As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’ve written many posts over the years about a fifteenth-century Vietnamese document known as the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” (The Great Proclamation on Pacifying the Ngô), or on issues related to that document.
While I still haven’t had the chance to research that period to the level of detail that I hope to find the time to do someday, nonetheless, what I do know about that period has long made it evident to me that the way in which the “Bình Ngô đại cáo” is usually depicted and explained today simply does not fit the historical context in which it was produced.
The “Bình Ngô đại cáo” is a text that was written by a scholar-official by the name of Nguyễn Trãi on behalf of a man by the name of Lê Lợi. It was issued, or proclaimed, in 1428.
Lê Lợi at that time had just come to power after leading a military campaign for many years against an occupying Ming Dynasty army.
It is for this reason that this document today is usually referred to as a “declaration of independence.”
However, there are many problems with viewing that document in that way, and it is because of those many problems that I have long sought to try to figure out what that document was really saying.
In response to a recent post that I wrote, some readers engaged me in good discussions and pointed out some information that has enabled me to finally reach a kind of “breakthrough” in my thinking and to see how the various pieces of this puzzle fit together in a way that is not historically anachronistic like the “declaration of independence” interpretation is.
So in what follows, I will write a series of posts on this topic in an effort to look at this issue in a more comprehensive manner.
Finally, I would really like to thank the readers of this blog, and particularly Ruan Song, Nguyen Bac and Winston Phan (whoever you all are, as we have never actually met in person as far as I know) for your recent comments. I am very fortunate to have people “push back” at my ideas, and to provide counter-evidence in the process, as this ultimately helps me to sharpen my ideas and to gain a clearer understanding of the past. I am always grateful for intelligent and insightful critiques of my ideas.
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I greatly enjoyed your thoughts and reasoning regarding Binh Ngo Dai Cao. Although you may have seen this I wish to draw your attention to a Chinese Phd thesis [2014] entitled “A Study on Da Gao and Ming Government Social Management –明《大诰》与明代社会管理”
The web site is part of a treasure trove of Chinese Academia containing Phd and Masters history dissertations broken down by time period (I am wallowing in the Ming period).
In his English language extract, the author noted “In traditional Chinese society, the nature of the purpose of the law in addition to the maintenance of social order, but its ultimate and true goal is also to maintain the ruling order. After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang paid much attention to learn the lessons from the demise of the Yuan Dynasty and attached great importance to the construction of legal system. In the first year of the HongWu Period, he revised the Da Ming Ling. In the sixth *twenty-second and thirtieth years of the Hongwu Period, he continuously revised the Da Ming Lv. However, among the many law forms that he issued, the most distinctive was the Da Gao. This law included four parts: Da Gao (Ⅰ), Da Gao (Ⅱ), Da Gao (Ⅲ) and Da Gao Wu Chen. They were codified and enacted by Zhu Yuanzhang in the Hongwu eighteen years to the end of twenty. Not only were they more fully reflect the social disadvantages that existed at that time, but also provided powerful means for the emperor to strengthen social management.”
I am left with wonder about how much influence the Da Gao had on Nguyen Trai’s Binh Ngo Dai Cao and if Trai may have studied them (while in China, of course).
Thanks for this!! Actually, another thing to consider is that the texts of these Da Gao could have easily made their way to the Red River Delta during this period with Ming dynasty scholar officials. But in any case, yes, I’ve long felt that these da gao were a possible inspiration for the BNDC. There is also a Da gao in the Shujing (or Shangshu). Either way, they are both documents that rulers directed at the people they were ruling over, saying “I am in charge now,” and that was the context for the BNDC, as far as I can see.
Thanks again for pointing this dissertation out.
The web site is http://119.167.209.11/Kcms/detail/detail.aspx?filename=1014310166.nh&dbcode=CDFD&dbname=CDFD2014
Besides the data base on Phd and Masters dissertations, it also has “China Academic Journals Full-text Database” plus “China Books Bibliography Database”