What is the most popular topic in the field of premodern Vietnamese history today?
Which topic has seen more than 150 studies produced about it over the past 15 years, with the majority appearing in the past 10 years?
Indeed, those numbers make it arguably the “hottest” topic of all time, as I don’t think there is any other topic in premodern Vietnamese history that has ever received so much attention in such a short span of time.
Can you guess what it is?
Let me help.
Ask yourself this: What did the visionary Liam Kelley see long before anyone else?
That’s right! It’s. . .
VIETNAMESE ENVOY POETRY!!!!!
30 years after I got the idea to study the poetry that Vietnamese envoys wrote when they journeyed across China to present tribute in the premodern period, it has become all the rage.
Ok, maybe it’s more accurate to call this a “Vietnamese literature” topic, but it intersects in many ways with the study of history, and I wrote about it as an historical topic, so I still consider it as such.
But wait, you ask, where are these 150+ studies? I haven’t seen a single one.
Primarily in China, but there have been some writings produced in Taiwan as well. In other words, in the Chinese-language world.
Why has this happened? Is it that my book has been translated and “gone viral,” and scholars across that region of the world have been so inspired that they have decided to conduct their own research on envoy poetry?
Sadly for me, no that’s not the case. In fact, in all those 150+ studies, I think I might only be mentioned once. The people who have produced these studies have absolutely no idea that there is a foreign devil (Yang guizi 洋鬼子) who wrote a dissertation and then book on the topic long before they were ever even aware of it.
So, how did they learn about this topic?
From a series of books. In 2010, Fudan University Press and the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies published the Yuenan Hanwen Yanxing wenxian jicheng (越南汉文燕行文献集成), a collection of 25 volumes that reproduces 79 works by Vietnamese envoys who traveled to China, from the Trần dynasty to the 1880s. Almost every study I have seen is built on it. Chinese scholars suddenly had a large body of Chinese-language texts that nobody had worked through, and they went to work.
And what have all of these studies been about? Many are about places along the route, and many of those concern Guangxi, with studies of Nanning, Guigang, Guilin, the Lingqu Canal, and Xiangshan Temple. Others follow the road north through Henan, Hebei, Shandong and Jiangsu. Most of these are written by scholars at local universities, who use the envoys as an outside witness to their own region’s past.
Then there are studies of individual envoys and their collections, including Nguyễn Du, Lý Văn Phức, and Lê Quý Đôn. Some are MA theses that provide an annotated edition of a single poetry collection.
Other studies look at the poetry itself: poems about history and ruins, farewell poems, poems exchanged with hosts, and poems written on fans, walls, and stones. Still others ask what envoys thought of China, and many of those focus on the late Qing, when envoys were reporting on war and Western powers.
A musicology thesis reads the records for what they say about Qing court music and opera.
Then there are other studies about the envoys’ meetings with Chinese officials, scholars, and monks, and with Korean envoys, meetings where communication was by “brush talk” (writing characters because they did not share a spoken language).
I also came across a study of envoys who died in China. It describes how the Ming and Qing courts paid for funerals, burial or the return of the coffin, and how the Vietnamese court honored the dead.
A pair of studies show Vietnamese elites using the Chinese hierarchy of civilized and barbarian for their own ends. One finds an envoy describing the Zhuang and Yao of Guangxi as ugly “savages.” Another finds Later Lê envoys treating the Ming as the legitimate dynasty and sometimes calling the Qing “Qing barbarians” (清夷).
A thesis on the 1790 mission in which the Tây Sơn ruler supposedly participated challenges what Vietnamese historians have long said, that the man who traveled to Beijing for Qianlong’s birthday was an impostor. It argues that this is not credible, because Qianlong welcomed the party warmly and wrote a poem when the ruler died.
And then there are the smaller surprises: One envoy spent almost three years in Guangzhou, gathered his poems with local friends into a printed book, bought and printed other books, and took a concubine who bore him a child. A poet from Guangxi traded verse with Vietnamese envoys for about twenty years.
There are also studies that cover Vietnamese missions that did not go to China, such as an 1863 embassy to France and Spain, and the 1830 voyage to Bengal that I wrote about earlier.
What I have reported above is based on what I have seen in titles and abstracts, not full texts yet, as I have just compiled a list of these studies. I will now start going through some of these works more closely.
Nonetheless, I think the main picture is clear. Vietnamese envoy poetry has become a hot topic in the Chinese-language world, and it is built on a 2010 publication that reproduced collections of envoy poetry, rather than the 2005 monograph that established Vietnamese envoy poetry as a scholarly topic. . . ☹
