Erasing Confucian Temples (Văn Miếu 文廟) from Vietnamese History

I’ve recently been doing some research using a nineteenth-century geography called the Đại Nam nhất thống chí 大南一統志 (Unified Gazetteer of Đại Nam). As usual, once you start looking closely at a text and comparing that text with what has been written about it. . . you run into all kinds of problems.

The geographical information in the Đại Nam nhất thống chí was compiled in the second half of the nineteenth century. Part of the text (covering the central provinces) was published in the early twentieth century.

In 1961 a modern Vietnamese translation of the text was published in Saigon, and in 1992 another translation was published in Hanoi.

In producing their 1992 translation, the scholars in Hanoi decided to not use the printed version, since it only covers the central provinces, but instead, to base their translation on two hand-written manuscripts.

Further, the scholars explained that they compared the two hand-written manuscripts and “chose the parts that we determined are the most correct” [lấy những phần mà chúng tôi cho là đúng nhất].

This is an extremely unprofessional way to make a translation. In making translations, the standard professional practice is to chose one text as the “base text” and to faithfully translate it. It is then acceptable to note (in footnotes, for instance) how other versions of the text vary from the base text. However, it is essential that one makes clear where all the translated information comes from.

As for choosing a base text, one can make that choice in various ways: one can choose the earliest version, the published version, the most complete, version, etc.

The point of having a base text, however, is so that there is a reliable source for the translation.

This was not the approach of the scholars who made the 1992 translation. Instead, they made their own decisions about what information to translate and what information to not translate, and in making those decisions, the scholars in Hanoi decided to not translate information about Confucian Temples (Văn Miếu 文廟).

To take one example, the Hanoi translation of the Đại Nam nhất thống chí says that in Thanh Hóa Province there was one Confucian Temple in the provincial capital.

The printed version of that text, however, lists 15 other Confucian Temples in Thanh Hóa.

I don’t have access to the entire translation of the Đại Nam nhất thống chí from Saigon in 1961, and as a result, I can’t see which version of that text this translation was based on, but like the printed version, it contains all of the Confucian Temples in Thanh Hóa.

If we were to visualize this, the Hanoi translation of the Đại Nam nhất thống chí would lead us to picture a limited presence of “official Confucianism” in Thanh Hóa, like this:

However, the printed Hán version of the text presents to us the following, very different, image:

Why were all of these temples not included in the 1992 translation from Hanoi? My guess would be that it was a deliberate effort on the part of scholars at that time to erase “Chinese influence” from the Vietnamese past.

The decade following the 1979 border war was one of intense anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam, a sentiment that is still strong in some quarters today. I’ve come across many examples like this one where it is clear that scholars have attempted to “whitewash” the past.

In the end, however, all this has done is to distort Vietnamese history, and for the 99.9999% of Vietnamese who can only access the past through translations like this one, such distortions are their historical reality.

Then there is the question about these actual Confucian Temples today. Where are all of these temples today? And where today are the numerous Confucian Temples listed in other provinces that likewise did not make it into the 1992 translation?

“When you drink water, remember the source. . .” (Uống nước nhớ nguồn. . .).