Yearly Archives: 2014

I keep coming across writings that claim that there was a matriarchal society in the Red River Delta at some point in the distant past that was later replaced by…

The story of Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ is a very famous story in Vietnam today. In this story Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ marry and Âu Cơ gives birth to 100 eggs, all of which produce boys. 50 of the boys then follow their father into the sea, and 50 follow their mother into the mountains, where one of them becomes the first ruler of a kingdom called Văn Lang.

This tale first appeared in a larger story called “The Tale of the Hồng Bàng Clan” in a fifteenth-century text called the Lĩnh Nam chích quái. There are many other parts of this larger story that clearly came from, or were inspired by, information in extant texts. However, this story about the 100 eggs does not appear to have any textual precedent.

So where did it come from? Many twentieth-century scholars argued that it comes from the oral traditions of the Việt nationality (dân tộc) and that it was passed down orally for centuries until it was recorded in the fifteenth century.

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I was reading an article in Nhân dân that prime minister Phạm Văn Đồng wrote in 1969 on the occasion of the death anniversary of the Hùng kings, the supposed…

There was a brief article in VnExpress the other day called “What can you do if you study Hán Nôm?” “Hán” is the same as what other people call “classical…

Archaeology garners a lot of respect in Vietnam. It is seen as being much more “scientific” (khoa học) than a field like history, as historical texts thought to be unreliable,…

I came across an article that Đào Duy Anh published in 1954 in the journal Văn Sử Địa. In this article, Đào Duy Anh argues against the ideas of European…