I mentioned in the post below about the various Lý Công Uẩn films that there is an account that a Chinese envoy who visited Đại Việt in 1293 CE wrote. It is called the Annan jishi (An Nam tức sự) and it contains interesting information about life in the Red River Delta region at that time.
Of course 1293 was later than the time of Lý Công Uẩn, but works like this one can help us understand what life was like in those centuries better than our current imaginations can. So it is worth reading.
Professor Trần Nghĩa translated this work into Vietnamese in the early 1970s. I don’t have the actual publication information, but I think his translation appeared in Tạp chí văn học in 1972.
For anyone interested, I’m attaching his translation here, along with a copy of the text in its original form, classical Chinese.
The original version can be found in Chen Fu 陳孚, Annan jishi 安南即事 [Present Matters in Annan], (1293 C.E.), in Gu Sili 顧嗣立, Yuan shixuan erji 元詩選二集 [The Second Collection of Yuan Poetry], (1702 C.E.), Siku Quanshu ed., 6/52b-6/59a.
