In 1930, a Vietnamese teacher by the name of Trần Trọng Kim published a book called Confucianism (Nho giáo).
Printed in four volumes, it covered the history of Confucian philosophers and ideas from the earliest times to the Qing Dynasty period (1644-1911) and concluded with a section on Confucianism in Vietnam.
That is a lot of material to cover in a book. However, what makes Trần Trọng Kim’s Confucianism particularly impressive is that it was not only the first of its kind in Vietnam but one of the first such books in the world.
But there was also something else about Trần Trọng Kim’s book that was special.
Let me explain.
While for some 2000+ years there were people in “China” who contributed to an ever-evolving set of ideas and practices that we call (for lack of a better term) “Confucianism,” before the twentieth century, no one in China had ever tried to write a history of all of those people and ideas.
Then when, in the early twentieth century, some Chinese did finally decide to write about the history of Confucianism, they did so by essentially following a book that had earlier been written by a Japanese scholar.
What we can consider the first history of Confucianism was written by a Japanese scholar by the name of Matsumoto Bunzaburo 松本文三郎 and was called the History of Chinese Philosophy (Shina tetsugaku shi 支那哲學史).
Published between 1890 and 1902, there was a lot that was new about this book. The word “philosophy” (tetsugaku 哲學) in its title, for instance, was coined by Japanese scholars in the late nineteenth century to translate the Western concept of “philosophy,” a concept that did not exist in East Asian languages at that time.
Given that the concept of philosophy didn’t exist, of course, there were no books on the topic, and therefore Matsumoto had to read through a wide range of historical texts and decide for himself what information constituted “philosophy” and to create a history of philosophers and their ideas.
That he wrote about “Chinese” philosophy was also something new. As the Western concept of the nation took hold in late-nineteenth-century Japan, Japanese scholars started to think not only about what made the Japanese nation distinct, but what made other nations distinct as well, and philosophy was seen as a key indicator of national differences.
In the early twentieth century, the transformation that Japan had been going through as it “Westernized” had a big impact on Chinese reformers, and one result of that influence was that in 1916 a Chinese scholar published book (in Chinese) on the history of Chinese philosophy that closely followed Matsumoto’s earlier work.
Published in 1916, this book was written by Xie Wuliang 謝無量 and was called the History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史)
So, the history of the writing of the history of Chinese philosophy actually began in Japan and was then emulated in China. In time, there were other Chinese scholars who wrote histories of Chinese philosophy and who were more original in their writing, although they did not deviate far from the general structure that Matsumoto had created.
Here the most famous works are Hu Shih’s 胡適 Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue dagang 中國哲學史大綱, 1919), which dealt mainly with the first millennium BC, and Feng Youlan’s 馮友蘭 comprehensive History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史, 1934).
In between the publication of these works there were Chinese translations of two other histories written by Japanese scholars that were both published in 1925: A Brief Introduction to the History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhe xue shi gai lun 中國哲學史概論, 1925) by Watanabe Hidekata 渡邊秀方 and translated by Liu Kanyuan 劉侃元; and the History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史) by Takase Takejiro 高瀨武次郎 and translated by Zhao Lanping 趙蘭坪.
As such, by the time that Trần Trọng Kim wrote his Confucianism in the late 1920s, there were various works that he could rely on, and it appears that he definitely did so.
In 1940, ten years after Trần Trọng Kim’s Confucianism was published, a scholar by the name of Ngô Tất Tố wrote a critique of this book in which he mentioned in passing that much of it was translated from Chinese books.
In looking at the layout of Trần Trọng Kim’s book, it’s easy to see that its content follows the same essential structure of the Japanese works that had been previously published, and at times we can see that Trần Trọng Kim quotes the same passages from ancient texts that were cited in the Japanese histories.
Nonetheless, I haven’t found evidence that Trần Trọng Kim “copied” or directly “translated” from these earlier works.
And I think that the reason why we can’t see evidence of this is because Trần Trọng Kim did something remarkable: he vernacularized Confucian philosophy.
So, this is the deal: Confucian philosophy can get very arcane, and when one writes about it in Chinese or using Chinese characters, it can be a lot easier to simply use the arcane terms and concepts that one finds in ancient texts than to try to explain what all of those terms and concepts mean in a way that is comprehensive to people today.
In the writings on Chinese philosophy that were produced in Chinese in the early twentieth century (be they original or translations), you can see a gradual move towards writing in a more vernacular style that entailed more of an effort to explain arcane terms and concepts.
This makes sense. In the early twentieth century in China, there was an effort to stop using classical Chinese and to employ the vernacular, what we now call Baihua or Mandarin. At the same time, when the end of the traditional civil service examinations, the way people were educated changed, and fewer people were exposed to the arcane philosophical ideas of the past.
Therefore, when Feng Youlan wrote his history of Chinese philosophy in 1934, he had to make much more of an effort to explain things in common terms than Xie Wuliang had done in 1916.
Meanwhile, in 1930, Trần Trọng Kim had to work extra hard because he was writing in a script (Quốc ngữ) that did not include Chinese characters, and therefore, he couldn’t rely on his readers’ familiarity with certain expressions or terms, as his Chinese counterparts could.
I was comparing how various of these authors wrote about a Song Dynasty scholar by the name of Shao Yong (邵雍, Viet., Thiệu Ung).
Shao Yong’s ideas are not easy to understand or explain, and in comparing how Xie Wuliang wrote about Shao Yong in Chinese in 1916 and the way that Trần Trọng Kim wrote about him in Vietnamese in 1930, one can see a big difference.
Xie Wuliang wrote in a style that still employed classical elements, and in doing so, he made use of a lot of the original terminology in Shao Yong’s writings. As a result, if you don’t know what those terms mean, you will have a tough time following what Xie Wuliang has to say.
By contrast, Trần Trọng Kim went much further in explaining Shao Yong’s ideas in plain language. Ultimately, he had no choice but to do so, because by writing in Vietnamese, he could not rely on his readers understanding certain classical Chinese terminology.
I don’t know what people in Vietnam think about Trần Trọng Kim’s Confucianism today, but Western historians have generally not seen much in this work to be impressed with. Instead, they have tended to see it as a conservative work that was out of touch with the ways in which Vietnam was developing.
However, when you look at Trần Trọng Kim’s Confucianism from a regional and temporal perspective, as I’ve tried to do here, you can’t really say that this work was “conservative” or “out of touch.”
Instead, it was incredibly modern and innovative. Yes, Confucianism was perhaps not the most fashionable topic in some circles of society in 1930 Vietnam, but the way that Trần Trọng Kim wrote about Confucianism was cutting-edge for the time.
Indeed, the approach that Trần Trọng Kim took to present Confucian ideas in plain vernacular language is one that Feng Youlan would employ in 1934 in his extremely famous and influential History of Chinese Philosophy.
But as impressive an intellectual as Feng Youlan was, I would argue that Trần Trọng Kim had a much more difficult task. To be the first person to vernacularize two millennia of arcane Confucian philosophy in a script that was not based on Chinese characters was quite simply a monumental endeavor.
When you look at things from that perspective, you had to admit. . . Trần Trọng Kim’s Confucianism is epic!!
This Post Has 5 Comments
In the introduction to ” Confucianism in VN ”
TTKim made a damning remark for VN , Japanese and Korean scholars ; he said : in his book , he talked only about C. in China , because China was its country of origin and spiritual centre and all the later changes , mutations , reforms of C. were initiated by Chinese scholars , the other peoples were just followers .
Some puny remarks :
_ TTKim book has only two volumes .
_ in one paragraph , you equate Baihua with
Mandarin . There are vernacular and vernacular . Baihua is the literary vernacular of Wenyan and Mandarin is the geographical vernacular ( local prononciation ,i.e. Pekin of Han characters )
_ you still call the Latin transcription of Vietnamese as ” quoc ngu ” , a most grievious misunderstanding , to my biased eyes.
Thanks for your comments.
As for Baihua vs. Mandarin, yes, strictly speaking, as you point out, Baihua refers to the literary vernacular of Wenyan and Mandarin is the spoken language of officialdom, but after centuries of Mandarin influence on vernacular novels in the Ming-Qing, when the “Baihua movement” got underway in the early 20th century, it was essentially a Mandarin movement as well, as the those two categories merged together ever more closely. So I would say that by Tran Trong Kim’s time, the terms are basically interchangeable.
As for quoc ngu, yes, you are right, it gets used by many people inaccurately. People will say a book was “written in quoc ngu,” when what they actually mean is the book was “written in vernacular Vietnamese using the Romanized/Latin script.” However, as this shows, it is much easier to say “written in quoc ngu” that it is to say “written in vernacular Vietnamese using the Romanized/Latin script,” and that, I think, is why people (myself included) tend to use that term inaccurately. That said, when I write something for publication, I tried to use the term accurately, but at other times, I like to save time. 🙂
Addendum :
TTKim ‘ s book explains Confucianism in plain talk ( quôc ngữ , vernacular ) and is written in Latin phonetic transcription ; the Latin script has not much to do with “quôc ngữ ” . I can’ t catch how it came to be called “chữ quôc ngữ “
The Vietnamese National Library has digitized some old newspapers. If you do a search for “chữ quốc ngữ” there you can see how that expression was used in the past. You might find an answer there to your question.
http://baochi.nlv.gov.vn/baochi/cgi-bin/baochi?a=q&hs=1&r=1&results=1&dafdq=&dafmq=&dafyq=&datdq=&datmq=&datyq=&deq=&puq=&taq=&tyq=&wofq=&wotq=&yeq=&txf=txIN&txq=%22ch%E1%BB%AF+qu%E1%BB%91c+ng%E1%BB%AF%22&e=——-vi-20–1–img-txIN——#
Thanks for the tip !
About quốc ngữ and chữ quốc ngữ :
_ Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục established in 1907 taught among others Latin script .
How was iit called in VN , French , Chinese ?
_ I happened on an 2008 VN newspaper . It talked about Hội truyền bá quốc ngữ founded in 1938 by among others
Vo nguyên Giap : to promote literacy . the colonial authorities allowed its opening , on the condition that it to be called Hội truyền bá chữ quốc ngữ
At start , by quốc ngữ , what did the founders mean ? the vernacular or the Latin script ?
[ In 1919 , was founded Hội Khai Trí Tiến Đức (Association pour la Formation Intellectuelle et Morale des Annamites)
to promote French- VN cultural exchanges . Among the founders the famed intellectual Pham Quỳnh and Louis Marty , chief of the Secret Service (and the real power behind ) . It was inaugurated by the then governor Albert Sarraut The association taught also among others Latin script .