I spent some time today looking through a journal that was published in Hanoi in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries called Revue Indo-Chinoise. This was a time when the French were attempting to firmly establish their control over the areas of what are today Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
To do so the French needed knowledge about these areas and the peoples who lived there, and many of the articles in Revue Indo-Chinoise served precisely that purpose.
Hence, in the early twentieth century one can find several articles by Auguste Bonifacy, a military officer and gifted linguist who wrote extensively about the minority peoples in the area of what is now northwestern Vietnam, and Gustave Dumoutier, a scholar who produced pioneering work on the religious beliefs and practices of the “Annamites,” or the people whom we today refer to as the ethnic Việt.
These two topics – ethnic minorities and the religious beliefs of an ethnic majority group – might seem unrelated, but today as I was looking through what these two men wrote, I realized that these two topics are very closely related, and that they are also relevant for a certain debate that is currently taking place.
In 1904, Bonifacy published an article in the Revue Indo-Chinoise about the “White-Trouser Savages” (Man Quần Trắng), a group of people whom we would today refer to as Dao/Yao. In talking about their religious ideas, Bonifacy noted that the key figures in their religious worldview included the Jade Emperor (Yu Di 玉帝), Pan Gu 盘古, Fu Xi 伏羲 and Shen Nong 神農, all of whom are individuals from what we might today call “Chinese” antiquity.
Similarly, in talking about the religious beliefs of the Việt, Dumoutier made reference to such figures as Confucius 孔子, Shi Xie/Sĩ Nhiếp 士爕, Shen Nong/Thần Nông 神農, Maitreya (Mile/Di Lạc 彌勒), Guanyin/Quan Âm, Ziwei/Tử Vi 紫微, Xuandan/Huyền Đàn 玄壇, etc. . .
. . . as well as to certain ritual ceremonies to mark the summer solstice (Duanwu/Đoan Ngọ 端午) and the mid-autumn moon (Zhongqiu/Trung Thu 中秋).
What all of the above people and events share is an origin in the place that we today refer to as “China.” They are all part of what we can refer to in general as the “Sinitic” cultural world.
And given how important religious beliefs are for human communities (particularly in the past), what all of this also shows is that the groups of people whom we today refer to as the Yao/Dao and the Việt would be very different peoples if they had never included in their religious worldviews all of those elements from the Sinitic cultural world.
The reason why this is important is because today there are people who are talking about the need to “escape” from the Sinitic cultural world. However, for people like the Yao/Dao and the Việt, that would be about as possible to do as it would be for Europeans to escape from the Christian and Roman cultural elements that their societies were created from. In other words, for all of these peoples it is impossible to “escape,” because to do so would be to become someone else, and people can’t do that. They are who they are.
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I would say the debate on “Thoát Trung” is more about escaping the Chinese political influence than cultural aspects. But anyway, I’m curious to know your view on the social construction of the Japanese identity since the Meiji Restoration, which many consider as the point of Japanese breaking its attachment to the Chinese sphere. Did they really “escape” from the Chinese influence or is Japanese culture inherently different from Chinese? Do you believe “culture is destiny” then?
Yea, political and economic, but there has been some discussion of culture too.
I don’t think it was inevitable that Japanese culture is so different from Chinese culture now. Yes, the Japanese never had the civil service exam, and yes, there was a nativist intellectual movement before the Meiji Restoration, but there was still a great reverence for the Chinese world.
An historian by the name of Joshua Fogel wrote a good book years ago on travel writings that Japanese wrote after visiting China right around the time of the Meiji Restoration. For a long time before that (during the Tokugawa period) few Japanese visited China. What Fogel argues is that by the nineteenth century, there was a very idealized/romantic idea of China in Japan, and then when travelers actually went there, they found that the place was very different – crowded, dirty, lots of ignorance.
So when the Meiji period began there was 1) a sense of disgust with China that was being expressed and 2) a sense that people needed to learn from the West.
That was a very special moment, and I think that enabled Japanese to change their culture quite a bit.
I don’t think culture is destiny, but I think that a lot depends on politics and nationalism. Politics and nationalism were used during the Meiji period to change culture, whereas politics and nationalism today in Vietnam work together to maintain a form of Sinitic culture (even though people claim that the culture is different from Sinitic forms of culture).
I have heard that “Thoát Trung” are just code words for regime change. Since Vietnam’s current rulers consider an accommodationist stance vis-à-vis China to be the necessary condition for the survival of their regime, the call to escape from China’s orbit could be understood as a call to put an end to their reign. When Vietnamese talk about the need to thoát Trung, they may mean the need to thoát Cộng.
People without freedom of expression tend to be inventive in finding legal ways to convey their messages. Thanks to a historically minded speech writer, an opposition politician in the South Vietnam ruled by Ngô
Đình Diệm had been able to tell voters during an election campaign that he had a Đại Cáo to make…
Ah, so there was another Bình Ngô đại cáo!!
I heard that 盘古 originated from Laibin, Guangxi (a non “Chinese” area in ancient times). Do you have info you would like to share?
Yes, people have said that figures like Shen Nong came from a non-Chinese area too. The problems with these ideas are that 1) they rely on contemporary (or early twentieth century) beliefs [scholars talked to local peoples to try to see who believed in these peoples, and when they found that belief in say Shen Nong was more common in one area, they concluded that this is the area that the belief in that figure must have begun in the past], 2) they’re based on an assumption that thousands of years ago the same types of groups of peoples that exist today existed in the past,
The thing we call “Chinese” culture has diverse origins, but for very early stuff like this, it’s very difficult to figure out where things came from and who was there then.
I am conducting a research on the Mienh/Yao/Dao of the United States. I would like to learn more about the Dao of Vietnam. I would like to leant more about what you have about the Dao of Vietnam, especially in the early 1900.