The Quốc Tử Giám and the Transformation of Traditional Learning in 1910s Vietnam

In 1909, reformist Nguyễn Dynasty scholar Phạm Quang Sán offered an example of a theoretical civil service exam question and answer that sought to demonstrate that the origins of Western learning lay in Asia, and that people in Asia now needed to learn Western learning so that they could reap the results of the seeds of knowledge that they had originally sown. Further, by doing so Phạm Quang Sán argued that Asians would then be able to compete with Westerners on a more intellectually equal level.

A year later, in 1910, there was an actual question on the palace exam that addressed this issue of the value of Western knowledge, as well as the value of reformist writings that people like Phạm Quang Sán produced. The model answer that was published that year dismissed the value of both Western and reformist learning by arguing that ultimately all knowledge can be found in the (Confucian) classics.

It is therefore clear that there were differing views at that time among the traditional elite about Western learning. However, it is also clear that by the end of the 1910s that same elite had largely come to accept Western learning.

How did that happen?

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Phạm Quang Sán’s Social Darwinist Call to Restore Ancient Ways

In reading writings from the world of the Nguyễn Dynasty in early twentieth century Vietnam the one thing that becomes clear is that there was a lot of information available about the West at that time. So the traditional elite were not ignorant about other parts of the world.

However, there were members of the traditional elite who were reluctant to change, even though they knew about Europe and America and the developments that had taken place there in recent years.

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The Untold Story of the Self-Modernization of Vietnam’s Traditional Elite

In the previous post I introduced a book that Nguyễn Dynasty official and reformist scholar Phạm Quang Sán published in 1909 that sought to introduce students studying for the civil service exams to new ideas.

While many of the questions and answers in that book covered topics that were very new, there were also some questions and answers in that work that as least ostensibly sought to follow traditional ideas and patterns.

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Phạm Quang Sán’s Attempt to Revolutionize the Civil Service Exams (Khoa Cử)

In 1909, a year after he had published a textbook that was aimed at modernizing elementary education, Nguyễn Dynasty official and reformist scholar Phạm Quang Sán published another small book that was targeted at more advanced students, namely students who were studying for the civil service exams (khoa cử).

Entitled A New Selection of Policy Studies (Sách học tân tuyển 策學新選), this book purported to present model examples of the types of questions that one could expect to be asked in the exams, as well as model examples of how one should answer those questions.

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The True Vietnamese Revolutionaries

I’ve long had a problem with the general narrative about the history of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Vietnam. Over and over you read in books that the Nguyễn Dynasty failed to deal with the French, and as a result of this, the “old world” of traditional Vietnam, and classical Chinese, died and the “new world” of reformers and revolutionaries like Phan Bội Châu took over, and that led to the Tonkin Free School in 1907 where vernacular Vietnamese written in quốc ngữ was promoted, etc. and. . . that’s the end of the story, as that road all leads to 1945.

What’s wrong with this narrative? First of all, Phan Bội Châu spent very little time in Vietnam in the early twentieth century, and his writings were not published at that time, so how could he have been influential?

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Read more about the article Wealth and Power, Mencius and 1910 Vietnam

Wealth and Power, Mencius and 1910 Vietnam

In the nineteenth century there were Chinese scholars who realized that China needed to catch up with the technological advances of Western nations. This was referred to as the need for “wealth and power” (fuqiang 富强).

What Chinese scholars did not want, on the other hand, were Western ideas, as they felt that those were inferior to Chinese ideas.

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A 1910 Vietnamese Defense of the Yijing

The arrival in East Asia in the nineteenth century of people in steamships from the industrializing West was a shock to the educated elite there, and they struggled to understand why it was that there were people in the world who had created technologies that were so different, and so much more powerful and advanced, than anything in East Asia at the time.

Many scholars looked into the ancient texts that they studied in an effort to pass the civil service exams and declared that there was nothing about Western technology that did not already exist (or which the potential to emerge did not exist) in ancient texts.

The Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經) was particularly important for these efforts, as it declared that in antiquity the sages had “fashioned implements” (zhiqi 制器) by “regarding the images” (shangxiang 尚象) of the 64 hexagrams in that work.

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The Idea for a Mandarin Language in Early-20th-Century Vietnam

The civil service examination was of course an extremely important institution in Vietnamese history, but it is a topic that has yet to be researched in depth. Indeed, trying to understand how that institution worked is a daunting task, and it is understandable that not many scholars have tried to take on this difficult topic.

Recently I took a look at some documents that were produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that contain questions from the exams and “ideal answers.” Known as Selected Essays from the Palace Exam [Hội đình văn tuyển 會庭文選], these texts were meant to serve as study guides for future exam takers.

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Hồ Chí Minh and China’s Destiny

I was reading a newspaper from Republican China today called the Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao 中央日報). On 19 May 1946 it published a brief article entitled “Việt Chairman Hồ Chí Minh Translates China’s Destiny; Since Publication it has been Selling Extremely Well.”

(越主席胡志明譯中國之命運，出版後極暢銷)

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Read more about the article A Review of “The People between the Rivers”

A Review of “The People between the Rivers”

In 1976, Edward Schafer published a book about “the South” in the medieval Chinese imagination called The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South. Filled with fascinating details about everything from plants to people, Schafer’s book demonstrated how vast and rich the information in Chinese sources is for the region of what is now Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, as well as northern and parts of central Vietnam, in the first millennium CE.

At the same time, however, in focusing on how Chinese “thought” about the south, The Vermilion Bird is not an ideal work to read in order to gain a sense of “what actually happened” in that region during that time period. This is a gap that Keith Taylor’s 1983 work, The Birth of Vietnam, partially filled as it provided a very detailed narrative of the history of the Red River Plain, part of the larger region that is examined in The Vermilion Bird, from the earliest times up through the period of Tang Dynasty rule.

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