I’ve recently been doing some research using a nineteenth-century geography called the Đại Nam nhất thống chí 大南一統志 (Unified Gazetteer of Đại Nam). As usual, once you start looking closely at a text and comparing that text with what has been written about it. . . you run into all kinds of problems.
I’ve said it a million times before, but I’ll say it here again: “It is impossible to understand pre-20th-century Vietnamese history if one does not read classical Chinese.”
I just came across an example of a single sentence that demonstrates this point perfectly (see the previous post for a detailed discussion of the passage where this sentence comes from).
Any time I read something in English about the premodern history of the Red River Delta and find an author saying that a work from that region mentions “China,” I…
A long time ago I criticized the scholars who translated the Đồng Khánh địa dư chí into Vietnamese (here), because in that work the people whom we would today refer…
I want to thank blogger Quach Hien for investigating this issue of why modern Vietnamese translations of the [Đại] Việt sử lược mention “Hùng vương” when the original mentions “Đối…
Blogger Quach Hien has a nice response to this issue of how modern Vietnamese translations of the [Đại] Việt sử lược do not note that the original has the character…
Yet another problem with Vietnamese translations of classical Chinese writings is that translators have left out parts of old texts which they do not like. Take, for instance, the case…
One of the first problems I noticed with quốc ngữ translations is that they add the words “China” (nước Tàu or Trung Quốc) or “in China” (ở bên Tàu, etc.)…
Continuing on the issue of the translation of the character “đôi” (碓) in the Đại Việt sử lược as “hùng,” a reader kindly sent me a copy of Trần Quốc…
There is a text known as the Việt sử lược or the Đại Việt sử lược which was reportedly compiled in the fourteenth century. During the Ming occupation, it was…