The Birth of Vietnam
The Birth of Vietnam
By Keith Taylor
Berkeley : University of California Press, c1982.
xxi, 397 p. : maps ; 24 cm.
http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Vietnam-Keith-Weller-Taylor/dp/0520074173
The Civilization of Angkor
By Charles Higham
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.
xv, 192 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
In my last South East Asia post I subjected the reader to a lengthy complaint with illustrations from illustrious texts. I wish now to reverse that complaint, at least in the sense that I am going to suggest two books for those interested in the history of the region that do precisely what I dreamed a book on the ancient and lost kingdom of Champa would do. They are narrative histories that synthesize information provided by ancient inscriptions and histories with archaeology, linguistics, sociology, geography and anthropology. Both books rely upon a groundwork of studies provided by others, along the lines of Wheatley’s historical geography of the Malay peninsula and Wolters’ work on Srivijaya. In the case of Charles Higham, he is indebted to his own archaeological work and the epigraphic studies of Michael Vickery, among others. Taylor’s work is indebted not just to his own studious reading of French, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese sources (as well as European) but to Jennifer Holmgren’s Chinese Colonisation of Northern Vietnam: Adminstrative geography and political development in the Tongking Delta, first to sixth centuries A.D. (Australia National University Oriental Monograph Series; number 27, 1980). In her words:
‘This work covers the administrative, social and political history of the first five hundred and fifty years of Chinese occupation in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam….
‘Until now, European, Chinese, and Vietnamese scholars have made very little effort to investigate this period of Sino-Vietnamese history….very little is known about the relations between Chinese and Vietnamese during this period….Early this century, several French scholars attempted to pinpoint the locations of Chinese administrative centres in the Red River Delta during the earliest and latest phases of the Chinese occupation. Nothing, however, has been done since then to follow up their work.’
A familiar lament!
Taylor’s scholarship is scrupulous, and there is no other book like it that I know of. The writing is purely functional, but this is no impediment, especially to those of us who are frustrated by the 10-20 pages accorded this thousand year period by general histories and surveys. A review of the book by Truong Buu Lam frankly describes the period as being ‘dry’, but then, so did CS Lewis label the poetry of early 16th century England ‘drab’. I’m sorry, but there is nothing drab about Skelton, nor is there anything dry about the long evolution of Vietnam from a collection of culturally related clans and villages, farming and trading along the Red River, to a unified polity with a distinct self consciousness. How aware a people are of their own difference, their own uniqueness as a people (which can be easily confused with nationalism), is a fraught subject. One of the fascinating things about Vietnam is that it is a clear example of a nation created by colonization. That is Taylor’s narrative, though the end point of the book is really the beginning of what we call Vietnam. At that point, in the late 900’s A.D., the Vietnamese had not yet written their own histories. They had not yet created a Confucian state, or developed beyond its embryonic beginnings the native script, or Chu Nom.
The story of state formation on the South East Asian mainland is also told by Higham in his book. This process, which is to be seen everywhere, takes many distinct forms. My reading has been shaped by a desire to know the total history of Vietnam. Early on in my research I became fascinated by the Cham, a people conquered by the Vietnamese. Their history has barely been written in a western language, though it may lie locked in their as yet untranslated and studied inscriptions. But the Cham lay between two states, Angkor and Vietnam, and the land that is today Vietnam extends down to territory covered by Higham in his book. Indeed, the earliest independent, urban polity in South East Asia lies south of modern day Saigon, in the ancient ruins of Oc Eo. Oc Eo was a trading state, totally unlike Angkor or Vietnam. It was perhaps the capital of the polity known to the Chinese as Funan, though the idea of a capital is wrong. The Funanese were probably Khmer speaking people.
The story of the rise of Vietnam as an independent entity has a context, and it is a complex one that includes not just China and the areas of southern China not yet Chinese (especially Yunnan, but also as far north and east as modern-day Canton), but the Khmer in Cambodia, the Cham in central Vietnam and farther abroad, the evolving trading kingdom of Srivijaya. Srivijaya, Funan and Vietnam were directly involved in the India/China trade from Han times on. And this list excludes the many related peoples living in the hills and mountains between China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Funan, like Srivijaya, was a trading ‘kingdom’, located in scattered polities along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnam itself was engaged in foreign trade and a source of exotic forest materials and luxury goods. This is what attracted the attention of the Chinese. It was certainly not the climate or the people, which disgusted most elite Chinese and frightened them. To be stationed in Vietnam was to suffer isolation, disease, and death.
By the end of Chinese colonization Vietnam was becoming an ‘inland polity’, a state based not on foreign trade but on wet rice agriculture. Higham’s book, like Taylor’s, charts a similar trajectory for Cambodia, as the Khmer move slowly up the Mekong River, building and digging monuments, canals and reservoirs. ‘Chenla’ succeeded Funan. Power becomes centralized. By the 13th century they had built a monumental civilization that rivals that of Egypt and accounts for the enduring interest in the region.
Today Cambodia is known chiefly for a its recent auto-genocide. It is a small, powerless nation which has for hundreds of years been the pawn of powerful neighbors (Vietnam and Thailand) or colonial aggressors (the French and the Americans). Oddly, France’s colonization of Indochina may have preserved Cambodia as an independent country. Vietnam on the other hand is a regional power, an economic player, a nation that has defeated China, France, Japan and America in successive wars and preserved its language, history and culture for thousands of years. Yet there are more books written about the early history of Cambodia than Vietnam and that is certainly because of the monuments they left behind. In the end, Vietnam’s monument was its political acumen.
