I recently published a paper entitled “Taxation and Military Conscription in Early Modern Vietnam: Nguyễn Đàng Trong in Comparative Perspective.”
While taxation and military conscription might not sound all that exciting, I use that topic to challenge some of the ways that a kingdom in the southern half of the Vietnamese world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been characterized in English-language scholarship.
Known variously as “Đàng Trong/Cochinchina/Nam Hà,” and ruled over by the Nguyễn clan (that later established the Nguyễn Dynasty), this kingdom has been depicted in English-language studies as being less Confucian, less bureaucratic, more militarized and more “Southeast Asian” than the kingdom in the northern half of the Vietnamese world at that time, a kingdom known variously as Đàng Ngoài/Đại Việt/Bắc Hà, and ruled over by the Lê Dynasty and the Trịnh clan.
This is a paper that I never planned to write. Instead, what happened is that I was writing a paper about nineteenth-century Vietnam and was going to cite some of the extant English-language scholarship on Đàng Trong in my introductory section of the paper, but as I looked at those works I started to detect problems.
Whenever I read and come across information that I’m not familiar with I always ask myself, “How does the author know that?” This leads me to check the footnotes, and then to follow the footnotes to the sources that are cited, and that’s where I (sometimes/often) detect problems.
In fact, in looking into the extant English-language scholarship on Đàng Trong I discovered a large number of inaccuracies and misinterpretations, and therefore I decided to write a paper that would more faithfully document what is recorded in the primary sources for that period and place.
This is a phenomenon that I have encountered repeatedly over the course of my career, and it is a phenomenon that is unfortunately widespread in the extant scholarship in English on premodern Vietnam. The problem is that the sources for premodern Vietnamese are in classical Chinese, but the field does not have any standards or norms in place to demand and ensure that scholars have competence in reading that language. Some can, some can’t. Some rely on sources in the original classical Chinese, some use translations in the modern Vietnamese vernacular.
The result is that the extant scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history in English is extremely uneven in quality, and small issues that can easily be caught in the peer-review process in a field where scholars have achieved an equivalent norm of linguistic competence slip through the cracks and detract from otherwise solid scholarship.
I say all of this because in this paper I have to spend a good deal of time pointing out problems in the extant scholarship, as I build my own argument based on a reading of the sources in their original classical Chinese. Without doing that, a reader would be confused because after reading my paper, s/he will find contradictory information in other studies. What I try to point out in this paper, however, is that such information is not contradictory; it is incorrect.
That said, this was a difficult topic to research and the information in the primary sources is limited and at times contradictory and confusing. Nonetheless, I think I have come close to documenting what we can know, at least at a general level, about taxation and military conscription in early modern Vietnam, and in the process I’ve been able to put forward a different characterization of Đàng Trong.
As I see it, what was unique about the Nguyễn was not that they were “Southeast Asian” or “less bureaucratic,” but that they were much more firmly in control of their population than the Lê/Trịnh in the north, and that the rise of the centralized Nguyễn Dynasty in the nineteenth century is much more understandable when we realize how solid of a ruling foundation the Nguyễn clan had developing in Đàng Trong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This paper is free to download until the end of June 2020 at the link below, after which point I will upload a pre-published version to my Academia.edu page.
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Born quite far to the south of the seventeenth parallel, I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Wheeler’s article on the political significance of Buddhism in 17th century Đàng Trong or Nam Hà. To me at least, it was a revelation to read how Lord Nguyễn Phúc Chu had swiftly seized upon the opportunity offered by the sectarian rivalry between two Zen Buddhist schools in South China to solidify his power over the population in his Southeast Asian polity. Compared to Vietnam’s current rulers who are both provincial and dependent on brute force, Lord Nguyễn Phúc Chu emerges from the research by Wheeler as a worldly, sophisticated and agile monarch who was able to exploit the international creed of his subjects to reinforce his grip on them. For that reason, I am glad that his work has not been subjected to your debunking expedition :), which, on reflection, may not be a surprise. Population control, after all, seems to be the point connecting your study to that of Wheeler. Both studies appear to agree that the Nguyễn lords had been very good at it.
Thanks for the comments! As an MA student, I planned to produce an annotated translation of a travel account to Dang Trong by a Chinese Buddhist monk in the 1690s.
I think I made that proposal before I had actually looked closely at the text. Once I started trying to translate it, I realized that my linguistic skills were not up to the task, but I pushed ahead anyway. After many months of work, I gave my translation to my advisor (a professor of Chinese intellectual history) with a copy of the original, and a couple of days later he called me into his office and said, “This is not going to work.” He explained that sometimes I translated passage correctly, while at other times I did not, and that therefore, it would be better to write “about” this text rather than try to produce a translation.
https://www.academia.edu/3385980/Vietnam_Through_the_Eyes_of_a_Chinese_Abbot_Dashans_Haiwai_Jishi_1694-95_
Later, I spent a year in Taiwan intensively studying classical Chinese, and that made a huge difference. I started to think about returning to that draft translation but never did, and now I have no idea where it is (last time I remember, it was on Mac floppy disks that my PC could not open).
Charles Wheeler used that work in his PhD research, and like you, I like his work. At the same time though, one thing I remember is that the final chapter of that travelogue contains a very dense philosophical discussion, and as an MA student, I don’t think I ever tried to translate that part. I don’t think Charles dealt with it either. I’ve always wondered what that chapter actually says, and if knowing that would alter (in any way) how we think about Nguyen Phuc Chu’s understanding and use of Buddhism.
So while you are correct to recognize my tendency to deconstruct the scholarship of others, there is a dense world of Buddhist thought and philosophy that stands between that urge and Charles Wheeler’s work, and I don’t see myself trying to figure that stuff out anytime soon. But also like you, while it’s been a while since I’ve read his work on Dang Trong, I remember at the time thinking it was good, and that deciphering dense Buddhist philosophy would probably add some interesting details (and maybe some twists), but that the outline that Charles provides is probably solid.