Vietnam

The Red River Delta’s Limited Rice Supply in the First Century AD

As far as I know, no one has ever written a history of rice cultivation in the Red River Delta. Instead, I think most people simply assume that people have been employing sophisticated irrigation techniques in order to cultivate wet rice there since the earliest of times.

As I’ve started to look at this issue, however, I’ve come to realize that there isn’t evidence to support such a view. Instead, I see evidence that would indicate that people relied mainly on broadcasting seeds in floodplains until the end of the first millennium AD, when efforts started to be made to dike the Red River and when Vietnamese came into contact with Southwestern Tai-speaking peoples, peoples who possessed sophisticated knowledge about irrigation techniques.

Some readers have been providing information from historical sources (thank you!!) that can help us determine the history of rice cultivation in the Red River Delta, and in looking at this information, it is interesting to see how it has been interpreted.

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Lạc Fields and Tidal Irrigation in Early Vietnam

The earliest record that tells us something about life in the Red River Delta in ancient times is Li Daoyuan’s sixty-century Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Annotated Classic of Waterways). That book cites an earlier work, the late-third or early-fourth-century Jiaozhou waiyu ji 交州外域記 (Annotated Classic of Waterways), to say the following about agricultural practices:

“In the past, before Jiaozhi had commanderies and districts, the land had lạc fields. These fields followed the rising and falling of the. . [KEY WORD]”

交趾昔未有郡縣之時，土地有雒田，其田從潮水上下. . .

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Who Were the Yue?

In her Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BC-50 CE, historian Erica Brindley opens the book with a chapter entitled “Who were the Yue”?

That may seem like an easy question to answer given that starting from the final centuries of the first millennium BCE one can find many references in Chinese sources to “Yue” 越/粵 peoples who lived to their south, peoples who were sometimes also collectively referred to as the “Bai-yue” 百越/百粵 or “Hundred Yue.” So surely it must be possible to go through those sources and get a sense of who those people were and to piece together some of their history.

In actuality, however, that is not the case, and in this chapter Brindley clearly documents how little we can actually determine with certainty about the Yue from early Chinese texts.

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What Language(s) did the Ancient Yue Speak?

In the first millennium BC, “Chinese” writers recorded information about various peoples who lived to their south. These people were called by various names such as Ou, Luo, Western Ou, and Ouluo. At other times more generic terms were used like a term meaning “savages” – Manyi .

Then finally another common term that was used was “Yue” 越/粵, or more generally, the “Hundred Yue” (Baiyue 百越/百粵).

These terms are problematic because there is no evidence that the peoples that Chinese authors identified by these names actually referred to themselves by these names.

This then leads to an important question: What criteria did Chinese authors use to distinguish one group from another? Was it geography? Culture? Language? Ethnicity?

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The Trần Dynasty’s Exotic Pet Crocodile

In 1282, upon seeing that crocodiles had reached the Lô River (i.e., the Red River), emperor Trần Nhân Tông ordered one of his officials, Nguyễn Thuyên to compose a document and throw it into the river in order to drive the crocodiles away.

The passage that records this event in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史記全書 (Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt) states that the crocodiles “reached” or “arrived at” (chí 至) the Lô River.

That is a clear indication that crocodiles were not usually seen in that area. So where had these crocodiles come from?

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Digital Humanities, Bronze Drums and Buffaloes

Dông Sơn bronze drums are today a symbol of Vietnam. The images of bronze drums and the details on them (birds, etc.) can be found everywhere in Vietnam. But why do people think that they are so representative?

And if they don’t really represent Vietnam, then what does?

This is a question that Digital Humanities can help answer.

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How Did Vietnam Transform from a Lateral-Aristocratic Ethnie into a Modern Nation?

In 1980 a conference was held in Hanoi to mark the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of History (Viện Sử Học). The topic of the conference was the question of when the Vietnamese nation formed (vấn đề hình thành dân tộc Việt Nam).

The opening address of this conference noted that this was an issue that had been discussed since 1955, and had been viewed in two main ways over that period of time.

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