Yearly Archives: 2016

Đào Duy Anh’s (French) Characterization of Vietnamese Intellectual Inferiority

In his 1938 work, An Historical Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Việt Nam văn hóa sử cương), Vietnamese historian Đào Duy Anh tried to do something that no Vietnamese scholar had ever attempted to do before. He tried to write a history of Vietnamese society.

This was very difficult, because as he noted in his book, the historical records that Vietnamese had written up to that point had dealt primarily with dynastic politics. They did not talk about “the people” (nhân dân), and therefore it was difficult to write about Vietnamese society in the past.

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Đào Duy Anh and Vidalian Geography

As the previous post demonstrated, while it is clear that in writing his An Historical Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Việt Nam văn hóa sử cương, 1938) historian Đào Duy Anh was influenced by Yang Dongchun’s A General Outline of the Cultural History of China (Benguo wenhuashi dagang 本國文化史大綱, 1931), he was also influenced by French scholarship.

We can see this right away at the beginning of the book in the section on “What is Culture?” Right after Đào Duy Anh more or less repeats word-for-word the opening passage from Yang Dongchun’s book, he then offers discusses the issue of why different people have different cultures.

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