Đào Duy Anh

Đào Duy Anh’s (French) Characterization of Vietnamese Intellectual Inferiority

In his 1938 work, An Historical Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Việt Nam văn hóa sử cương), Vietnamese historian Đào Duy Anh tried to do something that no Vietnamese scholar had ever attempted to do before. He tried to write a history of Vietnamese society.

This was very difficult, because as he noted in his book, the historical records that Vietnamese had written up to that point had dealt primarily with dynastic politics. They did not talk about “the people” (nhân dân), and therefore it was difficult to write about Vietnamese society in the past.

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Đào Duy Anh and Vidalian Geography

As the previous post demonstrated, while it is clear that in writing his An Historical Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Việt Nam văn hóa sử cương, 1938) historian Đào Duy Anh was influenced by Yang Dongchun’s A General Outline of the Cultural History of China (Benguo wenhuashi dagang 本國文化史大綱, 1931), he was also influenced by French scholarship.

We can see this right away at the beginning of the book in the section on “What is Culture?” Right after Đào Duy Anh more or less repeats word-for-word the opening passage from Yang Dongchun’s book, he then offers discusses the issue of why different people have different cultures.

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Đào Duy Anh and ROC Intellectual Influence in Colonial Vietnam

One of the (many) problems with the way that modern Vietnamese history has been written about (both by historians inside and outside of Vietnam) is that there is virtually no recognition of any Chinese intellectual influence on Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s when in fact there was significant influence.

Everyone recognizes that the traditional Vietnamese elite were deeply influenced by the ideas of their counterparts in imperial China. Everyone also recognizes that early-twentieth-century reformers like Phan Bội Châu were influenced by the ideas of late-Qing reformers like Liang Qichao.

But then after that. . . there is virtually no mention of any kind of intellectual connection between members of the Vietnamese elite and their counterparts in the Republic of China (ROC).

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