The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 10 | Number 2 | Article ID 5036 | May 15, 2017

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Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present

Ben Kiernan introduces his new book (Oxford University Press, 2017)

“The mountains are like the bones of the earth.Water is its blood,” wrote a Vietnamesegeographer in 1820. Lowland Việt Nam isaquatic, but it is also multiregional andpolyethnic. The country’s three historic lowlandregions are bounded by extensive uplands, alllinked by interrelated landscapes, economies,and cultures. Throughout the plains, water playsa key role in the economy and communications.In the north and south, the Red River and theMekong River form wide deltas and flow into theSouth China Sea. Linking the two deltas is thecentral region, many hundreds of miles ofcurving coastline, broken every twenty miles orso by river mouths and port towns.

Central Việt Nam, once known as Champa, is along, narrow coastal plain that Vietnameseoften picture as a thin bamboo pole, at whoseends are suspended two bulky rice baskets, thenorthern and southern deltas of the Red Riverand the Mekong. In the past three millennia,these three lowland regions have nourishedunique wet-rice civilizations, speaking primarilyforms of the V ietnamese, Cham, andCambodian languages, respect ively.Overlooking the lowlands, and descending veryclose to the coast along the narrow centralplain, forested ranges and hills (“the bones ofthe earth”) serve as the watersheds of thecountry’s many rivers, occupy three quarters ofits territory, and are home to over fifty moreethnic minority groups speaking as manylanguages.

Thus the rich tapestry of Vietnamese historycannot be reduced to a national story, anunchanging ethnic identity, or an enduringancient polity—any more than the country can

be reduced to a singular twentieth-century war.What is known today as Việt Nam is a landshared and contested by many peoples andcultures for several thousand years.

Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to thePresent treats the country over the millenniaprimarily as a place, a series of homelands thathave become a shared territory, a changingland and common home rather than acontinuous culture or a developing polity.

The book focuses not on the origins ofVietnamese nationhood or the persistence of apolitical identity but on documenting andnarrating the experiences of the variety ofpeoples who have inhabited the country’sdifferent regions since earliest recorded times,as well as their interactions with their naturalenvironments and with neighboring countries.The focus is on much more than the politicalhistory of a geographical area defined by themodern state’s contemporary boundaries.Rather, a history of the different regions withinthose boundaries helps to integrate themultiethnic nature of its people’s histories andtheir cultural relationships with the landswhere they have lived.

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Ethnic Khmer children at Wat Somrong,Vĩnh Long province. Photograph by BenKiernan, 1975.

The book therefore departs in several waysfrom previous Western-language histories ofViệt Nam. Its multiethnic coverage, its inclusionof non-Vietnamese premodern geographicsettings, and its historical organization are alldistinct. Most histories have focused on thestory of the ethnic Vietnamese, oftencommencing with their emergence in the northand then pursuing their intermittent “march tothe south.” Here attention is given not only tothe history of the modern Vietnamese majoritybut also to the extensive historical record of theCham and Khmer peoples who have longpopulated the central and southern lowlands,and to the smaller ethnic groups of the northernuplands and Central Highlands. The histories of

these central, southern, and upland regions andtheir inhabitants are presented here assignificant in themselves, not simply for the partthey played in Vietnamese settlement in thoseregions, though the shared history of theirinterethnic relations is equally important.

Many earlier works have also focused onspecific eras of the country’s history,determined by the ethnicity or political systemof its rulers: the Chinese imperial period in thefirst millennium CE, or that of Vietnamesemonarchies in the second; the era before thefirst French conquests in 1859, or the era thatfollowed; the period up to the 1945 communistrevolution, or the postwar era. Previous workshave also divided the history of independentViệt Nam (like that of imperial China) intosuccessive, implicitly cyclical eras based on therise and fall of the kingdom’s ruling families ordynasties, for example the Lý, Trần, Lê, andNguyễn. In contrast, this book attempts a long-range view that includes in one narrative thediverse people and peoples of all these differenteras from prehistory to the present. Its chaptersperiodize Việt Nam’s past on the basis ofbroader historical themes—not only political butalso cultural, economic, and environmentalchanges. Some chapters, for instance, aredivided on the basis of climate eras.

While this book is not a “deep history” of ViệtNam in the sense of covering forty thousandyears of the country’s human habitation,nonetheless “thinking far back,” integrating itsprehistory into its history, represents one goalof this survey of the last three millennia there. Itseeks to uncover some of the “vibrations ofdeeper time” that can be detected more easilythrough a wide-angle view over what historianscall the longue durée: “horizons longer—usuallymuch longer—than a generation, a humanlifetime, or the other roughly biological time-spans that have defined most recent historicalwriting.” As historians Jo Guldi and DavidArmitage argue, “Micro-history and macro-history—short-term analysis and the long-term

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overview—should work together” by fusingclose study of individual eras into “big picturework . . . woven from a broad range of sources”to pursue the search for “crucial pivots, turningpoints” and achieve an understanding ofmultiple causality over time. A long-rangenarrative should enable readers to assess thechanges and continuities, the themes andvariations, the similarities and differencesbetween historical eras, as well as among thepeoples who inhabited the land.

On a transnational level, this book furtherdeparts from other histories by assessing ViệtNam not only in terms of its long political andcultural relationships with China but also in thecontexts of Southeast Asian and global history,including environmental history. The fact thatthe name “Việt Nam” became widely used onlyin the twentieth century was far from unique inSoutheast Asia. Siam changed its name toThailand in 1939, emphasizing its own ethnicmajority, and the names “Indonesia” and“Malaysia” are also twentieth-centuryneologisms. To go back to the early modern era,the formation of the “geo-body” of Việt Namresembles much more closely those of Burmaand Siam than the vast inland empire of China.The long, thin coastal regions of southern ViệtNam, Burma, and Siam all betray their commonhistorical experience of north-south, partlyseaborne expansion at the expense of otherSoutheast Asian realms. For instance, ViệtNam’s incorporation of Champa and ofCambodia’s Mekong delta from the fifteenth tothe nineteenth centuries roughly parallels theUpper Burman kingdom’s conquest of the LowerBurman k ingdom of Pegu, which wasindependent up to 1539 and again in 1740–57,and of the coastal kingdom of Arakan.

In addition, the impact on Việt Nam of what anineteenth-century Vietnamese thinker termed“world trends” is important. Factors such ascolonialism, along with climate changes andother global patterns such as the spread of theLatin alphabet to Việt Nam and other maritime

countries of Southeast Asia—the Philippines,Indonesia, and Malaysia—all merit close studyalong with the local lifeways they transformed.

A long history of such a rich place brings to theforefront themes of continuity and disruption.This book identifies ten major themes ofVietnamese history, three of which appear tohave a rather continuous influence while sevenare transformative and often recurrent. Overthree millennia, these themes have marked thelives of the people of the region.

Three perennial themes—ecological, linguistic,and genealogical—have permeated the longhistories of these lands and their inhabitants.First is the importance of the naturalenvironment, including both the landscape andclimate, themselves varying over the differentgeographical spaces within this territory andchanging over time as heavy rains swept siltdownstream and new sea levels transformedcoastlines. Second is the history of languagesspoken in the region. From the first millenniumBCE onward, people in parts of this territoryspoke Proto-Vietic and Vietic languages, earlybut scientifically recognizable linguisticancestors o f the d ia lects o f modernVietnamese. And third, while individuals andgroups often migrated and could learn andswitch languages over time, some of theirgenealogical heritage and cultural affinities justas easily persisted.

If nations, states, and sea levels rise and fall,some elements of the regional ecology andclimate have proved enduring influences oncultural life in Việt Nam. The country has longpossessed an aquatic culture. In his study “Liveby Water, Die for Water (Sống vì nước, chết vìnước),” Huỳnh Sanh Thông, a scholar of theVietnamese language and culture, documentedand analyzed the frequent use, from earliesttimes to the present, of aquatic metaphors inpoetry, writing, and folklore. He wrote: “Theancestors of the Vietnamese attached far moreimportance to ‘water’ than to either ‘hills’ or

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‘land’ in their idea of a homeland.” Aquaticmetaphors recurred in nineteenth- andtwentieth-century poetry. In Vietnameseliterature, water could represent far more thanjust the idea of a homeland. “The sea andstreams, ponds and lakes, water plants andbeasts, barges and bridges, fisherfolk andboaters, all serve as graphic metaphors toembody harsh facts or base desires as well asnoble truths or deep thoughts.” Huỳnh SanhThông characterized “the Vietnamesewor ldv iew” i t se l f as “Water , watereverywhere.”

The crucial role of water across the land haslong struck foreign observers too. “Elephantscan actually swim,” marveled a Chinese borderofficial peering southward in the twelfthcentury. Samuel Baron, probably the firstWesterner born and raised in Việt Nam, wrote inthe seventeenth century that in the northernregion from March to May, “the great rains”caused floods to descend down the Red River“with that incredible rapidity . . . as threatensbanks and dams with destruction . . . drowningthereby whole provinces.” Baron likened the“low and flat” Red River plain to theNetherlands, “especially for its moats andbanks.” For most of the year, the river’s manybranches irrigated vast areas of “wet ground,”creating “infinite ponds” and flowing into thesea through “eight or nine mouths, most ofthem navigable for vessels of small draught.”These rivers, he added, “swarm with boats andlarge barks.”

Not long afterward, but during the dry season,the English buccaneer William Dampier reachednorthern Việt Nam. He described its landscapeas he headed inland up the Red River in July1688, “sometimes rowing, sometimes sailing”through its low-lying, irrigated delta. Dampierfound “a delightful prospect over a large levelfruitful country. It was generally either pastureor rice-fields, and void of trees, except onlyabout the villages, which stood thick, andappeared mighty pleasant at a distance.” He

reported: “Every house has a small gate or stileto enter into the garden first. . . . In the gardensevery man has his own fruit trees, as oranges,limes, betel; his pumpkins, melons, pineapplesand a great many herbs.” But as months passedand the rains returned, Dampier discovered thatduring the wet season these northern deltavillages looked very different: “All the landabout them is under water, two or three footdeep,” like “so many duckhouses.” People couldnot “pass from one village to another, but mid-leg or to their knees in water, unless sometimesin boats, which they keep.”

The landscape was different farther south, inthe hill country and narrow coastal strip thattoday comprise central Việt Nam. A Chineseadmiral visiting the Hindu realm of Champa in1433 remarked on its tropical weather and flora,different from those in China: “The climate ispleasantly hot, without frost or snow. . . . Theplants and trees are always green.” In 1686 aPortuguese Jesuit described the winds off theSouth China Sea that often drove ships againstChampa’s coasts, where mountains and forestsdescended almost to the shore and a passingIndian mariner could count the individualbranches of trees. “No one can pass by Champawithout seeing and hearing the birds in itstrees.”

Here, by the seventeenth century, Vietnamesegovernments and settlers had expandedsouthward from the Red River delta andgradually conquered most of the land ofChampa. Although the lay of its land was verydifferent and the monsoons reversed, theaquatic environment and lifestyle there alsostruck foreign observers. From 1618 to 1622,the Italian Jesuit Christoforo Borri lived at QuiNhơn on the central coast. Perhaps the firstWesterner to reside in Việt Nam, Borri wrote of“the continual rains” from September toNovember over the nearby mountains, “whencethe waters running down in abundance do soflood the kingdom, that meeting with the sea,they seem to be all of a piece.” And here too

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the local population, “very often when they donot think of it at night, . . . find themselves thenext morning surrounded with water; so thatthey cannot go out o f the i r houses.”Nevertheless, “the country being all navigable”and its commodities “very easily convey’d fromone city to another,” the wet season saw “thegreatest fairs and markets,” and “greaterconcourse of people than at any other time inthe year.” Borri remarked how the locals, theirboats loaded with wood from the mountains,would row them “into the very houses, built forthis purpose on high pillars.” Between the stiltsof their homes, the residents placed only looseboards, removable to “leave free a passage forthe water and boats.” Throughout the rest ofthe year, the proximity of the South China Seawas equally important. Borri recorded that inthis central region, a narrow coastal plain “lyingall along upon the sea, there are so many boatsthat go out a fishing, and they bring in so muchfish to all parts of the kingdom, that it is reallyvery remarkable to see the long rows of peoplecontinually carrying fish from the shore to themountains, which is duly done every day, forfour hours before sun-rising.”

Medieval Cham Hindu temples at ThápChàm. Photograph by Ben Kiernan

In the far south lay the Mekong delta, part ofCambodia until the nineteenth century. TheMekong’s slow flow through its low-lying, widebasin built up one of the world’s flattest deltas,where marine tides can wash sixty miles inland.In 1686 the Portuguese Jesuit wrote that atraveler heading south from Champa down thecoast to Cambodia would see people “collectingwood in its forests.” One of the very firstVietnamese descriptions of the Mekong delta,written in 1776, noted the “many rivers” thatmade travel on foot difficult there. “Waterwayswere so numerous that they resembled a netover the land.” By 1820 a more familiar andsettled portrayal of the region had emerged:“Water is like a system of blood vessels for theland.” Living on its rivers and islands, “ninepeople out of ten are good swimmers and knowsomething about piloting boats. They like to eatsalted fish.” Moreover, “there are boatseverywhere. People use boats as their homes orto go to market or to visit their relatives [and to]transport firewood and rice or engage initinerant commerce. . . . The boats fill the riversboth day and night.” A modern description ofthe Mekong delta province of Bến Tre (“bambooport,” from its original Khmer name KompongRussei) notes that its three main islands were“created over the years by the alluvial depositsof the four main branches of the Mekong Riveras they poured their way down into the SouthChina Sea. The province, therefore, iscompletely surrounded by water and has about65 kilometers of coastline. The three mainislands are further divided into many smallerones by scores of other rivers, major canals,and waterways which crisscross the mainislands like veins in a human body.”

The historical survey in Việt Nam: A Historyfrom Earliest Times to the Present includes allthree of the ancient lands—north, center, andsouth—that fall within Việt Nam’s contemporaryfrontiers drawn in the twentieth century. Inconsidering these territories as a whole, itattempts to integrate their climate, water, andlandscapes into the histories of their different

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inhabitants. The historian of medieval Việt NamOliver W. Wolters remarked on the need to takeaccount of the impact of “ecologica lconsiderations” on the country’s development,a gap this book aims to help fill.

While cultural and political history tends tofocus on change, some environmental issuesare perennial. Rhinoceros horn has long been acomponent of Sino-Vietnamese traditionalmedicine and a part of the transnational tradein items of the region’s ecology that beganmil lennia ago, long before the “age ofcommerce” of the early modern era. Around1620, Christoforo Borri had witnessed arhinoceros hunt near Qui Nhơn: “A hundredmen, some a foot, and some a horseback, andeight or ten elephants” confronted the creatureas it emerged from a wood near Borri’s house.The fearless rhino “furiously encountered themall; who opened and making a lane, let therhinoceros run through.” There in the rear, theVietnamese governor of Qui Nhơn sat “a-top ofhis elephant, waiting to kill it; the elephantendeavors to lay hold with his trunk, but couldnot by reason of the rhinoceros’s swiftness andleaping” and its “striving to wound the elephantwith its horn.” The governor held back “tillleaping it laid open the naked place, and castinga dart, [he] dexterously struck it through fromside to side.” The excited “multitude ofspectators” quickly laid the animal’s carcass“upon a great pile of wood, and setting fire to it,leap’d and danc’d about” as they roasted,sliced, and ate the flesh. From high ground thegovernor surveyed his subjects, enjoyed “amore dainty dish” of the heart, liver, and brain,and presented the hoofs to Borri, who reportedthat “the horn is good against poison,” butadded skeptically, “as is the unicorn’s.” In theCentral Highlands in the late nineteenthcentury, a rhino horn was worth no fewer thaneight water buffalo. The trade continued andaccelerated from the 1980s on.

Just as the environment set contours from earlyhistory, a second long-range continuity is the

country’s Proto-Vietic linguistic heritage and itsevolution. Yet linguistic diversity has an equallylong history. The oldest surviving text in anySoutheast Asian language was composed in thefourth century in a southern region now part ofViệt Nam. Its author wrote not in any form ofVietnamese but in the Malayo-Polynesianlanguage and Indic script of the Cham people.By contrast the first extant Vietnamese-language historical sources date only from thefourteenth century, a millennium later.

To write the country’s history exclusively fromcontemporaneous Vietnamese texts would be toconceive of it as beginning only in northern ViệtNam and as recently as the second millennium.Any traces of preexisting cultures there andfarther south must be found in other kinds ofevidence. Chapter 1 takes up the r icharchaeological record from before the CommonEra to survey the prehistory of the lands thatbecame Việt Nam. As chapters 2–4 show, thefirst thirteen centuries of the Common Era aredocumented in Chinese-language sources, ininscriptional texts in Southeast Asian languagessuch as Cham and Khmer, and, at least for thepost-939 period, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Vietnamese histories.

These sources reveal the development in thenorth over several millennia of complex localcommunities speaking precursor Vieticlanguages and dialects that borrowed heavilyfrom their neighbors, slowly transformed intomodern Vietnamese, and spread to the centerand south. These early inhabitants have beentermed “Proto-Vietnamese,” but only in limitedlinguistic and geographic senses. It would bemisleading to see their languages (or culturesor polities) as stages in a teleological“progression” toward modern Vietnamesenationhood, just as it would be tenuous to relyon prehistory for the origins even of a medievalVietnamese state. The evidence for thatemerges only much later, during a millenniumof imperial rule.

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A history that includes the ancient Việt, Cham,and Khmer lands of what we know as northern,central, and southern Việt Nam necessarilyencompasses a range of ethnic groups, asuccession of realms and polities, and, evenamong ethnic Vietnamese, a mosaic of regionsand cultures, competing monarchies, successivedynasties, and finally contending republics. Yetover more than two millennia of human historyin a single but extensive geographical space,the longev i ty there o f a de tec tab leethnolinguistic family of Proto-Vietic and latermodern Vietnamese dialects does provide,along with the ecologies of the three regions, anelement of narrative continuity. That themeprojects back into the past a statement of theearly twentieth-century Vietnamese scholarPhạm Quỳnh: “As long as our language lasts,our country will last.” If his measure is extendedback to include archaic linguistic ancestors ofmodern Vietnamese, the history of northern ViệtNam has lasted more than two millennia, andthat of the Cham and Khmer communities,whose languages are still spoken in thecountry’s southerly regions, possibly evenlonger.

A third long-term continuity is the importancemost Vietnamese attach to family life andextended clan affiliations. At least as early asthe first century CE, regional familiesdominated social organization. A millennium ofimperial influence brought little change in thatregard; in China too clan loyalty and “ancestorworship” were features of everyday life. Afterindependence in the tenth century, the RedRiver delta briefly dissolved into nearly a dozenfiefdoms. Many Vietnamese families have keptrecords of their ancestors going back for manygenerations; wealth was often displayed inelaborate ancestral tombs and shrines. Theidentities of many Vietnamese are deeplyrooted in the very land where their ancestorslie buried.

Vietnamese clan loyalties may have outstrippedChinese ones. As late as the 1930s, eight out of

ten Vietnamese in Bắc Ninh province werefound to belong to one of twelve surnamegroups, or lineage clans. Officials vainly tried toprevent people from marrying members of thesame clan. Possibly half of Việt Nam’spopulation today bears the single surnameNguyễn. Genealogical continuity, however, isnot necessarily genetic. Centuries of ethnicChinese immigration have contributedsignificantly to the modern Vietnamese genepool, still detectable in DNA. Likewise, inmodern southern Việt Nam the DNA of Chamspeakers reveals their assimilation of numerousindigenous Mon-Khmer speakers who long agoadopted the Cham language. The genealogicalrecords of some central Vietnamese familiestrace back as far as their Cham forbears. In theHuế area family names such as Chế haverecognizably Cham origins, as do others inQuảng Nam and Quảng Ngai provinces (Ong,Tra, Ma). Among ethnic Cambodians in theMekong delta, unlike in Cambodia itself, a fewKhmer family names (Son, Thach, Chau) arevery common and identify their bearers ashai l ing from Kampuchea Krom (LowerCambodia).

Against these continuous themes of ecology,language, and genealogy, this book argues forseven transformative historical forces.Vietnamese history is punctuated by thesetransformations and discontinuities, rangingfrom imperial conquest to climate change totransregional migration, seaborne commerce,ethnic and religious diversification, andregional and political confrontations from northto south, as well as increasingly importantinteractions between Vietnamese and the worldoutside—not only in what became China andSoutheast Asia but also elsewhere across theglobe.

A first transformative influence on Vietnamesehistory was the Chinese imperial conquest ofthe early first millennium CE. This conquestwas followed by colonization and the localadoption of what became a shared classical

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high culture that outlived nine centuries ofnorthern political domination and weatheredthe storms of subsequent imperial invasionsand occupations. Chinese political models andvocabulary and China’s writing system andliterary canon all helped shape Vietnameseculture.

A second major external influence has beenclimate change. The young kingdom of Đại Việt,separated from imperial China in the tenthcentury, benefited from the Medieval WarmPeriod, several centuries of higher rainfall thatraised crop yields in the wet-rice economies ofmainland Southeast Asia and their neighborsand favored the development of agrarian states.As historian Victor Lieberman has shown, the“charter state” of early Đại Việt, like those ofBurma and Siam, commenced what becamemany centuries of fitful economic expansionand slow, intermittent administrative andcultural integration. Even after the end of theMedieval Warm Period, Đại Việt had gainedsufficient strength to overcome invasions fromChampa and Ming China and also launch newsouthward territorial expansion.

Third, transregional migration has long played arole in Vietnamese history. Especially from thelate fifteenth century onward, Đại Việt militarycolonies and then Vietnamese civilian settlersmoved south into the Cham territories, in somecases intermarrying there and in many casesadopting southern customs while also bringingwith them their strong attachments to the cultsof their northern ancestral shrines. Conversely,conquered Cham communities, often drivennorth and resettled in the Vietnameseheartland, slowly switched languages butsometimes retained distinctive cultural traitstraceable to their Hindu past. An “island” ofthree Cham villages forcibly relocated north toNghệ An in the 1250s was still identifiable to aFrench scholar seven centuries later.Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Vietnamesesettlers in the flat, waterlogged landscape of theMekong delta borrowed heavily from its Khmer

inhabitants, not only by propitiating their localspirits (neak ta) but also by adopting their fastgrowing “floating rice” varieties, theiragricultural techniques and tools, and theirspecies of draft animals, which worked moreeffectively in the marshy soils. A newVietnamese society was emerging based onmigration and a sense of genealogicalconnection to one’s origins while adapting to anew southern environment.

Fourth, the new environment meant that ViệtNam was increasingly a seaborne economy.Champa and the sinuous coastline of easternmainland Southeast Asia, narrow and infertilecompared with “the riches that mountains andsea offered,” had long been a hub oftransregional and transoceanic commerce. AfterĐại Việt’s conquest of most of Champa in 1471,the Cham ports near river mouths strung outalong the shore continued to serve as entrepotsof trade with China, Japan, Southeast Asia,India, and the Middle East. Vietnamese settlersmoving south from the riverine world of thewide northern delta, historian Charles Wheelerwrites, “entered a coastal stream that mergedwith one of the largest thoroughfares foroceanic shipping in Asia.” Here, “riparian,coastal, and overseas crosscurrents converged,somewhere between the sea and the lagoons.”Central Việt Nam was a multiethnic littoralsociety, clustered around a series of port townsintegrated into the “archipelagic” world of theSouth China Sea and beyond.

Fifth, as Vietnamese settlers moved farthersouth they tempered but also partly reproducedthe longstanding regional differentiations alongthe extended coast of the eastern mainland.The three major contemporary Vietnamesedialects vary greatly in the country’s threelowland regions, partly as a result of the factthat their inhabitants once spoke differentlanguages: Vietnamese, Cham, and Khmer.

Language was not the only factor thatinfluenced regional diversity. For many

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centuries, Cham speakers of the central coastand Khmer speakers of the southern delta,before becoming ethnic minorities within ViệtNam late in the second millennium, inhabited avariety of successive, sometimes evencontemporaneous and conflicting, indigenouspolities. The ancient and medieval kingdoms ofLinyi and Champa occupied and contested theland that comprises central Việt Nam today. Formuch of its history Champa was not onlymultiethnic but also politically divided intoseveral kingdoms along the central coastline. Asfor the Mekong delta region, classical Chinesewriters knew it first as the kingdom of Funanand then as part of “Water Chenla.” It belongedto the Khmer kingdom of Cambodia until thefinal Vietnamese conquest of the delta in theearly nineteenth century. Khmers in modernCambodia still often call that region KampucheaKrom. During the period from the fifteenth tonineteenth centuries, as Vietnamese statesincorporated most of the Cham territories andthen the Khmer-speaking Mekong delta,historian Keith Taylor identifies no fewer thanfive discrete geographical and cultural/politicalregions stretching down the length of Việt Nam.Ethnolinguistic and environmental diversitysettled uneasily into a Vietnamese stateframework.

A sixth recurring theme has been the persistenthistorical and political differences that havelong divided ethnic Vietnamese and oftenoverlapped with regional divisions. Forinstance, in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, competing Vietnamese kingdomsoccupied the northern and central regions. Inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theFrench ruled the far south as a separate colony(Cochinchina) and the center and north asprotectorates (Annam and Tonkin). Then from1954 to 1975, the center was divided betweenVietnamese regimes based in the north andsouth. Historians take these politicalregionalisms seriously. John K. Whitmorestresses “the variety of media and messagesavailable to us from the lands we call Vietnam.”

Taylor urges us to hear these “many voices thatundermine the idea of a single Vietnamesepast” and to disregard “the stranglingobsession with identity and continuity.” Ofcourse these plural histories may notdisaggregate the country, while others maytranscend its borders.

The seventh key theme is the globalization ofViệt Nam’s economy, culture, and politics,especially in the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies. This noticeably began in the earlymodern era with seaborne international trade;the arrival of European ideas, scripts, andtechnology; and by the mid-nineteenth centurythe increasingly thoughtful responses ofVietnamese to the challenges these posed.

Each chapter of Việt Nam: A History fromEarliest Times to the Present addresses someor a l l o f these ten themes as keys tounderstanding Vietnamese history. The morecontinuous themes of an aquatic society,linguistic continuity and change, and theimportance of family genealogies and ancestralsites appear continually throughout the book.The relationship with China also emerges veryearly. The Medieval Warm Period, with itsboost to the rain-fed wet-rice economy and theagrarian state, represents another distincttransformation that propelled new forces forchange: mobility and migration, the seabornepolitical economy especially in the center andsouth, a polyethnic culture, regionaldifferences, and global influences.

Over three millennia, Việt Nam’s three mainregions have seen dramatic changes in theirclimate, landscapes, ruling powers, populations,and politics. They have been home to scores ofethnolinguistic groups and most of the world’smajor religious traditions, and have experienceddozens of political formations from chiefdoms toprovinces, tributary kingdoms, independentmonarchies, colonies, and republics. The lastingoutcome of the “Vietnam War” was theunification of Việt Nam’s two republics and

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three multiethnic geographic regions. Thecountry’s democratic future in the fast-changingSoutheast Asian and global environmentremains unclear.

In a new era of global warming, with droughtsand upstream dams restricting the flow of waterin the Mekong River, while sea levels rise and a

new conflict heats up in the South China Sea,water is still the life blood of Việt Nam.

This text is excerpted from the introduction toBen Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History from EarliestTimes to the Present (Oxford University Press,New York and London, 2017).

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University, and hasserved as Chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies and as Founding Director of theGenocide Studies Program at Yale. He is the author of Việt Nam: A History from EarliestTimes to the Present (Oxford, 2017), How Pol Pot Came to Power (Yale, 2004), The Pol PotRegime (Yale, 1996), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination fromSparta to Darfur (Yale, 2007), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2008).