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"Confucianism" in Vietnam: A State of the Field Essay

February 2006
Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1(1-2):314-370

February 2006
1(1-2):314-370

DOI:10.1525/vs.2006.1.1-2.314

Authors:

Universiti Brunei Darussalam

This article reviews the scholarship on Confucianism in premodern Vietnam by the leading figures in the field in North America and Australia. By testing the findings of this scholarship against primary sources and similar work done on China, the author concludes that scholars have not acknowledged the full role that Confucianism played in Vietnam's past, and that key research remains to be done. The article concludes with suggestions for such research.

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"Confucianism" in Vietnam: A State of the Field Essay

Review by: Liam C. Kelley

Journal of Vietnamese Studies,

Vol. 1, No. 1-2 (February/August 2006), pp. 314-370

Published by: University of California Press

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state of the field

liam c. kelley

“Confucianism” in Vietnam:

A State of the Field Essay

This is an essay on a topic that I have great difﬁculty in deﬁning but that

I immediately recognize when I see it. I cannot adequately explain

what it is, but I can ﬁnd it almost everywhere in the recorded history of

Vietnam. It is there in LBCnng U*n’s decision to move the capital in the

eleventh century, and it is also there in the words of the mediums who

recorded messages from the goddess Li#u Hfnh in the early twentieth

century. Gia Long employed it to justify his ascension to power in the early

nineteenth century, and Tr6n Thái Tnng did the same to explain his deci-

sion to step down from the throne to become a monk in the thirteenth

century. And, last but not least, it was LBVen Ph+c’s fervent belief in it that

led him to record his outrage over a sign that he saw outside a hostel in

Fujian Province in the 1820s.

The topic that I cannot clearly deﬁne or adequately explain but that I will

discuss at length in this essay is “Confucianism,” and Confucianism in

Vietnam in particular. The reason I have difﬁculty in deﬁning and explain-

ing this term is because, as one scholar has aptly stated, Confucianism is “an

invented signiﬁer that bears a problematic relationship to the thing it signiﬁes.”

The problematic character of this relationship stems from the fact that

although Confucianism emerged in China, there is no term in Chinese for

which “Confucianism” is a translation. Instead, this term is partially of West-

ern manufacture and mold, and it tends to essentialize a rather disparate set

314

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 1, Numbers 1-2, pps. 314–370. ISSN 1559-372x, electronic

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of practices and beliefs.

Nonetheless, scholars agree that this disparate set of

practices and beliefs that Confucianism problematically signiﬁes did exist in

the past, and to some extent it still exists today. The difﬁculty lies in ﬁnding

the vocabulary to describe and identify it.

In recent years some scholars of East Asian history and culture have

begun to employ the concept of a “repertoire” to discuss “religions” such as

Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. I place “religion” in scare quotes

here precisely because it is the inability of this Western term, with its con-

notations of doctrinal adherence, to adequately explain the form and func-

tion of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism in East Asia’s past that has led

scholars to seek out more appropriate terminology. Seeing Confucianism,

Buddhism, and Daoism as repertoires, or more speciﬁcally as “repertoires of

resources,” from which individuals marshaled different ideas and practices at

different times and in different circumstances but which never constituted

an all-encompassing ethos, or cultural system, is one technique that some

scholars are currently proposing.

In the introduction to a recent conference volume entitled “Rethinking

Confucianism,” for instance, the authors deﬁne Confucianism as a “reper-

toire of world-ordering devices,” or, alternatively, as a “repertoire of common

techniques or tactics,” that “included techniques . . . for remaking and repro-

ducing state and society on the model of a Confucian golden age in the dis-

tant past.”

These scholars recognize that although there was a historical

individual whom we refer to as Confucius, the elements that make up the

Confucian repertoire did not begin with Confucius, for much of his intel-

lectual output was produced in reference to earlier periods of history when,

he believed, state and society had enjoyed a greater degree of prosperity. And

although information about antiquity therefore constituted a critical

resource in this repertoire, countless other resources were also incorporated

in the centuries after the time of Confucius, from death rituals to reading

techniques. Therefore, in discussing Confucianism it is impossible to

demarcate any clear bounds of an enduring entity, as a term such as “reli-

gion” urges us to do, for the elements in this repertoire have constantly

changed and their use has never been exclusive.

A phenomenon that is equally difﬁcult to describe is the spread of this

repertoire to a land like Vietnam. Some scholars have referred to this as a

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process of “Confucianization.”

However, in doing so, they have employed

a deﬁnition of Confucianism that is much narrower than the concept of a

Confucian repertoire. A term that can encompass a wider range of beliefs

and practices is “Sinicization” (or “Siniﬁcation”), yet this term is also

problematic. In particular, the fact that under conquest dynasties certain

cultural practices in China changed while they were upheld in lands like

Vietnam and Korea calls into question the value of a term such as “Sini-

cization” for describing the appropriation of the Confucian and other reper-

toires by people like the Vietnamese and Koreans.

Part of the issue here is again that, as with the term “Confucianism,” the

signiﬁers “Confucianization” and “Sinicization” are modern Western terms

for which there is no exact original indigenous equivalent. However, prior to

the twentieth century there was an understanding that there were two main

categories of people—“Efﬂorescents” and “Barbarians”—and that it was pos-

sible to move from one to the other. “Efﬂorescent” [Hoa] is a term that is

now usually translated as “Chinese,” but it was originally more of a cultural

than an ethnic label. Efﬂorescents were people who maintained what they

believed was a sophisticated and interrelated system of ritual and governance

that had ﬁrst taken form in distant antiquity, a system that Confucius later

looked back to as a model for the people of his day to follow. The Efﬂores-

cents judged the sophistication of their system to be superior to the practices

of both the peoples on the peripheries of the Efﬂorescent culturo-ritual

sphere and those within the Efﬂorescent realm who did not follow these

practices, called “Barbarians” [Di]. Nonetheless, the border between these

two categories of people was theoretically amorphous. Efﬂorescents could

journey to Barbarian areas and work to transform local practices, and

Barbarians could move into the Efﬂorescent realm and by learning the

proper ritual practices, become Efﬂorescents themselves. Indeed, it was held

that two of the most revered Efﬂorescent emperors in antiquity, Shun and

Zhou Wenwang, had both originally come from Barbarian areas.

Educated Vietnamese upheld this view of the world throughout much of

the history of imperial Vietnam. They were convinced that they maintained

the same interrelated system of ritual and governance that had ﬁrst become

manifest in distant antiquity, and that they also upheld the many beliefs and

cultural practices that had adhered to this original system in the centuries

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subsequent to that time. Chinese, on the other hand, did not necessarily

view the Vietnamese in this same light. Hence, when the Nguy#n Dynasty

scholar-ofﬁcial LBVen Ph+c journeyed to Fujian Province on a diplomatic

mission in the 1820s, he found that the hostel where he was scheduled to

lodge had a sign posted outside that read, “Hostel for the An Nam Barbarians”

[An Nam Di Quán]. Outraged, LBVen Ph+c vented his anger in a docu-

ment where he defended his home by stating the following:

As for the laws for governing the kingdom, they are based on those of the

Two Emperors and the Three Monarchs [of antiquity]. With regard to the

transmission of the way, it takes as its root the Six Classics and the Four

Books, the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, and those of Zhu Xi and

Cheng Yi. As for learning, it springs forth from the Zuo Commentary and

the “Odes of the States,” and can be traced back to Ban Zhao and Sima

Qian. As for writing, poetry and rhapsodies, there is the Collected Writings

of the Zhaoming [Reign], and reliance on Li Bo and Du Fu. For calligra-

phy, it is the six scripts in the Rites of Zhou, with Zhong You and Wang

Xizhi taken as models. In employing worthies and selecting scholars, the

Han-Tang exam system is employed, while sashes and caps follow the gar-

ments of the Song-Ming. How numerous are the examples. If all of this is

called Barbaric, then I know not what it is that we call Efﬂorescent!

LBVen Ph+c did not make reference to “Vietnam” or even “our king-

dom” in this passage. Nor did he employ any term to indicate that everything

and everyone that he mentioned came from China. He did not draw any dis-

tinctions because—unlike the Chinese ofﬁcials who prepared his lodgings

for him, men who had shaved their heads like the Manchus and who no

longer wore robes in the style of the Song and Ming—LBVen Ph+c did not

believe there were any distinctions. How then do we describe the process by

which LBVen Ph+c came to understand himself as Efﬂorescent? Had he

been Sinicized? This document can also be read as a critique of the Chinese

under Manchu rule for not following Efﬂorescent ways, so clearly that term

is inadequate. At the same time, there is no question that everything that LB

Ven Ph+c valued originated in the place that we now refer to as China. The

difference is that where we today see a nation called China with its own dis-

tinct cultural heritage, LBVen Ph+c saw the “Central Efﬂorescence” [Trung

Hoa], that is, the fount of the teachings of the ancient sages; the land of

Confucius, Mencius, Zhu Xi, and Cheng Yi; the birthplace of the Han-Tang

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examination system; the world where Li Bo and Du Fu composed verse for

all to emulate, and where Wang Xizhi and Zhong You’s brushstrokes set cal-

ligraphic models for others to follow.

In what follows, I will examine scholarship on Vietnam that deals with

some of the very elements that LBVen Ph+c listed in his essay. While LB

Ven Ph+c did not have a way to label all of these people and practices, the

fact that he listed them together suggests that he felt that they were related.

Indeed, it is precisely elements such as these that scholars today refer to

when they speak of the Confucian repertoire. In examining scholarship on the

Confucian repertoire in Vietnam, I will make no effort to be comprehensive.

Most of the following discussion will look simply at studies published in

English, and even here I examine only a selection of the existing scholar-

ship. Nonetheless, the works that I do examine here are those of the leading

scholars in the ﬁeld. Based at top universities in North America and

Australia, these scholars have produced the main arguments concerning the

role of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam, arguments that have in some

cases stood unchallenged for decades.

Much of the scholarship that I examine here argues for a limited role of

the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam’s past. This concord is understandable;

to some degree each of the scholars discussed in this paper has been inﬂu-

enced by similar concerns. In particular, they have all to some extent sought

to counter the descriptions by colonial-era scholars of Vietnam as a lesser

imitation of its northern neighbor, that is, a “little China.” One can also

detect that many of the scholars examined here, as members of the relatively

young ﬁeld of Southeast Asian studies, consciously took up John Smail’s call

to pen “autonomous histories.”

Although thus informed by noble objec-

tives, the works that these scholars have produced have nonetheless not

always proved convincing.

To the contrary, I make the argument in this article that the dominant

paradigm we have created in the ﬁeld of Vietnamese studies is ﬂawed. By

publishing study after study that points to the supposed limited inﬂuence of

the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam, or that argues for the existence of

Vietnamese practices that countered the Confucian repertoire, scholars

have established a discourse on Vietnam that now goes largely unques-

tioned. I argue here, however, that the evidence supporting this discourse is

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highly problematic, and I demonstrate this point by considering compara-

tive information from China and by offering an alterative reading of some

source materials. I argue that these are necessary measures because distorted

or uncontextualized readings of the textual record in the scholarly literature,

speciﬁcally in the work that I examine here, are too frequent to disregard.

Finally, at the end of this essay I brieﬂy introduce some of the vast amount of

material pertaining to the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam that remains

unexamined, and I discuss some of the many topics that thus remain

unexplored. In doing so, I point out that although this is supposed to be a

“state-of-the-ﬁeld” essay, at present there really is no ﬁeld of the Confucian

repertoire in Vietnam, for scholars have yet to engage in research on core

elements of this topic.

L´y Dynasty Religion

In examining the role of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam, I will move

in a roughly chronological manner through Vietnamese history and exam-

ine works as they deal with different periods, starting with the time of the

first major autonomous Vietnamese dynasty, the LB(1010–1225). Keith Taylor

has examined this period more thoroughly than any other scholar and has

put forth some unique arguments about LBDynasty statecraft. These argu-

ments build on Taylor’s 1976 dissertation, which he revised and published

in 1983 as The Birth of Vietnam.

This work covers the “Chinese period” of

Vietnamese history—that is, the roughly thousand years prior to the tenth

century during which Vietnam was part of various Chinese empires.

Although Taylor acknowledges in this work that at least the Vietnamese

elite had appropriated aspects of the Confucian repertoire by the tenth

century, he also argues that precontact beliefs and sensibilities endured as

well, and in his work on the LBDynasty, Taylor focuses more closely on this

latter topic.

In an extremely important and well-researched article published in 1986

entitled “Authority and Legitimacy in 11th Century Vietnam,” Taylor chal-

lenges previous claims that the LBDynasty had established a Chinese-style

bureaucratic centralized state that exerted temporal control over the land,

arguing to the contrary that the LBDynasty was legitimated more by reli-

gious or supernatural powers than by administrative orders. More speciﬁcally,

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Taylor argues that supernatural powers announced themselves to LBDynasty

rulers in recognition of their virtue, and that the LBDynasty kings allowed

these spirits to help protect the realm. The effectiveness of this relationship

in turn encouraged regional clans to support the LBkings, for they believed

the spirits’ conﬁrmations.

Taylor came to these conclusions through a close examination of one of

the earliest extant Vietnamese works, the Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm

[ViDt IiDn u linh tup], a work that I will refer to several times in this essay.

The Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm is a fourteenth-century collection of

biographies of spirits around which cults emerged to honor their protective

powers. This text is in turn based on several earlier works, the majority of

which are no longer extant, and some of which were compiled by Buddhist

monks. The biographies tell the histories of these spirits and give evidence of

their powers. Some of the information they contain records dates from the

early centuries CE, but there is also a considerable amount that corresponds

with the ninth through eleventh centuries, and Taylor persuasively argues

that the work as a whole reﬂects Vietnamese perceptions from that time

period.

For lack of a better term, Taylor labels this phenomenon of local spirits

announcing their support to Vietnamese monarchs as “LBDynasty religion.”

We can perhaps gain a fuller understanding of what “LBDynasty religion”

was if we let Taylor describe it himself:

[T]he LBkings posed as men, not gods, whose superior moral qualities,

broadly deﬁned in Buddhist terms as compassionate and humanitarian,

stimulated and aroused the supernatural powers dwelling in the terrain of

the Vi0t realm (mountains, rivers, trees, ﬁelds) and in the historical mem-

ory of the Vi0t people (deceased heroes); these powers were aroused by

royal virtue to declare themselves as protector spirits of the realm. Ideas

from the Chinese classics and histories were occasionally cited as textual

authority for explaining or justifying this process of “declaring the unfath-

omable.” This process appears to be a distinctive aspect of “LBdynasty reli-

gion,” being a form of “self discovery” for the Vietnamese after several

centuries of Chinese overlordship, which denied and attempted to suppress

“subversive” elements of popular Vi0t culture related to a separate (i.e.,

non-Chinese) sense of Vi0t cultural identity and political history. It seems

to me that the sort of religious or supernatural sanction that the LBkings

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derived from this role was the primary ingredient in establishing and main-

taining their legitimacy and authority; they were obeyed for what were per-

ceived as their moral and spiritual qualities, not because they commanded

an administrative system that could enforce compliance.

From this quote we can see that Taylor envisions something “non-Chinese”

occurring in LBDynasty Vietnam. Although the millennium of Chinese

rule left some traces in the continued, but limited, use of “ideas from

the Chinese classics,” what was really important in LBDynasty Vietnam was

the sanction that indigenous spirits gave to the LBDynasty kings. These were

spirits that Taylor suggests were part of a “separate (i.e., non-Chinese) sense

of Vi0t cultural identity and political history” that the Chinese had sought to

suppress but that now, after a thousand years, was reemerging. Further

emphasizing the “non-Chinese” aspects of this style of rulership, Taylor

argues that it reﬂected “patterns of thought shared with other Southeast Asia

peoples.”

While Keith Taylor was researching and writing this paper, Valerie

Hansen was examining the same phenomenon in her dissertation on Song

Dynasty (960–1276) China. Published as a monograph in 1990, Hansen’s

Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 demonstrates that this process

whereby spirits proclaimed their presence and rulers or ofﬁcials acknowl-

edged the spirits’ powers was unfolding all over China at precisely the same

time as in Vietnam, as the Chinese empire experienced a move toward

localization.

Subsequent works, such as Terry Kleeman’s study of the

emergence and spread of the Wenchang cult and Ellen Neskar’s examina-

tion of the emergence of local cults to “Confucian worthies” and their even-

tual recognition by ofﬁcialdom, have further illuminated the similarities

between Vietnam and China in the emergence of spirit cults and their

appropriation by government ofﬁcials.

Works such as these call into ques-

tion the extent to which “LBDynasty religion” was distinct from the Confucian

repertoire. To the contrary, after examining what we now know about

medieval China, one can easily argue that the information that we ﬁnd in a

text such as the Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm reveals precisely the oppo-

site, namely, that the ruling elite in LBDynasty Vietnam were doing exactly

what Chinese ofﬁcials from Sichuan to Fujian were doing—adding the ofﬁ-

cial control of spirits to the Confucian repertoire.

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We can see this ﬁrst and foremost from the simple fact that one of the ear-

liest ﬁgures found interacting with the spirits in the Departed Spirits of the

ViDt Realm is the ninth-century Chinese administrator Gao Pian [Viet., Cao

Bijn]. Sent by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) to quell the Nanzhao rebellion,

which had engulfed the southwestern extreme of the empire, Gao Pian

remained for a time in Vietnam, employing his knowledge of geomancy and

the spirits to bring order to the land. Taylor’s article does not highlight Gao

Pian’s contributions but instead emphasizes the fact that some of the infor-

mation in the Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm comes from Buddhist texts,

thereby suggesting that in Vietnam this practice of incorporating the spirits

took on a uniquely Buddhist approach.

This latter point, however, is also similar to what was transpiring in China

at the time. Indeed, as the late Michel Strickmann noted, Buddhists were

often “powerful agents of siniﬁcation.”

What Strickmann referred to here

was the fact that Buddhism was quickly indigenized in China and in the

process adopted many ideas, particularly those concerning morality, from

the Confucian repertoire.

Further, it was often the case that Buddhists

would precede government ofﬁcials in moving into territories where such

ideas were not known. There they would either suppress or incorporate local

spirits and begin to teach people ideas about proper behavior, which gov-

ernment ofﬁcials had little trouble building on when they later arrived. That

this same pattern is manifest in early Vietnam is strongly suggested by the

fact that the Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm, though it contains passages

from pre–LBDynasty Buddhist accounts, was not compiled until the Tr6n,

when the spirits were granted ofﬁcial titles, many of which labeled the spir-

its with the Sinitic title of “king” or “monarch” [v}Lng].

Fragmenting the Confucianist Corpus

Although Taylor’s observations of the LBwill beneﬁt from being placed in a

larger context, his core research remains solid and valuable. For anyone

wishing to understand the importance of the spirits for the LBDynasty,

“Authority and Legitimacy in 11th Century Vietnam” is an informative and

authoritative source. Much more problematic is the scholarship by the late

O.W. Wolters on the subsequent Tr6n Dynasty (1225–1400). Wolters was a

pioneering scholar who engaged in pathbreaking scholarship on the topic of

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localization in Southeast Asia. Arguing against the views of colonial-era

scholars who emphasized the importance of outside inﬂuences on the

region, Wolters sought to illuminate the existence and importance of a

Southeast Asian “cultural matrix” that informed the actions of individuals.

By taking into account this cultural matrix from within which people in

Southeast Asia acted, Wolters was able to return agency to Southeast Asian

peoples and reveal, for instance, that a phenomenon that colonial-era schol-

ars had labeled “Indianization” can really be better understood as a process

of “self-Hinduization” on the part of various peoples in Southeast Asia.

While Wolters’ examination of the Southeast Asian cultural matrix as a

whole is multifaceted, there is one issue, repeatedly discussed in his work on

Vietnam, that directly relates to the role of the Confucian repertoire, namely,

the question of how to interpret classical Chinese texts written by scholars

during the Tr6n Dynasty. Writing was central to the Confucian repertoire, for

its upholders believed that it was through writing that the ideas of the reper-

toire had originally brought order to the world.

It is understandable, then,

that literati in later centuries sought to comprehend the true meaning of the

most ancient texts in the repertoire, what we today often refer to as the

“Confucian classics.”

And although there was a long history in China of tex-

tual exegesis in which scholars debated the meaning of certain speciﬁc terms

and passages in the classics, there was also wide agreement about the major-

ity of the material in these works, for the commentaries that scholars read

along with these texts agreed on far more than they contested.

Wolters’ work does not maintain, however, that this shared understanding

of the classics extended to Tr6n Dynasty Vietnam. It argues instead that even

though the Vietnamese and Chinese both wrote in classical Chinese, quot-

ing the main texts in the Confucian repertoire when they did so, Vietnamese

writers did not necessarily seek to convey the ideas that were contained in

the Confucian repertoire but, instead, expressed ideas that were distinct

from, and at times even in opposition to, some of the most basic and widely

accepted concepts in that repertoire. Here it is perhaps best to let Wolters

explain this point himself:

In China the Confucianist classics were venerated as a coherent blue-

print for political, social, and moral behavior, a blueprint sanctioned by

what was believed, in spite of different interpretations, to be the example

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of the sage-rulers in China’s golden age. In Vietnam the Confucianist

texts were certainly consulted, but they enjoyed prestige for another and

more practical reason. The texts were read as records indicating useful

precedents in a miscellany of unrelated ﬁelds of human activity; they

embodied timeless and tested experience, available when the Viet-

namese, always disregarding the totality of the norms of civilized conduct

in China, chose to take into account speciﬁc instances of such experi-

ence. Their tradition was to ignore the moral and historical framework

that, in China, gave coherence to the text’s contents. Instead, they local-

ized the Confucianist corpus by fragmenting it and detaching passages,

drained of their original contextual meaning, in order to appropriate frag-

ments at their discretion and ﬁt them into the context of their own state-

ments. In this way, their statements were furnished with additional

authority, derived from the experience of antiquity.

Wolters thus ﬁrmly contends that in Vietnamese hands, the “Confucianist

corpus” was put to novel uses, and he provided arguments in support of this

claim. These arguments are often based on extremely detailed readings of

texts. Therefore, to fully appreciate Wolters’ arguments, and their ﬂaws, we

need to examine some of the minutiae that they are based on.

In 1979, Wolters published an article in which he looked closely at a

thirteenth-century Vietnamese history, Lê Ven HMu’s Historical Records of

x\i ViDt [x\i ViDt sHkP]. Although it is no longer extant, we know of this

work because the ﬁfteenth-century historian NgnS˜

Liên noted that he

incorporated some of Lê Ven HMu’s history into his own Complete Book of

the Historical Records of x\i ViDt [x\i ViDt sHkPtoàn th}]. However, the only

parts of Lê Ven HMu’s history that we can positively identify in this later work

are some of the personal comments that Lê Ven HMu made regarding cer-

tain historical events and personages, for these are clearly indicated in the

text. It is through a reading of a single comment of Lê Ven HMu’s that

Wolters sought to demonstrate how Vietnamese and Chinese texts differed.

NgnS˜

Liên’s Complete Book of the Historical Records of x\i ViDt begins

in distant antiquity with the mythical Chinese emperor, Shennong, and then

traces a line of descent from that mythical ruler to the Hùng kings. Lê Ven

HMu’s Historical Records of x\i ViDt reportedly began later, with the exploits

of a Chinese ofﬁcial by the name of Zhao Tuo (?–137 BCE), or Tri0u Aà in

Vietnamese, who established a kingdom called Nanyue [Viet., Nam ViDt] in

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the second century BCE in the area of what are today the Chinese provinces

of Guangdong and Guangxi as well as part of northern Vietnam.

Looking back on Zhao Tuo’s achievements from the perspective of the

late thirteenth century, a time when the Vietnamese had maintained a

separate kingdom for some three centuries and had recently fought off a

Mongol invasion, the historian Lê Ven HMu wrote the following:

If Liaodong had lacked the Viscount of Ji, it could not have established the

[correct] customs for wearing caps and robes. If Wugui did not have Taibo,

then it would not have been able to establish a powerful royal enterprise.

The great Shun was from among the Eastern Barbarians, and became the

most distinguished of the Five Emperors. King Wen came from among the

Western Barbarians, and became the most virtuous ruler of the Three

Dynasties. From this we can see that being adept at governing does not

depend on the size of one’s land or whether one is an Efﬂorescent or a

Barbarian. Instead, it is all determined by moral virtue.

Emperor Zhao Tuo was able to open up [the land of] We Vi0ts, empire

over his own realm, and hold his own against the Han [Dynasty]. In his writ-

ings he referred to himself as the Old Grandee. He was the founder of the

royal enterprise of We Vi0ts. How great was his merit! As for those who sub-

sequently empired over the Vi0ts, if they modeled themselves after the Mar-

tial [Emperor], Zhao, and maintained the border, put the proper military

and administrative affairs in order, engaged in [the correct] relations with

neighboring realms, and governed with benevolence, then they could pro-

tect the realm for a long time, and Northerners would have no cause to act

without restraint again. Acting without restraint contravenes decorum.

Lê Ven HMu began this passage by discussing four individuals who rep-

resent two kinds of people, Efﬂorescents and Barbarians—that is, people

who represented the two main divisions of the world that LBVen Ph+c

referred to in his response to the derogatory hostel sign. The Viscount of Ji

and Taibo were Efﬂorescents who lived during the Zhou Dynasty

(1045–256 BCE) and transmitted Efﬂorescent ideas and ritual practices

into previously Barbarian territories. Shun and King Wen (i.e., Zhou Wen-

wang), meanwhile, were Efﬂorescent rulers from the third and second

millennia BC, respectively, who both originally came from Barbarian

regions. Lê Ven HMu’s intent in mentioning these individuals was to point

out that the distinction between Barbarian and Efﬂorescent regions was

not absolute. Instead, it could be transcended through the presence and

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actions of individuals who harbored a great deal of moral virtue. Zhao

Tuo, according to Lê Ven HMu, had enjoyed such a reserve of virtue and

therefore was able to establish a kingdom in a previously Barbarian area.

In so doing, Zhao Tuo set a standard for later rulers in that region, the

Vietnamese, to follow. Hence, from these comments we can see that Lê

Ven HMu envisioned the imperial tradition beginning in Vietnam with the

arrival of moral virtue, and in particular, with a type of moral virtue that

was shared by some of the most famous individuals of what some today

would label “Chinese” antiquity.

Wolters, however, views the advent of an imperial tradition in Vietnam dif-

ferently. He does this by stating ﬁrst that: “Chinese history, written by schol-

ars of the ‘Confucian persuasion,’ was seen as a record, generation by

generation, of mankind’s performance in living up to the moral standards

taught by the sage rulers of high antiquity. Chinese historians contemplated

a golden age of the sage rulers, whose moral principles supplied canons for

interpreting the behavior of subsequent generations of rulers and subjects.”

Having thus explained that Chinese history takes as its starting point the

“moral standards taught by the sage rulers of high antiquity,” Wolters then

argues that Lê Ven HMu did not see history beginning that way. Wolters

informs his readers that Lê Ven HMu did not “speciﬁcally mention the

Chinese primeval golden age—when the sages were ruling,” but that his

comments nonetheless “show that he [was] familiar with the sages.” Wolters,

however, only partially indicates to his readers how exactly it is that Lê Ven

HMu showed his familiarity with the ancient sages. While he acknowledges

brieﬂy that “[Zhao Tuo]’s virtus is compared to that of Shun and Wen Wang,

ancient sage rulers,” Wolters never mentions here, or anywhere else in the

paper, that Lê Ven HMu began his commentary on Zhao Tuo by linking him

with the ancient precedents set by the Viscount of Ji and Taibo, two Efﬂo-

rescents who in antiquity journeyed to Barbarian lands, transformed the peo-

ple there by teaching them the moral standards of the Central Efﬂorescence,

and served as exemplars of the power of moral virtue for centuries afterward.

Instead of informing his reader about this opening passage of Lê Ven HMu’s

commentary, Wolters translates only its ending, starting with the sentence

“He was the founder of the royal enterprise of We Vi0ts” (see above), there-

fore skipping the information about moral virtue and antiquity.

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Having ignored this critical section of the commentary, Wolters then

contends that because Lê Ven HMu’s history began with Zhao Tuo,

“Vietnam’s golden age is depicted not in terms of cultural excellence but of

imperial independence, when the court’s style was exactly the same as that

of the Han court. Here is a reconstruction of a golden age that seems to car-

icature the Chinese view of the most ancient past.”

Hence, in disregarding the way in which Lê Ven HMu clearly linked

Zhao Tuo with the “cultural excellence” of “Chinese” antiquity, Wolters can

now argue that Vietnamese history, for thirteenth-century scholars like Lê

Ven HMu, was seen to begin not with the culture and morals of China but

with the political independence of Vietnam. This is critical for Wolters;

Vietnamese scholars saw their golden age beginning with the political inde-

pendence that Zhao Tuo brought in the second century BCE, and thus

when they cited texts from China’s golden age, those citations did not have

the same meaning or resonance to Vietnamese scholars as they did to their

Chinese counterparts. The Chinese, Wolters argues, saw the texts of antiq-

uity as “the point d’appui for afﬁrming the cultural identity of the Chinese

people,” whereas Vietnamese scholars saw their golden age beginning with

Zhao Tuo’s much later establishment of an independent kingdom, and thus

such texts could “not be read as the sacred overture to Vietnamese history.”

While Wolters suggests here that by contrast Zhao Tuo’s establishment of

an independent kingdom did serve as a sacred overture to Vietnamese his-

tory, in another article he describes signs of another, and earlier, non-Sinitic

golden age that Vietnamese recalled a century after Lê Ven HMu. Ironically,

what leads Wolters to discover this non-Sinitic Vietnamese golden age are

comments by literati in the fourteenth century, such as TrMKng Hán Siêu and

Lê Quát, in which they criticize the baneful inﬂuence on the peasantry of

Buddhism and the lack of schools. Aware that in making such criticisms these

literati “seem to be speaking as Confucianist advisors,” Wolters questions the

veracity of such a conclusion and sets off to uncover what these statements

really mean. Engaging in an intricate process of linguistic association, he

concludes that these men were simply seeking “to restore Vietnam’s tradi-

tional way of life and not to propagate Confucianist moral values.”

The process of linguistic association that leads to this conclusion begins

with Wolters’ examination of a poem that the scholar-ofﬁcial Phfm SM

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Mfnh composed in the 1360s while patrolling the northwestern border

region. In this poem, Phfm SMMfnh mentioned Ven Lang, a kingdom that

reportedly existed in the region prior to Zhao Tuo’s Nanyue. After men-

tioning Ven Lang, Phfm SMMfnh then wrote two lines that state, “With

writing and chariots for myriad leagues, the border is now quiet/But in this

universe over a thousand years, incidents have been numerous.”

The combined characters for “writing” and “chariots” [th}xa] refer to a

concept that is loaded with meaning from the perspective of the Confucian

repertoire. This concept was employed to celebrate unity, but unity of a cul-

turally speciﬁc kind. In particular, it celebrated a world that traveled in car-

riages of the same axle width, and thus a world that was politically uniﬁed.

This world also used the same written script, classical Chinese, and

therefore was intellectually and morally uniﬁed as well, for in employing the

same script people were understood to be reading the same texts, the

“Confucian classics.”

Wolters does not note the connotations that link this expression ﬁrmly to

the Confucian repertoire, instead stating more generally that “Chariots,

standardized by their axles, and a standardized script were symbols in China

of a well-regulated State.” More important for Wolters is the simple fact that

Phfm SMMfnh mentions Ven Lang and writing and chariots in the same

poem. This is evidence to him that Phfm SMMfnh is associating “the bor-

der region in antiquity with the norms of good government when it was

ruled by Ven-lang’s kings.”

To describe more exactly the “norms of good government” in ancient Ven

Lang, Wolters turns to an undated and anonymously authored history from

the Tr6n period, the Outline of ViDt History [ViDt sHl}Kc], to quote a passage

about Ven Lang: “Its customs were of a simple and pure substance. For pur-

poses of government knotted cords were used.”

From the perspective of the

ideas found in the Confucian repertoire, “knotting chords” [kCt th1ng] is the

antithesis of “writing and chariots.” The Classic of Changes [Yijing], for

instance, contains a passage that notes that the period in high antiquity when

people knotted chords as a means to record information and aid in governing

was also a time when people “lived in grottoes and in the wild.” The subse-

quent invention of writing by the sages not only brought more order to the

land, but it also allowed people to move from “grottoes” to “palaces.”

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Wolters is aware that “knotting chords” refers to a preliterate society, but

he disregards the negative connotations that this term carried and contends

instead that:

The Ven-lang rulers were therefore able to govern equally successfully by

means of a form of government which . . . could owe nothing to the

Chinese script because Ven-lang ﬂourished long before any question of a

Chinese political and cultural inﬂuence arose. Ven-lang’s image towards

the end of the fourteenth century was that of a well-regulated State,

inspired by independent cultural traditions.

What Wolters has discovered here are two radically different conceptions

of Ven Lang. The Outline of ViDt History depicts it as a world that had yet to

come under the sway of the teachings of the sages, while Phfm SMMfnh

sees it as already transformed by those teachings. Wolters, however, ignores

the powerful and diametrically opposed connotations of these statements.

He argues instead that the knotting chords can be combined with the writ-

ing and the chariots, without contradiction, to describe a uniﬁed image of

Ven Lang generally held among Vietnamese literati in the late fourteenth

century. From his reading of this poem and brief passage, Wolters asserts that

literati in late fourteenth-century Vietnam looked back nostalgically to Ven

Lang as a time when there were no “royal advisors” and when the “sage-like

and heroic Ven-lang rulers, inventors of Vietnamese civilization, needed

only obedient servants.”

According to Wolters, this image was powerful

because it represented precisely what literati like TrMKng Hán Siêu and Lê

Quát wanted. Although they acted the role of “Confucianist” royal advisors

in condemning Buddhism and promoting education in the countryside in

an effort to bring calm to the land, they in fact wished to be “relieved of their

unwonted and self-imposed responsibility for critical commentary.”

They

were thus not “speaking as Confucianist advisers,” Wolters contends, for they

only wanted “to restore Vietnam’s traditional way of life.” They desired a

return to a world where there was no need for “Confucianist advisors,” a

world where “customs were of a simple and pure substance” and “for pur-

poses of government knotted cords were used.”

These are admittedly only two examples from Wolters’ writings on Tr6n

Dynasty Vietnam. However, I would argue that these examples are emi-

nently representative of Wolters’ style of scholarship. As core arguments in

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two important articles, these examples demonstrate the degree of detail that

one must delve into in order to follow, and unravel, Wolters intricately inter-

woven line of argumentation. They also demonstrate the degree to which

Wolters relies on a selective and partial reading of source materials, as well as

the degree to which he imposes his own ideas onto texts that loudly proclaim

contrary views, to say nothing of his highly questionable logic.

In the ﬁrst example, Wolters employs a comment recorded by Lê Ven

HMu to argue that Vietnamese and Chinese texts differed in meaning

because the Vietnamese did not share the same golden age with the

Chinese. Yet Lê Ven HMu himself makes no such distinction. He says

nothing about a Vietnamese golden age but speaks only of Barbarians and

Efﬂorescents, placing the Vietnamese ﬁrmly in the latter category thanks

to the fact that Zhao Tuo had brought to the region the type of moral lead-

ership that ﬁgures like the Viscount of Ji and Taibo had exempliﬁed in dis-

tant antiquity. How, then, do we know that this idea of a Vietnamese

golden age was so important if it was not expressed? And how do we rec-

oncile this contending concept of a world divided into Barbarians and

Efﬂorescents with Wolters’ insistence on the importance of a China-

Vietnam divide? Similarly, how can we follow Wolters when he equates

concepts that the Confucian repertoire loads with antithetical meanings to

imagine a uniﬁed fourteenth-century ethos in which literati made anti-

Buddhist statements but actually meant that they wanted to become obe-

dient servants in a world untouched by the Confucian repertoire? And

even if these concepts were not antithetical, how can one line in one

poem and a comment in an undated history reveal an ethos so powerful

and all-encompassing that it causes straightforward statements to take on

radically novel meanings?

Literati Cycles

No scholar from the ﬁeld has seriously challenged Wolters’ work.

Instead,

historians like John Whitmore have built on Wolters’ ideas, placing them in

a larger temporal context. An expert on the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788),

Whitmore has sought to explain how it is that the elite of that time appear to

have valued the Confucian repertoire much more than their counterparts

during the Tr6n, as characterized by Wolters. Whitmore has concluded that

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they did so because a transformation took place between the late Tr6n and

the early Lê from “classical scholarship” to “Confucian belief.”

Whitmore proposes that the period from the LBto the early Tr6n was “an

overwhelmingly Buddhist era” in which “Chinese classical learning

appeared . . . as part of a peripheral Court cult.”

According to Whitmore,

the upholders of this “court cult,” the literati, gained exposure over time to

new Confucian ideas coming from China and gained inﬂuence within the

court, until by the fourteenth century they were pressing Vietnamese mon-

archs to promote certain administrative and social changes that were

inspired by ideas in the Confucian repertoire.

At this point Whitmore’s ideas tenderly break with those of Wolters, for

while Wolters argues that to view these men “as masterminding a step for-

ward in the direction of a Confucianist State would be to drain the four-

teenth century of intelligibility,” Whitmore contends that in the fourteenth

century we see the beginning of belief and adherence to the ideology that

was “attached” to the “forms” of Chinese literary and historical writing.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of instances from the fourteenth century

where Tr6n monarchs rebuked the proposals of scholar-ofﬁcials, denigrating

these literati as “pale scholars” [b\ch diDn th}sinh], and Whitmore interprets

these to indicate that although the literati were starting to believe the ideas

that attached to the forms of Chinese literary and historical writing, these

ideas still remained largely alien to Tr6n Dynasty monarchs and the aristoc-

racy from which they came.

Aware that roughly a century later, historical and literary sources from the

reign of Lê Thánh Tnng (1460–1497) provide clear evidence for belief in Con-

fucian ideas, Whitmore has posited that there was a dramatic transformation

that took place in the late fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth centuries. Here he

posits that the Ming occupation (1407–1427) was instrumental in bringing

about change. In particular, Whitmore argues that the Chinese imposed on

the Vietnamese a new bureaucracy and ideology, neo-Confucianism, and that

it was through this aggressive imposition of the “Chinese model” that a major

transformation of Vietnamese society began.

John Whitmore’s assertion that the appeal of ideas from the Confucian

repertoire during the LBand Tr6n was largely limited to a small group of

individuals in Vietnam whose advice was not necessarily heeded by

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Vietnamese monarchs is one that Keith Taylor shares to some degree. While

Whitmore usually refers to this group as the literati, Taylor has recently

employed the untranslated term nho [Chn., ru], a term that he states “indi-

cates a class of people unambiguously associated with what we think of as

Confucian thought and practice.”

Further, in his earlier work we ﬁnd

Taylor seeking to trace the fortunes of this supposedly discrete group from

“the ﬁrst indication that there may have been advisors with Confucian ideas

at the court,” when LBThái Tnng (1028–1054) “honored the God of Agri-

culture by personally plowing three furrows.

Like Whitmore, Taylor sees the literati becoming more activist in the

fourteenth century, but he notes that it was not until the reign of Lê Thánh

Tnng in the second half of the ﬁfteenth century that their voices were truly

heard.

Further, this inﬂuence was short lived; both Whitmore and Taylor

argue that over the course of the following centuries in “successive eras of

warfare and political change” the nho were “challenged by actors favoring

more personalized, non-bureaucratic modes of government,” namely, “war-

rior regimes.”

In Whitmore’s rendering of this period, with the passing of

each era of warfare, the literati reestablished their dominance. Given this,

we can view the period of Vietnamese history from roughly the ﬁfteenth

through the early nineteenth centuries as one of “the establishment and

re-establishment of literati culture.”

Taylor, meanwhile, offers a more

nuanced picture of these transformations in acknowledging that the warrior

elite also upheld some Confucian ideas, and noting that during periods of

warfare, the literati kept alive their learning and cultural practices in their

home villages. Thus, although Taylor still writes of a “literati revival” in the

seventeenth century, for instance, he presents such a change in terms that

are less stark than Whitmore’s.

This idea of the emergence and re-emergence to prominence of the literati

is one that the late Ralph Smith made years ago. Smith’s argument, however,

was much more mechanical than those of Whitmore and Taylor. Smith

spoke not speciﬁcally of the literati, but of a related concept—a “cycle of

Confucianization” in Vietnam. Smith deﬁned Confucianism in narrow and

abstract terms as “an aspiration to have order obtain at all levels of society,” argu-

ing that the extent to which such order was obtained could be measured by dis-

cerning the times “when Vietnamese rulers were insisting on propriety” and

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when they “ordered the compilation of historical records,” as well as through

the “presence or absence, and relative power of Confucian scholars.”

The

periods of Confucianization that Smith mapped out roughly accord with those

that Whitmore and Taylor argue for. Recently, George Dutton has offered a

corrective to Smith’s claim that the Tây SKn period (1788–1802) marked a low

point in the cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam.

However, Dutton leaves

the concept of a cycle of Confucianization intact.

While the work of Whitmore and Taylor contributes a great deal toward

our understanding of the period from the LBthrough the Lê dynasty, the

linking of the Confucian repertoire to the fortunes of a supposed discrete

group of individuals is a problematic enterprise, particularly when that

group is referred to as the nho. Michael Nylan has noted that in China this

term had a wide range of meanings, from a “master of state ceremonial” to

“anyone who attempted to live by Confucius’s teachings,” and that while

some of these meanings changed over time, it is unlikely that there was ever

a period when a single meaning completely dominated.

More important is

the fact that while a term like nho indicates that there were individuals who

privileged at least some aspects of the Confucian repertoire enough to be

labeled separately, all of the available repertoires overlapped to some degree.

Further, the adherents of different repertoires were never in a zero-sum con-

test with each other, where the increase in the numbers of one therefore

indicated a decline in the inﬂuence of the ideas of another.

This is a topic that Edward Davis has recently addressed in a work on

spirit-possession and exorcism in the Song Dynasty. Davis challenges the

idea that medieval Chinese history should be understood as the story of the

victory of neo-Confucianism over Buddhism and Daoism, and he also chal-

lenges the practice of associating what he calls “cultural categories” with

“social categories,” such as associating Confucianism with ofﬁcialdom. For,

according to Davis, Buddhism and Daoism never “declined,” as some

authors have alleged, and “social categories” were not necessarily consti-

tuted of individuals who shared exclusive beliefs. Instead, Davis pictures

Song Dynasty society as follows:

At the top we ﬁnd a group broadly deﬁned to include the emperor, the

court, and the bureaucratic and religious hierarchies (civil and military

ofﬁcials and their families, Daoist priests, and Buddhist monks); at the

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bottom are village spirit-mediums and Buddhist acolytes, local landowners

(large and small), tenants and servants, and sub-bureaucratic servicemen

and functionaries. In the middle I place a new and expanding group of

Daoist exorcists called “Ritual Masters” (fashi), Esoteric Buddhist monks,

doctors, ritual experts and religious specialists (shushi, xiangshi, daoren,

etc.), and those who passed one or more of the examinations but were

without ofﬁcial posts (shiren).

Davis then argues that in Song Dynasty China, tensions were more likely to

occur between different classes of the adherents of a given repertoire, such as

between Daoist priests and Daoist exorcists, than between adherents of sep-

arate repertoires. Meanwhile, Davis points out, there was a great deal of sym-

biosis across repertoires at various class levels, so that Buddhist priests and

government ofﬁcials, for instance, held much in common.

This vision of Song Dynasty China can help us understand early imperial

Vietnam and, in particular, can enable us to put into perspective an artifact

such as the Khai Nghiêm inscription. This inscription was composed by the

Tr6n Dynasty scholar-ofﬁcial, or nho, TrMKng Hán Siêu, one of the literati

whose anti-Buddhist statements Wolters contends we should read to indicate

his desire to live in an ideal Vietnamese state where there were no royal advi-

sors but only obedient servants. TrMKng Hán Siêu was asked in the 1330s to

commemorate the renovation of Khai Nghiêm temple in what is today B:c

Ninh Province. While TrMKng Hán Siêu did provide information about the

temple renovation in this inscription, he also made the following comments:

Renovating a temple that has fallen into disrepair does not [reﬂect] my

intent, so in inscribing and erecting a stele, why ask for my comments? At

present the Sagely Dynasty wishes for the imperial mores to prosper so as

to eliminate depraved customs. Heterodox teachings must thus be rejected

so that the royal way can be revived. For literati, if it is not the way of Yao

and Shun, then they should not promote it; and if it is not the way of

Confucius and Mencius, then they should not record it. Therefore, were I

to stick to conventions and babble on about the Buddha, who would be

deceived by that?

Putting aside Wolters’ assertions about how we should read these state-

ments, if we imagine nho as an unambiguously separate group with anti-

thetical beliefs toward others, then it is difﬁcult to understand why TrMKng

Hán Siêu would be asked to compose a text for an inscription at a Buddhist

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temple, much less why such a disparaging inscription would be displayed.

The key here is that this inscription likely points to precisely the kind of soci-

ety that Davis describes in his discussion of Song Dynasty China. Yes,

TrMKng Hán Siêu had strong ideas about the importance of the Confucian

repertoire, but these ideas did not preclude him from providing his assis-

tance to the Khai Nghiêm temple. Similarly, the head abbot of this temple

certainly had the ability to discern what TrMKng Hán Siêu was saying in his

inscription, but that did not prevent him from allowing it to be erected on

the temple grounds. This was the case because these men shared common-

alities as members of the elite, but it was also probably the case that they

shared ideas as well. Although TrMKng Hán Siêu criticized Buddhism in this

inscription, the fact that he agreed to compose it might indicate that he also

sensed the power of this temple and the teaching associated with it, and was

thus unwilling to completely decline. At the same time, the head abbot of

the Khai Nghiêm temple probably also understood the value of promoting

the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, for as mentioned above,

Buddhism in East Asia had long come to terms with these ideas.

Actually, as early as the tenth century, when Vietnam became autonomous,

the “three teachings” (or what I would label the “three repertoires”) of Dao-

ism, Buddhism, and Confucianism had in many ways already come to terms

with one another, as they had undergone a great deal of interaction and

would continue to do so over the succeeding centuries. Two of the clearest

examples of this cross-fertilization are the emergence during the Song

Dynasty of the Learning of the Way [x\o HLc/Daoxue], or neo-Confucianism

as it is often labeled in English, and the “Three in One” religion in the

Ming.

While some scholars have referred to this intermixing of ideas as syn-

cretism, others, such as Timothy Brooke, caution against using such a term,

pointing out that the merging of different teachings did not necessarily result

in a unitary worldview, for even those who championed the commonalities of

the three teachings still often privileged one of the three.

We can see an example of this in the comments that the scholar-ofﬁcial

Phan Huy Ích wrote in 1796 in his preface to friend and fellow scholar-

ofﬁcial NgnThì Nh$m’s work on the Buddhist Trúc Lâm sect, the Great

Pronouncement of the Essential Teachings of the Trúc Lâm Sect [Trúc lâm

tông chUnguyên thanh]:

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Although the teachings of the Sak[yamuni] clan state that everything is

empty and immaterial, their main point is [to encourage people] to elimi-

nate barriers and comprehend the suchness of existence; to concentrate

on clearing one’s mind in order to discover one’s true nature. In compar-

ing this with the learning of we nho [which promotes] making one’s

intent sincere and extending one’s knowledge, there is nothing here that

is contradictory. I have heard that our Master [i.e., Confucius] stated that

“In the West there is a great sage.” He therefore never denigrated the

Brahma sect as heterodox.

In this passage we ﬁnd Phan Huy Ích noting that there is an essential com-

monality between the two teachings, but he justiﬁes his comments through

the Confucian repertoire, and by reference to Confucius in particular.

We can see a similar instance of this in the 1258 decision of the Tr6n

Dynasty monarch Tr6n Thái Tnng to pass the throne to his son and become

a Buddhist monk. In a later writing he justiﬁed this decision by stating that

he sought “to seek the teaching of the Buddha so as to understand the

secrets of life and death and to repay the debt of parental love.”

Hence,

Tr6n Thái Tnng became a Buddhist monk, but he justiﬁed doing so in terms

of ﬁlial piety.

What examples like these point to is the centrality of ideas from the Con-

fucian repertoire even in contexts that appear to be dominated by other

repertoires. That a Tr6n Dynasty monarch became a Buddhist monk or

composed Buddhist poetry does not mean that he did not value various ele-

ments of the Confucian repertoire. Unfortunately, scholars have overlooked

this important point, tending instead toward more categorical interpretations.

For example, in the case of Tr6n monarchs labeling ofﬁcials as “pale schol-

ars,” Whitmore suggests that this indicates a signiﬁcant rift in perspectives—

a “pale scholar” was someone who exclusively upheld the Confucian

repertoire, while the monarch who disparaged such a person was conversely

grounded in an indigenous, and separate, ethos.

The fact, however, is that the term “pale scholar” referred simply to a

young and inexperienced scholar.

Its use did not indicate that these mon-

archs viewed literati as possessing a separate creed. Thus, although we can

ﬁnd literati encountering opposition to some of their proposals in the four-

teenth century, this does not mean that their ideas were alien. To the con-

trary, I would argue that ideas from the Confucian repertoire were always of

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central importance to the ruling elite in premodern Vietnam, as these were

the ideas that were employed to legitimate the monarch’s rule.

Indeed, from the information that we have about events as early as the

founding of the LBDynasty, we can see that even though Vietnamese mon-

archs lived in a world that was infused with elements from each of the vari-

ous repertoires, ideas from the Confucian repertoire held central

importance. Information in the sources regarding LBCnng U*n, the

founder of the LBDynasty, illuminates this point perfectly. Although LB

Cnng U*n was raised in a Buddhist monastery and advised by monks, we see

these same monks explaining his rise to power in terms that come directly

from the Confucian repertoire. In particular, they interpreted various

signs—such as an arcane poem revealed by cracks in a tree struck by light-

ening and the birth at their temple of a white dog with black hair in the

shape of the characters for “son of Heaven” [thiên tH]—as indications that

the mandate of Heaven was passing to LBCnng U*n.

Similarly, after LB

Cnng U*n came to power and decided to move his capital to Theng Long,

he justiﬁed this, ﬁrst, by citing the Venerated Documents [Shangshu], and

then also by noting the new location’s auspicious geomantic position, as well

as the fact that Gao Pian had previously recognized its potency.

Thus,

although we ﬁnd here mention of Buddhist monks, oracular poetry, and

geomancy, they all serve to support more central expressions of legitimacy

for LBCnng U*n’s rule that come from the Confucian repertoire.

This “unequal” coexistence of elements from different repertoires calls

into question the efforts that some scholars have made to trace the fortunes

of “Confucianism” or “literati culture” in Vietnam by linking these phe-

nomena to a discrete social group, the nho. It may be true that “military

skills, concepts of personal loyalty, and the blood oath of allegiance” were

valued by some individuals during times of warfare, as Whitmore argues.

But does this mean that these individuals did not believe in the mandate of

Heaven, and that they did not teach their sons to be ﬁlial and their daughters

to follow the three submissions?

Similarly, when Taylor speaks of a “pop-

ular efﬂorescence of Buddhism” in the seventeenth century, are we to

assume that literati had nothing to do with it?

Were there no nho at the

time who saw value in this teaching, as Phan Huy Ích did in the late eigh-

teenth century?

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A New Way of Being Vietnamese

In the previous section I have sought to point out some of the contributions

that scholars such as John Whitmore and Keith Taylor have made toward

our understanding of the Vietnamese past, at the same time that I have sug-

gested that there is a need to build on their ﬁndings and take our under-

standing of imperial Vietnam to a new, more complex and nuanced level. In

this section I will make the same argument about research that has recently

been conducted on the southern half of the Lê Dynasty realm. In the six-

teenth century the Lê Dynasty came to be dominated by two powerful clans,

the Trinh and the Nguy#n. The Trinh based themselves in Hà N4i and

ruled over northern and parts of north-central Vietnam on the Lê Dynasty’s

behalf. Meanwhile, the Nguy#n clan initially performed the same function

in areas further south, but then over time became increasingly autonomous.

Simultaneously, the Nguy#n also extended their control further southward

toward the Mekong Delta. As they did so, the Nguy#n clan came to incor-

porate Cham, Khmer, and Chinese into their domain, and thus they found

themselves governing over a land that was quite unique.

In governing over a frontier region, it was probably inevitable that the

Nguy#n would develop a style of statecraft that was different from that of the

Trinh clan in the north. Exactly how it differed is an issue that some scholars

have recently begun to examine. In particular, Keith Taylor, Li Tana, Nola

Cooke, and Choi Byung Wook have all written on this issue, and although

they have focused on different aspects of this topic in their studies, they have

all argued that in Aàng Trong, as the southern region was known, fewer

components of the Confucian repertoire were employed than in its northern

counterpart, Aàng Ngoài.

Of these historians, the one who has made the strongest argument for the

uniqueness of Aàng Trong society is Li Tana. Her NguyWn Cochinchina:

Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a pio-

neering work that examines numerous aspects of life in Aàng Trong, from

trade to material culture, and that is today the starting point for anyone who

wishes to seriously examine Aàng Trong society in the seventeenth and eigh-

teenth centuries. While the majority of Li Tana’s work deals with issues per-

taining to social and economic history, from currency and taxes to

population statistics, the ﬁfth chapter, “Life in Aàng Trong: A New Way of

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Being Vietnamese,” turns to ideas and addresses directly the role of the

Confucian repertoire in Aàng Trong. In this chapter, Li examines what she

envisions were efforts by the Nguy#n to “differentiate themselves from their

own ancestral people in the north in order to secure their own political

survival.”

In particular, Li Tana argues that the Nguy#n engaged in a process of

localization whereby they adopted diverse religious and cultural practices

from the area as a means of establishing their legitimacy. They did so

because, according to Li Tana, the Confucian repertoire was inappropriate

for achieving these goals. To quote:

But it is clear that the basic premises of Chinese political theory and Neo-

Confucian philosophy, if studied in any depth, would not serve Nguy#n

needs. They would have potentially focused attention northward, to the

captive Lê emperor, instead of inwards and southwards, on to the expand-

ing separatist state itself, and the Nguy#n needed an inclusive ideology, not

one that would highlight qualities distinguishing the Vietnamese from the

other peoples of the region. Of necessity, therefore, Confucianism in Aàng

Trong played a political and social role that was relatively minor compared

to its role in the north, where the Chinese-style examination system

ensured Neo-Confucianism never lost its grip on the literati elite.

In place of the Confucian repertoire, Li Tana argues that “the principle

means by which the Nguy#n successfully domesticated their regime was

through an eclectic weaving of indigenous spirits and beliefs into a syncretic

(Vietnamese) Buddhist framework, a hybrid religious system that bestowed

moral legitimacy on Nguy#n authority in Aàng Trong.”

As evidence of this

she cites the fact that the ﬁrst Nguy#n ruler in Aàng Trong, Nguy#n Hoàng,

constructed a pagoda in 1601 at a site that was home to powerful spiritual

forces that were perhaps identiﬁed locally with the Cham spirit, Po Nagar, a

spirit that the Vietnamese adopted and referred to as Thiên-Y-A-Na. Li also

notes that Nguy#n Hoàng and his successors renovated old Buddhist tem-

ples and constructed new ones, a clear sign of their patronage of that religion

and its institutions.

According to Li Tana, this “hybrid religious system,” created through a

process of localization, increasingly served to differentiate Aàng Trong from

the Trinh-controlled north. Citing an anecdote from the late eighteenth

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century to elucidate this point, Li Tana states: “Just how far from northern

tradition Aàng Trong had moved is illustrated by an anecdote concerning a

Tây SKn general in Ngh0An, who laughed at xã tVc(she ji in Chinese), the

god of land and crops and thus an important Confucian deity, exclaiming:

‘a dog is more useful than xã tVc.’ The southern general was not being con-

sciously iconoclastic: he was simply ignorant. Xã tVcwas basically unknown

in Aàng Trong under the Nguy#n.

”

The xã tVcis a very early example of the kind of appropriation of local

spirits into an ofﬁcial discourse that, as we saw above, would eventually

become widespread around the time that Vietnam ﬁrst gained autonomy.

The characters for xã and tVcliterally mean “soil” and “grain,” respectively.

In China there were originally separate spirits for each of these entities, but

by the time of the Zhou Dynasty they were joined and sacriﬁced to together.

We can logically think of the xã tVcas a single deity from that point onward.

There was also a tradition that associated this spirit with Hou Ji [Viet., H$u

T:c], a mythical ancestor of the Zhou. Throughout the rest of imperial

Chinese history, regular, usually biannual, sacriﬁces to the altar of the

“Spirit of Soil and Grain,” as I prefer to translate this term, did indeed play

an important role in the Confucian repertoire, for they were meant to secure

abundant harvests, the lifeblood of the empire.

At the same time, however, the sacriﬁces to the Spirit of Soil and Grain

also fulﬁlled another important function, namely, to reafﬁrm hierarchies of

space and power. During the Zhou Dynasty, the emperor would enfeoff his

vassals or underlords by giving them a lump of earth from the altar to the

Spirit of Soil and Grain in the capital. The vassals would then take these

satchels of earth back to their domains and place them in an altar to the Spirit

of Soil and Grain in their own capital as a symbol of their submission to the

Zhou emperor. In late imperial China this practice continued, albeit in

altered form, having undergone numerous transformations over the centuries.

During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), for instance, there was a main altar to

the Spirit of Soil and Grain in the capital, and then altars to the same spirit in

all of the provincial capitals. The biannual sacriﬁces were carried out simul-

taneously at all of these altars. However, in the manner in which these sacri-

ﬁces were performed, there were clear distinctions that reinforced the

centrality of the imperial capital and the subordination of the provinces.

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The Spirit of Soil and Grain was also honored in Vietnam. The anecdote

that Li Tana cites comes from a nineteenth-century edition of the Departed

Spirits of the ViDt Realm, the work Keith Taylor employed to examine tech-

niques of rulership during the LBDynasty. The earliest versions of that work

provide a biographical entry on the Spirit of Soil and Grain, referring to it as

Hou Ji, the mythical ancestor of the Zhou. The entry in the nineteenth-century

edition includes added commentary by a scholar-ofﬁcial named Cao Huy

Di0u, and it is in this commentary that the anecdote cited by Li Tana appears.

Prior to relating this episode with the Tây SKn general, Cao Huy Di0u’s

commentary indicates that the Lê Dynasty realm terminated in Ngh0An

Province, where there was an altar to the Spirit of Soil and Grain. This indi-

cates that Cao Huy Di0u did not consider Aàng Trong to be part of the Lê

realm. Since the Tây SKn emerged from Aàng Trong, it is possible that the

Tây SKn general mentioned in this passage was from that region. The

episode in question, however, appears to take place after the Tây SKn had

defeated the Lê, and so this Aàng Trong man was now able to visit places

such as Ngh0An Province, where the southernmost altar to the Spirit of Soil

and Grain in the former Lê realm was located. This commentary to the

Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm then states:

The Tây SKn usurpers had established their capital at Phú Xuân, but Ngh0

An defense command still maintained its altar. Nearby there was a literatus

who was fond of joking and adept at painting. After the usurping com-

mander of the defense command [i.e., the “Tây SKn general”] offered sacri-

ﬁces to the Spirit of Soil and Grain, he ordered this literatus to paint a

picture using the altar as his model. The literatus painted a picture of a dog

eating the sacriﬁcial remains, and wrote on it “Hopefully of beneﬁt to the

Soil and Grain [Altar].” This was extremely derisive. Since the spirit is per-

spicacious and upright, would it accept an offering which is not in accor-

dance with propriety?

While the Tây SKn general in this anecdote did not laugh and say that “a

dog is more useful than xã tVc,” this passage does mention the caption of a

painting that stated, “Hopefully of beneﬁt to the Soil and Grain [Altar].”

What I have translated here as “hopefully” is a character (cXu, ) that

rhymes with a character for “dog” (cXu, ). Therefore, if one heard the

sounds of this phrase without seeing the characters, it could sound like,

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“The dog is of beneﬁt to the Soil and Grain [Altar].” Paired with the content

of the painting, this double meaning became easily apparent—the punch

line to the painter’s joke.

More importantly, however, the person who wrote this derisive line was

not the “southern general,” but a “northern” resident of Ngh0An, and a lit-

eratus at that. What is more, the “southern general” was clearly not ignorant

of the Spirit of Soil and Grain, for he made offerings to this very spirit. This

being the case, what was the reason for this irreverent exchange? I would

argue that the answer to this lies in the terms that were used to describe these

two individuals—“usurping” and “fond of joking.” What the author

describes in this anecdote is an exchange between a Tây SKn ofﬁcial and a

literatus who most likely did not support the Tây SKn, and who expressed his

dissatisfaction through the derisive painting that he created. His derision was

therefore directed not at the Spirit of Soil and Grain but at the “usurping”

Tây SKn ofﬁcial, albeit at the spirit’s expense.

This example of a “northern” literatus joking at the expense of a spirit

who plays an important role in the Confucian repertoire, while a “southern

general” makes offerings to this spirit, complicates Li Tana’s claim that

beliefs and practices in Aàng Trong signiﬁcantly differed from those in the

Lê heartland to the north. To her credit, Li Tana acknowledges that key ele-

ments of the “hybrid religious system” that the Nguy#n created also existed

in the north. However, she argues that even such shared practices took on a

different tone or signiﬁcance in Aàng Trong.

An example of this would be the ofﬁcial recognition of local spirits. As

noted above, Li Tana points out that in 1601 Nguy#n Hoàng erected a

pagoda at a site that might have been associated with the Cham spirit Po

Nagar. Some scholars suspect that worship of this same spirit had earlier

spread to the north, with Cham war captives, and that by the sixteenth cen-

tury Po Nagar had undergone a process of Vietnamization in the north by

which it came to be worshiped by Vietnamese as a female spirit known as

Li#u Hfnh.

Li Tana follows this account and then adds the following:

Legends surrounding this new female cult suggest that Confucian-trained

ofﬁcials opposed the spread of her cult during the seventeenth-century

literati revival in Aàng Ngoài and vainly tried to expel her, but at last the

court was forced to acknowledge her power by ofﬁcially bestowing titles.

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This Confucian effort to tame a goddess not only contrasts with the ready

acceptance of Po Nagar/Thiên-Y-A-Na by both rulers and people further

south, but also with the welcome the Nguy#n accorded all useful local spir-

its, whatever their background.

Li’s understanding of the reaction of “Confucian-trained ofﬁcials” toward

the cult of Li#u Hfnh is based on her reading of two secondary sources that

present information, in abbreviated form, from the main historical source

on Li#u Hfnh, Aoàn ThiAi;m’s “Story of the Vân Cát Goddess” [Vân Cát

th2n nTtruyDn].

The legend, as recorded in this primary source, demon-

strates that “Confucian-trained ofﬁcials” and the spirits were not necessarily

in opposition to each other. In fact, in this legend we ﬁnd Li#u Hfnh inter-

acting with literati and even engaging in a long a poetic exchange with one

of the most famous and erudite “Confucian-trained ofﬁcials” in Vietnamese

history, the sixteenth-century scholar-ofﬁcial Phùng Kh:c Khoan.

After relating detailed information about Li#u Hfnh’s history, Aoàn Thi

Ai;m records that in the seventeenth century the court heard of a mysteri-

ous power at work in the land and sent a magician to exercise it. The cosmic

battle that ensued created hardship for the people living in the area. Li#u

Hfnh then appeared and urged the local residents to tell the court that she

was a goddess and to erect a temple in her honor. If the court did, she prom-

ised to transform calamity into prosperity.

Here the earlier information

about Li#u Hfnh’s friendly interaction with literati would have signaled to

readers that she was in fact benevolent and that the court’s decision to ofﬁ-

cially recognize her was therefore justiﬁed.

In comparing this story with that of Nguy#n Hoàng’s recognition of Po

Nagar, it is essential to place the confrontation between the court of “Con-

fucian-trained ofﬁcials” and Li#u Hfnh’s spirit in the context the full legend

provides. It is also important to keep in mind that scholars working on this

same topic in China have found that ofﬁcial interactions with the spirits

could take on an “astounding range of variations,” from outright recognition

or suppression to an initial contest followed by a delayed recognition.

Hence, that these single examples differ is not necessarily signiﬁcant.

What is signiﬁcant is the fact that Nguy#n Hoàng established a Buddhist

pagoda at the site where Po Nagar’s spirit was active. Li Tana argues that the

“hybrid religious system” that the Nguy#n employed to “secure their own

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political survival” involved incorporating indigenous spirits into a Buddhist

framework, and that this was part of the “new way of being Vietnamese” that

the Nguy#n established in Aàng Trong. However, if we follow Michel

Strickmann’s characterization of Buddhists as “agents of siniﬁcation” and

consider that according to Li Tana there was a “shift towards civil government”

in the eighteenth century in Aàng Trong, then Nguy#n Hoàng’s recognition

of Po Nagar comes to represent a very old way of being Vietnamese (and

Chinese), for it likely marked the ﬁrst step in the incorporation of spirits into

the Confucian repertoire, just as it had in the Red River Delta centuries ear-

lier, during the LBand Tr6n Dynasties.

Li Tana, however, does not envision such changes taking place in Aàng

Trong. Although she recognizes that there are signs that the Nguy#n estab-

lished institutions associated with the Confucian repertoire in the eigh-

teenth century, she plays down these developments as “highly symbolic in

nature.”

She argues instead that during the eighteenth century, and in

keeping with what Wolters characterized as the religious nature of kingship

in Southeast Asia, the Nguy#n “acted to provide a religious coloration to

their position as rulers.” She contends that they did this in relation to their

“Southeast Asian neighbors,” such as the Khmer. In particular, Li Tana

notes that when the Aàng Trong ruler Nguy#n Phúc Khoát ofﬁcially

ascended the throne in 1744 and implemented certain reforms that were

part of the shift toward civil government, he nonetheless stated that Aàng

Trong’s “Southeast Asian neighbors” should continue to refer to him as thiên

v}Lng, a term that Li Tana translates as “king of heaven” and that she argues

was distinct from the “son of heaven” moniker employed by the Trinh and

Lê to the north, “who continued to accept the Confucian concept that the

emperor could only be the son of heaven, not heaven itself.”

Nguy#n Phúc Khoát’s statement is recorded in the ofﬁcial chronicles of

the Nguy#n Dynasty (1802–1945), a work compiled in the nineteenth cen-

tury and known as the Veritable Records of x\i Nam [x\i Nam thZc lEc]. Just

preceding the statement about the term thiên v}Lng in the Veritable Records

of x\i Nam is an edict that Nguy#n Phúc Khoát issued upon ascending the

throne. It brieﬂy relates the history of his ancestors’ rule over Aàng Trong

and mentions some of the circumstances surrounding his own ascension to

the throne. The edict then ends with a wish that the new mandate of

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Heaven that he had received will bring with it the moral virtue that will

allow for the establishment of a realm like the land of Gong Liu and Hou

Ji—one ﬁlled with the peace and harmony that had prevailed during the

time of You Yu and Cheng Zhou. Although all of these ﬁgures are signiﬁ-

cant personages from antiquity and thus clearly place this edict within the

ambit of the Confucian repertoire’s privileged treatment of the rulers of

antiquity as models for later ages to follow, what is particularly important for

our purposes here is the mention of Hou Ji, that is, the very same ﬁgure

whose spirit was honored as the Spirit of Soil and Grain, the spirit who Li

Tana states was “basically unknown in Aàng Trong under the Nguy#n.”

Following this edict, the Veritable Records of x\i Nam then offers infor-

mation about certain administrative changes that this new ruler imple-

mented. First, Nguy#n Phúc Khoát ordered that when ofﬁcials submitted

documents to him, the verb that they used for this act would be changed

from “submit” [thân] to “memorialize” [t{u]. Second, while all documents

were to continue to use the reign year of the Lê Dynasty emperor, h\thuzc

quFc, that is, “dependencies” or “tributaries” and not “Southeast Asian

neighbors,” were to refer to Nguy#n Phúc Khoát as thiên v}Lng.

What is evident from this passage is that Nguy#n Phúc Khoát was attempt-

ing to expand his power by employing techniques found within the Confu-

cian repertoire. The edict records that his ascension to the throne marked the

start of a new mandate of Heaven, a divine charge that only emperors

received. His administrative changes likewise elevated his status, for ofﬁcials

memorialized only the emperor. Finally, the term thiên v}Lng had relevant

precedents in the Confucian repertoire as well. The Record of Rites [Liji],

one of the “Confucian classics,” noted that thiên v}Lng was a title by which a

son of Heaven was to be referred when he visited the domains of his vassals

[ch}h2u] and invoked the spirits there.

Thus, although this term did have a

religious coloration, it was informed by the Confucian repertoire and res-

onated with connotations of difference and hierarchy.

Li Tana presents her effort to demonstrate a “new way of being Viet-

namese” in Aàng Trong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an

attempt to counter simplistic conceptions of the southward migration of

Vietnamese as a direct extension of political and cultural practices long

established in the Red River Delta. She argues instead that “The localized

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Nguy#n state was no simple continuation or mere regional variant of north-

ern Vietnam but, on the contrary, the product of numerous differing—and

often quite heterodox—forces and inﬂuences.”

However, in examining her

comments in dialog with the primary sources, I am struck by precisely the

opposite point, namely, that even though the Nguy#n found themselves rul-

ing within and over a novel human environment, they continued to operate

primarily through recourse to practices that had been established in the

north, from appropriating spirits and patronizing Buddhist establishments to

justifying their political position by reference to ideas from the Confucian

repertoire, such as the mandate of Heaven.

Li Tana is correct in noting that ideas from the Confucian repertoire

were probably inappropriate for establishing a separate kingdom, as they

inevitably focused attention northward, but what is so fascinating about

Aàng Trong is that the Nguy#n employed these ideas anyway. More specif-

ically, they sought to enhance their own power through employing aspects of

the Confucian repertoire at the same time that they allowed this repertoire

to restrict their power in relation to that of the Lê. Their continued use of the

Lê dynastic calendar is one clear example of a limitation on their authority.

Less clear is the question of the role of altars to the Spirit of Soil and Grain

in Aàng Trong. If it is true, as Li Tana argues, that there were no altars to the

Spirit of Soil and Grain in Aàng Trong, it may very well have been because

the Nguy#n understood that the establishment of such altars was the perquisite

of the Lê Dynasty emperor they served, for clearly Hou Ji, the mythical ﬁgure

associated with this spirit, was known and revered in Aàng Trong. Perhaps

they declined to establish their own altars out of deference to the Lê emperor.

A countertrend to this, at the least, is indicated by the decision to have neigh-

boring lands refer to their rulers as thiên v}Lng, an alternative form of thiên tH

[son of Heaven] and a term perhaps reserved for the Lê emperor, and the

decision to order their own ofﬁcials to memorialize. In any case, what is sig-

niﬁcant is that all of this transpired by employing the Confucian repertoire.

Vietnam and the Chinese Model

The impulse to highlight the limitations of the Confucian repertoire in

Vietnam that we ﬁnd in the above-mentioned studies is also apparent in a

work that simultaneously emphasizes the extensive reach of the Confucian

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repertoire throughout Vietnamese society. Alexander Woodside’s Vietnam

and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese

Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century has long stood as the

premier study in English of the early years of the Nguy#n Dynasty. This

work is based on a broad reading of nineteenth-century sources, and as

Woodside states in the ﬁrst sentence of the book, it deals with “Chinese cul-

tural inﬂuences and their limitations in the politics, literature, education

and society of early nineteenth-century Vietnam.”

Through discussions of

such topics as the Nguy#n Dynasty bureaucracy, educational system, and

foreign relations, Woodside makes it clear that the “Chinese model”—by

which he means everything that I am including here in the Confucian

repertoire, from the structure of the bureaucracy to an emphasis on ﬁlial

piety in children’s primers—was dominant in nineteenth-century Vietnam.

Nonetheless, according to Woodside, this Chinese model did not monopo-

lize the Nguy#n world, for it always sat unsteadily on top of a “Southeast

Asian infrastructure.”

I have contended in this essay that many scholars have played down the

role of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam’s past, but Alexander Woodside

stands out as a clear exception to this observation. Nonetheless, I would still

argue that the manner in which Woodside presents information about the

role of the Confucian repertoire in nineteenth-century Vietnam deserves

further consideration. In particular, while I agree with Woodside that the

Chinese model played a dominant role in Nguy#n Vietnam but did not

monopolize Vietnamese society, I question the value of seeing this entity as

a “Chinese model” in opposition to a “Vietnam” that stands on a “Southeast

Asian infrastructure.” This is admittedly a minor critique, but I argue that it

affects our broader perspective on Vietnam during this period.

By the time that the Nguy#n Dynasty came to power, an autonomous

Vietnam had partaken of the Confucian repertoire for close to one thousand

years. Just as mention of Buddhist monks interpreting the hair patterns of a

temple dog and LBCnng U*n’s citing of the Venerated Documents to justify

moving the capital demonstrate this point for the eleventh century, so does

all of the information in Vietnam and the Chinese Model about the Nguy#n

bureaucracy, examination system, and foreign relations indicate the same for

the nineteenth. In Woodside’s rendering, however, the fact that prior to the

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Nguy#n Dynasty there were centuries of institutional growth within

Vietnam, as well as institutional borrowing from China, is rarely discussed in

any detail. Instead, Woodside gives his readers the impression that the

Nguy#n were able to look to a complete and still unfamiliar Chinese model

in the nineteenth century, suggesting that the Chinese model was somehow

alien to Vietnam. He notes, for instance, that: “In general, Vietnamese insti-

tutional borrowing from China was conditioned by the sequence of evolu-

tion of institutions in China itself. The older a Chinese institution was, the

more important it was considered to be. Gia Long created the Nguy#n Six

Boards, but a Nguy#n Grand Secretariat was not completely constructed

until 1830.”

Such an impression is misleading. Although it is true that Gia Long

established the Six Boards, the Lê Dynasty had set up this institution far ear-

lier, in 1675. And although it is also true that it was not until Minh Mfng’s

reign that a Grand Secretariat was established, there was an internal insti-

tutional development in the early nineteenth century that led up to the cre-

ation of this ofﬁce.

This is not to say that the Nguy#n did not seek out

information about institutions in China. At times they did, and Woodside does

a wonderful job of examining some such instances. However, these efforts

must be seen in the long historical context of which they are a part. Such a

view makes it clear that the Chinese model was in no way alien to Vietnam.

This is an important point because in viewing nineteenth-century

Vietnam as a time and place when a court largely embraced a Chinese

model while the peasantry lived mainly amidst a Southeast Asian infra-

structure, Woodside contends that the distance between the court and the

peasantry was greater in Vietnam than in China. Hence, after quoting a

derogatory comment that emperor Minh Mfng made in 1840 about village

operas, Woodside notes that “Such an outburst was more than a conven-

tional expression of disdain similar to utterances made by Chinese emperors

about the Chinese ‘little tradition.’”

It was more than this because unlike

Chinese emperors who sought to impart the elite ideas and practices of the

Chinese model on the Chinese people, Minh Mfng attempted to do so to a

Southeast Asian people. And while Minh Mfng and the other Nguy#n

rulers “feared that Vietnamese village communities embraced a host of

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Southeast Asian folk customs which, if allowed to ﬂourish, would under-

mine the village pedagogue’s attempts to uphold sinicization and the behav-

ior recommended in Chinese books,” they persisted nonetheless, thereby

creating a tension in Vietnamese society that Woodside suggests was more

severe than that between the court and peasantry in China.

The foreignness of the Chinese model contributed to the tension

between the court and countryside, but according to Woodside, so did the

pull of indigenous beliefs, for at the same time that the Nguy#n elite upheld

foreign ideas and practices, Woodside also points to an awareness and valu-

ation among this same elite of Vietnam’s own cultural traditions, thereby

suggesting that while the elite sought to impose the alien Chinese model on

the peasantry, there were also beliefs among the peasantry that resonated

with the elite. Thus, Woodside sees two main “streams of thought” inﬂu-

encing educated Vietnamese in the nineteenth century, one indigenous and

one foreign. He contends that these two streams of thought coexisted and

that their manifestation could be found in such phenomena as a “dual the-

ory of sovereignty,” where the Vietnamese ruler was simultaneously an aloof

Chinese-style emperor and a more earthy and accessible “protector ﬁgure,”

who protected the Vietnamese from, among other things, Chinese political

and cultural domination.

Woodside’s main evidence for this dual theory of sovereignty is the exis-

tence in the Vietnamese language of a word for king [vua], which he argues

is non-Sinitic in origin, and which was employed alongside the Sinitic term

hoàng IC[Chn., huangdi], meaning “emperor.” According to Woodside, not

only were the origins of these terms distinct, but they also referred to differ-

ent types of rulers, with hoàng ICsignifying an aloof Chinese-style emperor,

and vua a more earthy and accessible protector ﬁgure.

Woodside bases this claim on an uncontextualized reading of anecdotal

evidence, such as a Chinese traveler’s comments about the behavior of Viet-

namese ofﬁcials in the presence of their monarch, and by making reference

to the Departed Spirits of the ViDt Realm.

It is in this Tr6n Dynasty collec-

tion of biographies of protective deities that Woodside argues we can ﬁnd the

model of the type of leadership that the term vua signiﬁed. This is an

extremely problematic assertion, however, for the Departed Spirits of the

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ViDt Realm was compiled when the Tr6n Dynasty ofﬁcially recognized these

spirits and bestowed upon them ofﬁcial titles, many of which label them as

v}Lng [Chn., wang], a Sinitic term meaning “king” or “monarch.”

Thus, if

the prototypes for this supposedly distinct Vietnamese form of kingship are

spirits that we know about because the ruling elite appropriated them and

bestowed upon them the Sinitic title of v}Lng, how can we argue that they

represent a non-Sinitic form of kingship, and that this ideal was still valid in

the nineteenth century?

While I would thus offer the limited critique that Woodside overempha-

sizes tensions between a “Chinese model” and a “Southeast Asian infra-

structure,” and that we should consider ways to repackage the valuable

contribution that he has made to our understanding of nineteenth-century

Vietnam, other scholars have charged that Woodside does not go far enough

in emphasizing the non-Sinitic elements at work during this period. In par-

ticular, Nola Cooke has argued that Woodside does not take adequately into

account the inﬂuence on the Nguy#n family’s style of rulership of their long

history in the supposedly much less Sinicized/Confucian region of Aàng

Trong. In an article entitled “The Myth of the Restoration: Aàng-Trong

Inﬂuences in the Spiritual Life of the Early Nguy#n Dynasty (1802–47),”

Cooke challenges the view of Woodside that the Nguy#n Dynasty consti-

tuted a restoration, after the tumultuous years of the Tây SKn period, of the

Sinicized/Neo-Confucian political ideas that had prevailed in northern

Vietnam under the Lê. While Cooke does not deny that “Chinese ideas and

administrative models” did inﬂuence political thought in nineteenth-

century Vietnam, she argues that the early Nguy#n were more powerfully

“galvanized” by a belief system that was quite distinct, and rooted in the

much more non-Sinitic/non-Confucian world of Aàng Trong.

To make this point, Cooke examines passages from edicts that were issued

in the early years of Nguy#n rule that helped justify the Nguy#n rise to

power. Examining these documents in the Vietnamese vernacular [quFc

ngT] translation of the original classical Chinese ofﬁcial records of the

Nguy#n Dynasty, The Veritable Records of x\i Nam, Cooke ﬁnds that the

ﬁrst Nguy#n emperor, Gia Long, honored the nine generations of ancestors

that preceded him—dating back to Nguy#n Hoàng, the member of the

Nguy#n family who ﬁrst took up a post in Aàng Trong in the sixteenth

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century—as “sovereigns of the past” [liDt thánh] whose “miraculous spirit

power” [thiêng liêng] had provided him with assistance in establishing a

royal enterprise.

Here the mention of “miraculous spirit power” is particularly important

for Cooke, for its root, thiêng, she notes, is a Vietnamese term that can only

be rendered into writing through the demotic script, Nnm. According to

Cooke, this term “does not refer to human morality” and is thus distinct

from Confucian concepts, referring instead “to the mysterious, divine forces

inhabiting the natural and supernatural realms.”

That the ﬁrst Nguy#n

Dynasty ruler, Gia Long, would cite the importance of this “miraculous

spirit power” is evidence to Cooke that what the Nguy#n were “restoring” to

prominence was not the Confucian orthodoxy of the Lê Dynasty, but more

likely the unique beliefs of Aàng Trong.

This issue of how the Nguy#n justiﬁed their ascension to power is a fas-

cinating one. Unfortunately, this particular argument about the importance

of a “miraculous spirit power” that was not part of the Confucian repertoire

is seriously compromised in two major ways. First, while the term thiêng

does appear in the Vietnamese vernacular translations that Cooke relies on

to make her argument, its demotic equivalent does not appear in any of the

original texts that those translations are based on. There one ﬁnds only

Sinitic compounds based on the Sinitic term linh [Chn., ling].

Linh is a term that one could also translate as “spirit power,” that is,

thiêng liêng minus the adjective thiêng, “miraculous.” But a more accurate

translation of this term would be “spirit of the deceased.” Spirits of the

deceased played an important role in the Confucian repertoire, for they

could bestow some of their spirit power to certain living individuals. But

there was nothing miraculous about the power mentioned by Gia Long.

Instead, it was a hoped-for response to the proper execution of ﬁlial duties.

Nothing was more central to the execution of ﬁlial duties than the proper

execution of death ritual and the honoring of one’s ancestors. Further, in

carrying out one’s ﬁlial duties to one’s ancestors, a ruler could maintain the

hope that the spirit of the deceased would aid and assist him in this world.

This appears to be precisely how Gia Long thought, for besides the fact

that he mentioned the linh of his ancestors, he also emphasized the impor-

tance of ﬁlial piety. To quote from one of his edicts, one in which he

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honored his ancestors with posthumous titles and which Cooke cites with-

out noting this passage: “Monarchs rule All Under Heaven through ﬁlial

piety. As for ﬁlial piety, nothing is more important than respecting one’s par-

ents. Posthumously honoring one’s ancestors is the means to fully demon-

strate one’s reverence and ﬁliality.”

100

The spirits of Gia Long’s ancestors

were thus important to him, but not because they represented a miraculous

spirit power from a source outside of the Confucian repertoire.

We can discern this from the terms that were used, and also from portions

of these documents that Cooke fails to cite—the second way in which her

argument about the importance of powers beyond the Confucian repertoire

is compromised. For instance, one of the documents that Cooke uses to

demonstrate the importance to Gia Long of the miraculous spirit power of

the nine generations of his ancestors begins with the following comments:

I have heard that to take revenge after nine generations is one of the great

lessons of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and that to console the people by

punishing the wicked is the highest form of benevolence for a monarch.

Profound achievements grow from difﬁcult beginnings, and great orders

disperse like ﬂowing sweat.

101

This document then moves on to talk about the Nguy#n family’s estab-

lishment of a separate kingdom in Aàng Trong. It mentions how prosperous

the domain was until the Tây SKn rebellion brought an end to its peaceful

existence. The document then recounts the effort that Gia Long made to

retake the kingdom, and then concludes by stating:

All of this was accomplished by relying on the assistance of Heaven [th}Kng

huyMn, an arcane term for Heaven], the aiding spirits of the deceased of the

Nine [Ancestral] Temples, the meritorious services of the ofﬁcers, and the

effective efforts of the Three Armies [i.e., the soldiers].

102

In this case, as with the other examples that Cooke cites, the term thiêng

only appears in the vernacular translation of this text. The classical Chinese

original employs a Sinitic compound, hiDp linh [Chn., xieling], which I

have translated as “the aiding spirits of the deceased.” More important, how-

ever, is the manner in which this document begins. It commences by stating

that “I have heard that to take revenge after nine generations is one of the

great lessons of the Spring and Autumn Annals.”

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The Spring and Autumn Annals [Chunqiu] is of course one of the main

texts in the Confucian repertoire. The comment in Gia Long’s edict refers to

an episode recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals about the destruction

of one kingdom (Ji) by another (Qi) to avenge an insult that had taken place

nine generations earlier. Whether the latter kingdom should be praised for

having avenged an insult or condemned for taking the extreme measure of

destroying another kingdom is a matter that was debated extensively by later

generations of scholars.

103

Gia Long, or the scholars who drafted this edict

on his behalf, clearly felt that the act of avenging a wrong was worthy of

praise, and that this precedent justiﬁed the Nguy#n rise to power.

The question remains: what exactly was the insult that the Nguy#n fam-

ily suffered nine generations before Gia Long? And how did the Nguy#n

conquest of the Tây SKn serve to avenge this past insult? What the edict

demonstrates is that the answer to these and other related questions is to be

found not outside of the Confucian repertoire but deep within its own intri-

cate logic. As Philippe Langlet has pointed out, the Nguy#n found them-

selves in a very difﬁcult position, as they had to strike a balance between

rewarding the ofﬁcers who had helped them defeat the Tây SKn, honoring

their ancestors as royal precursors to this new dynasty, and respecting the

memory of the Lê Dynasty, which their ancestors had served.

104

The Con-

fucian repertoire, however, was ﬁlled with examples and precedents that one

could use to justify one’s actions. That the Nguy#n did so demonstrates its

central importance to them.

Inventing a Confucian Past

From the previous discussion it should be clear that a great deal of intellec-

tual effort has been expended over the past four decades toward demon-

strating the supposed limited appeal and inﬂuence of the Confucian

repertoire in premodern Vietnam. Given that many of these arguments can

be contested, scholars who work on the modern period face particular difﬁ-

culties in attempting to assess the role of the Confucian repertoire in the

twentieth century in a nuanced manner. We can get a sense of this difﬁculty

from Shawn McHale’s fascinating examination of the rise of a modern print

culture in early twentieth-century Vietnam, Print and Power: Confucianism,

Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam. In this work,

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McHale devotes a chapter to a discussion of some major works from the

1920s to 1940s that debated the role of Confucianism in Vietnamese history

and society. Familiar with the scholarship on premodern Vietnam, with its

emphasis on the limited role of the Confucian repertoire, and having con-

ducted some research of his own on the Tr6n period that echoed this same

perspective, McHale expresses his surprise in this work at ﬁnding prominent

intellectuals from the period, such as Tr6n TrCng Kim, declaring that Con-

fucianism was historically central to the Vietnamese identity.

105

Before examining Tr6n TrCng Kim’s magnum opus, Confucianism [Nho

giáo], McHale reminds his readers of the arguments that scholars have made

about Confucianism and the Vietnamese past, namely, that the Tr6n period

was not Confucian, that Confucian inﬂuence rose and fell with state power

and was thus limited in its overall reach, and that Confucianism played a

limited role in Aàng Trong. Having thus established “the place of Confu-

cianism in Vietnamese history,” McHale then goes on to examine what he

sees as Tr6n TrCng Kim’s “mapping of a ‘forgotten’ Confucian antiquity.”

106

In particular, McHale notes that Tr6n TrCng Kim saw his work on Con-

fucianism as a map from the past that the current generation could use to

ﬁnd their way through the troubled present. This map worked by showing

Vietnamese the importance of their Confucian heritage and encouraging

them not to forsake it. However, given that from McHale’s perspective the

role of Confucianism in Vietnam’s past had been relatively weak, he argues

that “the past that Tr6n TrCng Kim was interested in ‘remembering’ was

more a projection onto the past than a chronicle of it.”

107

McHale suggests

further that this practice of imagining a past that had never existed led Tr6n

TrCng Kim to certain contradictions. On the one hand, he felt that Confu-

cianism had inﬂuenced virtually every aspect of life in the past, but on the

other, he had to explain its rapid demise in the twentieth century. Tr6n

TrCng Kim did so by arguing that in the past Vietnamese had focused too

heavily on studying for examination success and in the process had failed to

grasp the true meaning of Confucianism, or as McHale summarizes this

point, Vietnamese had “simply mimicked true Confucianism.”

108

Tr6n TrCng Kim was a fascinating individual, and he did certainly project

some anachronistic ideas onto the past. However, his views also suggest the

powerful hold of certain ideas on the Vietnamese elite, from centuries past

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right up to Tr6n TrCng Kim’s day. We can see this, for instance, in his expla-

nation for the demise of Confucianism. Although probably not the ﬁrst to

offer such a criticism, Confucius is recorded to have said, “Those who stud-

ied in antiquity did so for themselves, while those who study today do so for

others.”

109

This perception that there was a dichotomy between scholars

who studied for superﬁcial reasons (“for others,” and by extension, for “other

purposes”) and those who studied to cultivate themselves and obtain true

knowledge gained even more salience during the Song Dynasty with the

emergence of the Learning of the Way, or neo-Confucianism. Zhu Xi, the

most famous proponent of this school of thought, felt that it was precisely

because scholars were studying for superﬁcial goals that the China of his day

was suffering from foreign invasions—be they human, in the form of the Jin,

or intellectual, in Buddhism. Here Zhu Xi placed particular blame on the

civil service examination, as he felt that the wealth and prestige that suc-

cessful exam graduates accrued led aspirants to disregard the true meaning

of the classics and to focus all of their efforts on passing the exams.

110

Zhu Xi thus wanted scholars to focus once again on learning for their

own beneﬁt. He argued that scholars could indeed come to apprehend the

true meaning of the classics if they engaged in self-cultivation, a practice

probably inspired by Buddhist meditation, and if they followed a certain

progression in reading through the classics.

111

In the end, however, Zhu Xi’s

emphasis on discovering the true meaning of the classics through self-

cultivation and reﬂective reading may have served to exacerbate the sense

that there was a dichotomy between true learning and what scholars engaged

in to pass the civil service examinations, for literati would continue to lament

the poor quality of examination candidates in the centuries that followed.

Viewed from this context, it is hardly surprising that Tr6n TrCng Kim

would claim that the inﬂuence of Confucianism was dwindling fast in

twentieth-century Vietnam because scholars, presumably in the ﬁnal years

that the exams were held, had focused too narrowly on passing the exami-

nations and had not apprehended the true meaning of Confucianism. Such

an opinion suggests that this concept of a dichotomy between true and

superﬁcial learning was alive and well in the mind of scholars like Tr6n

TrCng Kim as late as the 1930s. What is interesting about Tr6n TrCng Kim,

however, is his proposal for reapprehending the true meaning and import of

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that teaching. For according to McHale, Tr6n TrCng Kim felt that one could

use intuition to do this.

The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) scholar Wang Yangming had already pro-

posed this concept, but Tr6n TrCng Kim was now borrowing it from the

French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas were in vogue in East Asia

at the time.

112

Thus, Tr6n TrCng Kim’s complaint may seem straightforward,

but it was likely loaded with signiﬁcance, both historical and cultural.

However, until work on the premodern period can better illuminate the his-

torical role of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam, such signiﬁcance will

probably elude us.

The World Waiting in the Archives

While various aspects of what we can call the Confucian repertoire have

been discussed in the above-mentioned works, much of this scholarship has

been based on an extremely limited selection of texts, the majority of which

have long been available in quFc ngTtranslation. Many of these sources only

peripherally deal with some of the more central aspects of the Confucian

repertoire, such as philosophy, death ritual, and the civil service exams. In

contrast, sitting unexamined in Vietnamese archives are a wealth of manu-

scripts, in both classical Chinese and Nnm, that have the potential to revo-

lutionize our understanding of the role of the Confucian repertoire in

Vietnam’s past. In what follows I will brieﬂy try to describe the types of mate-

rials that exist, as well as the kinds of knowledge that we can gain from them.

One of the most glaring lacunae in our understanding of the historical

importance and functions of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam regards

philosophy. Textual exegesis was arguably the premier technique for dis-

cussing philosophical issues contained in the classics, and yet virtually no

scholarship has been done on this topic. Recently, Wai-Ming Ng composed

a short piece on an early twentieth-century commentary on the Classic of

Changes; though limited in scope, Ng’s study nonetheless gives a sense of

the rich ideas that scholars can ﬁnd in such commentaries.

113

Alexander

Woodside, meanwhile, has written in broad terms of “primordialism” in

Vietnamese thought. Woodside’s argument is that Vietnamese scholars priv-

ileged original Zhou-era texts over the metaphysical arguments of the Song

and later periods.

114

This point, although insightful, is limited in its plausibility

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by the fact that it is based on a small selection of sources, none of which are

works in which the authors directly discuss the classics.

It would be wonderful if a scholar would test Woodside’s assertion by

examining some of the numerous commentaries that Vietnamese wrote on

the classics, all of which exist in manuscript form in Vietnam. A passing

glance at some of these works suggests that Woodside is correct in his asser-

tion that Vietnamese scholars did not focus on metaphysical discussions of

their own. Nonetheless, they were very much aware of Song and post-Song

scholarship on these works, as we can see in the references that Vietnamese

writers make to Song Dynasty scholars, such as Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi, as

well as to scholars from the Ming.

Just to mention a few more studies of the Classic of Changes: a work com-

piled in 1805, Persisting Questions about the Meaning of the Changes [D\ch

nghQa tOn nghi], focuses largely on explaining Zhu Xi’s interpretation of that

work.

115

An 1815 preface to a Nnm translation of the Classic of Changes

notes that the interpretations of Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi are unsurpassed,

whereas another undated Nnm translation includes the preface to Cheng

Yi’s commentary on the Changes.

116

Therefore, even if Vietnamese were

“primordial” in their philosophical interests, they nonetheless kept up with

later scholarship. At this point, how or whether Vietnamese scholarship was

in any way distinct from similar scholarship in late imperial China, Korea,

and Japan are all topics that can fruitfully be explored given the abundance

of available materials.

117

A related topic about which there is likewise an abundance of materials

that scholars can mine concerns the civil service exams. Although scholars

like Zhu Xi complained that the civil service exams were a hindrance to

gaining a true understanding of the classics, in actuality, by our standards

today Zhu Xi’s failed scholars likely learned a great deal about those works as

they studied for the exams. The exams were thus an important institution for

the perpetuation of the teachings of the classics, and in order to truly under-

stand the place of the Confucian repertoire in Vietnam we need to com-

prehend how the exams worked and what their impact on society was.

Alexander Woodside devoted a chapter of Vietnam and the Chinese

Model to this topic. He provided an outline of how the exams worked and

also discussed such issues as the curriculum that candidates studied in

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preparation. Recently, Nola Cooke has published a series of articles that crit-

icize Woodside’s claim that the exams were meritocratic and that literati

from the Red River Delta took advantage of their long history of scholarship

to rise through the ranks in the Nguy#n Dynasty.

118

In tracing the career tra-

jectories of various Nguy#n Dynasty ofﬁcials, Cooke ﬁnds that applicants

from the northern part of the empire were actually discriminated against,

and that less scholastically qualiﬁed individuals from the center and south

were allowed to skip exams and rise through the ranks.

While Cooke’s ﬁndings are a welcome addition to our understanding of

nineteenth-century Vietnam, they will come as no surprise to anyone who

has read any of the many studies on the civil service examination in China

that have come out in the decades since Woodside published his study.

119

Indeed, our understanding of the civil service examinations in China is so

much more sophisticated than it was when Woodside researched and wrote

his book that the absence of similar work on Vietnam points to another great

void in our knowledge of that land. Cooke’s articles likewise would have

beneﬁted from a familiarity with the work on China; while her claim that

the exam system was not meritocratic is persuasive, her effort to extrapolate

from this that “the nineteenth century was no era of widespread Neo-

Confucian resurgence” is less convincing, for she never explains what she

thinks Neo-Confucianism is and how it can be detected or measured in soci-

ety. Cooke admits that the individuals who were promoted without having to

take all of the exams were “hardly uneducated,” but she never indicates what

their education consisted of and how it differed from those who passed all of

the exams.

120

To ﬁnd answers to such issues, scholars need to examine what exam can-

didates wrote as well as what the average person studied to become literate.

For the former, there are many extant collections of sample essays from the

various levels of the exam system that historians could examine to determine

what candidates were tested on and whether or not there was a clear dis-

tinction between the regional and metropolitan exams in terms of scholastic

ability. At the other end of the spectrum, scholars could examine educa-

tional primers to ﬁnd the kind of ideas that children were ﬁrst exposed to.

One 1834 work, the New Edition of the Precious Mirror for Enlightening the

Young [Tân toyn thiCu tiWu khai tâm byo giám], for instance, contains

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excerpts on proper behavior from such works as the Record of Rites, the Greater

Learning [Daxue], the Analects [Lunyu], Zhu Xi’s Reﬂections on Things at

Hand [Jinsi lu], and Hong Zicheng’s Vegetable Root Discourse [Caigen tan].

121

The inclusion of passages from this latter work in a text that also con-

tains excerpts from the classics points to another unexplored, but rich,

topic—what we might call popular Confucian thought. The Vegetable Root

Discourse is a Ming Dynasty work that mixes ideas from all of the “three

repertoires” and presents simple advice on how the average person can live

a good life.

122

A wide variety of such texts circulated in late imperial China.

In general, they sought to promote moral behavior among the common

people, encouraging them to accumulate merit through such behavior as a

way to avoid supernatural retribution. Referred to as “morality books” or

“ledgers of merit and demerit,” these texts also spread to Vietnam, and

there are extant copies of these works that scholars could examine to gain a

sense of how ideas from the Confucian repertoire were propagated at a

more popular level.

123

Related to these works are numerous extant examples of spirit writing, a

phenomenon that spread to Vietnam from China around the turn of the

nineteenth century. In this genre, mediums would become possessed by

spirits and thereby communicate essentially the same messages that one

found in morality books and ledgers of merit and demerit. At ﬁrst, the mes-

sages were transmitted by spirits that originated in China, usually Wenchang

Dijun. But by the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, Viet-

namese spirits, such as that of the goddess Li#u Hfnh, were assisting

Wenchang Dijun in communicating through mediums and exhorting

Vietnamese to follow the moral dictates of the Confucian repertoire—that

is, for “ofﬁcials to be loyal, children to be ﬁlial, older siblings to be fraternal,

younger siblings to be respectful, husbands and wives to live in harmony,

friends to rely on trust, the ﬁve relationships to conquer all, and the hundred

moral attributes to never decay.”

124

These are just a few of the many topics that are central to the Confucian

repertoire but that have yet to be examined. In addition to materials on the

above topics, there is an extensive body of extant writings on rituals, as well

as community compacts, that is, sets of rules that were employed to regulate

behavior and ritual performances at the village level. Finally, there is also

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the issue of the relationship between the Confucian repertoire and the spirit

world. While the Departed Spirit of the ViDt Realm is by now well-known to

scholars, by the nineteenth century the court was ofﬁcially recognizing over

a thousand tutelary spirits. This is another topic for which there is a wealth

of materials, and one that could give us a sense of how the court employed

the Confucian repertoire to appropriate and control the spirit world.

125

Conclusion

What, then, is the “state of the ﬁeld” for the study of “Confucianism” in

Vietnam? Again, I would have to argue that there basically is no such ﬁeld.

Scholars simply have not yet researched core aspects of the Confucian

repertoire. There is only one brief article on a commentary to a classic,

although numerous such works are still extant. Very little has been written

on ritual, a critical element in the Confucian repertoire. Our understanding

of the civil service examination system is still comparatively rudimentary. No

one has examined in detail morality books or community compacts to give

us a sense of how ideas from the Confucian repertoire might have impacted

the lives of common people. We know precious little about the curriculum

used for general literacy or education. The list goes on and on and on.

Meanwhile, alongside this dearth of core scholarship is the ﬂawed dom-

inant paradigm that we have created, which is based on an abundance of

studies that only indirectly deal with the Confucian repertoire but that argue

for its limited inﬂuence and appeal. Unfortunately, even though so much

work needs to be done, I am not at all optimistic that anyone will pursue

such research. First, doing so will require that whoever engages in this work

have a strong foundation in classical Chinese. To really get at the heart of

the role that the Confucian repertoire played in Vietnam’s past will require

that scholars examine manuscripts in the raw, without reliance on the crutch

of quFc ngT, but few scholars today engage in that type of research. Fortunately,

a good deal of scholarship on the Confucian repertoire in China does exist,

and therefore, historians who take advantage of that body of work will gain

some guidance.

Doing so, however, will require “going through China to get to

Vietnam,” and that is a step very few individuals take. Indeed, as I stated at

the outset, much of the scholarship discussed in this paper is to some

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degree part of an effort to counter the claims of colonial-era scholars that

Vietnam was a “little China.” Ironically, in challenging this claim, schol-

ars generally appropriated, rather than interrogated, the concept of

“China” that colonial scholars employed. Meantime, China studies have

evolved a more nuanced understanding of Chinese imperial history.

While Henri Maspero once argued that in extending its bureaucratic gov-

ernment to Vietnam in the ﬁrst millennium CE, China brought an

unprecedented degree of cohesion to Vietnamese society, today historians

of China debate the very idea of a bureaucratic government in early impe-

rial China, and instead envision the China of that time in terms that are

much more ﬂuid and heterodox than colonial-era scholars, like Maspero,

ever imagined.

126

It is precisely through understandings such as these that scholars working

on China have started to employ terms like “repertoire,” for they realize that

conveying the nuances of the past that previous generations of scholars over-

looked at times requires the creation of a new vocabulary. This is a point that

scholars working on Vietnam should heed as well, for it will assist us in our

effort to move out from under the long shadow cast by colonial-era scholar-

ship and its later refutation, so that we can make sense of the voices of ﬁgures

like LBVen Ph+c and Li#u Hfnh on their own terms. Until that is achieved,

we will have to keep in mind that the current scholarship on the Confucian

repertoire in Vietnam, like the colonial-era scholarship that preceded it,

possesses both strengths and weaknesses and should be approached with

caution. ■

liam c. kelley is Associate Professor, Department of History, University

of Hawai‘i, Manoa. He would like to thank the participants of the “Vietnam

Studies: States of the Field” conference (April 6, 2006, University of

California, Berkeley), especially Keith Taylor and Charles Wheeler, for

their insightful comments. He also thanks the two JVS reviewers and the

JVS editors for their assistance in the revision process.

abstract

This article reviews the scholarship on Confucianism in premodern

Vietnam by the leading ﬁgures in the ﬁeld in North America and Australia.

By testing the ﬁndings of this scholarship against primary sources and simi-

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lar work done on China, the author concludes that scholars have not

acknowledged the full role that Confucianism played in Vietnam’s past,

and that key research remains to be done. The article concludes with sug-

gestions for such research.

keywords: Confucianism, Vietnam, China, premodern history

Notes

1. Thomas A. Wilson, “Introduction: Culture, Society, Politics and the Cult of

Confucius,” in On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics and the Forma-

tion of the Cult of Confucius, ed. Thomas A. Wilson (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 24.

2. See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and

Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

3. See Robert Ford Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions (In the Modern

West and in Early Medieval China),” History of Religions 42, no. 4 (2003):

317–319; Robert Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models

of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 2002), 5.

4. Benjamin A. Elman with John B. Duncan and Herman Ooms, “Introduc-

tion,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea

and Vietnam, eds. Benjamin A. Elman et al. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian

Paciﬁc Monograph Series, 2002), 4–5.

5. R.B. Smith, “The Cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam,” in Aspects of Viet-

namese History, ed. Walter F. Vella (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,

1973), 1–29.

6. For more on this, see Evelyn Rawski, “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the

Qing,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1997): 829–850, and Ho Ping-ti, “In

Defense of Siniﬁcation: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s ‘Reenvisioning the

Qing,’” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 123–155.

7. LBVen Ph+c, Mân hành t\p v]nh [Random Chants from a Journey to Mân]

(1831), A. 1291, 24b–25a.

8. For more on these points, see J.D. Legge, “The Writing of Southeast Asian

History,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, part 1, From Early

Times to c. 1500, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999), 1–50, and John Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous His-

tory of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2

(1961): 72–102.

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9. Keith Weller Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1983).

10. It should be noted that Taylor clearly situated his work during this period as a

challenge to colonial-era scholarship. See, for instance, his “An Evaluation of

the Chinese Period in Vietnamese History,” The Journal of Asiatic Studies 23,

no. 1 (1980):139–164.

11. K.W. Taylor, “Notes on the Vi0tAi0n U Linh T$p,” Vietnam Forum 8 (1986): 42.

12. Taylor, “Authority and Legitimacy in Eleventh-Century Vietnam,” in South-

east Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, eds. David G. Marr and A.C. Milner

(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 143.

13. Taylor, “Authority and Legitimacy,” 141. Also see Taylor, Birth of Vietnam, 296.

14. Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1990).

15. Terry F. Kleeman, A God’s Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of

Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); and

Ellen G. Neskar, “The Cult of Worthies: A Study of Shrines Honoring Local

Confucian Worthies in the Sung Dynasty (960–1279)” (PhD dissertation,

Columbia University, 1993).

16. Taylor, “Authority and Legitimacy,” 156–161. Keith Taylor has written a more

recent article that more directly addresses Gao Pian’s position in Vietnamese

history. However, the focus of that article is on nineteenth-century memories

of Gao Pian rather than his ninth-century activities. See Keith W. Taylor, “A

Southern Remembrance of Cao Bijn,” in Liber Amicorum: Mélanges offerts

au Professeur Phan Huy Lê [Liber Amicorum: A Miscellany Offered to Profes-

sor Phan Huy Lê], eds. Philippe Papin and John Kleinen (Hà N4i: Thanh

Niên, 1999), 241–258.

17. Michel Strickmann, “The Consecration Sutra: A Buddhist Book of Spells,” in

Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (Honolulu: University

of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 98.

18. For more on this, see Kenneth Ch’en, The Chinese Transformation of

Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

19. For a fuller understanding of Wolters’ ideas on this topic, see his History, Cul-

ture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY:

Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999).

20. There is an enormous body of literature on this topic. For a good place to start,

see Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1999).

21. For more on these works, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

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22. To get a sense of the type of issues that Chinese scholars debated, see Ching-i

Tu, ed., Classics and Interpretations: The Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese

Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).

23. O.W. Wolters, Two Essays on x\i ViDt in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven,

CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), 5–6.

24. NgnS˜

Liên, x\i ViDt sHkPtoàn th}[Complete Book of the Historical Records

of Afi Vi0t], ed. Chen Jinghe, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka

Kenkyujo Fuzoku Toyogaku Bunken Senta, 1984), 113–114.

25. O.W. Wolters, “Historians and Emperors in Vietnam and China: Comments

Arising out of Lê Ven HMu’s History, Presented to the Tr6n Court in 1272,” in

Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, eds. Anthony Reid and David Marr

(Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), 70.

26. Ibid., 73.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 83.

29. Wolters, x\i ViDt in the Fourteenth Century, 40.

30. This is my own translation. ry Ban Khoa HCc Xã H4i Vi0t Nam, Vi0n Ven

HCc [Social Sciences of Vietnam Committee, Institute of Literature], ThL-vJn

LP-Tr2n[LB-Tr6n Poetry and Prose], vol. 3 (Hà N4i: Khoa HCc Xã H4i, 1978),

99.

31. For more on this, see Liam C. Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry

and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,

2005), 185–188.

32. Wolters, x\i ViDt in the Fourteenth Century, 27.

33. Ibid., 25.

34. Yijing, xici xia.

35. Wolters, x\i ViDt in the Fourteenth Century, 26.

36. Ibid., 38.

37. Ibid., 39.

38. Ibid., 25 and 40.

39. Grant Evans, an expert on Laos, however, is one exception. See his “Between

the Global and the Local There Are Regions, Culture Areas, and National

States: A Review Article,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2002):

147–162.

40. John K. Whitmore, “From Classical Scholarship to Confucian Belief in

Vietnam,” Vietnam Forum 9 (1987): 50.

41. John K. Whitmore, “Chu Ven An and the Rise of ‘Antiquity’ in 14th c. Afi

Vi0t,” Vietnam Review 1 (1996): 50–61.

42. Wolters, x\i ViDt in the Fourteenth Century, 39; Whitmore, “From Classical

Scholarship,” 56.

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43.John K. Whitmore, “Foreign Inﬂuences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core: A

Discussion of the Premodern Period,” in Borrowings and Adaptations in Viet-

namese Culture, ed. TrMKng B9u Lâm (Honolulu: Center for Asian and Paciﬁc

Studies, 1987), 8; Whitmore, “From Classical Scholarship,” 54.

44.Cf. John K. Whitmore, Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371–1421) (New

Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies), 1985.

45.K.W. Taylor, “Vietnamese Confucian Narratives,” in Rethinking Confucian-

ism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, eds. Benjamin A.

Elman et al. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Paciﬁc Monograph Series, 2002), 339.

46.Taylor, “Vietnamese Confucian Narratives,” 344–345.

47.The ﬁrst and third quotes are from Taylor, “Vietnamese Confucian Narratives,”

345, while the second is from Whitmore, “Literati Culture and Integration in

Afi Vi0t, c. 1430–c. 1840,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 666–667.

48.Whitmore, “Literati Culture and Integration,” 674.

49.K.W. Taylor, “The Literati Revival in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam,” Journal

of Southeast Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1987): 1–23.

50.R.B. Smith, “The Cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam,” 1–29.

51. George Dutton, “Reassessing Confucianism in the Tây SKn Regime

(1788–1802), South East Asia Research 13, no. 2 (2005): 119–145.

52.Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics, 2:364–365. The quoted items are on

page 365.

53.Edward L. Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 7.

54.Phan Ven Các et al., comps, VJn khVc Hán Nôm ViDt Nam, vol. 2, ThNi Tr2n

[Hán Nnm Inscriptions of Vietnam, vol. 2, Tr6n Period] (Hà N4i: Vi0n Nghiên

C+u Hán Nnm, 2002), 303.

55.Judith A. Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-En (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1980).

56.Timothy Brook, “Rethinking Syncretism: The Unity of the Three Teachings

and Their Joint Worship in Late-Imperial China,” Journal of Chinese Religions

21 (1993): 13–44.

57.Mai Quhc Liên, ed., Ngô Thì Nhum, tác phXm[NgnThì Nh$m, Works],

vol. 3 (Hà N4i: Ven HCc, 2002), 265–266.

58.Dung Ngoc Duong, “Buddhist Discourse in Traditional Vietnam”

(PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2001), 150.

59.Whitmore, “Foreign Inﬂuences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core,” 8.

60.For examples of this, as well as for the closely related terms b\ch diDn lang and

b\ch diDn th}lang in works such as the History of the Jin [Jinshu], the History

of the Song [Songshu], and in the poetry of Tang Dynasty poets Du Fu and Bo

Juyi, see the citations for these terms in Lin Yin and Gao Ming, comps.,

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Zhongwen da cidian [Great Dictionary of Chinese], vol. 6 (Taibei: Zhongguo

Wenhua Daxue, 1982), 857.

61. NgnS˜

Liên, x\i ViDt sHkPtoàn th}, 202, 207.

62.Ibid., 207–208.

63.Whitmore, “Literati Culture and Integration,” 677.

64.Taylor, “Vietnamese Confucian Narratives,” 346.

65.Keith Taylor, “Nguy#n Hoàng and the Beginning of Vietnam’s Southward

Expansion,” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and

Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993): 42–65; Li

Tana, NguyWn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eigh-

teenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University,

1998), as well as her article, “An Alternative Vietnam? The Nguy#n Kingdom

in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southeast Asian

Studies 29, no. 1 (1998): 111–121; Nola Cooke, “Regionalism and the Nature of

Nguy#n Rule in Seventeenth-Century Aàng Trong (Cochinchina),” Journal

of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (1998): 122–161; and Choi Byung Wook,

Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang (1820–1841) (Ithaca, NY:

Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2004).

66.Li Tana, NguyWnCochinchina, 101.

67.Ibid., 103.

68.Ibid., 102.

69.Ibid., 104–106.

70.Ibid., 110.

71. To get a sense of this process, see Kenneth Dean, “Transformations of the She

(Altars of the Soil) in Fujian,” Cahiers d’Extême-Asie 10 (1998): 19–75.

72. Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacriﬁce as Text/Performance in

Eighteenth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 130–131.

73.LBT!Xuyên, ViDt IiDn u linh tup[Departed Spirits of the Vi0t Realm] (Sài

Gòn: Khai Trí, 1961), 218. Li Tana and I both work with the classical Chinese

text appended to this quFc ngTtranslation.

74.Nguy#n Th!Anh, “The Vietnamization of the Cham Deity Po Nagar,” in

Essays Into Vietnamese Pasts, eds. K.W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (Ithaca,

NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1995), 46–47.

75.Li Tana, NguyWnCochinchina, 105.

76.Aào Thái Hành, “La Déese Li#u Hfnh” [The Goddess Li#u Hfnh], Bulletin

des Amis du Vieux HuC1, no. 2 (1914): 167–186; Nguy#n Th!Anh, “The

Vietnamization of the Cham Deity Po Nagar,” 42–50.

77.Aoàn ThiAi;m, TruyMn kUtân phy[New Register of Tales of the Strange]

(1811), A. 48, 20b-23b, or, for a summary of this passage in English, Olga Dror,

“Aoàn ThiAi;m’s ‘Story of the Vân Cát Goddess’ as a Story of Emancipa-

tion,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2002): 67.

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78.Aoàn ThiAi;m, TruyMn kUtân phy, 31a–31b.

79.For a description of this research, see Judith Magee Boltz, “Not By the Seal of

Ofﬁce Alone: New Weapons in Battles with the Supernatural,” in Religion and

Society in T’ang and Sung China, eds. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Peter N.

Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), 242.

80.Li Tana, NguyWnCochinchina, 46.

81. Ibid., 48.

82. Ibid., 109.

83.x\i Nam thZc lEc tiMn biên [Veritable Records of Afi Nam, Preliminary Com-

pilation] (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Linguistic Studies, 1961), 10/6a–7b.

84.Ibid., 10/7b.

85.Liji [Record of Rites], Quli xia.

86.Li Tana, NguyWnCochinchina, 100.

87.Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative

Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nine-

teenth Century (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univer-

sity, 1971, reprint 1988), 1. Citations are to the 1988 edition.

88.Ibid., 8.

89.Ibid., 96.

90.A? Ven Ninh, TSIiWn chAc quan ViDt Nam [Dictionary of Vietnamese Ofﬁcial

Titles] (Hà N4i: Thanh Niên, 2002), 99, 465.

91. Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, 27.

92.Ibid., 28.

93.Ibid., 9–13.

94.Ibid., 10–12.

95.There is one spirit, Phùng HMng, who is referred to in this work as the “BhCái

Afi VMKng,” with I\i v}Lng meaning “great king.” Keith Taylor has hypothe-

sized that bFmight have originally been read as vua, and cái might have meant

“great,” to produce a title that stated “great king” in both Vietnamese and Sino-

Vietnamese forms. In the text itself, however, bFand cái are speciﬁcally trans-

lated as “father” and “mother,” respectively. Therefore, even if this title

contained a character that was originally read as vua, by the time this text was

recorded in the fourteenth century, that reading was apparently no longer com-

monly recognized. See Keith Taylor, “Phùng HMng: Mencian King or Austric

Paramount?” Vietnam Forum 8 (1986): 10–25; and LBT!Xuyên, ViDt IiDn u linh

tup lEc[Record of the Departed Spirits of the Vi0t Realm], in Yuenan hanwen

xiaoshuo congkan [Collection of Vietnamese Novels in Chinese], eds. Chan

Hing-ho, Cheng A-tsai, and Tr6n Ngh˜

a, series 2, vol. 5 (Paris and Taipei: École

Française d’Extrême-Orient and Student Book Company, 1992), 22.

96.Nola Cooke, “The Myth of the Restoration: Aàng-Trong Inﬂuences in the

Spiritual Life of the Early Nguy#n Dynasty (1802–47),” in The Last Stand of

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Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast

Asia and Korea, 1750–1900, ed. Anthony Reid (Melbourne, Australia:

Macmillan Press, 1997), 269–270.

97.Ibid., 272–273.

98.Ibid., 275.

99.For more on this, see Evelyn S. Rawski, “The Imperial Way of Death: Ming

and Ch’ing Emperors and Death Ritual,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and

Modern China, eds. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 228–253.

100.x\i Nam thZc lEcchính biên IDnh{t k ?

y[Veritable Records of Afi Nam, Pri-

mary Compilation, First Era] (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Linguistic Studies,

1963), 24/11a.

101. Ibid., 19/4a.

102. Ibid., 19/5a–5b.

103.See Chunqiu, Zhuanggong 4; Gongyang zhuan, Zhuanggong 4; James Legge,

The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew with The Tso Chuen (Hong

Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 76–77.

104. Philippe Langlet, L’Ancienne Historiographie d’État au Vietnam, Tome I, Raisons

d’être, conditions d’élaboration et caractères au siècle des NguyWn[The Old Histo-

riography of the State in Vietnam, vol. 1, Its Purpose, Development and Charac-

ter in the Nguy#n Century] (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1990), 18.

105.Shawn Frederick McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and

Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i

Press, 2004), 77–88. McHale’s main work on the Tr6n is “‘Texts and Bodies’:

Refashioning the Disturbing Past of Tr6n Vietnam (1225–1400),” Journal of the

Social and Economic History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999): 494–518.

106.McHale, Print and Power, 69–77.

107.Ibid., 80.

108.Ibid., 81.

109.Lunyu [Analects], 14.24.

110. Daniel K. Gardner, Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of

Master Chu, Arranged Topically (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1990), 15–22.

111. For more on the importance of self-cultivation, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confu-

cian Moral Self Cultivation (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 49–66; and for Zhu

Xi’s plan for learning, see Gardner, Learning to Be a Sage, 35–56.

112. McHale, Print and Power, 81–82. McHale notes that Tr6n TrCng Kim might

have learned about Bergson from the Chinese thinker Liang Shuming, but

also states that he may have learned about Bergson from his own reading in

French. For more on Bergson and Liang Shuming, see An Yanming, “Liang

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Shuming and Henri Bergson on Intuition: Cultural Context and the Evolu-

tion of Terms,” Philosophy East and West 47, no. 3 (1997): 337–362.

113. Wai-Ming Ng, “Yijing Scholarship in Late-Nguyen Vietnam: A Study of Le

Van Ngu’s Chu Dich Cuu Nguyen (An Investigation of the Origins of the

Yijing, 1916),” Review of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 1–14.

114. Alexander Woodside, “Classical Primordialism and the Historical Agendas of

Vietnamese Confucianism,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in

China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, eds. Benjamin A. Elman et al. (Los Angeles:

UCLA Asian Paciﬁc Monograph Series, 2002), 116–143.

115. Anonymous, D]ch ngh˜

a tOn nghi [Persisting Questions about the Meaning of

the Changes] (1805), A. 363.

116. A<ng Thái Bàng, comp., Chu d]ch quFc âm ca [An Ode in the Kingdom’s

Language of the Zhou Changes], (1815, orig. comp., 1750), AB. 29, 4b; Anony-

mous, D]ch kinh chính vJn diWn nghQa [The Extended Meaning of the Ortho-

dox Text of the Classic of Changes], (n.d.), VHv. 1114.

117. For a list of Vietnamese commentaries on the “Confucian classics,” see Trinh

Kh:c Mfnh, “ThMtich Hán Nnm Vi0t Nam lu$n giOi vjtAth}và ng˜ukinh

hi0n có 1Vi0n Nghiên C+u Hán Nnm [Vietnamese Han Nom Works on the

Four Book and Five Classics Presently Held at the Han Nom Institute],” T\p

Chí Hán Nôm 68, no. 1 (2005): 33–43.

118. See Nola Cooke, “Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization in His-

torical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations (1463–1883),” Jour-

nal of Southeast Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1994): 270–312; “The Composition of

the Nineteenth-Century Political Elite of Pre-Colonial Nguy#n Vietnam

(1802–1883),” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 4 (1995): 741–764; “Southern

Regionalism and the Composition of the Nguy#n Ruling Elite (1802–83),”

Asian Studies Review 23, no. 2 (1999): 205–231.

119. For a list of this scholarship, see the bibliography in Benjamin A. Elman, A

Cultural History of Civil Service Exams in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

120. Cooke, “Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization,” 312 and 306,

respectively.

121. Anonymous, Tân toyn thiCu tiWu khai tâm byo giám [New Edition of the Pre-

cious Mirror for Enlightening the Young], (1834), VHv. 719.

122. See Daniel W.Y. Kwok, “Afterward,” in Vegetable Roots Discourse: Wisdom

from Ming China on Life and Living, trans., Robert Aitken with Daniel W.Y.

Kwok (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006), 165–216.

123. For a study on these works in China, see Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Ledgers of

Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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124. Anonymous, Tam v]thánh mVu cyng thCchân kinh [The True Classic of the

Three Sagely Mothers’ Warning to the World] (1906), VHv. 3742, 9b.

125. See Tr6n Ngh˜

a, ed., Di syn Hán Nôm ViDt Nam th}mEc IMyCu, bvdi 1

[Catalog and Abstracts of Vietnam’s Hán Nnm Heritage, Supplement 1],

2 vols. (Hà N4i: Khoa HCc Xã H4i, 2002).

126. For Henri Maspero’s claim, see his “L’Expédition de Ma Yuan,” Bulletin de

l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 18 (1918): 27–28. To get a sense of what his-

torians today think government was like during this period in China, see

Dennis Grafﬂin, “Reinventing China: Pseudobureaucracy in the Early South-

ern Dynasties,” in State and Society in Early Medieval China, ed. Albert Dien

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 139–170; Christopher Leigh

Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial

China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1998); and Charles Holcombe,

In the Shadow of the Han: Literati Thought and Society at the Beginning of the

Southern Dynasties (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994).

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Economic Institution, Religion, and Economic Development: Confucianism and Economy in Vietnam after The Implementation of the Doi Moi Policy

Article

Full-text available

May 2024

Wen-Tung Lin

Among the three borderline Mainland Southeast Asian countries, located in the Indochinese Peninsula, Vietnam has the best economic performance, compared to Laos and Cambodia. The GDP per capita of Vietnam reached US$4,163 in 2022, which was two times higher than Laos and Cambodia. While economic reform policies, political and economic institutions, and colonial history, are similar in all three countries, why does Vietnam have better economic development? Researchers pointed out the economic factors, specifically the positive effects of economic reforms on economic performance. Nonetheless, it is not convincing, while the economic reform in all three countries emphasized property rights, and encouraged decentralization, privatization, and marketization. This study suggested the religious factor of Confucianism in Vietnam that reinforce the effects of economic institutions on economic development, which leads to greater economic performance. The Confucian characteristics of emphasis on saving, education, and following the government's instruction and policies, support the government’s economic reform, which is conducive to economic development.

Generation Z job seekers in Vietnam: CSR-based employer attractiveness and job pursuit intention

Article

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Apr 2022

This study aims to advance our understanding of the effects of Generation Z job seekers’ attitudes towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) and initial job pursuit intention (JPI). A survey of 290 senior students in Vietnam shows that two of three aspects of Generation Z job seekers’ attitudes towards CSR (positive CSR assessment and CSR engagement) are positively related to JPI. In addition, the relationship between Generation Z job seekers’ attitudes towards CSR and JPI is mediated by CSR-based employer attractiveness. These findings suggest that including social and environmental issues into corporate strategy is a valuable approach for attracting Generation Z job seekers. We discuss the implications for theory and practice as well as the limitations and directions for future research, of these findings.

Confucian Legal Tradition

Chapter

Feb 2024

Ngoc Son Bui

Comparative law is a common subject-matter of research and teaching in many universities around the world, and the twenty-first century has aptly been termed 'the era of comparative law'. This Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law presents a truly global perspective of comparative law today. The contributors are drawn from all parts of the world to provide different perspectives on how we understand the 'law' and how it operates in practice. In substance, the Handbook contains 36 chapters covering a broad range of topics, divided under the following headings: 'Methods of Comparative Law' (Part I), 'Legal Families and Geographical Comparisons' (Part II), 'Central Themes in Comparative Law' (Part III); and 'Comparative Law beyond the State' (Part IV).

An Overview of State-Religion Relationship in Vietnam

Chapter

Oct 2023

During the history of Vietnam, religion was considered by the states as an important factor in the agenda of nation-building. Major religious traditions were provided favorable conditions for development and selected religious doctrines were utilized for the purpose of ruling the nation and education for the people by feudal states. In current times, the state-religion relationship has become more complicated and politically sensitive. What are the prominent patterns of the state-religion relationship in Vietnam at different historical periods? In today’s social context conditioned by international integration, what are remarkable changes and that which drives the relationship between the secular socialist state and religion? This chapter seeks to shed light on these issues by reviewing and analyzing the state-religion relationship in Vietnam since the formation of the independent Vietnamese state until the present.

Digital Vietnam: State of the ‘State of the Field’, Saigonese Motorbike YouTubers, and Diasporic Vietnamese Social Memories of the Republic of Việt Nam

Article

Jun 2023

Alvin Khiêm Bùi

This article employs two approaches to characterize the nascent field of research on digital Vietnam. I first analyze the source base and methodologies in state of the field essays about Vietnam. I then turn to digital autoethnography to weave my academic journey with digital Vietnam studies and resources that I encountered along the way. In the second half, I use a case study from an emerging genre in YouTube videos uploaded by Saigonese motorbikers. These motorbikers not only provide a record of the city today that can offer points of entry for social-scientific studies of contemporary Hồ Chí Minh City but also helps historians and members of the Vietnamese diaspora alike to identify histories and memories of a Sài Gòn of the past.

Library as a learning organization: the influence of leadership skills on organizational citizenship behavior at Vietnamese libraries

Article

Apr 2023
Learn Organ

Quan Hoang Nguyen Tran

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of leadership skills (technical, human and conceptual) on organizational citizenship behavior in Vietnamese libraries and the role of organizational culture as the mediator. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative approach was chosen to gather data from 356 participants working in various libraries in Vietnam. The validity of the measures was assessed through regression analysis and SPSS software. Findings The results showed that leadership skills do have a significant impact on organizational citizenship behavior, but only human skills had a significant effect on bureaucracy culture. The study also revealed that bureaucracy culture played a significant role in affecting organizational citizenship behavior of organizations. Furthermore, bureaucracy culture was found to mediate the relationship between human skill and organizational citizenship behavior of organizations. Originality/value This study makes a valuable contribution to the field by exploring the influence of three types of leadership skills on organizational citizenship behavior and the role of leadership in promoting organizational culture. The findings of this research can help organizations understand the importance of leadership skills and organizational culture in promoting good citizenship behavior among employees. The research implications are discussed and can be used to inform decision-making and future research in the field.

Vietnam through Chinese Eyes: Divergent Accountability in Single-Party Regimes

Chapter

Jul 2013

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. The essays offer a theoretical argument that emphasizes the importance of institutional adaptations as a foundation of communist resilience. In particular, the contributors focus on four adaptations: of the economy, of ideology, of the mechanisms for inclusion of potential rivals, and of the institutions of vertical and horizontal accountability. The volume argues that when regimes are no longer able to implement adaptive change, contingent leadership choices and contagion dynamics make collapse more likely.

The Sông Cái (Red River) Delta, the Chinese Diaspora, and the Trần/Chen Clan of Ðại Việt

Article

Mar 2022

John K. Whitmore

The expansion of the Sông Cái (Red River) delta combined with the first Chinese diaspora and settlement in the region led to the Chen/Trần clan emerging and rising to power in the polity of Ðại Việt 大越 . Emerging among the Ngô ( 吳 Sino-Vietnamese) community in the lower delta, the Trần 陳 emphasized the agricultural development of this area as they built their power. I approach Trần rule in three phases: 1220s–1260s, 1260s–1330s, and 1330s–1420. In the first phase, under the tight clan control of Trần Thủ Ðộ, the Trần developed Ðại Việt in their own form within the existing Viet pattern, politically, administratively, and economically. After Thủ Ðộ’s death, the clan reformed, as a new generation of princes first fought off the Mongols, then retired to their country estates, leading to a decentralization of power. To counter this decentralization, the kings and the court developed their Thiền Buddhism of the Trúc Lâm school. But in the end this was not successful, and in the third phase the court turned to a brand of Chinese Classical thought (that of Han Yu) in the face of many calamities, natural and social. Eventually three political and ideological crises emerged, the Champa invasions (1370–1390), the seizure of power by Lê/Hồ Quý Ly (1380–1407), and the Ming conquest and occupation (1407–1427) turning Ðại Việt into its province of Jiaozhi. Each crisis led to deeper Sinic ideological penetration.

Academic Dependency Theory and the Politics of Agency in Area Studies: The Case of Anglophone Vietnamese Studies from the 1960s to the 2010s

Article

Mar 2022

Yufen Chang

Academic dependency theory argues that scholars of developing countries uncritically imitate Western academia. Anglophone Vietnamese studies presents a puzzle: many scholars, particularly historians, follow the research frameworks developed in Vietnam and emphasize Vietnam's agency since the field emerged in the 1960s. To explain, this essay conducts content and citation analyses of 25 key texts on history of Vietnam. The findings show that they are influenced by Vietnamese official historiography in the following ways. First, they adopt Vietnam's “nation to nation” framework and essentialize China into a Confucian Other in dealing with the asymmetrical dimension between the two societies. Second, while their works utilize sources in Literary Sinitic, they seem to rely on modern Vietnamese translations and reinterpretations rather than on original primary sources. Third, the scholars are more attentive to Chinese authors' ethnocentrism than to their Vietnamese counterparts, even though ethnocentrism is inherent in both. By following Vietnam's nationalistic historiography and emphasizing Vietnam's agency, Anglophone scholars are wittingly or unwittingly involved in the power struggles between the United States and China, a current hegemon and a historical one that has been rising rapidly in the twenty‐first century.

The Challenges of Inclusive Education in Developing Countries in South East Asia

Chapter

Jan 2022

This conceptual chapter presents an overview of the current developments in special education, specifically in inclusive education, and focuses only on the barriers experienced by the different stakeholders in developing countries in South East Asia. To support inclusion and equity in education, governments need to influence public opinion, implement legislation and policy regulations, and provide financial resources. The three key stakeholders are the government, educational professionals, and families. There are also others including instructors and other education professionals, teacher trainers and researchers, national, local, and school-level administrators and managers, policy-makers and service providers in other sectors, civic groups in the community, and members of minority groups who are at risk of exclusion. Awareness of the value of inclusive education should be raised amongst all stakeholders to develop a network of support for all learners.

An Alternative Vietnam? The Nguyen Kingdom in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Article

Full-text available

Mar 1998
J SOUTHEAST ASIAN ST

Tana li

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nguyen kingdom was known as Dang Trong to Vietnamese, and Cochinchina by the Westerners. In just 200 years it won control over three-fifths of the territory in modern Vietnam. The experiences of this expanding southern frontier area seem to suggest an image of Vietnam that is very different from the north, opening a door to an alternative world in which diversity was tolerated, and indeed exploited, for Vietnam's own development.

10. The Imperial Way of Death: Ming and Ch'ing Emperors and Death Ritual

Chapter

Dec 1988

Evelyn S. Rawski

The Consecration Sutra: A Buddhist Book of Spells

Chapter

Dec 1990

Michel Strickmann

THE CYCLE OF CONFUCIANIZATION IN VIETNAM

Chapter

Dec 1973

R. B. Smith

7. Authority and Legitimacy in 11th Century Vietnam

Chapter

Dec 1986

Keith Taylor

Rethinking Syncretism: The Unity of the Three Teachings and their Joint Worship in Late-Imperial China

Article

Jan 1993

Timothy Brook

The Birth of Vietnam

Article

Jun 1984

Regionalism and the Nature of Nguyen Rule in Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong (Cochinchina)

Article

Mar 1998
J SOUTHEAST ASIAN ST

Nola Cooke

Analyses of regionalism in the Vietnamese past usually adopt a north-south dichotomy. This essay presents a more nuanced approach to one case, Nguyen rule in Cochinchina (Dang Trong), by arguing it was initially a form of Thanh Hoa colonialism, rather than colonization, and only developed a truly southern focus after Nguyen rulers failed to regain their family's ascendancy at the Restored Le court.

Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization in Historical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations (1463–1883)

Article

Sep 1994
J SOUTHEAST ASIAN ST

Nola Cooke

This essay examines the common perception that the nineteenth century was the apogee of Neo-Confucianism in Vietnam by a comparative analysis of high examination passes from 1463 to 1883. Analysing the data generated reveals the nineteenth century as the historic nadir of the traditional examination system. The essay then relates this result to the politics of the time, and especially to the southern nature of the new regime.

Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276

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Dec 1992

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