Vietnam

Read more about the article A 1910 Vietnamese Defense of the Yijing

A 1910 Vietnamese Defense of the Yijing

The arrival in East Asia in the nineteenth century of people in steamships from the industrializing West was a shock to the educated elite there, and they struggled to understand why it was that there were people in the world who had created technologies that were so different, and so much more powerful and advanced, than anything in East Asia at the time.

Many scholars looked into the ancient texts that they studied in an effort to pass the civil service exams and declared that there was nothing about Western technology that did not already exist (or which the potential to emerge did not exist) in ancient texts.

The Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經) was particularly important for these efforts, as it declared that in antiquity the sages had “fashioned implements” (zhiqi 制器) by “regarding the images” (shangxiang 尚象) of the 64 hexagrams in that work.

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Read more about the article The Premodern Past that Haunts Modern Vietnamese

The Premodern Past that Haunts Modern Vietnamese

There at it again. For the past few days Vietnamese cyberspace has been filled with articles and discussions about whether Chinese characters (chữ Hán) should be taught in schools in Vietnam.

I think the article that got the current debate started was one that called for teaching Chinese characters in order to “preserve the clarity of Vietnamese” (Cần dạy chữ Hán để giữ sự trong sáng của tiếng Việt), and this provoked somewhat of a backlash from some people who see this idea as some kind of effort to make Vietnam more “Chinese.”

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Read more about the article Knowledge Production, Globalization and Vietnamese Studies

Knowledge Production, Globalization and Vietnamese Studies

The video below aired on ThinkTech Hawaii and covers a range of topics that the Engaging With Vietnam conference series deals with, from knowledge production to globalization.

A big mahalo to Dr. Grace Cheng of Hawaii Pacific University for inviting us and facilitating a great conversation!!

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Read more about the article Phan Bội Châu, the Later Trần and the Ngô

Phan Bội Châu, the Later Trần and the Ngô

I love the early twentieth century, as that is when the Vietnamese worldview started to change dramatically, and the documents from that period make that perfectly clear.

I’ve been writing about a fifteenth-century document known as the “Great Pronouncement on Pacifying the Ngô” (Bình Ngô đại cáo), and of course the question of what the term “Ngô” refers to has come up.

The limited evidence from the fifteenth-century makes it difficult to determine what exactly that term meant at that time, but early twentieth century writings make it very clear what the term meant at that time.

A case in point is an historical novel that Vietnamese revolutionary Phan Bội Châu wrote in classical Chinese in the early twentieth century called The Lost History of the Later Trần (後陳逸史 Hậu Trần dật sử).

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Read more about the article The Ngô in the Dư Địa Chí were not the Ming

The Ngô in the Dư Địa Chí were not the Ming

There is a fifteenth-century document that is today very famous in Vietnam. It is called the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (The Great Proclamation on Pacifying the Ngô) and today it is seen in Vietnam as a kind of “declaration of independence” that was made after the Ming Dynasty forces were driven out of the Red River Delta after some two decades of occupation.

For years I have had problems with this interpretation of this document, and there are many posts on this blog which deal with this topic. I do not see this document as a “declaration of independence” but as a “declaration of victory” of one faction in the Việt world over another faction.

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Read more about the article Streaming From Saigon: Lê Văn Siêu on the Race of the Hồng Bàng

Streaming From Saigon: Lê Văn Siêu on the Race of the Hồng Bàng

In my ongoing effort to experiment with ways in which digital media can enhance the efforts of historians to examine and talk about the past, I am particularly pleased to begin a new series of videos that I will call “Streaming From Saigon.”

The purpose of these videos will be to introduce ideas that were discussed by Vietnamese historians in the 1950s-1970s.

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Read more about the article Seeing Like a State in Fifteenth Century Vietnam

Seeing Like a State in Fifteenth Century Vietnam

There is a book that was compiled in fifteenth century Vietnam called the Treatise on the Territory (Dư địa chí 輿地誌). This work was supposedly initially compiled by the scholar-official Nguyễn Trãi, but the versions that exist today also contain information that later scholars added.

The way this text is usually talked about in Vietnam today is as an example of any early “geography” or as a work of “historical geography.” As one scholar put it, Nguyễn Trãi’s text planted the seed that would eventually lead to the development of the field of “the historical geography of the Vietnamese people.” (Lần đầu tiên, Nguyễn Trãi đã đặt nền mống xây dựng khoa địa lý lịch sử của dân tộc Việt. . .)

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Read more about the article Microhistory in Phan Quang’s Re/Cover

Microhistory in Phan Quang’s Re/Cover

There is an art exhibition being held at BLANC Art Space in Saigon at the moment which displays a series of photographs taken by artist Phan Quang, and which is called “Re/Cover.”

The curator of the exhibition, Nguyễn Như Huy, kindly sent me a copy of the catalog for the exhibition. In the catalog, Nguyễn Như Huy has an essay entitled “Re/Cover: A Microhistorical Approach by Phan Quang” in which he explains how Phan Quang’s art can be understood as a form of microhistory.

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