Shortly before he died in 1043 BC, King Wu of the Zhou (周武王 Zhou Wuwang) succeeded in overthrowing the Shang Dynasty and establishing a new dynasty under his family name – the Zhou. With his death, however, this newly established Zhou Dynasty faced an uncertain future.
Does the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” represent a decision 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?
“No.”
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.”
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvtLqVukuIc Responding to a call from “Jacques from France,” Dr. K. and guest The Midnight Dreamer discuss the question of “Who were the Ngô?” on the WTXT’s Late Night Textual…
There is a fifteenth-century document that is today very famous in Vietnam. It is called the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (The Great Proclamation on Pacifying the Ngô) and today it is seen in Vietnam as a kind of “declaration of independence” that was made after the Ming Dynasty forces were driven out of the Red River Delta after some two decades of occupation.
For years I have had problems with this interpretation of this document, and there are many posts on this blog which deal with this topic. I do not see this document as a “declaration of independence” but as a “declaration of victory” of one faction in the Việt world over another faction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_K_sFrQ9hs The above video is a discussion of Nguyễn Đăng Thục’s essay “The Origins of the Vietnamese People,” which was published in either the 1960s or early 1970s by the…
In my ongoing effort to experiment with ways in which digital media can enhance the efforts of historians to examine and talk about the past, I am particularly pleased to begin a new series of videos that I will call “Streaming From Saigon.”
The purpose of these videos will be to introduce ideas that were discussed by Vietnamese historians in the 1950s-1970s.
This is a meditation on the “Nam quốc sơn hà,” strangeness in history, Benedict Anderson, language learning, the “Bình Ngô đại cáo,” Soviet soldiers, Tạ Chí Đại Trường, and the…