One of the most important books in English on Vietnamese history is David G. Marr’s Vietnamese Tradition on Trial 1920-1945.
Published in 1984, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial is about the tremendous intellectual (and social) transformations that took place in the 1920s and 1930s in Vietnam as a growing number of young Vietnamese became literate, attended newly-established colonial schools, and consumed information from an incredible number of magazines and books that emerged with the development of a modern print culture.
In researching this book, Marr gained access to many magazines and books from this era by conducing research in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His Vietnamese Tradition on Trial is an encyclopedic overview of the ideas in the print culture of Vietnam at that time.
Since publishing this important tome, there are few other scholars who have gone through these historical materials in Paris with the same degree of attention that Marr did, or who have sought to examine the breadth of materials that were produced at that time, as Marr did.
So for well over 30 years, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial has rightly stood as the most authoritative study on the intellectual developments of 1920s-30s Vietnam.
While there is so much to admire about Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, I have always felt uneasy about the book, because it is clearly evident to me that Marr came to the research and writing of this work with a limited understanding of East Asian history and culture.
From my own research, I’m well aware that Vietnam fully participated in the “traditional” world of East Asian culture, and that the ideas of the “traditional” Vietnamese elite transformed in the early twentieth century in ways that mirrored the ideas of their counterparts in other areas of East Asia.
As such, one can’t really understand the intellectual changes of the 1920s and 1930s in Vietnam, without an appreciation for the changes that were taking place in the larger East Asian world of which Vietnam was a part. However, that world is largely absent in Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, and that has long troubled me.
“But wait!,” a reader might protest, “Marr talks about things like Confucianism. Isn’t that East Asian?”
Yes, it is, but I can see the limitations of his understanding of something like Confucianism from the way he writes about it. Anytime Confucianism is explained in terms of things like the five relationships, the five cardinal virtues, etc., is when an author is presenting a modernized, Westernized, textbook-ified version of Confucianism.
This is how Marr talks about Confucianism in Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, and it is clear that he is not aware of how modern and “manufactured” that way of understanding Confucianism is.
So I’ve always enjoyed reading Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, but it has always left me feeling unsatisfied because I know there must be more to the story. However, the rest of the story is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the few times I’ve visited Paris I’ve spent my days enjoying the food and the sites. . . not in investigating Vietnamese history.
It is thus with great joy that I now see that the Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitized Vietnamese materials from the 1920s and 1930s, including some of the sources that Marr cited in Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, and in examining some of these materials, I can see that there is indeed so much more to the story than what Marr was able to tell.
Let’s take as an example a book and author that Marr talks about in a chapter on Morality Instruction. Vietnamese authors wrote a lot about morality in the 1920s and 1930s, and Marr introduces texts that approach this topic from various perspectives.
One text that he mentions is a book entitled Eastern Ideals (Đông-phương lý-tưởng). This book contains 200 sayings from classical texts. It provides the original text in “Chinese” characters, transliterates each sayings into the Latin script (quốc ngữ), provides explanations in modern Vietnamese of what the transliterated words mean, and then it provides a modern Vietnamese translation of the saying.
Eastern Ideals was compiled by a certain Nguyễn Duy Tinh, and it includes an introduction that the author wrote while serving as an official in Lào Cai.
Marr mentions this man and his book in two places in the chapter on Morality Instruction. He first mentions the author as someone who’s concern for morality was typical of Vietnamese in the 1930s, as this was a time of intense social change. To quote,
“The clash between old and new, East and West, collaborator and anticolonial, rich and poor, urban and rural, was tangible, and people had no certainty about what they should do in these circumstances. As one provincial literatus [Nguyễn Duy Tinh] plaintively expressed, he was somehow prepared to accept the fact that the twentieth century was the age of electricity and chemistry, of momentous struggle and competition, but he was deeply troubled to discover that most people could not tell him what they were struggling for.” (55)
Later in this chapter, in a section on “Traditionalist Reformulations,” Marr again talks about Nguyễn Duy Tinh and his book. Here Marr includes Nguyễn Duy Tinh together with authors whom he refers to as “traditional moralists” and discusses the kind of texts that they published. To quote,
“A small number of these texts were attempts to return directly to the Neo-Confucian classics. Thus, the previously mentioned scholar who complained that Vietnamese did not know what they were struggling for, gave as his answer two hundred passages from the classics, carefully translated and annotated in quoc ngu. His efforts rated a letter of endorsement from the French Resident Superior of Tonkin, which the author proudly reproduced at the head of his text.” (89)
So from Marr’s perspective, Nguyễn Duy Tinh was a “traditional moralist” who wanted to “return directly to the Neo-Confucian classics” and that he couldn’t understand what people were struggling for.
To Marr, Nguyễn Duy Tinh was a member of an outdated and ultimately unimportant class of intellectuals. That the French Resident Superior gave his approval of Eastern Ideas was, to Marr, a clear sign of this, as obviously the French did not see a “traditional moralist” as a threat.
But did Marr really understand this text correctly? Before I was able to actually read it, I had my doubts. For instance, the book is called Eastern Ideals, and both of those words (East – Đông phương; ideal – lý tưởng) are modern. They are Western concepts that entered East Asian languages beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.
So was Nguyễn Duy Tinh really a “traditional moralist”?
Further, there is no such thing as “the Neo-Confucian classics.” There are a group of texts that can be referred to as “the Confucian classics,” and there were scholars in the Song Dynasty who wrote commentaries to some of those texts, and who developed ideas that we refer to as “Neo-Confucianism.” However there are no “Neo-Confucian classics.”
So what exactly did Nguyễn Duy Tinh “return to”?
Let’s take a look at the first paragraph of Nguyễn Duy Tinh’s introduction, as this is where Marr got some of this ideas about this book.
To quote, the first paragraph states,
“Whether one talks of a past age or of this age, East or West, ethics are of the utmost importance for a ruler and society.
While the twentieth century is a civilized century, a century of electricity, chemistry, economics, military affairs; and although this century is one of competition, however, for as long as humans live on the earth it is always necessary to teach ethics.
As long as humans still know to love life and to hate death, to love good fortune and to hate calamity, to love peace and to hate unrest, to love noble conduct and to hate vile conduct, to love good characteristics and to hate bad characteristics, to love kind actions and to hate evil actions, then ethics will occupy a space as essential as air, food, clothing, and a home.
So they say that cannons, chlorine gas [?], planes, submarines, bombs, bullets, swords, spears, horses, and vehicles are all objects for defense and competition, and are appropriate for the current age, but let me ask:
To protect what? To compete for what?
Are they not the means to maintain a noble spirit of independence and to escape from forced abject conditions? If that is the case, then those objects are also objects that are controlled by ethics.”
For anyone who has a background in East Asian history/studies, one thing that is immediately apparent is how modern the language in this passage is. Besides the terms for modern objects, like planes and submarines, this paragraph is filled with Western terms that entered East Asian languages in the late nineteenth century.
East (phương đông), West (phương tây), ethics (luân lý), society (xã hội), century (thế kỷ), civilized (văn minh), competition (cạnh tranh), humans or mankind (loài người), earth (trái đất), and freedom (tự do) are all words and concepts that were new to the Vietnamese language at that time.
So in terms of language, Eastern Ideals was a very modern text. Further, the concept of ethics itself was likewise a new concept to East Asia, one that scholars in Japan had first come to understand and write about in the nineteenth century, and that reformist intellectuals in China, Korea and Vietnam had subsequently discussed as well.
Nguyễn Duy Tinh’s text is therefore not a “return” to something. Instead, it is an attempt to take something old (sayings from the Confucian classics) and to repurpose it for a new age.
We can see this in the way that Nguyễn Duy Tinh structured his text. Sayings 1-5 were about thought (tâm tư), 6-35 were about effort (công phu), 36-41 were about family (gia định), 42-58 were about society (xã hội), 59-140 were about various theories (lý thuyết khác nhau), and 141-200 were quotes from the Classic of Changes (Kinh Dịch/Yijing).
This is not a “traditional” or “Neo-Confucian” way of organizing information. It is something new. Again, the concept of society, for instance, was new, and therefore no “traditional” scholar had ever organized information from the Confucian classics in terms of its relevance for society.
Further, in his introduction, Nguyễn Duy Tinh talks quite a bit about the Classic of Changes, and there he also demonstrates that his point was not to “return” to some old way of doing things. To quote,
“The essence of the Changes is to teach people the correct way, that they have to change, and that they must not stick to one course. This idea is appropriate for this twentieth century. But how to change? For that, one’s purpose must be proper.”
From the first paragraph of his introduction, we can see that, contrary to what Marr wrote, Nguyễn Duy Tinh knew exactly what people were struggling for.
In addition, from his comments about the Classic of Changes we can also see that Nguyễn Duy Tinh was not “returning” to anything in the past. He fully accepted that the twentieth century was a new age, that people needed to change to adapt to that new age, and that there was no returning to the past.
That said, he also believed in ethics. Ethics were what kept a modern society together, and Nguyễn Duy Tinh had a stake in seeing the current society remain stable.
Marr refers to Nguyễn Duy Tinh as a “provincial literatus,” however the letter of endorsement from the French Resident Superior of Tonkin refers to him as the “secrétaire des Douanes et Régies à Laokay.”
Nguyễn Duy Tinh was thus not a provincial literatus or a “traditional moralist” who wanted “to return directly to the Neo-Confucian classics.” Instead, he was a modern, educated (probably tri-lingual) Vietnamese man who worked for the French colonial administration, and who’s somewhat vague language nonetheless suggests that he doesn’t seem to have held a high opinion of people who were opposing the French.
That Marr categorized Nguyên Duy Tinh and his book the way he did points to the issue that I’ve always felt uncomfortable with regarding Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, as well as a lot of other scholarship on Vietnam in the early twentieth century – the lack of an appreciation for the larger East Asian context.
Marr is a great historian, but if you study Vietnam in the early twentieth century without a strong foundation in East Asian history and studies, then there is a lot that you will miss.
Just because a book has quotations from the Confucian classics doesn’t mean that it’s “old” or “outdated.” In 1931, a book on ethics that cited passages from the Confucian classics was a modern text. What is more, the language of the text makes that immediately clear as well.
While I’ve dwelled on this one example, in looking through the Vietnamese books that have recently been digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I keep getting struck at how intensely “East Asian” the contents of those books are, and again, that is precisely what I haven’t detected in works like Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, and in many other works on modern Vietnamese history.
To take this same topic of morality, for instance, when I browse through the digitized holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France I see so many books that are part of the East Asian popular cultural tradition of promoting “goodness” (thiện 善).
This concept of goodness had been one of THE MOST IMPORTANT moral concepts in East Asia for centuries by that time. It is a concept that was shared by the “three teachings” of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism and was THE MOST PUBLISHED teaching prior to the twentieth century as well (It’s also where the “Mother Goddess Religion” in Vietnam comes from.).
How can this not be covered in Vietnamese Tradition on Trial and in other works on modern Vietnamese history? I think the answer is simple: If one doesn’t know about East Asian history and culture, then one isn’t going to know what books about goodness are. They are just going to look like some weird, arcane “Chinese stuff,” and will therefore be dismissed as not really important for understanding modern Vietnamese history.
However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Vietnam was/is part of East Asia. We cannot understand modern Vietnam without seeing it from that larger perspective, but to date, far too little scholarship has attempted to present modern Vietnam in that light.
I’ve focused on “morality” here, but there are many other topics where we can see this “East Asian disconnect” between what has been written in English and what the works at the Bibliothèque nationale de France talk about.
However, now that the Bibliothèque nationale de France has opened its (digital) doors, there is nothing stopping us from rectifying that situation.
East Asian modern Vietnam is waiting for us in Paris. Let’s go to the Bibliothèque nationale de France!!
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As a native English speaker trying to learn Vietnamese, my main thought on seeing Viet texts from the 30s is that I really wish they’d kept the practice of hyphenating compound words. Makes it a lot more readable for non-native readers.
I agree with you!! I find it aesthetically pretty cool too!! 🙂