An article that I wrote a year or two ago has just been published. It is called “Sinology in Vietnam.”
There are people who would label anything that was written in Vietnam in classical Chinese in the past as “Sinology” (Hán học). I don’t agree with that view. Instead, I would argue that Sinology is a type of knowledge that only emerged in Vietnam in the twentieth century.
Sinology is the study of “China.” For one to be able to study “China,” one has to have the sense that “China” is a distinct nation with its own distinct culture that is different from the culture of one’s own nation.
Those are ideas that only emerged in places like “Vietnam” and “China” starting in the late nineteenth century. Prior to that point, when scholars in what is now “Vietnam” wrote in classical Chinese, they were just producing what they saw as “knowledge.” They did not see it as “Chinese.”
However, when the concept of the nation took hold in the early twentieth century, and as there was a transition to using the Vietnamese language in writing, then all of what had previously been simply “knowledge” now became “Chinese knowledge,” and as this happened, the field of Sinology emerged in Vietnam.
In this article, I document the emergence of Sinology in twentieth century Vietnam and trace its history to the present. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of ups and downs that this body of knowledge passed through as Vietnam itself went through revolution and various political movements.
As such, the history of Sinology in Vietnam is very similar to the history of modern Vietnam itself.
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VN people got a lobotomy , they gulped the 1000-year Chinese domination hoax .
Actually , since Triêu Dà , as in England, the natives mixed with foreign rulers ever since That showed in the VN language , half Nôm, half Hán viêt. After french colonisation , the VN thought that despite 1000 years , they were not assimilated , while for well versed foreigners , VN culture is a paste and copy to Han culture . They extolled Nôm literature , thinking Han culture is juste a tiny part .
Another hoax story : VN literati started with Hàn Thuyên in 1282 to write Nôm literature to split from Ch. culture , to show their independence of mind . People thought that such works were written only with Nôm
words . In reality, as said ,half of VN vocabulary is Han -Viêt . One cannot at all write anything with only nôm vocabulary.
Besides , nôm words are mostly low grade ones . In reality when one talks of Nôm writing , it only means that it is not written in
wenyan , vān ngôn , classic Chinese but it used nôm and Han words .Anyway , most Nôm works are filled with Hán references ;
for example Kiêù is overfull of such references
Formerly , high brow literature or administrative memos was mandatorily written in wenyan . VN literati were well versed in wenyan , they also dabbled in writing nôm works as hobby before Hàn Thuyên .Nôm literature was seen by them as light , low grade literary genre . They have absolutely no cultural independence in mind when writing nôm literature . The difference between nôm and wenyan is not political -cultural at all .
So “sinology ” ,as modern VN call it , means
“vān ngôn , wenyan “literary works .
You said that due to the August Revolution and the first Indochina war, all sinological projects were postponed. The fact, not your wording, is quite surprising to me. All the mains cosmopolitan centers were under the control of the non communist authority; Hà Nội, Huế and Saigon, not including other imoportant city, Hai Phong, Cần Thợ … As for the Center of VN, only the provinces of Ngãi Bình Phú and Thanh Nghệ Tịnh were they governed by the Viêt Minh. I was in Huế, the situation was normalized around at the end of the year 1946 (when I was six year old), which permitted schools to be resumed. The intellectuals were still living in Hà Nội to emigrate comfortably to the South in 1954. Thái Thanh first sang Tiếng Xưa by Dương Thiệu Tước for France Asie Radio from Hà Nội in 1953, the Hanoi where the Tonkin Governor, Thủ Hiến Bắc Việt, exerted his power. I would like to say the cultural stagnation was caused by unknown (to me) developments, other than the Indochinese conflict. In the way I see it, the political atmosphere, basically, remained the same; the French keeping the reign as in the “properly spoken” colonial time. (Oct 6, 2023)
Sorry a lot of typos: the MAIN cosmopolitan centers – important CITIES
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