TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia A Historical Sketch of the Landscape of the Red River Delta (original) (raw)
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A Historical Sketch of the Landscape of the Red River Delta
TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2016
This article is an attempt to stand back and re-imagine the landscape of the Red River over the last two millennia. The only static components of the Red River valley and delta are its mountains and geological deposits, everything else has changed over time. By marrying historical records with recent scientific findings on the Red River, this article outlines aspects of these changes; including changes to the climate and landscape, the possibility of shifting river courses, the movement of historical trade routes, and the rise of Thang Long–Hanoi.
The Chao Phraya delta in perspective: a comparison with the Red River and Mekong deltas, Vietnam
The deltas are the major rice bowls of Asia. They combine high population densities with intensive agriculture. Agricultural activities are strongly shaped by the hydrologic regime, its floods, low flows in the dry-season and the tidal effect. Their historical development seen in terms of settlements, cultural origin and socio-political formation are nevertheless contrasting. This paper attempts to highlight a few commonalities of the Red River, Mekong and Chao Phraya deltas, together with their main discrepancies. It thus provides a comparative perspective on the Chao Phraya delta and helps sketching out its particularities.
This article attempted to trace the waters and animals that once existed but disappeared into the history of the Red River delta, and how human and climate factors combined to make this happen between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. The human factor is crucial in understanding the water history of the Red River delta. It contributed significantly to the disappearance of swamps, lakes, the building of the first state sponsored dike, the possible changes of the course of the Red River, and the plausible origin of the Thien Duc (Song Duong) river. It appears that human reclamation of the coast mainly happened after the independence of Dai Viet in the tenth century, which was marked by increasingly intensive human activities on the coast and this increased activity is testified to by the gradual retreat of the elephants from the delta. All these changes occurred in the eastern Red River delta few centuries ahead of the western delta. The degradation of natural environment in the eastern delta seems to have caused an out-migration to the western delta between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
Riverscapes, Estuaries, and State Formation in Traditional Southeast Asia 1
‘Riverscapes, Estuaries,and State Formation in Southeast Asia’. In Nusantara:An International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. Vol 2-1 (2020): 138-154., 2020
Riverscapes have recently gained renewed scholarly attention in historical, environmental, and cultural studies on man and the natural environment. This paper explores the extent to which the main rivers of the Southeast Asian subcontinent have given shape to the rice growing human societies that emerged in their basins and, further, how those rivers may have influenced distinct historical state formation processes. In Southeast Asian islands, riverscapes became the cradles of a completely different kind of state formation process: the estuary-based Malay port polity.
The history of water management in the Red River Delta presents a stark contrast with the Mekong Delta. While the latter was an ancient site of contact between the Khmer, Siamese, Malay, Chinese, Chăm, and Vietnamese populations, its large-scale hydraulics planning are of relatively recent date, having been initiated during the seventeenth century under the Nguyễn lords. In the Red River Delta, the conquest and development of the territory is intimately related to the history of water management, as well as to the hydrographical network which shaped it through a long process of alluvial deposit. The basic need for self-protection against the river’s violent floods is a constant feature of the ancient past and the modern period in Vietnam’s history and largely contributed to the structuring of relations between the state and the peasantry. This chapter’s aim is to present several important features of the history of hydraulics policy implemented in the northern delta during the nineteenth century by the Nguyễn dynasty, drawn from one principal documentary source, the imperial annals. Indeed, it was in the nineteenth century that the most concerted efforts were made, to such an extent that on the eve of the colonial intervention, the construction of the Red River Delta’s dike system was complete. This unprecedented investment should not mask, however, the instability and ambiguity of the hydraulics policy implemented by this dynasty’s successive emperors; this was illustrated by discontinuity in the administration and management of the dikes and alternating periods of state involvement and withdrawal, whereby part of its prerogatives was abandoned to peasant communities. Looking beyond this contrasting conclusion, we may consider that the Nguyễn dynasty played a key role in the area of water management, establishing the foundations for a modern and rational system in the delta.
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Conventional Southeast Asian scholarship uses documentary sources and art history to explain the origins of first millennium CE developments, when temple-anchored Brahmanic and Buddhist religions, international trade networks, and the region’s earliest cities emerged. Geopolitical factors and regional intellectual paradigms partly explain why archaeological research lags behind epigraphy and art history for interpreting Early Southeast Asia. Yet findings from recent landscape-based archaeological research complicate interpretations in novel and important ways. This paper blends archaeological and historical research from protohistoric and pre-Angkorian Cambodia as a springboard for discussing the first millennium CE developments across mainland Southeast Asia. Studying sites, water features, statuary, ceramics and beads helps us understand how Southeast Asians drew from a South Asian idiom to forge ritual-political landscapes, establish local identities, and cohere populations into several of the region’s earliest states.
From Zomia to Holon: Rivers and Transregional Flows in Mainland Southeastern Asia, 1840-1950
Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , 2020
[ Abstract ] How might historians secure for the river a larger berth in the recent macro-historical turn? This question cannot find a greater niche than in the emerging critique of the existing spatial configuration of regionalism in mainland Southeastern Asia. The Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze rivers spread out like a necklace around Yunnan and cut across parts of the territories that are known as South, Southeast and East Asia. Each of these rivers has a different topography and fluvial itinerary, giving rise to different political, economic and cultural trajectories. Yet these rivers together form a connected "water-world". These rivers engendered conversations between multi-agentive mobility and large-scale place-making and were at the heart of inter-Asian engagements and integration until the formal end of the European empires. Being both a subject and a sponsor of transregional crossings, the paper argues, these rivers point to the need for a new historical approach that registers the connections between parts of the Southeast Asian massif through to the expansive plain land and the * Associate Professor, History and International Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, iftekhar.iqbal@ubd.edu.bn
Early mainland Southeast Asian landscapes in the first millennium AD
Annu. Rev. Anthropol., 2006
Southeast Asia's earliest states emerged during the first millennium a.d. from the Irawaddy River of Myanmar to the Red River delta of northern Vietnam. Developments during this time laid the groundwork for the fluorescence of the region's later and better-known civilizations such as Angkor and Pagan. Yet disciplinary and language barriers have thus far precluded an anthropological synthesis of cultural developments during this time. This review uses a landscape focus to synthesize current knowledge of mainland Southeast Asia's earliest states, which emerged in the first millennium a.d. Research from archaeology and history illuminates articulations between physical and social factors in several kinds of Early Southeast Asian landscapes: economic, urban, and political. Social and ideological forces that shaped these first-millennium-a.d. landscapes are discussed as integral aspects of early state formation.