Today that I can introduce to you Professor Emeritus Keith Vela Taylor.
He is Emeritus for Vietnamese History or Vietnamese Studies at Cornell University in Istaka,
one of the world's most famous centers of Southeast Asian studies.
I think Cornell and ANU have been the pillars of Southeast Asian studies for many decades.
Now one pillar is broken, ANU and you left a very strong Southeast Asia program.
And he is known especially for, he has written many books and many, many articles and I could
fill the time slot in citing them all, but you would have, I think, comprehension if
I cite only two of them who have been very famous.
The first was his first book for his monograph, The Birth of Vietnam, written or published
in 1983, where he covered the first ten centuries of the former millennium in a period where
on this territory, which today is northern and north and central Vietnam, Chinese province
was situated and we will hear more about it, about Han Toms here in this lecture, which
today is called Vietnam.
And so he wrote about this formative Sino-Vietnamese phase of Vietnamese history, a very interesting
book and I recommend it to all students who start studying about Vietnam.
The second book he has published in 2013, A History of the Vietnamese and the title
is already very much revealing, it's not a history of Vietnam, but it's a history of
the Vietnamese people, how it developed from the modest beginnings until today, a book
which has taught many controversies because it challenged some of the established view
that Vietnam has always been a nation since time immemorial and always be a centralized
state and so on and so forth.
And some of these issues who are debated or who are seen from a different perspective,
he will introduce to us today, namely the Han Toms and the so-called, what's the French
called Le Mure de d'Anhoy, the wall of d'Anhoy, but we should not imagine something like the
Berlin Wall.
And what this was, he will introduce to us today and I'm very pleased to have him and
I'm very pleased that hopefully our technical devices will also cover it in full.
Please, I give the floor to our guest, Keith Taylor.
I'm very grateful to Professor Ngocher for this opportunity to talk a little bit about
a couple of issues that I've been very interested in for a number of years.
They both have to do with some myths, very established and stubborn myths that have become
part of modern Vietnamese historiography.
The first one I want to discuss has to do with the, it's a Vietnamese called the Mo Han
or the Han Toms or the Brick Toms that we find in northern Vietnam during the first millennium
of this era.
When I first visited northern Vietnam in 1986, I was taken out to see a number of archaeological
sites and one of them was a field that was just filled with mounds and I asked, no one
was really explaining things much unless I asked questions, what were these mounds and
they were the Han Toms, these brick tombs that were, people were buried in during the
first millennium.
When I asked of how many tombs there were, they said thousands, they have thousands of
them and the more I looked into it, the more fascinated I became about these brick tombs
but the problem is it's almost a somewhat taboo topic in Vietnamese historiography because
how to interpret these tombs and particularly the artifacts that are found in them.
They've never been systematically catalogued.
There's no Vietnamese archeologist who is specialized in studying these tombs.
It's a topic that no one really wants to get into.
What we know published is basically this, the Olav Yancey's archaeological study that
was published long ago, discussed some of these Han Toms that he uncovered and in Bezasié
and in Phuong, in the 70s, published some good studies and particularly in these books
you will find some good photographs of the tombs and of the artifacts found in them.
There's one article published in Vietnam in 1988 that focuses on the tombs which I've
indicated here, Phan Tien Bao's article, which is not, it follows some rather odd analytical
twists and turns that are not really very satisfying to me and there's been nothing
else but what we have in Vietnam in the Institute of Archaeology's archive are these excavation
reports.
The archaeologists have excavated quite a number of these tombs.
Of course, my very strong impression is that most of the tombs have simply been destroyed
but there were over the decades a number of them that the Institute of Archaeology was
able to send people out and to study them, to subject them to the archaeological method
and they produce these reports.
They're in booklets as we see here and they're just a page just to show you the kind of materials
that do exist and four years ago when I was able to work in the archive of the Institute
of Archaeology, I was able to get copies of most all of these reports which I'm just
really fascinated with because these reports are written by archaeologists and they certainly
know their work, their method and what they have found, what is revealed in these reports
is very interesting.
Unfortunately I do not have any photographs of the tombs themselves.
If you go to the Provincial Museum in Haizong, they have a reconstruction of one of these
tombs there which is very interesting to see.
Probably one of the best museums for these tombs is the Provincial Kwangning Museum which
has quite a number of artifacts from the Han tombs on display.
So what is in these tombs?
We find in these tombs clay models of things.
This is a photograph that is presented in the Museum of History in Hanoi as a kind
of token acknowledgment of the existence of these Han tombs and it shows one of the clay
models.
These are, it looks like a fortress which to a certain extent is a fortress.
These models included two, sometimes three-story buildings formed in a fortress-like place
but also there were many other kinds of artifacts.
Here's an example from the Kwangning Provincial Museum that's on display there.
It gives you an idea of the kind of places that these people who are buried in these
tombs where they lived or the kind of structure of their society in a very architectural sense.
Here's a, I have a number of photographs taken from the archaeological reports in the Institute
of Archaeology.
Here's another one.
You can see that they're really meant to protect the people who live within them.
They imply that there were guards and soldiers but also there are other aspects of these
that show that there were animals kept, pigs and some cattle.
Here's another example.
Just to, I wanted to show you some of the, just you get an idea of the kind of places
that the people who were buried in these tombs and of course these would have been the local
elite, the elite people of that time.
These tombs are all dated from Han through Tang Dynasty that is first through eighth,
ninth century.
And here's another like a storehouse where things were, where grain was kept and what
is this?
There are a lot of these kind of items that we find in these tombs.
It's an oven.
And here we get another view of this kind of oven that is obviously designed to produce
a lot of food for a lot of people.
Again, more ovens.
Coins from the, you know, the imperial dynasties.
And here's just another artifact.
It's a lamp, but it's a lamp that is in the form of apparently a slave perhaps or some
kind of a servant who is kneeling and holding the lamp up in one hand and a spear in the
other.
So where are these tombs?
I want to show you the extent of these tombs because it has to do with the number of things
I want to discuss.
The tombs are from all along the coast and up through, you know, this area here was still
ocean back then.
It hadn't really, the deltas had not been filled in, so we don't find any tombs down
here, but up along here and then down through here and all the way down through here.
So this is the Red River Delta, Tanghua, Niyang, Hating, and Northern Bochit Province here.
You can see the Xian River, the river that was the border between the various empires
in the north and the Chan peoples who lived to the south of this river.
And the tombs are stopped here.
There are some tombs still found in this region here just near the border, but not south of
the Xian River.
So that's the extent of the tombs and it basically represents the extent of the provinces that
the province of, it was called Jelsi at one point, another point, Anam, provinces of the
various empires in the north.
And just to show you what it looks a little bit in terms of the river system, again, you
find them along the coast and up this region all the way and then down to this Xian River
that I mentioned before.
We'll come back to this river again, but not with a hard tomb, so just on another topic.
So I wanted to just analyze briefly some ideas.
What kind of society do these tombs and the artifacts in them represent?
These clay models, they definitely indicate wealth.
You had to have a certain level of wealth in a society to be buried in these very elaborate
tombs.
Some of them are very large, had several chambers.
Some of them, if you were not too tall, you could actually stand upright inside of them.
They show fortified habitations which imply that there were soldiers, agriculturalists,
communal food preparation, granaries, wells.
There are some wells which I didn't show, but we do have some photos of the clay wells,
big pens, and the interesting thing about these Han tombs is that they're essentially
the same as the kind of tombs found in what we now call China from that time.
In China, they're associated with what is called in Chinese history the great families
of that time.
These were powerful local families that controlled land, controlled people, had their own private
families, had their own technicians, their crafts specialists, spies, and also these
families often were continued with adoptees.
They would find talented young people in the community, bring them in, make them part of
the family.
This was another aspect that we find evidence of in the texts that come from that time.
The people here belonged to the locality, certainly.
They were not these high-ranking imperial officials who came down from the north, and
if they died there, typically their bones were brought back north to be buried with
their ancestors in their home territories.
These were people who belonged here, wanted to be buried here, and we find them, these
tombs in Lekropolai, that is, groups of them in one area, as I mentioned before, the first
time I ever encountered them, there was a huge field full of these mounds, so it implies
a kind of local society where these powerful people identified with one another and were
buried together, and they fully accepted Sinaitic civilization, there's nothing in
here in these tombs that suggests that there was anything other than the Sinaitic cultural
context, so it was really a provincial Sinaitic society.
I want to mention language just a little bit because there's been a lot of work done on
historical linguistics in recent times.
We talk about two main languages now at that time, and a large degree of bilingualism between
them.
Proto-Vietnam is considered the Hmong Khmer language that is Vietnamese today is believed
to be, according to the theories of the linguists, a member of that language family, Hmong Khmer,
and then the prestige language at that time, which linguists now are referring to.
It's not been very many years ago that this regional version of Middle Chinese has been
proposed, which some linguists, Hmong Hmongists, are referring to as Alamese Middle Chinese
or AMC, which is found not just in northern Vietnam, and it's not clear exactly how far
it extended into what is now southern China, but it was a form of what linguists call Middle
Chinese, and this was the form of what we call Chinese today that eventually contributed
to what we call Vietnamese language today, and this is preserved in Vietnamese language.
The pronunciations are considered to be much closer in modern Vietnamese to the way it was
pronounced back then than in modern China, where the pronunciation has changed much more
through the centuries.
So how did Vietnamese language, when can we date that there's a language we would call
Vietnamese?
Well, probably not before the 10th or 13th century, somewhere in there, because this was
after the time when the connection between this area and what is now northern Vietnam
and what is now China, the connection was broken, and why, I'll mention a little bit
of my ideas about that in a moment, but that meant that if you were basically an AMC speaker
and you wanted to stay there, you identified of being there, and apparently a large, there
was a large population who spoke this elite language, and probably many, for them, it
was part of their bilingual linguistic framework.
Without more and more people coming from the north, each new dynasty, you know, the nasty
connection was broken, and so over a period of a few generations, these people shifted
or merged in with the PVM speakers and produced the Vietnamese languages as we know it today.
I think that also gives us some idea how important it is to try to get away from using the term
Chinese and Vietnamese for this period of time.
Those terms are simply meaningless, because there was no China at that time, as we know
that term today, because there was no Vietnam, it was just something pre-before that.
The people who were buried in these tombs, to some extent, they were, must have been
sociologically very similar to the people buried in the tombs for the north, in what
is now China, a mixture of common and prestige people, there was a lot of intermarriage,
we know, we have evidence of that, northern men and local women, adoptees, and these families,
these great families, the fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, cultural orientation towards
the empire would, of course, have been very important, but at the same time, there would
be generations of, with marriage, people, and this, of course, was also very significant.
So I think it's something that has not been fully digested, either in Chinese history
or Vietnamese history, that these terms, Chinese, Vietnamese, are totally anachronistic for
this period of time.
We could say maybe pre-Chinese or pre-Vietnamese, or anamis, I think, is a word that has often
been considered pejorative as a kind of colonial term, but I think colonial also, I believe,
is anachronistic term.
It's not a colonial situation here, a colonial idea is a very modern thing, I believe, I
would think it's more of a provincial than a national or colonial term.
So I want to just briefly expand on this idea of the myth of a thousand years of Chinese
domination and Vietnamese resistance, uprising, rebellions, these are two plaques or presentations
that you will find in the Museum of History in Hanoi.
One shows the list of all of the uprisings during this thousand years of domination,
and this map shows where all these uprisings took place, which right off the bat is a little
bit odd because we find they've added uprisings in places where neither the ancient Chinese
or the ancestors of the ancient Chinese or Vietnamese even lived or existed at that time.
So there's something else going on here.
So what about the textual evidence we have?
My first book, I went through this, but at that time, you know, this was published 40
years ago, and I wrote it 40, 45 years ago, and we had that generation of graduate students
who were really impregnated with this nationalistic idea, and we, you know, I was taught to be
a good scholar and to read the text, but still this kind of nationalistic mentality was part
of the way we read it.
And so in my first book, my ideas have certainly changed very definitely from that, and when
you look at the actual evidence of political unrest or uprisings during this thousand year
period, you have certain kinds of things happen.
One is there are these exotic heroes, I would say, who come from the edge, you know, coming
in for various reasons.
The Trung sisters are the most famous, of course.
I think it's from a strictly scholarly point of view, it's impossible to say to associate
them with the Vietnamese people, I mean, they didn't even exist yet at the time, these are
famous figures, but they all are rather exotic kind of creatures or heroes in the context
of what we know was going on at that time.
There were also the most of the political unrest came from the ruling class itself,
the imperial administrators themselves, either within the provincial politics you had governors
who rebelled against the dynasties, you had military commanders rebelled against the governors,
you had disappointed office seekers who mobilized their partisans to try to take over, and various
adventurers.
None of these can you associate with the Vietnamese people, there are also these dynastic cycles
where local leaders did take charge of local affairs because the dynasties were too weak
in the north to actually control the region.
But I've gone back and looked and looked again at all of these various episodes in the texts,
and there's really no evidence of the people rising up in resistance to northern ruler
in this whole period of time.
On the other hand, we do find two or maybe three episodes where the people are mentioned
in which they are requesting that a very popular governor be sent back because they felt very
attached to this particular person.
So then I think another key element is how did it end, and I'm not going to go through
this whole thing, but of course the 10th century is a very complex period of time when after
the fall of the Han dynasty you had a lot of changes going on, and when the Song dynasty
came up in the later part of the century it was a very different dynasty, it was what
a lesser dynasty, it did not have the power to project itself as the Han and Tang dynasties
did.
Why?
Because it was not governed, the emperors were not military men anymore.
The rulers were these scholar officials, increasingly decisions were made by bureaucrats, the bureaucracy
was being developed.
So we find in the 10th century there was a long process of imperial revival, it took
a long time for the Song dynasty to appear, and it was much weaker, it could not control,
it tried, it did invade into what is now northern Vietnam, and it tried to take it over, but
it didn't have, and it's another whole other story about that war and why the Song armies
were so incapable, but it was a time when the local people had to take matters into
their own hands, and the provincial ruling class then founded their own dynasty, and
so called the first Vietnamese dynasty began to appear.
So in just concluding this part of what I wanted to talk about, the Han tombs, the so
called ancestors of the Vietnamese during this period of time, I believe were not in
a colonial situation as we understand this term today, but they were in a provincial,
they were in an empire, they were in a province, they certainly enjoyed the benefits of that,
the economic, cultural, almost every aspect of Vietnamese culture, society, ideology,
religion are a result of this connection with the so called Chinese empires at that time,
and it ended not because as the cliche in Vietnamese history puts it, that the Vietnamese
were resisting continually and finally were able to throw off the Chinese domination,
but because China changed, China wasn't able to rule anymore, they would send armies, but
they simply did not have that military capacity that had existed during the Han Tom period,
and as a result the Vietnamese had to deal with their own affairs, and that's another
whole question.
We get into the formation of the Vietnamese dynastic tradition.
Okay I want to go back and look again at this map and just make another observation because
we're going to shift from the Han tombs to the Han walls, the brick tombs to the brick
walls and draw your attention again down to this border, and here you see this big, this
little bump of the coast, it's a mountainous massif, referred to as the han sol, and then
just below that is the An River, this is the border region, and then if you just go a little
bit further south, you can see what looks like a long stretch of sand dunes, and there's
a river that comes out of the mountains and flows, it comes against the sand dunes and
it runs up to the north of them and then out to the sea, that's the Nyat Le River, and
we want to look at that.
This is a map that shows this, there's Han Suumu Sif, this is the traditional border
there's Yang River, and here is the Nyat Le River where I want to talk about these walls.
I want to point out that this, in the whole long coast of Vietnam, is what I would call
the traditional choke point.
This was the border between the ancient Chinese Vietnamese and the Chan peoples for centuries,
because here you can see that the mountains come closer to the coast.
So here you have them, the mountains right to the sea, but at the other hand, this Nyat
Le River curls up way behind these mountains and there's a lowland route down here like
that.
But here, if you're going to go south, you've got to drift through here somehow, and we're
talking about the 17th century now, and a new myth, the myth of Vietnamese unity, and
these walls, brick walls, were built during the 17th century by the Vietnamese who went
to the south and became the southerners, and they built these walls because the northerners
were attacking repeatedly over a 50-year period, and they built these walls and fortresses
to keep them out, to keep the north out of the south.
There, the main walls you can see here, there's a fortress, another wall along the sand dunes.
Many invaders coming from the north would really have to take this region, because for
one thing, the southern navy was much more efficient than the northern navy.
At that time, the southerners had learned from the Portuguese how to shoot cannon, northerners
had not mastered, and never really mastered during that period.
So the southern ships coming out of here would make coming along the coast virtually
impossible.
So the north had to, they would come down, and they would try to break through by a man,
and as you can see, the southerners, these walls were built on a brick, and they had
a cannon mounted on the top of them, and repeatedly, the northern invasions were stopped
here in the 17th century.
Well, if you go to Domhoy, the city of Domhoy today is located right in this region here.
If you go there and you look around, you don't see these walls anymore.
Of course, they've been dismantled since, well, they were still there in the late 18th
century, but in the 19th and 20th century, they've been pretty much dismantled, and the
bricks used for other purposes.
And that's why we don't find anything here, but here's a photo there.
That's one of the, that's the peak that is the anchor point of the, one of the walls,
the first walls, and here you find, looking down at the mouth of the Nyatli River, there's
a high embankment, and on that embankment, there's a little shrine to the man who built
these walls, Dao Zhi Te, he is a very interesting man, and I'd love to talk, I could talk to
you a long time about him, he's a poet, scholar, musician, diplomatist, and very, a very interesting
man, but he was a northerner, but he went south and became a very prominent figure in
designing these walls and creating the strategy that the southerners used to keep the northerners
out.
This is a well, it's a big well, it's dry now, but it's maintained as a kind of tribute.
This and several other wells are the only physical remains from that period of time,
those wars.
Why?
What is it?
The wall itself was located just in front of this well, and there's a whole string of
wells which were dug behind the walls in order to produce water for the southerners who were
on the walls during the battles, and these are, that's what remains, well, here's another
one, and here you can see the edge of one, but the main point is the mountain in the
distance, that was the anchor of the second main wall, there were two main walls that
were from the mountains to the sea, and if you climb up onto that mountain and look out,
this is what you would see, the whole territory of where the moans of the ballads took place.
So I just wanted to spend a few minutes trying to produce some kind of conclusion to my point
here about these northern invasions being repelled here, the importance of these brick
walls at this historic choke point, this was, I think it's worth pointing out, this
was also the limit of the Hong Kong imperial power, the limit of the brick tombs, the old
chamvilla border, and it became the border between the northerners and the southerners,
and in fact the 17th parallel is basically at that same place.
In the modern time, during the 1950s, 60s, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the
North and the Republic of Vietnam and the South had their border at this same place,
but the southerners, they had a much smaller population than the North, but they were more
technologically advanced, as I had mentioned, both in muskets and cannons, more advanced
in naval warfare, they actually were able to defeat a Dutch fleet, the Dutch joined
the northerners in one of their expeditions, and the southerners sunk their ships.
They also made very effective use of war elephants, both sides used elephants, the northerners
mainly used them to carry cannons, but the southerners used them to attack.
The southerners had a standing army right behind the walls, where soldiers lived with
their families, in fact a very distinctive aspect of the southern army was that you could
not join the army unless you were married, you had to have a wife, why?
Because you could not afford to have a lot of young men in the army who are not also
having children, because the population was so much smaller than the northerners, and
also it just became a tradition of the southern army that the soldiers would live with their
families, and their wives would be very important figures in marketing and in producing food
for the family.
So for two centuries there were two Vietnamese kingdoms, in 1802 the southerners marched
north and created the Vietnam that we see on the map today.
So this myth of the historical unity of the Vietnamese people is another one, the second
myth I wanted to talk about today, the first being the thousand years of Chinese domination
and the Vietnamese resistance to that is the second one.
For two and a half centuries the northern and southern Vietnamese lived in separate
polities, very different economies, very different political system, different social organization
and cultural characteristics.
It ended at the brick walls, this separation was really tested and maintained.
Through very violent encounters, and I just want to mention some of the very salient differences
that developed at this time, and you can find them also in the historical records.
The way in which these events of the 17th century were described in the northern annals
and then in the southern annals are very different, and that's I think another important indication
when you look at the mentalities that created these texts.
The southerners encountered foreign peoples in a way the northerners did not, they were
relatively open to the outside world, they were not so interested in education but more
in entrepreneurship.
Northerners were very much mesmerized by being coming erudite as a way to get into the system,
whereas in the south wealth rather than education was more important.
The way the military was organized, the kind of technological training and development
of weapons in the south and the north was also very different, and the role of the state.
The south, the state was much less intrusive in daily life affairs than in the north, which
is natural because the southern rulers wanted to welcome people, and there was a continuous
stream of people from the north coming into the south during these years, immigrating
into the south.
So that's what I have to say today, so I'll stop here and if you have any questions, discuss
it further.
Thank you very much for this interesting and I think very challenging presentation,
challenging the so-called established myth of Vietnamese history.