Tự Đức’s Dismissal of Sĩ Nhiếp
One of the stereotypes which the Nguyễn Dynasty has suffered from is that it was “overly Sinitic/Confucian,” and that this made them impractical to the extent that they could not…
The Problem of Continuity in Early “Vietnamese” Archaeology
Archaeological Highlights, a Vietnamese blog on archaeology, history, methodology, and other issues, has an interesting recent post which questions how the archaeological materials that have been unearthed in Vietnam can…
Where Vietnamese Antiquity Came From
Keith Taylor began his 1983 work on early Vietnamese history, The Birth of Vietnam, with the following sentence: “The earliest traditions of the Vietnamese people, as revealed in the Lĩnh…
How the Hùng Kings Obtained a Citadel
The Hùng Kings are an invention. They were not invented out of nothing, but instead were fashioned out of extant written sources. This process of creation, however, was not clean.…
The Real Ông Trọng
Over a year ago I posted a blog entry on The Invention of Lý Ông Trọng in which I argued that there was no evidence that a man by this name had lived in the Red River delta in the third century B.C. and had gone off to fight the Xiongnu for Qin Shihuangdi. I argued instead that a Tang Dynasty administrator by the name of Zhao Chang had “imported” this story into the region and used it to create a story about a local spirit.
I still believe that this story about Lý Ông Trọng is an invention. However, I recently found some information which indicates that there once had been a man by the name of Ông Trọng who was connected to the Red River delta.
(more…)The 18 Generations of Hùng Kings
Everyone knows that the Hùng Kings supposedly ruled for 18 generations. However, where does that information come from? The earliest sources on the Hùng Kings are the Lĩnh Nam chích…