Yearly Archives: 2016

Let’s now look at the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” to see to what extent we can find evidence that it was created by “representatives of the people” who had decided together to break away from an empire and to enter “a pre-existing international order” as “equal to other, similar states” by seeking the approval of the other states in that international order.

Let’s begin by looking at who the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” talks about and try to see to what extent it represents the expression of “representatives of the people.”

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On July 4, 1776 a group of representatives from thirteen British colonies in North America, known collectively as the Continental Congress, met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and signed a document which stated that those thirteen colonies were now independent from British rule.

The men who signed this document claimed to represent “the people” from their respective colonies, and they stated that the content of the document was “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,” meaning that the representatives of “the people” from the thirteen colonies all agreed on the content of the document that they signed.

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As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’ve written many posts over the years about a fifteenth-century Vietnamese document known as the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (The Great Proclamation on Pacifying the Ngô), or on issues related to that document.

While I still haven’t had the chance to research that period to the level of detail that I hope to find the time to do someday, nonetheless, what I do know about that period has long made it evident to me that the way in which the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” is usually depicted and explained today simply does not fit the historical context in which it was produced.

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