History
Imperial Vietnam
Imperial Vietnam refers to the period when Vietnam was ruled by a series of dynastic emperors, beginning with the Đinh dynasty in 968 and ending with the Nguyễn dynasty in 1945. This era saw the development of a distinct Vietnamese culture, the expansion of the country's territory, and the adoption of Confucianism as a guiding ideology.
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6 Key excerpts on "Imperial Vietnam"
eBook - PDF- Peter Church(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
In 939 AD, they took advantage of polit- ical disorder in China to seize their independence and reestablish a Vietnamese state. In later centuries, the Chinese attempted on several occasions to reassert their authority—leading to a Vietnamese per- ception of themselves as a permanently threatened nation—but they were successfully resisted. The early Ming did manage to take and hold Vietnam for 20 years (1407–1428) but were ousted by forces led by one of Vietnam’s greatest heroes, Le Loi, the founder of the Le dynasty, which was to last from 1428 until 1789. VIETNAM 205 The history of Vietnam after independence in the 10th century would be marked by two principal, and conflict-provoking, tenden- cies. The first of these was the development of a Confucian state and high culture modelled on China. By the 15th century, Vietnam had a system of government similar in all but size to that of its mighty northern neighbour. The Vietnamese emperor, at the capital, Hanoi, presided over a mandarin bureaucracy educated in the Confucian clas- sics. Law, administrative structures, literature, and the arts all followed Chinese forms. The educated class also tended to prefer to use Chi- nese rather than the Vietnamese language. In theory, the adoption of the Confucian model of social organisation should have conferred enlightened government on Vietnam. In practice, it produced a ruling class culturally alienated from their subjects. This problem was com- pounded by the grip on the country’s commercial life maintained by Chinese merchants allied with the Vietnamese ruling class. Nevertheless, popular Vietnamese culture absorbed many attitudes and values of Chinese derivation, through acceptance of codes of law and morality promulgated by government and spread by scholars.
- Willard J. Peterson(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
134; chapter 4 of Zottoli, “Reconceptualizing southern Vietnamese history from the 15th to the 18th centuries.” the emergence of the state of vietnam 207 territory in the Mekong delta. A thirteenth unit, the center at Ha-Tien in the far southwest, lay in an area once dominated by Portuguese traders. By the eighteenth century, it had come under the influence of Cantonese immigrants (said to have been part of the Ming diaspora) and subsequently joined the Nguyen realm. 21 This realm was ruled through mainly martial regimes, and the extent of civil bureaucratic administration varied. Standing behind the walls at Dong-Hoi on their northern border, a defensive line built across the narrow lowlands between the sea to the east and the mountains on the west, the Nguyen continued to develop their military capabilities. The officer corps was originally composed of men of Thanh-Nghe origin, descended from the border warriors whose ancestors had been fighting for the past two centuries as well as men of eastern Dong-Kinh origin. Other men from the immigrant northern Vietnamese population formed the reserves and were conscripted into the army. Linked to these forces were craftsmen and artisans who provided construction labor and supplies. Elephant troops and artillery units formed significant elements in the military, and naval forces were key to defending against Trinh intrusions down the coast. 22 The economic engine that drove southern Vietnamese society and was a source of power in the new realm was involvement in production for interna- tional trade. From the time that Nguyen forces entered Thuan-Quang in the second half of the sixteenth century and joined surviving Mac forces there, they had participated in the burgeoning seaborne foreign commerce. The expanding Vietnamese presence along the eastern coast of the Southeast Asian mainland coincided with the major growth of regional trade occurring from the middle of the sixteenth century.
eBook - ePub- Peter Church(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
11 VietnamThe Vietnamese were ruled by the Chinese for over a thousand years, from the 2nd century BC until the 10th century AD . After winning their independence, the Vietnamese continued looking to China as their cultural model, their prime source of concepts of government, social organisation, and the arts. Culturally, Vietnam thus belonged to the Confucian world of East Asia, which distinguished it sharply from neighbouring states with Theravada Buddhist or Islamic cultures. The difference in cultural outlook between Vietnam and her South‐East Asian neighbours has long contributed to conflict in the region.But the Vietnamese regard for China also made for conflict within Vietnam itself. It proved difficult to reconcile with another Vietnamese impulse—to protect their distinctive character as a people and to uphold uniquely Vietnamese cultural traditions. Whether to adopt or to resist Chinese ideas became a perennial source of social and cultural stress within Vietnam's ruling class, and also between ruling class and people.The Vietnamese state was an expanding one, which only intensified such cultural stresses though it took 700 years. The expansion, known as the “march to the south,” eased the country's population pressures and made Vietnam a major power in South‐East Asia. But it also bred deep regional differences and rivalries within Vietnamese society. Vietnam in the 19th century was in poor shape to face the challenges posed by the West's political, economic, and cultural expansion.The Western impact, in the shape of French colonial rule and subsequent American intervention, aggravated the historic tensions and also cut bitter new divisions in Vietnamese society. Communism in Vietnam, as in China, won wide popular support, with its promise of national independence and a reintegrated and just society. It delivered on the first promise; it failed on the second. As in China, communism in Vietnam as an overarching state ideology now drifts uncertainly, though most observers are optimistic about the future of Vietnam's 94 million people living in a state under Communist Party control but with a free‐enterprise economy.
eBook - PDFReligion and Societies
Asia and the Middle East
- Carlo Caldarola(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
The emperor headed a complex bureaucratic government which had as its responsibilities the maintenance of internal law and order, defense of external borders, and amelioration of the living conditions of its citizens through construction and maintenance of public works and opening of new lands for settlement (Woodside 1971). Above all, as befitting a system modeled directly on Confucian China, the traditional Vietnamese state was concerned with symbolic issues—the regulation of relations between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of heaven—and hence the most important ministry was the Ministry of Rites. There was no such idea as 'separation of church and state', as the state itself was a church, its functions as a political institu-tion inextricably linked with its religious functions. The emperor was as much a spiritual symbol as a political leader, and his daily activities were as much concerned with maintaining the spiritual well-being as the material prosperity and military security of his kingdom. In fact, material concerns were believed to be greatly influenced by the spiritual state of the people and their leaders. If the people, and especially the emperor, followed the prescribed rituals, thought the right thoughts, and spoke the correct words, then and only then would the country know peace and prosperity. The entire population, from the richest to the poorest and from the highest to the lowest, were bound together by common participa-tion in a complex symbolic and ritual sytem designed to win Heaven's favor for Vietnam. Despite the many ritual observances, life in traditional Vietnam was rarely harmonious. There were frequent disasters: floods, droughts, epidemics, famines, civil wars, and foreign invasions. There were recurrent economic crises stemming from the state's failure to achieve an equitable distribution of wealth and from a growing shortage of land to be farmed by an expanding peasant population. These various factors stimulated frequent
eBook - PDFPostcolonial Vietnam
New Histories of the National Past
- Patricia M. Pelley, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Duke University Press Books(Publisher)
This widely cited chronicle covers the entire pre-Nguyễn span of Vietnamese history, from the prehistoric kingdom of Văn Lang to the collapse of the Lê dynasty. Dur-ing the reign of the Nguyễn emperor Tự Ðức, court historians also com-pleted The Geography of United Ðại Nam. This gazetteer, which devotes one book to each of twenty-eight provinces, is divided into three sections, each of which represents the major regions: North, Center, and South. Because of its description of provincial resources and historical sites, as well as its at-tention to demography, this source is invaluable for research on nineteenth-century topics. 1 Nguyễn scholarship is now considered indispensable, and even during Nguyễn times its importance was clear. And yet, because the Nguyễn emper-ors presided over Vietnam’s loss of independence, postcolonial historians often viewed their accomplishments as compensatory devices that masked a state of disgrace; in other words, there appeared to be no correspondence between the Nguyễn court’s intellectual interest in history and its political resignation vis-à-vis the French. Like the Nguyễn historians, those associated with the occupation forces —including adventurers, administrators, merchants, scholars, and mission-aries—were also enormously productive. Far more than their Nguyễn con-temporaries, however, colonial authors spoke from a position of power. In addition to the scholars Léonard Aurousseau, Gustave Dumoutier, Maurice Durand, Pierre Huard, and Henri Maspero, a number of writers with mis-sionary backgrounds (Léopold Cadière), commercial interests (Alfred Schreiner), or in military positions (Charles Gosselin) also presumed to speak authoritatively about the Vietnamese past. Institutions such as the French School of the Far East (École française d’Extrême-Orient) issued in-numerable works that because of their distinguished imprimateur enjoyed quasi-official status.
eBook - PDFThe Last Emperors of Vietnam
From Tu Duc to Bao Dai
- Oscar Chapuis(Author)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Thus, the Vietnam of Tu Duc could only follow the steps of its role model, the decadent China of the Ch’ing. Worse, Vietnam kept going on where China had stopped: When in 1905 the Ch’ing put an end to the traditional examination system, Vietnam still carried it on for a few more years. 12 THE LAST EMPERORS OF VIETNAM The dependence of Tu Duc on China stemmed first from the ambiguous con- ditions of his enthronement, which compelled him to seek legitimacy from the tradition of Chinese investiture. Thus, on September 10, 1849, a great amount of money was spent to greet the imperial delegate. From the port to the palace, streets were covered with precious carpets; adorned rest areas attended by grace- ful hostesses were built to allow the Chinese delegation to pause; several junks were decked with fresh flowers to serve as an alternative to land transportation. Bags of Chinese soil were constantly kept within the reach of the Chinese Am- bassador, who should never feel far from his motherland. Pham Van Son, more patriot than historian, bitterly complained that in spite of such attentions, the Chinese affected an air of superiority no longer compatible with their conspic- uous decline at European hands. Yet, in spite of the Ch’ing’s investiture, the legitimacy of Tu Duc remained a major problem. Indeed, at the outset of his reign, he was confronted with the rebellion of his eldest brother Hong Bao and later another coup d’etat perpetrated by a relative. There were also the periodical revolts of a population loyal to the Le Dynasty. In Tonkin, the Tai Ping remnants controlled the Red River. But the biggest challenge came from the defiant missionaries, and government perse- cution gave a pretext for French intervention. The Hong Bao Coup The role of Hong Bao seems to be a point of controversy among Vietnam historians.
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