The Great Transformation
The Great Transformation
In the early twentieth century, educated Vietnamese broke the intellectual connections to the Sinitic world that they had maintained for centuries, adopted Western ways of viewing the world, and sought to modernize Vietnam.
This was an enormous change, so big that I refer to it as “The Great Transformation.”
That transformation has not been researched and written about in detail before for various reasons.
A lot of the sources for that time are in classical Chinese and most historians of modern Vietnam can’t read that language.
The idea that the Vietnamese have “always been” a certain way (such as always being “patriotic to the nation”) is very important for the modern, nationalist view of the past. However, we can see from the changes that took place at this time that educated Vietnamese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were VERY DIFFERENT from the educated Vietnamese of today. This is something that historians in Vietnam do not want to see or talk about, and that is the second reason why research on this period has been neglected.
The nationalist narrative of the past that was constructed in the twentieth century centered around “revolutionaries.” Much of the change that took place in Vietnam in the early twentieth century, however, was carried out by the traditional elite, including Nguyễn Dynasty officials. Telling that story undermines the nationalist narrative that claims that only revolutionaries had the vision and ability to transform Vietnam.
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