The reference in the title of this volume to “Vietnamese” suggests a common, albeit broad, society now bounded by the borders of the modern nation-state. Nonetheless, readers should bear in mind that it is anachronistic to use the term Vietnam to describe the territories inhabited by these peoples in the past. The reason is that the name Vietnam was not used until the early nineteenth century and that the territory so labeled did not reach its current size until around the same time.
Over the past two thousand years, the geographical expanse today known as Vietnam has had many labels, including Giao Chi, Lam Ap, Zhenla, Champa, Dai Viet, Van Lang, Van Xuan, Dai Nam, and Ai Lao. More recently, this area was separated into three territories—labeled by French colonial authorities as Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina—even after it was joined with the Lao and Khmer territories to form a new entity known as the Union of Indochina. Then, for nearly thirty years in the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnamese territories were again divided, this time by the forces of Cold War politics, creating the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. The geographies encompassed by these multiply termed places varied as well, some representing only small parts of what is today Vietnam and others representing large portions of this area. In this book, we hope to avert the all-too-common teleological perspective that views the Vietnamese past as an inevitable trajectory moving toward a unified modern state. We then must recognize that there are indeed multiple pasts, as well as what are now known as “regional” cultures, histories, and geographical realities bounded by a single, but still extremely diverse, modern state.
SELECTION AND ORGANIZATION OF TEXTS
We recognize that the sampling of texts in Sources of Vietnamese Tradition risks creating an artificial canon of readings that represent Vietnamese history and culture. This risk is particularly great in the Vietnamese case because of the very few existing translations of historical materials, especially those from before the twentieth century. But it is not our intention to create a canon of any kind, and we are not suggesting that the readings assembled here are the only significant ones or even that all of them are of equal importance. Instead, they may be viewed as representative of certain literary genres, ideas, or views.
Ten years from now, this project would be very different in different hands or, indeed, in our own. We caution, too, that these texts may not necessarily allow readers to arrive at some understanding of the “essential” Vietnamese cultural or social outlook. But the texts certainly do offer glimpses into the minds of certain Vietnamese individuals at particular moments, and they do suggest some of the many themes to be found over the long trajectory of Vietnamese history. What these (mostly) elite texts can tell us about the Vietnamese people is limited, however, since the vast majority of the Vietnamese population has historically been illiterate or semiliterate. Accordingly, their view of their world has been preserved to some extent in a rich tradition of folk stories, Buddhist tales, foundation myths, aphorisms, and songs, a few of which are included in this book.
In selecting the texts, we tried to cover a broad range of voices, time periods, regions, and issues. The voices are almost exclusively those of elites and lowland Vietnamese because only the elites were literate and, furthermore, their texts were preserved as part of official court histories or were passed down within literary lineages or even, in rare cases, were printed in woodblock form. Consequently, we seriously considered including materials from ethnic minority peoples living within the boundaries of modern Vietnam, for the histories of the Vietnamese are bound up with these groups in significant ways. But we finally decided that we could not do justice to the voices of these many groups, none of which could be said to “represent” the others, and therefore excluded them from the project. Thus when we speak of “Vietnamese” traditions, we are referring to the majority lowland Vietnamese populations, sometimes called the Kinh or, simply, the Viet. Our decision to limit our coverage to the lowland Vietnamese also was strongly shaped by the fact that the other volumes in the Introduction to Asian Civilizations series similarly restricted their coverage to the majority socioethnic groups in their countries.
Most of the documents we chose have not been previously translated into English, particularly those from the “early modern period,” the early seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Although many of these texts were translated from their original Chinese or vernacular Vietnamese characters into modern Vietnamese and were published and sometimes republished in Vietnam during the twentieth century, we based our translations on the original language in which the texts first appeared. Most of the pre-twentieth-century documents were written in either classical Chinese or chu nom, the demotic script used to represent the Vietnamese vernacular. A few texts from this period, all by Vietnamese Christians, were written in early forms of the romanized quoc ngu alphabet.
Tracking down the original texts was often a challenge, since most modern Vietnamese translations do not include a copy of the original, and many of the original texts have never been published. We consulted the originals in the Han-Nom archive in Hanoi, in Vietnamese journals from the early part of the twentieth century, or in microfilm versions when available. We also used texts from steles, on rubbings or on published versions of the stele texts, which was yet another challenge. Even many of the primary twentieth-century texts were difficult to locate in their original forms. Anthologies contain excerpts of some, while others appeared in short-lived Vietnamese newspapers or weeklies of the 1930s. Yet others we knew about only through references or even rough English translations but had trouble finding the original texts. Some texts that we wanted to include we ultimately could not because we could not find an original-language version and did not wish to work from a translation. The very few exceptions to this rule include some eighteenth-century texts that have survived in contemporary translations, into either French or Portuguese. Throughout our translations, we tried to minimize the use of footnotes. But at the same time, we recognized that certain texts, particularly classical references, needed an additional explication of terms, and in those cases we offer more extensive annotation.
We deliberately limited the number of literary texts that we would include. As a result, we have only a small number of poems and only a few excerpts from longer literary pieces, whether historical novels, modern novels, or short stories. We made this decision in part to limit the range of documents. Particularly with respect to poetry, English-language readers already are well served by a number of recent anthologies that offer a good sampling of Vietnamese poetry. Finally, we again followed the existing volumes in the Introduction to Asian Civilizations series, which focus mainly on nonliterary texts. We nonetheless hope that future scholars will translate more texts from Vietnam’s rich literary tradition. For example, several significant historical “novels” from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer compelling story lines and extremely useful insights into Vietnamese society at that time. The very brief excerpts we included from a few of the most important such texts can only hint at their rich content.
In organizing our materials, we decided to arrange our texts both chronologically and thematically. Chronologically, we divided the text into seven time periods, three in the premodern period and two each in the early modern and modern periods. The criteria we used to select the time periods were chiefly political and therefore a bit arbitrary. The documents’ elite nature inevitably reflects political considerations, which helped justify this approach. The thematic divisions were more problematic, and we are aware that they sometimes appear arbitrary. Nonetheless, we felt that organizing readings under particular categories would make the book more accessible and more useful to readers interested in particular themes that they could trace through the various time periods. Moreover, our method of organizing anthologized materials is one with which the Vietnamese themselves are familiar. For example, Phan Huy Chu’s famous early-nineteenth-century encyclopedia, Categorized Records of the Institutions of Successive Dynasties (Lich trieu hien chuong loai chi), organized its selected texts under such headings as geography, people, natural resources, and government.
The categories we settled on are both new and old. Some are those that the Vietnamese literati (like Phan Huy Chu) themselves used, particularly our geographical and economic classifications. Other categories, such as “Society and Culture” and “Philosophy and Religion,” are modern inventions, which pre-twentieth-century Vietnamese would not have recognized. Nonetheless, we feel that such labels are useful, for our project is translation, which encompasses not merely words but also ideas. To translate is to build bridges between languages and between time periods, and our categories are part of this bridge-building process, enabling modern readers to find materials relevant to topics of interest. We understand that placing various practices, beliefs, and texts into the general category “Religion” narrows highly complex ideas, although our project is not about defining “religion” but providing some practical categories for modern readers. We could have used other categories, and some documents could well have been placed under several of our own headings. The chronological and thematic divisions that we selected largely guided our distribution of sources, as we sought to maintain some balance among time periods and across themes. Some time periods and themes contain a larger or smaller number of texts, reflecting various considerations, including the availability of suitable writings.
Finally, we note that nomenclature and labels can often become a stumbling point in a project spanning such a long history. Indeed, the terms China and Vietnam, whose modern territorial and political implications are readily apparent, are much less useful when discussing pre-twentieth-century geography. Accordingly, we tried not to use them in reference to earlier incarnations of what became China and Vietnam, unless doing so was either unavoidable or helped us avoid particularly awkward circumlocutions. Especially for earlier periods, we use the general geographical referents North and South to designate the peoples and polities of the Chinese and Vietnamese realms, respectively.
We hope that this volume will be the beginning of a much larger project to make the historical, cultural, and ideological heritage of an important civilization available to an English-language audience. At the very least, the texts included here represent ideas and concepts and offer useful comparisons placing Vietnamese civilization within a larger Asian or even global context. If this book inspires another generation of students and researchers to explore more fully the history and society of Vietnam we will consider our efforts to have been worthwhile.