The Unimportance of Bronze Drums in Việt History
In the second half of the twentieth century, the bronze drum became a symbol of “the antiquity of Việt nation.”
However, from the time that the people we refer to as the Việt started to record information about themselves until the present – a time period roughly equivalent to the thousand years of the second millennium AD – bronze drums were never part of the cultural lives of the Việt. Instead, it is people whom the Việt perceived to be different from themselves, and whom the Việt looked down upon, who employed bronze drums in their cultural lives.