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.
Phan Bội Châu, the Later Trần and the Ngô
I love the early twentieth century, as that is when the Vietnamese worldview started to change dramatically, and the documents from that period make that
Conquest and Intermarriage in the Formation of the Annam Race
The concept of race is a concept that Vietnamese only came to learn about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once they had,
The Origins of Patriotic Education in Vietnam
Following the ideas of the previous two blog entries below, one of the main elements of the dominant paradigm of Vietnamese history is that Vietnamese
Dương Bá Trác on the Origins of the Vietnamese Race
Scientists have long noted that there is no biological basis for race. Races of human beings do not actually exist. They are social constructs. People
Hoàng Cao Khải’s Social Darwinist Ideas
The Nguyễn Dynasty official, Hoàng Cao Khải, is usually regarded today as a traitor for having assisted the French in the late nineteenth and early
A Việt View of Savages and Aborigines
I posted a while ago (here) about a geographical text which was produced in the late nineteenth or (more likely) the early twentieth century which
Vietnam Mapped
I have absolutely no desire to get involved in the Trường Sa/Hoàng Sa debate. Why? Because I’m an historian and as an historian I can’t
Localizing the Nation in Early Twentieth Century Vietnam
The concept of the nation, or a nationality, as consisting of a single people living within a defined territory speaking a single language and sharing
Losing Land and Misquoting Tự Đức
At the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnamese intellectual learned a great deal about the West and began to transform the way they thought about
The Traumatic Origins of Modern Thai and Vietnamese Historical Writing
River Books in Bangkok has just published a new volume entitled, Southeast Asian Historiography, Unravelling the Myths: Essays in Honour of Barend Jan Terwiel. The
Vietnamese National History in the Mid-Twentieth Century
I just came across this article by Hoa Bằng from 1943 on “National History Nowadays” (“Quốc sử ngày nay” in Tri Tân, #97, 27 May
Vietnam’s 45 Savages and Aborigines
I was looking at a geographical text from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century called the Việt Nam dư địa chí. The Viện Hán Nôm’s catalog entry
Rethinking the Past in Early Twentieth Century Vietnam
In response to a question about the post on “Imprinting the Nation in Early Twentieth Century Vietnam,” I’m posting a translation of part of a
Imprinting the Nation in Early Twentieth Century Vietnam
I was reading a history textbook from 1911 called the Essence of Việt History for Middle Schools (Trung học Việt sử toát yếu). It is
Lạc Long Quân and the Ancient Script of Our South
I came across this revealed gatha (偈), or verse, in a collection of spirit writing from 1921 entitled the Nam Hải Tam Thừa Diễn Nghĩa
Vietnamese Early-Twentieth-Century Racial Ideas
I love the past because it is filled with fascinating complexity. I dislike nationalism because it destroys the past by draining it of its complexity
The Martial Achievements of Lý Thái Tông
In the same vein as the entry on the extermination of Champa which I posted yesterday, here is an excerpt from a similar text, Biographies
The Extermination of Champa – A Great Event??
I find the early-twentieth century to be one of the most fascinating periods for the study of Vietnamese intellectual history. In the first two decades
The Westernization of Mundane Thought in Vietnam
A question came up with regard to the entry “On (Not) Discussing the Nation” which made me realize that I don’t know of any study
Liang Qichao and Annam
I just came across this editorial from 1929. It is from the Vietnamese newspaper, Thần Chung, and it is about the death of the Chinese