Not long after the French obtained control over the area around Saigon, Louis Gabriel Galderic Aubaret published a French “translation” of an early-nineteenth-century gazetteer of the region, Trịnh Hoài Đức’s Gia Định thành thông chí.
I have “translation” in scare quotes because it wasn’t a word-for-word translation, it contained errors, and it was not complete.
In the 1950s, Chen Jinghe published a section of the Gia Định thành thông chí that Aubaret had not included in his translation, the section on citadels. Chen also included numerous footnotes of his own.
Not long after this piece was published, a Vietnamese translation was published in the journal Đại Học.
While the Gia Định thành thông chí is available in Vietnamese translation today, what is valuable about Chen Jinghe’s article is the information that he included in his footnotes.
People who study the history of the Mekong Delta might find some of the information he provided helpful. Since these materials are not easy to find, I’m providing them here for anyone interested.
