I recently co-wrote an article with my colleague, anthropologist Đinh Hồng Hải, on the “Lạc Việt” (Chn., Luoyue).
This is a name that appears in ancient Chinese texts where it refers to a group of people who inhabited an area somewhere around what is now Guangxi/northern Vietnam.
In the twentieth century, this group of people was claimed by Vietnamese scholars to be the ancestors of the Vietnamese, and this group was also claimed by Chinese scholars to be the ancestors of the Zhuang, an ethnic group that currently lives in the area of Guangxi province.
The Vietnamese and the Zhuang, among other differences, speak languages that are from different language families. That fact alone makes it difficult to see how they both could be descended from the same group of ancestors, and yet. . . Vietnamese and Chinese scholars have both claimed the Lạc Việt as ancestral to the Vietnamese and Zhuang, respectively.
In our article, Đinh Hồng Hải and I do not resolve this issue. Instead, we document its emergence and the arguments that have been made on each side.
For anyone interested, the paper can be viewed here.
I’m also placing below a video that I made a few years ago that was inspired by Đinh Hồng Hải’s work on totems, an issue that also relates to the Lạc Việt.
