Michigan State University (MSU) recently announced a “soft launch” of a digital archive that some people at MSU are creating to document materials produced and collected by a technical assistance program for the Republic of Vietnam that MSU ran from 1955-1962.
In looking through some of the materials I came across a document entitled “The Vietnamese Historical Sources Project – A Proposal” which the Japanese-educated Taiwanese historian of Vietnam, Chen Jinghe (Ching-Ho Chen), had written while he was a visiting professor at the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in the early 1970s.
This proposal was to support the creation of printed, collated versions of Vietnamese historical sources and was to involve the cooperation of three universities: Southern Illinois University, Hue University and Keio University.
In his proposal, Chen Jinghe provided a detailed history of the modern efforts to index and categorize Vietnamese written sources. While the efforts by French scholars such as Cadiere, Pelliot and Gaspardone are well known, I was unaware of the efforts of Japanese scholars at that time to do the same (Matsumoto Nobuhiro, Yamamoto Tatsuro, Iwai Taikei, etc.)
He also talks about the efforts of French, Japanese and Vietnamese scholars to publish copies of certain historical sources in the twentieth century.
This then leads Chen Jinghe to the “problem” that his proposal sought to address.
To quote, he stated that, “From the above description on the work of introducing and publishing Vietnamese historical materials, we can see that the works done in Vietnam mainly concerned the translation and transcription into the Chu Quoc Ngu (Romanized characters) of the sources originally written in Chinese or Chu Nom. The reason is that the majority of contemporary Vietnamese scholars have difficulties in reading Chinese and Chu Nom.”
“However,” he notes, “the translators and transcribers of these works generally lack bibliographical training and experience in compiling and editing historical materials, so the translated or the transcribed editions published tend to be of minor importance.”
What made these works of minor importance to Chen Jinghe was that scholars had not always published the classical Chinese text of the works they translated, and they did not “revise” the sources, by which he meant they had not “collated” the sources.
If there are multiple manuscript versions of a text, what is considered by many scholars to be the best thing to do is to create a new version of the text in which one can see where the various manuscripts differ.
The way to do this is to use one text as the “main” text, and then to indicate when other versions differ from the main text.
Chen Jinghe did this in the early 1960s for one historical text, the An Nam chí lược. With The Vietnamese Historical Sources Project, however, he proposed to produce collated versions of many other texts.
First and foremost, Chen Jinghe proposed to collate and publish the chronicle, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư (the ngoại kỷ, bản kỷ and tục biên). However, there were many other works that he proposed to publish.
From 1959-1962, Chen Jinghe was supported by the Harvard-Yenching institute to classify and arrange the 611 volumes of records (châu bản) in the Imperial Archives of the Nguyễn Dynasty, documents which in the early 1970s were being held in Dalat. As part of The Vietnamese Historical Sources Project, Chen Jinghe proposed “to extract the part of this group of materials which deal[s] with foreign relations, external trade and missionary activities during the four reigns of Gia-long, Minh-mang, Thieu-tri and Tu-duc (1802-1883). in order to compile them into a collected edition of historical materials on the foreign relations of the Nguyen, so as to promote the study of modern Vietnamese history.
Chen Jinghe also proposed publishing the geographical works, the Đại Nam nhất thống chí and the Gia Định thành thông chí, as well as Phan Huy Chú’s history of institutions, the Lịch triều hiến chương loại chí.
Once these works were collated and published, Chen Jinghe proposed to move on to “Phase II” and to do the same for some 15 more works.
What ultimately came of this proposal? Apparently it was funded around 1973 by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’m not sure how long the funding lasted, but 1975 undoubtedly brought an end to collaboration between Southern Illinois University and Hue, etc.
Several years later, Chen Jinghe did publish in Japan a collated version of the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư as well as a collated version of the Việt sử lược.
The Chen Jinghe version of the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư does contain some errors, but it is by far the best version of that text to work with.
Until I came across this proposal, I had no idea that Chen Jinghe had planned to do so much more, and that at least initially, there was financial support for such a project.
Today it is extremely difficult to find funding for a project like this. Collating texts is something that funding agencies are not interested in supporting as it is an activity that scholars in many fields engaged in decades ago, and it is therefore something that is supposed to be “complete” by now.
Other than the three texts that Chen Jinghe collated, however, no other collated versions of Vietnamese historical texts exist, as far as I know.
This leaves an ache in my belly, for what could have been and what should be. We need to find a way to continue what Chen Jinghe began. Thanks for summing up such a basic and important aspect of the state of the field!!
Great story and picture of Chen Jinghe. I remember reading his works in college and graduate school. His son is now a French citizen and works for the French Foreign services, Yo-jung Chen, having just finished a tour in Singapore and now moving on to San Francisco or Los Angeles. http://www.metropoleparis.com/2001/628/628diplo.html.
How good was Chen Jinghe’s study of the Nguyen archives and the Chau-ban?
Thanks for the comment. And thank you very much for the information about Chen Jinghe’s son. It’s very interesting!!
I never met Chen Jinghe, but I consider him to be a very important teacher for me, as in reading his articles I learned a lot about how to do scholarship with old Vietnamese sources. If he was using an historical text, for instance, he would then turn to geographical texts to corroborate the information that he found there (since those texts also contained historical information), and I feel like I learned how to do things like that from reading his scholarship.
As for his “study” of the Nguyen archives, it was more of an effort to catalog the archives, meaning the Chau-ban. Two volumes were published in the early 1960s that were more or less summaries of the information in Chau-ban from the Gia Long and Minh Menh reigns, but then, from what I understand, Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated and the project that Chen Jinghe was involved in was seen as a kind of “archaic Diem project” that did not fit the needs of a modern Vietnam and was called off. So no more volumes were published, and I think Chen Jinghe left South Vietnam at that time. However, index cards of notes had already been prepared for the publication of more volumes.
In recent years some new volumes have been produced. I haven’t used them, but someone told me that they are essentially the notes that Chen Jinghe made in the 1960s. Actually, as far as I know it wasn’t only him. There were some elderly former Nguyen Dynasty officials who were helping. However, their writing style was unique in that it was much more “Sinitic” than the way Vietnamese write today, so a friend told me that these new volumes that are coming out are written in that older style, and this is a sign that they are actually just reproducing what was produced by Chen Jinghe and his team in the early 1960s.
Chen Jinghe interacted with the final generation of Vietnamese who really had the ability to read classical Chinese, and he himself was also part of that world. The generation that followed was nowhere near as good. It’s only in recent years (in the 21st century) that a small group of young people has started to emerge which can start to do the kind of work that Chen Jinghe and his Vietnamese colleagues engaged in. That’s good to see!
There is a new generation in China and Taiwan that is systemically organizing the Vietnamese Han Van now.
Chongqing’s Southwest Normal University 西南师范大学学 together with Beijing Renmin University has lithographically reprinted the original Nguyen texts of 皇越一统舆地志 (2015), 大南一统志 (2015), and 钦定大南会典事例 (May 2016). However, the price for 钦定大南会典事例 is supposed to be around RMB8000, which prices out of the range of most provincial libraries. There was gossip that the next few texts will be 大南实录 and 历朝宪章类志.
The last I checked on world cat, none of these new Chinese reprints are available in the US yet, but reprinting and making available these Le/Nguyen texts will increase the community of Vietnamese Han Van readers.
So maybe the work of Chen Jinghe, Matsumoto Nobuhiro, and Yamamoto Tatsuro will be realized in mainland China and Taiwan.
On Wikipedia, the entry for Han-Nom Institute notes that in 2005, a delegation from the Confucius Institute of the Renmin University of China arrived at the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies, both sides signed the . So the books listed above probably come from the 2005 agreement.
I wonder if the collected works of Le Quy Don are also part of the Renmin University-Han-Nom Institute agreement of 2005.
Taiwan National University has about seven titles in its Southeast Asian texts, all of which are originally from the Han Nom Institute. Two texts are by Le Quy Don and originally found on microfilm.
All in all, there is a new wave of reprinted and unpunctuated Han Van texts from China and Taiwan. Maybe there is a bright future for Han Van studies.
You touch on a lot of different issues here. 1) Yes, Vietnamese texts in classical Chinese have been, and are being, printed in Taiwan and China. However, we are in the DIGITAL AGE. The Koreans have been building a massive online database of their texts in classical Chinese which include 1) scans of the originals, 2) searchable versions of the Han text and 3) translations of the texts into modern Korean and. . . this is available FREE on the Internet.
That can create a “bright future.” Publishing books that are too expensive for people to buy, or creating databases and then charging a ridiculously high rate for people to use those databases. . . that’s what happens in the PRC, and that is not going to crate a “bright future” for anything.
I’ve lost touch with Taiwan, but there were a couple of series of books that were published in the 1990s that were filled with mistakes. Yes, it was nice to be able to get a “feeling” for what was written in several Vietnamese texts, but you couldn’t use those publications in scholarship because they were filled with mistakes, and were therefore unreliable.
Similarly, the Ecole Francaise worked with the Vien Han Nom on inscriptions and there have been many volumes of books produced, but why not create a searchable DATABASE???
So at the end of the day, I don’t think any of the “official channels” are really creating a “bright future.” Creating and enterprising individuals, however, are doing that. I think you commented on the video about Tiếu Chi (Nguyễn Hữu Sử). People like that, I think, are the “bright future,” namely smart people who either work outside of the official world or on the periphery of the official world. People like that create their own “archives” by digitizing sources and sharing with others (and obtaining sources that others have digitized).
So in other words, rather than saying that it’s great that Vietnamese sources are getting published China, the better situation is that people will “steal” those publications by scanning and sharing them (which is what official institutions should be doing in the first place, like the Koreans have been doing).
Finally, with the publication of Vietnamese sources in Taiwan/China there has been an increase in scholarship in China/Taiwan about Vietnam based on those works. While on the one hand I sometimes find that Chinese scholars can point out connections (such as literary connections in texts) between Vietnamese and Chinese sources that I was unaware of, for the most part, Taiwanese/Chinese scholars have a very limited/conservative view of Vietnamese history. They can’t really see beyond the dominant/official Vietnamese nationalist discourse, so I don’t see anything “pioneering” or “innovative” coming from Taiwan/China any time soon. The young scholars who know Han Nom in Vietnam today strike me as being much more perceptive (in a critical sense) than any scholars from Taiwan or the PRC.
So yes, publishing books is still good, but. . . I think the world is very complex now. And to see the “bright future,” I think we need to look in places that are different from the places that people used to look.
Wow! I just took a look, and it appears that they have done a great deal of work during the last few years. The last time I checked, they had just started that project; most of the materials they had up at that point were probably not particularly useful for scholars, but I was able to use one of their photos of the late Professor Wesley R. Fishel for his page on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3385117.Wesley_R_Fishel). Back in the early 2000s, my name had somehow gotten on a mailing list, and I received a postcard soliciting donations for an archive of U.S. Civil War soldiers’ letters, or something like that. I had heard rumours that the Viet Nam archive was completely disorganised, starting to deteriorate, and essentially unavailable for research, so I was fairly annoyed when I saw the postcard. I actually called the office of the MSU archives department to raise hell, and was assured that there were plans to fix that situation as soon as they got funding. The poor lady I spoke with undoubtedly thought I was deranged, she kept asking where I taught and seemed confused when I said “I don’t!”…