Vịet, “Chinese,” Savages and Bronze Drums

Having talked in the previous post about how bronze drums were not important to the Việt in the past, there is one case in which they were, and that is in regards to a shrine known as the Shrine of the Spirit of the Bronze Drum (Đồng Cổ Thần Tự 銅鼓神祠) which was in the area of Thanh Hóa Province on a mountain called Mount Đan Nê, but which was also known as Mount Khả Lao (可牢山).

There is a passage about this shrine in the nineteenth-century geographical text, the Đại Nam nhất thống chí 大南一統志. That passage is a bit confusing because in addition to the shrine on Mount Đan Nê, an altar dedicated to this spirit was also later set up in the capital. So this information is about one spirit who was honored in two locations.

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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.

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