeared in 1801 as rapidly as they had appeared three decades earlier, the social fury they unleashed and the shattering of political sovereignties they left behind were as transformative as that which the Taiping achieved in China. By marching from one end of Vietnam to the other, the Tay Son opened the way to a wider southern-dominated unitary state, which Gia Long assumed upon his final victory over the Tay Son in 1802. As a high-ranking Nguyen official put it accurately in 1806: ‘It is true that in our country of Viet, from ancient times to the present, this territory had never before been as broad and vast as this.’ This is how modern Vietnam acquired its current S-like form.64
But that unity came at a high price, as it would in the twentieth century. In a dirge for the fallen civil war soldiers, Nguyen Du, one of Vietnam’s greatest poets, captured the suffering caused by thirty years of death and destruction. He spoke of the young who had gallantly ridden off to fight but who died without children to tend to their souls:
There were proud men who followed glory’s path—they warred and hoped to conquer all the world. Why talk about the heyday of their might? Remember their decline, their fall, and grieve . . . Killed young, they’ve left no heirs—they drift unmourned as headless ghosts that moan on nights of rain. Defeat or triumph lies in Heaven’s scheme—will ever those lost souls escape their fate?65