Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

I recently had an email exchange with a young scholar who, among other things, tried to define the concept of “the Vietnamese intellectual tradition.” That got me thinking about how difficult it is to describe something like a “Vietnamese intellectual tradition.” People in the past who have attempted to do so have used terms like “Confucianism,” and “Western ideas,” etc., but such terms are all so vague.

The way that Vietnamese intellectuals think today is the product of something more specific than such vague terms can describe. So how can we describe the way that Vietnamese intellectuals think?

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Periodically there are articles that appear in the Vietnamese press about the “ancient Việt script” (chữ Việt cổ). There are people in Vietnam who are determined to show that there…