“Rice from the Sky” . . .
In his new survey of Vietnamese history, Ben Kiernan attempts to include information on environmental history.
As part of that effort, he has a section on “Climate Change and Economic Growth in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” This section is based on his reading of an English translation that he had someone make based on the Vietnamese translation of the Việt sử lược 越史略 (Outline of Việt History), a fourteenth-century text that was written in classical Chinese.
In other words, Kiernan’s understanding of climate change and economic growth in Vietnam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is based on a translation of a translation.
Let’s take a look at how that went.