Author: Le Minh Khai

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2. Going Backwards: Tai and Vietics

There are people in Khammouane Province in Laos who speak a language known as Saek (Sek). In the twentieth century, Western scholars struggled to identify what language family this language belongs to. The earliest scholars claimed that it was Mon-Khmer, but eventually French linguist André-Georges Haudricourt made a convincing case that it was a Tai language, and more specifically, a Northern Tai language.

Linguists believe that Tai languages emerged in the area of what is today Guangxi Province in China. Out of some proto-Tai language that existed some 2,000 years ago emerged Central Tai, Northern Tai and Southwestern Tai. Of these three, Southwestern Tai is the one that emerged the latest. Linguists now say that it emerged around the eighth or ninth centuries CE, and that its speakers started to migrate away from the “Tai homeland” at that time as well.

As the map below indicates, these three branches can be identified with different areas, and the place where the Saek language is spoken is in an area where one would expect to find Southwestern Tai speakers, not Northern Tai speakers.

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Who Were the Yue?

In her Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BC-50 CE, historian Erica Brindley opens the book with a chapter entitled “Who were the Yue”?

That may seem like an easy question to answer given that starting from the final centuries of the first millennium BCE one can find many references in Chinese sources to “Yue” 越/粵 peoples who lived to their south, peoples who were sometimes also collectively referred to as the “Bai-yue” 百越/百粵 or “Hundred Yue.” So surely it must be possible to go through those sources and get a sense of who those people were and to piece together some of their history.

In actuality, however, that is not the case, and in this chapter Brindley clearly documents how little we can actually determine with certainty about the Yue from early Chinese texts.

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1. Going Backwards: The Aquatic Culture Myth

In his 1983 work, The Birth of Vietnam, Keith Taylor argued that Vietnamese “mythical traditions. . . reveal a sea-oriented culture coming to terms with a continental environment. Civilization arrived with a culture hero from the sea. . .” (1)

The “culture hero” that Taylor was referring to here is Lạc Long Quân, a “mythical” figure that first appeared in the fifteenth century Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện 嶺南摭怪列傳 (Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes) and in abridged form in the fifteenth-century history, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書 (The Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt).

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Going Backwards: A Series

Not all scholarship is equal. There are books and articles that get published that are flawed. Part of the job of a scholar is to gain an understanding of which scholarship is reliable and which scholarship isn’t.

When Keith Taylor researched and wrote his first book, The Birth of Vietnam, he came to realize that the ideas of French scholar Leonard Aurousseau were flawed. In 1923 Aurousseau had written an article that argued that there had been a southward migration of “Yue” peoples in the first millennium BCE from the area of what is today Zhejiang Province in China to the Red River Delta in Vietnam.

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What Language(s) did the Ancient Yue Speak?

In the first millennium BC, “Chinese” writers recorded information about various peoples who lived to their south. These people were called by various names such as Ou, Luo, Western Ou, and Ouluo. At other times more generic terms were used like a term meaning “savages” – Manyi .

Then finally another common term that was used was “Yue” 越/粵, or more generally, the “Hundred Yue” (Baiyue 百越/百粵).

These terms are problematic because there is no evidence that the peoples that Chinese authors identified by these names actually referred to themselves by these names.

This then leads to an important question: What criteria did Chinese authors use to distinguish one group from another? Was it geography? Culture? Language? Ethnicity?

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“Rice from the Sky” . . .

In his new survey of Vietnamese history, Ben Kiernan attempts to include information on environmental history.

As part of that effort, he has a section on “Climate Change and Economic Growth in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” This section is based on his reading of an English translation that he had someone make based on the Vietnamese translation of the Việt sử lược 越史略 (Outline of Việt History), a fourteenth-century text that was written in classical Chinese.

In other words, Kiernan’s understanding of climate change and economic growth in Vietnam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is based on a translation of a translation.

Let’s take a look at how that went.

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The Trần Dynasty’s Exotic Pet Crocodile

In 1282, upon seeing that crocodiles had reached the Lô River (i.e., the Red River), emperor Trần Nhân Tông ordered one of his officials, Nguyễn Thuyên to compose a document and throw it into the river in order to drive the crocodiles away.

The passage that records this event in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書 (Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt) states that the crocodiles “reached” or “arrived at” (chí 至) the Lô River.

That is a clear indication that crocodiles were not usually seen in that area. So where had these crocodiles come from?

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Crocodiles and the Sinking of Premodern Vietnamese History

I have been trying my hardest not to comment on Ben Kiernan’s recent book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. However, a sense of morbid curiosity keeps leading me to open the covers of that book, and each time I look inside I can’t believe what I see (this is after all a book published by Oxford University Press in 2017).

For instance, I recently opened the book to the following passage (pg. 173):

“The first extant text written in Vietnamese was composed in 1282, in the nôm script. Its author, Nguyễn Thuyên, addressed this poem to crocodiles that had appeared in the Lô branch of the Red River, and Emperor Trần Nhân Tông ordered the text thrown in the river in the hope of driving the reptiles away.”

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