मुख्य A History of the Vietnamese
A History of the VietnameseK. W. Taylor
The history of Vietnam prior to the nineteenth century is rarely examined in any detail. In this groundbreaking work, K. W. Taylor takes up this challenge, addressing a wide array of topics from the earliest times to the present day - including language, literature, religion and warfare - and themes - including Sino-Vietnamese relations, the interactions of the peoples of different regions within the country, and the various forms of government adopted by Vietnam throughout its history. A History of the Vietnamese is based on primary source materials, combining a comprehensive narrative with an analysis which endeavours to see the Vietnamese past through the eyes of those who lived it. Taylor questions long-standing stereotypes and clichés about Vietnam, drawing attention to sharp discontinuities in Vietnam’s past. Fluently written and accessible to all readers, this highly original contribution to the study of South-East Asia is a landmark text for all students and scholars of Vietnam.
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A History of the Vietnamese The history of Vietnam prior to the nineteenth century is rarely examined in any detail. In this groundbreaking work, K. W. Taylor takes up this challenge, addressing a wide array of topics from the earliest times to the present day – including language, literature, religion, and warfare – and themes – including Sino-Vietnamese relations, the interactions of the peoples of different regions within the country, and the various forms of government adopted by the Vietnamese throughout their history. A History of the Vietnamese is based on primary source materials, combining a comprehensive narrative with an analysis which endeavors to see the Vietnamese past through the eyes of those who lived it. Taylor questions long-standing stereotypes and clichés about Vietnam, drawing attention to sharp discontinuities in the Vietnamese past. Fluently written and accessible to all readers, this highly original contribution to the study of Southeast Asia is a landmark text for all students and scholars of Vietnam. is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. His career began in the US army, where he was deployed in the US–Vietnam War. He has now been researching Vietnam for nearly forty years, and his work has made a fundamental contribution to the development of the field. K. W. TAYLOR A History of the Vietnamese K. W. Taylor CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521699150 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Taylor, K. W., author. A history of the Vietnamese / K.W. Taylor. pages cm ISBN 978-0-521-87586-8 (Hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-69915-0 (Paperback) 1. Vietnam– History. 2. Vietnam–Civilization. I. Title. DS556.5.T38 2013 959.7–dc23 2012035197 ISBN 978-0-521-87586-8 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-69915-0 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents List of figures List of tables List of maps Acknowledgements Introduction Prologue Vantage Language Apologia Summary Pronunciation and spelling of Vietnamese names 1 The provincial era The empire comes south The Han conquest Shi Xie and the rise of the great families Giao Province Imperial weakness and local heroes The Protectorate of An Nam The Nan Zhao War A lesser empire 2 The Ly dynasty Hoa Lu Ly Cong Uan Ly Phat Ma Ly Nhat Ton Outbreak of the Ly–Song War The Ly–Song War Ly Can Duc Do Anh Vu and To Hien Thanh Collapse of the Ly dynasty 3 4 5 The Tran dynasty Tran Thu Do Early Tran literati Solidarity among the princes Poetry and language Mobilizing resources: eunuchs, slaves, dikes, and war The First Mongol War Living with danger The Mongols return Farewell to tattoos Farewell to the princes Tran Manh and the late Tran literati Agrarian unrest, Tran Hao, and Nhat Le Tran Phu Le Quy Ly The Le dynasty Destruction of the Tran aristocracy Ho Quy Ly A historic watershed Ming Giao Chi The abandonment of Ming Giao Chi Le Loi A new dynastic structure Great lords and Le Nguyen Long Great lords and Le Bang Co Le Tu Thanh as teacher Le Tu Thanh as ruler Expanding the borders The beginning of inter-regional warfare Return of adolescent kings and great lords Rise of the east The early Mac dynasty Outbreak of the Seventy Years War The Le restoration 6 7 8 9 The Fifty Years War The north The south War begins Dao Duy Tu and southern mobilization Trinh mobilization Christianity Maritime trade New leaders in an old war The far south Nguyen Phuc Tan, Trinh Tac, and the Nghe An campaign The last battle The south and the north diverge Relations with Cambodia Politics and government in the south Nguyen Phuc Khoat, the first southern king Misgovernment in the north Trinh Cuong’s reforms Trinh Giang and the collapse of government Trinh Doanh and the age of rebellion Another cycle of Trinh misgovernment The Thirty Years War The rise of Qui Nhon Resurgence of the Nguyen Phuc and decline of the Trinh Tay Son ascendancy and division Nguyen Hue, the Quang Trung emperor Nguyen Phuc Anh at Saigon From Saigon to Dien Khanh From Dien Khanh to Binh Dinh A new peace The Nguyen dynasty Between north and south Literature Siam and the question of Khmer vassalage Dynastic discipline Relations with the Khmer vassal Minh Mang’s centralizing policies Background to Le Van Khoi’s rebellion Le Van Khoi’s rebellion and war with Siam Thieu Tri and the French navy Tu Duc’s accession and incapacity to rule The threat from Europe 10 The French conquest The Treaty of Saigon, 1862 Formation of French Cochinchina The Treaty of 1874 Post-treaty disorder in the north French administration in rural Cochinchina Law and language in Cochinchina The Sino-French War The French take Hue Formation of French Indochina 11 Franco-Vietnamese colonial relations Intellectuals respond to the colonial regime The 1908 disturbances and their sequel Domestic ferment with Europe at war The beginning of Saigon politics Cochinchina and the new generation The new generation in Tonkin and Annam The soviets in Nghe-Tinh and western Cochinchina The French resort to the monarchy Vietnamese politics and the Popular Front New cultural patterns 12 Indochina at war The Japanese arrive Formation of the Viet Minh The August Revolution Return of the French Outbreak of a new war A Franco-Vietnamese government Radicalization of the Viet Minh The beginning of United States involvement The peace settlement 13 From two countries to one Saigon Hanoi Start of a new war Ngo Dinh Diem between communists and Americans The Kennedy escalation Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem Political turmoil in Saigon Formation of the Second Republic of Vietnam The communist offensive of 1968 US redeployment out of Vietnam The Second Republic The victory of Hanoi The Sino-Khmer War and renovation Retrospective Bibliographic essay Materials in Asian languages Suggested readings in English and French organized by chapters Figures Tables Maps Index Figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Tran dynasty genealogy Le dynasty genealogy (15th & 16th c.) Le dynasty genealogy (17th & 18th c.) Mac dynasty genealogy The Trinh rulers Nguyen dynasty genealogy Tables 1. Hoa Lu king list 2. Ly dynasty king list 3. Tran dynasty king list 4. Le dynasty king list (15th & 16th c.) 5. Le dynasty king list (17th & 18th c.) 6. Mac dynasty king list 7. List of Nguyen Phuc rulers 8. Descendents of Nguyen Phuc Khoat who were crown princes or kings 9. Nguyen dynasty king list Maps 1. The provincial era 2. The Ly dynasty – map 1 3. The Ly dynasty – map 2 4. The Tran dynasty – map 1 5. The Tran dynasty – map 2 6. The Le dynasty – map 1 7. The Le dynasty – map 2 8. The Mac dynasty 9. The Trinh domain 10. The Trinh–Nguyen border 11. The northern Nguyen Phuc domain 12. The southern Nguyen Phuc domain 13. The Nguyen dynasty: south 14. The Nguyen dynasty: north 15. The French conquest: south 16. The French conquest: north 17. Southern Vietnamese French Indochina 18. Northern Vietnamese French Indochina 19. The wartime Sino-Indochina border, 1940s 20. Recent Vietnam: north 21. Recent Vietnam: south Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to four people who have provided inspiration for this book. The late Paul G. Fried (1919–2006), whom I encountered at Hope College nearly half a century ago, gave me confidence in the importance of studying the past and in the possibility of becoming a historian; without his encouragement, I doubt if I would have subdued the disquiets of wartime experience to commence a life of scholarship. John K. Whitmore, who initiated me into the study of Vietnamese history at the University of Michigan, demonstrated a commitment to academic study, an intellectual integrity, and an abiding curiosity about the past that have given me a deep appreciation for the craft of the historian. The late Oliver W. Wolters (1915–2000) taught me how to critique my ideas about historical study; his questing mind was a constant prompt to reread and to rethink texts with an awareness of the options exercised by those who wrote them. The late Alton L. (Pete) Becker (1932–2011), both during my training at the University of Michigan and during a summer seminary in 1992, taught me a love of words, of how language shapes and is shaped by thought, and of the pleasure of translation; his influence has gone deep into how I understand culture as a process of telling stories and of translating them. Olga Dror, my wife, has been my intellectual companion and most valued discussant for ideas about the Vietnamese past. Introduction Prologue When people first began to live on Earth, terrain was very different from what it is today. For tens of thousands of years, what we know as the country of Vietnam was the mountainous western edge of a broad plain. Now covered by the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea, this plain extended in places for hundreds of kilometers east of the modern coastline and included a massif that we now call Hainan Island. Today we can imagine that beneath the mud at the bottom of the sea lie the relics of the people who inhabited this plain. But our knowledge of their existence comes only from the remains of quarries and workshops where they crafted stone tools at the tops of mountains along the modern Vietnamese coast. During that time, people also inhabited the mountains in what is now northern Vietnam, and we know of them from what they left in the caves where they lived. About twelve to eight thousand years ago, the coastline shifted westward as sea levels rose with the melting of the ice-age glaciers. The water reached to around 5.8 meters above the modern level of the sea and penetrated into the mountain valleys. Thereafter, the sea gradually receded to its present level, exposing a chain of coastal plains that became the lowlands of what is now Vietnam. The most important of these plains for early Vietnamese history is the most northern of them. This is the plain of the Red River. It was formed by grey oceanic sediment emerging from the receding sea that has been increasingly streaked by accumulations of the red silt that has given the Red River its name. The Red River flows in nearly a straight line from the Yunnan plateau to the sea. It follows what geologists call the Red River Fault Zone. This is a major geological discontinuity where for millions of years the land south of the fault has been shearing a few millimeters each year southeastward under tectonic pressure from the Indian subcontinent against the Eurasian land mass. The plain of the Red River, along with the smaller plains of the Ma and Ca Rivers immediately to the south, make up the scene in which Vietnamese history was lived until the fifteenth century. Between four and five thousand years ago, people with stone tools began to live on these plains in agricultural communities with rice, domesticated animals, and pottery. It is fruitless to speculate about the origins of these people. They lived so long ago and left such meager evidence of their existence that they are impervious to our strategies for using archaeological, geological, geographical, or linguistic evidence to identify them as having arrived from a particular somewhere. They may have come from the continental land mass, they may have come from the lands submerged beneath the sea, or, most likely of all, they may have come from a mixture of peoples from both directions. During the succeeding millennium, people with bronze weapons gained supremacy over these communities. At that time, advanced bronze cultures existed in several areas of the Asian continent. There is no surviving evidence that would allow us to specify from where the bronze-age people came to assert their rule over the Red River plain, or even to determine that they came from elsewhere and did not arise from the existing society as a result of bronze technology being introduced through peaceful exchange. Thereafter, contact with expanding political powers in the north, which we now associate with ancient China, increasingly exposed the people living here to northern influence and power and led to incorporation into the Chinese imperial realm. The Dong Son Culture with its distinctive bronze drums decorated with boats, warriors, musicians, dancers, feathered garments, birds, animals, reptiles, and amphibians flourished during the four or five centuries preceding conquest by the Han Chinese in the mid first century CE, after which this culture disappeared. During the next nine centuries, the people here lived under a local form of imperial administration as the southernmost members of a succession of Chinese empires. During the past thousand years, local dynasties ruled as vassals of Chinese empires, save for the last century and a half during which a brief French hegemony gave shape to modern Vietnam. Vantage Vietnamese scholars have endeavored to project a sense of national identity back into the past as far as possible. In the modern period, it became common for Vietnamese to affirm a national history going back four thousand years to when archaeologists date artifacts that they have assembled and categorized under the name of Phung Nguyen Culture. Phung Nguyen is defined as a late stone and early bronze culture that represents a level of archaeological uniformity in the Red River Plain that did not previously exist. Many Vietnamese scholars are inclined to draw a line of continuity in cultural, and even ethno-linguistic, development from Phung Nguyen to modern Vietnam. This inclination, however, makes an exuberant use of evidence. The search for origins in the distant past is a common intellectual endeavor among peoples in nearly all times and places. For example, historians at royal courts in northern Vietnam during the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries were concerned to affirm their status in reference to rampant northern empires, the Yuan and the Ming. They did this not only by culling references from classical Chinese texts about what they imagined to have been their ancestors in antiquity but also by constructing a “southern” history for themselves that is largely parallel with and a response to “northern” imperial history. The urge for connections with the past is a means of self-affirmation, not a scholarly endeavor. What we can know about the past with some degree of confidence is a meager residue of what remains from an ongoing process of accumulation and attrition, of gain and loss, of putting together and tossing away, a process in which all generations participate. Human efforts to remain oriented amidst change can take forms between the extremes of denying change and of seeking change. Historians are not immune to the implications of such efforts, and they do not agree on the appropriate pose to assume toward change in wielding the rhetoric of their craft. I believe that the task of historical scholarship is to look at what survives from the past as coming from people with their own existence, not as evidence of people who attain significance primarily as precursors of people today. The Vietnamese past does not display an internal logic of development leading to the present. Rather, it reveals a series of experiments designed by successive generations as solutions to perennial problems of social and political organization. These experiments have failed, have reached an impasse, or have been overcome by the possibilities or the violence of larger contexts. None has been a final solution. Vietnamese history is a convenient name for what can be known about a certain aspect of the past. What makes it Vietnamese is that the events of which it is comprised took place in what we now call the country of Vietnam and that certain versions of it have been taught as a common memory to generations of people who speak the Vietnamese language, thereby inducing a sense of ownership. I find interest in the Vietnamese past not because it is Vietnamese but because it is about how human society has been organized and governed during many centuries on the edge of an empire. Vietnamese history as we know it today could not exist without Chinese history. The manner in which Vietnamese history overlaps with and is distinguished from Chinese history presents a singular example of experience in organizing and governing human society within the orbit of Sinic civilization that can be compared with Korean history and Japanese history. Such a comparison is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is to present a narrative of current scholarship on Vietnamese history that is accessible to students and general readers. But, this book is also written with an awareness of comparative possibilities within the academic jurisdiction of East Asia. Vietnamese history can also be viewed in a Southeast Asian comparative context. The kingdom of Dai Viet that existed in Vietnam from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries was contemporary with other major kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia at Angkor (Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand) and at Pagan (Burma). Also, the southward expansion of the Burmese and Siamese peoples from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries is seemingly parallel with a similar movement of Vietnamese peoples at the same time. However, the disparity in surviving evidence, the great differences in culture and politics, and the exceptional imperatives of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship are obstacles to meaningful comparisons. Language A large proportion of the modern Vietnamese vocabulary derives from Chinese, but linguists categorize the Vietnamese language as a member of the Mon-Khmer family of languages. Although available comparative data for studying Vietnamese with other Mon-Khmer languages are limited, there is an abundance of materials documenting the historical relationship between Chinese and Vietnamese. Linguists continue to develop new methods for analyzing such data, and developments in Sino-Vietnamese historical linguistics enable new ways of theorizing how the Vietnamese language came to be. Building upon the work of scholarship in French and Chinese in the early twentieth century and of Japanese scholarship more recently, linguists are beginning to appreciate the great complexity of the relationship between speakers of the Chinese and the Vietnamese languages; both the speakers and the languages are products of great changes during the past two millennia from which documentation of this relationship exists. Sino-Vietnamese historical linguistics has tended to focus attention upon words from the classrooms in which what we call Literary Chinese was taught for more than two millennia. This was the language of education, scholarship, literature, and government in both China and Vietnam until the turn of the twentieth century. While Literary Chinese in its written form has changed relatively little through the centuries, the phonologies of Literary Chinese have changed significantly in accordance with changes in spoken languages. Advances in phonological analysis enable greater understandings of the realms of spoken languages that have interacted with Literary Chinese. Literary Chinese, as the written form of the prestige language, was an aspect of a larger world of language contact between speakers of languages that we now identify as contributors to modern Chinese and Vietnamese. Modes of speaking Literary Chinese can be thought of as literary registers that became aspects of prestige versions of vernacular forms of language. For over a millennium, up until the tenth century, speakers of HanTang Chinese accumulated in what is now northern Vietnam. Imperial government was based in the area of modern Hanoi where the most critical mass of Chinese speakers concentrated. During the thirty to forty generations of this time, the Chinese speakers developed their own regional version of Chinese, for which one modern linguist, John Duong Phan, has found evidence and that for convenience can be called Annamese Middle Chinese. It is possible that this was simply a dialect of a broader Southern or Southwestern Middle Chinese of that time. The non-Chinese-speaking lowland population spoke a language that linguists call Proto-Viet-Muong, the most eastern member of the MonKhmer languages that at that time prevailed in the plains drained by the Mekong and the Menam. Proto-Viet-Muong can be imagined as having spread north at some earlier time from the passes linking the Mekong and Ca River valleys. During the ten centuries of imperial rule, many Chinese words were borrowed into spoken Proto-Viet-Muong and we can reasonably conjecture that there was a significantly high level of bilingualism among primary speakers of both languages. Beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the governing connection with Chinese dynasties was broken, there were no longer regular infusions of Chinese speakers from the north and local kings appeared. The population of Annamese Middle Chinese speakers was increasingly concentrated in the Red River plain where political authority was based. As the diglossic situation collapsed, speakers of Annamese Middle Chinese gradually shifted into Proto-Viet-Muong, bringing with them a critical mass of vocabulary and grammatical particles, thus giving rise to the Vietnamese language as we categorize it today, the speakers of which at that time were called Kinh, meaning the people of the “capital” in the region of Hanoi. On the other hand, the speakers of various forms of Proto-Viet-Muong who did not participate in this “shift,” namely those in the plains of the Ma and Ca Rivers, were eventually driven from the lowlands by the Kinh speakers, who referred to them as Trai, or “outpost” people; in the twentieth century, French ethnographers and colonial administrators identified the descendents of these people as Muong. The Kinh–Trai distinction is first mentioned in historical records from the mid thirteenth century, although it surely existed prior to that time; this is also the time when the writing of Vietnamese poetry is first documented and when the last generation of Vietnamese princes who spoke Chinese are known to have lived. In the fifteenth century, two decades of Ming Chinese rule introduced new pronunciations for words already existing in Vietnamese from the Han-Tang/Annamese Middle Chinese experience. Some later Vietnamese scholars viewed the Ming pronunciations as less correct than the older forms. This is an example of a common phenomenon during the long history of Sino-Vietnamese interaction: Chinese words once absorbed by Vietnamese would be “re-borrowed” from a later version of the Chinese language with new pronunciations and sometimes modified semantic fields. The rejection of Ming pronunciations was part of a general reaction among educated Vietnamese to the memory of Ming rule. Nevertheless, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, during which Vietnamese began to flourish as a literary language, writers adopted or invented many classroom-inspired Chinese words to bejewel and elevate the vernacular in a process of “relexification.” A further complication is that, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Vietnamese speakers in what is now central and southern Vietnam began to develop regional versions of the language as a result both of normal language change and of contact with nonVietnamese speakers. In central Vietnam, many Cham speakers began to speak Vietnamese, and, in the late seventeenth century, a large wave of Ming Chinese refugees into the south also had a linguistic impact. This new understanding of the Vietnamese language as arising from a long history of Sinic bilingualism gives formative significance to the centuries of Chinese rule that is more plausible than the well-established cliché of “a thousand years of Chinese domination” that imagines an already existing Vietnamese identity surviving many generations of participation in Sinic civilization while being fundamentally uninfluenced by it. It also requires a major shift in our view of Vietnamese history and culture away from the scheme of an ancient and enduring Vietnamese identity claimed by modern nationalists. Vietnamese culture and language came into existence as the result of a merging of what linguistic evidence reveals as speakers of Annamese Middle Chinese and Proto-Viet-Muong. Apologia In this book I combine a chronological political narrative, expositions of interpretive themes, and discussions of geography, education, ideology, language, literature, religion, society, government, economy, and warfare. Information surviving from pre-modern times is often very sparse, which is likely to disappoint the thirst of some readers for more knowledge than is available. I have sought to avoid excessive speculation or large generalizations that lack plausible evidence. At the same time I have endeavored to rise above a tedious account of random events by charting a narrative to stimulate the imagination, making thought about the past possible. I have excluded a mass of detail and have aspired toward coherence sufficient to satisfy both those who prefer to think diachronically across time and those who prefer to think synchronically with topics. An introductory survey, this book provides a point of entry into Vietnamese history and does not excavate the historiography from which my ideas have emerged. It aspires to provide a sketch of the Vietnamese past using political, administrative, economic, and cultural information. I have given much attention to simply sorting out a basic sequence of events because this has never yet been done with the detail and method enabled by surviving evidence and recent scholarship. Although many detailed studies exist in Vietnamese, and to some extent in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and French, English-language writings have for the most part referred to the pre-modern past with vast clichés and to modern times with relatively narrowly focused narratives that follow lines of argument about interpretive themes fundamentally unrelated to the Vietnamese. I have endeavored to provide as much opportunity as possible for readers to enter the past and to see events from the perspective of those who lived them or who recorded them. If we imagine the past with the dynamism of possibility with which it was lived, we can glimpse it looking back at us with the eyes of aspiration that each human life and each generation have aimed at the future. The Vietnamese past is full of personalities and events both obscure and famous, and often the obscure have had greater effect upon the direction of culture, society, and politics than have the famous. I have tried to move beyond the propaganda of memory and memorializing to display a thicker layer of information that has accumulated about people and events. My purpose in doing so is to evoke a sense of the past as alive in its own time. Because much of what survives from the past concerns the vicissitudes of political authority, some readers may view this as a “kings and battles” approach, which I believe would be a superficial impression, for I have endeavored to give serious attention to geographical contexts, language, literature, education, ideology, religion, ethnic and social formations, institutional developments, agrarian policies, trade, and commerce. Nevertheless, I have striven to sort out the political and military events because in the English language there has not yet been a sustained engagement with the history of Vietnamese efforts to structure authority and negotiate change. Some readers will be disappointed by the lack of footnotes. The decision to avoid marking the text with notes was made out of consideration for the intended audience and from an expectation that readers looking for documentation can consult the bibliographic essays. I have done my best to stay close to the sources. There were times when I was tempted by an interesting thought toward an interpretation that in the end had to be discarded because the evidence was insufficient to bear its weight. I have indicated places where the evidence is too problematic to sustain any definite assertion. I am sure to have made errors and can do no more than to trust that other scholars will find them. In this book, I have taken a pragmatic approach to the great morass of toponyms that have accumulated from past to present. The maps are provided as references for reading the book and do not indicate names and jurisdictions in their historical specificity. Places in the book have been known by various names during the two thousand years covered by historical records, and these names often covered different or overlapping territories at different times. Consequently, I have used a mix of historical and modern names, noting when I am using a modern name anachronistically for the sake of clarity. As much as possible, my aim has been to facilitate a narrative without digressions into the complexities and conundrums of historical geography, which require a separate study. For example, the name Hanoi does not date before the nineteenth century. During the past millennium and a half, this place has been an administrative and dynastic center known by several names, the most prominent being Dai La, Thang Long, Dong Kinh, and Ke Cho. I have used these names in their historical contexts while at times also using Hanoi when doing so solved rhetorical problems, enhanced clarity, and seemed unobjectionable. In general, I have used modern names when historical names would introduce contextual inaccuracies and excessive explanatory asides. The maps do not indicate jurisdictional boundaries for provinces and districts because that would introduce two unnecessary problems. First of all, the maps do not show every toponym but only those that come into the narrative; since we cannot begin to draw some boundaries without ending up by drawing all of them, we would need additional names that would clutter the maps with information of no use for the narrative. Also, since boundaries change and can be known but approximately, the project of sorting them out for each historical era, along with all the complexities and conundrums arising when doing that, is a task for a different, more specialized, kind of book. I have endeavored to provide enough dates to maintain a sense of diachronic orientation but without cluttering the narrative with unnecessary information. The tables contain reign dates for rulers, but these are not unproblematic, particularly when times of transition occur near the end or the beginning of years as counted according to different calendars and historiographical rules. Vietnamese texts follow the lunar calendar in which the twelfth lunar month overlaps with the first solar month of the calendar currently in general usage. Furthermore, Vietnamese historians assigned whole years to rulers so that the remainder of a year in which a ruler died was counted in the reign of the deceased ruler and the successor’s reign was considered to officially start only at the beginning of the next year. In some cases, sources provide different dates for the death of a ruler and the accession of the successor, or rulers were deposed so their death dates and the end of their reigns do not coincide, or the reigns of rival or coterminous rulers overlap, or there may be a gap between one ruler and another during times of dynastic turmoil or change. As a consequence of these considerations, readers will find a variety of dates in different books. Rather than drawing attention to these problems and analyzing them, I have followed a policy that privileges the solar calendar without the strictness and precision that a detailed study of dating problems deserves, seeking instead to provide dates that maximize the integrity and the readability of the narrative while remaining essentially faithful to a careful study of surviving sources. Summary The thirteen chapters of this book are organized on the basis of length and convenience and do not represent any scheme of periodization with which to conceptualize Vietnamese history. In terms of large themes, I am inclined to organize this material into four periods: first, the centuries during which what is now northern Vietnam was a province of Chinese empires (Chapter 1); second, the four centuries of the Ly and Tran dynasties during which Buddhist aristocracies in the Red River plain ruled (Chapters 2 and 3); third, the four centuries attributed to the Le dynasty during which kings came from Thanh Hoa Province, Confucianism was the ideology of rulers, the Vietnamese expanded into the south, and there were long eras of separate realms at war (Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8); finally, the two most recent centuries during which the modern country of Vietnam came into being (Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13). During the millennium when what is now northern Vietnam was a frontier province of Chinese imperial dynasties, the people living there were acculturated to what we call East Asian civilization. In art, music, architecture, dress, cuisine, education, language, literature, religion, philosophy, social organization, and political behavior, nearly all the distinguishing features of Vietnamese culture were acquired at this time as a consequence of contact with the Han-Tang civilization of China. A thousand years is a relatively long time in human history and it is hard to overemphasize the changes that occurred during this age of belonging to northern empires. The people who lived in the Red River plain before this time and those who lived there after this time would surely be unrecognizable and unintelligible to each other. Important changes can be attributed to any people during such a period of time, but the effect of being governed by a succession of imperial dynasties surely accelerated the pace of change in particular directions that reflected the course of imperial history. During these centuries, local culture, society, and political organization passed through many vicissitudes, some of them utterly transforming. Crafts, erudition, and political thought were mostly focused upon mastering the elements of imperial civilization. At the same time, from generation to generation and from dynasty to dynasty, a population of “northerners” accumulated and became a critical mass of people that were the governing class and its most reliable followers. Furthermore, there were a great variety of interactions, overlaps, and adaptions between local and imperial societies. It is not surprising that, intellectually, Vietnamese history later came to be written as a discussion, even an argument, with imperial Chinese history, for Vietnamese history can be understood only in reference to Chinese dynastic history. Accordingly, the earliest large event in Vietnamese history has to do with the arrival of northern imperial power near the end of the third century BCE and the eventual absorption of the region into the realm of northern dynasties. This situation was not altered until the tenth century after basic changes in imperial society and politics made it impossible for Chinese dynasties to continue to rule this region, thereby bringing the provincial relationship with northern powers to an end. During the period from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries, political leadership shifted from the individual charisma of kings to leadership by men related to the mothers of kings. The Ly royal family came from the upper plains northeast of Hanoi. Two brief wars with the Northern Song dynasty confirmed a relationship of formal vassalage with autonomy. The culture at royal courts combined popular spirit cults with the moral teachings of Buddhist monks, the occult skills of Daoist priests, and the erudition of Confucian scholars. The dynastic scheme of authority that was established at this time unraveled in synchrony with the decline of imperial power in the north. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Tran dynasty, based on the coast downriver from Hanoi, endeavored to eliminate the power of maternal families by ensuring that queen mothers were always from the royal family itself. In place of individual charisma, a group charisma was nurtured among the many talented princes of the royal family, who gained fame by leading soldiers against Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, as the royal family lost interest in governing the country, kings nurtured a new class of educated commoners to provide talent for their courts. In the late fourteenth century, the dynasty failed to respond to new military, political, and ideological pressures from the rising Ming dynasty in the north and an echoing resurgence of Cham power in the south. The prevailing syncretistic attitude toward the “three religions” of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism faded amidst dynastic collapse as the ascendant Ming dynasty trumpeted a new affirmation of Confucianism in China. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, there were four successive experiments in government that responded to the rise of a new power base in Thanh Hoa Province, located immediately south of the Red River basin in the plains of the Ma and Chu Rivers. This opened a new age in Vietnamese history that would for the next four centuries be marked by regional conflict as Vietnamese migrated into the southern coastlands and began to challenge the ascendant position of the Red River plain. At the turn of the fifteenth century, a leader from Thanh Hoa assembled an entourage to pursue a series of experiments in educational, fiscal, agrarian, social, and political reform. Resistance to him in the Red River plain assisted the Ming conquest in the first decade of the fifteenth century. The Ming then experimented for two decades with efforts to turn the region into an imperial province. They built schools and propagated a curriculum that promoted Confucian forms of social and political organization. Although the Ming assembled a large local following drawn from erudite families in the Red River plain, resistance to them formed in Thanh Hoa. When the Ming eventually abandoned their policy in Vietnam, a coalition of Thanh Hoa clans proclaimed a new dynasty. There was an era of relative peace, prosperity, and power in the late fifteenth century during the reign of a king who combined personal charisma with a court aspiring toward the forms of bureaucracy practiced in Ming China. During his rule, Confucian values were propagated as never before; new laws governing education, administration, land tenure, taxation, conscription, and public morality were promulgated; the writing of vernacular as well as classical poetry flourished; soldiers were sent to conquer lands along the southern coast and over the mountains as far as the Mekong River. However, in the early sixteenth century, royal authority collapsed and was superseded by a struggle for power between leaders from Thanh Hoa and a new dynasty in the Red River plain that survived for seven decades before being pushed aside by armies from the southern provinces. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new Vietnamese perspective emerged on the southern frontier. This perspective was produced by close contact with other peoples such as Chams, Khmers, Malays, Siamese, Japanese, Chinese, and Europeans and by a sense of options and possibilities that drew Vietnamese speakers away from the relative sense of discipline and confinement that prevailed in the provinces around Hanoi. Northerners and southerners tested each other on battlefields for fifty years in the seventeenth century; an uneasy truce then lasted for a hundred years before another era of warfare erupted in the late eighteenth century. By the mid eighteenth century, the southern kingdom had pushed its southwestern border to the extent of the current Khmer–Viet boundary. European merchants and missionaries arrived during this time and found two rival Vietnamese kingdoms that they called Tonkin and Cochinchina. The military and political deadlock was eventually broken at the beginning of the nineteenth century when a new dynasty established its capital at Hue, in central Vietnam, uniting for the first time all Vietnamese speakers in the territories that now make up the country of Vietnam. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Vietnamese encountered the global forces that drove the emergence of what is commonly called the modern world, giving rise to various visions of social and political organization. In the early nineteenth century, the dynastic regime looked to China for culture and ideas about government. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a French colonial regime subordinated Vietnamese life and thought to a European-based imperial system that for the first time cut the Vietnamese off from their historic relationship with China. When the French era came to an end in the mid twentieth century, northern and southern governments fought for twenty years over competing visions of a future Vietnam. The government in the north was allied with the communist world, being communal and disciplined. The government in the south was allied with the capitalist world, being relatively more individualistic and free. The northern regime conquered the south and then was at war with its neighbors and in relative international isolation for another fifteen years. At the end of the twentieth century, with the end of the Cold War confrontation, the Vietnamese state began a process of integration into the global system of economic and political relationships that presently exists. One of the most enduring features of Vietnamese history is that the rulers of China and Vietnam have maintained a common worldview amidst all the experiments undertaken through the centuries. Pronunciation and spelling of Vietnamese names This book does not include Vietnamese diacritical marks, which are an integral part of the Vietnamese alphabet. Some diacritics indicate tones and some indicate particular vowel or consonant sounds. Jesuit missionaries invented the Vietnamese alphabet in the seventeenth century, largely in reference to Portuguese phonology. Consequently, readers who do not know Vietnamese but are familiar with European languages will not go far wrong in sounding out most pronunciations in Vietnamese. However, readers may be interested to know how to pronounce certain common names in Vietnamese history that have unexpected sounds. For example, Ly is pronounced “lee”; Le is pronounced “lay”; Tran rhymes with “bun”; Mac is pronounced “mock”; Hue is pronounced “way.” One consonant sound that may pose particular challenges to nonVietnamese readers is the initial “ng” sound in Ngo and Nguyen, which is a nasalized “guh” made in the back of the throat, somewhat similar to the “ng” sound in “bingo” (which rhymes with Ngo). For Nguyen, this sound is combined with “we” and “in” to produce “ng-we-in,” spoken as one syllable. When “ng” is combined with an “h” as in the name of the tenth-century ruler Duong Dinh Nghe, a “y” sound is added to the consonant cluster, producing a sound something like “Ngyay.” Without diacritics, the distinction between two consonants formed from the letter “d” is lost. The “hard d,” indicated by a horizontal dash through the vertical line in either the upper (D) or lower (d) case letters, is pronounced as if in a European language. The “soft d” is indicated by the absence of that horizontal dash; northern Vietnamese pronounce it like a “z” and southern Vietnamese pronounce it like a “y.” For example, Duong Dinh Nghe contains both a soft and a hard “D” and is pronounced “Zoong Dinh Ngyay” by northerners and “Yoong Dinh Ngyay” by southerners. Another example is the name of the president of the first Republic of Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem, 1955–1963), which also contains both kinds of “d,” being pronounced “Ngo Dinh Ziem” by northerners and “Ngo Dinh Yiem” by southerners. On the other hand, the name of the tenth-century king Dinh Bo Linh is pronounced about the way it looks in English by both northerners and southerners. One orthographic convention that I observe is that I spell Hanoi, Saigon, Cholon, Dalat, and Vietnam rather than Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Cho Lon, Da Lat, and Viet Nam, which is how these are rendered in the Vietnamese language. My reason for doing so, while leaving other Vietnamese place names in their Vietnamese forms, is that these names have been absorbed into common English usage without the space between syllables and without the capitalization of the second syllable. 1 The provincial era The empire comes south After conquering the Yangtze River basin and proclaiming the Qin Empire in 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, “The First Emperor of China,” sent thousands of his soldiers over the mountains into the valleys and coastlands of what is now South China. He also sent convicts and women to establish a population of northerners there. After years of hard fighting against local people, Qin commanders built a city on the site of modern Guangzhou (Canton), the main seaport for trade into the southern seas. When the Qin Empire collapsed after Qin Shi Huang’s death in the year 210 BCE, this coastal outpost became the center of a regional kingdom ruled by the senior commanding officer, Zhao To. As armies fought for control of the empire in the north, Zhao To proclaimed himself King of Nan Yue (Southern Yue). Zhao To is among the first historical figures with a role in Vietnamese history. Sometime during the first quarter of the second century BCE, he extended his authority over the people living in the Red River plain of northern Vietnam. Yue had been the name of a state on the south-central coast of China (the modern province of Zhejiang) during the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. It was appropriated by Zhao To and eventually applied to the Red River plain by ancient Chinese dynasties; in Vietnamese, it is pronounced Viet. Zhao To was not the first conqueror to arrive in the Red River plain from the north. Armed adventurers, apparently fleeing the Qin invasion of southern China, had previously arrived and defeated the local ruler. Their leader proclaimed himself King An Duong (Pacifier of the South; An Yang in Chinese). He occupied and rebuilt an existing fortress now called Co Loa. The earliest stories about this can be found in books compiled six or seven hundred years later. They tell about King An Duong and Zhao To struggling for control of the Red River plain. Several versions of this story have been recorded through the centuries; it is a tragic romance involving the transfer of political power. The main line of the story is as follows. During a truce in the fighting between Zhao To and King An Duong, Zhao To’s son, Shi Jiang, visited King An Duong’s court. There, he and King An Duong’s daughter, My Chau, fell in love and were married. The young bride and groom resided at An Duong’s court until Shi Jiang managed to lay his hands upon the magic crossbow that was the source of King An Duong’s power. He destroyed the crossbow and fled back to his father, who thereupon attacked and vanquished King An Duong. King An Duong escaped to the sea with My Chau in tow. She surreptitiously marked their way so as to be found by her husband. Perceiving this, King An Duong slew her for her treachery, and then disappeared into the sea. Finding his wife’s body, Shi Jiang leaped into a well to join her in death. This story exists today because it was interesting to compilers at Chinese dynastic courts in the third and fourth centuries CE, and maybe it was even created by them. At least three aspects of the story would have been popular at that time and place. One aspect is the theme of romantic love leading to tragic death, which was in literary fashion then. Another aspect is that it provides an explanation for how this remote part of the world was brought into the imperial political system; Zhao To’s kingdom of Nan Yue (Vietnamese Nam Viet), which eventually expanded to include northern Vietnam, finally became part of the Han Empire, and all subsequent dynasties considered themselves to be heritors of Han. Another reason why this story was interesting to people in the empire is the dissonance between a matrilocal society in which a man becomes a member of his wife’s family, for which we have evidence from ancient Vietnam, and a patrilocal society in which a woman becomes a member of her husband’s family, which for several centuries had already been the rule among educated people in China. Ngo Si Lien, a fifteenth-century Vietnamese historian, even commented upon how strange and “wrong” it was that in this story Shi Jiang lived with his wife’s family and that My Chau did not go to live with her husband’s family. It was hard for him to think that there had been a time when people in this country did not know the patriarchal Confucian family system. In fact, the people whom King An Duong and Zhao To encountered in the Red River plain were very strange to educated northerners at that time. Two hundred years after the time of King An Duong, around the year zero, Han imperial administrators recorded their efforts to promote agriculture, to open schools, and to introduce the institution of marriage among the inhabitants of northern Vietnam. They wanted to expand agriculture to maximize the taxable surplus; schools were a way to win the minds of intelligent young locals; marriage practices governed the social system and consequently the form of political authority that could be exercised. Yet, according to the San Guo Zhi (Annals of the Three Kingdoms), an imperial administrator named Xue Zong, who two centuries later spent most of his career in northern Vietnam, wrote: “According to the records, civilizing activities have been going on for over four hundred years, but, according to what I myself have seen during many years of travel since my arrival here, the actual situation is something else . . . In short, it can be said that these people are on the same level as bugs.” Until the middle of the first century CE, outside of a few imperial outposts, local rulers limited the influence of Han officials. These local rulers can be seen riding in boats that decorate the large bronze drums that announced their authority. In their graves of boat-shaped wooden coffins, they have left their weapons, tools, jewelry, and daily life items made of wood, pottery, bronze, and iron. From such things, and from brief written descriptions by imperial officials compiled in later books, we can vaguely see the society ruled by these people. Imperial officials called them Lac (Chinese Luo) and Au (Chinese Ou), which they understood as kinds of Viet (Chinese Yue), a name applied to southern non-Han people. The Lac people were rice growers in the Red River plain. The Au had arrived with King An Duong, who combined his entourage with the existing class of rulers to produce what was recorded as the kingdom of Au-Lac. The Lac lords had previously served the ruler dethroned by King An Duong. In later centuries, historians used the name Hung for those who ruled before King An Duong at the place where the Red River emerges from the mountains, called Me Linh in old texts. It would have been easy for this place to be in contact with other bronze-age cultures up the Red River to the northwest in what are now the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. King An Duong’s fortress of Co Loa was in the upper plain north of the Red River, located to dominate the plain while defending it from intruders coming from the northeast, either along the coast or through the upland passes leading to Zhao To’s kingdom of Nan Yue in the modern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. One detail in the earliest versions of the story of King An Duong and Zhao To can be related to the archaeology of Co Loa. Cao Thong (Chinese Kao Tong), a man described in such a way as to indicate that he was from China, was the chief advisor of King An Duong as well as the inventor of the magic crossbow. As long as King An Duong retained the loyalty of Cao Thong, Zhao To could not defeat him. However, King An Duong treated Cao Thong disrespectfully, and Cao Thong abandoned him. Thereafter, King An Duong lost the magic crossbow and was defeated. The archaeology of Co Loa reveals an adaptation of engineering practices from the Warring States of ancient China to the local terrain and a range of weapons similar to contemporary armies in China, which suggests that King An Duong’s magic weapon may have been some kind of “new model army” trained and led by Cao Thong, which was no longer effective without his leadership. After Zhao To had expelled King An Duong, he posted two legates to supervise the Au-Lac lords, one in the Red River plain, which was named Giao Chi, and one in the Ma and Ca River plains immediately to the south, which was named Cuu Chan. Some records suggest that he also invested a king at Co Loa who continued to preside over the AuLac lords. The legates established commercial outposts accessible by sea. Their presence was apparently unobjectionable to the Au-Lac lords, for there is no record of trouble between them. Access to stable markets with goods from the north was surely a benefit to the local rulers. For the next century and a half, no recorded information survives about this place. The local organization of society and politics apparently remained fundamentally unchanged in the transfer from Hung kings to King An Duong to the kingdom of Nan Yue. The next transfer of suzerain also did not bring any drastic change. When the Han General Lu Bode conquered Nan Yue in 111 BCE, his army was met at the Giao Chi border by the two Nan Yue legates with cattle, wine, and tokens of submission. At that time, an Au-Lac lord received a titular reward from Han for overthrowing the king who had been invested by Nan Yue at Co Loa. Han subsequently established two new outposts as frontier garrisons, one facing northwest, up the Red River into the mountains at Me Linh where the Hung kings had supposedly ruled, and one facing the southern coast in Nhat Nam, on the plain between the Ngang and Hai Van Passes beyond Cuu Chan. The headquarters for Giao Chi and the entire region was at Luy Lau, a seaport amidst fields connected by river with the coast leading north. Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam were given the status of prefectures in Han imperial administration. A total of twenty-two districts were organized, or at least theorized, in these prefectures, ten in Giao Chi, seven in Cuu Chan, and five in Nhat Nam. The districts were left in the hands of local lords who received imperial “seals and ribbons” as symbols of their status in return for what the lords viewed as tribute to a suzerain but which imperial officials over time began to view as taxes. Although this situation, so far as surviving evidence reveals, remained peaceful for the next century and a half, the accommodation achieved between a feudal aristocracy and the Han practice of prefecture and district administration was an expedient and would not be sustainable in the long run. Han officials sought to maintain peaceful relations with the local population while pursuing the complex, sometimes contradictory, goals of imperial administration. These goals included patrolling the frontiers to ensure security, monitoring the local leaders to maintain domestic tranquility, nurturing trade and agriculture to produce a taxable surplus, encouraging northern immigration to consolidate a mass of people directly responsive to imperial authority, and seeking opportunities to change local ways toward northern norms with education and social reform. The perspective of the Han officials was largely limited to their prefectural headquarters and garrisons and the security of the river routes that connected these places. They met with the lords who governed districts to receive a portion of the local surplus and to confer tokens of imperial authority and benevolence. For their part, the lords upon whom Han officials were dependent for governing the non-Han population inhabited a world very different from Han people. Theirs was the realm of the Lac, and of the Au who during this time were probably for the most part absorbed into the Lac. People today apply the archaeological name of Dong Son to their culture. Here were communities of agriculturalists settled along riverbanks beside rice fields. The rulers sent men by boat to collect rice and other goods, armed with crossbows, spears, swords, and their distinctive bronze pediform axes. They proclaimed their arrival by beating on bronze drums to summon the people to submit what was due. Many of these drums still exist and are decorated with scenes of the boats bearing warriors with weapons, large jars to carry rice, and the drums. There are also depictions of people wearing clothing decorated with feathers. Some are pounding rice in large mortars with long wooden pestles. There are musicians and dancers, men and women copulating, and warriors holding decapitated heads. The drums also bear images of birds, deer, crocodiles, and frogs. The rulers of this society met with Han officials to exchange gifts and to gain access to markets with goods from afar, and they were buried with their weapons, wooden combs, bracelets, ceramic pillows, and Han coins. An imperial census was taken in the year 2 CE. It recorded 143,643 households and 981,755 people in the three prefectures of Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam. It is doubtful that these enumerations came from an actual registration of the population or even that they were a compilation of estimates. It was at this time that some prefects in remote jurisdictions endeavored to become famous for claiming to have promoted agriculture and patriarchal marriage rites, activities related to the taking of a census. They typically made impressive but unverifiable claims seeking to gain a reputation that would lead to more desirable assignments nearer the imperial heartland. Despite many problems in evaluating the accuracy of this census, it is nevertheless plausible evidence for the existence of a settled population in the lowlands of what is now northern Vietnam that was significant and substantial in the context of imperial administration in ancient China. This is apparent in comparison with numbers in the same census recorded from the modern southern Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, even allowing for the certainty of error and fiction: 71,805 households and 390,555 people, less than half the households and only around 40 percent of the people recorded for the prefectures in modern Vietnam. Who were these people and what language did they speak? Han immigrants aside, we can plausibly conjecture that much of the lowland population spoke what linguists call Proto-Viet-Muong related to the Mon-Khmer language family that apparently expanded northward from the Ca River plain in modern Nghe An and Ha Tinh Provinces. The geographical connection with other Mon-Khmer languages appears to have been via the Mu Gia Pass from the middle Mekong plain to the Ca River plain. Another plausible conjecture is that the aristocracy that ruled these people, called Lac in Han texts, came from the mountains north and west of the Red River plain and spoke an ancient language related to modern Khmu, another Mon-Khmer language now spoken in the mountains of northern Vietnam and Laos. On the other hand, the Au conquerers who arrived from the northern mountains with King An Duong might be imagined to have spoken a language related to the TaiKadai language family that includes modern Lao and Thai. In any case, it is too early to speak of the Vietnamese language. The Han conquest During the years 9–23 CE, the empire was in turmoil as a so-called usurper named Wang Mang tried to supplant the Han dynasty. Uprisings spread disorder in northern China, and fighting continued until a Han prince restored the authority of his dynasty. During this time, officials in southern China remained loyal to Han. Many Han loyalists fled from the north seeking safety in what is now southern China and northern Vietnam. After the Han restoration, large numbers of the officials who had found refuge in the south returned north, but some remained and established families that would be prominent in local government for centuries after. This wave of refugees from the north strengthened Han officials in their dealings with local peoples during this short but tumultuous era and accelerated the ascendancy of imperial administration over the Lac aristocracy. Han administrative activity in these years reflects an accumulation of immigration from the north as well as growing familiarity and experience with local conditions. Han officials began to extend the sphere of their direct authority over increasing numbers of inhabitants. Some of these were immigrants from the north settled near Han garrisons and administrative centers. Others were local people who either lived near these places or were attracted to migrate there for economic opportunities or for the security provided by direct imperial rule. Han centers surely attracted refugees from the politics of the Lac lords and the vicissitudes of local society. By this time, Han administrators had apparently established a presence at the district level where they were in a position to intervene in relations between Lac lords and local people. Han officials endeavored to draw the Lac lords into the hierarchy of Han government, to teach them to observe the norms of Han civilization and administration. This effort was probably successful in some cases, but in other cases produced non-cooperation and resistance. Contradictions grew between Han government and Lac lords. Han officials were appointees in an imperial administrative system; Lac lords were hereditary aristocrats in something like a feudal system. Han officials organized and registered families in a structure that governed through the responsibility of patriarchs to control their subordinates and to pay taxes; the status of Lac lords passed through the family line of one’s mother and tribute was obtained from communities of agriculturalists who practiced group responsibility. For Han people, land and inheritance rights were possessed by men; in Lac society, access to land was based on communal usage rather than individual ownership and women possessed inheritance rights. Immigrants from the north included officials, soldiers, agriculturalists, and technical experts of various kinds who married local women and obtained land. The contradiction between the Han practice of land being inherited through the male line and the Lac practice of land rights being inherited through the female line came to a head with these people. In mixed marriages, the conflicting interests of male and female offspring were aligned with the discordant regimes of Han administrators and Lac lords. At stake was control of land and access to the taxable agricultural surplus. While in Han society men inherited wealth through their fathers, in Lac society both men and women inherited wealth through their mothers. As late as the third century CE, an imperial administrator wrote disapprovingly that levirate was still practiced in areas where Lac traditions remained strongest. This meant that childless widows had a right to bear children with men from their deceased husbands’ families in order to obtain heirs. This practice ostensibly provided an heir for the mother, although some patriarchal societies used it to provide an heir for the deceased father. A woman’s prerogative to bear children for her family line may lie behind an observation from that time and place that local women were difficult to control and that aspiring patriarchs attached bells to the ears of their wives to prevent them from sneaking off at night to be with other men. According to Han historical records, in the fourth decade of the first century CE, a Lac lord was “tied up with the law” by the Han prefect of Giao Chi. This provoked an uprising led by two women, daughters of another Lac lord, who were married to the “tied up” lord. These were the famous Trung Sisters who in later centuries became heroines of Vietnamese history. The details of what happened can only be conjectured. If the “law” referred to had to do with land ownership and inheritance rights, a plausible scenario is that Han officials endeavored to restrain a man who was championing the inheritance rights of women to whom he was related by marriage against efforts by the imperial regime to assert Han ideas about land ownership. But there may have been other issues at stake as well, for the Trung Sisters were from Me Linh, the locality where the Hung kings were said to have ruled before the time of King An Duong, so they may have been infused with a venerable tradition of authority. Han descriptions of northern Vietnam compiled three to four centuries later say that the most distinguishing feature of Me Linh was the presence of big beautiful snakes that could be captured only by covering them with women’s clothing. If this indication of female potency were imagined as a remnant of thought about there once being Hung queens rather than Hung kings in this place, it would offer an explanatory context to the fact that when Han settlements and garrisons were overrun in the spring of 40 CE the Trung Sisters then ruled as queens from Me Linh. These queens established their influence over the Han jurisdictions in northern Vietnam of Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam, and also a prefecture on the coast to the north that today is within the Chinese border. The Trung Sisters reigned for two years until a Han expeditionary force was organized and put in motion. The only detail about their rule that remains from Han historical records is that they “adjusted taxes,” which suggests that the most inflammatory issue leading to the uprising was control of land and agricultural surplus – an important target of Han taxation. It might also refer to control of the markets and taxation of local commodities that were sought by Han merchants. These were primarily luxury goods such as rhinoceros horns, elephant tusks, tropical bird feathers, pearls, aromatic woods, and slaves. Rulers in northern China had by then already been coveting these items for centuries. Two and a half centuries earlier, Qin Shi Huang’s attention had been drawn to the south by the trade in these goods. Considerations of frontier security, revenue from a relatively large agricultural population, and access to tropical commodities all contributed to the Han determination to regain control of this region. One climatic feature that has affected warfare in Vietnam for centuries is the monsoon rains. During the warm months when temperatures rise on the Eurasian land mass, winds from the sea bring rain, and sometimes typhoons, beginning in May and extending into October. The land becomes waterlogged and will not sustain the movement of large armies. As temperatures fall during the cooler months, from November to April, winds blow out to sea and the land dries out making it possible for large armies to move. In the dry season of early 42 CE, General Ma Yuan led a Han army into the Red River plain, building a road along the coast as he came. Ma Yuan established his headquarters near King An Duong’s fortress of Co Loa and camped there during the soggy months of the monsoon rain season, from May to October. Around the end of the year, as the land dried out and the fighting season opened, he captured and beheaded the Trung Sisters after a series of battles in which thousands of their followers were killed, were captured, or had surrendered. He spent the next year receiving the submission of local leaders, tracking down and killing those who refused to submit, deporting hundreds of prominent clans to the north, building fortified towns from which localities could be governed, establishing garrisons, and settling his soldiers on land from which they could supply their own provisions. He also issued regulations to eliminate the contradictions between Han law and local practice, and he took oaths of loyalty from those who submitted. Having established a foundation for direct imperial governance, he returned north in 44 CE. The expedition of Ma Yuan ended the age that historians associate with Lac lords and that archaeologists associate with Dong Son Culture. It came two and a half centuries after Qin Shi Huang’s imperial armies crossed the passes into southern China, initiating recorded history in this region with the frontier perceptions of Han administrators and the legendary struggle between King An Duong and Zhao To. Local society and the people who ruled it do not appear to have experienced any major disruption as Han officials garrisoned headquarters at a few strategic locations and began to attract immigrants from the north. As years went by, however, contradictions between imperial policy and local practice grew ever more apparent and eventually led to the violence of the 40s CE. Stories about relations between imperial administrators and the local society during this long era of coexistence were compiled in a book annotated in its present form around five centuries later entitled Shui Jing Zhu (Commentary on the Waterways Classic). The stories are about boundaries between the realms of human beings and animals with the humans standing for imperial civilization and animals standing for uncivilized locals. Three stories are attributed to three regions of the Red River plain. One of these is the story, mentioned above, about the big beautiful snakes at Me Linh. This is where the Hung kings or queens are thought to have ruled and also where the Trung Sisters held court. The snakes are entirely in the animal realm, and the point of the story is how to capture and kill them. Another story is located in the region of Co Loa, where King An Duong ruled. It is about chimpanzees able to transform themselves into creatures with handsome human heads that spoke using elegant language that moved the emotions of human listeners. Humans ate the delicious flesh of these creatures in time of famine. This story of an animal able to enter the human realm with its face and speech is a metaphor for local people who learned some aspects of civilization. But that they were eaten in an emergency indicates that for civilized people they nevertheless remained animals. The third story comes from Luy Lau, the Han administrative center established at the seaport facing the northern coast. Here a Han administrator became famous for having transformed himself into a tiger and then later returned himself back into a man. This story is about a representative of imperial civilization penetrating the animal world and taking control of it in the form of the most ferocious of beasts, then returning to the human realm. These stories reflect perceptions of three different regions, but they also reflect three phases in a process of contact between local people and Han officials. The big snake is utterly beyond human civilization and must be killed. The talking chimpanzees assumed some civilized characteristics and were interesting but could never become members of the civilized human world. The Han tiger-man learned to enter and master the realm of savagery yet remained a civilized man and an imperial official. These stories present metaphors for three policies: extermination of the uncivilized, allowing the uncivilized to acquire some aspects of civilization, and penetrating the uncivilized realm and dominating it with imperial versions of uncivilized potency. In the same book where these stories are recorded, each of these three places is also associated with an emblematic military encounter. At Me Linh, Ma Yuan defeated and killed the Trung Sisters. Co Loa is the scene of the struggle for ascendancy between King An Duong and Zhao To, two aspiring monarchs on the imperial frontier. The battle recorded for Luy Lau is an event that took place in the year 411 when a rebel army fleeing from imperial forces in southern China entered northern Vietnam and attempted to seize control of it; the loyal imperial governor rallied the frontier province against the invading rebel and defeated him. These episodes show a shift of perspective on northern Vietnam from a place of disorder where uncivilized people were slain to a place where semi-civilized kingdoms competed for dominance on the edge of the civilized world to a loyal civilized province that overcame rebellious forces emanating from the imperial heartland. For nine hundred years following the expedition of Ma Yuan, the southernmost province of successive dynastic empires was in northern Vietnam. During this time, every aspect of society and culture was transformed by education in the Confucian and Daoist classics, by the arrival of Buddhism and its synthesis with local religious practices, by waves of immigrants, by imperial ideals of political organization and social behavior, and by a transformation of languages, both Annamese Middle Chinese that developed among the Chinese speakers and ProtoViet-Muong spoken by the non-Chinese population, in a context of centuries of bilingualism. The series of acculturating episodes during this time progressively turned the lives and aspirations of people inhabiting this place toward the civilization in the north. There was no further mention of the name Lac. Instead, the people here were recorded as Viet (Chinese Yue). As a name, Viet had a relatively prominent imperial pedigree. Although it was a designation for southern non-Han peoples, it nevertheless indicated a kind of uncivilized people that were redeemable. A kingdom named Yue/Viet was one of the “warring states” of ancient China in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, on the southern coast of the civilized world near the mouth of the Yangtze River. Its most famous ruler, King Goujian (fifth century BCE), claimed descent from a sage-king in antiquity. His people, originally considered civilized, had assumed uncivilized aspects through long residence among uncivilized peoples. Consequently, the Yue/Viet were thought of as a kind of uncivilized people predisposed toward the civilizing process. This was a name for people on the threshold of civilization who had the options of going over the threshold, of turning away, or of looking both ways. Shi Xie and the rise of the great families For fifty years after Ma Yuan’s expedition, Han power was at its peak. Very little information about the southern frontier during this time was recorded by imperial historians, which may be taken as an indication that, in the wake of Ma Yuan’s frontier sojourn, the situation was relatively calm. When events began to be recorded, in the second century, they were about invasions, rebellions, and political turmoil. Ma Yuan left most of his army in Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam to form the core of what became a frontier garrison. Large numbers of Han soldiers, administrators, merchants, craftspeople, agriculturalists, and adventurers came and went. Many of these people remained to take advantage of opportunities on the new frontier. Ma Yuan’s expedition is the pivot for a dramatic shift in archaeological evidence. Han-style brick tombs replace Dong Son graves. These tombs are nearly identical with tombs found throughout the Han Empire, being underground chambers covered by mounds of earth and containing coins, jewelry, lamps, figurines, utensils, mirrors, ceramics, weapons, and other miscellaneous items, all typical of Han culture. Among the artifacts found in these tombs are clay models of agricultural compounds with wells, ovens, granaries, pens for animals, residential quarters, and walls with towers for defense. Such clay models are found in Han tombs everywhere and indicate the basic composition of Han society in the first and second centuries CE, a social structure that continued in various forms until the sixth century in southern China and northern Vietnam. Historians of China refer to this as the age of “great family dominance,” meaning that “great families,” or agglomerations of people and property under the authority of kin groups, whether actual or fictive, constituted government at the local and provincial levels and dominated imperial administration outside of the capital region and of strategically located garrisons. These were similar to the latifundia in the Roman Empire and the hacienda of colonial Latin America, which emerged from contexts of imperial conquest and appropriation of land, manpower, and other resources. As economic units, they were typically based on control of large tracts of agricultural land worked by peasants and herders in various forms of servitude or dependency, but they could also include craftsmen with specialized skills, for example in ceramics, bronze and iron ware, woodworking, fishing and pearl diving, salt making, ivory carving, precious stones and metals, and the production of incense from aromatic wood. There would also have been scholars, scribes, teachers, medical doctors, priests, monks, soldiers, spies, assassins, alchemists, and magicians, all of whom were employed to serve the interests of the group of people composing the “great family,” constituted by birth, adoption, marriage, or some other expedient. The “great families” were economic and social units that brought together local people and immigrants or sojourners from the north. They were arenas with potential for upward social mobility for local people having skills, aptitudes, and attributes in demand by those in power. They were also places where northerners could find opportunities for employment and possible advancement. The people who presided at the very top of these “great families” were buried in the vaulted brick tombs. They were either northerners and their descendents or local people who had assimilated into the imperial governing class. The tombs indicate a fundamental regional stability of imperial society despite the vicissitudes of dynastic politics during the five hundred years following Ma Yuan’s expedition. During the first to sixth centuries, thousands of these tombs were built in the rice lands of Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam. They are today found as far south as the region of modern Quang Trach (Ba Don) in Quang Binh Province, on the Gianh River just south of Ngang pass. It is not coincidental that at this place the distribution of the brick tombs reached its southernmost extent. After the fall of Han, Ngang Pass became the southern border of the provincial jurisdictions inhabited by the ancestors of modern Vietnamese. The Han jurisdiction of Nhat Nam had its northern border at Ngang Pass and it became a contested frontier zone between Sino-Vietnamese, later Vietnamese, and other peoples generally called Cham. Not until the fifteenth century did Vietnamese armies decisively conquer this area and open the southern coast to Vietnamese immigrants. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Vietnamese along this southern coast had established their own separate political system, and for two centuries the Gianh River was the border between northern and southern Vietnamese kingdoms. Decades of warfare ensued. Thirty kilometers south, at Dong Hoi, the southerners built a system of defensive walls from the mountains to the sea to block northern invasions. Seventy kilometers south of Dong Hoi is the Ben Hai River at the seventeenth parallel, the border between warring northern and southern Vietnamese states for twenty years in the mid twentieth century. This region was the southern extremity of the Han Empire at its greatest extent, and thereafter it remained a border zone of one kind or another. There are at least four reasons for this: geography, climate, political history, and human activity in response to these factors. North of Ngang Pass, the plains of the Red, Ma, and Ca Rivers form a coherent geographical space of rice lands amidst large rivers and mountainous terrain with possibilities for defense against external threats. Major rivers all lead west-northwest into the highlands of southwest China and northern Laos. These plains are at the southern edge of the temperate climatic zone, having four seasons with cold, if brief, winters. Wresting an agricultural life from flooding rivers and the salty sea instilled a disciplined lifestyle. Internalizing the social organization and cultural ideals acquired from centuries of participation in an imperial world added new forms of discipline. Communal responsibility and deference to authority remain strong among northern Vietnamese. The southern border of the Han jurisdiction of Nhat Nam was Hai Van Pass, located between the modern cities of Hue and Da Nang. South from Hai Van Pass, one enters the tropics and a coastal environment with greater exposure to the outside world of seafaring and maritime trade routes than is possible on the more northerly coasts facing Hainan Island. Here the Cham peoples, and later the southern Vietnamese, found scope for a more diversified economic, social, and cultural life than was possible further north. The mountainous hinterland communicates with the central Mekong and territories inhabited by ancient Khmer speakers and, more recently, by Tai speakers. The coastal plain between Ngang Pass and Hai Van Pass is a transitional zone that includes both temperate and tropical climatic features. Han-era Nhat Nam was anchored in its north with a society in the plain of the Gianh River and its tributaries that produced the Hanstyle brick tombs. Here was sited the headquarters for commanders of garrisons and patrols that maintained watch as far south as Hai Van Pass. In the second century, as Han power began to decline, frontier disorders in Nhat Nam began to multiply, leading by the end of that century to abandonment of the entire jurisdiction. During that time, the people of Giao Chi and Cuu Chan repeatedly mobilized in response to these disorders and came to understand that with the ebbing of Han power their security increasingly depended upon their taking for themselves the responsibility of regional leadership. The story of how this happened is about the first inkling of local political initiative after the shock of Ma Yuan’s conquest, which had been followed by several generations of immigration, intermarriage, and acculturation in the context of the “great family” estates. At the center of this story is a family that traced its ancestry to refugees from Shandong Province in northeastern China that had fled into the south during the Wang Mang disorders at the beginning of the first century CE. This family settled at the headquarters commanding the frontier jurisdiction comprised of southern China and northern Vietnam, located at Cangwu (modern Wuzhou) on the present border of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces in southern China. Here a main route over the mountains from the north met the West River, about 420 kilometers northeast of the modern Sino-Vietnamese border. During the years from the late 140s to the late 160s, the leader of this family, Shi Si, served as the chief administrative officer of Nhat Nam. These were critical years in the unraveling of the southern Han frontier, and Shi Si served there at a time when especially talented and trusted men were assigned to rule by force of personality in lieu of reliance upon military force only. During the previous decade, in 137 and again in 144, Han outposts and settlements in Nhat Nam were overrun by uprisings originating in the southernmost part of the jurisdiction, provoking turmoil and the breakdown of Han authority in Cuu Chan as well. A disorder similar to these had been put down by force in the year 100, subsequent to which there were several episodes of local peoples immigrating into the areas of Han administration and submitting to Han authority. Since this was also the time when Han power began to decline, Han administration was apparently unequal to the task of carrying out its civilizing mandate among these new subjects or of keeping them at peace. When Nhat Nam erupted in 137 and 144, Han was no longer capable of sending large numbers of soldiers so far south. Consequently, a policy was implemented in which men were selected for their prior experience and success in dealing with non-Han peoples on the frontier and were sent to calm the situation through persuasion and charisma. Shi Si was such a person. In 160, when disorders once more broke out in Nhat Nam and Cuu Chan, Han officials again negotiated peace without resort to arms. The progressive ebbing of Han power, however, continued to offer new opportunities for frontier adventurers. Nhat Nam was temporarily stabilized, but in the 160s uprisings began to break out further north in what is now southern China. The 170s were a time of contention among Han officials in southern China and northern Vietnam, where loyalty to the distant Han court was increasingly eroded by personal ambition. By the 180s, imperial appointments to prominent local men recognized an emerging arrangement of regional autonomy. At that time, Shi Si’s eldest son, Shi Xie, was appointed to govern Giao Chi. For the next forty years, Shi Xie kept Giao Chi and Cuu Chan in peace, while all around swirled the consequences of Han collapse. One of these consequences in the early 190s was the appearance of the kingdom of Lin Yi in southern Nhat Nam. The people of Lin Yi included groups from both the coast and the adjacent uplands along with Han renegades. Lin Yi must also have had some contact, if not connection, with Cham peoples led by kings in the region beyond Nhat Nam’s border, south of Hai Van Pass. As portrayed in later Chinese records, the logic for the existence of this kingdom was to exploit opportunities for probing, plundering, and appropriating territories in imperial frontier jurisdictions. For much of the next four centuries, Lin Yi would be a chronic adversary for those who governed the Red River plain. It nevertheless appears that Shi Xie managed to maintain a modus vivendi with this nascent power. In his youth, Shi Xie had been sent north to study with a famous scholar. He subsequently served as a secretary at the Han court, then returned south to mourn for his father, and thereafter served as an administrator in Sichuan in western China before being appointed to govern Giao Chi. This appointment was based upon both his personal qualities and his position as head of the Shi family, which had become prominent on the southern frontier. In the 190s, the lapse of imperial control in the south enabled Shi Xie to appoint three of his brothers to govern Cuu Chan and the coastal regions of modern Guangxi and Guangdong in southern China. Shi Xie governed from Luy Lau, about thirty kilometers east of modern Hanoi, where his tomb can be seen to this day. Around a hundred scholars fleeing the collapse of Han found refuge with Shi Xie. Shi Xie was remembered among later generations of Vietnamese as the father of education in their land. He reportedly built schools and encouraged lively debates among the intellectuals who gathered around him, including Confucianists, Daoists, and Buddhists. Centuries later, he was credited with compiling a dictionary explaining classical terms in vernacular Vietnamese for use in schools. He surrounded himself with Buddhist monks, and the building of the earliest known Vietnamese Buddhist temples is attributed to him. The story about how Buddhism originated among the Vietnamese connects him to the first appearance of a Buddha in this land, a Mother Buddha who miraculously gave birth to a daughter who, via a tale entwined with the worship of trees and rocks, became embodied in images of four sister Buddhas with rain-making powers. One of these, the Dharma Cloud Buddha, was particularly worshipped by imperial governors and also by Vietnamese kings as late as the eighteenth century. Shi Xie’s posthumous cult also credited him with Daoist powers of immortality. In short, Shi Xie is associated with the introduction of every major aspect of what came to define Vietnamese culture. This is why in his study of Shi Xie, Stephen O’Harrow called him “the first Vietnamese.” Giao Province Shi Xie was termed a “king” in Vietnamese writings of later centuries, but during his lifetime he posed as a loyal official of the Han court until this was no longer plausible, at which point he shifted his allegiance to the rising Wu dynasty in southeastern China, one of the three kingdoms that partitioned the Han Empire in the early third century. After Shi Xie’s death in 226, the Wu moved quickly to exterminate the Shi family and to gain control of northern Vietnam. Cut off from the Silk Road across Central Asia to northern China, the Wu wanted direct access to the maritime route to India and the Mediterranean Sea, for which northern Vietnam had become a terminus during the rule of Shi Xie. Wu exactions and resort to harsh expedients provoked resistance, and in 248 the leader of Lin Yi took advantage of this to seize northern Nhat Nam, inspiring local leaders in Cuu Chan and Giao Chi to rebel against the Wu regime. The Wu calmed the situation with conciliation, resorting to force only to suppress resistance in southern Cuu Chan led by a woman remembered in Vietnamese texts as Lady Trieu. Despite these successes, the Wu made no effort to re-enter Nhat Nam. The Wu kingdom, locked in continual war with its rivals in northern and western China, treated Giao Chi and Cuu Chan primarily as sources of wealth, which was not a popular policy among the people who lived there. In the 260s, the Wei of northern China conquered the Shu Han dynasty of western China in Sichuan and thereafter became the Jin dynasty, thereby reducing the Three Kingdoms to two. Local leaders in Giao Chi sent envoys to Sichuan to offer their allegiance to the Jin, Wu’s remaining enemy. In response, the Jin sent a governor with seven military commanders and their men to establish an anti-Wu regime in northern Vietnam. There followed three years of fighting between Wu forces attempting to regain control of the Red River plain and Jin forces endeavoring to prevent this. Local forces were initially allied with Jin. However, when Tao Huang, an astute Wu commander, sent treasure that he had seized from the Jin contingent to a prominent local leader, thousands of local troops shifted their allegiance to Wu. The Jin soldiers were soon besieged and forced to surrender. Tao Huang thereafter governed northern Vietnam, now known as Giao Province, for around twenty-five years, until near the end of the third century; the exact year is unknown. Just as had been the case with Shi Xie, he governed during a time of dynastic change in the north. In 280, Jin conquered Wu. Based far away in northern China, Jin was content to confirm Tao Huang’s appointment as governor of Giao, where he continued to serve until his death. Tao Huang was known as a patron of Buddhism. He also established an administrative structure for Giao Province that lasted through several dynastic regimes. A salient feature of this structure was the formation of three new frontier jurisdictions. Two of these were in Giao Chi facing the mountains to the north and to the west; one was in southern Cuu Chan facing the old Nhat Nam border. Tao Huang endeavored to re-establish some semblance of authority in Nhat Nam, proclaiming an economic embargo against markets in Nhat Nam and garrisoning soldiers on the frontier, but there is no evidence that he achieved more than a temporary stabilization of the border. On the contrary, his efforts appear to have done little more than elicit attacks by Lin Yi. During the first two decades of the fourth century, warring princes tore the Jin dynasty apart and various groups of non-Han peoples conquered northern China, sending a great wave of refugees into southern China, where a Jin prince reassembled the dynasty from his base on the lower Yangtze. During this time, Giao Province was left to its own devices with a regime over which local leaders invited prominent members of old Wu families to preside as governors. In the 320s, the newly constituted Jin court in southern China was strong enough to begin sending soldiers to Giao in efforts to gain control of the government there. As in the previous century when Wu attempted to gain ascendancy and local powers turned to the Jin in Sichuan, local powers in Giao now resisted Jin, inspired by the Cheng Han dynasty that had arisen in Sichuan in opposition to Jin. Meanwhile, Jin immigrants were seeking their fortunes in the south by pushing aside the old Wu families that had come to the fore in the late third century; Giao Province was the last place of refuge for these families. The Jin dynasty finally established its authority in Giao in the 330s, after Jin troops had cut communications between Sichuan and northern Vietnam; within a decade, Jin gained control of Sichuan and removed that option entirely. Jin forces were concerned to get a grip on the southern frontier because the turmoil of the preceding years had attracted the unwelcome attention of Lin Yi. In the 340s, Lin Yi armies, commanded by a king of Han ancestry who had traveled extensively in China as a merchant and knew of conditions in China at first hand, began a series of raids into Giao, culminating in a full-scale invasion in 347. Jin mobilized soldiers from Giao and the province of Guang (modern Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China) for a major effort against Lin Yi. In 349, the Jin army advanced as far as the Gianh River, the former headquarters of Han-era Nhat Nam, where it was defeated and forced to withdraw. The Lin Yi king was mortally wounded in this battle, but his son continued the policy of attacking Giao until defeated by another Jin expedition in 359. The mobilizations of men and resources for the expeditions of 349 and 359 bore heavily upon Giao and even provoked some dissention among provincial officials. But after Lin Yi had been quieted, Jin interest in Giao rapidly faded as the imperial court became preoccupied with other threats. In the late 370s, the governorship fell vacant and the prefect of Cuu Chan, the leader of a prominent local family named Li Xun, seized control of provincial affairs. In 380, the Jin court sent Teng Dunzhi to be governor and Li Xun, perceiving that imperial power was weakening, opted to resist him. However, the head of another leading Giao family, Du Yuan, then serving as the prefect of Giao Chi, took the opportunity to further his ambitions by killing Li Xun and welcoming Teng Dunzhi. The Du family then stood at the head of provincial affairs for the next fortyseven years. Teng Dunzhi remained in Giao as governor for nineteen years, during which the Du family enjoyed preeminence in provincial administration. Du Yuan’s grandfather was originally from Chang’an (Xi’an) in northern China and had been assigned to a post in modern Guangxi near the Giao border early in the fourth century before the fall of northern China in 311. He subsequently settled in Giao during the time when Jin authority was being established there, apparently participating in that process. The family was prominent in Giao throughout the century of Jin rule. Shortly after Teng Dunzhi’s departure in 399, Giao was surprised by a Lin Yi invasion that succeeded in placing the provincial capital under siege. Du Yuan mobilized provincial forces and counterattacked, rapidly pushing the invaders back across the border. Shortly thereafter, the Jin court appointed him governor. When he died in 410, his son Du Huidu succeeded to the governorship. When Du Huidu died in 423, his son Du Hongwen succeeded to the governorship, which he occupied until 427 when he received an appointment at the imperial court. The Du family left in Giao a reputation for good government, reportedly using benevolence and strictness as circumstances dictated. It was a time of dynastic change as the Jin court declined and was replaced in 420 by the Liu Song dynasty, which was content to confirm Du Huidu as governor of Giao. During these years, Giao faced a threat from its northern as well as from its southern border. In 410, Lu Xun, the governor of Guang, the province in southern China adjacent to Giao, aimed to benefit from the feebleness of the Jin court by rebelling. When defeated by a Jin general in 411, Lu Xun led his army into Giao. There he lost his life when defeated in battle by Du Huidu, who thereby protected both his family’s ascendancy in Giao and its reputation for loyalty to the imperial court. The more constant threat to Giao was in the south, where fighting with Lin Yi became chronic, with serious episodes of warfare breaking out in 405–407, 413, 415, and 424. In each case, Lin Yi attacks were repulsed, but to eliminate the problem would take more resources than Giao Province by itself could provide. Although the ascendancy of the Liu Song dynasty in Giao was brief (for less than half a century), yet because of the need to respond to Lin Yi and because of major social, cultural, and economic developments during that time, important changes occurred in Giao. Unlike the expeditions organized in the fourth century by Jin against Lin Yi that relied heavily upon local resources, the Liu Song expedition came after several years of preparation that energized Giao with a prosperous imperial economy. During the fourth century, Jin military leadership had been relatively diffuse, exercised by prominent émigrés who fled into the south after the loss of northern China in 311. These émigrés and their heirs continued to command the armies, keeping the emperors in a position of weakness. This changed when, in 420, the founder of the Liu Song dynasty concentrated control of the military in his own hands. The Liu Song era in the mid fifth century saw a major shift in the structure of politics and society with significant economic effects. Rather than martial prowess, the élite class of émigrés was encouraged to display literary accomplishments at court, where their status relations were carefully monitored. Those uninterested in this turned to trade and business, aiming their ambitions at the accumulation of wealth. The southernmost provinces, including Giao, attracted the attention of these people as a frontier of opportunity, a place to exercise their entrepreneurial and literary skills. This became an era of accelerating commercial activity and great prosperity. As the élite émigré class shifted its attention away from military affairs to become a class of landed scholar gentry and urbanizing merchants, new wealth gained from agriculture and commerce opened possibilities for luxury, for taxation, for religion, and for investment. In Giao, this came after a century of stable government under the Jin and Liu Song dynasties and the administration of the Du family. In the 440s, borders with the dynasties in northern China were calm and did not distract merchants and adventurers from prospects in the far south, and a famously successful expedition against Lin Yi accelerated prosperity by destroying trading rivals on the southern coast and by infusing Giao with a great store of booty. In 443, Tan Hezhi, the governor of Giao, was instructed to recruit soldiers and assemble supplies. He spent three years on this task, recruiting a formidable and well-trained military force, preparing a fleet to transport it, and gathering sufficient supplies for an extended campaign. He also enlisted the services of two commanders famous for their battlefield successes on the northern borders of the empire. In 446, the army advanced down the coast into the old territory of Nhat Nam. Defeating the Lin Yi king in several encounters, the expedition first sacked the seaport on the Gianh River where the headquarters of Nhat Nam had once been, then continued south to sack the citadel and palaces of the Lin Yi king near modern Hue, in what had been the southernmost part of old Nhat Nam. The expedition returned to Giao loaded with plunder. The Lin Yi that had contested the frontier during the preceding two and a half centuries had been thoroughly destroyed and the frontier was thereafter quiet for many years. What subsequently came to be called Lin Yi was from then based beyond the Hai Van Pass in the region of modern Da Nang, a major center of culture and kingship for Chams, who were ethno-linguistically related to the Malay peoples. In Giao, the mid fifth century was a prosperous time. New lands were opened for agriculture south of the Red River in the region of modern Hanoi, resulting in the formation of a new prefecture ther