2016-"Nguyễn Công Trứ at the court of Minh Mạng," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 47, 2 (June 2016): 255-280. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
The concept of a steadily expanding Vietnamese empire first took a rough shape in the narrative choices made by the 19th century Nguyen Dynasty Historical Office. After 1802, early scholar-officials of the Nguyễn Dynasty constructed formal claims to the territory of Tonkin, relying in part on European texts familiar to their French supporters in Saigon such as Alexandre de Rhodes' popular history of Tonkin, which described, in vague terms, a link between the rulers of Tonkin and Cochinchina. Nguyễn officials claimed that an ancestor of the dynastic founder, Nguyễn Ánh, had played a key role in upholding the Lê Dynasty, implying that the Nguyễn Dynasty held an ancient claim to rule in Thăng Long. Tonkin and Cochinchina were unified by rulers from the south, first the Tây Sơn from Quy Nhơn, then a Nguyễn ruler from Saigon. These regimes arrived in Tonkin seeking to connect their rulers' personal legacy with the Tonkin populations they sought to control. Both attempted to enlist the support of Tonkin elites, and adapted the historical literature produced under the Lê Dynasty to justify the new regimes in the language of the local literati. The Nguyễn attempted to destroy most Tây Sơn literature, however, and along with their French supporters sought to combine elements of existing histories of Tonkin and China, while incorporating elements from other sources from abroad, including venerable, widely disseminated, Rhodes account. The Lê and Nguyễn dynasties produced dynastic histories, written by scholarofficials who staffed each court's Historical Office (quốc sử quán), which form the backbone of virtually every narrative of Vietnam before colonial rule. Over several centuries, scholars at successive Lê (and, for a time, Mạc) courts compiled and revised the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư, or Complete History of the Great Việt, referred to here as the Toàn Thư. The classical Chinese style of chronicle the Lê scholars sought to emulate depicts history as a seamless narrative. It tells a story beginning in the times of early legends and myths, continuing unbroken to describe the current events of the day. Thus, the Toàn Thư begins with a dragon, tells of tribes magically hatched from eggs, and proceeds to chronicle the rise and fall of successive historical dynasties. The final volume ends up listing the minutiae of chaotic edicts and battle orders in the tumult that engulfed Thăng Long around the time of the Ming-Qing transition. The southernmost territories of Đại Việt lay on the periphery of the Lê world, where it was particularly difficult to separate fact from fiction. 1 The Nguyễn scholars made a dramatic departure from the Lê court tradition, if they considered themselves to be heirs of a Lê tradition at all. Nguyễn court officials based their own history, beginning with the Liệt Thánh Thực Lục Tiền Biên, or Preceding Book of the Veritable Records of Great Men, referred to here as the Thực Lục, on the model of the Shi-lu, or Veritable Records, beginning with events during the reign of a dynastic founder. But with some exceptions, Ming and Qing Veritable Records were each created shortly after the end of each emperor's reign and described events within living memory of the editors, who drew on a vast archive of court documents. Thus, this style of dynastic chronicle was, at least implicitly, purported to be compiled directly from "veritable"-archived-court documents originating from and held by the ruling regime. Unlike the Ming scholars, however, the first head of the Historical Office in Huế, Trương Đăng Quế, and his co-editors, did not begin their story with a recently deceased emperor.
Trần Hưng Đa . o (1228-1300), the Vietnamese general who led troops to hold off Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, is honoured across Vietnam today as a hero of the nation (anh hùng dân tộc). This ubiquitous representation has, however, come about only recently, having been crafted in the twentieth century. Prior to that time, Trần Hưng Đa . o was honoured in other ways. This article will examine precisely how it is that Trần Hưng Đa . o was represented and remembered in various works-from official histories to spirit writing textsbetween the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. It will trace the transformations in these representations over time and argue that it was only in the early twentieth century that Trần Hưng Đa . o began to be represented as a national hero. In its coverage of the transformations in Trần Hưng Đa . o's representation, this article will demonstrate how modern nationalist ideas emerged in Vietnam in the early twentieth century.
An Alternative Vietnam? The Nguyen Kingdom in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nguyen kingdom which controlled the area later known to the West as Cochinchina, had its origins in modern central Vietnam. The Nguyen annals portray Nguyen Hoang, the governor of Thuan Hoa and Quang Nam, which then marked the southern frontier of Dai Viet, as the founder of this kingdom of the south. War broke out in 1627 between the Nguyen in the south and the royal Le-Trinh government which controlled the region from Nghe An to the Red River delta. By creating a new state, the Nguyen put themselves into a rebellious position that was fraught with danger, for they were far weaker than the Trinh in almost every way. The north had well-established institutions, its territory was three or four times larger than that of the Nguyen, and it possessed correspondingly more military strength. In addition, the Trinh were established in an area occupied by ethnic Vietnamese and therefore governed their own people, while the Nguyen administration governed the former lands of Champa, an Indianized kingdom which had remarkably different traditions from those of the Vietnamese. Yet the Nguyen government not only survived, defeating seven campaigns launched by the Trinh, but also progressively pushed its border further into the south, securing control over three-fifths of the territory that makes up present-day Vietnam in the space of just 200 years. Why did forces operating in a new environment survive, and triumph, while those that remained in familiar surroundings faltered?
Nguyễn Thị Năm and the Land Reform in North Vietnam, 1953
New scholarship has challenged conventional portrayals of the Vietnamese revolution and its leader, Hồ Chí Minh. However, little has been said about Hồ Chí Minh’s role in the social-political and economic revolution known as the land reform. This paper looks at the life and trial of landowner Nguyễn Thị Năm to illuminate Hồ Chí Minh’s role in the decision to execute Nguyễn Thị Năm. It also examines the execution as part of the broader history of the land reform and of the consolidation of communist power in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang
China Review International, 2018
This book provides the reader with close readings of a number of literary pieces created by two highly educated men of letters who held positions of authority in several territories south of Huế during the eighteenth century, and in so doing takes the reader deeply into the social and intellectual history of that time and region. Of the two figures whose literary productions are examined, one, Mạc Thiên Tứ (1710-1780) was the local Chinese ruler of Hà Tiên, a coastal port city on the western edge of the Mekong Delta. Hà Tiên was at that time used as an enclave by Ming loyalists generally allied with the Nguyễn lords who ruled the South from their capital in Ph u Xuân (present-day Huế). Mạc Thiên Tứ's family had come to the region as political refugees in the late seventeenth century. The second figure, Nguyễn Cư Trinh (1716-1767) was a high ranking Vietnamese official whose forebears had served the Nguyễn lords for several generations. He served successively as the governor of Quang Ngãi Prefecture