I have long wondered about place names like Phù Đổng. This is the name of a village in the Red River delta. Many of the place names there are in Hán and the characters make sense, such as “rising dragon” for Thăng Long. Phù Đổng, however, is representing sounds, and it’s either the sounds of something in old Vietnamese or another language, because today it doesn’t make any sense.
In many Tai languages, Phù Đổng makes sense as phudong or the “forested mountain/hill” (ภูดง). However, I think linguists argue that Tai words with this “ph” in them are not ancient. They emerged around the time that Southwestern Tai started to develop around say 800 A.D. or so. That is also the time when linguists think Tai peoples started to migrate out of the Guangxi area into mainland Southeast Asia.
In the first half of the twentieth century there was a theory that these Tai peoples had created a kingdom in the area of Yunnan Province called Nanzhao in the eighth and ninth centuries, and had migrated into mainland Southeast Asia when that kingdom went into decline.
This view was challenged by Chinese scholars, who argued that Nanzhao had not been a Tai kingdom, but a kingdom of Tibeto-Burman peoples. This is the view which most scholars follow today.
I have long been suspicious of this view, and I’ve recently started to look at materials from that time period. It is clear to me now that Chinese scholars challenged the idea that Nanzhao had been Tai for political reasons, namely that they did not want Thailand to incite any of the ethnic minorities in the southwest to think of leaving China.
It is also clear to me now that Tai peoples were definitely involved in that kingdom. It may have been multi-ethnic, but Tai peoples definitely played a role. I still need to look at this more closely, but materials from that time make it obvious that Tai were active in the region.
One of the main sources for the Nanzhao period is a book called the Manshu (The Book of Savages), which is about Nanzhao and the various peoples who were in the area at that time. One group it mentions is called the “Mang Savages” (茫蠻).
“Mang” is how the Chinese wrote the Tai term “muang,” meaning a polity. The leader of a Tai muang was called a cao (pronounced like “jao”), and that is exactly what the Manshu says that the Mang Savages called their rulers “mang zhao” (茫詔), which in Tai word order would be the reverse, cao muang.
The Manshu lists a bunch of different groups of Mang Savages who were living in the area of what is today northern Burma, perhaps the ancestors of the Shan who live there today. However, it also makes mention of Mang Savages in the Red River delta.
The Manshu states that on the 21st day of the 12th lunar month in the third year of the Xiantong era [863 A.D.] there was a regiment of 2-3,000 Mang Savage men congregated on the bank of the Tô Lịch River in An Nam.
鹹通三年十二月二十一日，亦有此茫蠻，於安南蘇歷江岸聚二三千人隊。
The Tô Lịch River today flows within the bounds of Hà Nội city. In the ninth century it would have been more distant from the citadel. Nonetheless, this is right in the center of the “Vietnamese” world.
So what happened next? Where did those 2-3,000 men go? Did they settle in Phù Đổng?
Interesting information!
In his Thần người và đất Việt and Những bài dã sử Việt (Lịch sử một thần tích: Phù Đổng Thiên vương), Tạ Chí Đại Trường had the same explaination of “Phù Đổng” (ie., pù-đống in Tai/or Tay language, i don’t remmember exactly). Your last question is very worth thinking about!
Yea, I think Tran Quoc Vuong also claimed that “phu dong” comes from Tai. However, I don’t think people have a clear idea of when Tai-language speakers started to be present in the Red River delta. There is a young Thai linguist in Bangkok who has convinced me that it’s quite late (roughly around 1,000 AD). So with that in mind, when I came across this comment in the Manshu, it made sense. This is roughly the time when (according to my linguist friend) Tai-language speakers were moving away from the area of what is now southwestern China.
Pay attention to the emergence of Xung Thien than vuong (then Phu Dong thien vuong) around 9th-11th century AD on some ancient texts such as: Viet dien u linh tap, Thien uyen tap anh ngu luc, Linh Nam chich quai,… It seem to be no accidental!
Yea, Xung Thien than vuong is the last of several deities that were important for Phu Dong. To try to link that spirit with Tai-speaking peoples, we would need some more information that is identifiably Tai.
There is more evidence, from works like the Annan zhiyuan, that we can use to see Tai-speaking peoples active around Mount Tan Vien, and maintaining a cult to “my nuong” (a Tai term for “princess”).
I don’t see “ethnic” evidence in the Xung Thien than vuong cult, but it is definitely true that Phu Dong was a very “potent” and active place.
茫蠻 = Mường Mán (in “tiếng Nôm”)? (example: thằng mường thằng mán)
Thanks for the comment.
Yes, I see what you mean, but 1) this comes from a Chinese text and 2) a point I try to make is that when Chinese wrote about other peoples they were not “exact/precise.”
I kind of wrote about this issue here:
http://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/seeing-tai-in-nanzhao/
Chinese scholars look for information to be “exact” or “precise,” but it’s not.
Actually, no one who wrote about other people in the past were “exact/precise.” The information that they recorded, especially about names, was always very imprecise.
Below are some examples from North America of Native American names that outsiders “misunderstood/got wrong” etc.:
http://horslesmurs.ning.com/group/nativeamericanhistory/forum/topics/original-tribal-names-in
A’aninin (“white clay people”) Gros Ventre (French word for “big belly,” unclear why the French called them this.)
Anishinaabe (“original people”) Today the Anishinaabe have two tribes: Ojibway/Ojibwe/Chippewa (Algonquian Indian for “puckered,” referring to their moccasin style) and Algonquin (probably a French corruption of either the Maliseet word elehgumoqik, “our allies,” or the Mi’kmaq place name Algoomaking, “fish-spearing place.”)
Attikamekw (“whitefish people”) Attikamekw, also T�te-de-Boule (French word for “ball head,” unclear why the French called them this.)
Baxoje/Pahoja (“gray snow”) Ioway (from a word in their language meaning “sleepy,” unclear how this came to be a tribal name.)
Beothuk (possibly “kinfolk”) Unfortunately the Beothuk are extinct today. They were more commonly known as Red Indians (English, after their extensive use of red ochre dye.)
I like your comment! I mean Big Like Icon?
haha!! Thanks!
?—>!
The term Mang/Mu’o’ng comes from a Tai word, but not only Tai peoples could be named in this way. Mang Savage could also include the Viet-Muong speakers who were living in the uplands villages (those who are the Muongs now). At least, when Vietnamese scholars are describing “the ancient Muongs” they notice that both Tay-Thai and Muong were named as Mang.
Keith Taylor has argued,I think convincingly, that Moung is an ethnic category that emerged during the colonial period and was to a large extent created by the French. Before the 20th century, Vietnamese scholars did not write about the Muong.
As for the work I cite here, and the terms that it contains – like cao, it is unquestionably referring to Tai-language speakers.
Chances that if the Vietnamese adapted the word ”phudong” sometime in 800s AD, then they must have changed it from Proto-Tai form ”budong” to ”phudong” for some reason. If it’s not the case, then this word may have been adapted by the Vietnamese from the Tai much later when *b evolved into *ph and the people that the Vietnamese adapted this word from may be Southwestern Tai speakers because ”phu” does not exist in Central Tai. That means that the traditions of the Saint Giong (Thánh Gióng) associated with the place name may also be a recent invented one besides the Hong Bang clan traditions.
I was under the impression that that linguistic change occurred somewhere around this time. If not, do you know when people think it did take place?
Sorry no. I’m not a linguistic specialist. I just read one of your 2014 articles here https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/the-logic-of-historians-and-the-28-yin-dynasty-female-generals/ It seems that you are coming up with the answer. You should write a new article about that then.
Ever since I read your two articles ”the Hong Bang clan as a Vietnamese invented…” and ”the Tai position in the Vietnamese past”, everything related to premodern Vietnamese history is kind of fake in my view. The stories of the Trung sisters and the Saint Giong are either fake or unrelated to the Vietnamese.
I just came across this post, even though it was written ten years ago and wow, what a fascinating discovery. I never would’ve guessed that Manshu could be connected to Chao Muang. It’s honestly genius. It all makes sense, China likely feared the potential rise of a pan-Tai nationalist identity, which could link Tai peoples across Southeast Asia to their historical roots in southern China. To prevent this, they may have intentionally downplayed or discredited any connections between Tai-speaking groups and ancient Chinese polities. I’ve even heard claims that the promotion of “Zhuang” as a standardized ethnic identity was partly born out of this political concern, a way to localize and contain Tai identity within China’s ethnic classification system.
The case for a Tai presence in Nanzhao seems increasingly difficult to deny. Geographically, it would be hard to imagine otherwise. The territories once controlled by Nanzhao overlap significantly with modern Tai-speaking regions such as those inhabited by the Shan, Dai, and Dehong Dai peoples. Their widespread presence across Yunnan and northern Southeast Asia strongly suggests that a Tai element existed within Nanzhao’s population and possibly even its political structure.
As for Manshu, your reference reminded me of the work of the highly respected linguist Zhengzhang Shangfang. He argued that the kings of Wu and Yue didn’t have names in the traditional Chinese style. In fact, their names often carried no discernible meaning in Chinese. According to Zhengzhang, these names were likely phonetic recordings of the Yue language, and he suggested that these rulers may not have used surnames at all a feature that aligns more closely with Kra-Dai naming traditions than with Chinese ones.
One example he gave was Shoumeng, a king of Wu. Zhengzhang noted that the naming pattern particularly the use of titles like Chao and Muang has deep roots in Tai tradition, often used for kings and nobility. Later kings of Wu even used names like Zhu, which Zhengzhang suggested is phonetically similar to the modern Chao (ຈ້າວ or เจ้ in Thai/Lao). He also examined the name of King Fuchai (夫差), whose Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as Pa Sre. In Kra-Dai languages, Pa (or Po) often means “lord” or “father,” and is still used today in royal or noble contexts. This suggests that Fuchai may not have been a Sinitic name at all, but rather a Yue or Kra-Dai one.
Thank you for the kind comment!!
There is something really bizarre about the writings on this topic. People on all sides have been 1000% determined to demonstrate that “There is no Tai anything here!!!” However, it is so obvious that there is (at least to some extent), and when you follow the footnotes of the scholars who claim otherwise, it’s pretty easy to see that they are not standing on stable ground.
I don’t understand why people don’t just say: “Ok, let’s test BOTH the Tai hypothesis and whatever other option there is to see which one makes more sense (or to see if something we have not previously thought of emerges).” Isn’t that the logical way to investigate an historical topic?
However, that is not what people have done. Instead, you read their articles and it’s all “No Tai! There are NO TAI here!! Absolutely NOTHING Tai!!”
People obviously are putting some kind of personal investment into this position, but for the life of me, I don’t get what that’s all about (yes, the earlier Chinese position I can understand, but Western scholars writing about this in the past 15 years or so???).
Sorry but ethnically Yue state rulers were Austroasiatics while the commoners were indeed Austronesians/Tai
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Certain references in Guóyŭ and elsewhere indicate that an obscure branch of the house of Chǔ took over the Yuè (northern Zhèjiāng) region about two centuries subsequent to the founding of Zhōu11; thus the Yuè rulers who emerge in the late Spring and Autumn era are likely to have had an ancestral relationship to Chŭ, a possibility that harmonizes well with Yuè’s frequent military cooperation with Chŭ in that period.
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The King of Yue sighed and said, The Yue are weak and stupid by nature. They travel by water and in the mountains. They use boats as vehicles and oars as horses. They go as if they are floating, but it is difficult to follow them when they leave. They are happy to fight and dare to die. This is the normal behavior of the Yue.
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It may surprise readers, but this ABC sample suggests that, for any substantial number of Old Chinese entries, TB comparanda will account for roughly 43.8% of entries, AA-affiliated words for 24.1% (and “southeastern” ones for 27.8%), unknown etymologies for 27.8%, and words with two plausible alternative roots and area words will account for 8% (again, figures add up to slightly more than 100%, because of the last two categories). Given roughly 5,500 words in ABC, we would estimate he found about 2,420 TB comparanda, 1,323 AA, 204 Thai, maybe 34 MY, a meager handful of AN, 34 “others,” about 1,527 unknown etymologies, and perhaps 440 area-words and words with two or more plausible etymologies.
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Tai is only 4% and Austronesian negligible so given such a low linguistic impact on Old Chinese from Austro-Tais we can speculate that they occupied a very low position in China at the time which was dominated by Austroasiatics and Sinitics. Interestingly enough imperial Vietnamese and Chinese always regarded Tais as uncivilised barbarians so the position of Tai people in the eyes of both groups holds true all throughout history, working backwards it’s totally reasonable to believe the ruling class of Yue was in fact Austroasiatics not Tai. So if anything it’s other people like Vietnamese who’s history Chinese are erasing, you acknowledged that renowned Chinese scholars have published works making connections between Tai and non Sinitic people of antiquity while none such works exist for Austroasiatic so I don’t see how China is suppressing Tai history?
I know this author. He was my professor. He would DEFINITELY disagree with your conclusion.
“We do not want to mislead readers into thinking “non-TB” equals “AA.” Far from it. ”
“Observe that we shy away from trying to identify any specific ethnolinguistic groups with
any particular prehistoric cultural horizons.”
Oh that’s pretty cool, what a small world
If AA no longer exist in China while groups like Tais and Hmong do isn’t it extremely strange AA words have higher retention than the others? I feel 24% v 4% is not like a minor discrepancy that can be brushed off.
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Yangtze originally being a reference to the middle then later the entire river shouldn’t the Austronesians/Tais have their own word for it living at the mouth, why did the AA word take precedence? It can only be that of all the groups that came into contact with Sinitics as evidenced by linguistic retention AAs either had the earliest contact, the most contact or were regarded the highest among all non Sinitics, I don’t see what else can explain the Chinese retaining such a vast amount of AA words but other groups falling away or failing to supercede AA.
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Yes, it’s standard caveat from historians and linguists because you want to be objective but equally I’m sure you also want to avoid providing ammunition to people like many to weaponise haha. So while scholars may place restrictions on yourselves from expressing the logical conclusion anyone can see it for what it is
Thank you for sharing all of thi, I genuinely appreciate your comments. I’ve learned a lot just from reading your them. I’m not an expert in this field by any means, I was simply referencing what Mr. LMK said about Manshu.
I personally don’t believe there’s any effort to suppress Tai history. I’m just trying to keep an open mind and dig a little deeper rather than accepting the first explanation I come across. From what I’ve seen, China has been pretty clear that Nanzhao was Bai and Yi, and I agree with that assessment, it’s not something I ever questioned.
That said, I did find it interesting that Manshu might be connected to Chao Muang, and the way Mr. LMK laid it out made the link feel surprisingly clear. I’m not trying to argue that Tai played any major role in Nanzhao or anything like that, just noting that it’s interesting to see that Tai-speaking groups may have been present, even if only marginally, despite some historical sources not mentioning them.
Thanks again for your thoughtful contributions. They’ve helped me look at things from a much more critical and informed perspective.
Actually it just came to me that it’s even worse and the total opposite, Chinese scholars actively try their utmost to invalidate connections between Austroasiatic and Ancient China like the word for Yangtze. It’s a total warfare campaign of erasure
I have no idea what Chinese scholars are saying, but if the argument for the Yangzi being Austroasiatic comes from Norman and Mei’s article from many years ago, then that might not be good.
My linguist colleagues tell me that the Norman and Mei article is badly flawed. Apparently, I wrote something about that once: https://leminhkhaiblog.com/revisiting-norman-and-meis-austroasiatic-speakers-in-ancient-south-china/
In other words, linguists today believe that the “homeland” of Austroasiatic languages may be in what is now southern China, but they don’t rely on Normal and Mei for making that point.
Well yes, your article makes perfect sense because Yue state/Nanyue were polities where most of the people were Austro-Tais so it’s not out of place for those words be Austronesian. Whatever the error made by Norman and Mei it’s not 100% error rate so we can’t just wholesale dismiss their ideas otherwise every linguistic paper should be wholesale dismissed.
@Le Minh Khai what’s current trend in Vietnamese/Indo-Chinese ethnogenesis studies? I got that the Tai branch of Kra-Dai are mostly assimilated Austroasiatic O1b (O2-M95) tribals instead of Kra-Austronesian O1a. Hainan Hlais also turns out to be Austroasiatic genetically but speak a Kra-Dai language.
Thanks again for the comment!!
However, it looks like you are mixing genetics and linguistics and that gets very tricky because languages are not passed down through genes.
Also, it looks like you are talking about the really early periods of history, and for those periods, the linguistic evidence is really thin, so that makes it even more difficult to theorize.
That said, if there are specific studies that you are getting these ideas from, it would be interesting to know, as off the top of my head, I don’t have much to say about this as this is far beyond my areas of expertise.
@Le Minh Khai thank for the advice. Certain I can say that I’m not incredibly well versed in ancient Chinese history as well as anything East of India, so I will restrain myself from making any opinions or interpretations on Chinese history/South-east asia. However, there are seemingly quite noticeable aspects that I think I could tell you from the modern languages of tai-kra Dai, austronesian, chinese, vietic, austro-asiatic.
Austronesian family look neatly agglutinative with a lot of long words and quite simple phonology as well as phonotactics. I believe these were characteristics of proto-austronesian too.
We know that Kra-Dai and Austronesian are related, Kra-Dai probably an offshoot of austronesian or they branched down together from a proto-Austro-Tai.
However, the Tai or the Dai branch (especially southwest Tai) of Kra-Dai don’t feel similar to austronesian at all, but even contrast. They are mostly isolating monosyllabic and have much complex phonology.
On the other hand, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, and Tibeto-Burman all have complex phonology and phonotactics that can all be reconstructed to their ancestral languages respectively. They also tend to share monosyllabic, isolating typologies even though they have not been in contact for a very long time.
I could guess, the simple conclusion here is that the southwest Tai has gone through heavy restructuring due to contact and demographic assimilation with Austroasiatic-Hmongic-Tibeto Burman locals, making its typological diverged from ancestral proto-Austro-Tai.
Big doubt that the Thais swept through southern china to modern-day Thailand without any contact and intermixing with local Wa, Palaungic, Khmuic, Mon-Khmer inhabitants on the way.
Hmmm, I’m not a linguist, but I don’t feel like it’s the case that Tai languages went through a lot of restructuring. The “expansion” was pretty fast, and relatively recent. The big change, I feel, was the incorporation into the languages of a massive elite Sanskrit/Pali/Khmer/Mon vocabulary.
Thanks again for your insights. I don’t know you personally, but I genuinely enjoy reading your blog and comments, they’ve been really eye-opening. Sometimes it’s the simplest point, like “just test it and compare,” that makes you stop and go, wait… why haven’t they done that? Wtf
Honestly, your posts got me thinking a lot deeper. I’ve been revisiting old theories I once took at face value. For example, I used to associate Nanzhao with Tai origins, but after reading more, especially from the Thai side, it felt like the evidence just didn’t hold up. The whole Altai Mountains origin story, the sloppiness of some of the sources… then I looked at the names of the Nanzhao kings and realized it probably had nothing to do with Tai at all. At that point, I thought: okay, if it’s Bai like China said. then let’s accept that and move forward.
I randomly came across your blog, and now I’m binge-reading everything…Viet history, regional history, language, you name it. It’s like you barely scratched the surface and still managed to open up an entirely new way of thinking for me. I’ve got my thinking cap on now, questioning everything coming out of China lol. No wonder Vietnam stays cautious. Also, I completely missed the significance of Manshu but your breakdown really showed how a single word can unlock a whole different perspective.
Thanks for doing what you do. It’s inspiring.
I agree 😌 I think the professor is among the best historians and academics on Vietnam and Southeast Asian history, hes great. Moreover he reaches out and connects to people🤔 If I had the money I would erect a statue of him somewhere nice. 💸
Thank you for the kind comments!! The key phrase here is “somewhere nice,” as opposed to a statue in a swamp or an industrial waste dump. . . 🙂
For Templescribe, theoretically, the way that the world of scholarship is supposed to work is that people get professionally trained (by people who are qualified to train them), and then the knowledge they produce gets verified by people with the same professional qualities.
While that probably does exist in some fields, it’s not the case for Southeast Asian history. In terms of English-language scholarship, the field first started to emerge around the 1960s, and simply by being the first person to study about a topic, you could become “the expert.”
So, what’s happened is that people then follow whatever “the expert” said, because in the world of scholarship, that’s what you generally do (because expert knowledge is supposed to be produced by professionally trained people who’s scholarship is verified by professionally trained people). But the field of Southeast Asian history isn’t like that. So, what I would say, is that yes, you should stop and ask about everything: How does this person actually know what s/he says?
This doesn’t mean that there is no good scholarship out there. There is, but it’s just that you can’t take things for granted.
Finally, when it comes to Chinese and Chinese scholars, I think scholarship on Southeast Asia in China is also weak, and so you have this problem where most scholars of Southeast Asian history don’t know Chinese (and all the knowledge that comes with that), and most Chinese who write about something that relates to Southeast Asia do not know Southeast Asian languages (and all the knowledge that comes with that). As such, there is a definite “knowledge gap” out there.
Mr Liam C Kelly you are indeed awesome and it’s amazing that you allow yourself to be accessible to us scrubs. Thank you for your efforts