Vietnam and China

There are a couple of bronze drums that have been found in the Red River delta that have Chinese characters on them.

One of them records a place name, Huihe zhou/Hồi Hà châu, and the weight of the drum (回河州鼓重兩千百八十二).

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There was a theory that emerged in the early twentieth century which argued that at the end of the first millennium BC, Vietnamese migrated to the Red River delta from an original homeland in what is today southeastern China.

This idea was suggested first by Edouard Chavannes in 1901, and was then developed further by Leonard Aurousseau in 1923. Today this theory is no longer upheld, although one can still find it mentioned. Nonetheless, I don’t think that many people are aware of why this theory does not make sense.

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A reader asked where the idea that the millennium when the Red River Delta was part of various “Chinese” empires can be seen as something like “1000 years of Chinese…

I was reading an essay by the late Trần Quốc Vượng in which he talked about Vietnamese and Chinese culture. Trần Quốc Vượng states at the beginning of the essay…

I spent some time today looking through a journal that was published in Hanoi in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries called Revue Indo-Chinoise. This was a time when the French…

I was reading the newspaper, The Truth (Sự Thật, 7/12/46), and found an article about “An Overseas Chinese Intellectual Who Died for the Independence of Vietnam.” The masthead of this…

I’ve been doing some reading on the concept of Sinicization. It’s interesting to see that while the term has been widely used, very little effort (until recently) has been done…

I have read countless times that in 1979 the Chinese invaded Vietnam to “punish” the Vietnamese for having invaded Cambodia, a “client state” of the PRC. I think that is…