Keith Taylor began his 1983 work on early Vietnamese history, The Birth of Vietnam, with the following sentence: “The earliest traditions of the Vietnamese people, as revealed in the Lĩnh Nam chích quái, an accumulation of popular lore edited in the fifteenth century, are associated with the Hùng kings who ruled the kingdom of Văn Lang.” (pg. 1)
Then in an appendix to this work in which he reviews a debate which began in the twentieth century over whether the earliest rulers in the Red River delta were called Hùng or Lạc, Taylor states that “I personally want to study this question more than I have before committing myself on it; in the meantime, I use the term Hùng as it has traditionally been used by Vietnamese historians.” (pg. 307)
It is a shame that this latter statement is more or less “hidden” in the back of this scholarly study, because this work has been read by many as “proof” of the existence of the Hùng kings and of a “Vietnamese antiquity.” However, all of this is suspect, and in that latter comment, Taylor revealed that he was aware of this.
Having spent the past few years looking at this issue and all of the relevant sources, it is now obvious to me that what we today think of as “Vietnamese antiquity” is largely a medieval invention.
How was “Vietnamese antiquity” invented? In the following way:
1) “The Chinese” recorded information about the far south in official histories and some short treatises which are now lost, like the Record of the Outer Territory of Jiao Region (Jiaozhou waiyu ji) and the Record of Guang Region (Guangzhou ji), but are cited in extant histories, the Annotated Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu), the Wide Gleanings from the Taiping Era (Taiping Guangji), etc.
2) A couple of Tang Dynasty administrators wrote treatises, both of which were called the Record of Jiao Region (Jiaozhou ji). These are no longer extant, but passages of them are cited in the 14th-century Vietnamese text the Collected Records of the Departed Spirits of the Việt Realm (Việt Diện u linh tập lục). This same text sometimes also cites a non-extant 12th-century Vietnamese history, Đỗ Thiện’s Historical Records (Sử ký). In fact, it sometimes cites Đỗ Thiện’s Historical Records for information which was in those Tang-era Records of Jiao Region, as Đỗ Thiện apparently relied on those earlier Chinese works.
Now, some of the information recorded in the two Records of Jiao Region were about spirits. It is clear that Tang Dynasty administrators tried to domesticate spirits by creating personalities and stories for them (as Chinese officials were doing all across the empire at that time). In so doing, they created information about antiquity. There is one spirit, for instance, called Lý Ông Trọng, who was supposedly a man from theRed River delta who went off to fight the Xiongnu during the time of Qin Shihuangdi.
No such person ever existed. He was created by someone, and my guess is that it was probably Zhao Chang, a Tang Dynasty administrator. (See the previous posts on that topic here and here). However, Lý Ông Trọng is a part of Vietnamese history now because of #4 below.
3) Vietnamese scholars created stories about antiquity, such as the story of the Hùng kings which we find in the 15th-century Collected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lĩnh Nam chích quái).
4) Finally, Ngô Sĩ Liên based his late 15th-century Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư) on all of the above sources.
When it comes to early history, this work is derivative in that much of what it says comes from Chinese sources. Meanwhile, whatever information it contains about early history which Chinese sources do not record, like the stories about Lý Ông Trọng or the Hùng kings, is not real. It was either invented during the Tang by Tang Dynasty administrators or created later by Vietnamese scholars for similar or related purposes.
The one exception is that there is some material for the Tang period which was probably contained in either or both of the two Records of Jiao Region and which then made it into Vietnamese sources but which never made it into Chinese ones.
What historians have never done is to seriously attempt to determine which information in Vietnamese sources is historical and which information is invented. This outline above can hopefully help people do this.
This Post Has 3 Comments
Well, I have seen so far according to your argument that Vietnamese Antiquity was created by groups of Chinese who ruled the Red River delta during the socalled “One thousand year northern domination” and then the Vietnamese elite of the 10th to the 15th centuries INTENTIONALLY/ UNINTENTIONALLY developed the idea into “identity” and “tradition”.
And later on, generation after generation of Vietnamese intellectuals just simply “made their ancestors’ dream come true”.
Now, the idea is among different periods of time in which, such body of knowledge was transformed, I want to focus on the Viet’s elite between 10th and 15th centuries. Of course, They were undoubtedly in the need of creating something like: ” Nam Quốc sơn hà Nam đế cư” or “từ Triệu Đinh Lý Trần trải bao đời gây nền độc lập” [The customs of the North and the South are also different. We find that the Trieu, Dinh, Ly, and Tran built our country. Alongside the Han, Tang, Song, and Yuan, the rulers ruled as emperors over their own parts], ect., ect.
But, I do not think scholars like Lê Văn Hưu, Nguyễn Trãi, Ngô Sĩ Liên, Trần Nguyên Đán… just followed what Triệu Đà, Sĩ Nhiếp, Cao Biền said or wrote before without any criticism or analysis. They all knew Chinese classic very well.
and, IF your idea is true, the notion of “Viet” will face extremely serious challenge which probably never seen before. Then, what historians can do to trace back the “REAL” Viet/ or a group(s) of people living in the Red River delta before their history was significantly made up.
ok, first of all, to be more specific we should realize that words like “Chinese” and “Vietnamese” don’t make much sense for the time period we are discussing (I use them sometimes in these blog entries just to simplify things, but in reality they are not very good terms. You probably realize this already). I don’t think it is entirely accurate to say that “Chinese” started something and then “Vietnamese” continued it. It is more accurate to say that members of the elite throughout this period did these things. Yes, some of these elite were officials who were sent to the Red River delta by “Chinese” dynasties, but some of the “Vietnamese,” like the Tran dynasty family, were also reportedly “Chinese.” Finally, some of the local elite in the Red River delta and southern China were probably something other than the categories of “Vietnamese” and “Chinese” that we use today, as it was a multiethnic region. The result of this long process was the creation of something “Viet.”
Next, Trieu Da, Si Nhiep and Cao Bien did not write anything that we know of. Where the information in a work like the Dai Viet su ky toan thu comes through is mainly from the official dynastic histories and a Zhu Xi’s abrigid version of a longer history created during the Song Dynasty.
As for later people being critical of the sources, actually, for the Ngoai ky, the DVSKTT is basically word for word the same as Chinese sources. If anything it is uncritical in that it makes a lot of mistakes. There are plenty of places in the Ngoai ky where the text isn’t clear. When you check it against the original Chinese source you can see where the mistakes were made. In the 19th century the Kham dinh viet su thong giam cuong muc corrected a lot of these mistakes.
Finally, thanks for citing this sentence: “từ Triệu Đinh Lý Trần trải bao đời gây nền độc lập.” I think there are a couple of main translations of the Binh Ngo dai cao, but this one is the most famous. It is also the worst. There is nothing in that line which talks about “gây nền độc lập.” In fact, the term/concept of “độc lập” didn’t enter the Vietnamese language until the early 20th century (it comes from the Western concept of “independence” which wasn’t used in the sense it has today until I think the 17th century).
Thanks, I will keep those in mind for sure although truth be told that your argument is huge, fundamental and essential which may lead to a complete change of what have been built up and believed for centuries or millenniums.
Many thanks again, wish you all the Best during the Holiday time and Happy New Year.