I’ve been reading a recent (2017) PhD dissertation from China that is on Han tombs in Vietnam. The dissertation is entitled “Archaeological Research on Han Tombs in Vietnam” (越南境内漢墓的考古研究) and the author’s name is Wei Weiyan (韦伟燕/韋偉燕).

There were French scholars who “discovered” and wrote about some of these tombs over a century ago. During the period when “Vietnam” was under the rule of the Han Dynasty (~111 BC – 220 AD), there were some Han Chinese who died there and were buried in tombs that were constructed similar to tombs in the area of what is today southern China.

That said, these “Han” tombs sometimes contain funerary objects that demonstrate that the Han Chinese community in the area of what is now Vietnam were clearly in contact with people of other cultural traditions.

While these tombs get mentioned in writings on Vietnamese history, Wei Weiyan greatly advances our knowledge of Han tombs in Vietnam by synthesizing together basically all of the extant information about these archaeological sites from reports in multiple languages.

What is more, Wei Weiyan takes all of that information and then produces her own categorizations and periodization of the tombs.

This is a topic that is far out of my small range of expertise, so I have no way to evaluate the details of her categorizations and periodizations. However, the fact that Wei Weiyan has “mapped out” the information on this topic is incredibly valuable, and it has led me to literally wish to “map out” her findings.

I therefore created two Google Maps based on information in this dissertation.

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1oPD0sN3OwTvU1W8_tCY3VM0fTLTDuC58″ width=”640″ height=”480″>

According to Wei Weiyan, at present some 53 Han graveyards have been identified in Vietnam. These graveyards contain a collective total of 236 graves. Not all of those graves take the form of tombs, and many are too damaged to be able to examine.

Nonetheless, Wei Weiyan provides detailed information about each of the 53 graveyards, and attempts to periodize the graves in those graveyards (if possible).

In the map above, I have input information about the 53 graveyards. Please note: the geographic location of each graveyard is not exact. In most cases I’ve only been able to give a general sense of where the graveyard is located.

Meanwhile, the map below places graveyards in both space and time. I use a different color for each time period. You can turn the layers on the left on and off to see where there were graveyards in different time periods. Further, I use a different color for each time period. If a graveyard was active across more than one time period, I continue to label it with the same color as the time period when it initially appeared.

In mapping out this information, the first thing that caught my eye was the way that these graveyards demonstrate that the Han Dynasty ruled over what we can essentially think of as a “riverine” empire in Vietnam.

These days, we tend to think in terms of territory. You set up a base and control the territory around it. For Han Dynasty Vietnam, by contrast, it clearly makes much more sense to think of rivers. The Han set up bases on rivers, and. . . who knows how far from the rivers they actually controlled.

Finally, it’s also very interesting to see which rivers have the most graveyards. While we think of the Red River as “the center” of the region, that is not where most of the Han graveyards are located. Of course this could be simply because graveyards there have been destroyed over time. After all, this is the most densely populated area in the region and the Red River has changed its course over time.

Nonetheless, even if there were once more graveyards along the Red River, that would only make it more equal with other areas, like the Bạch Đằng River and the Mã River. This makes me think of another issue.

Ultimately, the big attraction of Vietnam to the Han Dynasty was its exotic goods, and those came from the forests, not from the agricultural heartland of the Red River delta. Seeing all of the Han graveyards on the Bạch Đằng and Mã rivers is therefore not surprising, as those were perhaps the areas where it was easiest to obtain the valuable exotic goods from the forests.