After the August Revolution in 1945, Vietnamese historian Đào Duy Anh was invited to teach history at a university that was established later that same year called the Hanoi University of Letters (Đại Học Văn Khoa Hà Nội)
He only taught for about a couple of months because the university soon shut down, but his students were apparently so impressed by his teaching that they urged him to write and publish a book based on his lecture notes.
Đào Duy Anh agreed to do so and by March 1946 the book was complete. It was called The Origins of the Vietnamese Nation (Nguồn gốc dân tộc Việt Nam).
This book was eventually published by the World Publishing House (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới) in Hanoi in 1950, however I have never seen a copy of that version of this book. Instead, the one copy that I have found was reproduced at some point in Saigon for internal use by teachers and students at the Saigon Normal University (Đại Học Sư Phạm Sài Gòn).
In 1957 Đào Duy Anh produced a book on Vietnamese history called The Ancient History of Vietnam (Lịch Sử Cổ Đại Việt Nam) that contained a section on the origins of the Vietnamese nation.
However, that section and the earlier book of the same name are different. More specifically, it is clear that the 1946/1950 book represents an earlier version of Đào Duy Anh’s ideas about ancient Vietnamese history, one which he subsequently built on and presented with more sophistication in his 1957 book.
So what were Đào Duy Anh’s early ideas about ancient Vietnamese history? He states in some prefatory remarks that he wrote in 1946 that his goal in writing that early book was to attempt to provide young people with a realistic understanding of the origins of the Vietnamese, so that they could move beyond the “superstitious” stories about dragons and fairies that earlier texts had employed in discussing the earliest stages of Vietnamese history (. . . để xóa bỏ những điều mê tín với nguồn gốc Tiên Rồng. . .).
In his opening chapter, Đào Duy Anh summarized those stories, but then he went on to write about the past in ways that no Vietnamese historian had ever done before.
Essentially what he did was to try to document what the Vietnamese race was, where it came from, and how it had developed and changed over time.
For more on this, see the video below. To read this actual book, see the attached file below the video.
To read Đào Duy Anh’s 1946 book, click here: nguon-goc-dan-toc-vn.
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_ TT Kim wrote Việt Nam sử lược in 1919 . As far I remember , he saw Bắc thuộc as ” appartenance ” . DDA ‘s book Origins of the Vietnamese Nation adopted the ” domination ” and struggle for independance narrative
_ Before modern times , did the different succeeding VN dynasties share DDA’s point of view ? I think nobody thought about that . .
The narrative of VN as a different ethnie and culture was modeled after the ” Gaulois ” ‘ which was promoted by Napoleon IIII . The French Republicans who took over from him taught it to fuel anti-german spirit while actually , French and German people rulers shared the same barbarian origin
_ after they conquered VN , French scholars , at first , saw VN as a copy of China . After a while , they
tried to drive a wedge between the 2 peoples , they did some research to find antagonistic narratives ; they fell upon : The sisters Trung , Phù Đổng Thiên Vương , Trần Hưng Đạo , etc , etc …
The anti chinese narrative crystallized after 1940 . Its father , french admiral Decoux , ruled French Indochina
from 1940 to 1945 when it was cut off from France . https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Decoux
https://indomemoires.hypotheses.org/8601 .
He tried to promote a common cultural background for the VN compradore ” instruits” or ( évolués ) who were then needed to help French colonists to administer Indochina and that cultural background was to have anti chinese features to drive apart VN from Chinese .
I think , DDA’s book was written as propaganda book for Decoux ‘ political purposes
It’s may be farfetched but according to me , here ‘s the origin of the (in-) famous narrative of ” VN 1000-year of resistance to Chinese rule .
The book ” Origins ….” was published in 1946 .Probably , it was begun in the early 1940s . Then , French Indochina was ruled by French admiral Decoux under Japanese suzerainty .
The colonial authorities were cut off from the mother country without reinforcements expected and outnumbered by the natives , some 30000 Frenchmen lording over 20 million or more Indochinese . Adapting to reality , Decoux decided to enlist the natives to help maintain French rule , he opened advancement ways for the local youth . He developped among other things for them scouting activities , calisthenics training in school , etc …..
He organized cycling Tour d’Indochine ; he commemorated the cult of heroes as the sistersTrung , lord Trân hung Dao , etc… . Some of these youths would be promoted to become lower officials or NCOs
This new class of compradore underlings was to be fitted with a new cultural background to give them some social cohesion ; they were also given a new historical narrative that would combine pro- french bias as well as anti- chinese ones
When the French conquered Indochina , at first , they got the impression that Vietnam culture was a copy and paste
of the chinese one . Later on , they tried to find some differences between them and did some research , they collected historical data ( such as An duong vuong , Phu Dông thiên vuong ,the sisters Trung , Triêu Âu , etc… )
local or regional legends , local customs …
In the 1940s , they conflated all these data in a new historical and cultural anti chinese narrative with two main features : difference of VN culture and 1000 year of chinese domination
Dào duy Anh ‘s book must have been written in that spirit during the early 1940s .
It may be a fantasy of mine : the modern VN history comes from that period and its godfather was Admiral Decoux