Vietnam

Minh Mạng and Nôm

Alexander Woodside’s Vietnam and the Chinese Model (1971) is a pioneering work of scholarship that remains today an important study of nineteenth-century Vietnam and the Nguyễn Dynasty. Woodside was the first scholar in the English-speaking world to make extensive use of Nguyễn Dynasty sources and no scholar since has produced a work of scholarship that ranges so broadly over the nineteenth-century Vietnamese historical record.

Like any pioneering study, however, Vietnam and the Chinese Model can still of course be improved upon, and we can see this with regards to one issue that Woodside discusses in this work, the role of Nôm, or the demotic script, in early nineteenth century Vietnam.

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The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

There is a major new documentary about the Vietnam War that is about to be broadcast on TV in the US. It is called The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick.

Burns and Novick have made some very successful documentaries together, but they are not experts on Vietnamese history, and while experts were consulted during the making of this documentary, I think it will be safe to assume that this documentary will essentially be a documentary about “what the Vietnam War means to a certain segment of the American population.”

That is fine. As long as educated viewers understand what this documentary is, and what its perspective is, then they can appreciate it for what it is.

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Hoa, Annamite and Ta: Or Why People Can’t Understand Vietnamese History

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).

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Engaging With Vietnam in HCM City, Bình Dương and Phú Yên

After an intensive summer of planning for the 9th Engaging With Vietnam conference, we are pleased to announce details about the conference and to encourage everyone interested in participating to please submit a proposal by August 31 (see www.engagingwithvietnam.net for details).

This year’s conference theme is “TOURING VIETNAM: Exploring Development, Tourism and Sustainability in Vietnam from Multi-disciplinary and Multi-directional Perspectives.” We encourage submissions that address this theme, but as a multidisciplinary conference on Vietnam, we also consider submissions on topics not directly related to the theme, so please feel free to submit a proposal!

This year’s conference will engage the theme through the following formats:

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Sihanouk’s “Thank You, Hồ Chí Minh Trail” (1973)

In 1970, the head of state of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, was overthrown by one of his military officers, Lon Nol.

Sihanouk, who had declared Cambodia to be a neutral state, was in Moscow at the time. He then flew to Beijing. In Beijing, Premier Minister Zhou Enlai summoned Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng, and together they convinced Sihanouk to form a government-in-exile and resist Lon Nol.

Sihanouk proceeded to do so, and in the process, he decided to support a group that was also opposed to Lon Nol, the Khmer Rouge.

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A World War II Annam Anthem (Đăng Đàn)

One period of Vietnamese history that I find fascinating is World War II. During the War, Vietnam was occupied by the Japanese, but for most of the war the Japanese left the French in power.

France, however, had been occupied by the Germans, so the French colonial officials in Indochina during the war were part of a collaborating government known as Vichy France.

Vichy France was led by Philippe Pétain, a military man and authoritarian. He sent Admiral Jean Decoux to Indochina to promote his authoritarian agenda and to try to keep the Japanese from gaining influence among the Vietnamese.

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59 Years of English-Language Scholarship on Vietnamese History

While reading Christopher Goscha’s new survey of Vietnamese history, Vietnam: A New History, I decided to go back and read the first survey of Vietnamese history in English, Joseph Buttinger’s 1958 work The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam.

Buttinger was an interesting person. Born in Austria, he quit school at age 13 and got involved in underground politics. During World War II he started to work for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organization that at that time was helping war refugees.

In 1954, Buttinger worked for the IRC where hundreds of thousands of refugees were arriving from the North. He became interested in Vietnam at that time and start reading about.

Four year later he published The Smaller Dragon.

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Colonial Republicanism and the Revolutionary Narrative of Modern Vietnamese History

I used to teach a course on modern Vietnamese history (19th and 20th centuries), but I stopped teaching it a few years ago because I got really bored with it.

I got bored of the general narrative of Vietnamese history that I was presenting to students. The way I was teaching Vietnamese history is the way that I suspect a lot of people in North America teach it (or have taught it), and that is to see a pretty sudden decline of “traditional” Vietnam and the gradual emergence of a modern Vietnam.

Topics covered in the first half of the course included ones such as the following:

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