A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century [New ed.] 1009237632, 9781009237635

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A Maritime Vietnam

Despite its 3,000-kilometres coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact. Li Tana is Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and Pacific Studies, Australian National University (ANU).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

To my ANU colleagues and friends: David, Tony, Nola, Philip, and Cathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century Li Tana Australian National University

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009237635 DOI: 10.1017/9781009237628 © Tana Li 2024 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 & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-23763-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-23764-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment 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.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam

Despite its 3,000-kilometres coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact. Li Tana is Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and Pacific Studies, Australian National University (ANU).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

To my ANU colleagues and friends: David, Tony, Nola, Philip, and Cathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century Li Tana Australian National University

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009237635 DOI: 10.1017/9781009237628 © Tana Li 2024 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 & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-23763-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-23764-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment 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.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam

Despite its 3,000-kilometres coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact. Li Tana is Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and Pacific Studies, Australian National University (ANU).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

To my ANU colleagues and friends: David, Tony, Nola, Philip, and Cathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century Li Tana Australian National University

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009237635 DOI: 10.1017/9781009237628 © Tana Li 2024 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 & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-23763-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-23764-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment 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.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam

Despite its 3,000-kilometres coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact. Li Tana is Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and Pacific Studies, Australian National University (ANU).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

To my ANU colleagues and friends: David, Tony, Nola, Philip, and Cathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press

A Maritime Vietnam From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century Li Tana Australian National University

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009237635 DOI: 10.1017/9781009237628 © Tana Li 2024 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 & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-23763-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-23764-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment 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.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Contents

List of Figures page vi List of Maps vii List of Tables viii Preface ix Introduction

1

1 Maritime Formations

17

2 Aromatics, Buddhism, and the Making of a South Seas Emporium

52

3 ‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’: Linyi, 200–700 ce 80 4 Maritime Resurgence and the Rise of Dai Viet

110

5 Winds of Trade from the Middle East: Champa in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries

140

6 Muslim Trade and the Conquest of the Coast: The Mystery of the Topkapi Vase

164

7 Silks and Society: Tongking in the Age of Commerce

195

8 Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

228

9 The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth-Century Water Frontier

255

10 Ships and the Problem of Political Integration: Transporting Rice in the New Empire

285



Conclusion: Some Reflections on a Maritime Vietnam

309

Bibliography 319 Index 339

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Figures

1.1 Compares tripod pots and bells from Viet Khe and southern China. page 23 1.2 (a) The dagger from Ha Dong, Red River Delta and (b) the dagger from Shumuling, Hunan. 25 1.3 Monthly mean wind-stress in the Gulf of Tongking 32 1.4 Bronze pots found in Hepu (a) and in Thanh Hoa (b) 41 1.5 ‘Kneeling man’ from Lach Truong, Thanh Hoa 50 1.6 The ‘Hu style man’ from Gejiu, Yunnan 50 2.1 Two incense burners of the Qing palace 72 3.1 Zhigongtu [Picture of Tribute by envoys from overseas] (central part) 94 3.2 Japanese musicians playing Linyi music 100 5.1 Overlapping missions to Song from Champa, Srivijaya, and Arabia, 960–1116 152 5.2 Champa’s missions to Dai Viet and the Song, 960–1169 160 6.1 Qing navigational map, route next to the Jiaozhi Sea 173 6.2 Muslim three tip counterweight trebuchets, c. 1187 177 6.3a Scroll of the Master Truc Lam coming down from the mount Yen Tu 179 6.3b Scroll of the Master Truc Lam coming down from the mount Yen Tu 179 6.4 Vietnamese tiles found in Tuba (a) and Demak (b), Java 184 7.1 Silk painting from the Mogao cave, tenth century 199 7.2 Total volume of imported raw silk via Nagasaki and the suppliers, 1633–1666 203 7.3 Construction and renovation of temples, markets and bridges, 1500–1840 212 9.1 Wu Heguan’s contract with Swedish supercargo for trading to Cochinchina, 1765 265 9.2 Cochinchinese gold bullions in Nagasaki, 1767 272 9.3 Canton junk flying VOC flag, c. 1747/48 274 9.4 Vietnam, Siam, Java, and Manila’s sugar prices in Singapore, 1830–1854 281 vi

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Maps

1.1 Jiaozhi’s place in first millennium Asia page 30 1.2 (a and b) Coastline from Ha Long Bay to Thanh Hoa, 4,000 years ago and present 35 1.3 (a and b) Lach Truong and the Upper Route to Thang Long 37 1.4 Winter currents in the Gulf of Tongking 38 1.5 Locations of Hepu, Xuwen, Lach Truong, and Man Bac 39 1.6 Districts worshipping Thunder God in northern and central Vietnam 44 1.7 Distribution of Neolithic sites on the Red River Plain and in adjacent areas 46 1.8 The Five-chi and Yak roads (Wuchidao, Maoniudao) 48 3.1 Locations of Cham wells in Ha Tinh area 104 4.1 The Red River Delta in the tenth century 112 4.2 The main areas under the Ly control and its royal travel lodges 125 4.3 The horse–salt trading routes and the trading sites of silk-aromatics in Qinzhou. Enlargement: Ceramic making areas. 131 4.4 The Tran’s royal farms on the coast, thirteenth to fourteenth centuries 136 5.1 Stopping points of Arabian ships in the eighth century 144 8.1 Viet expansion southward 231 8.2 Locations of markets and guesthouses of the Nguyen Cochinchina, c. 1690 240 8.3 Linyi citadels of the first millennium and capitals of the Nguyen lords 242 8.4 Locations of Nguyen lords’ capitals 242

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Tables

4.1 Registered households in the gulf region, c. first century–1078 page 114 4.2 Raids carried out by the former Le and Ly dynasties, 980–1175 117 5.1 Numbers of Cham tributes to Song and Dai Viet, 960–1100 159 6.1 Visits by Cham and Viet Envoys to Guangzhou, 960–999 168 8.1 Forest products exported to Nagasaki from Southeast Asia and the share of Cochinchina, 1641–1650 247 8.2 Number of Chinese junks to Japan from Southeast Asian countries (1647–1720) 249 8.3 Forest products from Thuan Hoa paid as taxes in the mid-1550s, areas from Quang Binh to Hue 251 9.1 Sugar exported from Cochinchina in 1767 (tons) 261 9.2 Destinations of Canton Hong junks, 1764–1774 266 10.1 World silver production 1781–1820s (million ounces) 288 10.2 Cash crops export from the Mekong Delta (early nineteenth century?) 291 10.3 Taxpayers (đinh) in the Red River Delta and Mekong Delta, 1819 293 10.4 Registered lands (dien) of the Red River Delta and Mekong Delta before 1831 294 10.5 Monthly frequency of typhoons which struck the district regions of Vietnam, 1954–1991 296 10.6 Numbers of ships in official shipping and shipwrecks, 1849–1883 297

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Preface

Forty-five years ago, I began studying Vietnam and the Vietnamese at Beijing’s Peking University. One of the first things I learned there was a song called ‘Làng tôi’, or ‘My Village’. I still remember its words, which can be paraphrased in English as ‘my village, lush with its bamboo shade, where each afternoon the religious bell chimes, where all are content, with our dear fields, our trees, our boat, and our river’.1 As a Mongol from the steppe, I found the music and lyrics captivating. In my mind’s eye, I could see a small village, quiet and bucolic, surrounded by tall stands of green bamboo. Among those hedgerows flowed a river, murmuring gently as it ran along a row of betel nut trees that shaded passing boats from the intense sun. A bell faded as it reverberated across the village’s fertile fields. I fell in love with this picture of Vietnam before ever touching its soil. In my broader studies, I discovered that my cherished village imagery of Vietnam was hardly unique. In China as all over the world, scholarly conceptualisations of Vietnam rested on the ‘village’ as its basic unit of society. Yet if Vietnamese society was fundamentally rural – indeed agrarian, as I was taught – it was nevertheless equally revolutionary. These crucial words, ‘rural’ and ‘revolutionary’, became inseparable in my mind, the keys to understanding Vietnamese history. First, one had to grapple with its rural village society, which by the nineteenth century was concentrated in two core regions, the grand deltas of the Red and Mekong rivers. These important areas were separated by a thousand miles of winding shoreline facing the Bien Dong – to Vietnamese the ‘eastern sea’, and to the rest of us the South China Sea – where thin soil and harsh climate made agriculture difficult. When focused on these two deltas, the conventional image of peasant men and women donning their conical hats to labour in rice fields was easy to imagine. Villages were self-sufficient and possessed common fields (cong dien), distributed among fellow villagers on a four-year rotational basis, thus ensuring each household’s access to fertile plots. Vietnamese people took this 1

This popular song was written by Van Cao, in 1947, about his home village in Vu Ban district, Nam Dinh.

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x Preface

inward-looking and stable social unit with them, reduplicating it endlessly with only minor variations, as they advanced southwards from their northern delta origins to the Mekong, in the process settling the territory of modern Vietnam. Historians likened the country to two rice baskets hanging from a long, thin shoulder pole – the metaphorical apotheosis of village Vietnam, in which two agriculturally rich deltas were held together by a slender strand of poor coastal territory, today’s central region. In the literature I studied, I learned that in this ‘S’-shaped territory, Vietnamese had built a centralised government not unlike that of China. This was not surprising, because of a story about the Vietnamese people which depicted their original development under China’s long shadow, beginning as a Chinese province in the second century bce and ending ten centuries later as an independent kingdom. Thereafter the strong spirit of the Vietnamese people repeatedly dashed China’s attempts to reconquer its former province. During this second millennium, we were taught, resistance to foreign aggression and occupation had flourished in Vietnamese villages. This fierce spirit had triggered several uprisings against China’s dominance and its later postindependent aggressions, events that inspire Vietnamese to this day and which Vietnamese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used to mobilise their compatriots against French colonialism and American imperialism. Here, the link between rural society and revolution became clear. I was content with this basic, conventional understanding of Vietnamese history, even eager to build my own scholarship on it, when I travelled to Australia in early 1988 to undertake graduate studies at the Australia National University. There I was exposed to a very different set of teachers, and to a vast new body of literature, the product of layers upon layers of interpretations added over several generations by a diverse community of scholars – some Chinese, some French, some American, mostly Vietnamese – who were driven by a variety of ideologies and agendas. I am infinitely indebted to my teachers in Canberra, especially to David Marr and Anthony Reid, for opening my eyes and guiding me past the static, bounded image of my early years. Luckily for me, too, my time in the Research School of Pacific and Asian History coincided with that of several other graduate students who would become my friends and colleagues, among them Christopher Goscha, Nola Cooke, Philip Taylor, Do Thien, and Andrew Hardy. My interactions with teachers and students alike challenged me to ask the critical question that I had not properly thought about before: what is Vietnam? When approached from several different perspectives, this question suddenly became not so easy to answer. From then on, that question, and my immersion in the budding new scholarship, consumed my interest. Driven by a new critique of the unquestioned assumptions that had sustained the long-accepted model of ‘traditional’ Vietnamese history and society, novel approaches opened the field in several

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Preface xi

directions. As Keith Taylor would urge in 1997, it seemed that our task was to reconsider the concept of ‘a unified Vietnam, a village Vietnam, a Confucian Vietnam and a revolutionary Vietnam’.2 Inspired by such ideas, I turned away from vindicating old models to searching for new sources and new insights into Vietnam and its past. This led me to a time and place in Vietnamese history that the conventional model had largely overlooked, perhaps because it seemed such a poor fit – the early modern kingdom of Cochinchina, or Dang Trong, whose multiethnic, syncretic, and commercial characteristics contrasted sharply with the image of a village-centric, monolithic Red River Delta heartland to its north.3 In this frontier kingdom on the margins of conventional Vietnamese history, I found a new sort of Vietnam that was difficult to perceive through the constricting lens of ‘traditional’ Vietnamese history. All that was needed, I discovered, was an open mind and the willingness to search for alternative sources, however disparate. Slowly my attention was drawn towards the sea and to the commercial relations with foreign markets that merchant networks made possible. Two co-edited books emerged from the first part of my quest, Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Regions, 1750–1880 and The Tongking Gulf through History, both based on fruitful workshops that had brought together scholars from Vietnam, China, Japan, Germany, France, and the United States as well as Australia. My growing interest in understanding what the view from the sea could tell us about life on land was brought into sharper focus at this time by my exploration of the work of scholars like Keith Taylor, John Whitmore, Victor Lieberman, James Warren, Carl Trocki, Richard O’Connor, Paul van Dyke, Bruce Lockhart, Roderick Ptak, Mark Selden, George Souza, Sakurai Yumio, Fukui Hayao, Momoki Shiro, Charles Wheeler, Geoff Wade, Catherine Churchman, and Judith Cameron, to name but a few. In retrospect, my switch to a maritime perspective appears a logical step. My work on Cochinchina had shown me that ‘traditional Vietnam’ was not the self-sufficient, inward-looking agrarian society of colonial and immediate post-colonial models, despite the still-widespread belief that it was. I hope this book helps to explain why. I owe great debts to my Vietnamese colleagues and friends, accrued since I first visited Vietnam in 1990. My thanks go to the late professors Do Van Ninh, Nguyen Duc Nghinh, Da Lan (Nguyen Duc Du), and the archaeologist Nguyen Tien Dong (who passed away just as this manuscript was finished). All of them helped me graciously, though I did not get the chance to express a hearty cam on or ‘thank you’. To Nguyen Van Ku, Do Bang, Nguyen Nghi, 2

Keith Taylor, ‘Vietnamese Studies in North America’, keynote speech at the first International Conference on Vietnamese Studies, Hanoi (July, 1997), p. 2. Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asian Program, 1998).

3

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xii Preface

Nguyen  Dinh Dau, Hoang Anh Tuan, Cao Tu Thanh, Vu Minh Giang, Ho Trung Tu, Nguyen Quang Ngoc, Dinh Khac Thuan, and many scholars who I admire but am unable to list in full here – thank you for taking me in as one of yours during all these years and tirelessly helping me to understand what is Vietnam. I am grateful to the Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore for offering me senior visiting fellowships in 2008 and 2017 on this topic. Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia has been a major source of inspiration for my studies. I am indebted to Yumio Sakurai, Momoki Shiro, Fukui Hayao, Koizumi Junko, Kaoru Sugihara, Nishimura Masanari, and Shine Toshihiko for their inspiration and for patiently answering the many questions I asked. It is my great fortune that Charles Wheeler was willing to help me with editing this manuscript. This book in some way is a dialogue between us. This book could not have realised its current form without his critiques and encouragements. My source of constant inspiration came from the works of Anthony Reid. Thank you, Tony, for opening one window after the other for me all these years, and for encouraging me to tackle maritime Vietnam, which seemed impossible to accomplish at the time I began. I could not have carried this project through without the challenges and countless hours of intense discussions and debates with my colleagues Nola Cooke, Philip Taylor, and Catherine Churchman. David Marr, my teacher and supervisor who brought me to Australia 34 years ago, has never failed to inspire and encourage me to tien len (forward!) all these years. He read the draft of all the chapters in this book and made thoughtful comments and suggestions. I could not dream of a more thorough and devoted teacher than David. My thanks also go to ANU’s Cartography Unit for making nearly all the maps of this book for me. My husband Lihong has never failed to give me love and support all these years. So many hours and days that we could have spent together were consumed on this book instead. I owe you, Lihong. And last, I dedicate this book to my fellow ANU colleagues and friends: David, Tony, Nola, Philip, and Cathy. Thank you for the stimulation and support to make this happen. This is a piece of our collective work, a team work. The errors, of course, are my own responsibility.

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Introduction

Thirty years ago, in Hanoi, the archaeologist and historian Do Van Ninh stood stunned (choáng váng) over the thousands of weapons being excavated from the bottom of the city’s Ngoc Khanh Lake and from under the fields of water spinach growing nearby.1 In the 2000s Vietnamese archaeologists further retrieved a large quantity of handguns, bombards, and cannons from ­excavation sites in the Giang Vo and Kim Ma areas of Hanoi.2 These weapons were not imports from abroad: most of these firearms were cast locally, in fifteenth-century Dai Viet under Le Thanh Tong. They were part of Dai Viet’s enormous store of firearms used to execute its ambitious campaigns of political expansion, which included its decimation of Champa. Dai Viet under the Le dynasty was, as Sun Laichen put it, a small ‘gunpowder empire’. He estimated that during the fifteenth century about 98,800 soldiers, or 38 per cent of the Dai Viet military, carried firearms during wartime. This firepower gave the Le court a military advantage and upended the region’s balance of power in the 1470s and 1480s: in particular, among its western neighbours, invading Ai-lao, Muong Phuan, and Lan Sang (roughly all of today’s Laos) in 1479 while threatening Sipsongbanna in Yunnan and overrunning Lanna (now northern Thailand) in 1480, and to the south, crushing Champa in 1471 and completing a major thrust in Vietnamese territorial expansion into today’s central and southern Vietnam. The range of Dai Viet’s ‘gunpowder empire’ grew so mighty that, in the course of these Le campaigns, troops marched as far as the Irrawaddy River in the Ava kingdom in 1479.3 1

http://khaocohoc.gov.vn/kho-vu-khi-co-duoi-long-ho-ngoc-khanh, accessed 10 Feb 2020. The old placenames of ‘bombard field’ (Bai Dan) and ‘shooting ground’ (Truong ban) are still remembered among the neighbourhood of Ngoc Khanh. 2 Sun Laichen, ‘Chinese-style Firearms in Dai Viet (Vietnam): The Archaeological Evidence’, Revista de cultura 27 (2008), 43–45. 3 Sun Laichen, ‘Chinese Gunpowder Technology and Dai Viet, ca. 1390–1497’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Maddison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 102; this is confirmed by the Viet Chronicle itself. See Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [The complete annals of Dai Viet]. Completed 1479, new edition, Chen Chingho (ed.) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka kenkyujo), vol. 2: 710: ‘[Our army] attacked Ailao and defeated them. [We] Went into the Lao capital and obtained their treasures.

1

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2 Introduction

Such brilliant military successes, which significantly shaped Vietnam and mainland Southeast Asian histories, ultimately rested on one thing: the materials for making gunpowder: sulphur and saltpetre. Dai Viet, however, lacked both of the key ingredients. Sulphur could only come from the volcanic soils of places like Java, Sumatra, and Japan. Saltpetre could be found in Dai Viet but only in minimal quantities. During the fifteenth century, saltpetre was available only in China. Indeed, it was so identified with China at the time that the Arabs called it ‘Chinese snow’. The Ming government, understanding its strategic importance, imposed a strict ban on exporting such strategic materials on pain of death. To amass firepower necessary to achieve the scale that Viet chronicles indicate or the scale of military success that the Le court achieved in the 1470s, it must have imported many tons of gunpowder. But how did they obtain it? Vietnamese had a good reason to withhold any information on the Le court’s source for gunpowder, because they imported through illegal channels from China. One clue comes from an early European source, the travelogue of Portuguese apothecary and voyager Tomé Pires. He visited Dai Viet (which he called Cauchij = Jiaozhi) sometime between his arrival in 1511 and his travel to China in 1516–1517, not long after the death of the Viet emperor Le Thanh Tong in 1497. Summarising Dai Viet’s trade, Pires included the following: This king is much given to war, and he has countless musketeers and small bombards. A very great deal of powder is used in his country, both in war and in all his feasts and amusements by day and night. All the lords and important people in his kingdom employ it like this. Powder is used every day in rockets and all other pleasurable exercises. … Sulphur from China is greatly valued. A very great deal comes to Malacca from the islands of Solor beyond Java … and from it goes to Cochin China. A large quantity of saltpetre is also of value, and a large quantity comes there from China and it is all sold there [Cochin China]. They rarely come to Malacca in their junks. They go to China, to Canton, which is a large city, to join up with the Chinese; then they come for merchandise with the Chinese in their junks.4 [Bold added]

Given the timing of Pires’ book, written in Melaka sometime between 1512 and 1515, it is clear that the saltpetre importers sailing to Canton to ‘to join up with’ Chinese there were actually smugglers. They were probably a mix of Chinese and Vietnamese for, at this point in the Ming dynasty, sea trade was illegal and exporting raw materials for arms was doubly forbidden. Pires

Their king escaped so we captured their people and marched to the Kim Sha River (Irrawaddy River) which was at the south of Burma 偭國 where we attained Burmese books and documents and came back triumphantly.’ 4 Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1944), vol. 1, p. 115.

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Introduction 3

seemed to indicate that sulphur travelled to Dai Viet through a triangular trade, sailing to Melaka on Chinese ships before Chinese merchants transshipped it to Dai Viet.5 Such statements reveal the surprising existence of a thriving interregional commerce in contraband goods that fed an arms industry sponsored by the Le court. Its structure was far-reaching and sophisticated, comprising travel routes that extended for long distances up rivers, over land, and of course, over sea. The existence of such sophistication in industry, transport, commerce, or political strategy, much less in military technology, would have been inconceivable to Vietnam specialists only a few decades ago.6 Le Thanh Tong (r.1460–1497), universally considered the most Confucian king in Vietnamese history, under whose reign the regular triennial Chinese examination system was implemented, and therein where one might least expect to find maritime trade a matter of very high importance to the court. Yet here he is, no doubt well informed about trade operations and even encouraging them to happen. Surely, he must have known that without these Chinese and Vietnamese seagoers, none of his military successes could have materialised. If Vietnam’s most Confucian king could not escape the grasp of maritime commerce, how many other such histories are still buried in lakes, sunk along river bottoms, or submerged along the long, undulating coast of Dai Viet? Such questions first set me on my search. In my pursuit I was enlightened by Momoki Shiro whose words deserve to be quoted:7 Many historians consider Dai Viet during these [precolonial] periods to have been an inward-looking, self-sufficient agrarian state, but this is not true. Agrarian bases in early Southeast Asia were in fact not sufficiently developed to sustain large polities, and what agriculture advances took place occurred largely in response to trade stimuli and to the rise of cities—which demanded increased supplies of agricultural products for food consumption and for export—rather than to internal developments.

5

Copper was another contraband raw material needed for firearm manufacture. It took great quantities of the metal to forge such a large volume of cannonry and guns, but Dai Viet possessed little of it at this point. Nonetheless, it secured sufficient quantities of the strategic metal from a source upriver, in the Chinese province of Yunnan. For evidence, Sun cites among other sources a fifteenth-century Chinese civilian official in Yunnan, who reported: ‘Copper was mined by evil people who sold it to Jiaozhi [Dai Viet] to be made into arms.’ Sun Laichen, ‘1390~1497 間中國的火器技術與越南’ [Chinese firearm technology and Vietnam, 1390–1497], Haiyangshi yanjiu 海洋史研究 [Studies of Maritime History] 7 (2015), 43–44. 6 Archival materials in the Ming Huong village in Vinh Long help identify how Chinese functioned in the Nguyen economy and state building. One such document lists Chinese community tasks from 1783 to 1847, including importing rice, copper, tin, zinc, and gunpowder for official purposes. See Nguyen Cam Thuy (ed.), Dinh cu cua nguoi Hoa tren dat Nam Bo: Tu the ky XVIII den 1945 [Chinese settlement in the Southern Vietnam, from eighteenth century to 1945] (Ho Chi Minh City: Vien khoa hoc Xa hoi Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, 2000), pp. 281–292. 7 Momoki Shiro, ‘Dai Viet and the South China Sea trade from the 10th to the 15th century’, Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, 1 (1998), 1–2.

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4 Introduction

In other words, agriculture had been stimulated by the growth of overseas trade and urbanisation, not the other way around as I had been made to believe since I was a student. Moving my gaze away from Confucians, villages, kings and battles, a miracle slowly occurred: fragments of unknown pasts began revealing themselves to me in their hundreds and thousands, like shells and pebbles gleaming in the receding tide. Seemingly scattered at first glance, when they were seen from a new angle patterns appeared among them, patterns that had been overlooked by early historians, beginning with traditional chroniclers themselves. Successive generations of colonial and early post-colonial historians had then followed their lead. In Vietnam, post-colonial Marxist and nationalist historians had also largely omitted these matters from their metanarratives, if only because what peeped out tended to reveal a millennial pattern of foreign, often Chinese, involvement in the maritime trading life of the region now known as Vietnam. For Marxists, foreign merchants were little more than parasites on the feudal agrarian society; while nationalists, almost by definition, exiled them from their highly exclusive fusion of nation, ethnicity, and identity. Analysing this massive quantity of new data over two decades, I came to perceive in these patterns the components of a new historiography and a new master narrative that revealed a very different story from other histories of the ancient lands that form modern Vietnam. Denys Lombard, in his 1988 discussion of this problem in all areas of Southeast Asian studies, pointed out this trend:8 This perception is reflected more or less clearly in all the successive histories of Southeast Asia. Initially written from a colonial perspective, and later from a nationalist one, in either case they were marked by a strong desire to stress that the greatest influences came from the West: first of all, ‘Indianisation’, then ‘Islamisation’ (conceived essentially as coming from Islamised India, or from the Middle East) and finally, of course, ‘Westernisation’, after the early sixteenth century arrival of the Portuguese. Written originally by Europeans and aiming above all to teach readers to look to Europe (and later the US), these histories minimised the rhythms coming from the North to very little indeed, except for the Japanese commotion of 1942 which, even so, was rightly related as a totally unforeseen and even aberrant cataclysm. In this sort of perspective, the Southeast Asian space naturally remains open to the Indian world, beyond the Gulf of Bengal … as well as towards the Melanesian world (which we know begins in Indonesian itself, in Maluku, Irian and Timor). Yet, by contrast, it excludes all relations with the Chinese world.

8

Denys Lombard, ‘Another “Mediterranean” in Southeast Asia’, trans. Nola Cooke, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 1 (2007), 3, http://chl.anu.edu.au/chinese-southern-diasporastudies/chinese-southern-diaspora-studies-volume-one-2007. Originally published in Hérodote 88 (1988), 184–192.

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Introduction 5

In colonial and nationalist discourse, ‘China’ had too often become generalised and abstracted, so little more than a name representing nothing but a shadow spectre threatening the existence of Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, with complex historical realities lost in the process. The theme of ‘resistance to foreign aggression’ has been so central to nationalist historiography that, as Victor Lieberman points out, it became ‘the overriding principle for deciphering the past 2000 years’ and it ‘placed Hanoi squarely at the centre of “national” development’. Quoting Keith Taylor, he attributes this to a ‘strangling obsession with identity and continuity mandated by the nationalist faith … has animated virtually every twentieth-century historian who has written about Vietnam’.9 As a consequence, as Nhung Tran and Anthony Reid note, scholars ‘unwittingly constructed a model of ‘indigenousness’ that nationalists would soon appropriate in their construction of the inevitability of the Vietnamese nation. The dominant themes became a distinct, non-Chinese origin, the homogeneity of Vietnamese culture.’10 Through such discursive manoeuvres, to paraphrase Clare Sutherland’s sharp point, nationalism became a mode of purification,11 one in which the function of the ‘China factor’ was already firmly established as outside the national body. With China so essentialised and rejected in the exclusive and dogmatic construction of the Viet nation that has dominated twentieth-century Vietnamese historiography, even interregional interactions like those between northern Vietnam and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi were excluded from the dominant discourse. This is important, because the referents behind the names we use to identify early Vietnam can be vague. It was never clear, for example, what constituted the people we call the ‘Viet’ or the ‘Lac’, as Catherine Churchman has shown. Moreover, actions taken in these regions could have important effects on their southern neighbours. Churchman also revealed that it was the Li and Lao chiefdoms in today’s Guangxi and western Guangdong provinces between the third and seventh centuries CE that significantly slowed Han migration from northern China,12 a development that paved the way for Dai Viet’s independence. Such an important connection eludes those focused solely on internal dynamics. 9

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 342. Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid, ‘Introduction’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: The University Press of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 7. 11 The exact phrase is ‘Nationalism is one such mode of purification, though its apparent incompatibility with cosmopolitanism is not as clear as may first appear.’ Claire Sutherland, ‘A Postmodern Mandala? Moving beyond Methodological Nationalism’, HumaNetten 37 (2016), 91 (http://dx.doi.org/10.15626/hn.20163705, accessed 7 May 2017). 12 Catherine Churchman, The People between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 10

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6 Introduction

More recently, historians have begun to recognise the existence and importance of maritime regions in national histories, which has extended to Vietnam as well. The nationalist approach to Vietnamese history, while making early Dai Viet’s independence appear like a heroic departure from its inland neighbours, essentially erased the links between the region we now called Vietnam and the maritime world to which it owed so much, as this book will show. It made Dai Viet more like its land-locked neighbours like Laos or Yunnan and appear wholly different from its maritime Southeast Asian neighbours. As Charles Wheeler explains, the distortion of history is particularly notable when considering the role of the sea in Vietnamese history: ‘Influenced by the artificial, land-based boundaries that subverted human ecologies to imperial realities, academic disciplines have traditionally ignored fundamental, enduring patterns of cross-cultural exchange, both within and beyond this region.’13 Ironically, despite its 3,200 kilometres of coastline, until recently the coast and its many ports have been the least likely places through which to approach Vietnamese history in conventional historiography. This book echoes and embraces Wheeler’s advocacy of approaching Vietnamese history from the sea; in some ways it is like a dialogue with his work, as we laboured over the same problems in Vietnamese history for decades. Still, to approach the deeper structures of Vietnamese history through the sea, standard sources are not enough; interdisciplinary efforts are essential. Geographers, archaeologists and geologists helped me to delve into the historical morphology of the coast, in which a constantly shifting boundary between interacting bodies of land and water helped to shape the material cultures of local peoples. It is this new perspective that enables me to ‘reverse the conventional gaze’, so to speak, and to uncover the submerged history of this coastal region by viewing the land from the sea. Discovering how this sophisticated process worked on the Dai Viet side challenges us who are committed to understanding Vietnam’s historical place in greater Asian and world history. Who created and sustained this economy? Could the traffic between China and Dai Viet have been facilitated by smugglers on both Vietnamese and Chinese coasts? While none of the official documents written at the time is very useful, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nguyen policy provides some helpful comparisons that suggest sea traders may have transported the contraband into Vietnam openly. During the nineteenth century, the Nguyen emperor encouraged the import of strategic goods, frequently reducing and sometimes even exempting both import and export taxes for junks transporting goods like iron, tin, zinc, and sulphur, to 13

Charles Wheeler, workshop abstract, ‘Maritime Southeast Asia: The Sea as Center’, University of California Irvine, January 2004.

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Introduction 7

name a few.14 Indeed, Dai Nam had no choice but to rely on imports of sulphur, saltpetre, and other militarily essentials, as the following example shows. In 1834, during the fourteenth year of his reign, Viet Nam’s emperor Minh Mang ordered the empire’s southern provinces to each store 6,000 can (1 can = 500 grams) of saltpetre and 1,200 can of sulphur, and its northern provinces to stockpile 4,000 can of saltpetre and 800 can of sulphur. Ha Tien, in the Gulf of Thailand, had to keep 1,000 can of saltpetre and 200 can of sulphur.15 Ideally, this means that Dai Nam’s provinces were meant to maintain a total store of 131,000 can (65.5 tons) of saltpetre and 26,200 can (13 tons) of sulphur, excluding a strategic stockpile held in the capital Hue. Yet the empire’s 19 mines had at best only produced a meagre 2,350 can, or 1.9 per cent of requirement, which had dropped to almost nothing after most were abandoned during the Minh Mang reign.16 This meant that all of the essential sulphur and most of the saltpetre had to be imported. If this occurred under nineteenth-century Nguyen emperors, it likely also occurred under the expansionist fifteenth-century king Le Thanh Tong. The only feasible explanation for his extraordinary military prowess was that Le Vietnam, like its Nguyen successor, encouraged and protected Chinese merchants who smuggled strategic materials into Vietnam. To put it simply, smuggling by river, land, and sea was official policy in Dai Viet. As one would expect, the smuggling economy grew large enough to attract an ever-larger number of commodities. Before the twentieth century, literate Vietnamese all read Chinese books, creating a steady market demand that even high prices did not deter.17 If the Chinese shipping to Nagasaki was typical, such books were often exported together with other commodities.18 Books sold to Dai Viet thus fetched high prices, guaranteeing a sustained book trade throughout the second millennium – certainly large enough to help sustain a steady sea trade, whatever its size. But beyond market considerations, maritime influences via the book trade surely also influenced two important cultural events in early modern Dai Viet, the fifteenth century Neo-Confucianist 14

Kham dinh Dai Nam hoi dien su le [Official compendium of institutions and usages of Imperial Vietnam] (Hue: Nxb. Thuan Hoa, 1993), 4: 429–431. ‘Ty hoa phao’, in Kham dinh Dai Nam hoi dien su le, 1: 307–308. 16 Kham dinh Dai Nam hoi dien su le, 4: 240. 17 In the early seventeenth century, a Fujianese maritime officer named Zhang Xie noted, ‘[Viet] scholars love books so much that they often pay very high price to buy them’. Zhang Xie 張燮, Dongxi yangkao 東西洋考 [A study of the Eastern and Western oceans]. Completed 1617, anno. Xie Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 20. 18 Oba Osamu, 大庭脩 Jianghu shidai zhi rizhong mihua 江戸時代日中秘話 [A secret relation between Japan and China in the Edo Era], trans. Xu Shihong (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), pp. 58–61. At times, Chinese officials sought to block their export, but the court’s overriding interest in encouraging Sinitic culture in places like Vietnam prevailed, as occurred in the 1100s the Song emperor Huizong (1082–1135) overrode the objections of his officials to selling books to visiting Viet envoys. ‘The country’s love of books did not start then or finish then’, Zhang observed. Zhang Xie, Dongxi yangkao, p. 20. 15

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8 Introduction

expansion and its seventeenth-century literati revival.19 As technologies of cultural transmission, imported Chinese books undoubtedly influenced local elite readers, sometimes acting as a stabilising factor in Dai Viet’s political integration or, in some cases, a subversive one.20 These exports, so important – perhaps crucial – to the prosperity of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries are invisible in either official history (chinh su) or unofficial history (da su). They were also absent from Chinese sources, since these items were precisely the substitutes of Chinese porcelain and silk exports during the Ming and Qing sea bans. Had there been no evidence of agents of Vietnam’s incorporation in the international arena – such as seventeenth-century Japanese and Portuguese merchants or Dutch and English factors buying silk in historical records, or the fifteenth-century purveyors of ceramic exports recently revealed by underwater archaeologists – Dai Viet might indeed have seemed similar to Dali and Laos, with no access to the sea and with maritime income into the economy and impacts on the society next to zero. The many threads teased out and explored in this book suggest a real undercurrent of wealth flowing through maritime Chinese networks moving through Vietnam that the Vietnamese court could tap into during times of political necessity. But the crucial roles played by non-national actors in the foundation, consolidation, and expansion of Viet states rarely attracted the attention of the official or literati histories, probably because Sinitic models discouraged such activities as beneath serious concern. A more accurate understanding of Vietnamese history would have to redeem from undeserved obscurity of those non-national actors, networks, and movements on Vietnam’s thousand kilometres of the coast,21 to reveal their complicated relations with the political powers in the Viet courts. My examples suggest something important about our understanding of Vietnamese history: Underneath village and Confucian Vietnam there lies a submerged Vietnam, a Vietnam that maintained its connections with both the Southeast Asian interior – James Scott’s Zomia, the non-agrarian societies of upland Southeast Asia – and the South Sea in thousands of ways.22 As this book will show, at many junctures these connections played fundamental roles that profoundly affected the various states that developed in the region we now know as Vietnam. 19

Nguyen Ngoc Huy and Ta Van Tai, The Le Code, 3 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); John Whitmore, ‘The Development of Le Government in Fifteenth-century Vietnam’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1968; Keith W. Taylor, ‘The Literati Revival in Seventeenthcentury Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 18, 1 (March 1987), 1–23. 20 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol.1: 341–342. 21 ‘Introduction’, in Tran and Reid, Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, p. 4. 22 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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A Maritime History of Peoples and Commodities 9

A Maritime History of Peoples and Commodities But how to tell this story of maritime Vietnam that spans the two gulfs, the Gulf of Tongking and the Gulf of Siam? The stale nationalist model is not an option, as it folds the coastal Viet, Linyi, Champa and lower Khmer kingdoms into a single, set recipe and cooks them together in the pot called ‘Vietnam’.23 Another possible approach, which echoes Vietnamese southern expansion, is equally unsatisfactory. Historically this expansion happened along the coast, and it was in coastal areas that major changes occurred first before permeating along rivers and valleys to the hinterland. Seas and rivers were often crucial to shaping regional political changes over the last two thousand years at least, but simply organising their story chronologically risks reproducing a narrative of Vietnamese imperialist expansion south, something about which I am likewise dubious. Among all the Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam is perhaps the one whose maritime history is hardest to tell, full as it is with the hurdles of constantly defining and redefining which of its contemporary coastal areas once belonged to Mon-Khmer, Cham, Ma, Sting, and Khmer speakers. Can there be a relatively neutral approach that allows one to simply tell the maritime story of over 3,000 kilometres of eastern mainland Southeast Asia without giving primacy to modern boundaries? Charles Higham pointed to one possibility when he wrote: ‘Where did the kingfisher feathers and the pearls, the turtle shells and cowries [found in central China] come from? In reverse, how did jade yazhang blades find their way into Neolithic tombs in northern Vietnam? There can only be one answer, through the medium of trade, and the exchange of ideas, between the peoples of greater Southeast Asia and the Chinese nuclear area.’24 My research supports Higham’s insight: this area is critical for appreciating relations between Southeast Asia and the expansive Neolithic communities, and later states, of the Yangzi and Yellow River valleys. Although the current ‘S’ shape boundaries were barely 50 years old when the French arrived, the interactions of the peoples found within those bounds were tens of thousands of years old. A maritime history of its peoples and commodities deserves to be told, without reference to later state-inspired historiographical frames. This is the best possible way to recover a rich, colourful, and significant past, 23

Both Christopher Goscha and Ben Kiernan warn against backdating modern geographical conceptions to the past, and Goscha points out that there have been many different Vietnams. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), pp. 1–3; Ben Kiernan, Vietnam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 4. 24 Charles Higham, ‘Crossing National Boundaries: Southern China and Southeast Asia in Prehistory’, in Ian C. Glover et al. (eds), Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006), p. 14.

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10 Introduction

many elements of which have been drowned in an ocean of forgetfulness or deliberate disregard. Such a history would need to connect the southern China coast to archipelagic Southeast Asia, India, and West Asia. All naturally belong to the maritime history of what is now Vietnam. To this end, this book focuses on commodities, ideas, and peoples and seeks to trace the history of the multiple exchanges which substantially shaped the civilisations along the shores of the South China Sea (V. Bien Dong – ‘Eastern Sea’). By definition, such a maritime history of this coastline must be characterised by discontinuities, ruptures, and gaps, as entirely new forms emerge or old ones pass away, and as sudden redistributions occur along more than 3,200 kilometres coast.25 In this way as well, the book stands apart from the smooth continuities of reductionist state histories. Major Themes of the Book In this book maritime Vietnam is explored in ten chronological chapters, organised around three major themes. They are urbanism as a way of life; the importance of Muslim networks for both Champa and Dai Viet; and the connections between non-national actors and littoral communities on both coasts of the South China Sea. Urbanism: A Way of Life A major argument of this book is that we need to understand the part of the modern Vietnamese coast that included Jiaozhi in the north and Linyi or Champa in the south (bounding modern north and central Vietnam) differently from the agrarian view that is at best really only appropriate to its later history. So much comes into focus if we instead consider it as a series of major stations or relays between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean world. This new perspective captures the essence of its early history. Trade brought here major religions, ideas, and flora and fauna from distant worlds which were exchanged, and often transshipped via other routes radiating across Asia. The story of valuable items like the ‘wonderful Storax Oil of Jiaozhi’, as told in Chapter 2, when combined with those of the aloeswood that decorated the royal swords in seventh-century Japan and the ‘Linyi music’ played in tenthcentury Japanese palaces (Chapter 3), all reveal the important position that Jiaozhi and Linyi once occupied in the high culture of Asia. 25

William Southworth, ‘The Origins of Campa in Central Vietnam, A Preliminary Review’. PhD dissertation, SOAS, University of London (2001), p. 27, quoting Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, English trans. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 169–170.

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Major Themes of the Book 11

Thus, tenth century Jiaozhi, which would soon become the basis for independent Dai Viet, was already a maritime entity like its neighbour Champa or, taking a regional perspective, like its neighbours in the archipelago to the south. Its main wealth came from the sea. Unlike Champa or Island Southeast Asia, however, Jiaozhi was the maritime outpost of successive Chinese empires, spanning dynasties from the Han to beyond the Tang. As such, it did not merely serve as a province of China but was akin to Hong Kong for late Qing China. If this comparison sounds strained, consider Jiaozhi’s following characteristics: an entrepôt whose goods could be transhipped in both directions between the South Seas and China proper; a safe space where people from different parts of Asia could meet beyond the empire’s political core; a major hub of new ideas travelling from south, such as Buddhism and Brahmanism; the primary centre of aromatics refinery for the Chinese market; and finally, a cosmopolitan centre where many leading Chinese scholars of the time sought refuge. All these people came to Jiaozhi, not because it was remote, isolated and backward, but precisely because it was the opposite: a wealthy, exciting place where diverse peoples and ideas could intermingle. Was this not similar to Hong Kong in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Only by seeing its early history in this perspective can we understand Jiaozhi’s rapid population growth and its extraordinary population density at the beginning of the Common Era, given its seemingly remote location at the margins of the Han empire. This perspective also explains the widespread fourth-century cultivation of aromatic plants in lands between the Red River Delta and the frontier with Yunnan. Only by seeing Jiaozhi and its capital Luy Lau as a metropole can we understand why so many temples began to appear there in the third century CE and why Luy Lau became the main relay station for Buddhist monks journeying between India and China. It was most likely here that Indian Buddhists en route to China made their initial acquaintance with the Chinese language. As Paul Wheatley long ago argued: The temples of Tongking may well have been the most likely places in which to find fellow monks competent in both Chinese and some other tongue of the South Seas such as Cam or Javanese, or perhaps Sanskrit, so that the region would have been a convenient halting point where a Javanese or Indian monk could have the intricacies of Chinese grammar explained in his language … Jiaozhi as a whole, and its seat of government in particular, had become part of a system of religious order that reached from China to India, and of a trade network that extended from the China Sea to the Mediterranean.26

As political entities, Jiaozhi and Linyi/Champa both focused on the capital and the ports, which together organised life and production and from which 26

Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography, 1983), pp. 371–373.

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12 Introduction

an urban autocracy arose. Extant sources reveal that urban autocracies existed in the societies inhabiting the western shore of the Gulf of Tongking, even as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the case of Dai Viet, under the aegis of the Tran dynasty. As Richard O’Connor pointed out, for two millennia, urbanism was a way of life for Southeast Asians. Cities brought diverse peoples and societies together, and even remote peoples might shape themselves according to their reactions to urban rule. For O’Connor the Southeast Asian city was ‘not an alien imposition but an indigenous construction […] distinct from, superior to and yet representative of society’.27 Acknowledging the city’s centrality is vital to our understanding of the social and cultural order of both Jiaozhi and Champa. The Long-Understated Muslim Networks: Dai Viet Ambitions and Champa’s Exports The breakaway of the Red River Delta region from China in the tenth c­ entury and its successful transformation into the kingdom of Dai Viet marks a key watershed both politically and economically. Best known historically by ­ its Han-era name, Jiaozhi (V. Giao Chi), from the second century bce it had formed part of several Chinese empires and kingdoms, as the foregoing ­discussion has noted. For most of this time, this area had been China’s major gateway – in early years its principle one – to overseas trade, as Chapters 1 and 2 will ­establish. Even after Guangzhou’s fortunes rose as the major seaport in the seventh c­ entury ce, Jiaozhi retained its maritime primacy in the Gulf of Tongking. This role vanished in the tenth century. As an independent kingdom, Jiaozhi ceded its Chinese role to Quanzhou, a fact made manifest when the new Song dynasty created the Maritime Customs Office in Quanzhou in 1087. This created new opportunities for Champa, to Dai Viet’s south. It maximised its position as ‘THE port and THE path’ (see Chapters 3 and 5) of the commerce of maritime Southeast Asia to overland territories like Laos and Cambodia as well as ably exploiting its existing Muslim networks in the China trade. In the twelfth century, however, the rise of the Jiaozhi Yang (Jiaozhi Sea in this book) trade in the Gulf of Tongking enabled Dai Viet to revive Jiaozhi’s lucrative middleman role, linking Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guangxi with Island Southeast Asian markets and, through them, to the Indian Ocean trading world and West Asia. In this, Muslim trading networks were essential. Muslim merchants who landed in Champa and Dai Viet effectively extended the Jiaozhi Sea’s commercial reach west across the Indian Ocean. They also extended it eastward, as growing Muslim mercantile communities in Chinese cities like 27

Richard O’Connor, ‘Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 1 (1995), 30–31.

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Major Themes of the Book 13

Quanzhou in Fujian incorporated Champa into their networks, something which also benefited Dai Viet and pushed its ambition to control the coast. As Chapter 6 shows, many of the key developments in Dai Viet’s early history – including the population boom, agricultural expansion to the coast, political integration of upriver, mid-river, and littoral, cultural developments like the rise of Neo-Confucianism, and ceramic export – were all driven, in part at least, by the impact of maritime influences and opportunities. Many of these involved profitable non-state Cham and Viet commercial arrangements. But when Le Thanh Tong smashed Champa in 1471, claiming its northerly region for himself and kidnapping, killing or scattering much of its population, he unwittingly put all that at risk. The 1471 campaign and its aftermath, that de-coupled the non-state Cham– Viet connections, created a previously little-known watershed in Vietnamese history. Before 1471, Cham merchants had been intermediaries between the Dai Viet trading world and the Malay Archipelago for a millennium and a half; losing them damaged Dai Viet commerce since it generally relied on outsiders to transport its commodities. Losing these Muslims and their southern connections also denied the gulf the precious trading alternatives that Jiaozhi and early Dai Viet had enjoyed for centuries. As Keith Taylor noted, it had been the access to trade with Cham and Khmer – both well-developed, non-Chinese cultures – that had broadened the cultural perspectives of the Dai Viet ruling elite for centuries.28 Now those connections lay in ruins. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Dai Viet’s production began to increasingly compete with that of coastal China, rather than complement it. Non-national Actors: Littoral Societies on Both Coasts of the South China Sea Historians never question the importance of maritime trade with Champa but, as discussed earlier, the limitations imposed on Vietnamese history by a landlocked, inward-looking and narrowly focused historiography makes the idea of a maritime and commercial Vietnam seem an unlikely fit with generations of historical studies. But the case studies assembled in this book, based on an exhaustive survey of the available Chinese and Vietnamese literature, plus numerous other sources, now allow us to confidently say that maritime influences were far-reaching and often extremely important. Top-down histories rarely recognised their significance because official historians in Viet courts largely failed to acknowledge the economic roles of non-Viet actors. But this did not mean no such activities occurred. What a variety of sources suggest is that arrangements seemed to have been made between different Vietnamese 28

Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 299.

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14 Introduction

courts and many generations of sea merchants so that these trades could be carried out sometimes secretly, and most of time openly. Such arrangements were made because the matters concerned were not trivial or marginal but crucial to the fundamental structures of the Dai Viet state. As James Anderson has argued regarding the early post-independence Sino-Viet coastal trade, ‘the local peoples may have been conducting the trade, but the courts now knew how to manipulate the trading environment to their own benefit’.29 Reflecting on the numerous ways in which these factors were essential over long periods, one wonders whether any Southeast Asian kingdom relied on maritime contacts through non-state operators as much as Dai Viet did. Yet the ‘hidden but essential supporting cast in the grand narrative of events’, as Anderson puts it,30 had so little to say for themselves that they hardly appear in existing narratives, official records and statistics. Salt trade between the eastern coast of the Red River plain and the deep mountains of Yunnan and Guangxi illustrate how crucial exchanges for people’s daily life could have been written off the official histories. As discussed in Chapter 4, a network of interested parties – Viet officials on the coast, Song officials in southern China, and TaiKadai chieftains in between – facilitated to their own benefit a lucrative commerce in salt, boiled on the coast but trafficked through Yunnan or Guangxi into inland China. The littoral societies of both coasts of China and Vietnam – salt makers, merchants, peddlers, sailors, porters, and pilots – left no written records of their daily experiences and maritime livelihoods.31 For both, it would have invited unwanted attention from the government. For Vietnamese a further reason applied: the written language was not their mother tongue.32 Among those who could write, very few literati scholars were as interested in recording things concerned with money as the eighteenth-century scholar Le Quy Don was. Regarding this aspect, Vietnamese men shared similarities with their Southeast Asian counterparts. Men were concerned with other things, notably status, and showed their manliness by disdaining trade and commerce, preferring to leave those activities to women and foreigners.33

29

James A. Anderson, ‘“Slipping through Holes”: The Late Tenth- and Early Eleventh-Century Sino-Vietnamese Coastal Frontier as a Subaltern Trade Network’, in Nola Cooke, Li Tana, and James Anderson (eds), Tongking Gulf through History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 99. 30 Anderson, ‘Slipping through Holes’, p. 89. 31 This point was made by Nguyen Van Kim in Nguoi Viet voi Bien [the Vietnamese and the Sea] (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2011), p. 98. 32 Although a vernacular writing system called ‘Southern characters’ (Chu Nom) started being used in the fifteenth century, as Woodside points out, it was often fashioned more complicated characters out of the existing Chinese ones. Alexander B. Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1988), p. 51. 33 Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 24–25.

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Conclusion 15

Conclusion Why has the maritime story been submerged so long as to be absent from the national history of Vietnam? Vietnam as a nation-state has been keenly aware of its historical location, situated between China and Champa, one the permanent aggressor and the other its longtime, vanquished rival. It is Champa, however, which has posed the most thorny and awkward problem for Viet scholars. As Bruce Lockhart points out, ‘The kingdom of Champa no longer exists, and its disappearance is the direct consequence of Vietnamese expansion and colonization.’34 Until recently, its study has long presented a minefield of latent sensitive issues relating to Vietnam’s historical relations with its neighbours and to the old tensions that persist among the variety of peoples who, willingly or not, comprise a single multiethnic nation. From this point of view, the image of an ‘agrarian, village and Confucian Vietnam’ offers a safer, cozier basis for historians to build upon. The post-World War II historiography of the autonomous school, which looks for the local impetus as the fundamental driving historical forces consolidated this approach.35 The creation of the image of a revolutionary Vietnam was more complicated. From the 1860s to 1975 – more than a century – Vietnam was forced to face the question of whether it could exist as an independent country. Very few peoples of the modern world have suffered what Vietnamese had to endure, in the face of aggression by French, Japanese, American and, one last time perhaps, the Chinese during the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. As a nation, Vietnam needed all the resources it could get to sustain its fight for existence, given its paltry resources and the economic barriers imposed by their wealthier enemies. One vital resource it could cultivate at home, however, was moral resolve. National myths matter to every nation, but it counted for a lot in wartime Vietnam as a means to inspire its nascent military forces to meet the succession of Goliaths hell-bent on destroying it. Thus, the national mythology of resistance against foreign aggressors like the Chinese and Cham helped to inspire the ‘militant’ nature of Vietnamese historiography that Philippe Papin insightfully points out, reflects the context in which it was created.36 In the process, for better or worse, certain aspects of history were subverted. The history of the Cham and the history of the maritime share a common fate.

34

Bruce Lockhart, ‘Colonial and Post-Colonial Construction of “Champa”’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 1. 35 Harry J. Benda, ‘The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 3, 1(1962), 106–138; Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 9–15. 36 Philippe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancient’, Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 87, 2 (2000), 609.

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16 Introduction

The suffering has been long. From a historian’s point of view, Vietnam enjoyed little luck since the cataclysmic Tay Son war (1771–1802) that tore it to pieces. The country’s long misery seems to have finally reached its end. Even in 2020, when the whole world faced pandemics and economic downturns, Vietnam persisted as one of the world’s top economic performers and a favourite destination for foreign investment, hopefully securing a prosperous future for many generations to come. The change of the winds began at least twenty years ago. Since the late twentieth century historians in Vietnam have approached their history from various points of view, all opening new horizons.37 Long before that, a Vietnamese scholar, Thanh The Vy, published Overseas commerce of Vietnam in the seventeenth, eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries in 1961, during the most difficult year of the Vietnam War.38 I was touched to learn how he persevered on this topic while other historians rushed to the more fashionable topics such as peasant rebellions.39 His book was printed on the worst quality of paper because of the embargo but it was my absolute inspiration. Thanh The Vy made me believe that there was something valuable and hidden to find about Vietnamese history. I have benefited from both old and new scholarship in Vietnam and hope this book will contribute to it, and together reveal a richer history of Vietnam.

37

For example, just to name but a few, see Do Bang, Pho cang vung Thuan Quang the ky XVII– XVIII [Port cities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Thuan Quang] (Hue: Nxb. Thuan Hoa, 1996); Hoang Anh Tuan, Silk for Silver: Dutch–Vietnamese Relations, 1637–1700 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007); Nguyen Van Khanh et al. (eds), Viet Nam trong he thong thuong mai Chau A the ky XVI–XVII [Vietnam in the commercial system of Asia, 16th–17th centuries] (Hanoi: Nxb. The Gioi, 2007); Nguyen Van Kim (ed.), Nguoi Viet voi Bien [the Vietnamese and the sea] (Hanoi: Nxb. The Gioi, 2011); Nguyen Van Kim, Van Don–Thuong cang quoc te cua Viet Nam [Van Don: The International Commercial Port of Vietnam] (Hanoi: Nxb. Dai hoc Quoc gia Ha Noi, 2014); Do Thi Thuy Lan, He thong cang thi tren Song Dang Ngoai: Lich su ngoai thuong Viet Nam the ky XVII–XVIII [The foreign trade system of port-city in seventeenth and eighteenth century Tongking] (Hanoi: Nxb. Dai hoc Quoc gia Ha Noi, 2016). Le Thi Mai’s PhD dissertation on maritime environment and ecology of Quang Nam (2016), among other excellent works. 38 Thanh The Vy, Ngoai Thuong Viet Nam hoi the ky XVII–XVIII va dau XIX [Overseas commerce of Vietnam in the seventeenth, eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries] (Hanoi: Su Hoc, 1961). 39 Personal correspondence with my old friend Nguyen Van Ku.

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Maritime Formations

Sea Changes and the Story of Vietnamese History Between 15 and 40 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent pushed northwards against the Eurasian landmass to uplift the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. The south-eastern strip of Eurasia escaped this tectonic collision, moulding the massif that we now call the Indochinese Peninsula. The landmass continued to mutate over the many millions of years that followed; until recently, it looked very different from what we see today. Geological change greatly impacted the evolution of the Red River Delta. As recently as 18,000 to 15,000 years ago – a flash in geological time – the Gulf of Tongking had not yet fully emerged. At that time, the sea level lay about 120 metres below what it is today. This means that the Indochinese Peninsula’s shoreline extended far into the South China Sea, well beyond its current delineation. Then, between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago, the sea level began to rise, as part of a single phase of sea-level change in geological time. In this phase, ascending seawater expanded shorelines at the expense of landforms, submerging the vestiges of the coastal settlements as they advanced. Archaeologists have pointed out that, when seen in this new context of sea-level change, the so-called prehistoric cultures of the Tongking Gulf more likely represent the survivors of this sea-level phase rather than any original or exclusive culture. In the process of this sea expansion, once the sea level had risen 2–5 metres above that of a previous epoch, the pre-existing coastal settlements vanished beneath the waves without a trace. Therefore, cultures of the upper Red River Delta such as Son Vi and Hoa Binh, as the survivors of the sea change, do not represent the same diversity of peoples, cultures, and economic systems that had once existed in the much larger landform that existed before sea-level rise.1 1

Andreas Reinecke, Le Duy Son, and Le Dinh Phuc, ‘Towards a Prehistory in the Northern Part of Central Vietnam: A Review Following a Vietnamese–German Research Project 59’, Beiträge zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Archäologie 19 (1999), 59–61; Roderich Ptak, ‘Quanzhou: At the Northern Edge of a Southeast Asian “Mediterranean”’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 395–428.

17

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Maritime Formations

Between 5000 and 3000 bce, coastal habitats again stabilised. The seacoast receded to leave a yawning expanse of sea, which we call the Gulf of Tongking. The Red River responded to this change, reforming its delta, in which the ancestors of Vietnamese would later develop. During the following prehistoric periods the sea level fell. As it did so, seawater intermingled with the descending freshwater of the Red River to sculpt its Palaeolithic delta and form a new coastline. At this time, the coastal culture known as Cai Beo appeared on the northern tip of modern-day coastal Vietnam, extending as far as Thanh Hoa and Nghe An, where the archaeological sites of Hoa Loc (dated to 4000 bp) and Quynh Van were occupied by affluent foragers and hunters.2 More than 70 coastal sites, dated between 5000 and 3000 bce, located along the long arc of coast between southern China and northern Vietnam – straddling the modern international border – show signs that their inhabitants operated in an extensive maritime world where coastal communities traded material items and shared cultural practices. Over time, they began to support large settlements with formalised village structures and dense cemeteries while also representing several distinctive cultural groups.3 Since these prehistoric groups shared the same coastal ecosystem, one cannot define them culturally according to contemporary national categories. As Andreas Reinecke points out, to look for the roots of the Bau Tro culture only within central Vietnam would be in vain, ‘because there were some similar coastal “cultures” around the South China Sea and they had many trade, cultural and economic connections with each other’.4 Thus, a prehistory of the Gulf of Tongking must begin further inland, indeed further upriver, as far as the vicinity of today’s Hanoi, which sits comfortably about 100 kilometres from the gulf. To illustrate, at a dig in Dai Trach, just 20 kilometres from Hanoi, Nishimura Masanari reports that archaeologists identified pollen that could only have come from brackish-water plants, confirming the presence of saline water, which often happens at estuaries where seawater mixes with fresh water.5 Legend supports this. A fourteenth-century Vietnamese historical record relays a bit of lore about an ‘ancient pond’ 2

Charles Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 78–80; Carmen Sarjeant, Contextualising the Neolithic Occupation of Southern Vietnam: The Role of Ceramics and Potters at An Son (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), p. 19. 3 Hsiao-chun Hung, ‘Prosperity and Complexity without Farming: The South China Coast, c. 5000–3000 BC’, Antiquity 93, 368 (2019), 346; see also Reinecke, Le, and Le, ‘Towards a Prehistory’, 52–58. 4 Reinecke, Le, and Le, ‘Towards a Prehistory’, 61. 5 Masanari Nishimura remarks: ‘Vietnamese geological studies clearly show that the coastline was inundated during the Holocene transgression and was located near Hanoi, as is apparent from the absence of Neolithic sites across most of the region.’ ‘Settlement Patterns on the Red River Plain from the Late Prehistoric Period to the 10th Century AD’, Bulletin of the IndoPacific Prehistory Association 25 (2007), 99–100.

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The Viet from the Sea 19

(V. (Vietnamese) ao; C. (Chinese) chi) – it would logically be a lagoon – in Co Loa, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Au Lac (257–179 bce), whose remains lay about 16 kilometres north-east of Hanoi.6 Here, Viet kings ‘gathered pearls and used the water to wash the pearls’. Indeed, the text claims, the pearls became exceptionally bright and more beautiful after they had been washed with the lagoon water.7 This legend seems to suggest that Co Loa at the time was much closer to the coast than we imagine from the present landscape, about 120 kilometres away from the sea. These recent findings reveal a long-term process of geomorphological change that challenges archaeologists and historians to consider the effects of an ever shifting coastline on our interpretations of Vietnamese society’s origins in the Red River Delta region. Such a process is already reflected, however dimly, in the tales we tell. It is even reflected in its effects on our interpretations of history. For example, according to a Chinese Daoist legend popular along much of the Chinese coast, a fairy named Magu ‘had seen the mulberry groves became the sea, and the sea became mulberry groves three times’ in her life, as if to suggest the three-cycle ebb and flow of cultures in response to a changing shoreline environment or a three-stage transgression and regression of the sea.8 The archaeological findings of the Red River Delta’s prehistory force us to value the dynamic environment of the Tongking Gulf’s ever shifting coastal geography as a primary factor in the development of Red River Delta societies during the first millennium bce. Once we have restored key historical sites like Co Loa, a major symbol of ancient Vietnamese culture, to their proper historical-geographical context, shifting their location from delta interior to seacoast, the context of Vietnamese history in this early phase changes. Such a change necessitates consideration of long-standing beliefs about Vietnam’s beginnings. The evidence is clear: the sea has been affecting Vietnamese history since before it even really began. The Viet from the Sea One hundred years ago French scholar Leonard Aurousseau observed that anybody looking for historical evidence of the earliest known Vietnamese would find them along the rim of the Tongking Gulf – namely, the south of China’s modern-day Guangxi Province and the lower reaches of northern and central 6

Nam C. Kim, The Origins of Ancient Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford Studies in the Archaeology of Ancient States, 2015). Le Trac, Annan zhilue (V. Annam chi luoc), completed c. 1330 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), p. 29. 8 Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Taoism (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 731. Vietnamese expression for this is ‘mộ t cuộ c bê ̉ dâu’, as in Tale of Ki ê` u: ‘Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu’ [After seeing the sea became mulberry grove]. 7

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Vietnam today – and even these people appear in historical records dated no earlier than the third century bce.9 ‘So’, he queried, ‘who were they and where did they come from?’ After a meticulous study of the texts, Aurousseau advanced a theory. He suggested that the origins of the Vietnamese lay in the middle Yangzi with the Chu conquest of a people called Yue – pronounced ‘Viet’ in modern Vietnamese – in the lower Yangzi River Delta, where they lived in 333 bce. In response, the defeated Yue migrated south along China’s modern-day coast towards the ‘South Sea’, or South China Sea, before turning west into the Tongking Gulf. In the process of this migration, various branches settled along the way. From this developed the greater society of the ‘Hundred Yue’ – namely, Baiyue (C.) or Bach Viet (V.). One branch that Chinese documents identify as Xi Ou (V. Tay Au) migrated along the coast to eastern Guangxi and western Guangdong and then into the Red River Valley, where they settled and laid the origins of Vietnamese society. Many have criticised Aurousseau’s theory since its publication, including his own colleague Henri Maspero, who regarded it as an embarrassment that ‘should be allowed to pass in silence’.10 This negative reputation stuck. In the 1960s, Vietnamese nationalist historians agreed with earlier generations of critics and produced a four volume, 1,400-page book entitled Hung Vuong dung nuoc, essentially a declaration that ‘the Hung Kings founded the nation’.11 This has remained the orthodox view of the origins of Vietnamese ever since. In the last few decades Aurousseau’s ill-fated migration theory of a century ago has been revitalised by archaeologists and linguists of Vietnam and southern China. Judith Cameron, for example, points out that the major problem of Aurousseau’s theory lies mainly with its chronology. To be exact, the abovementioned exodus of people from the Yangzi River Delta into southern China occurred millennia before the Chu conquest. In other words, the migration of the Yue from the Yangzi River Delta into southern China, northern Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia occurred during the prehistoric rather than the historical period. Cameron has analysed the archaeological evidence for spinning and weaving at 7,000-year-old Early Neolithic sites belonging to Hemudu culture, located in the lower Yangzi delta, and identified diagnostic

9

Leonard Aurousseau, ‘Le premiere conquete chinoise des pays annamites’, Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 23 (1923), 250. 10 Henri Maspero, ‘Bulletin critique’, in ‘Le premiere conquete chinoise des pays annamites’, T’oung Pao 23 (1924), 393; Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 314. 11 Hung Vuong dung nuoc [The Hung Kings founded the nation] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1970). For a systematic review of how the political ideology shaped the discipline of prehistory in Vietnam, see Haydon Cherry, ‘Digging Up the Past: Prehistory and the Weight of the Present in Vietnam’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, 1 (2009), 84–144.

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The Viet from the Sea 21

spinning tools such as biconical spindle whorls with distinctive motifs at sites like Tianluoshan and other Middle Neolithic sites along the southern Chinese coast before they appeared at sites in the Red River Valley associated with Phung Nguyen (2000–1500 bce) and subsequently Dong Son (1000 bce–first century ce) cultures.12 Judith Cameron concluded that these artefacts represent the consequence of immigration by agricultural groups bearing both rice-growing and textile-weaving technologies into the Red River Valley in prehistorical time.13 The migration of people from the Yangzi River Delta is confirmed by recent excavations of Man Bac, a site at the south-western corner of the Red River Delta in Yen Mo District, Ninh Binh Province. In 2007, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a migrant community. The biological evidence from 32 skeletons suggests new arrivals at the site, located along the delta’s southern access to the sea, between 2500 and 2000 bce. The analysis of the human remains confirmed a mixed-blood population. One gene in the sample resembled those of people from Hoa Binh and Bac Son from northern Vietnam and Da But in Vinh Loc, north and central Vietnam, while another gene suggests a strong genetic connection with people from the Yangzi River Delta far to the north.14 As Ken-ichi Shinoda points out, people from southern China during prehistoric times contributed ‘to the formation of the basic genetic pattern seen in the modern northern Vietnamese population’.15 Significantly, Man Bac is dated between 2500 and 2000 bce and predates the Phung Nguyen (2000– 1500 bce), which experts generally regard as the beginnings of Vietnamese civilisation. As Cameron points out, the archaeological findings from this site resonate with the Vietnamese legend of the Lac Dragon Lord (Lac Long Quan), who emerged from the sea to teach the Red River Valley people how to cultivate rice and weave clothes. Looking at this migration into the lower valley of the Red River Delta, one cannot help but wonder about the situation upriver. What can we say about the people discovered in Hoa Binh and Bac Son in the upper delta? When analysed

12

Judith Cameron, ‘Textile Crafts in the Gulf of Tongking: The Intersection of Archaeology and History’, in Nola Cooke, Li Tana, and James A. Anderson (eds), The Tongking Gulf in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 29–30. She has also traced the transmission of the technology further into Cambodia, Laos, and as far as the Mun River valley of northeast Thailand, presumably through Yunnan and down the Mekong, where they occur around 2000 bce. 13 Ibid., p. 31. 14 Ken-ichi Shinoda, ‘Mitochondrial DNA of Human Remains at Man Bac’, in Marc F. Oxenham, Hirofumi Matsumura, and Nguyen Kim Dung (eds), Man Bac: The Excavation of a Neolithic Site in Northern Vietnam, the Biology (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2011), p. 100. 15 Ibid., p. 101. See also Damien Garrett Huffer, ‘The Ties that Bind: Population Dynamics, Mobility, and Kinship during the Mid-Holocene in Northern Vietnam’, PhD dissertation (2012), Australian National University.

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in the context of the most recent archaeologist studies of human skeletal remains throughout Eurasia, samples taken from the exhumed bones of Bac Son share cranial characteristics with pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers found in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Venddah Sri-Lanka. Collectively called ‘Australo-Papuans’, they constituted the first wave of people to migrate into north and central Vietnam about 14,000 years ago. Among the second layer of migrants who arrived c. 5,000 years ago were the Dong Son people, who shared cranial characteristics with those from Tanshishan, Hemudu in China, and Ban Chiang in Thailand.16 Aurousseau’s theory of the Chu conquest and Yue/Viet exodus still stands, thanks to ethno-linguist David Holm, who has revealed evidence of their southern migration during a later period than Cameron has suggested. He collected Old Zhuang scripts and traced the data it provided on age and affiliation against the archaeological evidence and concluded there is ample evidence of close cultural links between the Yue heartland in Zhejiang and the Yue polities in Lingnan, and a well-established sea route affording mobility up and down the coast.17 Beginning in the late Spring and Autumn period (c. 550–481 bce), Holm notes, bronze sites in Guangdong and north-eastern Guangxi show a marked increase in Yue cultural influences, and that in the middle of the Warring States period (around 350 bce) these influences became more pervasive and deep-seated. The number of Yue-style artefacts and their sudden appearance indicate migration as the most likely cause.18 Indeed, there does exist hard evidence of the southern migration of Yue elite. In 1961, one of the richest archaeological sites in this regard was unearthed in Viet Khe, located at the northern tip of the Red River Delta, where it meets the sea. Along with many Dong Son bronzes, archaeologists unearthed a tripod pot called a ding (V. dinh). This artefact is significant. At the time of its making, the use of tripod pots was prohibited to all but aristocratic families. It was no coincidence that it was unearthed with a bell, for a classic description for an aristocratic family goes: ‘A household enjoying food cooked in tripod pots while bells are ringing’ 鐘鳴鼎食之家. The closest typological parallels between this tripod and others excavated in the lower Yangzi delta (see Figure 1.1) have been dated to between the fifth and third centuries bce.19 16

Hirofumi Matsumura et al., ‘Craniometrics Reveal “Two Layers” of Prehistoric Human Dispersal in Eastern Eurasia’, Scientific Reports (2019) 9, 1451, 7. David Holm, ‘A Layer of Old Chinese Readings in the Traditional Zhuang Script’, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 79/80 (2015), 233. 18 Ibid., 234. Erica Brindley points out that the ‘Yue’ that archaeologists and linguists refer to should not be confused with the historical reference ‘Yue’, which may or may not have been a single ethnicity. Erica Brindley, ‘Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing Conceptions of the Ancient Yue (Viet) Peoples, ca. 400–50 BC’, Asia Major 16, 1 (2003), 7. 19 Wei Weiyan and Shiung Chung-Ching, ‘Viet Khe Burial 2: Identifying the Exotic Bronze Wares and Assessing Cultural Contact between the Dong Son and Yue Cultures’, Asian Archaeology 2 (2014), 81. 17

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The Viet from the Sea 23

Figure 1.1  Compares tripod pots and bells from Viet Khe and southern China. Source: Courtesy of Wei Weiyan and Shiung Chung-Ching, ‘Viet Khe Burial 2: Identifying the Exotic Bronze Wares and Assessing Cultural Contact between the Dong Son and Yue Cultures’, Asian Archaeology 2 (2014), 81.

Similar bells were found in western Guangdong, in the vicinity of the West River, the important corridor for north–south traffic. Both have been dated to the third century bce.20 The Yue were foremost boatmen and seafarers. The Yue king Gou Jian famously said that the Yue people ‘travel by water and reside by the mountains; the boat is their cart and rowing oars are their horses. They come like 20

Wei and Shiung, ‘Viet Khe Burial 2’, 81.

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Maritime Formations

wind and once they are gone no one can catch them.’21 Holm verifies this claim in his observation that the primary route of the Yue/Viet exodus relied on sea travel using ocean-going vessels or coasters such as double canoes called fangzhou. Yue military boats were large enough to hold 50 men, along with three months’ provisions, and could travel 300 li (1 li = 500 metres) downstream in a single day.22 He found that the depictions of ‘feathered men rowing a boat’ (considered to be typical Dong Son feature) have been discovered not just in coastal Zhejiang, but also in Guangxi, Yunnan, and in the royal tomb of Nanyue in Guangzhou.23 Water travel also took Dong Son culture to southern China. One artefact is very telling in this regard. In 1974, Chinese archaeologists discovered a bronze dagger in the form of a woman among other bronzes excavated at a site called Shumuling, located along the Xiang River in the Changsha region of Hunan Province in south-central China. Archaeologists dated its manufacture between the fourth and third centuries bce. Figure 1.2 shows how its shape resembles one of several Dong Son daggers discovered throughout northern and central Vietnam, much further south. This is just one example of how cultural exchanges always involve a two-way cycle of traffic. Another ready example is found in a study by Japanese scholar Yoshikai Masato, who showed that the transmission of Heger II bronze drums and drum-casting techniques travelled from the lower Red River plain north-westwards to Guangxi – not from Yunnan to Guangxi, as previously thought.24 Evidence of southern migration can also be detected in language. Holm’s study of Old Chinese and Zhuang scripts reveals much closer connections between the present-day Viet and Tai. Catherine Churchman has established a linguistic link between the two in her study of early bronze drum cultures. For example, after identifying the earliest historical evidence of the Vietnamese word for ‘drum’, which Vietnamese today vocalise as trô´ng, to Alexandre De Rhodes’ seventeenth-century dictionary of Vietnamese, she then compared it with a record in Nôm script (an ancient, localised form of Sinitic script used to write Vietnamese) transliterating Tai speech to 21

Yuejueshu 越絕書 [End of the kingdom of Yue], compiled in the beginning of the first century ce by Yuan Kang and revised by Wu Ping (https://ctext.org/yue-jue-shu/zhs, accessed 4 April 2019). The Chinese states: ‘越人水行而山處,以船為車,以楫為馬,往若飄風,去則難從.’ 22 ‘Zhang Yi Liezhuan [Biography of Zhang Yi]’ 張儀列傳, in Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian], completed c. 90 bce (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 70, vol. 7: 2290. The reference to fangzhou 方舟, ships, in this passage actually belonged to the Qin empire, but their technology was borrowed from the Yue (cited in Holm, ‘A Layer of Old Chinese Readings’, 233). 23 Holm, ‘A Layer of Old Chinese Readings’, 234. 24 Quoted in Catherine Churchman, The People between the Two Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 32.

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The Viet from the Sea 25

Figure 1.2  (a) The dagger from Ha Dong, Red River Delta and (b) the dagger from Shumuling, Hunan. Sources: (a) The dagger is from Ha Dong, northern Vietnam. (b) The dagger is from Shumuling 樹木嶺  in Hunan, courtesy of Wei Weiyan. Victor Goloubew, ‘L’âge du bronze au Tonkin et dans le Nord-Annam’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 29 (1929), pl.19. The Hunan connection is important: John Phan points out that Hunan (Xiang 湘) was the most likely donor for the ‘Annamese Middle Chinese’ for Sino-Vietnamese originating from the Red, Ma, and Ca rivers region. John Phan, ‘Re-Imagining “Annam”: A New Analysis of Sino-Viet-Muong Linguistic Contact’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 4 (2010), 9–13.

reveal the word’s ancestral proto-Tai form.25 Simply put, proto-Tai influenced proto-Vietnamese and, by extension, modern Vietnamese. Studies by Vietnamese linguists confirm Churchman’s assertion of a strong shared 25

Churchman, The People between the Two Rivers, p. 33. Stephen O’Harrow notes: ‘Dong-Son culture is linked to a very broad span of material cultures which are spread over a region much larger than the area that has been claimed as the Vietnamese urheimat, undoubtedly a region encompassing many different ethnic groups at the time.’ ‘Men of Hu, Men of Han, Men of the Hundred Man: Si Nhiêp and the Conceptualization of Early Vietnamese Society’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 75 (1986), 255.

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vocabulary between these two early languages in such areas of culture as rice production.26 Viewed collectively, the linguistic, archaeological, and historical evidence points to the strong influence of northern peoples on the formation of proto-Vietnamese culture in the Red River Delta, which in turn strengthens the importance of the maritime factor. Does this evidence overthrow the present Vietnamese nationalist view that it was the Hung Kings who founded the Vietnamese nation? Not necessarily. Three points are central to the Vietnamese argument: first, the Hung Vuong era was real rather than an origin myth of the nation’s history; second, the Hung Vuong era was a period of historical transition; and, finally, it was during the Hung Vuong era that the Viet nation was born and developed.27 Nothing in these statements suggest incompatibility between the new evidence and the old thesis. In fact, a popular myth about Hung Vuong origins suggests they fit together well. According to this tale, the first Hung King was a descendent of ‘Lac Dragon Lord’ (Lac Long Quan), a prince of the sea, who married Au Co, the princess of the mountains who gave birth to the first Hung Kings.28 This mythical tale might indeed reflect the collective cultural memory of the descendants of the original Yue/Viet elites who migrated from the Yangzi River Delta sometime during the third millennium bce. The cumulative archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographical findings of the last few decades provide firm support for the historical records of 2,000 years ago to resolve inconsistencies and elucidate deeper historical truths in mythology and clarify, rather than overturn, long-standing theories. Putting Vietnamese history back into this much larger context only highlights the rich heritage of the Vietnamese people, rather than undermining it. Confining the world that nourished the Viet nation for thousands of years into the narrow space of the upper Red River Valley deprives the Viet nation of the strength and vitality of its own history. Whatever people may see in my attempt here to reconsider the earlier history of the Viet, what Keith Taylor said roughly forty years ago still stands today: ‘The mythical traditions surrounding Lac Long Quan and the origin of Hung Vuong reveal a sea-oriented culture coming to terms with a continental environment.’29 Or, in Philippe Papin’s words, ‘great mythical epics [of the Vietnamese] tried to account for the essential partition between the world of lagoons, marshes, 26

Nguyen Ngoc San, Tim hieu tieng Viet [Understanding Vietnamese language] (Hanoi: NXB Dai hoc Su Pham, 2000), pp. 135–140; quoted in Churchman, The People between the Two Rivers, p. 33. 27 Phan Huy Le, ‘Thoi ky dung nuoc doi Hung Vuong va An Duong Vuong’ [The era of Hung kings and An Duong Vuong in founding the nation], in Phan Huy Le, Tran Quoc Vuong, Ha Van Tan, and Luong Ninh (eds), Lich su Viet Nam [A history of Vietnam] (Hanoi: NXB Dai hoc va Giao duc chuyen nghiep, 1991), vol. 1, p. 55. 28 29 Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p. 304. Ibid., p. 1.

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Creating Jiaozhi 27

land soaked in water and around, and that of the harsh mountain environment where the base is exposed’.30 Restricting our frame of analysis to the narrow space of the upper Red River Valley ‘would mean dressing the Hero Giong’ – Thanh Giong, a legend giant of 1220s bce – ‘with a baby cloth’, to quote the scholar Diep Dinh Hoa.31 In other words, it denies the multitude of cultural streams that contributed to the development of today’s Vietnamese people, a multitude that can only be detected from a larger pan-Asian perspective. Without this perspective, we cannot begin to appreciate how a sea-oriented culture engaged, interacted, and integrated with a mountain-oriented culture upriver, and how the new cultural behaviours that developed from this synthesis contributed to the rise of a new society linked to mountain, plain, river, and sea, which led to the creation of an important new hub in the burgeoning sea trade of maritime Asia – a place Chinese called Jiaozhi and Vietnamese Giao Chi – a development explained in the next section. Creating Jiaozhi Aurousseau correctly noticed that the term ‘Jiaozhi’, a long-time reference to northern Vietnam, appeared much later than the earlier terms associated with the region, like ‘Xi Ou’ (V. Tay Au) and ‘Luo’ (V. Lac).’32 Just as the term ‘Luo’ (Lac) originally referred to people living in what is now Guangxi as well as northern Vietnam and therefore cannot refer to a singular linguistic lineage exclusive to Vietnamese,33 the term ‘Yue/Viet’ was once similarly broad in its reference, though it is nowadays ‘often carelessly used as if it referred to an ethnic group’, as Catherine Churchman points out.34

30

Philippe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancien’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 87, 2 (2000), 612. 31 Diep Dinh Hoa, ‘New finds on Zhang in the Phung Nguyen Culture’, South Pacific Study 17, 1 (1996), 93–94. 32 In the case of Luo/Lac, Vietnamese linguist Tran Tri Doi traced the origin of the word along the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family to ancient, pre-Chinese times, and discovered that the word meant ‘human beings’. Tran Tri Doi, ‘Trao doi them ve tu nguyen cua yeu to “Lac (lua 雒/駱)” trong to hop “Lac Viet” (Luoyue 雒越)’ [Further discussion on the original element of the word Lac in the name Lac Viet], Bao tang va Nhan Hoc [Museum and anthropological studies] 2 (2017), 49. 33 Catherine Churchman, ‘Before Chinese and Vietnamese in the Red River Plain: The Han–Tang Period’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 4 (2010), 33. Relying on textual studies, Jiang Tingyu pointed out that the areas Lac Viet occupied stretched from the Left River and the Yong River to the Red River Delta, while across the Tongking Gulf on its eastern coast, which included Hepu, Au and Lac mixed. Jiang Tingyu, Guiling kaogu lunwenji [On archaeology in the mountainous Guangxi] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 2009), pp. 70–71. 34 Churchman, The People between the Rivers, p. 26.

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Maritime Formations

It is also important to tackle the rather muddy question, as Stephen O’Harrow puts it, ‘of where the term “Vietnamese” becomes useful and, by contrast, where it might hinder our view of things’.35 Churchman points out that the ancestors of the people now commonly referred to as ‘Viet’ (the majority ‘Kinh’ of today’s Vietnam) were rather late in picking up the term as a group designation for themselves. Perhaps more revealingly, the word ‘Viet’, conventionally defined as the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Sinitic character 越 (C. Yue), is accurately a pronunciation of the character according to the rules of Late Middle Chinese, the form of Chinese that existed during the time of Chinese rule in the Red River Delta region.36 The term ‘Jiaozhi’ has suffered from a similar misunderstanding. It has referred to territory that nowadays extends beyond Vietnam into China, much like ‘Yue/Viet’ or ‘Lac’. Most importantly, and contrary to Aurousseau’s observation, the term is considerably older than these other Sinitic names. In fact, ‘Jiaozhi’ originally referred to the southernmost territory of the mythical king of Shennong – in other words, a mythical rather than historical place – when it first appeared in the Chinese classic Huainanzi [The Huainan Masters], in the second century bce.37 As Aurousseau pointed out, it was only during the Han dynasty that the term was used to refer to the Red River plain and then further extended to other areas that fell under Chinese and later Vietnamese control.38 Jiaozhi was an umbrella name which covered many language speakers in its domain, as the Book of Later Han recorded: ‘Although administrations had been set up in Jiaozhi, there are many different language speakers, [and] one needs several interpreters to get the message through.’39 In other words, Chinese appropriated a name born in their mythology to describe a broad expanse of conquered territory, while later generations applied the name to new geographical formations, so that ‘Jiaozhi’ eventually became synonymous with Vietnam. The word remained the same, even as its referent changed. This happened as a consequence of Chinese conquest. Centuries after the Yue migration, access to the growing trade of the South China Sea emboldened China’s first empire builders to expand into south-eastern China and 35

O’Harrow, ‘Men of Hu’, 251. 36 Churchman, ‘Before Chinese and Vietnamese’, 30. ‘Zhushuxun’, in Huainanzi 淮南子 [The Huanan Masters], compiled 139 bce (https://ctext .org/huainanzi/zhu-shu-xun/zhs, accessed 7 May 2019). ‘Jiaozhi’, or ‘cross toes’, might refer to a people in present-day southern Hunan. In 2010 about 10,000 stone figures were found in Yongzhou, Hunan. The oldest of these has been dated to 5,000 years ago. Most of the figures are cross-legged, which the press described as ‘Jiaozhi’ (www.chinanews.com/cul/2010/0818/2473973.shtml, accessed 12 January 2011). 38 Aurousseau, ‘Le premiere conquete chinoise des pays annamites’, 260. 39 ‘凡交趾所統，雖置郡縣，而言語各異，重譯乃通.’ The Book of Later Han [Houhan shu後 漢書], completed 445 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013) chapter 86, vol. 10:4. 37

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Creating Jiaozhi 29

beyond, into the Gulf of Tongking. They gave their new territory the name ‘Jiaozhi’ after the Han Wu emperor defeated the Nan Yue kingdom based in Panyu (Guangzhou) in 111 bce, though it was their new city of Jiaozhi, not Panyu, that would oversee all the affairs of this new territory spanning southeastern China and northern Vietnam. As such, to quote Catherine Churchman again, the phrase ‘People of Jiaozhi’ is in fact one of the oldest ways of referring to ‘Việt’ as we know it today. It survives today in the Tai-Kadai languages (surrounding the Austroasiatic ‘Việt’ people of the plains) as ‘Keeu’, and in Malay as ‘Kuchi.’40 ‘Keo’ was likely also how people in Jiaozhi pronounced the character 交 – pronounced jiao in modern Chinese and giao in Sino-Vietnamese; the latter did not develop until sometime before the end of the first millennium.41 Thus began the millennium of Chinese rule that fundamentally redefined the cultures of the Tongking Gulf – and most importantly for our purpose, that of the Red River Delta – which set in motion the process that resulted in the distinctive Vietnamese identity that emerged at the end of it. The Han originally favoured the delta and its surrounding gulf partly because they could reach it more easily than Guangdong, and centuries later it would become China’s preferred southern portal. This was thanks to the Ling Canal (literally, ‘smart trench’), which labourers dug at the behest of China’s first emperor between 223 and 214 bce to transport troops south, a major achievement in Chinese history, for it linked the Yangzi River of Central China to the West River system of South China and ultimately the Gulf of Tongking. From the Xiang River, a tributary of the Yangzi River in today’s Hunan province, the Ling Canal led riverboats to the Li River, through which they could descend to the new Chinese seaport of Panyu (today’s Guangzhou), or link to the North and South Liu rivers of today’s Guangxi to ultimately reach the port of Hepu on the Gulf of Tongking (Map 1.1). The importance of this new economic corridor between Central China and the Gulf of Tongking reveals itself in the large number of Han tombs that archaeologists have uncovered in Guangxi province. Evidence from excavated tombs of the Early Han period (206 bce–24 ce), concentrated in the areas of Guilin, Wuzhou, Yulin, and Qinzhou indicates that the population 40

Churchman, ‘Before Chinese and Vietnamese’, 30. Middle Chinese is kæw. Thanks to Charles Wheeler for this information. John Phan points out that the velar initial has softened from /k-/ to /z-/, which is something that happened in Annamese Middle Chinese, probably at the end of the first millennium. Personal correspondence, 9 September 2020. I am grateful for John’s enlightenment on this matter. Michel Ferlus, however, proposes that the character was pronounced in late Old Chinese as kraw. Quoted in Pain Frederic, ‘“Giao Chı̉” (Jiaozhi 交趾) as a Diffusion Center of Middle Chinese Diachronic Changes: Syllabic Weight Contrast and Phonologisation of Its Phonetic Correlates’, Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 50 (new series), 3 (2020), 370.

41

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Maritime Formations

Map 1.1  Jiaozhi’s place in first millennium Asia

of this area was already relatively dense and communication with the rest of the empire ­relatively well established. Over 10,000 Han tombs are estimated to have spread across the Hepu area alone.42 On the coast of Jiaozhi, along 42

Estimate by Ye Jiwang, director of the Hepu Museum. Most of the more than 1,000 tombs excavated are dated to the Later Han era, i.e. contemporary with Luy Lau (www.gxmuseum .cn/a/news/8/2014/12/5216.html, accessed 16 July 2016).

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The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports 31

the Duong and Thai Binh rivers, lie hundreds of tombs that date back to the Han dynasty.43 Local people have reported that in Thuy Nguyen alone, a vo so, or ‘endless number’, of Han-style tombs crowd Mount Turtle (Nui Rua) near the village of My Cu, and that some of them are huge.44 Amalgamating these graves with the thousands of Han graves discovered in Hepu in coastal Guangxi, Lach Truong in Thanh Hoa, and Tra Kieu in central Vietnam (for the latter, see Chapter 3) reveals the ring of ancient Han graves that surround the entire Tongking Gulf rim. It seems to suggest a kind of ‘Mediterranean’ unity to which Han conquest and settlement responded. These peoples on different coasts may have had multiple contacts. The remnants of these once coastal communities have long since been landlocked by delta sands that expanded greatly during the first and second millennia ce,45 hiding the vestiges of ancient landings underneath the sediments as they advanced inexorably against the gulf. To appreciate what attracted Chinese to this frontier territory of Jiaozhi, it is important to first understand its external trade networks, starting with the travel routes that defined them. The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports It has been assumed that Chinese transport moved in and out of the Gulf of Tongking by means of roads, riverboats, and coaster boats, and that the route through the Ling Canal provided the commandery’s main link with Central China. Historical sources, however, suggest a more complicated picture arising from the fact that in this era, the Tongking Gulf was more feared than used. Han documents indicate that Jiaozhi’s tributes travelled to the court on sailing vessels east across the Zhang Hai – the ‘Swelling Sea’ – to today’s Fuzhou in Fujian.46 In his campaign to quell the rebellion of the Trung Sisters in 41–43 ce, the ‘Wave Pacifying General’ Ma Yuan (V. Ma Vien) preferred to go to the trouble of opening mountain roads rather than risk his armies in the gulf’s treacherous waters.47 Two conditions particular to the Gulf of Tongking made 43

Do Van Ninh, ‘Lien Lau’, in Vien Su Hoc ed. Do thi co Viet Nam [Ancient cities and towns in Vietnam] (Hanoi: Vien Su Hoc, 1989), p. 79. 44 ‘Mo co trong nui o Hai Phong la … kho bau’ [Ancient graves in the mountains of Haiphong are … treasures], Dat Viet online, n.d. (http://baodatviet.vn/van-hoa/nguoi-viet/mo-co-trong-nui-ohai-phong-la-kho-bau-2238154/, accessed 14 May 2019). 45 D. S. van Maren, ‘Morphodynamics of a Cyclis Prograding Delta: The Red River, Vietnam’, PhD dissertation, Utrecht University (2004), p. 12. 46 See Xu Jian 徐堅 et al., Chu xueji 初學記 [An encyclopedia for beginners], 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), vol. 1:115. 47 ‘Tianweijing xinzuo haipaibei 天威徑新鑿海派碑’ [Stele in celebrating the newly opened route of the Mighty Heaven], in Phan Van Cac and Claudine Salmon (eds), Épigraphieen chinois du Viêt Nam / Van khac Han Nom Viet Nam (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient; Ha Noi: Vien nghien cuu Han Nom, 1998), pp. 33–40.

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Maritime Formations

N/m2

0.1

0

−0.1

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Figure 1.3  Monthly mean wind-stress in the Gulf of Tongking Source: Nguyet Minh Nguyen, ‘Tidal characteristics of the Gulf of Tonkin: Ocean, Atmosphere’, PhD dissertation, Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III (2013), p. 12.

coastal travel something to fear. First, a string of huge hidden rocks, lurking beneath the waves, often undetected, stretched from the Red River Delta’s eastern coast to the Guangxi coast. It was not until the late ninth century ce that Gao Pian (Cao Bien, b.821–887 ce), governor of the delta region known as the Annam Protectorate, ordered their removal.48 Chinese ships set sail from Chinese ports for Southeast Asia when the northeast monsoon commenced, usually in December and lasted until April the following year. In other words, ships would be propelled by the northwest wind. In the Gulf of Tongking, however, the wind blows westward, so there is no north–south wind to facilitate north–south traffic during the entire year. The strength and direction of this westerly wind is apparent when looking at Figure 1.3, which shows the monthly variation in the direction and force of the gulf’s winds. These two conditions together spelt danger to mariners, because winter north-easterly winds could blow ships west towards the Red River Delta and smash them against one of the many hidden rocks offshore. This was precisely the case before the ninth century, as one historical source advises: ‘If one is drawn by the wind and sails to hug the coast, his ship will definitely be wrecked.’49 48

Recently there have been debates on where and how the huge rocks had been removed and whether Gao Pian built a sea canal on the way to Jiaozhi for a safe and shorter journey. See Franciscus Verellen, ‘La réalisation du Chenal de la puissance céleste sous la Chine des Tang: Sources épigraphiques et archéologiques’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 105 (2019), 229–253. Some Chinese scientists point out that building a sea canal was neither possible nor economical at the time. He Fanneng 何凡能 et al., ‘“Tanpeng yunhe” de shuzhuo ji dili weizhi kaoxi’ 潭蓬運河的疏鑿及地理位置考析’ [Excavation and geographic location of the ‘Tanpeng Canal’], Dili kexue jinzhan 地理科学进展 [Progress in Geography] 38, 11 (2019), 1684–1691. Verellen argues convincingly, however, that Gao Pian used gunpowder to have the big rocks removed. I am grateful to John Whitmore for bringing this matter to my attention. 4 9 See Zhou Qufei, Lingwaidaida [Representative answers from the region beyond the mountains] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999), p. 33.

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The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports 33

The details regarding these navigational hazards resolve some major mysteries about early Han maritime travel. The Book of Han (Hanshu), a history of the early dynasty written in the first century ce, lists three departure ports from China to Southeast Asia and India: ‘From the barricades of Rinan (in the south part of the gulf in central Vietnam), Xuwen (on China’s Leizhou Peninsula), or Hepu (on China’s Guangxi coast), one would travel five months to reach the Kingdom of Duyuan (on the Malay Peninsula).’50 Curiously, this list does not include a port in the Red River Delta region. Jiaozhi, where the Han governor presided, lay in the Red River Delta and was well known for its southerly location and involvement in maritime trade. Clearly, however, the actual business of trade largely functioned elsewhere. Sailing conditions in the Gulf of Tongking prevented the use of any port in the Red River Delta for long-distance maritime transport. In the 1950s, the historian Wang Gungwu pointed out that Jiaozhi’s ‘very value to China lay in its overseas trade’.51 Han-era Jiaozhou enjoyed a reputation as China’s primary portal to that trade, attracting a large share of the maritime commerce of the South China Sea, and maintained its high standing even after Guangzhou rose to prominence in the sixth century ce, creating two major ports during the Tang dynasty (617–906). This description by a court official of the sixth-century Southern Qi – the Chinese dynasty best informed about Southeast Asia – offers insight into Jiaozhi’s importance to China:52 Different southern barbarians occupied various islands to found kingdoms. No place has more worldly treasures than [these islands]. These treasures are hidden in the mountains and the seas, where pearls and jewels shine into one’s eyes. Ships coming from afar all gathered in Jiaozhou, thus enriching Jiaozhou and Guangzhou (the prefecture of Guang), where treasures pile up in prefectural offices. [Italics added]

And yet, despite Jiaozhi’s famed riches, nobody seems certain where this prosperous port of Jiaozhou lay,53 while the location of Guangzhou’s port has 50

Hanshu, chapter 28, 6:1671. Wang Gungwu, Nanhai maoyi yu Nanyang huaren [The Nanhai trade and the Nanyang Chinese], trans. Yao Nan (Hong Kong: Zhonghuashuju, 1988), p. 46 (a translation of ‘The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31, part 2 [1958]). 52 The original Chinese states: ‘南夷雜種, 分嶼建國, 四方珍怪, 莫此為先, 藏山隱海, 珠寶 溢目。商舶遠屆, 委輸交州, 故交廣富實, 積王府.’ ‘Nanyi zhuan 蠻夷傳’ [Biography on Southern Barbarians], in [梁] Xiao Zixian萧子显Nan Qi shu 南齊書 [The History of the Southern Qi] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 58, 3:1018. 53 For example, see the different opinions about the location of the port described by Henri Maspero in his article, ‘Le protectorat général d’Annam sous les T’ang’, cited and translated in Feng Chengjun, Xiyunanhai shidikaozheng yicongsibian [Fourth collected translations of papers on the history and geography of the Western Regions and the South Seas] (Shanghai: Shangwushudian, 1940), pp. 73–80; and Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi [The land of Vietnam throughout history], (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1964), pp. 72–74. 51

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always been clear. It seems incredible that we cannot find evidence of a port large enough to serve as the maritime hub of imperial China during its first millennium of existence, when historical evidence shows it clearly existed. Where might this lost port have been located? The Thanh Hoa Portal of Lach Truong To find this missing port for Jiaozhi, one must look south of the Red River Delta to the neighbouring province of Thanh Hoa. Its importance to Vietnamese history is manifold, and research is proving that its importance to the country’s maritime history was no less critical, as subsequent chapters will show. In addition to its helpful regional map, Keith Taylor’s 1998 essay on the regional factor in Vietnamese history demonstrates Thanh Hoa’s pivotal role in all the transformative political struggles of late imperial and modern Vietnamese history. As he shows, a number of fine scholars have correctly attributed the dynamics of Thanh Hoa’s interregional interactions to a combination of regional cultural characteristics, interregional rivalry among lowland Vietnamese, and perhaps most importantly their ongoing conflicts with the non-Vietnamese peoples they encountered or pushed into the western hinterlands.54 Adding a maritime perspective further clarifies the source, strength, and antiquity of Thanh Hoa’s influence by framing the region within the larger perspective of the Gulf of Tongking. Looking at the Jiaozhi period of Vietnamese history, for example, the motive force behind Han conquest and settlement in the second century bce, which ensured Thanh Hoa’s central role in the formation of the first independent Vietnamese kingdom in the tenth century ce, lay squarely in its ability to serve Jiaozhi’s administrative centre of Luy Lau as well as its sea trade (see Map 1.1). Thanh Hoa’s importance to the Jiaozhi phase of Vietnam’s maritime history lies in two places: Da But and Lach Truong. First is Da But, now located about 100 kilometres inland from Vietnam’s current seacoast, in the town of Vinh Tan in Vinh Loc District. This was the site of the region’s earliest coastal culture, dated between 4500 and 3700 bce.55 Map 1.2 shows the coastline as it existed in the Red River Delta and Thanh Hoa 4,000 years ago and at present. As noted previously, all of the sites in the delta that were important to Jiaozhi were much closer to the sea than they are today.56 At Da But, the 54

Keith W. Taylor, ‘Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region’, Journal of Asian Studies 57, 5 (1998), 954–971; Nola Cooke, ‘The Composition of the Nineteenth-Century Political Elite of Pre-colonial Nguyen Vietnam’, Modern Asian Studies 29, 4 (1995), 741–764. 55 Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia, p. 82. 56 Susumu Tanabe et al., ‘Song Hong (Red River) Delta Evolution Related to Millennium-Scale Holocene Sea-Level Changes’, Quaternary Science Review 22, issues 21–22 (2003), 2357 (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-3791(03)00138-0, accessed 7 September 2019).

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Map 1.2  (a and b) Coastline from Ha Long Bay to Thanh Hoa, 4,000 years ago and present Source: The coastline of 4,000 years ago is adapted from Susumu Tanabe et al., ‘Holocene Evolution of the Song Hong (Red River) Delta System, Northern Vietnam’, Sedimentary Geology 187 (2006), 53. The river courses in this map are contemporary but would have been vastly different 4,000 years ago.

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ancient Ma River – rather than follow its present-day direction south to flow into the Chu River that descends to the sea – used to run a bit northward and emptied into the sea at a place called Lach Truong, which today lies about 10 kilometres north of the present-day primary port of Cua Hoi.57 It was here that the trading ships and Han government vessels seeking access to Jiaozhi made landfall. Lach Truong provided a strategic place from which people could gain access to Jiaozhi’s administrative centre at Luy Lau and the Red River Delta at large. This was done by first sailing west to the estuary of the Day River, the southernmost tributary of the Red River, located today in Ninh Binh Province. Map 1.3a shows the distance between Lach Truong port and this ancient river route linking Thanh Hoa with the Jiaozhi capital. This ‘upper road’ (thuong dao) was the shortest route to the heart of the delta. By moving upstream on the Day River, one can travel as far as Chuong My, just southwest of today’s Hanoi.58 This is supported by the second map (Map 1.3b), which shows the three routes that, centuries later in 1426, the antiMing hero Le Loi took in attacking China’s Ming invaders from his base in Thanh Hoa.59 At first glance, Lach Truong’s location appears to lack any advantage for such a large administrative jurisdiction as Luy Lau, which stretched from Guangdong to central Vietnam. Again, a maritime perspective that places Thanh Hoa and the Red River Delta in the context of the Gulf of Tongking clarifies this confusion. Map 1.4, which depicts the gulf’s current, shows that water flows west from the South China Sea through the Qiongzhou Strait between the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan Island to reach the gulf. From there, the current generally moves west, with some occasional undulation towards the south. Looking at this map, it seems obvious why Hepu and Xuwen developed as key ports for the Han. Hepu (located at 21°40′N and 109°12′E) and Xuwen (20°19′30″N and 110°10′37″E) are both ideally situated for southern travel in winter. Anybody trying to sail to the South Sea from Central China would have to depart from the major ports of Hepu and Xuwen and then head due west between 250 and 270 degrees to reach the western end of the Red River

57

Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, p. 43. Le Quy Don, ‘Phong vuc’, in Kien van tieu luc [Small chronicle of things seen and heard] (trans. and repr. Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb Tre–Nxb Hong Bang, 2013), p. 69. Le Quy Don wrote: ‘The land of the Tot Dong village of My Luong district is flat and population is dense … there is a big road as wide as 2 truong (6.66 metres) and this was the road to Thanh Hoa of the previous dynasties. People say that this route was really short and close [to Thanh Hoa]. But the mountain route is now congested and no longer available.’ Tot Dong was where Le Loi’s army defeated the invading Ming army in 1426. 5 9 Source: Vietnamese version of Wikipedia ‘Tot Dong’ (https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Trận Tô´t Động – Chúc Động, accessed 14 September 2019). 58

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Xuöng Giang

Vinh Phúc

Tam Giang Chí Linh Dông Quan Thanh Dàm

Thi Câu

S.Dà

Quôc Oai

Thanh Trì

Khoái Châu Hung Yen Phu Li

S.M

ã

Thiên Quan Ninh Bình

Nam Dinh

Thai Binh

Cô Long

Tây Dô

Thanh Hoá

Map 1.3  (a and b) Lach Truong and the Upper Route to Thang Long

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Map 1.4  Winter currents in the Gulf of Tongking

Delta and Lach Truong.60 When Lach Truong, Hepu and Xuwen are plotted on a map of the gulf, as shown in Map 1.5, and compared with the current flows depicted in Map 1.4, it is clear that Lach Truong constitutes the most convenient point of convergence for ships sailing westward from Hepu and Xuwen. Lach Truong is only a short distance to Man Bac, the migrant community from the Yangzi delta 3,000 years ago, discussed earlier. Xuwen is particularly noteworthy. Had maritime travel during the Han era indeed hugged the gulf coast as historians have long assumed, Xuwen would have made a poor port, because its location would have made it redundant vis à vis Hepu, especially given Hepu’s closer proximity to the Red River Delta when sailing the coast. Only when one sails across the Gulf of Tongking would Xuwen enjoy a location rivalling Hepu in favourability. This explains the well-known proverb of the Han era: ‘If one wants to be rid of poverty, he should go to Xuwen.’61 Other archaeological evidence supports a relationship between Lach Truong, Hepu, and Xuwen. In the early 1930s Swedish archaeologist Olov Janse discovered an extraordinarily rich trove of Han artefacts in Lach Truong. This prompted him to conclude that Lach Truong had once been a Han port.62 In the eighty years of digging since Janse’s excavations, no one has yet found evidence of a Han-era port of Lach Truong’s scale or richness in the Red River Delta, even with the growing help of ever-improving technology and ever-expanding resources. This suggests the possibility that no other 60

‘A basic navigational technique of ancient sailors was to sail due east or west along a fixed latitude.’ John Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), p. 58. 61 The Chinese reads: ‘欲拔贫, 诣徐闻.’ 62 Charles Higham, Early Mainland Southeast Asia: From First Humans to Angkor (Bangkok: River Books, 2014), p. 332.

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Map 1.5  Locations of Hepu, Xuwen, Lach Truong, and Man Bac Source: Nguyet Minh Nguyen, ‘Tidal characteristics of the Gulf of Tonkin’, p. 12; see also Chen Changlin et al., ‘Numerical Study of the Tides and Residual Currents in the Qiongzhou Strait’, Chinese Journal of Oceanology and Limnology 27, 4 (2009), 933.

port of Lach Truong’s magnitude ever existed in the Red River Delta during Han times. If true, then Lach Truong constitutes the first important seaport in Vietnamese history. Some archaeological findings, however, reveal more and varied maritime connections. Together, they present an important puzzle about how certain type of bronze drums appeared in archipelagic Southeast Asia and nowhere else. Ambra Calo reveals that only three bronze drums of a specific cluster, Cluster 3, have been found in northern and central Vietnam, while 20 direct counterparts have appeared in eastern Indonesia. Among the three found in Vietnam, one was discovered in Hoa Binh, while the other two came from the coastal area near Hai Phong and Nghia Dan in Nghe An, respectively. Calo suggests that these drums travelled along a direct maritime route during the

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early Han-Viet period between the second and sixth centuries ce. Indeed, one of the drums discovered in Maluku bears Chinese characters that were cast as a part of its decoration.63 This suggests that numerous other portals and players helped to develop and maintain the millennium of trade that travelled along the Tongking Gulf’s western coast, even if the bronze drums represent a brief, one-time event, as Calo suspects.64 Different from the bronze drums found in the western Indochina, where Linyi played a major role as intermediary (see Chapter 3) in trading them, these drums seemed to have been brought to the archipelago by completely different peoples.65 The evidence of Han-era connections between Thanh Hoa and Hepu is strong. Archaeologists have discovered artefacts in Lach Truong similar or even identical to those exhumed from excavations in ancient ports like Hepu. For example, identical bronze pots from the Han era were discovered in both cities (Figure 1.4), and a pair of large pottery buckets inscribed ‘Cuu Chan Phu’ (‘prefecture of Cuu Chan’, today’s Thanh Hoa) were unearthed in a Han tomb in Hepu.66 That said, the necessity of cross-sea sailings by larger ships from large ports like Hepu and Xuwen does not negate the reality of thousands of smaller local coaster vessels plying the gulf’s offshore waters, creating the major force contributing to trade and settlement, a topic discussed in the next section. Rice and the Delta’s Eastern Coastal Connections Although they were close neighbours, connections between the Red River Delta, the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan Island are poorly known. Trade in this region was primarily carried out by peddlers rather than large-scale merchants, and therefore was rarely recorded. In pre-modern times, rice shipments were not so much a part of large-scale international trade as they were a crucial component of the coastal traffic that flowed around the Gulf of Tongking’s rim. Hepu, for example, greatly depended on the rice exported by people of the Red River Delta throughout much of its history; as late as the nineteenth ­century, Karl Gutzlaff (1803–1851) reported that more than 200 boats sailed 63

Ambra Calo, Trails of Bronze Drums across Early Southeast Asia: Exchange Routes and Connected Cultural Spheres (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), p. 16, see Figure 1.24 for the locations where these drums are found. 64 Calo, Trails of Bronze Drums, p. 16. 65 A bronze drum in Dongson style was also found from Chaiya, south Thailand. Several drums of this type have been found in the Malay Peninsula, indicating that this region had been integrated into a network of trade and communication over 2,000 years ago. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, p. 26. 66 Yang Shiting 楊式挺, ‘Luelun hepu hanmu jiqi chutu wenwu de tedian 略論合浦漢墓及其出 土文物的特點’ [On the characteristics of the Han tombs and the items unearthed from Hepu] (www.sohu.com/a/446818658_556515, accessed 10 October 2021).

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The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports 41

Figure 1.4  Bronze pots found in Hepu (a) and in Thanh Hoa (b) Source: (a) Hepu Historical Museum, photo taken by author; (b) Olov R. T. Janse, Archaeological Research in Indo-China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947–1958), vol. 3, plate 6.

from Hainan to Vietnam annually to buy rice.67 However, as Roderich Ptak puts it, the coastal routes that connected Hepu with the Red River Delta functioned more like ‘country roads’, serving regional and local transportation carried out by small peddlers.68 Rice cultivation appeared in the Red River Delta around 2000 bce. In time it became one of the key components of Vietnamese political economy that distinguished Vietnamese polities among their neighbours. Here, geography mattered. The Pearl River Delta was a bay dotted with islands until the fourteenth century and did not become a delta before the seventeenth century.69 The rapid silt of

67

Karl Gutzlaff, ‘Geography of the Cochin-Chinese Empire’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 19 (1849), 126. Roderich Ptak, ‘Some Glosses on the Sea Straits of Asia: Geography, Functions, Typology’, Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World 1/2 (2010), 93. 69 Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk & Silt: Environment and Economy in Later Imperial South China (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 66 (see the maps of the Pearl Deltas changes on p. 67). 68

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the Red River formed a delta up to the present mid Red River Delta around 2000 bce.70 This is to say, the Red River Delta had the capacity to sustain population concentration much earlier than the Pearl River Delta. Charles Higham has pointed out that some ‘communities might prosper unduly’ under certain conditions, singling out rice cultivation as one of those conditions, since rice surpluses could be employed to attract and maintain a political following of sufficiently concentrated mass to create a viable and durable polity.71 This is exactly what happened in the Red River Delta two millennia ago. In the second century bce, Jiaozhi’s households numbered four times more than those of Guangzhou to the north;72 indeed, the average size of households in Jiaozhi was larger than households in some parts of contemporaneous northern China, such as today’s Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces.73 This is all the more striking when one considers that the delta’s area was far less extensive than it is today and thus offered a smaller yield due to the smaller amount of arable land.74 Given the Red River Delta’s productive capacity, the rice its people cultivated played a vital role in integrating the Gulf of Tongking under Chinese rule, by making this relatively densely populated outpost of the Chinese empire the granary for the empire’s southernmost circuit. Indeed, the delta produced enough rice to supply neighbouring areas both north and south. To its north, writers noted, key Han commercial centres like Hepu ‘do not produce rice but only pearls’; however, thanks to the port’s position ‘next to Jiaozhi, [it] often trades [pearls] for rice’. This also explains why early Chinese records dating back to the first century ce cite pearls as one of Jiaozhi’s major products.75 The mutual dependence of Jiaozhi and Hepu becomes all too apparent in reports circulating in the mid-second century ce, which claim that Hepu’s local officers had grown too greedy and began to make excessive demands on trade, for which locals paid a heavy price: ‘thus the traders stopped coming to trade, and the people lost their livelihood, so [consequently] poor people starved on the road’.76 Not all the Han settlements surrounding the Gulf of Tongking engaged in rice agriculture. While many north-coastal people in places like Hepu sought alternatives to pearling, many others continued to profit from it. Similarly, 70

Funabiki, A. et al., ‘Holocene Delta Plain Development in the Song Hong (Red River) Delta, Vietnam’, Journal of Asian Earth Sciences 30 (2007), 518–529; Tanabe, Hori et  al., ‘Delta  Initiation and Holocene Sea-Level Change: Example from the Song Hong (Red River) Delta, Vietnam’, Sedimentary Geology 164 (2004), 237–249. 71 Charles Higham, The Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia (Bangkok: River Books, 2002), p. 224. 72 Ban Gu 班固, Hanshu 漢書 [Book of the Han] (completed 82 ce) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 28B, 6: 1629–1630. 73 Ge Jianxiong, Xi Han lishidili [Historical geography of the Western Han dynasty] (Beijing: Renminchubanshe, 1986), pp. 46, 53. 74 Higham, Bronze Age of Southeast Asia, p. 73. 75 Hanshu 28, vol. 6: 1671. 76 Hou Hanshu [Book of Later Han] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2012), chapter 76, 9:2473.

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Han subjects in Cuu Chan, a coastal prefecture of Jiaozhi, today’s Thanh Hoa region, and where Lach Truong was located, made their livelihood principally by hunting. ‘Cuu Chan’, one source reports, ‘lived on hunting and did not understand ploughing using draft oxen.’ As a consequence, ‘people of this prefecture frequently had to buy rice from Jiaozhi and often fell short of it’.77 The archaeology of the Cuu Chan sites in Thanh Hoa seem to confirm that rice cultivation developed much later in this region than it did in the Red River Delta.78 This was natural. As Anthony Reid has pointed out, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherer societies have coexisted, interacted, and exchanged throughout Southeast Asia for at least 5,000 years.79 Indeed, both river and coastal traffic played a crucial role in maintaining cohesion among societies with different ecological and economic characteristics.80 The Red River Delta’s connections with the Leizhou Peninsula, where Xuwen is located, were strong as well, if we look at the local religious practices that both regions shared. Among all the coasts of Guangdong, bronze drums are found most numerously in the Leizhou Peninsula.81 Together with the bronze drums found in Guangxi and on Hainan Island, this makes the Leizhou Peninsula stand out for its evident connections with Vietnam. There are two distinctive local worships of a thunder god and stone dog which seemed to have paralleled and related to each other: many stone dogs collected by the Leizhou Museum have carved patterns of cloud and thunder on them; both are regarded as the guardians of the local people and both are related to the rituals of praying for rain.82 Thunder was also believed to have the power to suppress typhoons.83 Thunder God worship can also be found among some people in northern and central Vietnamese villages in the form of thanh hoang (local deities or spirits). The location of these villages is interesting: they are situated near the coast beyond the alluvial plain created during the last 500 years, such as those in Thai Binh (Map 1.6).84 77

Hou Hanshu 76, 9: 2462. None of the earliest sites excavated at Da But and Con Co Ngua (Ha Linh Village, Ha Trung, dated 3500 bc), both in Thanh Hoa, yielded evidence of rice cultivation. 79 Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 5. Charles Higham notes: ‘As is well known from the Japanese Jomon sites, pottery, polished stone tools and cemeteries can well develop in rich coastal habitats without the presence of agriculture.’ The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia, p. 83. 80 Charles Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of Thuận-Quảng, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, 1 (2006), 123–153. 81 Guangdong difangzhi 廣東地方誌 [Journal of Guangdong local gazetteers], 4 (2009), 54. 82 Liu Lan and Li Xiongfei, ‘Leizhou shigou chongbai bianqian yü minzu geju zhi guanxi’ [Changes in stone-dog worship in Leizhou and its connections with ethnic structures], Guangxi shehuikexue [Journal of Guangxi social sciences], 8 (2008), 146. 83 Liu Xun, Lingbiao luyi [Strange Records from Beyond the Mountains], chapter 1. 84 Li Tana, ‘Epidemics, Trade and Local Worship in Vietnam, Leizhou Peninsula, and Hainan Island’, in Victor Mair and Liam Kelley (eds), Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), pp. 194–213. 78

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Map 1.6  Districts worshipping Thunder God in northern and central Vietnam

The Delta’s Other River Roads from the Sea In addition to Lach Truong, the deep-sea and coastal routes of the gulf connected to the Red River Delta by way of two passages. The coastal route entered by way of the Bach Dang River in the north. Like its northern counterpart, this southern route along the Day River ran along a stretch of

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The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports 45

limestone mountains that would have towered over the ancient traffic as it floated upriver and downriver. Here, before the tenth century, the big ships would have landed on the coast, then transshipped goods to river boats which travelled upriver from both north and south to make their first foray into the Red River Delta and the core of Jiaozhi, while many Han expeditions to the south began their approach to the sea. The northern route through the Bach Dang River was equally ancient. At the river’s mouth, travellers made their first landing before continuing upriver on the Duong River to reach the Red River Valley. Map 1.7 show that the major early archaeological sites discussed earlier lie along the two northern and southern routes, that is, the Bach Dang and the Day rivers.85 When these two routes are studied side by side, one striking fact emerges: Both were the major routes linking the Red River Delta to the gulf and the greater maritime world. However, the changing environment that had created their pre-eminence had, by the fifteenth century, reduced it. By then, the expanding delta had rendered both ancient routes obsolete, laden with sand and pushed ever further from the sea. As this map makes clear, one must consider the Red River Delta’s shifting coastline when trying to understand the geography of its sea traffic. The River Road from Yunnan One last factor played a crucial role in the development of the Red River Delta society from which much of early Vietnamese culture evolved. This was the Red River itself, and its strong connection to the land of Yunnan in China and, through the mountains passes, Sichuan and the Yangzte River. The Complete annals of Dai Viet (Dai Viet su ky Toan Thu), compiled in the fifteenth century, relates the legend of Hung Vuong, the ancestral king of Van Lang in the delta, and his beautiful daughter, My Nuong. The king of Shu (V. Thu, today’s Sichuan) heard of the princess’ beauty and wanted to marry her. Hung Vuong’s generals rejected the proposal. In response, the king married her to Son Tinh, the Mountain Spirit. ‘This rejection was resented bitterly by the Shu king, who asked his descendants to overthrow the kingdom of Van Lang whenever possible.’86 In 257 bce, the king’s grandson, Shu Pan (best known by his Vietnamese name Thuc Phan), made good on that request by defeating Hung Vuong, declaring the kingdom of Au Lac and assuming the title An Duong Vuong and creating his capital in Co Loa, which marked a definitive shift of 85

Nishimura Masanari, ‘Settlement Patterns on the Red River Plain’, p. 104. Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [The complete Chronicals of Dai Viet], ed. Chen Chingho, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyobunka kenkyujo, 1986), pp. 99–100.

86

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Map 1.7  Distribution of Neolithic sites on the Red River Plain and in ­adjacent areas Source: Nishimura Masanari, ‘Settlement Patterns on the Red River Plain’, p. 104.

0-2m 2-3m 3-5m 5-25m More than 25m Monad rock

0

20km

Early Neolithic Late Neolithic Early and Late Neolithic Early or Late Neolithic

N

The Search for Jiaozhi’s Deep-Sea Ports 47

the political centre of gravity from the mountains towards the triangular delta, and which according to Philippe Papin, signified both epically and geomorphologically the defeat of the mountain forces by the water forces of the plain.87 This southern migration of the Shu prince from Sichuan was confirmed in the fourth century ce by a Chinese source, entitled A History of Huayang Kingdom (Huayangguo zhi), the earliest and most comprehensive early history of southwestern China. This migration may have been forced by events in China, for the book claims that the Kingdom of Qin destroyed the Kingdom of Shu in 316 bce, after which a Shu prince led his countrymen south from Chengdu and settled somewhere between today’s districts of Xichang in Sichuan and Yaoan in Yunnan, not far from where the Red River begins.88 The Red River was not the Shu prince’s only means of travel. Two ancient roads stretching from Sichuan, moving through Yunnan, and leading to the Red River Delta, existed before the Qin dynasty. An eastern road formed a 1.5-metre-wide thoroughfare that people called the ‘Five-chi Road’ (Wuchidao), and a western road was called the ‘Yak Road’ (Maoniu dao, see Map 1.8). The eastern road led to Burma, while the western one travelled across Yunnan to Burma before turning westward to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and finally Central and West Asia.89 These two roads were among the longest and oldest traffic lines in Eurasia and embodied the communication web of the Eurasian supercontinent.90 A branch of the eastern Five-chi Road led from Kunming to the Red River Delta, which people called the Wuchi Way (or dao). Who built this Wuchi Way? Scholars who study Sichuan have claimed that the Kingdom of Shu built it as their official road, calling it wuchi to signify the number five (wu) as the kingdom’s primary number.91 In any case, the Shu prince and his soldiers could easily have taken the very road built by his ancestors to travel to Co Loa.

87

The characters for Shu Pan/Thuc Phan are 蜀泮; Philppe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancien’, 613; On the Yunnan Jiaozhi connections, see also Nam C. Kim, The Origins of Ancient Vietnam, p. 119. 88 The Shu history (‘蜀志’) of the Huayangguo zhi 華阳國志 states: ‘蠶叢國破, 子孫居姚嶲 等處’ [When the Cancong Kingdom was destroyed, the princes and princesses moved to places such as Yao and Jun (in today’s Liangshan of Sichuan and Yaoan of Yunnan)]. (https:// zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hant/華阳國志, accessed 19 June 2013). 89 Yang Bin, Chapter 1, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan: Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) (www .gutenberg-e.org/yang/chapter1.html, accessed 22 January 2019). 90 Duan Yu, Liu Hong, ‘Lun sanxingdui yu nanfang sichouzhilu qingtong wenhua de guanxi’ [On relations between bronze cultures of Sanxingdui and the Southern Silk Routes] (https:// yuedu.163.com/book_reader/5b18f98f72f048e8ac7aa1ebae5437f8_4, accessed 17 July 2016) 91 Duan Yu, ‘Wuchidao kaitong shidaikao’ [On the era when the Five-chi Road was opened], in Bashu wenhua yanjiu jikan [Collected studies s on the Sichuan culture], no. 7 (2011) (https:// yuedu.163.com/book_reader/5b18f98f72f048e8ac7aa1ebae5437f8_4, accessed 2 March 2016)

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Map 1.8  The Five-chi and Yak roads (Wuchidao, Maoniudao)

It is clear from the information above that the Gulf of Tongking was the shortest cut linking Yunnan and Sichuan with the sea. This route was brought to life by a significant finding by Vietnamese archaeologists in 1980, when a type of ceremonial jade blade, called a yazhang, was unearthed in two sites in Phu Tho province in the upper delta. Phung Nguyen is next to the Red River and Xom Ren is next to the Lo River, the two most important waterways to the Red River Delta. They are similar to those found in the Erlitou sites of northern China in terms of both shape and material. More yazhang were found twenty years later, in the early 2000s. In Xom Ren site alone, seven yazhang have been unearthed so far. The number and

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density of the ritual objects identified here ranks second only to those found in Sanxingdui, the major walled city of the Shu civilisation in Sichuan (12th to 11th centuries bce). Moreover, two of the jade blades are identical to some blades unearthed in Sanxingdui.92 How did these yazhang find their way to the Red River Delta? By sea or land? Perhaps the attraction of a sea route, because yazhang have also been found as far afield as Hong Kong in the Pearl River Delta.93 Yet a faint vertical line on the object distinguishes some blades from the others. Yazhang bearing a vertical line are found only at sites in western China, while they appear noticeably absent from all discoveries from sites in eastern and south-coastal China.94 It seems likely, then, that the blades found in the upper Red River Valley came by land from Sichuan. The Red River Delta is thus a two-headed dragon, looking northwest along river and overland routes to Yunnan, Sichuan, and beyond, and east to the coast, the gulf, and the South Sea. However deeply mountains surrounded them, the Red and the Lo Rivers provided the shortest paths by river or road for people in the southwest regions of China to reach the sea. Looking the other way, the Tongking Gulf then linked Jiaozhi to the Han Empire to the north and the lucrative South Sea to the south. It was no coincidence, then, that the delta played a central role in the history of southern China and Mainland Southeast Asia in the formative years of Han civilisation. At this favourable location and historical junction of the early first millennium CE, Jiaozhi played an important cultural role in linking what is now southwest China, then non-Chinese, and Lingnan. Lach Truong’s bronze lamp figure (‘kneeling man’, Figure 1.5), however unique and exotic it seemed to archaeologists from afar, finds its imitation in the Eastern Han tombs of Heimajing at Gejiu in Yunnan95 (Figure 1.6). The influence of Dong Song drums can be observed on the bronze buckets found in the tombs of Luobowan in Guixian, Guangxi, and the tomb of the king of Nanyue in Panyu, Guangzhou.96 What we see here is that Jiaozhi lay within the Han empire but belonged to a larger world comprised of both Han and non-Han traditions, thanks to its 92

Referring to the jade yazhang blades, Charles Higham remarks, ‘Foremost among these jades was a broken piece from a yazhang blade recalling those from Sanxingdui’; see Origins of the Civilization of Angkor: Excavation of Ban Non Wat, pt. 2, vol. 3, The Neolithic Occupation (Havertown, US: Fine Arts Department of Thailand, 2011), p. 204. 93 Deng Cong 鄧聰, ‘Zhong–Yue yazhang shuxiangwen bianshi’ [A study on the vertical lines on yazhang], in Mingjia lunyü [Expert comments on jade], 23 January 2014 (www.ddhty.com/ show-1918-5839-1.html, accessed 1 May 2017). 94 Deng Cong, ‘Zhong-Yue yazhang shuxiangwen’. 95 Wei Weiyan 韋偉燕， ‘The Archaeological Research on the Han Style Tombs in Vietnam’ 越 南境內漢墓的考古學研究, PhD dissertation, Jilin University (2017), p. 242. 96 See the photo in Li Linna (ed.), Nanyue cangzhen [Treasures in Nanyue King’s Tomb] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), p. 140.

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Figure 1.5  ‘Kneeling man’ from Lach Truong, Thanh Hoa Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong_Son_culture. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Figure 1.6  The ‘Hu style man’ from Gejiu, Yunnan Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/三枝俑灯. Accessed 10 April 2010.

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Conclusion 51

larger contacts with two greater land regions of the Han empire, its southwest and southeast, and the maritime worlds of South China and Southeast Asia. This helped it to serve the empire as an intermediary among imperial regions as well as with the world overseas. This would have profound consequences for Vietnamese history, not to mention its northern neighbour. Through the sea, not only exotic goods but also exotic ideas and practices found their way into the Red River Delta, adding to the mix that became Vietnamese culture, as Chapter 2 will reveal. Conclusion Jiaozhi formed the hub of three key circuits structured around water as well as road transport. First, access to the upper reaches of the Red River, by boat and the old road of Shu, allowed the Han court to integrate its southern commandery with the western circuits of the Han empire through Yunnan and Sichuan. Second, through the road leading south across the Ling Canal to the Gulf of Tongking, whose coastal and overseas routes firmly linked the commandery’s administrative centre of Luy Lau to its eastern seaports and population centres of Hepu, Xuwen, and Panyu on the South China Sea, through its main port at Lach Truong. Additionally, a string of ports established along the coast south of the delta linked Jiaozhi to the ports of the southern and western seas, creating the conditions for enormous commercial wealth but also for the rise of the commandery’s greatest commercial and political rival, the kingdoms of Linyi and Champa – about which more will be said in chapters to follow. Thanks to the sea, Jiaozhi formed a strategic knot integrating a network that reached as far as Sichuan, Central China, the South China Coast, and the South China Sea. Looking to the north, this structure integrated the Gulf of Tongking firmly into the empire of the Han, laying the basis for a millennium of Chinese rule in the Red River Delta. Looking to the south, it secured Chinese access to the riches of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The latter region observed a rapid growth in maritime commerce, as Chapter 2 illustrates.

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2

Aromatics, Buddhism, and the Making of a South Seas Emporium

A visitor to fourth century Jiaozhou1 (formerly Jiaozhi) would have been struck by the sight of a bushy herb with pale pink-white flowers growing throughout an extensive region that spanned from southern Yunnan to central Vietnam. This was an aromatic plant known as huoxiang (English patchouli).2 Once full grown, the patchouli plants ‘are then harvested and dried by the sun’, Ji notes. ‘When dried, they are fragrant.’3 This plant was not native to Jiaozhou. Its Chinese name huoxiang, in fact, first appears in a third-century report written by two officers of the court of the Kingdom of Wu, the successor to the Han empire in south-eastern China, who visited 130 principalities in the South Sea region in 243 ce. After their return to China, one of the officers, Kang Tai, who was likely of Sogdian origin,4 wrote An Account of Foreign Countries (Wushi waiguo zhuan), in which he identified huoxiang as a native plant in ‘Dukun’, Dunxun, or Dianxun, a trading port located in the vicinity of present-day Tenasserim, along the narrow Kra Isthmus facing the Andaman Sea.5 The other officer, Zhu Ying, wrote 1

For a comprehensive review on the administrative changes about Jiaozhi and Jiaozhou throughout history, see Pham Le Huy, ‘A Reconsideration of the Leilou – Longbian Debate: A Continuation of Research by Nishimura Masanari’, Asian Review of World Histories 5 (2017), 28–52. 2 Latin: Pogostemon patchouli. Chinese name 藿香. In his book Bencao gangmu 本草綱目 [Compendium of materia medica], Li Shizhen 李时珍 (1518–1593) said that huoxiang was also called douloupo xiang 兜婁婆香. See Bencao gangmu (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), p. 517. The Sanskrit term patchpan, however, sound nothing like doulo and more like patchouli. Huoxiang seemed to have kept its Han-Nom form and never had a local name. Vietnamese Hoac Huong is a direct translation of Chinese. 3 Ji Han (262–306), Nanfang caomu zhuang [Herbs and Trees of the south], quoted in Li Fang, 李昉Taiping Yulan 太平御覽 [Imperial reader or readings of the Taiping Era], completed 977–983 CE, chapter 982. (www.guoxue123.com/shibu/0301/0000/019.htm, accessed 23 February 2000). 4 Yin Botao 尹波涛, ‘Sute Kangshi kuaijijunwang kaolun 粟特康氏会稽郡望考論论 [Research into the ancestral home of the Kuaiji prefecture of the surname Kang of Sogdian origin], Dunhuangxue jikan 敦煌學輯刊 [Journal of Dunhuang Studies] 1 (2017), 156–164. 5 Kang Tai 康泰 Wushi waiguo zhuan 吳時外國傳 [The chronicle of foreign countries in Wu times], in 陳佳榮 (ed.), (Wu) Kang Tai, Zhu Ying Waiguo zhuan （吴）康泰朱應外國傳 [An annotated collection of Kang Tai & Zhu Ying’s Waiguo zhuan] (Hong Kong: Xianggang haiwai jiaotongshi xuehui, 2006), p. 25. Here I refer to both Dukun and Dunxun as the same port with different spellings from different periods. Dukun and Dunxun were both recorded as being

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about the commerce in aromatics there: ‘In the country of Dunxun people constantly make offerings to the gods in heaven … Winter or summer, there are always thousands of flower carts brought to the market for sale. The drier the flowers are, the more fragrant they become.’6 Dunxun was one of Jiaozhou’s key trade partners in the South Sea region. More than two centuries later, during the Southern Liang era (502–560 ce), one Chinese author noted, ‘Dunxun traded with Jiaozhou to the east and with India and Parthia to the west’ [italics added].7 Part of reason for this relationship rested on the strength of Jiaozhou as a key hub in the network of sea traffic that spanned Asia in the first millennium. Dunxun played a prominent role in pan-Asian commerce. Rather than travel southwest across the Gulf of Siam to the Malay Peninsula and then north to reach the Andaman Sea and India through the Strait of Melaka, in the first millennium merchants bypassed the strait by taking an overland shortcut across the Kra Isthmus where Dunxun lay. There, ‘the [merchants of the] countries outside the boundaries [of China] all come and go to trade there. In the markets of Dunxun, east meets west, and daily more than ten thousand people [trade there]. There is no lack of any of the valuable products and precious goods [in demand there].’8 Thanks to the southern route and the export of local products to markets in the South Sea, the region attracted merchants from beyond China and as far west as India, Iran, and even inland Central Asian cities like Samarkand. Typical of such commercial and cosmopolitan centres, the itinerants and migrants from these distant lands brought with them new ideas and cultural practices. Such is the case with the western Tongking Gulf region, where the cultivation and export of aromatic woods grew enmeshed in the development and spread of Buddhism in China. This allows us to witness another important facet of maritime influence in Vietnamese history, namely, its facilitation of cultural as well as demographic and economic change. Who organised the plantations, processing, and export of such aromatics in Jiaozhi? While there existed a sizeable Han population, the majority involved were undoubtedly local Viet and Tai-Kadai populations. At the very least, the leading role of local elites in this lucrative business seems very likely. located 3000 li (1,500 kilometres) south of Funan and Huoxiang as its local product. (吳時外 國傳: ‘都昆在扶南南三千餘里出藿香’; 梁書/卷54: 扶南 ‘其南界三千馀里有顿逊國’; 万震, 南州异物志: ‘藿香出典逊’). 6 ‘Funan zhuan’ [Account of Funan], in Yao Silian 姚思廉 (557–637), Book of Liang (Liangshu 梁書), chapter 54 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), 3: 787. 7 Cited in Wang Gungwu, ‘The Nanhai Trade’, in Geoff Wade (ed.), Southeast Asia-China Interactions (Kuala Lumpur: The Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2007), p. 95. 8 Ibid.

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Here, Erica Brindley’s analysis of the local aristocracy of the Han empire’s southern territory is illuminating: ‘Far from being mere puppets of their Han overlords, elite, aristocratic people on the frontier were pioneers of social and cultural change. Furthermore, these elites demonstrated an agency that neither wholly accepted nor resisted the Han, but which attempted to create original, mixed identities and responses to Han influence and pressures for their own benefit.’9 This chapter gathers the faint and disparate traces of Jiaozhi’s commerce in its native aromatics and pieces them together in order to reconstruct an economy in which communities organised by the local elite were driving its specialisation and temples were forming its central institution, much like societies in many times and places all over Southeast Asia.10 This story about Jiaozhou aromatics illustrates how well the peoples of Jiaozhou exploited their favourable geographical location, both in terms of natural resources and as an important node in the trade networks spanning South, Southeast, and East Asia. But more than Jiaozhi’s counterparts in Southeast Asia, and more than a province of China, Jiaozhi was much like the late Qing Hong Kong, as an entrepôt, a safe space to meet different peoples, a major hub of new ideas travelling from the south, and a cosmopolitan centre where many leading Chinese scholars of the time sought refuge. Jiaozhou and India Nestled in the seemingly remote Gulf of Tongking, the Red River Delta appears too remote from India – over 7,000 kilometres away – for the people of the two regions to have formed much of an economic or cultural relationship. Yet from the earliest days of Chinese rule over the gulf region, and for centuries thereafter, Jiaozhi functioned as the final stop on a traveller’s journey from India to China. As late as the eighth century, studies like Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu) declared, ‘Since [the time of] the Hanwu emperor [r.156– 87 bce], they have come to offer court tribute, necessarily by way of Jiaozhi’ [italics added].11 That is to say, during the early centuries of Chinese imperial history, Sino-Indian contacts mediated through the ports of the Tongking Gulf. A third-century Chinese account of the South Sea by Kang Tai, an officer of 9

Erica Brindley, ‘Representations and Uses of Yue Identity along the Southern Frontier of the Han, ca. 200–111 BCE’, Early China 33 (2011), 2. 10 Andrea Yankowski, ‘Trade, Technologies and Traditions: The Analysis of Artifacts Recovered from a Metal Age Burial Site in District Ubujan, Tagbilaran City, Bohol’, MA dissertation, San Francisco State University, 2005, p. 10. 11 ‘Nanhai zhuguo’ [South Sea countries], from ‘Dili zhi’ [Geography] in Liu Xu 劉昫, Jiu Tang shu [Old Book of Tang], completed 945 ce, chapter 41 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), 5:1750.

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Jiaozhou and India 55

the Kingdom of Wu, declared that the route ‘from Jiaozhou to Tianzhu [India]’ was the ‘nearest’ path for anyone travelling to or from China.12 Surely, maritime connections between Jiaozhi and the sea societies of South and Southeast Asia existed long before the Han conquest, as the Chinese dynasty utilised the pre-existing connections of the maritime peoples they conquered. This Han intervention into long-standing sea trade structures greatly stimulated exchanges between South and Southeast Asia, enhancing Jiaozhi’s role and securing China’s place in Asia’s growing interregional commerce. Two artefacts verify that direct contacts existed between India and Jiaozhi/ Jiaozhou during the early centuries of the first millennium ce and suggest the magnitude of their impact on Red River Delta society in the third century. One type of tile, which bears human faces, appeared among the artefacts excavated at the site of Luy Lau Citadel.13 Scholars first believed that the production of these tiles started in third-century Jianye, a Chinese city on the Yangzi River (now in Nanjing) and capital of the Wu kingdom that ruled Jiaozhou after the Han dynasty’s collapse in 220.14 Yet excavations by archaeologist Nishimura Masanari suggest that the direction of influence flowed in reverse, from south to north Jiaozhi to Jianye, given that they were unearthed from the dig layer corresponding to the late second century ce. This means that this style of tiles was made first in Jiaozhou, perhaps as much as a century before Chinese produced them in Nanjing.15 When another object, also unearthed from Luy 12

Li Diaoyan, Shuijing zhu [The river classic] (https://ctext.org/shui-jing-zhu, accessed 15 August 2010). 13 Scholars held different opinions on the locations of Luy Lau and Long Bien, in particular whether these were one and the same citadel. Conventional scholarship held that ‘Luy Lau = Longbian = Lung Khe.’ Following Nishimura, Pham Le Huy has asserted that Luy Lau ≠ Long Bien, and that Long Bien = Lung Khe. Luy Lau, in Pham’s opinion, could be found in Quoc Oai, west of Hanoi. See Pham Le Huy, ‘A Reconsideration of the Leilou – Longbian Debate: A Continuation of Research by Nishimura Masanari’, Asian Review of World Histories 5 (2017), 28–52. Pham is correct in pointing out that Luy Lau and Long Bien were recorded separately in early Chinese sources. That said, I continue to follow the traditional scholarship in this book, after considering the major travel route, namely the ‘invader’s route’ from Thuy Nguyen to Bac Ninh, the thousands of Han tombs along this route, and the location of the oldest known Buddhist temple, Phap Van. Archaeological evidence has yet to be found in Quoc Oai. For ‘Invader’s route’, see Li Tana, ‘A Historical Sketch of the Landscape of the Red River Delta’, TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (2016), 1–13. 14 In addition to the Red River Delta, these human-face tiles have been unearthed at sites in Tam Tho near Dong Son and further south in Tra Kieu and My Son in central Vietnam. Olov R. T. Janse, Archaeological Research in Indo-China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947–1958), plate 157; Yamagata Mariko, ‘Tra Kieu during the Second and Third Centuries ce: The Formation of Linyi from an Archaeological Perspective’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 96. 15 Nishimura Masanari, Betonamu no Koko-Kodaigaku ベトナムの考古・古代学 [The archaeology and ancient history of Vietnam] (Tokyo: Doseisha, 2011), p. 169. Tiles of lotus design was also found from the same layer, which was to become popular with the rise of Buddhism in China from the third century to the end of the Tang era. Nishimura, Betonamu no Koko, p. 168.

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Lau Citadel, is added into the big picture, Jiaozhou’s direct contact with India becomes clearer.16 This object, a kendi, is a utensil used by Indian monks to drink water. Such a tool and practice were not observed in China before the seventh century ce, which explains why the Chinese Buddhist monk Yijing took pains to praise the water jug in his memoir of travel to India.17 These artefacts provided material evidence for the view put forth by Hu Shi (1891– 1962), a leading Chinese scholar of the twentieth century, that Buddhism arrived in Jiaozhi perhaps four to five centuries earlier than it was introduced to the southern China in the third century CE.18 The two artifacts, however, could be equally possible to have related to Brahmanism, which have an even longer history in Jiaozhi. Analysing the earliest Vietnamese accounts on the arrival of Buddhism, Keith Taylor reveals the Tamil Hindu origin buried under the Sinitic Buddhist literary tradition, where Amman, a Tamil name of a popular Mother Goddess whose main function is making rain, was mixed with the poplar cults in Jiaozhi.19 These excavations in long-vanished urban centres like Luy Lau reveal a vivid picture of Jiaozhi as an administrative and trade centre under the Han empire. This is especially significant because Shi Xie (V. Si Nhiep, 137–226 ce), the Han governor of Jiaozhi prefecture, was the well-known promoter of new religions to the Gulf of Tongking region. Shi’s tenure and the simultaneous provenance of the excavated artefacts mentioned above, like humanfaced tiles and kendi, correlate to a watershed event in Buddhist history in both Vietnam and China, namely, the life and work of one of Jiaozhou’s most consequential monks, the master Kang Senghui. This name, which would have been adopted upon contacting the Han culture in Jiaozhi, means literally ‘A monk who came from Samarkand.’ Travelling Monks Kang Senghui’s parents were Sogdians, a people centred in the kingdom of Sogdiana and its capital Samarkand in Central Asia but dispersed in merchant communities across Asia, where they played a crucial role as middlemen in 16

Nishimura, Betonamu no Koko, pp. 170–171. Late in the seventh century ce, Yijing (also transcribed as I Ching, written in Chinese as 義淨), a Buddhist pilgrim to India, described Indian bhiksus or monks using the utensil for drinking water as follows: ‘The vessel should be made so that the tip always connects with the mouth [of the vessel]; the tip is pointed above a flange and should be two fingers high; in it a hole as small as a bronze chopstick is made.’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Francis Stewart Kershaw, ‘A Chinese Buddhist Water Vessel and Its Indian Prototype’, Artibus Asiae 3, 2/3 [1928–1929], 122–123. 18 Yuanlai ruci: Hu Shi shuo Fo [Karma is like this: Hu Shi on Buddhism] (Beijing: Qunyan chubanshe, 2013), pp. 8–10. Hu’s original sentence: ‘Buddhism arrived Jiaozhou very early, perhaps four to five centuries earlier than the Master Mou’s treatise dispelling doubts.’ 19 Keith W. Taylor, ‘What Lies behind the Earliest Story of Buddhism in Ancient Vietnam?’ Journal of Asian Studies 77, 1 (2018), 107–122. 17

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Travelling Monks 57

the trade between the China’s Han empire in the east and countries like Iran’s Parthian empire in the west.20 They were Buddhist, and they lived at a time when the Kushana Empire– encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India at its greatest extent, and connecting to the sea along the Indus River – simultaneously stimulated trade and the spread of Buddhism to all parts of Asia.21 In this environment, at the dawn of the third century ce, Kang’s father left India, where his ancestors had lived for a few generations, and settled in Jiaozhou to manage his business. There, Kang was born. When his parents died a few years later, the orphaned child was adopted by local monks that raised, ordained, and educated him. His education proved consequential to the history of Buddhism in Vietnam and China. At this time during the early third century, the people of Jiaozhou sponsored at least twenty temples and 500 monks in residence, making it the most important centre of Buddhist practice in the South China Sea region.22 Schools of study in key Buddhist languages like Sanskrit and Chinese, and perhaps even Pali, enabled the growth of translation centres, where scholars produced over fifteen first editions of Buddhist texts translated from Sanskrit into Chinese.23 Such work prepared Kang for his mastery of Buddhist teaching. The form of Buddhism that Kang Senghui introduced to the Wu kingdom during the third century derived mostly from the Theravada canon, although Mahayana theories also influenced him, as well as methods of Vedic tradition. In 247 ce Kang Senghui left Jiaozhou and travelled north to Jianye (today’s Nanjing), the capital of the Wu kingdom, where Buddhism was still largely unknown. Cut off from the overland Silk Road, which had closed at the end of second century ce, the people of the northern Wu kingdom had yet to experience Buddhist learning. As a consequence, it appears, Kang’s arrival became an event in Jianye: the Wu people were shocked to see Kang’s Sogdian face, shaved head, and red cloth wrapped around his naked body.24 20

The surname ‘Kang’ is a clear reference to Samarkand. Rong Xinjiang 榮新江, Medieval China and Foreign Civilization [Zhonggu zhongguo yu wailai wenming 中古中國與外来文 明] (Beijing: Sanlian, 2014), pp. 60–62. 21 Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 80. 22 Kenneth Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985), p. 37. 23 Nguyen Lang (Thich Nhat Hanh), Viet Nam Phat giao su luan [History and commentary on Vietnamese Buddhism] (Hanoi: Nxb. Van hoc, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 37, 39; Karashima Seishi 辛嶋靜志, a leading scholar on Buddhist texts, pointed out that the earliest Buddhist sutras (first–third century ce) were transmitted orally rather than by Sanskrit text and that many of these were dialogues between monks. Jiaozhi would have had numerous monks from India who translated and transliterated through various languages to make the texts. Karashima Seishi, ‘誰創造了大乘經典──大眾部與方等經典’ [Who created Mahāsāṃghika sutras], Foguang xuebao 佛光學報 [Journal of Buddha’s Glory] 3, 1 (2017), 1–4. 24 ‘Liang Caoseng zhuan’ 梁高僧傳 [Biographies of the prominent monks of the Liang era], zh.wikisource.org/zh/梁高僧傳/卷一; ‘Mouzi lihuolun’ 牟子理惑論 [Master Mou’s treatise dispelling doubts] (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh/理惑論, accessed 16 July 2010).

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Back in Jiaozhou, seeing a Hu – the Chinese term for people from Central and South Asia – was nothing unusual, being a part of everyday life there, as indicated by a story about Shi Xie, the final Han governor, whom Hu people followed burning incense whenever he ventured into the streets of Luy Lau.25 Sceptical at first, the king of Wu reportedly changed his mind and began to venerate the Buddha only after Kang produced a bone of the Enlightened One by simply burning incense and praying.26 This allowed Kang to spend the rest of his life in Jianye, where he laid an important foundation for Buddhism in China. Thanks to the sea link that brought Sogdian merchants to the Gulf of Tongking, Buddhist missionaries migrated to Jiaozhou; there, monasteries cultivated a new generation of monks like Kang Senghui who were able to translate Buddhist ideas for Chinese audiences. The word ‘dragon’ in Buddhist texts for instance, was translated from the Sanskrit ‘Naga’ – ‘snake’. Ji Xianlin points out: ‘After Buddhism was introduced into China, what we understand the word “dragon” is no longer the same.’27 Jiaozhou must have played an important role in this transformation of a crucial symbol of Chinese culture. In Vietnam, the style of dragon remained in snake form, until the Tran dynasty. This was an important consequence of the maritime interchange that developed between India and China through the gulf and explains the evidence of strong Theravadin influences in Mahayanist northern Vietnam. The Indian Buddhist influence by way of the sea lasted throughout the millennium of Chinese rule over the western Tongking Gulf. In contrast to the conventional assumption that early Buddhism in Vietnam developed from Mahayanist schools associated with China, evidence from the sixth and seventh centuries establish that schools of likely Indian origin, like the Vajrayana (Sanskrit for ‘Diamond Vehicle’) or Tantric school, continued to exert influence over the region. This includes historical sources that document Jiaozhou monks travelling to South Asia – specifically, Sri Lanka – most notably the famed Chinese compilation, Biographies of Eminent Monks Who Sought the Law in the Western Regions. Here, we find many Jiaozhou monks sailing to the South Asian Island before heading north to India in the seventh century: Master Kuichong, a native of Jiaozhou … [sailed]to the South Sea, arrived in Simhala (Sri Lanka), and from there travelled to western India.

25

‘Shi Xie zhuan’ [Biography of Shi Xie], in Sanguo zhi [Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms], chapter 49 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 5:1192. 26 Ren Jiyu (ed.), Zhongguo Fojiao shi [A history of Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1981), vol. 1, p. 178. 27 Ji Xianlin, Minjian wenxue yu bijiao wenxue [Folk literature and comparative literature] (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1991), p. 2.

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Travelling Monks 59 Master Huidan, a native of Jiaozhou … followed his teacher to Simhala and resided there. Master Dachengdeng, native of Aizhou [in today’s Thanh Hoa province of central Vietnam], when young, travelled with his parents to Dvāravatı̄ [Nakhon Pathom in central Thailand]. There, he became a monk … [before he] sailed the South Sea to reach Simhala. … From South India, he went to Tamluk [Tamralipti] in eastern India.28

Even as monks generally followed the general trend of merchants towards choosing Guangzhou over Jiaozhou, some Chinese monks persisted in travelling to South Sea countries like Sri Lanka through the Gulf of Tongking, especially during the sixth and seventh centuries. For example, two interesting passages from the same Biographies of Eminent Monks narrate the stories of two monks from Sichuan, far to the northwest of Jiaozhou. The biography of Mingyuan states: Because the magnificent sacred religion was already in a decadent state, [Mingyuan] arrived in the Far South [in India]. From there he set sail and reached Jiaozhou. He crossed the vast sea to reach Kolinga [Heling], and from there he went to Simhala [Sri Lanka].

Yilang’s biography tells a slightly more eventful story: Master Yilang is from Chengdu [in today’s Sichuan]. He was well versed in the Ludian (i.e., the Vinaya canon) and interpretations of the Yogic system. He reached Wulei Mountain [in the Gulf of Tongking] and embarked on a merchant ship. Tossed over thousands of high waves, the ship passed through Funan and anchored at Langka [Linga in Malay Peninsula], [where] he was treated as an honoured guest by the king.

Taking leave of Langka’s king, ‘[Yilang] and his brother then boarded a merchant ship for Simhala.’29 Why was the route between Jiaozhou and Sri Lanka so important to the itineraries of monks of the late sixth and seventh centuries ce like Mingyuan and Yilang? The answer has both religious and practical aspects. The China– Srivijaya/Java–Sri Lanka–east coast of India route is well documented from the fifth century. From the sixth century onwards Sri Lanka had been a key stopover on the maritime route, where Sogdian merchants traded at Anuradhapura, capital of Sri Lanka.30 This connection brings us right back to Kang Senghui, discussed above. Religiously speaking, the monks appear to have sought Abhayagiri Vihara, located in Anuradhapura, which was a major centre of practice for both Mahayanist and Vajrayana forms of Buddhism. 28

Latika Lahiri ‘s English translation of the book is entitled Chinese Monks in India, Biography of Eminent Monks Who Went to the Western World in Search of the Law during the Great T’ang Dynasty (Delhi: Motilal Bankarsidass Publishers, 1986, reprint 2015), pp. 39–40. 29 Lahiri, Chinese Monks in India, pp. 32–35. 30 Rila Mukherjee, India in the World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE (Singapore: Springer, 2022), pp. 65–66.

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Vajrayana was seen as heretical by more conservative Mahavihara monks in seventh-century China, so Sri Lanka may have offered a place of refuge in which Chinese monks could explore this esoteric form of Buddhist practice. Perhaps the itinerary was both convenient and religiously fruitful. Whatever individual motivations Mingyuan and Yilang possessed in travelling through Jiaozhou, a larger perspective shows that it continued to play a role in maritime Asia’s long-distance cross-cultural exchanges. The Vajrayana element to this maritime circulation of monks between South Asia and Jiaozhou matters to Vietnamese history because one monk, perhaps the most important monk in Vietnamese history, emerged from this circulation to land in Jiaozhou. His name is Vinitaruci (V. Ty Ni Da Luu Chi, d.594 ce). He was a Brahman from Oddiyana, a small country in northern Pakistan that was important to the dissemination of Vajrayana Buddhism. Vinitaruci travelled to China in 574 ce, where he stayed for five or six years before heading in about 580 to Long Bien (Luy Lau) where he created a new school at Phap Van Temple, one of the earliest Buddhist temples with the oldest connections to India in Vietnam.31 There he translated the Dacheng fangguang zongchijing (Sarvavaipulyasaṃ graha-mahāyānasūtra), an important sutra in the Vajrayana tradition.32 Perhaps this was a response to the increasing rejection of both Theravada and Vajrayana schools in China and Jiaozhou remained to be open to various Buddhist traditions. The popularity of Vinitaruci’s school and his many disciples in Phap Van Temple seems to have made Jiaozhou a base for what Andrea Acri calls the ‘esoteric Buddhism of Maritime Asia’.33 Here in this gateway between China proper and the countries of the South Sea, Buddhism could coexist alongside Shaivism, thanks to its long time connection to Vajrayana practitioners in Indian societies and Tantric practitioners in Cham, Javanese, Khmer, and Sinhalese societies during the sixth and seventh centuries. Seventh-century monks like Huining and his disciple Yunqi sailed back and forth between Jiaozhi and Kalinga (Heling) in Java, a centre of Tantric Buddhism in Southeast Asia, as they sought to introduce new translations and interpretations of the Agama Sutra (a collection of early Buddhist texts) to people in China – this included Jiaozhou, whose administrators provided the Yunqi with horses for travel.34 Indeed, Vajrayana Buddhism was already long established 31

Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p. 156. Nguyen Lang, Viet Nam Phat giao su luan, p. 125. 33 Andrea Acri (ed.), Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2016). 34 Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐西域求法高僧傳 [Biographies of eminent monks who sought the law in the western regions] (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/大唐西域求法高僧 傳/卷上, accessed 15 September 2010). For more of Yunqi and silk from the Red River Delta, see Chapter 7. 32

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Aromatics in Jiaozhou Commerce 61

in the Red River Delta before it arrived in Yunnan and Tibet, where they became dominant traditions in the eighth century. David Holm’s careful study on Buddhism among the Tai-Kadai speakers indicates that ‘there is sufficient information to indicate that Luy Lau in Jiaozhi developed into a major translation centre separate from the other centres in the north of China’.35 Furthermore, and importantly, the earliest and most powerful infusion of Indic learning among the Tay is likely to have come from there. Moreover, this may well also have been the source from which Buddhist missionaries and Indic learning spread among the other peoples in what is now southern and southwestern China.36

The sources that provide a window into the intellectual interchange that enriched the soil of Tongking Gulf culture with non-Sinic exogenous ideas from South and Southeast Asia also point to another South Sea import that reinforced Jiaozhou’s connections to inter-Asian networks, both commercial and religious. The commercial connections prompted the enterprising local people in developing commercial production of exotic plants for export. Some of these plants were native to the region; others were introduced to Jiaozhou from across the sea, like huoxing, the aromatic plant mentioned above. Nearly all of them were produced to meet ever-growing demand by both religious practitioners and luxury consumers. Aromatics in Jiaozhou Commerce The long-term consequences of cross-cultural interaction between people of the South Sea and Jiaozhou is reflected in the first two Chinese books written on the fauna and flora of the region: Exotic matters of Jiaozhou (Jiaozhou yiwuzhi),37 written during the time of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 ce) and Herbs and Trees of the South (Nanfang caomu zhuang), completed by Ji Han in about 304.38 Scholars have generally highlighted the books as a window to the region’s native flora; however, closer scrutiny reveals that many of the plants and products mentioned in these books originated elsewhere, primarily India. Though not an aromatic, sugar offers an excellent example of biological transfer from India to the Tongking Gulf, because it appears in a variety 35

David Holm, ‘“Crossing the Seas”: Indic Ritual Templates and the Shamanic Substratum in Eastern Asia’, Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 281 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 15. 36 Holm, ‘Crossing the Seas’, 15. 37 Also called Yiwuzhi 異物志. Compiled by Yang Fu 楊孚 in the Eastern Han era. In Hantang fangzhi jiyi 漢唐方誌輯佚 [A collection of the lost gazetteers compiled between the Han and Tang dynasties] (Beijing: Beijing Library, 1997), p. 14. 38 Ji Han, Nanfang caomu zhuang 南方草木狀 [Herbs and trees of the south] (www.guoxue123 .com/shibu/0301/0000/019.htm, accessed 23 February 2000).

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of historical sources. ‘Stone honey’ (shimi), or sugar candy, figured prominently among the tribute items submitted by Jiaozhou to the Chinese court of the Wu kingdom in the third century ce.39 The commodity was considered precious because consumption was restricted to the king.40 That sugar was unknown to most Chinese is supported by the absence of textual evidence of any knowledge about the plant, byproducts, or its associated technologies until the Tang era (seventh–tenth centuries).41 As for its origins, the source is clear; both the name and the necessary body of knowledge to produce the plant and it byproducts came from India; the name for sugar, sarkara, originally signified ‘grit or gravel’, which people used as a metaphor to describe sugar crystals.42 Ji Han’s Account of the Plants of the Southern Regions describes many tropical plants that could be found in third- to fourth century Jiaozhou and Jiuzhen (V. Cuu Chan) – namely, the Red River Delta and adjacent southern coast – many of which were foreign-born and most likely introduced by Indian merchants. For example, a well-known term in Chinese inventory of medicine was collectively called sanle, or ‘three le’, which were three forms of fruit-bearing myrobalan plants native to the Indian subcontinent. The name ‘three le’ derived from the Sanskrit term triphala, ‘three fruits’, a cornerstone of gastrointestinal and rejuvenative treatment described in Ayurvedic (Sanskrit for ‘the knowledge of life’) medical literature.43 Jin Han locates the source of two of them, hārātaka and amalaka, in Jiuzhen.44 Indian monks or merchants most likely introduced the plants to the region long before Jin recorded their presence there. Aromatics appeared increasingly in Chinese literature from the fourth century onwards; two factors explain why. First, the population of Han Chinese had grown significantly in the Gulf of Tongking region during the early centuries of Han rule thanks to a series of immigration waves. As John Phan has 39

In this passage, Ouyang Xun cites an earlier source entitled Records on the Eight Prefectures of the South [Nanzhong bajun zhi]: ‘There is sugarcane in Jiaozhi, a few centimetres round and over 200 centimetres long. It looks like bamboo. It is very sweet when it is cut and consumed. When pressed and dried for few hours it will become candy, which melts as soon as it goes into the mouth. People call it “stone honey”.’ See Yiwen leiju [Literary encyclopedia] (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1969), 6:2233. 40 Ji Han, Nanfang caomu zhuang. 41 Ji Xianlin, Tang shi [A history of sugar] (Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2009), vol. 1. 42 Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 486; see also Taiping yulan 太平御覽, chapter 974 (www.guoxue123.com/zhibu/0201/03tpyl/0973.htm, accessed 7 August 2019). 43 Christine Tara Peterson et al., ‘Therapeutic Uses of Triphala in Ayurvedic Medicine’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 23, 8 (2017), 607–614, here 607. 44 The term sanle 三勒 refers to the following three plants: (1) hārātaka (C. halele 訶黎勒) or black myrobalan; (2) āmalaka (C. anmole 庵摩勒) or Indian gooseberry; and (3) vibhātaka (C. bilile 毗梨勒) or beleric myrobalan.

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Aromatics in Jiaozhou Commerce 63

argued, Jiaozhi became decidedly Han in character after the famed rebellion led by the Trung Sisters in 41–43 ce.45 When the rebellion erupted, the Han court sent the legendary general Ma Yuan with an army of 100,000 men to quell it; after the conflict ended, many soldiers remained in Jiaozhi. Indeed, visible signs of a more thoroughly Sinicized society on the Red River Delta plain date from this time.46 Over a century later, Han immigration surged again. This time, in contrast to the commoners that comprised the soldier-settlers from Ma Yuan’s army, elite literati made up the larger proportion of immigrations to the gulf region, and many of them arrived from the Yangzi River Delta to Jiaozhi by the sea.47 This reminds us of the migration route of the Yue from the Yangzi Zhejiang millennia before them, by ‘a well-established sea route which afforded mobility up and down the coast’.48 Contrary to long-standing assumptions, they were not escaping to some wild place but rather sought a peaceful cosmopolitan city where social and intellectual life was vibrant and outward looking, which they found in Jiaozhou. A third immigration wave of massive proportions began in China in the fourth century, when the southward migration of nomadic steppe tribes into historically Chinese lands in and around the Yellow River region forced a mass migration of northern Chinese – over a million in total and 60–70 per cent of Han Chinese elites – living in northern China to migrate south into the Yangzi River Delta and beyond – in some cases, as far south as the Gulf of Tongking and Red River Delta. As Phan illustrates, such an influx transformed the greater region’s social and linguistic landscape.49 The consumption of aromatics grew in tandem with this growth in the Han population. Uprooted elites responding to their new home environment

45

‘The land aristocracy, which until then had been little hampered – rather, it has been strengthened – by its cooperation with Chinese, suddenly found themselves excluded from wealth, now based on trade and maritime exchanges, and ousted from power due to the recruitment of civil servants local on criteria that owed nothing to social extraction. This is the meaning of the revolt of the two Trung sisters.’ Philippe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancien’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 87, 2 (2000), 615. 46 John Phan, ‘Lacquered Words: The Evolution of Vietnamese under Sinitic influences from the 1st century BCE through the 17th century CE’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2013, pp. 74–75. 47 For example, see references to this migration in Le Trac’s An Nam Chi Luoc, such as Yuan Zhong 袁忠, Huang Ye 恒曄and Xu Jing 許靖, all of them came to Jiaozhi by sea. Le Trac, An Nam Chi Luoc [A brief history of Annam] (repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), pp. 251–252. 48 James R. Chamberlain, ‘Kra-Dai and the Proto-History of South China and Vietnam’, Journal of the Siam Society 104 (2016), 37. 49 John Phan, ‘From Sino-to-Vietnamese: A New Hypothesis for the Birth of the Vietnamese Language’, paper presented to the international workshop, ‘Vietnam, China and Chinese in Vietnam: New Research on Chinese in Vietnam, Past and Present’, Australian National University, Canberra, 28–29 July 2010, p. 4.

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in distant southern lands like Jiaozhou worked to cultivate a deep sense of erudition in Han culture through the development of Han philosophy, ­literature, music, and the arts. Consumption of exotic aromatics from South Sea c­ ountries played an important part in all the aspects above. Under the Southern Liang dynasty (502–557 ce), demand for aromatics by Han elites grew widespread. A contemporary named Yan Zhitui noted: ‘Every young aristocrat smokes his clothes with aromatics, powders his face and wears lipstick.’50 Patchouli was the main ingredient, according to Important Arts for Common People’s Needs, for making cosmetics like face cream, powder, lip colour, hair protection products, and fabric fragrances.51 Jiaozhou was the vanguard of this new trend, since they would have been the first subjects of the northern empire to consume patchouli and other aromatic products. Religion offers the second factor influencing demand for patchouli in fourthcentury Jiaozhi. The practice of burning incense for religious purposes was unknown there before the second century ce, when it travelled there by way of Jiaozhou.52 Early Buddhist texts like the Flower Garland Sutra (Sanskrit. Avatam.saka Sūtra; C. Huayan jing), one of the most influential scriptures in East Asian Buddhism, elaborate on the uses of aromatics. This text describes a cosmos of infinite realms within realms, each mutually containing the other. At the centre of the cosmos lies a luminous sea of perfume: treasures shimmer as they float over its surface, while sandalwood dust settles all along its bottom. Around this infinite sea of perfume run countless perfume rivers that whirlpool to the right.53 The relationship between aromatics and Buddhism was a close one. Indeed, Edward Schafer has pointed out that the Sanskrit word gandha, which means ‘aromatic’, often means simply ‘pertaining to the Buddha’.54 50

Yanshi jiaxun [Yan family precepts], chapter 3, in C-Text online (https://ctext.org/yan-shi-jiaxun/mian-xue/zhs, accessed 26 September 2019). 51 Jia Sixie賈思勰, Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術 [Important arts for common people’s needs], ­completed 544 CE (Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1982), 263–264. 52 Fukui Kōjun, ‘A Study of Mou-tzu’, Bukkyo Shigaku [Journal of the history of Buddhism] 2, 2 (1951), 12–14. Fukui Kōjun argued that Mouzi was written in the mid-Three Kingdoms era, sometime in the mid-third century. Béatrice L’Haridon thinks the work was completed earlier, as the text’s form of argument closely relates to late-Han forms of disputation (bian 辯) among the Confucian literati. Béatrice L’Haridon, Meou-tseu: Dialogues pour dissiper la confusion (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017), xi–xxi; quoted in David Holm, ‘Crossing the Seas’, 20. Chinese philosopher Ren Jiyu thinks that the work was most likely written in the early third century. Ren, Zhongguo Fojiaoshi, vol. 1, pp. 188–189. 53 Dafang guangfo huayanjing 大方廣佛華嚴經 [Flower Garland Sutra] (www.fomen123.com/ fo/jingdian/huayanjing/huayanjing/5478.html卷第八, accessed 15 May 2006). 54 Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 157.

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Jiaozhou’s Incorporation into Regional Aromatics Economies 65

The smoke of burning incense was believed to convey a person’s faith in the Buddha up towards heaven or to project a person’s calls for his mercy.55 For example, the earliest biography of the Buddha reports that if one held aloeswood, patchouli, or musk, their perfume would penetrate one’s body and bring luck to one’s relatives and friends.56 Thanks to this belief, sources on early Buddhism yield numerous references to aromatics and its cultivation, commerce, and consumption in Jiaozhi. It might not be a coincidence that Vietnamese legends claim that the first monk from the west to arrive in Jiaozhi’s capital Luy Lau was called kalachali (V. gia la xa le), whose name means ‘Calambac Buddhist priest’.57 Thus, evidence of aromatics use in early Buddhism society in Jiaozhi underscores a basic theme in Vietnamese history, that of maritime contact and its importance as a source of civilisation.58 The extensive imagery illustrates how thoroughly aromatics had permeated the culture of the region and of the new Buddhist religion. The spread of Buddhism to Jiaozhou also mirrors the way in which the religion and the cultures of its missionaries influenced aromatics industry and commerce. Evidence supporting this thesis still derives from trace fragments; however, piecing together these seemingly incidental and insignificant bits of information strongly indicates that Jiaozhou’s aromatics economy grew large in scale and broad in scope, as the city functioned not only as a producer but also as an import and transhipment hub for middlemen trucking aromatic commodities between East, Southeast, and South Asia. Such evidence makes necessary an understanding of Jiaozhou’s aromatic economy in a larger, regional context. Jiaozhou’s Incorporation into Regional Aromatics Economies Aromatic trade was the single most important commerce in the South Sea region from the fourth century onwards. In the seaside markets of Dunxun, as seen above, thousands of carts filled with fragrant flowers were traded

55

Silvio A. Bedini, The Trail of Time: Time Measurement with Incense in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 44. Fo benxing jijing 佛本行集經 [Abhiniṣkramaṇa sutra], trans. into Chinese between 587 and 591 ce. Chapter 57 (http://m.fodizi.tw/fojing/02/557.html, accessed 17 July 2016). 57 Kaluozhele 伽羅闍黎. See Keith W. Taylor, ‘What Lies behind the Earliest Story of Buddhism in Ancient Vietnam?’ The Journal of Asian Studies 77, 1 (2017), 1–16. The name calambac refers to the resinous heart of the aloeswood, a highly prized aromatic native to Champa, but the name calambac did not seem to appear in any text before the Song dynasty. 58 Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, p. 183. 56

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daily. Beyond the sea, people living in highlands above port cities like Srivijaya and Tapanuli in Sumatra and those on the Malayan Isthmus collected benzoin. Rinan (V. Nhat Nam), the southernmost prefecture of Jiaozhi Province (Cishibu 刺史部) during Han times, site of an important port, was famous for its aromatic markets where merchants from afar bought and sold (see Chapter 3). All this suggests that aromatic products were well established in the Southeast Asian economy and Jiaozhou was a part of it. The vivid picture of peoples travelling and trading aromatics is on display in Buddhist texts. The Flower Garland Sutra, to illustrate, tells the story of a boy eager to search for knowledge, who travelled through the South Sea where he was directed to ten wise persons. One of them was an elderly man who traded in aromatics in the South. He ‘knew every kind of aromatic, and understood every method of blending and assembling aromatics, whether it was for burning, for scrubbing, or for making dust’. His knowledge of aromatics-producing areas, as well as herbal cures for diseases, was complete.59 In another Buddhist tale written in the seventh century, Gem Forest in the Dharma Garden (Fayuan zhulin), uses markets to describe heaven: ‘there were seven markets in Heaven. The first one trades rice, the second clothes, and the third aromatics’, while the seventh market specialised in prostitutes. Officers policed trade in these markets, and princes and princesses wandered about and traded freely.60 In this way, aromatics became one of the most important revenues for the Southeast Asian rulers. In the Mekong Delta region beyond Jiaozhou’s southern frontier, the royal court of Funan relied on three commodities – gold, pearls, and aromatics – for revenue.61 Like Funan, Jiaozhi relied on aromatics as a major source of government revenue, and most likely, it depended on them even more heavily because of its proximity to China’s markets to the north. Aromatics from overseas was a crucial part of revenue to both the Northern and Southern Song dynasties. The courts would sell aromatics to the merchants at a profit, the income of which was then used either as cash to fund the cost of administration or bartered for grains to feed the army. Aromatic income jumped from 300,000 strings of coin of the Northern Song to 2,400,000 strings of the Southern Song during the mid-twelfth century, making it 10 per cent Flower Garland Sutra (Avataṃ saka Suˉ tra大方廣佛華嚴經) chapter 80 (https://tripitaka.cbeta .org/T10n0279_080, accessed 28 June 2015). 60 Shi Daoshi 釋道世, in his Fayuan zhulin 法苑珠林 [Gem Forest in the Dharma Garden], states: ‘There are seven markets in the heaven. The first is rice market, the second is clothes market; the third is aromatic market, the fourth is food market; the fifth is hair dressing market; the sixth is a crafts market, and the seventh market, prostitutes. Every market is managed by officers, and princes and princesses wander about and trade freely.’ ‘莊飾部’第十一, CBETA electric version, p. 33. 61 The ‘Funan zhuan’, Xin Tang shu [New book of the Tang], first published in 1060, chapter 222b (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 20:6301. 59

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Auspicious Dragon Brain & the Rise of Jiaozhou as a Processing Centre 67

of the total revenue.62 Such a large market meant increased revenues but also greater co-dependency. Still, the profits from aromatics trade were considerable: during the Tang era, even a small trader in aromatics could rely on a small amount of capital to live comfortably, to say nothing of what a big merchant from overseas could earn.63 The journey of a prominent Buddhist monk named Jianzhen conveys the scale of aromatic trade in eighth-century China. In preparation for his voyage to Japan in 742 from Yangzhou, a city and major commercial centre in the Yangzi River Delta, he bought aloeswood, onycha (a Greek word for sea snails, one of the four ingredients used for incense in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem), camphor benzoin, frankincense, and other aromatic woods – each of which amounted to 300 kilograms – plus over 100 kilograms of pepper and sugar. None of these South, Southeast, and West Asian products were produced locally. A shipwreck led him to the Hainan Island. The local chief there, Feng Ruofang, welcomed him. ‘Annually’, Feng ‘yearly robbed two to three ships from Persia … he often burned frankincense as candles, [burning] over a hundred jin (1 jin = 500 grams) in one go. Sappanwoods are piled at the back of his residence like mountains’. In Guilin, he was welcomed to a Buddhist temple. Guilin (Guangxi Province), he was welcomed to a Buddhist temple. ‘As soon as the gate of the temple was opened, the fragrance permeated all over the city’. In Guangzhou, where he sought to board another ship, he saw countless Brahmin, Persian, and ‘Kunlun’ craft – Southeast Asia ships – all of which carried aromatics and treasure ‘piled like mountains’.64 Anecdotes of aromatic woods of size and abundance unimaginable today – circulated year in, year out. Aromatic trade and production in first-millennium Asia was anything but incidental and insignificant to Southeast Asian economy. Auspicious Dragon Brain and the Rise of Jiaozhou as a Processing Centre Jiaozhou stood out as the most celebrated centre of aromatic processing in Asia of its time. In one year during the mid-eighth century, for example, it sent fifty pieces of an aromatic called ‘auspicious dragon brain’ (ruilong naoxiang) to Tang emperor Xuanzong (r.685–762).65 The fragrance of this 62

Lin Tianwei 林天蔚, Songdai xiangyao maoyishi 宋代香藥貿易史 [History of aromatics and herbs of the Song dynasty] (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua daxue chubanshe, 1960), 265, 339–344. 63 Li Fang, Taiping guangji [Extensive gleanings from the era of Great Harmony], completed 978 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), p. 1210. 64 Tōdaiwajō tōseiden [Tale of the Great Tang master’s travels east], comp. 779 ce (https:// zh.wikisource.org/wiki/唐大和上東征傳, accessed 26 September 2019). 65 For more on ‘auspicious dragon brain’ (ruilong naoxiang 瑞龍腦香), see Bedini, Trail of Time, p. 31.

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incense was so intense that it could be detected at more than ten paces. Manufacturers cast them into very fine pieces, ‘as translucent as cicada’s wings’. The emperor granted ten pieces of this perfume to his favourite concubine, Lady Yang Guifei, who in the same night sent three pieces by camel to her adopted son, the Tang general An Lushan, a Sogdian, stationed a thousand miles away in northern China. One day, while wearing the aromatic as a perfume, she sat in a garden to watch the emperor play chess with one of his officers, when a breeze suddenly lifted her scarf onto the cap of the officer playing chess, which instantly saturated it with the perfume’s scent. A few years later, when her adopted son An Lushan led a rebellion against her husband and suzerain, the emperor was forced to order Lady Yang’s death, which he regretted terribly. Seeing how miserable the emperor missed his concubine, the officer presented him with the cap that had brushed the scarf of the imperial lady years before. As he held the cap, the emperor wept: ‘This was the fragrance of the auspicious dragon brain!’66 The growth of knowledge about aromatic blending and processing in Jiaozhou would have benefited from the decline of its coastal neighbour on the southern Indochinese Peninsula, Funan. By the middle of the fifth century, the kingdom no longer functioned as a major international trade centre. As its status declined, the kingdom’s seagoing residents relocated north to more prosperous ports in central Vietnam, like Linyi, once a part of the prefecture of Rinan and after 192 an independent trading state (discussed in detail in Chapter 3).67 Craftsmen in Jiaozhi were known for their high-quality incense, and their proximity to knowledgeable crafts people among South Sea neighbours must have benefited the province’s economy tremendously. The essential ingredient needed to produce the auspicious dragon brain aromatic – camphor – again did not grow in Jiaozhi. Perhaps its manufacturers sought Barus camphor from Sumatra, which, according to Marco Polo, was worth its weight in gold;68 perhaps they looked to camphor from Borneo, 66

Duan Chengshi 段成式 (803–863), Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎 [The miscellaneous morsels from Youyang] in Sibu congkan chubian (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1937), 1:1–2. 67 Kenneth Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), p. 64. 68 See Make Puoluo xingji [Travels of Marco Polo], trans. Feng Chengjun (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2006), p. 381. See also a twelfth-century Arabic source by Ibn Al-Baytār, which lists four grades of camphor in which the one from Farusi (Pasuri) ranked as best (Alabo, Bosi, Tujue ren dongfang wenxian jizhu). Literary compendium of Arab, Persian, and Turkic peoples in the East], trans. Geng Sheng and Mu Genlai (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), p. 312. ‘Dragon brain trees grown in the kingdom of Poli’; Duan Chengshi, Youyang zazu, 2:150.

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Auspicious Dragon Brain & the Rise of Jiaozhou as a Processing Centre 69

which a nineteenth-century European author heard was rated ‘superior to the famous Barus camphor of Sumatra’.69 Perhaps the camphor used to make the blend was imported from trade partners in neighbouring Champa (Cām), a successor to Linyi and close trading partner of Borneo.70 Perhaps it came from a source nearer. According to a tenth-century Arab traveller, one could obtain camphor and camphor liquid from ‘the fifth sea, the Sea of Kundrang’, he wrote, where ‘there are many mountains and islands here on which camphor and camphor liquid are found’.71 The Auspicious Dragon Brain presented to the Tang emperor was a refined, value-added product, not a raw material. A Tang-era recipe for the ‘Perfume of the Auspicious Dragon’s Brain’, which has survived in a Song-era collection of aromatics recipes, reveals the heavy reliance of such blends on fragrances from Champa, the Southeast Asian archipelago, and Arabia: 50 grams aloeswood; 15 grams Champa musk wood; 15 grams of Champa aloeswood; 10 grams calambac [from Champa]; 5 grams of dragon spittle (ambergris); 10 grams Dryobalanops aromatica Gaertn [camphor, in the form of ‘golden dregs’]; 2.5 grams sandalwood; 2.5 grams Pistacia terebinthus [turpentine tree];72 5 drops of Dashi [Arabian] perfume; rosewater [any amount]; and 5 grams of Gardenia jasminoides [Cape Jasmine and other gardenias] from Dashi [Arabia].73

The sources of this aromatic’s ingredients all lay overseas, beyond the control of either Jiaozhou or the Tang imperial court. To create a scented form in the shape of a cicada’s wings like the one worn by mistress Yang, the maker has to ‘pulverize the ingredients extremely fine on a clean stone, mix it with rose water and Arabic perfume, and cast [it] into [its final] shape’.74 This skill of aromatics blending is found in a classic recipe, originally written in Sanskrit, for perfumed water used to wash the Buddha statue. It calls for the preparer to mix the aromatic components and ‘pulverize them finely 69

Earl, George Windsor, The Eastern Seas, or, Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago, in 1832–33–34 (London: W. H. Allen, 1837), p. 249. 70 According to Tang court records, in 627 ce ‘the king [of Poli] sent envoys who, along with the envoys of Linyi, came to present local products’ to the emperor. Jiu Tangshu, chapter 197, vol. 16:5271. 71 Al-Mas’udi (?–957), ‘Muruj al – Dhahab wa Ma‘adin al-Jawhar’ [Meadows of gold], in Relations de voyages et textes géographiques arabes, persans et turks relatifs à l’Extreme-Orient du 8e au 18e siècles, comp. G. Ferrand (Paris: E. Leroux, 1913), vol. 1, p. 99. ‘Kundrang’ here might be referring to today’s Ninh Thuan and Phan Thiet area. Pham Thi Thanh Huyen, ‘Champa and the Islamic World, 7th-15th Centuries’, PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore (2021), p. 13. 72 Pistacia terebinthus, commonly known as the turpentine tree, is native to the Mediterranean region. 73 Chen Jing 陳敬, Chenshi xiangpu 陳氏香譜 [The aromatic spectrum of Mr. Chen], written c. 13th century, in Qianlu 錢錄 [On numismatics], compiled by Liang Shizheng 梁詩正 first published 1750 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991), p. 306. 74 Ibid.

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on a clean stone’.75 Casting finely prepared ingredients into the shape of a cicada’s wings may have been a Jiaozhi creation. Throughout early Southeast Asia, elites monopolised aromatic processing; this seems particularly true for Jiaozhi. A fifth-century Chinese poem depicts the image of ‘the Viet king pounding hun-luk aromatic’.76 In Jiaozhi’s southern neighbour Champa, aromatic processing was also performed by elite, an aunt of the Cham king was celebrated as ‘very skilful in making perfumes’.77 Aromatics were handled by the high class in the Islamic societies. According to Pham Thi Thanh Huyen, aloeswood ‘was blended and offered as incense every Friday at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Bait al-Maqdis) by the mother of Abassid Caliph al-Muqtadir (908–932)’.78 There were recipes to prepare pure aloeswood incense or mixed scents as well, likely also compiled by the elite even royalty. All this suggests the high status that aromatic processing enjoyed among elite inhabitants of the South Sea region because this related directly with ritual and knowledge. This was different from China. As a Chinese source from the Song era explains: Linyi, Champa, Java and Jiaozhi produce various spectacular perfumes and [they know how to] blend them. When burned, they smell extraordinarily fine and elegant. [Because of this,] those people [from Linyi, Champa, Java and Jiaozhi] have commented that Chinese aromatics of the so-called ‘Three Balances’ (sanyun) or ‘Four Excellences’ (sijue) are nothing but beggars’ aromatics.79

Resituated into the context described above, it becomes clear that Southeast Asians were not merely deriding the low quality and inferior fragrance of Chinese-processed aromatics; they were also talking about the people who made them. The Chinese craftsmen most certainly came from common social classes, while aromatics processors in Southeast Asia typically came from among the highest social classes. 75

Yijing, Yu Fo gongde jing 浴佛功德經 [Sutra on gaining merit by bathing the Buddha], CBETA online, p. 2 (http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/BDLM/sutra/chi_pdf/sutra9/T16n0698 .pdf, accessed 4 April 2012). 76 Zhu Fazhen, ‘Luofushan shu’ [Commentary on Mount Luofu], in ‘Xiang bu’ [Incense section], Taiping yulan, chapter 982 (www.guoxue123.com/zhibu/0201/03tpyl/0981.htm, accessed 5 April 2014). Hun-luk 薰陸香, an early Chinese word derived from the Arabic word kundur, refers to frankincense (now pronounced xunlu), which originated in Yemen and Somalia. However, since Jiaozhi functioned as the first stop for any exotic import travelling from overseas to enter the Chinese empire, Chinese subjects generally considered the aromatic resin as a product of the province. The Chinese text states: ‘Hunluc is produced in Jiaozhou’ [薰六, 出交州]. 77 Specifically, the inscription acknowledges an aunt of the ninth-century Cham king Jayasiṁ havarman I. ‘Dong Duong Stelae Inscription of Jayasiṁ havarman I’, no. 36, in R. C. Majumdar, Champa: History and Culture of an Indian Colonial Kingdom (Delhi : Gian Pub. House, 1985), p. 103. 78 Pham Thi Thanh Huyen, ‘Champa and the Islamic World, 7th–15th Centuries’, p. 137. 79 Zhou Jiazhou, Xiangsheng, chapter 11, p. 439.

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Buddhist Temples as Production and Distributing Centres Although centuries under Chinese rule, traces of Confucian influence in the Jiaozhi society were faint while that of Buddhism was abundant.80 Like all other Southeast Asian countries, Buddhist temples would have been the major education institutions in Jiaozhi. Wang Yan, in an important fifth-century book on Buddhism, said that when he was a child in Jiaozhi he was educated by a monk named Hien (C. Xian).81 This was also true of the Ly dynasty’s founder Ly Thai To (947–1028), who was raised and schooled in a Buddhist temple. The scripts used in Buddhist temples in earlier centuries would have constituted a mix of Chinese and either Pali or Sanskrit, as Kang Senghui’s story tells. However, over time the language of instruction would increasingly have become Chinese – to be precise, the literary form of Chinese used for elite written discourse throughout the Sinitic cultural world until the turn of the twentieth century.82 Temples were the primary institution for publishing Buddhist texts in this region. Thanks to their large following, many Buddhist monasteries possessed the financial means to pay for their printing and distribution. In the 1940s, leading Vietnamese scholar Tran Van Giap counted that over 400 titles of Buddhist texts in the collection of books held by the École française d’Extrême-Orient,83 and a more recent study by Liu Yujun shows that over 139 temples have printed Buddhist texts throughout Vietnamese ­history.84 According to a Taiwanese scholar Chen Yiyuan, nearly half of the Han-Nom books reproduced in Vietnam comprise of Buddhist texts.85 Temples are also the most likely candidate for the dissemination of knowledge about aromatics and their processing, and they played a key role in linking 80

There was but one Jiaozhi scholar, Khuong Trong Phu (C. Jiang Zhongfu, 730–805), who is identified in historical records as a graduate from the Annan Protectorate (the name for Jiaozhi under the Tang dynasty). Both his grandfather and father hailed from Ai Chau (Thanh Hoa), but typical of Chinese officials, they served far from home as prefectural governors in central China. Technically speaking, then, Khuong must have been educated outside Annam (Le Trac, Annam Chi Luoc, p. 347). 81 Wang Yan 王琰, ‘於交阯賢法師所受五戒’. Minxiangji 冥祥記 [Notes on signs from the tenebrous world], comp. fifth century (https://zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hant/冥祥記, accessed 18 December 2017). This book is full of stories about the magic prowess of Buddhist monks. The earlier education that Wang received in Jiaozhi might have played a part. 82 Shawn F. McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2004), pp. 12–13. 83 Tran Van Giap, Contribution à l’etude des livres bouddhiques annamites conservés à l’ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 河內遠東考古學院現藏越南佛典略編 (Tokyo: Guoji fojiao xuehui, 1943). 84 Liu Yujun 劉玉珺, Yuenan Hannan guji de wenxianxue yanjiu 越南漢喃古籍的文獻學研究 [A philological study on the ancient Han-Nom sources] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), p. 109. 85 Chen Yiyuan 陳益源, Yuenan Hanji wenxian shulun 越南漢籍文獻述論 [Remarks on Vietnam’s sources in Han script] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), p. 55.

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Figure 2.1  Two incense burners of the Qing palace (Palace Museum, Beijing) Their wings can be opened to store aromatics, the scent to waft out through their beaks.

elites with aromatics manufacture and its markets. Their links with overseas trade are both ancient and well documented. In fact, for centuries the trade in religious relics was one of the central drivers of Sino-South Asia trade, along with the demand for aromatics to serve in religious rites, a commodity which in turn increased the importance of Southeast Asian trade.86 For example, a text carved on woodblocks and kept in one of Hanoi’s oldest temples, the Hong Phuc Temple (or Chua Hoe Nhai) explicates the importance of aromatics in Buddhist liturgy: Incense in the censer is now burning. The whole Dharma Realm receives its fragrance Throughout the vast Buddha Realm All inhale its sweetness Homage to the Perfected Boddhisattva of Incense Cloud Canopy Mahasattva87

The image in this inscription evokes the inextricable tie between incense burning and the chant recitation, both of which have wafted through the halls of this old temple for centuries (Figure 2.1). Temples acted as the largest employers and promoters of handicraft industry in pre-modern Vietnam, among which was aromatic processing, which later became joss-stick making. The sheer number of monks in Buddhist societies alone suggests that their needs were greater, more widespread, and more 86

Wang Gungwu, Nanhai maoyi yu nanyang huaren [Trade in the South China Sea and Chinese in the South China Sea] (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), pp. 72–75. 87 Thuy luc toan tap [A complete collection of the Great Compassion Water and Land Dharma Service], unpublished ms., Microfilm, École française d’Extrême-Orient, AC 270, EFEO_VIE08526_3.

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Buddhist Temples as Production and Distributing Centres 73

constant than those of the court, to say nothing of the demands of lay followers. Scholars of other Mainland Southeast Asian countries have emphasised the centrality of Buddhist temple endowments in economic expansion and explored the role of the temple as a centre of local redistributive economies.88 Applying this insight helps in structuring a model that contextualises different economic activities and their relations to Jiaozhou society, and in making a qualitative analysis of the effects of foreign trade on the structure of the economy.89 Since the introduction of Buddhism, hundreds of thousands of villages, formed around temples, have proliferated across the Red River Delta. At the same time, this delta has advanced against the sea by over 200 kilometres; throughout that time, human settlement has followed this advancing coast. The expansion of the sands created a series of sandy belts called pho sa (floating sand) in the Red River Delta. Such areas were ideal for growing aromatics herbs, as the seventeenth-century intellectual Qu Dajun wrote in his observations of the same phenomenon in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong.90 A plant he described anisochilus or paicaoxiang in Chinese was native to the Tamil region. A seventeenth-century work, A Vehicle of Aromatics [Xiangsheng] recorded that this plant was originally from Jiaozhi and transplanted in Guangdong.91 They chose to cultivate the plant there because it emitted an intense fragrance, and because ‘no aromatic is better than this when used for assembling perfumes’.92 In other words, Jiaozhi locals planted anisochilus specifically to blend it with other aromatics. Its profit must have been large, because its cultivation spread from Jiaozhou to Guangdong.93 Qu reported that the profits from growing this plant were so large that farmers would pay high prices to buy land for its cultivation.94 Land of similar conditions along the banks of the Red River Delta must have attracted the same growers as far back as the Jin dynasty. 88

Richard O’Connor, ‘Sukhothai: Rule, Religion and Elite Rivalry’, in James Chamberlain (ed.), The Ram Khamhaeng Controversy (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1991), pp. 288–291; Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Integration on the Mainland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), pp. 95–96. 89 For this point see Charles Wheeler, ‘Buddhism in the Re-Ordering of an Early Modern World: Chinese Missions to Cochinchinese in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 303–324. 90 Qu Dajun, Guangdong xinyu [New commentary on Guangdong] (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1991), p. 596. 91 Zhou Jiazhuo, Xiangsheng, p. 389. A contemporary source explains that anisochilus (C. paixiang 排香) is an annual herb. 92 Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea: The Natural World and Material Culture of Twelfth Century China, a translation of Fan Chengda, Guihai yuhengzhi 桂海虞衡志, trans. James Hargett (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 238. This source says that anisochilus was originally from Rinan and its scent is as strong as musk. 93 Xiangsheng, p. 394. 94 Qu Dajun, Guangdong xinyu, p. 596.

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In a one-time sandy part of today’s Hung Yen province lies a village called Cao Thon. Villagers here have manufactured aromatics for centuries. In the Tang era, when the dynasty ruled Jiaozhou as the Annam Protectorate, the village lay along the gulf coast at the mouth of the Red River. The location provided the village with the best possible conditions for aromatics industry: The new sands provided an excellent location for cultivating certain aromatics, while their location at the intersection of coastal and sea routes allowed them to easily import exotic overseas aromatics. Centuries have since passed, and the coast has advanced more than one-hundred kilometres beyond them, and yet the villagers are still doing what they have long done best – lam huong or ‘making aromatics’. Although they have ceased to grow aromatic plants locally, they continue to produce by purchasing ingredients from overseas. In their products, they blend 32 types of Chinese herbs to produce the most famous joss sticks in Vietnam. The profits from lam huong have been good. According to a contemporary source, joss stick production can reap a 50 per cent profit.95 Thus, a small village of over one hundred households maintains a vestige of the aromatics industry that a once-large population produced a millennium ago. Aromatic cultivation and processing contributed significantly to the prosperity of Jiaozhi, Jiaozhou, and Annam in the first millennium and developed well into the centuries that followed the province’s independence from China as Dai Viet in the tenth century ce. Below are some examples from Chinese sources of the Song dynasty (960–1279), which arose at about the same time as the Vietnamese kingdom. They indicate that aromatics production continued to be an important economic activity even after the era of Chinese rule, as indicated by these passages written in the twelfth century: Cyperus rotundus (purple nutgrass): All the leaves and stems are three-angled … Those found in Jiaozhou are the biggest … when used for blending aromatics, they double the fragrance of the rest of the aromatics.96 Aromatic of Silao (not identified): Found in [Rinan] … People in Jiaozhi use it to blend with other aromatics. Pinlangtai (Moss of pinang tree): Found on islands to the southwest. It grows on pinang trees … it smells extremely foul when heated by itself. People in Jiaozhi use it to blend with mud and turn [the mix] into a fragrance that smells warm and pleasant.97 95

Vo Dung, ‘Dan Quyet Thang kha gia nho nghe lam huong tram’ [The people of Quyet Thang are well-off thanks to their work making incense], BNews online, 2 September 2016 (http://bnews.vn/dan-quyet-thang-kha-gia-nho-nghe-lam-huong-tram/9098.html, accessed 12 September 2018). 96 Chen Jing, Chenshi xiangpu, p. 251. 97 The two plants are mentioned in Fan Chengda, Guihai yuheng zhi [Treatises of the supervisor and guardian of the Cinnamon Sea], ed. Qi Zhiping (Nanning: Guangxi minzu chubanshe, 1984), p. 10.

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The mud fragrance mentioned in the last source provided the raw material to make perfumed bracelets. Artisans shaped the mud into beads, laid them out alternately with glass beads, and then threaded them into a bracelet with coloured threads. Once finished, they transported the beads to China to sell, where reportedly they enjoyed popularity among Chinese women.98 These plants, systematically cultivated in Jiaozhou, inspired the growth in sophistication of aromatics processing techniques, which led to the creation of many blends. This evidence amply indicates that Jiaozhou played a crucial role in the development of recipes for aromatics blends. The art of ‘incense assembly’ in places like Japan (he, or kōe in Japanese), where sixty-six distinct blends are found,99 are no doubt the legacy of a long development in the techniques of aromatics blending, refined in Jiaozhou and its south-coastal neighbours Champa and Funan over centuries before they were transferred overseas. One recipe for ‘Jade flower perfume’, which survives today in Kyoto, Japan, calls for ‘5 catties of the Wonderful Storax Oil of Jiaozhi’.100 Storax plant was not native to Jiaozhi. It was a Mediterranean shrub that was difficult to obtain and expensive. Storax oil, historically developed in the regions of the Berbera Coast, Baghdad, Ghazni, and Asia Minor,101 and believed to cure pandemics,102 would have been even less likely to find its way into the hands of people in Jiaozhou. What kind of oil, then, did Jiaozhou actually produce? From across the South Sea, patchouli offered the substitute to storax that Jiaozhou producers were looking for. Like their South and Southeast Asian neighbours across the South Sea, enterprising locals in Jiaozhou looked for affordable alternatives to substitute more expensive imports to manufacture an aromatic blend able to reach a greater number of consumers. Southeast Asians often tried to find substitutes for expensive aromatics from Africa or Central and South Asia, to reach a larger market. Just as Indonesian pine resin found its way to China as a substitute for frankincense,103 people of Jiaozhou planted and processed patchouli as a substitute for storax. A Jin source, Jiaozhou zhi (fourth or fifth century ce),104 remarks that ‘patchouli (huoxiang) ‘resembles

98

99 Fan Chengda, Guihai yuheng zhi, p. 10. Bedini, Trail of Time, p. 37. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/95533477, accessed 14 April 2020. 101 On storax, see Paul Wheatley, ‘Geographical Notes on Some Commodities Involved in Sung Maritime Trade’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32, 2 (1959), 268–269. 102 ‘蘇合消疫之香’(storax is a cure for pandemics) (https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/太平御覽_ (四庫全書本)/卷0982, accessed 3 March 2020). 103 Oliver Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of S´rı ̄vijaya (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 116. 104 Wolters wrote: ‘Jiaozhou Ji, in Pelliot’s view, could not be later than the first half of the 5th century.’ Early Indonesian Commerce, p. 81. 100

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storax (suhe), referring to its similar aroma’.105 Thus, by the fifth century, Jiaozhou producers found that the patchouli their ancestors had transplanted from the South Sea a century earlier could be used as a key ingredient in its making storax oil. Red River Delta craft production was known for its detailed and restrictive regulations. For example, girls who married into other villages were barred from producing the specialty of their former village. Even if she needed to produce just a small quantity of it, she would have to first return to her original village to make it. Some other villages guarded their processing secrets so carefully that they prevented any girl from marrying out, while in other villages, recipes were restricted to the men and married women and kept away from all unmarried girls.106 The aromatics village of Cao Thon, mentioned above, observes just this policy.107 Conclusion While researching the history of Jiaozhi, Jiaozhou, and Annam, I have been struck again and again by one simple fact: While information on their overall economy and society is limited, information on specific topics like aromatics cultivation, harvesting, and refinery is astonishingly abundant. Jiaozhi’s history remains largely shut away in Buddhist texts, unofficial histories, books on flora and fauna and materia medica, and treatises on aromatics. Its importance to multiple histories yet unrecognised. This fact alone points the way to a new history of Jiaozhi, which remains little more than a monotonous chronology of Chinese governors, political events, and wars. This simplistic chain of events does not even provide a complete skeleton of Jiaozhi’s history, let alone a world in fully fleshed form. There is little here to offer us but dry description, the greater truth of its history manipulated and mostly destroyed. This in turn serves various political ends. The potential importance of further research to

105

The Chinese original: ‘藿香似蘇合謂其香味相似也.’ The seventeenth-century source Xiangsheng attributes this to Liu Xinqin’s Jiaozhou ji [Accounts of Jiaozhou], written during the fourth century. See Xiangsheng, p. 387. For more on Jiaozhou ji, see (zh.wikisource.org/ wiki/太平御覽/0982#藿香, accessed 12 December 2015). 106 Pierre Gourou, The Peasants of the Tonkin Delta: A Study of Human Geography (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1955), vol. 1, p. 527; Alexander. B. Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1988), p. 31; Chen Chingho, ‘Yuenan Dongjing defang zhi techeng “Kẻ”’ (The unique name ‘Kẻ’ in the Tongking region of Vietnam), Guoli Taiwan daxue wenshi zhexuebao 1 (1950), 217. 107 Le Phuong, ‘Cao Thon: Lang nghe huong xạ noi tieng dat Hung Yen’ [Cao Thon: Famed musk craft village of Hung Yen], Radio Vietnam online, 30 October 2017 (http://vovworld .vn/vi-VN/chuyen-cua-lang/cao-thon-lang-nghe-huong-xa-noi-tieng-dat-hung-yen-599014 .vov, accessed 12 November 2019).

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Conclusion 77

our understanding of the history of the Red River Delta and its adjacent coast under Chinese rule, and by extension the history of Vietnam is immense. After their introduction from India and Southeast Asia during the third century ce, aromatics became an indispensable part of the high culture of Chinese society.108 It is no exaggeration to say that the imagery in extant poems, essays, and histories written during the first millennium are permeated with the exotic fragrances of a world dense with aromatics to a degree that seems impossible to imagine today, but which we can conjure thanks to Edward Schafer’s poetic and masterly portrait, The Vermillion Bird.109 Coupled with Buddhist ideas and relics, aromatics civilised the Chinese elite in a totally different way from their Qin and Han forbears. One could argue that the Chinese history had a new birth after the third century CE. Jiaozhi played a crucial role in this process. Maritime trade organised the manpower, production, capital and commerce within this geographical space. People transplanted many varieties of aromatic plants from abroad and developed refineries to process them into products that satisfied the large Chinese markets of the north. The society that tuned into and moved around such production would have a different texture from the one that was based on subsistence economy. Maritime connection was crucial to such a society and economy. Jiaozhi’s place in introducing exotic aromatic plants reminds us of nineteenth century Hong Kong as the main port of China, and Jiaozhi’s role as a centre for handicraft production reminds one of seventeenth century Guangdong. Nothing could be further from the image of a traditional rural Dai Viet that we were accustomed to. Production seems to have organised by the elites in their manors close to temples. No official Vietnamese historical sources record such production but given the secrecy in the production of high-value commodities, its absence from official records is no indication of its relative importance to local economy. Indeed, the pattern repeated itself in the region during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the creation of a ceramics industry in Dai Viet, which will be discussed in Chapter 6. The relationship between local political power and the two craft productions – aromatics of the first millennium and ceramic of the second – is not yet clear. However, the importance of maritime connections to the creation of key markets in Jiaozhou and later Dai Viet is obvious. 108

The joss sticks we see today represent barely a per cent of the levels of sophistication and beauty that aromatics products achieved a thousand years ago – indeed, the mass production of the last few centuries has in fact reduced them to something comparatively vulgar. While perfume technology has grown more sophisticated over time in the Western culture, it has diminished in the East – where aromatics refineries began – and become a part of ‘lower’ culture. 109 Edward H. Shafer, The Vermillion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). As a panorama of the southern lands of the Tang empire, Annam or Jiaozhi features prominently.

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What does all the information above tell us about the nature of early Jiaozhi? This province at the southmost of the Han empire was a cosmopolitan at the forefront of overseas contacts and influence. Jiaozhi seemed to have had many if not all the earmarks of a commercial based economy that characterised seventeenth-century cash-cropping so amply documented for China’s Guangdong province or the eighteenth-century Mekong delta described in Chapter 9 than it is of our conventional ideas about ancient Vietnamese economy. This is particularly true when it comes to the role of the maritime, without which, it is now abundantly clear, the Jiaozhi period of Vietnamese history simply could never have happened. According to historians of Hong Kong, the name ‘Hong Kong’, ‘fragrant harbour’, derived from the aromatic trees that use to grow in the districts of Taipo and Shatin. These trees had been introduced from Annam during the Tang dynasty and became commercially important to the local economy of the Dongguan District that encompassed today’s cities of Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The aromatics of Dongguan, called guanxiang, became famous since the Yuan dynasty. Local people refined them and gathered at today’s Aberdeen Harbour to sell them to shipping merchants, who shipped to Guangzhou, and the great ports of the Yangzi River Delta, and beyond.110 The relationship between aromatics and Buddhist temples reveals the deep interconnections between commercial and cultural and religious histories that have been documented for later periods of Vietnamese history, a connection created by maritime circulations. Important facets of Buddhism and key aromatics came to Jiaozhou through the Indian Ocean’s growing sea traffic, whose cultural and commercial streams in turn reinforced Jiaozhi’s connections to the maritime world of the South Sea. In the extant literature we see the varied influences that washed ashore from the outside world. The Vajrayana or Tantric school of Buddhism, for example, played an important role in the sixth and seventh century Jiaozhi, and its maritime ties to distant places like Sri Lanka is apparent, a connection that places Jiaozhi firmly in the context of the Southeast Asian or South Sea environment in which it had long been a part, and points to other significant relationships of the first millennium such as Java and Champa that deserve further consideration. Such findings show the degree to which our assumptions of Vietnamese Buddhism’s primarily Sinic influences, which only grew profound with the rise of Chuc Lam school of the thirteenth century, have been mistaken. Similarly, even this initial peek into religion, commerce, and society under Jiaozhou and Annam makes clear that 110

Luo Xianglin 羅香林, Zhongguo minzushi 中國民族史 [A history of Chinese nation] (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), p. 311; Jao Tsung-I 饒宗頤， Xianggang shilunji 香港史論 集 [Essays on Hong Kong’s history] (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2019), pp. 188–191; Lin Zhunxiang 林準祥, Xianggang Kaigang-Lishi xinbian 香港開港 – 歷史新編 [Hong Kong and its opening, a new history] (Hong Kong, Zhonghua shuju, 2019), p. 32.

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Conclusion 79

the same goes for Confucianism. Compared with Buddhism, its evidence in historical sources is scant. Indeed, when Confucianism does concretely form in delta society after the rise of Dai Viet, it appears to have done so largely as the result of old Jiaozhi’s continued maritime ties with China under the new Song dynasty.111 South of the Red River Delta, however, it appears that maritime ties, aromatics industry, and Buddhist culture combined to produce a different result, beginning on the furthest fringe of the Chinese empire, which would catalyse the power of the coast in what is now central Vietnam and establish a powerful political dynamic that would define the region for more than a millennium. This is the story of Linyi, which we explore in the chapter that follows.

111

Insun Yu, ‘Bilateral Social Pattern and the Status of Women in Traditional Vietnam’, South East Asian Research 7, 2 (1999), 215–231. Yu points out that Confucian influence was confined to a small number of Vietnamese elites in the modern period.

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3

‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’ Linyi, 200–700 ce

To fully understand Jiaozhi’s history, we must look beyond the world of the ethnic Vietnamese ancestors in the Red River Delta plain, and look south, into the territory of what is now central Vietnam. The Han Empire’s southernmost district at present-day Quang Binh to Quang Nam area was so remote to the court in Changan that it was called Rinan, ‘South of the Sun’. This was the hub of interaction between Han imperium, Sino-Indian sea trade, and migrations by different language groups into the region. On this land in the second century ce a kingdom called Linyi appeared in Chinese historical texts. Rising from its commercial foundation – majorly based of transhipment of the long journey between China and India and harvesting exotic goods for export – it broke away from their Han overlords and begin to forge their own political destiny. Soon after establishing itself, Linyi became a commercial and political rival to Jiaozhi and its successors. This would evolve, by the seventh century ce, into what we consider the ‘kingdoms’ of Champa. Who Were the ‘Barbarian Trading Shippers’ of the First Century bce? Between 300 bce and 300 ce, coastal chiefdoms all over Southeast Asia began to participate in Asia’s growing maritime trade economy. The starting point of this first globalisation also coincided with the mass migration of the Yue people from the Yangzi River Delta, discussed in Chapter 1. In India, this period witnessed the rise of empires and their subsequent fragmentation into competing kingdoms. Sea travel became frequent, and networks became thick. The travels of the long-distance seaborne trade between China and India became so regular and the information on the ocean passages so detailed that it appeared in the Book of Han: From the barriers of Rinan, Xuwen and Hepu, it is about five months’ voyage to the country of Duyuan1 … These countries are extensive, their populations numerous and their many products unfamiliar (rare and precious objects). Ever since the time 1

On the Malay Peninsula. Could be Terengganu.

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of Emperor Wu [141–87 bce], they have offered tribute. There are chief interpreters attached to the Yellow Gate who, together with volunteers, put out to sea to buy lustrous pearls, glass, rare stones and strange products in exchange for gold and various silks. All the countries they visit provide them with goods and companionship. The trading ships of the barbarians transfer [the Chinese] several times to their destination. It is a profitable business [for the barbarians], who also loot and kill … It is about a further eight months’ voyage to the borders of Rinan and Xianglin [emphases added].2

This paragraph has become a classic and has been cited by many who study the maritime history of Asia, but Ng Chin-keong has recently made two key points about it that make it worth repeating: That the goods transported between China and India needed ‘several transfers on board barbarian trading ships’ [emphasis added].3 The ‘several transfers’ would have placed the major ports of Hepu, Xuwen, and Lach Truong discussed in Chapter 1 into a long chain of inter-Asian travel that reached all the way from China and the Tongking Gulf to India. Here, Ng asks a critical question: who were those ‘barbarian merchant shippers’?4 Both Wang Gungwu and Paul Wheatley believe that the Yue of the southern Chinese coast played an important role in maritime transport. Indeed, in his classic study The Golden Khersonese, Wheatley asserted directly that ‘Yue sailors were almost certainly the carriers of both merchandise and merchants’ in the Gulf of Tongking and on the South China coast.5 But long-distance travel to India was a different matter altogether, and here, the often-repeated Han-dynasty passage states clearly that it was done by the ships from elsewhere, by ‘barbarians’ – meaning peoples outside the empire. The way that Ng identifies likely carriers is clever, by distinguishing contemporaneous countries that rose to become major maritime powers in the South China Sea region during this era. In the end, he identifies two candidates: the Funanese and the Cham. Ng explains: ‘We can reasonably assume that the Funanese and the Chams had been skillful seamen capable of undertaking transfers even before the founding of their kingdoms.’6 2

Han shu 漢書 [Book of Han] complete 82 CE, 28 (https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/漢書, accessed 15 September 2010). The translation is by Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Geography before AD 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961), 8, 11, although Wheatley overlooked the key significance of the word ‘several’ here. 4 Ng Chin-keong, Boundaries and Beyond: China’s Maritime Southeast in Late Imperial Times (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), p. 11. 5 Wang Gungwu, ‘The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31 (1959), 23; Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese, p. 283. 6 Ng, Boundaries and Beyond, 11; Coedes assessed that Funan ‘must have encompassed southern Vietnam, the central Mekong, and a large part of the Menam Valley and the Malay peninsula’. G. Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, W.F. Vella (ed.), S. B. Cowing (trans.) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1968), p. 36; Miriam T. Stark’s extensive project on 3

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Ng’s point is illuminating, and once it has been factored into the equation of inter-Asian trade in this era, many odd pieces of information became easily reconcile.7 Kenneth Hall points out that during the first phase of Indianisation, ‘Funan’s chieftains mediated these initial commercial transactions as the instigators and organizers of Funan’s port and its Malay population.’8 The third century Funan (in Khmer bnaṃ ; the Middle Chinese pronunciation of 扶南 was /bʱi̯u năm) was capable of building large vessels that could carry a hundred passengers, as the two Chinese officers who visited the South Sea in 243 ce reported (see Chapter 2).9 Even more telling, these same two officers, who departed from Jiaozhi’s southernmost harbour of Rinan (V. Nhat Nam), noted that its port, Lurong 卢容 (V. Lo Rung), ‘is often the gate where [people] departed for Funan and the countries beyond’.10 Another Daoist classic of the fourth century recorded the itinerary from Linyi to Funan: ‘Departing from the lagoon of Shouling (V. Tho Linh) to sail the southern direction … sailing non-stop day and night for over ten days one would arrive Funan. Bochuan (ocean ships) depart from Shouling without stopping and sail for fifteen days one would arrive Dianxun’ (described in Chapter 2).11 Once properly emphasised the telling phrase ‘several transfers’, we can then see where those transfers occurred: first in Rinan, then Funan, and then in Dianxun, at the neck of the Malay Penninsula. The ships loaded in Rinan had to be ocean-going ships at least equal to the Khmer ships of Funan. Both ports thus constituted major and transhipment stations in Sino-Indian shipping. Angkor Borei (Takeo province), which has been consistently regarded as one of Funan’s principal capitals, is illuminating on the country’s early history. Miriam T. Stark ‘The Transition to History in the Mekong Delta: A View from Cambodia’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, 3 (1998), 175–203. 7 Ian Mabbett points out that densely populated inland centres produced agricultural surpluses for the purpose of exchange in coastal port cities: ‘These kingdoms controlled dense agrarian populations fairly closely knit by a web of political and commercial interdependence, a web into which the newcomers were easily drawn, and through which new institutions were readily transmitted.’ Ian Mabbett, ‘The Indianization of Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Historic Sources’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8 (1977), 14. 8 Kenneth Hall, ‘The ‘Indianization’ of Funan: An economic history of Southeast Asia’s first state’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13 (1982), 85–86. 9 Kang Tai, Wushi waiguo zhuan 吳時外國傳 [Description of foreign countries during the time of Wu], excerpted in Li Fang 李昉, Taiping yulan 太平御覽 [Readings of the Taiping Era], completed 977–983 ce, chapter 769 (www.guoxue123.com/shibu/0301/0000/019.htm, accessed 23 February 2000). Miksic points out that the Chinese ‘bo’ might represent the Malay word for ship, ‘perahu’ and that the main shippers connecting Funan to other coastal settlements in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. John Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), p. 48. 10 Kang Tai, Funanji [Accounts of Funan], cited in Li Daoyuan (472–527), Shuijing zhu [Commentary on the Water Classic], completed in the 5th century, chapter 36 (https://ctext .org/text.pl?node=570346&if=gb&remap=gb, accessed 8 June 2018). 11 Taiqing jingye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經 [Scripture of the Divine Elixir of the Golden Liquor of Great Clarity], believed to be written by Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343 ce) (zh.wikisource. org/zh-hans/太清金液神丹經, accessed 3 July 2016). The ‘Funan’ port here would have been Oc Eo.

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Sa Huynh, Rinan, and the Rise of Linyi 83

While the exact location of two ports have yet to be ascertained,12 we can be sure that the initial relay in Rinan lay in northern central Vietnam, and that over time pieces of the Jiaozhi prefecture would break away to become the port polity Chinese historians dubbed Linyi, an important predecessor to the northern part of a better-known trading polity, Champa. No history of maritime Vietnam would be complete without them, for their influence on commerce and culture in Jiaozhi and Dai Viet was profound. With that in mind, we turn our attention south, away from the delta to the coast of central Vietnam, and the story of Linyi. There was every reason why Linyi was called ‘THE harbour and THE path of all countries’ (眾國津逕), as the fifth-century source Linyi ji (Accounts of Linyi) solemnly declares.13 Linyi offered multiple pathways to trade, by the land and by the sea. By the sea it was a major base of transhipment in maritime Asia. On the land, Linyi linked the trans-Mekong networks of Mainland Southeast Asia with the coast of the South China Sea. The easiest and most important trading route of all the Annamite Range (Truong Son) runs through the Ai Lao Pass (west of Quang Tri near the Lao border), through which goods passed from the Mekong River region into the very heartland of Linyi and then to the sea. Four of the most important Early Metal Age complexes found in this region are located here, all of them near the Thach Han River and its ­tributaries.14 This route still provides Laos with its main access to the ocean. Linyi was important because it brought together the traffic of both sea and mountains, and this was what Linyi’s prosperity rested upon. Sa Huynh, Rinan, and the Rise of Linyi Earlier twentieth-century scholars were uncertain whether the southern border of Rinan commandery, and therefore of the Han Empire, lay at the Hai Van Pass, a formidable mountain pass that hugs the coast of Central Vietnam, just north of the present-day city of Da Nang, or whether it extended further south into the Thu Bon River valley of Quang Nam. Archaeological discoveries in 12

Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi [Vietnamese land throughout history] (Hanoi: Khoa Hoc, 1964), 61 for Tho Linh. Dao located Tho Linh to the port of the Gianh River. The Lurung (V. Lo Rong) port according to him and Dang Xuan Bang was today’s Tu Hien port. On discussion on the latter location, see Li Tana, ‘The changing Landscape of the Former Linyi in the Provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue’ (Singapore: Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, working paper series 30, 2019). My key point there is that landscape changes on this coast frequently closed old harbours and opened new ones that the location of the port could have changed many times over the last two millennia. 13 Cited in Li Daoyuan, Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. 14 Andreas Reinecke, Le Duy Son, and Le Dinh Phuc, ‘Towards a Prehistory in the Northern Part of Central Vietnam: A Review Following a Vietnamese–German Research Project 59’, in Beiträge Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Archäologie Band, 1999, 61.

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Quang Nam in the 1990s put an end to that doubt. Now it is certain that during the first century bce, bronze mirrors and vessels, iron knives, ceramics and coins of Chinese origin arrived the Thu Bon valley, where a trading centre for Indian, Chinese and inland goods developed.15 This proves Dao Duy Anh’s view that the center of Rinan’s southmost district, Xianglin (V. Tuong Lam, ‘elephant forest’), lay in Tra Kieu, now a village in Quang Nam province about 25 kilometres inland from the sea in the heart of the Sa Huynh cultural zone.16 In 2004 archaeologists excavated a grave at Lai Nghi (dated 200 bce–100 ce) in central Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, which contained six bronze vessels in Han style situated alongside Sa Huynh ceramics and an iron chisel among Sa Huynh jar burials, which they dated around the third century ce.17 Regarding this period of coexistence, which lasts from 100 to 300 ce, Vietnamese archaeologist Lam My Dzung points out: Linyi and Linyi-like polities of Central Vietnam from c. 100 to 400 ce were established under strong Han Chinese influence while the influence of Indic civilisation increased around ce 400 and 500.18

It was also within this span of time, during the early second century ce, that the power of the Han Empire weakened, and the citadel of Tra Kieu was built.19 Losing access to the overland silk route through Central Asia, China’s 15

For a detailed discussion on this see Chapter 2 in Charles Wheeler, ‘Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the Early Modern Era’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2001. 16 Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, p. 48. 17 Andreas Reinecke, ‘Early Cultures in Vietnam (First Millennium BC to Second Century AD)’, in Nancy Tingley (ed.), Arts of Ancient Vietnam: from River Plain to Open Sea (Houston: Asia Society, 2009), p. 39; Yamagata Mariko also points out that Linyi experienced a few centuries of emergence and formation as an early polity before the ‘Indianisation’ period, which shows less interaction with the Indians than the Chinese. Yamagata Mariko, ‘Construction of Linyi Citadels: The Rise of Early Polity in Vietnam’, in Karashima Noboru and Hirosue Masashi (eds), State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Society (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2017), p. 28. Pierre-Yves Manguin, who led the excavations on Oc Eo, points out that there is no evidence of Indianisation between first century and mid-third centuries. Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Archaeology of Early Maritime Polities of Southeast Asia’, in Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood (eds), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 292. 18 Lam Thi My Dzung, ‘Central Vietnam during the Period from 500 BC to AD 500’, in PierreYves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (eds), Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), p. 14; The date of Indian influence can also be seen by way of the introduction of Indica rice to Southeast Asia. The rice originally brought to mainland Southeast Asia from China was Oryza sativa ssp. japonica, whose earliest known evidence in Southeast Asia, found in northeast Thailand, dates to the fourth century ce. See C. C. Castillo et al., ‘The Khmer Did Not Live by Rice Alone: Archaeobotanical Investigations at Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm’, Archaeological Research in Asia 24 (2020), 100213:11. This corresponds well with the Sanskrit inscriptions found in southern Cham nagaras, see Chapter 5. 19 Yamagata Mariko, ‘Construction of Linyi Citadels: The Rise of Early Polity in Vietnam’, p. 42.

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Sa Huynh, Rinan, and the Rise of Linyi 85

long-distance trade shifted to the sea. This caused a reorganisation of the trade economy in the Tongking Gulf, which led to the emergence of a new trading polity in land wrested from the Han. The rise of Linyi was no accident: It was ideally located between Jiaozhi, the Han Empire’s primary port in southern China, and Oc Eo, a major entrepôt serving the long-distance trade that circulated between the South Sea and Roman Orient.20 Exotic items brought into China from overseas via Rinan appear repeatedly in historical records. For example: In 84 ce Jiubushi [Cambodia] sent rhinoceros and white pheasants via Rinan; In 131 the king of Yediao [Java] sent enjoys via Rinan; In 157 and 159 Tianzhu [India] repeatedly sent envoys via Rinan; In 166 the king of Daqin [Roman king Antoninus Pius] sent ivory, rhinoceros horns and hawksbill shell via Rinan. In 172, foreign countries sent tribute through Rinan after several language translaters.21 Such a list likely represents merely a handful of the dozens of recorded diplomatic and hundreds if not thousands of transactions of all types that must have been conducted between Han China and the world through Rinan at that time, for the commandery had long enjoyed the position as the empire’s most important middlemen in the empire’s maritime trade with foreign countries. This function did not change after the rebellion. However, the wealth of the sea trade that inspired Rinan’s creation and enriched the Han court diverted its flow towards the coffers of the new elite that arose in this breakaway district now known to the world as Linyi. Archaeological findings affirm this view of Linyi and its former ruler, the commandery of Rinan. Beads of Indian origin top the list of items that Rinan traded with the region. This trade is reflected in archaeological artefacts discovered throughout the Tongking Gulf region. In one burial in Hepu, for example, archaeologists found 5,000 glass beads, along with many other kinds of beads such as crystal, carnelian, gold, and agate.22 Beads such as these have also 20

Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 60; Charles Higham notes: ‘Exotic Iranian, Roman, Indian and Chinese artifacts reveal participation in an exchange network, while the presence of rings and seals engraved in characters of the Brahmin script confirm knowledge of an Indian writing system.’ The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 333. Pierre-Yves Manguin pointed out earlier that Indianised states did not sprout in Indonesia before the fourth century. Manguin, ‘Southeast Asian Shipping in the Indian Ocean’, in Himanshum Prabha Tay, and Jean-Francois Salles (eds), Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), p. 182. 21 Fan Ye 范曄, Hou Hanshu 後漢書 [Book of the Later Han], completed 445, chapters 8, 9, 116, 118. 22 Li Qingxin, Binhaizhidi [Lands along the sea] (Beijing: Zhonghuashuju, 2010), p. 12.

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been unearthed in Cham excavations, such as in Lai Nghi, where according to Reinecke, more than 10,000 beads were recovered.23 This appears to have been part of larger trend in which Southeast Asian trade routes expanded to integrate previously separate and smaller exchange systems into an interlocking series of networks that spanned from Western Europe to China through the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea.24 As this happened, the small-scale chiefly villages of the Sa Huynh region incorporated their economic, political, and cultural activities into these larger networks of trade and exchange. Jiaozhi and its Han overlord encouraged trade in the region, which accelerated class differentiation, as reflected in the graves of rich and poor in Lai Nghi.25 Village leaders in places like Linyi expanded their spheres of influence widely enough to form kingdoms based on new forms of political and religious expressions.26 The region of the Thu Bon River, wherein lay the southernmost territory of Rinan commandery, Xianglin or ‘elephant forest’ district, is the most likely candidate for the original site of Linyi. The district was not only geographically remote from the Han; it was politically distant, as well – a place fitting for the Chinese saying, ‘the mountain is high, and the emperor is far’ (shangao huangdi yuan). In fact, Han records offer no evidence that any tax was ever collected from Xianglin. Such a politically remote region that nonetheless occupied a key position in the long-distance trade made a candidate for an upstart kingdom.27 The Thu Bon district of Xianglin was also the main target in subsequent Rinan rebellions that the Han court recorded for years 136, 137, 144 and 160. In 178, local people in Rinan joined forces with others in the Han commanderies of Hepu (Guangxi) and Jiuzhen (Thanh Hoa) to attack the government offices of Jiaozhi in Luy Lau, a rebellion that took the Jiaozhi officer three years to defeat.28 As a consequence of these rebellions, Chinese control over its territory ‘South of the Sun’ weakened, so much so that even basic knowledge grew hard to come by. For example, no one knows exactly when Linyi

23

Reinecke, ‘Early Cultures in Vietnam’, p. 47. Kenneth Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 1985); Miriam T. Stark, ‘The Transition to History in the Mekong Delta: A View from Cambodia’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, 3 (1998), 177. 25 Reinecke, ‘Early Cultures in Vietnam’, p. 36. 26 Ian Glover and Yamagata Mariko, ‘Excavations at Tra Kieu, Vietnam 1993’, Southeast Asia Archaeology (1994), 85. 27 The elites of Xianglin in Rinan Commandery repeatedly rebelled against Han rule. A Han-era text recalls one such event, ‘in April [100 ce]’, when ‘over 2000 barbarians in Xianglin in Rinan looted the residents and burned the official temples. The provincial army was sent to fight it, and [they] killed the chief, whose followers surrendered.’ Hou Hanshu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 86, vol. 10: 2837. 28 Ibid. 24

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Aromatic Forests and Northern Expansion 87

claimed its independence; some say it happened in 192 ce, while others say it happened half a century earlier, in 136 ce. In any case, it is clear that the Han had lost de facto control over the territory of Xianglin sometime during the second century ce. It is conceivable that some Chinese residents in Xianglin participated in the rebellions and formed a part of the elite that created the new kingdom. After all, there must be a reason why the name Linyi retained one character, lin (forest) from the old Han name Xianglin (Elephant forest), rather than assuming a new name in Mon-Khmer or Cham. Continuity must be another consideration for keeping a familiar syllable to Xianglin’s trading partners. From the beginning of its existence as an independent kingdom, Linyi sought to expand its territory north to seize all of Rinan Commandery and remained persistent in its efforts to do so. In 248 ce its army defeated the forces of Jiaozhou and consequently pushed its border north at Chinese expense into the Gianh River region. This was the same general area that would divide later Trinh/Nguyen kingdoms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and North and South Vietnam in the twentieth century. Almost a century later, in 347, Linyi marched all the way to Thanh Hoa, driving so many people away from the area that ‘no cooking smoke was seen for thousands of li’ (1 li = 500 metres, suggesting hundreds of kilometres).29 In this same year, Linyi pushed its border north to the Deo Ngang Pass. However, we can never be sure whether this so-called northern ‘border’ ever existed in this region. The content of the Chinese records merely indicate that they had lost complete control of the area in question, while a vast and open-ended border existed between Linyi and the Han commandery of Jiuzhen (Thanh Hoa), where Jiaozhi retained relatively firm control. As a result of this northern expansion, the remote, mountainous and sparsely populated area we associate with Nghe An and Ha Tinh today came to play a pivotal role in the history of Linyi, one based in the region’s long-standing trade in aromatic flora. Aromatic Forests and Northern Expansion Linyi’s ethno-linguistic makeup was about to grow even more complex. Rising from the fertile Thu Bon valley in the second century ce, the small kingdom’s centre of gravity shifted northward. Perhaps this happened in reaction to the rise of powerful chiefdoms to its south. Before independence, the territory south of old Rinan was inhabited by a group of chiefdoms powerful enough that even the Ocean Pacifying General Ma Yuan (V. Ma Vien) had to reckon with them. Perhaps in response to this situation, he reportedly installed two bronze pillars four to five hundred li (200–250 kilometres) south of Linyi 29

Li Daoyuan, Shuijing zhu, chapter 36.

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in 42 ce to mark the extreme southern boundary between the chiefdoms and Han China.30 It appears that the power of these southern chiefdoms may have experienced a resurgence about a century after Linyi’s independence. Chinese historical records note that ‘300 li’ (150 kilometres) south of the new kingdom took the form of a kingdom called Xitu.31 To its south, more than ten smaller chiefdoms, all of them along the coast, paid the small polity tribute; it is likely, then, that they also provided military support as well.32 The presence of this power to the south suggests that northern expansion would have been the logical move for Linyi to make. To do so meant the crossing and control of the formidable Hai Van Pass. The Hai Van (Ocean cloud) Pass lies on the frontiers of two climatic and forest zones. To the north of it, the climate features a mix of tropical and sub-tropical elements; to the south of the pass, the climate is typically inter-tropical.33 During the months of November through to March, a distinct winter of three to five months might define the weather on the northern side of the pass while the weather to the south remains warm and dry. This is because the pass crosses over a spur of the Central Highlands (Truong Son) that emerges from the west and juts into the South China Sea, forming the Hai Van Pass and Son Tra Peninsula. According to the nineteenth-century Gazetteer of Dai Nam (Dai Nam nhat thong chi), the mountain is so high that ‘a traveller had to climb like a monkey or else fly like a bird’ to traverse it. It was believed, the passage continues, that a deity that once lived in the skies over the bay sank passing boats. A local folk song in this area thus goes: ‘what [you fear] when you walk is the Hai Van; what you dread when you sail is the deity of the bay’.34 The Hai Van Pass was an obstruction to north–south movement along the coastline. 30

The original Chinese states: ‘Bronze pillars were planted here to mark the southernmost border of the Han territory. Around the pillars there were over ten small states, all of them vassals of Xitu. There were over two thousand households.’ Jiaozhou yinan waiguo zhuan 交州以南外國傳 [Biographies of the countries south of Jiaozhou]. The book was written between the seventh and eighth centuries but only survived partly in Li Fang 李昉’s Taiping Yulan [Readings of the Taiping Era], chapter 790. 31 The Taiqing jingye shendan jing states: ‘Xianglin is the present Rinan district. In the old days when Ma Yuan opened the southern territory for the Han he founded the Xianglin district. Two bronze pillars were set up four to five hundred li off Rinan. When the Han dynasty declined the barbarians invaded thus the bronze pillars were lost. They had been located about 300 li south of [today’s] Linyi. That area is now separated as the Xitu Country where cinnabar is as abundant as dirt’ (zh. wikisource.org/zh-hans/太清金液神丹經, accessed 3 July 2016). William Southworth first raises the matter of Xitu. See his ‘Coastal States of Champa’, in Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood (eds), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (Routledge, 2004), pp. 209–233. 32 Wushi waiguo zhuan 吴时外國傳 [Description of foreign countries during the time of Wu], quoted in Taiping yulan, chapter 790. 33 Vu Tu Lap, Vietnam: Geographical Data (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1979), p. 34. 34 Cao Xuan Duc et al., Dai Nam nhat thong chi [Unified gazetteer of Dai Nam] (Tokyo: Society of Indochina Studies, 1941), vol. 1, Thua Thien, 206.

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The Hai Van Pass also formed a border between different language groups. Vickery argues that the people in the kingdom of Linyi spoke a Mon-Khmer, rather than Austronesian, language. He points out that Mon-Khmer speakers already inhabited the Sa Huynh region when the Cham arrived there. ‘In fact’, he adds, ‘mainland Southeast Asia at that time would have been linguistically a solid Mon-Khmer block.’35 Traces of this can still be seen in the composition of contemporary ethnic groups in Central Vietnam, as shown in a twentieth-century map. Mon-Khmer speakers spread over the upper land from Quang Tri all the way down to Vung Tau; Chamic (Austronesian) speakers form a block from Komtum to Phan Thiet; the Vietnamese, latecomers to the region, occupy the coast from Quang Tri to Vung Tau, the eastern Mekong Delta, and shared the Western delta with the Khmer speakers. The border between the Vietnamese and Austronesian speakers straddles the Hai Van Pass.36 Michael Vickery, echoing early twentieth-century scholar Rolf Stein, emphasises the presence and importance of Mon Khmer-speaking peoples in the region between the Hoanh Son and Hai Van passes. This emphasis is justified ethnographically and linguistically, and historically speaking it also seems to be valid for the proto-historical period in the central Vietnam’s history. Scrutinising archaeological discoveries, Southworth concludes that Linyi started as a Chamic proto-state but expanded gradually northwards into a territory dominated by Mon-Khmer speakers between the second and seventh century ce.37 Just to the north of Hai Van, the Hue region appears to have offered the site where the two major linguistic groups, Chamic and Mon-Khmer, intermixed intensively. Ecology might have acted as an equally important driving force behind Linyi’s northern expansion. The vegetation immediately north and south of Hai Van Pass, for example, differs in telling ways. Coveted aromatics in Linyi’s sea trade like lakawood 降真香38 can be found throughout central Vietnam, while prized aromatic woods such as aloeswood (Aquilaria agallocha) have not appeared anywhere on the records in Quang Nam and Quang Ngai south of the pass.39 One has to continue south and cross these two provinces into 35

Michael Vickery, ‘Champa Revised’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 371. CIA, Ethnic Map of South Vietnam 1972 (https://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/vietnam-warmaps/nggallery/page/2, accessed 2 July 2002). 37 William Southworth, personal correspondence, December 2015. 38 Lakawood (Malay kayu laka), is a reddish aromatic heartwood used as incense in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Derek Heng Thiam Soon, ‘The Trade in Lakawood Products between South China and the Malay World from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries AD’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32 (2001), 133–149. 39 China’s fifteenth-century invasion of Dai Viet in the years of the Ming dynasty did not extend south beyond the Hai Van Pass, so they could not have accrued first-hand information abouts 36

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Phu Yen, Binh Thuan, and Khanh Hoa in order to find aloeswood. The distribution of such aromatic woods can be found in historical literature, such as the Treatise on Annam (Annan zhiyuan), compiled during the Ming Empire’s short-lived occupation of Dai Viet between 1407 and 1427. With a keen interest in the revenues and natural resources potentially at its disposal, the conquering Ming court listed twenty mountains that produced aromatic woods. Of these, fifteen mountains are located in the area between Quang Binh and Thua Thien-Hue, and another five in Ha Tinh. When these mountains are marked on the map, all of them exist on the north of the Hai Van Pass: Four mountains in Tho Hoang [Nghe An, on the west of Lam Giang] all produce aromatic woods; Huong Tuong Son (Mountain of aromatics and elephants) in Can Loc [Ha Tinh], where ‘much aromatics and elephants are found’; Four mountains in Huong Khe [‘perfume stream’] District [in Ha Tinh]—’all four produce aromatic woods’; Five mountains in the west of Quang Ninh and Le Thuy [Quang Binh]—’all five produce aromatic woods’; Yen Nao Son [in Quang Tri] ‘produces aromatic woods’; The two mountains of Ba Khe Son and La Mat Son [in Quang Tri]—’both produce aromatic woods’; Bo Ban Son [in Quang Dien, Thua Thien-Hue] ‘produces aromatic woods’; Hai Cat Son [upstream from Hue] ‘produces aromatic woods’; Two mountains in Huong Tra District, Thua Thien-Hue, which ‘both produce aromatic woods’; Two mountains in Phu Loc district, Thua Thien-Hue, which ‘both produce aromatic woods’; [and]Dien Son [in Phu Vang, Thua Thien-Hue], which ‘produces lakawood aromatics.’40

These mountains spread across a vast area, spanning from Hue to Nghe An, territory along Jiaozhi’s southern frontier where battles raged episodically throughout the first millennium – Jiaozhi against Linyi followed by Champa during the first millennium, Dai Viet against Champa during the second, until the latter’s demise in 1471. Aromatics do not feature among the list of items that Rinan traded with China during the first through second centuries. Until the rise of Buddhism in China, people in China were not so aware of aromatic woods and their uses. They consumed scented herbs, locally produced, to purify the air and the body, but nothing more.41 Forest was more of a threat than a source of enrichment. its produce. Yet Vietnamese sources do not have any information about aloewood produced in the territory of today’s Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces either. Quang Nam is well known for cinnamon. See the sections on ‘Produce’ in the volumes of Dai Nam nhat thong chi (cited above): Quang Nam, p. 739; Quang Ngai, pp. 837–839; neither lists aloeswood as a local product. 40 Emile Gaspardonne, trans., Ngan-nan tche yuan (ca. early 15th century, repr. Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extreme-Orient, 1932), pp. 53–56. My own summary of the mountains and their products based on the information above. For present locations of these mountains see Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, pp. 120–125. 41 Fukui Kōjun, ‘A Study of Mou-tzu’, Bukkyo Shigaku [Journal of the History of Buddhism] 2, 2 (1951), 12–14. A small bowl found in the royal tomb of the Nanyue king in Guangzhou might have contained frankincense, but no one is sure. And in any case, it was not produced in Southeast Asia.

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In 2002, archaeologists in Tra Kieu excavated two Han-era claylutess that bear the Chinese characters ‘黄神使者章’ (Huangshen shizhe zhang), which translate as ‘Seal of the Yellow God’s Envoy.’42 The people who used these two Daoist seals sought to create a square of one-hundred steps around the residence, because they believed that the characters acted as a protective charm able to ward off the wild beasts and demons of the forest around them.43 That such claylutess were found in Tra Kieu suggests that the forest lay close to a human settlement. The spread of Buddhism in China changed the Chinese view of forests dramatically. By sometime between the third and fourth centuries ce, they began to view the forests of the empire’s far south as a source of fascination and wealth. This view, in addition to a newfound knowledge of aromatics from the southern forests, is evident in a condensed form in Baopuzi by Ge Hong (284–364 ce): Aromatics woods have different origins. Sinking and floating aloewoods are produced in Rinan [at this time a part of Linyi]; green coloured duliang is from Dunxun [Tenasserim]; fragrant clove is from Dubo[Java]; … punchuk is from Tianzhu [India] … All of them are from trees and plants, and all are precious. They are either in the form of flower or gum, [and are found] either in the heart or in the branches of trees.44

Linyi offers the paramount example of this change in Chinese attitudes towards the forest. Descriptions of Linyi epitomise fourth-century Chinese fantasies about the southern forest – misty, mysterious, yet at the same time potentially lucrative. By this time, the word ‘forest’ dominates discussions of Linyi; indeed, writers celebrate it. For example, one author describes Linyi’s northern city of Oli45 as ‘next to the mountains, where thick forest reaches to the clouds, [and] mist rises among and above them’.46 The capital of Linyi was also surrounded by thick forest: 42

Yamagata Mariko, ‘Tra Kieu during the Second and Third Centuries CE’, in Lockhart and Tran (eds), The Cham of Vietnam, p. 94. 43 In his Daoist classic Baopuzi (抱樸子), Ge Hong said: ‘In ancient times, everyone who went to the mountains would carry the seal of Huangshen yuezhang with him/her. The seal is four cun (13 cm), with 120 characters to seal the area around the residence in the four directions of 100 steps each, so the tigers and wolves would not get into the area’ (www.guoxuemeng.com/ guoxue/9255.html, accessed 6 June 2004). 44 Taiqing jinye shendan jing, 3. 45 The name ‘Oli’ – after the Chinese characters 區栗 (also pronounced ulik) – is still generally if incorrectly known as ‘Qusu’, a mistake that originates with the incorrect re-copying into Chinese ‘區粟’. Only Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯, Nanqi shu 南齊書 [History of the Southern Qi dynasty] chapter 58 keeps the correct form of 區栗. (Beijing : Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 3:1013. 46 Shuijing zhu, chapter 16. Rolf Stein placed Oli (Qusu) in the vicinity of today’s Ba Don town in Quang Trach. Southworth agrees but thinks Quang Tri may also be a possibility. Southworth, ‘Coastal States of Champa’, p. 217; and personal communication, December 2015. For Stein’s discussion of the location of Oli, see ‘Le Lin-i, sa localisation, sa contribution à la formation du Champa et ses liens avec la Chine’, Han-hiue 2 (1947): pp. 104–108.

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Outside the moat of the citadel [of Linyi] there are immense wild forests in dark green colour with trees of different heights, all pointing to the sky with rattans coiled between them. Among the deep mountain of forest there is a forest of aromatic trees [there are so many of them that] it scented the air.47

The existence of an aromatic forest in Linyi is confirmed by a fifth-century source entitled Shuyi ji (Accounts of curiosities), which states: ‘In Rinan [Linyi] there is an aromatic forest. It expands to an area of 1000 mu (1 mu = 667 square metres), where famous and fine aromatics (mingxiang) are found.’48 It is clear that both the northern town Oli (Ulik) and the Linyi capital were located next to or among mountains containing aromatic woods. This means that the powerbases of Linyi, both the one near Dong Hoi and the one near Hue, were close to sources of aromatics. A clearer picture emerges when a third source from the fifth century is added which clearly states: There is an aromatic market in Rinan (Nhat Nam), where merchants from afar come buying and selling aromatics.49

From this point of view, today’s Hue vicinity could either be the aromatic market mentioned in the fifth-century source, or one of the two major aromatic markets in Linyi. The sources provide two important pieces of information: that the aromatic forest was a vast area, and that this forest was near the capital of Linyi. The aromatic mountains spanning from the Hai Van to Deo Ngang passes (Hue to Ha Tinh), fit into the picture perfectly. Sources mentioning an aromatic forest next to the capital might not be referring to the same location, however. While Linyi’s capital might have been located near Dong Hoi between 358 and 359 ce, the same place in 446 ce would have been located much further south, in the vicinity of Hue, south of the Perfume (Huong) River. Different locations, but they share a pattern: Both lie close to aromatic mountains. Linyi’s capital in the fourth century could also be Van Xa, as Stein suggested. This is located on the Bo River, fifteen kilometres northwest of Hue.50 The Bo River Delta is one of the three deltas in Thua Thien Hue province and had a long history of settlement. In this old delta there are traces of many paleo-rivers of different sizes, plus oxbow lakes and abandoned canals, all of them signs of intensive human activity.51 Like Hue, it also sat next to aromatic 47

‘Wenshui’, in Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508), Shuyiji 述異記 [Accounts of curiosities] (https://zh.wikisource .org/wiki/述異記, accessed 14 May 2016). 49 Ibid. 50 Rolf Stein, ‘Le Lin-i’, 108. My thanks to Southworth for pointing this out to me. 51 Du Dia chi Thua Thien Hue [Gazette of Thua Thien Hue] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 2005) (www.thuathienhue.gov.vn/vi-vn/Tong-tin-du-dia-chi/tid/Dac-diem-chung-vehinh-thaithai-tram-bau/newsid/, accessed 7 October 2017). 48

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mountains and along a big river, the Song Bo. Two mountains in this region produced aromatic woods.52 Where exactly did Linyi’s northern city of Oli lie? Rolf Stein placed it in the area of today’s Ba Don, north of the Gianh River in Quang Binh. However, Dao Duy Anh pointed out a ruin, located on the south bank of the Gianh River in Cao Lao Ha Village, which could be the remnants of the ancient town.53 Both Ba Don and Cao Lao Ha lie close to aromatic mountains. But the site of Cao Lao Ha fits the description of Oli in the Shuijng shu perfectly: (Oli) ‘is situated between two rivers, surrounded by mountains in three directions, and facing the rivers of the north and the south’.54 This location was exactly what we find on a map in the nineteenth-century Geographical Gazetteer of Dong Khanh.55 Oli indeed seems to be on the south bank of the Gianh River. The location makes sense: upriver for defence, with multiple mountains yielding aromatics. From Linyi, Chinese first learned of the aloeswood of Rinan. A third-century source, the Record of Foreign Matters in the Southern Provinces (Nanzhou yiwu zhi), mentions this specifically: Aloeswood is from Rinan. To obtain it, one cuts the diseased tree and leaves it on the ground. After a long time, when its bark has rotted, one takes the hard core of the tree. When it is put into the water it will sink, that is why it is called chenxiang (‘sinking aromatic’).56

As another fifth-century source reports, ‘Rinan submitted as tribute qianbuxiang’, an aromatic that could be smelt one-thousand paces away.57 That Linyi presented aloeswood with other envoys to the Tang court was depicted by a Tang artist Yan Liben (? – 673), as Figure 3.1 shows.58 52

Gaspardonne, Ngan-nan tche yuan, p. 56. Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, p. 54. For the location of Oli in the area, see the map in Dong khanh Dia du chi [Geographical gazetteer of (the emperor) Dong Khanh] (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2002), 3:289. Dao Duy Anh also pointed out that Oli was founded at the former site of the Han office of Xijuan (ibid.). This agreed with Stein. 54 The original Chinese states: ‘Oli is situated among the two rivers and surrounded by mountains at three directions. It looks at rivers on the northern and southern sides and streams runs at its east and west which meet at the foothill of the citadel.’ Shuijing zhu, chapter36. 55 Dong Khanh Dia du chi [The descriptive geography of the Emperor Dong Khanh] (reprinted and eds.), Ngo Duc Tho, Nguyen Van Nguyen, and Philippe Papin (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2002), 3:289. 56 Wan Zhen 万震, Nanzhou yiwu zhi 南州異物志 [Curiosities of the southern regions], compiled between 220 and 280 ce, cited in Taiping yulan, chapter 982 (https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/ 太平御覽_(四庫全書本)/卷0982, accessed 4 April 2017). 57 The original Chinese states: ‘Rinan Prefecture Paid Tributes in Qianbuxiang.’ Ren Fang, Shuyiji, cited in the ‘Xiang bu’ section of Taiping yulan (http://ctext.org/all-texts/zh?filter=607320, accessed 3 October 2019). 58 Yan Liben 閻立本, ‘Zhigong tu 職貢圖’, kept in the Palace Museum, Taipei (www.npm.gov​ .tw/職貢圖, accessed 22 June 2010). 53

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Figure 3.1  Zhigongtu [Picture of Tribute by envoys from overseas] (central part)

It is important to remember that the names ‘Rinan’ and ‘Linyi’ were often used interchangeably in early Chinese sources when mentioning local products, even after Linyi became independent in the second century. The reason appears to be simple: those reports were made by merchants who had little concern for political territories and borders, for it was the producing area that mattered to them. We cannot assume, however, that all the records mentioning ‘Rinan’ mean Linyi. Aromatic mountains spanned coastal regions from Hue to Nghe An as discussed above, and a Rinan Commandery did continue to exist to the north of Linyi after its independence. Realising this point leads us to the likelihood that aromatic woods were a strong motivation behind Linyi’s northward expansion. Possessing the source of aromatic woods would have advanced Linyi beyond the status of middlemen in the South Sea trade to a major supplier of China’s increasing demand for aromatic commodities, demand that surged with the rise of Buddhist ritual in the empire to the north. This could indicate, then, a fundamental change in Linyi’s history. Once this factor is put into Linyi’s 500-year trajectory, many puzzles about Linyi’s activities become clear. By invading the northern territory of Rinan and entering into the business of promoting aromatics harvesting, Linyi became not only a commercial

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but also political competitor with Jiaozhi. Aromatics pitted the two regions against one another as a result. Throughout the third and fourth century, Linyi never stopped harassing Ha Tinh and Nghe An and as a result became a total nuisance in the eyes of officials in Jiaozhou. At times the harassment grew particularly violent. For example, in the year 347 Linyi’s king, Fan Wen, led 40,000 to 50,000 people to attack ‘Rinan’, that is, the area between Ha Tinh and Nghe An. They killed 5,000 to 6,000 people, including Rinan’s chief officer, a man named Lan. King Wen then travelled north beyond Rinan to Jiaozhi’s prefecture of Jiuzhen (Thanh Hoa), retrieved Lan’s body, and sacrificed it on an altar to heaven.59 Why was Lan so hated? The Jinshu, or ‘Book of the Jin [Dynasty]’, states that at around this time Jiaozhou governors and Rinan officials were especially corrupt, that they were ‘greedy and invaded’ the interests of merchants from overseas, who had to sacrifice 20–30 per cent of their profits to Jiaozhou officials.60 It adds that they even dispatched their ships throughout the region to harass overseas merchants. Why would the officers use their ships, if they only needed to charge higher taxes at the harbour? This Jin-dynasty (266–420) report seems to imply that Jiaozhi officers, personally engaged in the business of trade, were de facto commercial competitors, and so harassment seems quite logical as a strategic move. Nonetheless, this invited the hatred of Linyi. Fan Wen’s bloody action did not constitute pointless violence; instead, he deliberately orchestrated a concerted attempt to curtail Jiaozhou’s competition in overseas trade at the gateway to his kingdom. The gateway to Fan Wen’s kingdom was not located in Quang Binh, judging from the description of events that followed in 347, 348 and 349. Most likely, it lay around Ha Tinh and Nghe An, from where Wen attacked Jiuzhen. In 348, right after his first attack, Wen struck Jiuzhen again, and his soldiers reportedly killed 80–90 per cent of the inhabitants. This fact suggests that Fan Wen already held Nghe An and Ha Tinh in his hands. A record dated the following year supports this view. In 349 a general from Jiaozhi tried to engage Wen and his forces at a seagate called Lurong (V. Lo Dung, likely Cua Tung in Quang Tri) but was beaten by Wen and had to ‘withdraw to Jiuzhen’.61 Although the Deo Ngang range had marked the recorded border between Linyi and Jiaozhi since 347, Linyi no doubt possessed greater access to and control of lands to the north – in what is now Ha Tinh and possibly Nghe An – than did Jiaozhou. 59

Fang Xunling房玄龄, Jinshu [Book of Jin], completed 648 CE, chapter 97 ‘Linyi zhuan’ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 8:2546. In Chinese: ‘Tanli qinwu 貪利侵侮’, ibid. 61 Ibid. For further discussions on Linyi’s localities and landscape, see Li Tana, ‘The Changing Landscape of the Former Linyi’, 4–5. 60

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Fan Wen’s personal background must also have played a role in Linyi’s northward expansion. Departing from the earlier Linyi kings who seemed to have come from further south, Wen rose from the furthest north, in Rinan’s old district62 of Xijuan (V. Tay Quyen). Indeed, the office of Xijuan’s magistrate lay on the southern bank of the Gianh River, where Oli was built.63 Essentially, Fan was a chief from northern Linyi. His story paints a condensed image of Linyi’s overseas link and its cosmopolitanism during the fourth century. In Chinese records, his rise was no less than a fast-moving feature film, which contains all the major elements of the fourth-century South Sea: raid, slave, trade, palace conspiracy, subjugation, and military advances: Fan Wen was originally from Yangzhou [in China’s Yangzi River Delta]. He was kidnapped when he was young and sold to Jiaozhou. When he was fifteen or sixteen years old and was about to be punished with flogging for his crime, he escaped from his master and followed a Linyi merchant, travelled by sea and arrived the [Linyi] palace. He was much favoured by the king [Fan Yi]. The next decade, the king died. Wen murdered the king’s two sons together with the king’s marquis and generals and claimed himself the king. He … imprisoned all the wives and concubines of the previous king, [and] put them in a chamber in the palace. Those who obeyed him were allowed to eat, and those who refused were allowed to starve.64

Fan Wen raided and eliminated half a dozen of small principalities around Linyi and rallied 40,000 to 50,000 followers. According to Jinshu, these peoples came from a range of different backgrounds: ‘Some eat with the mouth, some drink with the nose, some tattooed the face, and some tattooed the body. Some belonged to the ancient race of Xulang and some were from the Kingdom of the Naked (luozhong), and still some were Chinese refugees of the Han and Wei eras. He awed all of them and mastered them.’65 His followers, who number 40,000 to 50,000, made up the army that he led to attack Thanh Hoa, which he did in 347, 348 and 349. It is likely that during his reign, Fan Wen also absorbed the southern kingdom of Xitu.66 By now, Linyi was expanding, both north and south. A Wealthy Sea-Trading Kingdom While Linyi endeavoured to expand north, its cultural orientation progressively moved south. By the end of the fourth century, not long after King

62

Dao Duy Anh placed this district to the area roughly the south of the Giang River and northern Quang Tri. Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, p. 47. 63 Dao Duy Anh, Dat Nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi, p. 54. 64 ‘Linyi zhuan’, Jinshu, chapter 97, vol. 8: 2546. 65 66 Ibid. Thanks to William Southworth for this advice.

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Wen’s northern invasions, Indian civilisation began to play an increasingly important role in shaping Linyi culture, as archaeologist Lam Thi My Dzung points out.67 One political development might have played a crucial role in Linyi’s changing political and cultural direction. The Jin court tried to repel Fan Wen’s northern advance repeatedly with no success when Wen was alive. The chance came in 351 when Wen died, and his son Fan Fo became the king. In 353, the general of Guangzhou joined forces with the governor of Jiaozhou and attacked Linyi in Tho Linh lagoon. Fo’s barracks stretched along the coast for 50 li along the coast but was defeated. The king surrendered. A treaty was negotiated, and the Jin army withdrew.68 This might have accelerated Linyi’s Indianisation. A sixth-century Chinese source quoting the fifth-century source Accounts of Linyi (Linyi ji), which states that a watershed custom developed under the rule of Fan Huda (r.380–413), during which Qin Chinese migrants in Rinan ‘became tainted by the southern culture, and [the] old customs of Rinan had completely gone’.69 It was also during the reign of Fan Huda (340–413), when Linyi began to build many citadels, where Indic influence became apparent. This is evident in the northern city of Oli.70 This name for the city had not been mentioned in any source prior to the fifth-century compilation of Accounts of Linyi (Linyi ji). Built on the site of Xijuan, a Han district office, Oli appeared unmistakeably exotic to Chinese eyes, judging from their descriptions: The citadel’s walls were built on a packed earth base that rose some seven metres in height and was further surmounted by a brick wall of three metres and a wooden structure or palisades up to five tiers in height. Thirteen gates gave access to the city’s interior, which protected 2,100 houses, while other houses and markets surrounded the perimeter walls.71 The architecture of the palaces in Linyi’s capital is equally impressive: ‘On the seven-meter-high brick wall, another brick wall of 3.3 meters high was built. On this brick wall lay planks on which pavilions were built, [and] on the pavilion houses were built, and on the houses yet more floors were built. Those tall buildings are six to seven zhang [20–24 meters] high; and [even] the lower 67

Lam Thi My Dzung, ‘Central Vietnam during the Period from 500 BCE to CE 500’, p. 14. 69 Jinshu, chapter 97. Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. 70 ‘Biao’ 表 or pillar was a street sign for directions and became a royal symbol particularly in the Eastern Han era. A ‘biao’ of eight chi (196 centimetres) was set up in Oli. Nanqi shu, ­chapter 58, vol. 3: 1014. Two biaos are present in Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate. 71 Southworth observes: ‘Almost certainly located between two branches of the Gianh or Rao Nay River near Ba Don in Quang Binh and may well have been destroyed in the aftermath of the 446 campaign.’ ‘The Origins of Campa in Central Vietnam, A Preliminary Review’, PhD dissertation, SOAS, University of London, 2001, p. 274. 68

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ones are four to five zhang [12–16 meters] high.’72 This clumsy description by Chinese observers portrays architecture characterised by multi-level chambers built on high walls and topped by a superstructure, tower, or spire. This style appears familiar to south Indians but peculiar and even spectacular to Chinese. Even the temples, king’s offices and harem sat on these high walls, the Chinese reported, and the people who inhabited these structures would sit next to the windows and chat with people below.73 The city was four kilometres in diameter and contained fifty residential blocks, including eight temples and pagodas and housing, densely packed.74 These descriptions of the Linyi city are the most detailed reports on any old Southeast Asian city ever recorded in Chinese literature. In these descriptions, the urban character of the settlements described is readily apparent, as Paul Wheatley pointed out.75 To fifth-century Chinese eyes, the cities were densely populated, mysterious and strangely fantastic. The reporters of the day were witnessing Linyi’s golden age: Indeed, at the capital’s main gate, which faced east, there stood a stele that praised the virtue of Linyi’s king, Fan Huda (340–413).76 In contrast to earlier descriptions which show a strong Chinese influence, Indian influences now became apparent: cremation replaced burial for funeral, and the king wore a wreath of jewellery on his naked body.77 These reports indicate that a correlation existed between Linyi’s building boom, its prosperity and its contacts with Indian culture in the fifth century. Maritime Connections It was also during this period that Linyi maintained large ships. In 424 Fan Yangmai, King Fan Huda’s son, wielded over 300 ships and boats in his successful defeat of Jiaozhi’s invading forces at the mouth of the Gianh River. In 430 Linyi sent over 200 large ships to loot Jiuzhen (Thanh Hoa). Records identify these ships as louchuan, the largest ship in the Tongking Gulf at that time. It featured several decks and depending on its size could carry anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred soldiers. All this technology and military know-how required a strong economic foundation. Linyi’s genesis and growth happened as a response to opportunities that manifested with the growth of the Indian Ocean trade network. Here, 72

73 Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. Ibid. Ibid. The description of Oli was translated by Southworth, in ‘Coastal States of Champa’, pp. 220–221. 75 Paul Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Tradition (Michigan: The University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper nos. 207– 208, 1983), p. 384. 76 Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. 77 ‘Linyi zhuan’, Jinshu, chapter 97, vol. 8: 2545. 74

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a comparison can be made to Srivijaya, another coastal polity on the coast of Sumatra. Oliver Wolters points out that it was Sumatra’s capacity to feed the island’s export of forest products to China that allowed the pre-Srivijayan polities on the island to grow. Linyi thrived under the very same conditions, and in doing so survived longer than comparable polities of its time, like the kingdoms of Panpan and Dandan on the Malay peninsula (see Map 1.1). The early trade networks they were a part of clearly had been created in Southeast Asia before Indian influences significantly transformed the region’s religious scene and state-formation process, events that occurred as early as the third century ce. Moreover, these new trade networks fostered new political arrangements, as the strong overseas demand helped Linyi to consolidate its connections with upstream societies. As Manguin points out, trade is a prerequisite for the creation of a full-fledged state for any aspiring centre of political power. In Linyi, as in Srivijaya and the rest of sea-trading Southeast Asia, trade ‘played a structuring role for these harbour polities’.78 As observed earlier in this chapter, Linyi was ‘THE harbour and THE gateway of all countries’ (衆國津逕), as the sixth-century Chinese source The River Classic (Shuijing zhu) declared, quoting the fifth-century source Accounts of Linyi (Linyi ji).79 It is an interesting fact that many descriptions of Southeast Asian kingdoms use Linyi as a reference point to indicate a kingdom’s location. For example, one source describes Panpan (Kelantan or Terengganu, on the Malay Peninsula) as follows: ‘The kingdom of Panpan is in a bay to the southwest of Linyi. [They] face each other across the small sea (Gulf of Siam) to its north, and it takes forty days to travel [there] from Jiaozhou.’80 The Tuoheng kingdom, located in the southeast of present-day Burma, is described as ‘on the sea southwest from Linyi’, while Poluo in today’s Sumatra is located ‘to the south of Linyi … two months travel by sea’.81 Even the location of the well-known kingdom of Funan was defined by its proximity to Linyi: ‘Funan is over 3000 li away, to the west of Linyi. It faces a big bay, and its territory runs for 3000 li.’82 By the eighth century, ‘THE harbour and THE gateway of all countries’ included Japan. In 736 ce, a Linyi monk, originally from northern India (C. Bei Tianzhu) with a name Fozhe or Foshi, arrived Fukuoka, on the 78

Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities in Insular Southeast Asia: Restricted Centres, Extended Peripheries’, Moussons 5 (2002), 88. 79 Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. 80 劉昫, Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Book of Tang], completed 945 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 197, vol. 16: 5271. 81 Ibid. For the present locations of these two nagaries, see Chen Jiarong and Xie Fang, (eds), Gudai nanhai diming huishi [A dictionary of place names of the ancient South Sea] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), pp. 464, 731. 82 Jinshu, chapter 97, vol. 8:2547.

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Figure 3.2  Japanese musicians playing Linyi music

ship of a Japanese envoy to China. Fozhe brought a precious present to the court: two music notations which the court called the ‘Linyi Music’ (see Figure 3.2). They soon became an important part of court music.83 One melody of the Linyi music Samāja was performed specifically as a dance for a rain prayer at the leading Buddhist temple Tōdai-ji in the capital Nara, where a solo dancer wore a golden monkey mask and dressed in a straw raincoat cape at the ceremony. This dance reflects strong influences of Tantra Buddhism.84 This story of the Linyi monk reveals important aspects about Linyi’s deep cultural links with India, about the influence of Tantra Buddhism in eighth-century Champa, and about the impact of Linyi on East Asian culture during the first millennium, which has since largely been forgotten except in Japan. The trading route in this connection ran through the Ai Lao Pass (today west of Quang Tri near the Lao border), through which goods could pass 83

Cui Jing 崔静, ‘Riben yuequ Samakusa jiqiyu Sumozhe zhi guanxi bushuo’ 日本樂曲《蘇莫 者》及其與《蘇莫遮》之關系補說 [More discussion on the relations between the Japanese melody ‘Samakusa’ and ‘Sumozhe’], Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 [Studies on Arts], 1 (2020), 132– 144, here 137. 84 Ge Xiaoyin 葛曉音  and Tokura Hidemi 戸倉英美. ‘“Samazhe”  yü Yindujiao nüshenji de guanxi’ 颯磨遮’與印度教女神祭的關係  [‘Samozhe’  and the goddess worship of Hinduism],Wenshi 文史 [Literature and History], 1 (2018), pp. 239–264. 

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A Wealthy Sea-Trading Kingdom 101

from the Mekong River region into the very heartland of Linyi and to the sea. Excavations in this area prove for the first time that the modern National Route 9 heading from Dong Ha across the Truong Son Range to Savannakhet at the border between Laos and Thailand beside the Mekong River follows a traditional exchange route. As Reinecke et al point out, this route links Early Metal Age centres from the Khorat Plateau, including the famous burial sites of Ban Chiang, Ban Na Di, and Non Nok Tha, to the communities of the coast, creating a channel through which people could transport their special local products.85 Savannakhet was most likely the place where the iron and copper used in Linyi was sourced.86 But bronze from the north, a primary import of which Linyi shared and relayed to the highlanders, was also crucial.87 Bronze drums found in this region shared a strong similarity with those cast in Lang Vac, Nghe An, the southmost site of the Dong Son cultural sphere.88 Archaeologists thus point out that since the last millennium bce, this region seems to have been a ‘borderland’ between Dong Son culture in the north, Sa Huynh culture in the south, and the cultures of Ban Chiang and related communities on the west side of the Truong Son range.89 Ambra Calo further points out that the former Linyi territory of Quang Binh, Quang Tri, and Thua Thien Hue – particularly Quang Tri – was the starting point for a major cross-regional exchange route passing through Laos and northeast Thailand, as well as to the Malay Peninsula, Cambodia, and western Indonesia during the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium ce.90 It was through this major route that Dong Son bronze drums from the north and Bayon style sculptures from the south are found.91 In antiquity, it was the busiest of all land and sea routes feeding the central coast, and it remains so up to the present. In Vietnamese times, this route between mountains and shore has descended eastward from the Ai Lao Pass on the Lao frontier through Khe Sanh, where one of the most furious battles were fought in 1968, and where 100,000 tons of bomb was dropped by the US within five months. The route then down through the town of Cam 85

Reinecke et al., ‘Towards a Prehistory’, 61–62. Archaeologists revealed that Sepon in Savannakhet province was a site of iron and copper mining and smelting during the Bronze Age, and here two Dong Son drums have been found. Ambra Calo, Trails of Bronze Drums across Early Southeast Asia: Exchange Routes and Connected Cultural Spheres (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), p. 78. 87 Oscar Salemink, ‘The Regional Centrality of Vietnam’s Central Highlands’, in David Ludden (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 4. 88 89 Calo, Trails of Bronze Drums, p. 78. Reinecke et al., ‘Towards a Prehistory’, 64. 90 Calo, Trails of Bronze Drums, p. 78. 91 William A. Southworth and Tran Ky Phuong, ‘The Discovery of Late Angkorian Khmer Sculptures at Campā Sites and the Overland Trade Routes between Campā and Cambodia’, in Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy, and Geoff Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2019), p. 327. 86

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‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’: Linyi, 200–700 ce

Lo, which is next to the present-day Dong Ha. This capital city of Quang Tri was completely wiped out during the Vietnam War period and every building that stands today was built after the War. Both locations testified the strategic importance of this route, which led to the sea at the port of Cua Viet. The book Frontier Chronicles (Phu Bien tap luc), an eighteenth-century Vietnamese compendium of southern historical geography, describes the route, moving westward on foot. Starting from Lao Bao it took two days to reach Tchepone, and then three more to Muong Vinh.92 Here, at certain times of the year, the Bang Hieng rapids were navigable by small boats so it was easy to reach the central Mekong basin, giving access to Savannakhet to the west, Khemarat to the southwest, or across the Mekong River to Mukdahan in northern Thailand.93 Wealth from all these directions made Linyi’s fortune. The importance of Linyi’s commerce made it a military target. For example, in 446, the Jiaozhou governor of the ruling Jin dynasty, Tan Hezhi, attacked Linyi. King Fan Yangmai fought back, but the elephants in his army were scared away by the Jiaozhou troops dressed as lions. On reaching Linyi city, those soldiers hung soft ladders and ‘cloud bridges’ to climb the tall citadel walls and high-rise buildings; once there, they set fire to the citadel: Drums and gongs were beating, soldiers were as furious as tigers and as powerful as lightening, fires burning while wind was strong. The citadel was in ruin and [its] residents were captured. The king [actually general] Fan Long was beheaded, and anyone who was over fifteen years old was killed with no mercy. Bodies filled the top chambers from which blood dripped in showers.94

The Chinese army looted an enormous treasure from Linyi. Before the war, King Yangmai had offered to pay 10,000 jin (5 tons) of gold, 100,000 jin (50 tons) of silver and 300,000 jin (150 tons) of copper, in addition to the return of the portion of Rinan territory that Linyi had seized, in return for peace. Jiaozhou rejected the offer. The invaders carried away countless treasures, ‘all [of which] had never before been seen or heard of’. Several 10,000 jin of gold alone were looted, after chopping up the kingdom’s eighteen gold statues.95 92

Phu Bien tap luc [Frontier chronicles] (Saigon: Phu Quoc vu khanh Dac trach Van Hoa, 1973), vol. 2, p. 69a. ‘Muong Vinh’ refers either to Muong Phine in the Bang Hieng River basin or the Bang Hieng River basin in general. 93 Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asian Program, 1998), pp. 121–122; Kennon Breazeale and Snit Smukarn, A Culture in Search of Survival, The Phuan of Thailand and Laos (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), p. 2. 94 Shuijing zhu, chapter 36. No other sources give this account, which was probably from the Accounts of Linyi (Linyi ji), written during the southern Chinese dynasty of Liu Song (420–479). 95 Nanqishu, chapter 58, vol 3: 1013.

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A Wealthy Sea-Trading Kingdom 103

The expedition of 447 dealt a heavy blow to Linyi, but there is not enough evidence to claim that the conquering Liu Song dynasty (420–479) afterwards re-established Rinan prefecture. The administrations the ostensibly governed Jiaozhou under the four kingdoms of the Southern dynasties (420–589) were weak, and subdivisions to the south were even weaker. Both of the two major attacks on Linyi in 446 and 605 seem to have been undertaken for the purpose of looting the kingdom rather than subjugating and governing it. Things did not improve during the Tang dynasty, either. A prefecture called Linzhou, built in the former Sui dynasty’s Linyi prefecture, provides evidence of this: Revealingly, its government office was in southern Huanzhou – that is, the Ha Tinh area, far to the north. Even this prefecture was lost soon after it was created, and no one ever again reported anything about it.96 An old Vietnamese term, Nam gioi hai khau (‘Sea gate of the southern border’), offers a telling context. It refers to present-day Cua Sot in northern Ha Tinh, two parallels or about 220 kilometres north from Deo Ngang, the assumed border between Linyi and Jiaozhi. This name must have been created in the era that Linyi conquered today’s Ha Tinh area. In recent years, many Cham wells (V. Gieng Cham) are found in Nghe An particularly the Ha Tinh area, indicating the settlements where the Chams once occupied. When these wells are marked on a map, as Map 3.1 shows, they are concentrated in the area south of Vinh and north of the Deo Ngang Pass. At the northern end of this concentration of Cham wells lay Cua Sot, the ‘Sea gate of the southern border.’ The long history of Linyi in Jiaozhi’s southernmost territory, whose area comprised today’s Ha Tinh area, set the stage for the centuries-long series of battles waged between the kingdoms of Dai Viet and Champa in the second millennium. But before we go on to the next section, let’s pause a minute and ask ourselves: What were these ‘Cham wells’? A typical Cham well is described as shallow but never dries. This impressed Vietnamese on Chams’ capability of finding fresh water on locations so close to salty water.97 This made it a similar, if not the same key landscape feature, as the Khmers finding freshwater on phno, as described by Philip Taylor when writing about the Khmers in the Mekong Delta: Khmers reside in great numbers along the phno, the ancient coastal dunes that run parallel to the shoreline … The phno nearest the sea is the highest and contains within it a reservoir of fresh groundwater, tapped by shallow ponds that mysteriously never salty.98 96

Jizhi 寄治 means ‘a district office is guest hosted by a different district, i.e. no territory of its own’. Jiu Tangshu, chapter 41, vol. 5:1756. 97 See an example of the Cham well in http://doisongtieudung.vn/ha-tinh-phat-hien-gieng-cothoi-cham-pa-20190515153120729.html, accessed 9 September 2019. 98 Philip Taylor, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology and Sovereignty (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), pp. 68, 71.

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‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’: Linyi, 200–700 ce

Cua Sot Mai Phu

Cam Huy

Cam Xuyen Ky Giang

Ky Ninh Ky Loi

Ky Chau

Ky Trinh Ky Nam

Deo Ngang

Map 3.1  Locations of Cham wells in Ha Tinh area Sources: For details on these wells, see: https://dantri.com.vn/van-hoa/ thanh-hoa-phat-hien-gieng-co-mang-dau-an-van-hoa-cham-pa-201608280 94829472.htm; https://nongnghiep.vn/phat-hien-15-gieng-co-thoi-cham-patai-ha-tinh-post39108.html; https://baohatinh.vn/khac/gieng-co-ha-tinh-dauan-van-hoa-cham-pa/77363.htm; https://nld.com.vn/khoa-hoc/ha-tinh-phathien-gieng-co-thoi-cham-pa-20130727111525278.htm; http://doisongtieu​ dung.vn/ha-tinh-phat-hien-gieng-co-thoi-cham-pa-20190515153120729​ .html; and http://thegioidisan.vn/vi/bi-an-ve-nhung-cai-gieng-o-ha-tinh.html, accessed 9 September 2019.

The locations of the Cham wells on Map 3.1 show that they are concentrated on sand ridges which also serve as inter-settlement communications routes.99 As Taylor points out, the dune belt is encompassed by major waterways, interlaced by internal water routes, and links into oceanic trade routes.100 Losing the Northern Forests: From Linyi to Champa The two major Chinese incursions into Linyi in 446 and 605 affected Linyi so profoundly that they forced its centre of gravity to shift south. If Linyi’s 99

For example, next to a Cham well in a village called Cam Thang in Ha Tinh, was a Buddhist temple. Here people gathered for ceremonies, and washed Buddha with its freshwater (http:// doisongtieudung.vn/ha-tinh-phat-hien-gieng-co-thoi-cham-pa-20190515153120729.html, accessed 23 August 2020). 1 00 Taylor, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam, p. 68.

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Losing the Northern Forests: From Linyi to Champa 105

capital lay in the Gianh River area in 358 (having earlier retreated from the Deo Ngang Pass), by 446 it had moved south to today’s Thua-Thien Hue area (around Hue or Van Xa). When the Sui attacked Linyi in 605, its capital had moved even further south, back to the Tra Kieu area in Quang Nam. The records on Linyi become confused and often contradictory, as the kingdom’s power centre migrated further and further south and away from the grasp of Jiaozhi’s governors to the north. Southworth noticed one such contradiction among different Chinese sources: Early fifth-century records cite two royal lineages, each of them contemporary to the other. One of these lineages identifies with Dizhen, also known as Gangārāja according to inscription C.96 at the My Son temple complex in the Thu Bon valley, who according to Chinese sources travelled to India. It is likely that this Dizhen lineage ruled the Thu Bon valley while Fan Yangmai ruled north of the Hai Van Pass in present-day Thua Thien Hue region.101 The southward movement of Linyi’s political centre in the fifth century coincided with a cultural process of Indianisation, which might have involved greater contacts by elites based in Tra Kieu. The earliest verifiable correspondence between a king of Linyi listed in the Chinese sources and a king recorded in the extant epigraphy of the Thu Bon valley is the one that exists between Gaoshulutuobamo and Ku SriRudravarman. ‘Gaoshulutuobamo’ is the Chinese transcription of the name of a king whom the Liang court received in late 529.102 This king is the same person as Sri Rudravarman, who is mentioned in inscriptions C.73 A and C.96 at My Son; the latter stele describes him as ‘the son of an eminent Brahmana, and the son of the daughter’s daughter of glorious Manorathavarman.’103 This was the very Linyi king who, taking advantage of Ly Bon’s rebellion in Jiaozhou in 542, attacked Rinan only to be defeated in the northern reaches of today’s Nghe An region.104

101

Southworth, ‘The Origins of Campa in Central Vietnam, A Preliminary Review’, pp. 304–305; see also Anton O. Zakharov, ‘Was the Early History of Campā Really Revised? A Reassessment of the Classical Narratives of Linyiand the 6th–8th-Century Campā Kingdom’, in Griffiths, Hardy, and Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks, pp. 147–157. 102 Yao Silian 姚思廉 (557–637), Liang Shu 梁書 [Book of Southern Liang], completed 627 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 54, vol. 3:787; Paul Pelliot ‘Deux itinéraies de Chine en Inde a la fin du viiie siècle’, Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 4 (1904), 384; Georges Maspero, Les Royaume de Champa [in Chinese], trans. Feng Chengjun (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1943), p. 38; Southworth, ‘The Origins of Campa in Central Vietnam, A Preliminary Review’, p. 308. 103 Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Champa: History and Culture of An Indian Colonial Kingdom in the Far East, 2nd–16th Century AD (Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1985), p. 21. 104 Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [The complete annals of Dai Viet], Chen Chingho ed. (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyobunka kenkyujo, 1986), 1:148.

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‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’: Linyi, 200–700 ce

Linyi’s golden era had passed before its defeat to Jiaozhou in 542. Prior to that, in the early half of the sixth century, Linyi had merged with Champa, once the economic supremacy of the Thu Bon valley was finally demonstrated by the annexation of the northern enclaves under King Sri Rudravarman. The earliest Sanskrit text discovered north of the Hai Van Pass, an inscription located in Dinh Thi in the vicinity of Hue, illustrates that a dramatic change in power relations took place in the early seventh century. While much of the text is lost, two significant titles are found on this stele. The first title, ‘Sri Campesvara’ (Lord of Campa), is the earliest evidence of the extension of the name ‘Campā’ beyond the Thu Bon valley. The second title – even more interesting – is ‘Sri Kandarpapuresvara’ (Lord of Kandarpapura), which almost certainly indicates the existence of a city called Kandarpapura in the Hue region.105 It seems, then, that northern Linyi was eclipsed by southern Champa’s rising star. The polity of Linyi disappeared, but the name did not. Indeed, the name was maintained for the sake of conducting trade with China for another century, that is, until the mid-eighth century. By this time, the societies inhabiting both sides of the Hai Van Pass had integrated into a single kingdom, Campā, centred in the Thu Bon valley. Significantly, the first Chinese reports of the appearance of Linyi people surface: ‘Its people have sunken eyes and long noses, their hair is curly, and their skin colour is black.’106 Not a single description of Linyi’s population was ever made in the six centuries that preceded the composition of this passage. Interestingly, it seems to indicate a change in the race of its mercantile elite. The results of recent DNA tests of Chams confirm both historical intermarriage between Mon-Khmer speakers and Chams, and significantly, input from South Asia.107 The ordinary Mon-Khmer speakers of Linyi may have adopted the political identity of Champa even when that identity was associated with speakers of a different language (Cham), as Andrew Hardy and Nguyen Tien Dong insightfully point out:108 Like that of the Romans, the Champa political community may have started out as small and linguistically unified, and then expanded—through the mobility of ordinary people, elites or ideas, and through the integrating mechanisms operated by its rulers—to give

105

Majumdar, Champa, p. 13; Southworth, ‘Coastal States of Champa’, p. 231. The original Chinese states: ‘其人深目高鼻, 發拳色黑.’ Weizheng 魏徵, Suishu 隋書, completed 636 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 47, vol. 6: 1832. 107 Charles Higham, Early Mainland Southeast Asia: From First Humans to Angkor (Bangkok: River Books Press, 2014), p. 317. 108 Andrew Hardy and Nguyen Tien Dong, ‘The Peoples of Champa: Evidence for a New Hypothesis from the Landscape History of Quang Ngai’, in Griffiths, Hardy, and Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks, p. 144; for them ‘Sanskrit cosmopolitanism’ was an important factor of political connection between the kingdom’s linguistically diverse peoples. 106

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Losing the Northern Forests: From Linyi to Champa 107 a unity of political identity to different political territories and to peoples who spoke different languages.

What happened to the old elites of Linyi? Michael Vickery suggested that by the sixth century the Mon-Khmer chiefs of Linyi had moved north to integrate with the Vietic peoples of Jiaozhi, where they maintained themselves as a high-status group.109 Their destination would reasonably have been the Ha Tinh and Nghe An area where battles between Jiaozhi and Linyi continued throughout the first millennium, and those between Dai Viet and Champa persisted well into the second millennium. However, there is another possible explanation. In the Chinese historical record, a kingdom named Huangwang falls chronologically between the names Linyi and Champa. The Tang Huiyao (completed 961) and Xin Tangshu (completed 1060) both claim that Linyi changed its name to Huangwang in the 750s, and that it also called itself Zhanpo (Campā). Thus, it appears that the Chinese historical record lumps Linyi, Huangwang, and Champa together as the same place with three names, each replacing the other in chronological order. However, during the two centuries in question, historical records clearly indicate an unbroken royal lineage in Champa and a consistent use the name ‘Champa’ in inscriptions, as Maspero long ago worked out in his classic study.110 An earlier Chinese source, the Tongdian, compiled between 766 and 801 – about two centuries earlier than the Tang sources – provides a clue to solving the puzzle of Huangwang. Rinan prefecture, it states, was 100 li (1 li=500 metres) east of the Fulu prefecture (Phuc Loc, in southern Ha Tinh); 150 li south of the Luofu prefecture (Huong Khe, Ha Tinh), 600 li north of Jiuzhen (Thanh Hoa), 800 li west of the Kingdom of Huanwang, and 150 li southeast of the sea.111 Rinan prefecture must have been in the mountainous area of the southwestern Nghe An during the Tang era. That creates a problem for the old Huangwang thesis: if Rinan lay in southwestern Nghe An, then the kingdom of Huangwang was another 800 li to the west. This would place Huangwang somewhere near present-day Savannakhet area of Laos or further southwest. Stephen Murphy recently pointed out a possible overland route connecting the Mekong River with 109

Vickery, ‘Champa Revised’, p. 375. Michel Ferlus put the locations of the Vietic speakers from Dong Hoi in the north to the upper Red River Delta and west to Khammouane up to today’s Lao-Nghe An border. Michel Ferlus, ‘Arem, a Vietic Language’, Mon-Khmer Studies 43, 1 (2013), see his map on page 2. 110 Maspero, Les Royaume de Champa, p. 44. See also, for example, the inscription of Vikrāntavarman I, No.16, dated 609: ‘Victory to Śr ı̄ Prakāśadharma, King of Champa’, in Majumdar, Champa, 2:31; no.18, p. 36; no.20, p. 38, citing ‘Lord of the city of Champa … King of kings.’ 111 Tongdian, 184, cited in Chen Jiarong and Xie Fang, (eds), Gudai Nanhai diming huishi, pp. 481–482.

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‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’: Linyi, 200–700 ce

Champa’s coast, and between ancient Champa and Dvāravatı ̄: From Lao Bao it would pass Savannakhet, head further west to Muang Fa Daed from where it would turn southeast by the Mun River, and reach Wat Phu, Champassak.112 If so, the Linyi elite might have taken ‘THE’ route, that is, the easiest, most ancient route via Cam Lo, as William Southworth and Tran Ky Phuong most recently point out,113 from the lowlands into the middle Mekong River region to create a new realm in the highlands, forsaking the sea. Conclusion As a classic Chinese saying goes, ‘bring the painted dragon to life by putting in the pupils of its eyes’, a crucial point can be so vital to a subject that without it the subject is lifeless. If Linyi was the dragon, the pupils then signify its place in the longest chain of transhipment relays in the world at the turn of the first millennium. Without understanding this, one would not see why Rinan/Linyi appeared in the Chinese records so frequently and in so many circumstances, and why it became the most fully Indianised kingdom among all other Southeast Asian countries by the sixth century ce despite its close ties with Chinese courts and markets. Its wide networks built itself a wealthy society along the central coast and its existence proved vital to the prosperity of Jiaozhou under the Chinese rule. The flow of commercial wealth that Linyi generated changed political equations in the Tongking Gulf. It inspired subjects in an outlying coastal district with the help of allied coastal chiefdoms to rebel against Jiaozhou and the Han emperor and create a rival sea-trading state. This rested on control of two key resources: strategic harbours for ports of call and the aromatic forests of the interior liked by well-established overland trails. These two factors would constitute the economic base of this important polity on the central coast between China and other Southeast Asian neighbours. Linyi did not collapse so much as fade away to re-emerge in part as Champa. This strong, new contender would control the region for centuries more, until it began to lose its long-standing competition with its northern rivals – first, Jiaozhou, then Annam, then Dai Viet, then Dai Nam – in 1822. Even the lords of Cochinchina, who created

112

Stephen Murphy, ‘Cultural Connections and Shared Origins between Campā and Dvāravatı̄: A Comparison of Common Artistic and Architectural Motifs, ca. 7th–10th Centuries CE’, in Griffiths, Hardy, and Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks, p. 321. 113 Southworth and Tran, ‘Discovery of Late Angkorian Khmer Sculptures at Campā Sites’, p. 328. They point out that this route was also the easiest route connecting Champa with Cambodia. It ran along the Thach Han River where three Bayan style Khmer statues were found.

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Conclusion 109

a Vietnamese state on the ashes of Champa in the seventeenth century, owe as much of their heritage to the non-Vietnamese predecessors and precedents peculiar to this region as they did to their genealogical forebears from the North, if for no other reason than they appropriated this fundamental maritime strategy for ensuring wealth and power.114 As the first two chapters of the book show, however, the ancient ancestors of the Vietnamese were hardly unfamiliar with the sea or its commerce. Seen together, these first three chapters demonstrate a pattern common to all young states forming around the Tongking Gulf, from the great northern empire to the upstart southern chiefdoms: They all looked to sea trade as a means of building power through wealth, mainly by exporting whatever marketable natural resources their people could harvest from the mountains, plains, and sea. The unboundedness of the South Sea networks meant they criss-crossed each other and, importantly, were maintained by multiple players rather than dominated by only one or two big powers. The next two chapters show how this picture survived into the next period of history. When the elites of old Jiaozhi broke free of Han control and created Dai Viet they continued the old commercial strategy, while further south Champa transformed the coastal chiefdoms into a formidable trading power. Both new kingdoms also continued their rivalry for control of the gulf’s maritime commerce.

114

Charles Wheeler, ‘One History, Two Regions: Cham Precedents in the History of the Hoi An Region’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 163–193.

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4

Maritime Resurgence and the Rise of Dai Viet

It was the seventh moon of the year 1066. In Thang Long the imperial officers arrived at the Crystal Palace dressed for court of the king Ly Thanh Tong, the Ly founder’s grandson. When ascended to the throne in 1054, he ruled that no officer of the court should ever present themselves without wearing the attire in the Tang fashion appropriate to their office and rank.1 Their dress complete, the officers of the Ly emperor went forth to answer his imperial summons to the Crystal Palace.2 The new Ly dynasty established their capital in Thang Long as a way to withdraw from the coast, the place where the previous two dynasties, the Dinh and Tien Le, had built their capital, Hoa Lu (Ninh Binh). The coast was precisely where Dinh Bo Linh, the founder of the first independent Vietnamese dynasty, arose. At his mature age, Dinh offered to become the adopted son of one of the Twelves Lords, Tran Lam, a Cantonese who had occupied Bo Seagate (today’s Vu Tien, in Thai Binh). With Tran’s support, Dinh Bo Linh was able to defeat the region’s other eleven lords and found the Dinh Dynasty in Hoa Lu.3 Having succeeded, the victorious Ly clan claimed the capital of the old Annam protectorate as their own, immediately becoming the legitimate heir of the old order rather than one of the unstable and quarrelsome Twelve Lords. From their upriver capital at Thang Long, moreover, the Ly could unite the two regions of the Red River Delta – the central plain that surrounds the middle reaches of the 1

Dai Viet su ky Toan Thu [Complete book of the historical chronicle of Dai Viet] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka kenkyujo, 1984–1986, hereafter Chronicle of Dai Viet or Toan Thu), p. 242. A Song officer Zhou Qufei commented that Viet officer’s dress and shoes were similar to that of the Song Chinese, but the headwear was different. Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida [A report on the situation beyond the Five Mountains] (comp. 1178, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), pp. 59–60. 2 The Sino-Vietnamese for ‘Crystal Palace’ is 水精殿 (V. Điện Thủy Tinh; Toan Thu, p. 242). This building seemed to be facing either a river or a big lake. Viet su luoc records in 1055 that Ly Thanh Tong went to the Crystal Palace to see boat racing. Dai Viet su luoc [Abridged Chronicles of Dai Viet], trans. Nguyen Gia Tuong (Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh: Nxb. Dai hoc Tong hop, 1993), p. 46. 3 Keith Taylor, ‘The “Twelve Lords” in Tenth-Century Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, 1 (1983), 58.

110

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The Source of Ly Power 111

river and with the upper reaches of the delta where the alluvial plain meets the mountains, thus concentrating power in the middle of the delta.4 Thang Long proved strategically important, however, memory of the coast remained vivid. The new capital’s local deity (thanh hoang), the Quang Loi Dai Vuong, had been known as the God of the South Sea since the Tang dynasty. The description of this deity, in which ‘he rode on a red dragon and smelled extraordinarily fragrant’, reveals its maritime origin.5 The coast was not far, either. As Map 4.1 shows, when Dai Viet gained its independence, a large part of today’s Red River comprised of coastal swamp. The position of Thang Long thus resembles the political centres among neighbouring Charter States like Angkor and Pagan, which were chosen for their strategic midpoint between three component regions: mountain, plain, and seacoast. At its early stage, raiding took precedence over trade as the means of accumulating wealth and power on land and increasingly along the gulf coast. This plundering strategy appears to have helped the Ly court to build its new capital and sponsor infrastructure projects, including Buddhist temples, which played an important institutional role in early Dai Viet society. Maritime influences came from two main groups of seafaring peoples: from the west, India, and Indic cultures in Southeast Asia primarily via Champa; and from the east, southern China, in particular, the region of Minnan-speaking peoples (roughly, today’s southern Fujian province). Dai Viet’s trade relations with China and the sea-trading people of Fujian began to grow in the twelfth century as a consequence of the commercial revolution in Song society. This enriched the court and committed it to incorporating the coast, but it also imperilled the kingdom as growing commercial wealth empowered coastal elites, thanks to the mostly Fujianese sea traders who sojourned or settled there. Eventually, this power expanded into the court, which led to the dynasty’s demise in 1225 at the hands of a general of Fujianese descent named Tran Thu Do (C: Chen Shoudu).6 The Source of Ly Power Let us return to that day in the seventh moon of 1066. Inside the royal citadel, the court officers advanced towards the focus of power in their new Viet polity, 4

John K. Whitmore, ‘Elephants Can Actually Swim’, in David Marr and Anthony Milner (eds), Southeast Asia in the Ninth to Fourteenth Centuries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 126–127. 5 Viet Dien U Linh Tap Luc 粵甸幽靈集錄 [Spiritual powers of the Viet realm], in Sun Xun 孫 遜, Trinh Khac Manh鄭克孟, and Chen Yiyuan 陳益源 (eds), Yuenan hanwen xiaoshuo jicheng 越南漢文小說集成 [A collection of novels produced in Vietnam] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2011), vol. 2, p. 27; another version of the same book Viet Dien U Linh Tap Luc Toan Bien 越 甸幽靈集全編 described the deity as riding a yellow dragon; see p. 98. 6 The surname Tran (C: Chen) is written 陳.

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Map 4.1  The Red River Delta in the tenth century Source: Courtesy of Philippe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancient’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 87, 2 (2000), 610.

a long house (nha dai) 61 metres long.7 Once inside, they listened to an official sermon; once it ended, they sat down to a grand banquet. On the previous day, Ly officials presented slaves (V. sinh khau) to the king; today, Ly Thanh Tong 7

Tong Trung Tin and Bui Minh Tri, ‘Ve mot so dau tich kien truc trong cam thanh Thang Long thoi Ly-Tran qua ket qua nghien cuu khao co hoc nam 2005–2006’ [Traces of architecture found from the excavations to the Thang Long citadel 2005–2006], in Nguyen Quang Ngoc

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The Source of Ly Power 113

would give them a feast in return.8 Food, rice, wine, betel nuts, and fruits put the king’s wealth and generosity on abundant display. To the banquet’s attendees, such plenitude demonstrated the Ly monarch’s power, for it suggested heaven’s favour. Thanks to the cosmos, the weather had again been good. The air was warm, and ‘wind and rain came at the right time’, as the proverb goes. Crops were plentiful. Such was Ly Thanh Tong’s good fortune, having manifested in the natural world. Weather had been good to his forefathers, too: During the reign of the king’s grandfather, Ly Thai To, the weather proved so favourable and the crops so cheap that in 1016 he exempted land tax for three years.9 This favourable climate, in which peoples of the Red River Delta secured an independent Dai Viet, would last for another century after Ly Thanh Tong’s death.10 He was not alone, for the Ly kingdom’s Southeast Asian neighbours also enjoyed good weather at the same time. Treering data obtained in southern Vietnam indicates that between the tenth and late-thirteenth centuries, Southeast Asia enjoyed unusually warm, persistent La Niña-like conditions that produced not merely an increase in monsoon volume but also a more even annual distribution, creating longer monsoons and shorter dry seasons that favoured local agriculture.11 Weather clearly created a favourable environment for the creation and growth of Viet power in the Red River plain under the Ly clan. Another factor was equally important. Dai Viet was born in good timing, from Chinese history’s point of view. It thrived during China’s Northern Song dynasty (960–1127 ce), contemporary to the first 150 years of the independent Dai Viet. The Northern Song stood out in Chinese history for two contrasting characteristics: militarily, it was the weakest of all major Chinese dynasties due to continual troubles with northern nomadic peoples throughout its whole existence; but in economic and social terms, this era experienced China’s first commercial revolution, with rapid development and growing consumer demand. Both factors benefited newly independent Dai Viet in its most vulnerable period. However, the early Ly state faced shortages in other areas, such as labour, and how it sought to address these deficits points again to the importance of the coast or littoral zone.

and Momoki Shiro (eds), Selected Japanese–Vietnamese Papers on the Thang Long Citadel ­[Nhat-Viet Tuyen tap bai viet nghien cuu Hoang thanh Thang Long] (Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 2012), pp. 88–89. 8 See Li Tana, ‘A View from the Sea: Perspectives on the Northern and Central Vietnamese Coast’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37 1 (2006), 83–102. 9 Toan Thu, p. 213. 10 Victor Lieberman and Brendan Buckley, ‘The Impact of Climate on Southeast Asia, circa 950– 1820: New Findings’, Modern Asian Studies 46 2 (2012), 16. 11 Ibid.

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Population, Manpower, and Sea Raiding Red River Delta society at the beginning of the Ly Dynasty bore little resemblance to the glory days of Han-dynasty Jiaozhi/Jiaozhou eight centuries before. For starters, far fewer people inhabited the region. When the Ly dynasty began in 1010, Dai Viet’s population numbered only a third of what it had been a millennium before, according to Table 4.1. Although the figures shown offer only a sketchy view of the demographic changes in the region, two characteristics stand out: the boom of the Guangzhou and the bust of the former Jiaozhou households. The reasons for this population decline are three-fold. First, between the third and seventh centuries the Kam–Tai speakers of the Li and Lao chiefdoms inhabited vast areas of what is today Guangxi and overland traffic between China’s population centres and the Red River Delta.12 Han Chinese migration to the region consequently slowed. Second, the migration path had clearly shifted east to the city of Guangzhou (then called Panyu) and the greater Pearl River Delta region, where by 609 the number of household registrations had Table 4.1  Registered households in the gulf region, c. first century–1078 Year

1st c. ce

609

742

806–813

1078

Jiaozhi Jiuzhen Rinan Nanhai Hepu Qinzhou Qiongzhou

92,440 35,743 15,460 19,613 15,398 – 23,000

30,056 16,135 9,915 37,482 28,690 14,072 19,500

24,230 14,070 9,619 42,235 13,029 10,146 4,777

27,135 5,379 5,292 74,099 – – 2,700

– – – 143,261 7,509 10,552 10,264

For household figures of 1st century ce, see Ban Gu 班固 (32–92), Hanshu Dilizhi [Book of Han: Geography]; for 609, see Wei Zheng 魏徵 (580– 643), Suishu: Dilizhi [Book of Sui: Geography], chapters 30–32. The Tang’s Rinan prefecture was in Huanzhou (Nghe An); for 742, see Liu Xu 劉昫, Jiu Tangshu: Dilizhi [Old book of Tang: Geogrphy], chapter 41; [for 806–813, see Li Jifu 李吉甫 (758–814), Yuanhe junxianzhi 元和郡縣志 [Treatise on all districts from the Yuanhe reign-period, 806–820], chapter 38; for 1078, see Wang Cun 王存(1023–1101) et al., Yuanfeng jiuyuzhi 元豐九域志 [Treatise of the Nine Regions from the Yuanfeng reignperiod. 1078–1085], finished 1080 CE, chapter 9. Yuanhe junxianzhi has the most complete population figures on the Annam prefecture from the early to late Tang era, when the household number decreased from 51894 to 39519. 12

Catherine Churchman, The People between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

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The Source of Ly Power 115

tripled the previous Han figure. Indeed, they surged after 742, because of the opening in 820 of the Dayu Mountain Pass, which provided Guangzhou with its first major overland link to China’s core inland regions, creating an enormous hinterland from which subsequently flowed an unprecedented abundance of goods.13 As a consequence, Guangzhou eclipsed Jiaozhou as the empire’s primary southern sea hub and political centre. Third, by the late first millennium ce, Persian and Arab merchants – the new princes of the Nanhai trade – had chosen to sail directly to Guangzhou on the open sea, bypassing Jiaozhou and many of its trading partners along the Indochinese coast. While the first factor hindered Han migration, the latter two factors may have simultaneously encouraged migration away from Jiaozhou and towards the city’s rival. By the ninth century, the combined number of households in northern and central Vietnam totalled under forty thousand – less than half the regional total recorded at the height of the Han Empire and one-quarter the size of Guangzhou. At the time of its independence in the tenth century, Dai Viet was anything but densely populated. This clearly affected the kingdom’s economic and political potential. Only a small portion of this limited population was bonded to the court. Yumio Sakurai pointed out that the hinterlands remained semi-autonomous under the Ly. The court directly controlled only two territories – the middle plain and the western delta, to which Momoki Shiro added Thanh Hoa, Thai Nguyen, and Son Tay.14 Governing power in the newly independent Kingdom of Dai Viet remained largely in the hands of local strongmen, ‘big men’ whose status was determined, in part, by the number of bonded people they could accumulate. Like so many Southeast Asian kingdoms of this era, labour became the primary obstacle to building necessary institutions of state power. The survival, growth, and longevity of the Ly dynasty thus depended upon an increased labour force. Moreover, as James Anderson points out, the Tongking Gulf had for many centuries been a region populated by competing and co-operating Mandalastyle powers on land and at the coast. Jiaozhi had been pre-eminent among them but not predominant.15

13

Wang Gungwu, ‘The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31 (1959), 78–79. 14 Yumio Sakurai, ‘On the Opening of the Red River Delta’, Southeast Asian Studies 18 2 (1980), 304–310; Momoki Shiro, Chusei Daietsu kokka no seiritsu to hen’yo [The formation and transformation of the medieval state of Dai Viet: A Vietnamese history during the Ly–Tran period within regional histories] (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 2011), p. 84. 15 James A. Anderson, ‘“Slipping through Holes”: The Late Tenth and Early Eleventh-Century Sino–Vietnamese Coastal Frontier as a Subaltern Trade Network’, in Nola Cooke, Li Tana, and James A. Anderson (eds), The Tongking Gulf through History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 87.

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Raiding offered the Ly court its most important means of obtaining the manpower it needed. All the courts of Southeast Asia considered raiding and warfare as positive pursuits by which any monarch could capture labour and other economic resources.16 The early Ly’s raid included the territories that were part of the so-called ‘24 prefectures’ of Dai Viet. An entry for 1008 in Chronicle of Dai Viet clearly indicates that Ly Thanh Tong’s grandfather, Thai To, ‘attacked the two prefectures of Du Lang and Vi Long (Tuyen Quang) and obtained several hundred barbarians (man) and horses’. Moving south past the delta, ‘he attacked Hoan Chau (Nghe An) and Thien Luu Chau (southern Nghe An), and [there] obtained manpower’.17 In 1012, he further plundered the Tuyen Quang area of 10,000 Tai speakers and horses. In 1028 Ly Thai Tong, Thanh Tong’s father, followed suit to raid the same region. The Ly’s raids seemed to have increasingly moved from the land to the sea. In 1044 Ly Thai Tong made advances by the sea, raiding Champa and capturing over 5,000 people and thirty elephants; fifteen years later, Ly Thanh Tong’s navy crossed the Gulf of Tongking to the Chinese coastal city of Qinzhou (Guangxi), where they ‘made a show of our force’.18 In 1069, he launched a major attack on Champa in which his armies captured 50,000 people, including Cham king Che Cu, who his Viet captors forced to cede territory in today’s Quang Binh and Quang Tri provinces as ransom.19 The Chinese who chronicled this raid stated: ‘[The Song] emperor heard that the majority of Cham households were captured by Jiaozhi’ – namely Dai Viet.20 In all these cases, it is clear that Dai Viet sought manpower as one of the main objects of plunder. Dai Viet’s need for labour must have been quite severe in the eleventh century, for the king also ordered raids on its powerful northern neighbour, China. Ly forces raided Song territory in 1059 and captured ‘countless’ men, women, cattle, and horses.21 In his invasion of Qinzhou in 1075, the eunuch general Ly Thuong Kiet captured over 2,000 people; only 221 were returned 16

Raid was a constant feature of pre-modern Southeast Asia. The legends and early inscriptions describe a culture dominated by warriors. The Chiang Mai chronicle describes one successful warrior: ‘Some [domains] he conquered and some he did not, taking one domain in some years and nine in others; sometimes taking two or three years for one; sometimes taking one without a battle. Those he took, he ruled, killing the rulers he conquered. When he killed the rulers, he would have one of his officers govern there, and sometimes he would maintain [the previous ruler] in charge.’ The warrior kings rewarded their valiant generals with command of outlying settlements, and showered them with gifts of gold, titles, regalia, and women. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 31. 17 18 19 Toan Thu, p. 200. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., pp. 210, 234, 245. 20 Li Tao, Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian [Continued compilation of sources as a comprehensive mirror to aid in government], completed 1183, chapter 273 (https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&ch apter=500083&remap=gb, accessed 2 March 2010). 21 Viet su luoc [A brief history of Vietnam], trans. Tran Quoc Vuong (Hanoi: Nxb. Van Su Dia, 1960), p. 35.

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The Source of Ly Power 117 Table 4.2  Raids carried out by the former Le and Ly dynasties, 980–1175 Year

No. of raids

980–1005 1005–1009 1010–1028 1028–1054 1054–1072 1072–1128 1129–1138 1139–1175

6 5 8 11 3 1 3 2

Source: Toan thu, pp. 188–298; Viet su luoc, pp. 54–152.

three years later.22 During these intervening years, the court built its first state-sponsored dike, a 30-kilometre structure built on the Cau River, which it completed in 1077. The war prisoners captured from the Song raid may have provided the major labour forces behind its construction.23 These raids did not last forever, however. Court records report that attacks carried out by the Ly kings, as well as the kings of the Early Le (Tien Le) dynasty that preceded them, listed above, date from 980 to 1175.24 According to the Chronicle of Dai Viet, summarised here in Table 4.2, the number of court-sponsored raids began at a relatively high annual level under the Tien Le dynasty before they reached their highest annual levels during the first five decades of the dynasty between 1010 and 1054, when their frequency reached once every two years or more. The number of raids and the estimates on captives provided by the Chronicle of Dai Viet indicate that, between 982 and 1175 ce, Ly forces seized many people (between 70,000 and 100,000 based on the accounts above). Their range included the Red River Delta and extended both upriver into the 22

Li Tao, Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian, chapter 300 (https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=94 2191&remap=gb, accessed 23 March 2012). This invasion was Dai Viet’s response to the Song officers not allowing Dai Viet trade with Qinzhou, according to the Lianzhou fuzhi [Gazetter of Lianzhou prefecture]. See also Zhang Guojing 張國經, Chongzhen Lianzhou fuzhi 崇禎廉 州府誌, completed 1637, chapter1, p. 15. This confirms the account of Vietnamese chronicle. Vietnamese records state that the Ly navy massacred 58,000 in the city of Yongzhou alone, while Viet raiders killed several hundred thousand people in the two prefectures of Qin and Lian (Toan Thu, p. 248). 23 Viet su luoc, p. 112. 24 The Tien Le dynasty was founded in 980 and ended in 1009. Ly Thai To, the founder of Ly dynasty, was a general serving the previous Tien Le dynasty.

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highlands and downriver to the gulf coast; along that coast, raids spanned the nearly all the Tongking Gulf rim from Qinzhou to Champa. Even if Dai Viet’s population numbered around 500,000 (100,000 households) – an implausibly high figure given the regional trend demonstrated in Table 4.1 – the forced migration of 70,000 to100,000 non-Viet peoples into the kingdom would still constitute a population increase around 20 per cent of its alleged total population. The relatively intensive forced migration of various Tongking Gulf peoples to Dai Viet during this period occurred during a crucially formative stage in the kingdom’s development, when manpower was needed to build new infrastructure necessary to ensure the Ly Dynasty’s early success, including a new capital. Building a Capital In 1010, Ly Thai To established his capital in the middle of the Red River Delta, on the foundations of the Tang Dai La citadel. He named the city Thang Long 昇龍, ‘ascending dragon’. The terrain was relatively new; it had only been made habitable about three centuries before Ly Thai To’s arrival, having long been submerged in the delta’s waters. From this perspective, the image of a city ascending from a body of water like a dragon makes sense. The foursquare city lay juxtaposed against West Lake (Ho Tay) and amidst the scattered remnants of a now inactive river channel or paleo-channel of the Red River. During most of the time of Chinese occupation, the land of Thang Long probably sat under an extensive inundation of rivulets, lakes, and ponds enveloped by thick forest. At the site of the old citadel, for example, archaeologists recently unearthed the fossils of 13 types of snails that typically live in lakes or ponds.25 The Han general Ma Yuan (V. Ma Vien) described the land of Lang Bac, today’s West Lake, where he defeated the rebellious Trung Sisters in 43 ce, as a ‘flood on the earth and fog in the sky, [where] poisonous air steamed people in various ways. [The miasma] was so strong that one could see birds fall into water one after the other [because they could not go through the thick air].’ Beyond the water, trees proliferated – as reflected in surviving place names such as Gia Lam (Good Forest), Truong Lam (Long Forest), Mai Lam (Plum Forest), and Dong Ngan (Mountain Forest).26 Thang Long’s great West Lake lay surrounded by forests that still teemed with wildlife in 1044, when Ly Thai Tong ordered soldiers to capture wild elephants using elephants 25

Dinh Van Thuan and Nguyen Dich Dy, ‘Dac diem moi truong dia chat – co dia ly Holocene giua – muon khu Hoang thanh Thang Long–Hanoi’ [Characteristics of the geological environment and paleogeography of the mid-late Holocene period in the Thang Long–Hanoi area], in Selected Japanese-Vietnamese Papers, p. 210. 2 6 Do Van Ninh, ‘Co Loa’, in Do thi co Viet Nam [Ancient cities of Vietnam] (Hanoi: Vien Su Hoc, 1989), p. 58.

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Building a Capital 119

looted from Champa, which he had raided earlier that year.27 Clearly, water and woods dominated the early environment of the new Dai Viet capital. Water remained a central aspect of Vietnamese life that defined urban architecture for centuries to come. As late as the seventeenth century, an Italian traveller reported: ‘all the houses are built on raised ground to prevent flood. No magnificent house can be built without a great expense, because the waters are everywhere interspersed in every two or three feet of the terrain.’28 In order to claim solid earth on which to build, people had to dig a pond on nearby marshy land into which water could drain from their chosen building site, using the excavated soil to build a small mound upon which they would construct their building.29 This led to a proliferation of ponds and lakes throughout Thang Long. Such an intensive form of land reclamation led generations of locals to repeatedly rebuild new structures on old foundations, as revealed by the excavation of the Thang Long Citadel that took place between 2002 and 2012.30 Such was the nature of water’s abundance and its power to define the surrounding terrain and society. In an environment defined by myriad waterways and impenetrable forests, the boat becomes an essential tool in human society. Such was the case in eleventh-century Thang Long, which sat next to the ‘Great River’ or Red River.31 Historian Nguyen Thua Hy discovered that both the city’s two major ferries were stationed east of the city facing the great river. One ferry, called Dong Bo Dau (C. Dong butou, ‘east port’, Ben Dong), which lay north-east of the capital’s citadel, offered people access to the upper Red River and Yunnan. Along the upper reaches of the Red River lay a port called by the same name, Bo Dau/Butou, except for the initial word ‘Dong’, east. This river port sat near the present day Jianshui in Yunnan.32 People had known about the river road, called Butou Road, since the Tang dynasty. Many battles were 27

Toan Thu, p. 235. Jean-Philippe Marini, Histoire nouvelle et curieuse des royaumes de Tunquin, trans. from the Italian of P. de Marini Romain (Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1666), p. 116. 29 Nishimura Masanari, ‘An Essay on the Formation of Enclosed-type Dykes in the Red River Plain, northern Vietnam’, unpublished manuscript, p. 2. 30 Indeed, the citadel’s axis ran north from the main southern gate Doan Mon past Kinh Thien, the main palace, to North Gate (Cua Bac). Do Van Ninh, ‘Nhung hieu biet moi ve thanh Thang Long’ [A new understanding of the Thang Long citadel], in Selected Japanese–Vietnamese papers, p. 10. It would be an amazing sight, with the mind’s eye, to behold the Ly, Tran and Le kings, accompanied by their court ladies, eunuchs, slaves and servants, walking through the same corridor century after century, however many times the citadel was built, destroyed and rebuilt. 31 Song Cai, meaning ‘Great River’, was the river’s long-time name. A note of clarification is in order here: The name ‘Red River’ does not actually appear in Vietnamese sources before the late nineteenth century. Throughout most of Vietnamese history, the Red River was called ‘Song Cai’ (Great River). It was often called by the different sections, such as ‘Song Phu Luong’ near Hanoi, or ‘Song Bach Hac’ near Viet Tri. 32 See Chapter 6 for Jianshui’s connections with the Chu Dau ware of the fifteenth century. 28

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fought there, before and after Ly Thanh Tong’s reign. Near this location of Dong Bo Dau, the Ly court built a palace, from which the royal family could watch boat racing on the river below.33 The core of the Ly polity seems to have remained firmly anchored in the inland riverine waters of the middle delta, detached from the coast, and therefore indirectly engaged with the sea. By appearance, it shared more similarities with inland neighbours like the Dali kingdom to the north and Lavo kingdom to the west than it did with southern maritime rivals like the kingdom of Champa. However, artefacts indicate evidence of Ly maritime connections, some of which would have proved crucial to the dynasty’s viability. Excavated coins often provide excellent evidence of maritime circulations, and Vietnam has proven no exception in this case. The Tien Le and Dinh dynasties cast some coins, but they seemed to have been found mainly in China rather than in Vietnam.34 The coins, in other words, could have been cast mainly for the purpose of trade rather than circulation in Dai Viet. This seemed to reflect the coastal characteristic of the two dynasties. There was no coin casting under the first 30 years of the Ly.35 Large numbers of Song coins, many of them minted during Ly Thanh Tong’s reign, were shipped from China to Ly Dai Viet annually in exchange for aromatic woods and gold.36 This changed 140  years later under Ly Cao Tong, who began to cast coins in 1186. Momoki Shiro studied the Ly institutions carefully and pointed out that the Ly’s taxation system derived from the southern Chinese variant of the ‘two-tax’ system (liangshui), in which taxpayers (dinh) must submit payments in the dual form of both copper coin and grain.37 Even if the number of viable 33

Nguyen Thua Hy, Thang Long-Ha Noi the ky XVII–XVIII–XIX [Thang Long-Hanoi in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries] (Hanoi: Hoi Su hoc Viet Nam, 1993), p. 26. 34 Yu Xiangdong 于向東, ‘Qianzhi suolu Ding, Tien Le tongqian yu yuenan zaoqi huobishi de ruogan wenti’ [On the early coin casting under the Dinh and Tien Le dynasties recorded in Qianlu], Zhongguo qianbi [Journal of China Numismatics] 102(2008), 61–66. 35 John Whitmore pointed out that during the first 200 years or so after Dai Viet’s independence, the court coined little cash except for the early 1040s, though it did this as much as for political as for economic purposes. John K. Whitmore, ‘Vietnam and the Monetary Flow of Eastern Asia, 13th–18th centuries’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), p. 365. After careful comparison on Chinese coins and Vietnamese coins Nguyen Anh Huy concludes that only two types of coins, ‘Minh Dao Nguyen Bao’ [Coin of the reign years of Minh Dao, 1042–1043] and ‘Thien Cam Thong Bao’ [Coin of the reign years of Thien Cam, 1044–1048], were cast during the Ly Thai Tong reign (1028–1054). Nguyen Anh Huy, Lich su tien te Viet Nam: So truy va luoc khao [Initial research into Vietnamese numismatics] (Hochiminh City: Nxb. Van hoa Sai Gon, 2009), pp. 55–59. 36 Song Huiyao: ‘Xingfa 2’ [Law], chapter 147: ‘Every year those [in Jiaozhi] who chase profit in trading gold and aromatics [with us] asked nothing else but the coins in exchange. [And the Viet court] mandated to the country that the coins are only allowed to come in and not to be carried out’ 逐年規利之徒貿易金香, 必以小平錢為約, 而又下令其國, 小平錢許入不許出 (https:// gx.httpcn.com/book/read/CQAZCQIL/UYILRNKOXV.shtml, accessed 7 March 2010). 37 Momoki Shiro, Chusei Daietsu kokka no seiritsu to hen’yo, pp. 69, 77, 468.

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The Fujian Connection 121

taxpayers, those directly under the Ly control, number half of what they would be under the succeeding Tran dynasty, the Ly economy required a considerable amount of copper currency if the king’s subjects were going to be able to reliably collect and submit the necessary tax due each year, not to mention the need for exchange on the markets. As John Whitmore pointed out, a ‘huge amount of [Song] cash moving out of China … allowed Vietnam to take [its] share of this reliable currency’.38 There were two ways to obtain coins, by paying tribute and by trade. In 1022 and 1028 when the Ly paid tribute to the Song court, the latter paid 6,000 strings (quan) of cash.39 Although the Ly made profit on both, according to Hans Bielenstein, this amount was hardly enough even to cover the cash used by the court and for granting prizes to the officials, let alone circulation in Dai Viet. In 1010 alone, Ly Thai To granted 20,000 strings of cash for building Thang Long citadel.40 This means that most of coins used in Dai Viet had to be obtained by means of trade, maritime mainly. The Ly court could tap into the networks of river, road and, just as importantly, sea routes to tap into the currency markets of its northern neighbour and in turn accelerate the monetisation of the Ly economy without producing much of its own. Clearly, under the surface of this apparently closed and agrarian polity flowed deeper currents, wealth was generated by the river but was also fed by the sea. Some of these sea currents enhanced Ly fortunes, while others undermined them; in the end, they appear to have contributed to the dynasty’s doom, another indication of the power that maritime connections could wield upon Dai Viet society and state. The Fujian Connection Maritime connections certainly played a role in the rise of Ly power. Consider the case of Thao Duong: Imagine a nice day in 1070, during which Ly Thanh Tong ventured from his palace to the Cat Tuong Temple. Thao Duong, his personal religious teacher, followed. He was not native to the region; indeed, he had not gone there willingly. Technically, he was a captive, seized from Champa when Ly Thanh Tong attacked it in 1069. After this, soldiers handed Thao Duong over 38

Whitmore, ‘Vietnam and the Monetary Flow’, p. 365. Hans Bielenstein, Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World, 589–1276 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 35: ‘In August of 1022, envoys presented official gifts and merchandise evaluated at 1,682 strings of cash, for which they were paid 2000 strings of cash. In the 3rd month (May/Apr.) of 1028, the high officials memorialized that the envoys, perhaps privately, had sold fragrant drugs at the price of 3,060 strings of copper cash. An edict ordered that they be reimbursed with 4000 strings of cash … The profit in 1022 was 19%, and in 1028, 31%. Even allowing for the possibility that the Chinese authorities and merchants undervalued the foreign goods, the profit was far from low.’ 4 0 Toan Thu, p. 208. 39

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to a monk-official, who kept him as his slave. Thao Duong was not his real name; it seems more likely that the Sino-Viet sounding appellation came to him after he arrived in Dai Viet. To be fair, he could have been a Chinese who roamed through Champa. However, he could just as likely have hailed from Champa or India – apart from the Sino-Viet Buddhist masters, some successors of Thao Duong’s lineage had Indian names, so the Indic connection was still there.41 More important than his name was his erudition, which clearly impressed his captors, for soon after his arrival in Dai Viet, he became Ly Thanh Tong’s teacher. Under Thao Duong’s tutelage, Ly Thanh Tong learned a Buddhism mixture of Mahayana and Brahmanism that predominated in much of South and Southeast Asia, rather than Zen Buddhism whose origins lay in China.42 This mix conforms to the tradition of Buddhism practised in Phap Van Temple, one of Vietnam’s earliest Buddhist temples. Thao Duong taught his royal student a combination of meditation, asceticism, magic, and ritualism that contained elements of not only Buddhism but also Brahmanism that came from either India or Champa.43 When he arrived in Thang Long, Thao Duong encountered a well-developed city, not the darkly forested swamp that the Ly patriarch had to contend with in 1010. The court had made great strides by the time his grandson and Thao Duong’s pupil Ly Thanh Tong ascended to the throne in 1054. Sources show that its architecture had assumed a decidedly Buddhist character. That year, over 150 official temples already sat in the capital Thang Long,44 in addition to another thousand or so said to have been built by ordinary people. Considering the city’s tiny size compared to today’s metropolis of Hanoi, which has only 120 Buddhist temples, Thang Long must have resembled contemporary Southeast Asian cities like Bagan, given such a density of Buddhist buildings and monuments. Unlike Thao Duong, most prominent monks in eleventh-century Dai Viet were not captured slaves. Many came from influential families, and many possessed Chinese surnames. Of the 51 prominent monks listed in the Thien Uyen Tap Anh (Outstanding figures in Vietnamese Zen community) who lived between 933 and 1216 ce, 21 bore typically non-Viet family names, many of them common to Fujian.45 The biographies of these monks indicate that they were locals of Chinese descent, not newly arrived migrants. As such, no bridge was needed 41

Quite a few of Thao Duong’s supposed successors were also laymen. Cuong Tu Nguyen, Zen in Medieval Vietnam: A Study and Translation of the Thien Uyen Tap Anh (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 53–54. 42 Ibid. 43 Keith W. Taylor, ‘What Lies behind the Earliest Story of Buddhism in Ancient Vietnam?’ Journal of Asian Studies 77, 1 (2017), 6; Nguyen Duy Hinh, ‘Three Legends and Early Buddhism in Vietnam’, Vietnam Forum 13 (1990), 10–23; Nguyen, Zen in Medieval Vietnam, p. 43. 44 Viet Su Luoc, p. 79. 45 They include Lữ 吕 (2), Mâu 牟, Khúc 曲, Đàm 譚 (2), Tăng 曾 (2), Nhan 顏, Vạn 萬, Khương 康, Âu 區, Kiề u 矯 (3), Vương 王, Phí 费, Hứa 許, Tô 蘇 (2), and Quách 郭. Thich Thanh Tu,

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between them and the court, and there would not be such a bridge as the common language spoken in the capital area, the eastern coast and the Thanh Hoa areas up to the tenth century was Annamese Middle Chinese.46 This language could be a dialect of a broader Southern or Southwestern Middle Chinese of the tenth century.47 Started from the Ly dynasty however, the influence of Middle Chinese diminished and, as Pain Frederic points out, ‘a sinicised proto-Vietic dialect emerged and would give birth to proto-Vietnamese, an urban language’.48 This would have been observable around the period of Ly Thanh Tong’s reign. The biography of Ly Thanh Tong’s cousin, the prominent monk Vien Chieu (999–1090) hints at the royal family’s Chinese background. Vien Chieu’s surname was Mai; he was a nephew of the Dowager Linh Cam.49 Like Vien Chieu, the Dowager surnamed Mai, a Chinese surname which might have been in Dai Viet for generations. Another eminent monk, Quang Tri (?–1091), a contemporary of Vien Chieu and Ly Thanh Tong, was the brother of an imperial concubine named Chuong Phung, and came from a wealthy family. They bore the surname Nhan, which unmistakably points to the region of southern Fujian. Such evidence suggests a Hokkien ancestral line in the Ly lineage. Such a thing would hardly be unusual, because Fujian Chinese circulated both inside and outside the Ly court. In the words of a Chinese contemporary, the Song Chancellor Wang Anshi (1021–1086): ‘Most of officers that Jiaozhi appointed are Min’  – in other words, Fujianese.50 This situation seemed to have continued throughout the Ly era. A century later Fan Chengda, a Song officer in Guangxi, reported that ‘all the Fujianese who went [to Jiaozhi] are treated very kindly. They are appointed as officers and their advice is sought after.’51 Such ethnic diversity in Ly society reflects its transitional character, Thien su Viet Nam [Buddhist Masters of Vietnam] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb. Tong hop thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, 2008), pp. 52–224. Many of these names belonged to big families, such as Lữ, Mâu, Khúc, Đàm, Kiề u, Phí, and Tô. Geng Huiling points out that many of these Buddhist temples in Dai Viet were built by the royal and aristocratic figures. Geng Huiling 耿慧玲, Yuenan shilun: Jinshi ziliao zhi lishi wenhua bijiao 越南史論: 金石資料之歷史文化比較 [Views on Vietnamese history: Historical and cultural comparisons on the epigraphic materials] (Taipei: Xinwenfeng Press, 2004), pp. 243–244. The temples where these monks practiced could have been built by their own big families. This practice was still in place centuries later in seventeenth-century Tongking. 46 John D. Phan, ‘Re-imagining “Annam”: A New Analysis of Sino–Viet–Muong Linguistic Contact’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 3 (2010), 3–24. 47 Keith W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5. 48 Pain Frederic, ‘“Giao Chı̉” (Jiaozhi) as a Diffusion Center of Middle Chinese Diachronic Changes: Syllabic Weight Contrast and Phonologisation of Its Phonetic Correlates’, Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 50, 3 (2020), 379. 49 Thich Thanh Tu, Thien su Viet Nam, p. 67. Toan Thu records a different title Kim Thien for this Dowager surnamed Mai. Toan Thu, p. 238. 50 Li Tao, Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian, chapter247. 51 ‘闽人附海舶往者, 必厚遇之, 因命之官, 咨以决事’. Ma Duanlin 馬端臨, Wenxian tongkao 文献通考 [Comprehensive Examination of Literature], chapter 330, ‘Jiaozhi’ (www​ .guoxue123.com/shibu/0401/01wxtk/333.htm, accessed 10 August 2019).

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which Keith Taylor has characterised as ‘varied, experimental and nonexclusive’. At this point in history, he continues, the Ly ‘were not consciously disentangling themselves from ten centuries of Chinese rule … They did not feel culturally threatened by China. China was a military and political problem, but not a cultural threat.’52 This Fujianese element in Dai Viet society that Wang Anshi and Fan Chengda point out can mean only one thing: a continuation of maritime interchange between the Red River Delta and the people of southern China. In the twelfth century the situation appears to change in ways that allow Fujianese and other elites of the coast to become a political power in their own right. The Rise of the Coast During the first 150  years of Ly dynasty rule, Dai Viet’s main ports lay in Nghe An and perhaps also Thanh Hoa, as the Chronicle of Dai Viet states: ‘when the ships from China came to visit, they had used the seaports of Dien Chau (Nghe An) and Tha Vien (unidentified location) as entry points’.53 This explains why the Ly court repeatedly sent eunuchs to ‘guard’ the Nghe An region, no doubt for collecting the wealth generated by the coastal trade than for military purposes.54 This also explains why the Ly built several royal outposts on the coastal area of the Red River Delta, both to oversee and collect taxes from people travelling the newly opened coastal area, and to facilitate travel to what is now central Vietnam. The travel palace of Ung Phong (hanh cung), for example, had been constructed along a route that led from Thang Long to Ly Nhan, then to Hoa Lu and Thanh Hoa before reaching Nghe An, creating a communication and logistics hub that connected the Red River Delta with the kingdom’s southern coastal territory.55 These complexes were situated on waterways and built around Buddhist temples with royal residences, storehouses, and production centres. Clearly, the attentions of the Ly court included the coast, its maritime hinterland, and its inland complements, but it also had a distinctly south-western focus (see Map 4.2). As the Ly court’s attention fixed towards the southwest, the eastern coast became a vibrant site of commercial activity most likely controlled by local powers, a situation that recalls the Water Frontier of the eighteenth-century 52

Keith W. Taylor, ‘Authority and Legitimacy in Eleventh-Century Vietnam’, in D. Marr and A. Milner (eds), Southeast Asia in the Ninth to Fourteenth Centuries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 149–150. 53 54 Toan Thu, p. 424. Ibid., pp. 274, 276, 278. 55 High-quality bricks were found here in a 2002 excavation conducted by Vietnamese and Japanese scholars; see Vu Minh Giang, ‘Su bien doi vi tri cua ngo cua vung ha luu chau tho song Hong’ [Changes in the sea gates on the lower Red River Delta], unpublished paper, IIAS Workshop on Vietnamese Village Studies, 28–30 August 2002, Leiden.

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Map 4.2  The main areas under the Ly control and its royal travel lodges Source: Reproduced from Momoki Shiro, Chusei Daietsu kokka no seiritsu to hen’yo, 259.

Mekong Delta (see Chapter 9). Salt was the region’s most lucrative trade, not because of its value but because for centuries trade in the good had been controlled by a government monopoly in China and was the single most important revenue of the government. Salt from Jiaozhi coast had been a major item exchanged for horses from Dali. It was so important to Dali and the TaiKadai speakers on the salt–horse route that the latter revolted in 858, when Li Zhuo, the Chinese governor of the Tang Protectorate of Annam, enforced an unreasonably low price on the exchange rate between salt and horses.56 The ‘Tale of Fish Spirit’ in a well-known fifteenth century book, the Collection of Strange Stories from Linh Nam (Linh Nam chich quai) describes how the Dan people of the eastern coast exchanged salt for rice, cloth, knives, and 56

Toan Thu, p. 163; John K. Whitmore, ‘Colliding Peoples: Tai/Viet Interactions in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, paper presented at the Association of Asian Studies, San Diego, 2000.

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axes with mountain peoples and often traded between the mountains and the Eastern Sea.57 An early fifteenth-century Chinese record shows that over 88 per cent of Dai Viet’s revenue from salt was produced on the eastern coast.58 It is not clear to what extent the Ly could tax this salt, if at all. From China’s side, however, it is certain that salt went to Guangxi. Indeed, it appears as one of the key items traded from the eastern coast to Yongzhou (today’s Nanning in Guangxi).59 According to a Northern Song officer named Wu Jing 吴儆 (1125–1183), the prefectural officer of Yongzhou: ‘Our prefecture is neighboured with Qinzhou, Lianzhou, and Jiaozhi, private salt haunted the region and we cannot ban all of them.’60 This eastern coast linked the sea with the hinterland stretching from upper Tongking to Guangxi and Yunnan, a place that Jamie Anderson and John Whitmore termed ‘the Dong World’,61 which before the thirteenth century formed a broad autonomous region in which local chiefs contended with each other for dominance over its valleys.62 The areas of Dong Trieu and Tien Yen which connected to Thai Nguyen and the hinterland could have been the places where salt transactions operated. Here, the crucial transactional links were maintained by two groups of people: the merchants who traded salt on Dai Viet’s coast, and the Tai-Kadai elite in the Sino-Viet border region. As another Song source dated 1185 states, ‘Yongzhou traded official salt … They had set up two trading sites in Yongping and Taiping (in today’s Guangxi) to 57

Tran The Phap, Linh Nam chich quai [Collection of Strange Stories from Linh Nam], in Sun Xun, Trinh Khac Manh and Chen Yiyuan (eds), Yuenan hanwen xiaoshuo jicheng, 越南漢文 小說集成 [A collection of novels produced Vietnam] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2011), vol. 1, p. 19. 58 Li Tana, ‘The Ming Factor and the Emergence of the Viet in the 15th Century’, in Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (eds), Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: China Factor (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), p. 91. 59 Catherine Churchman points out that salt and iron were used as weapons against the Li and Lao peoples between the Pearl River and Red River Deltas in the third century. Catherine Churchman, The People between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 127. 60 The original text reads, ‘緣本州與欽州、廉州、交趾相鄰, 私鹽出沒, 難以盡行禁止’. Wu Jing, Zhuzhouji 竹洲集 [Essays complied in the Bamboo Isle], chapter 2, collected in the Qinding siku quanshu 欽定四庫全書 [The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries] (https:// ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=701770, accessed 15 March 2012); For comprehensive research on the salt control of the Southern Song dynasty and salt smuggling of Jiaozhi, see Liang Gengyao 梁庚堯, Nansong yanque: shiyan chanxiao yu zhengfu kongzhi 南宋鹽榷:食 鹽產銷與政府控制 [Salt taxes of the Southern Song Dynasty: The production and circulation of salt and government control] (Taipei: Taida chuban zhongxin, 2014), p. 481. 61 Catherine Churchman points out that ‘Dong’ was likely a Tai word for a mountain valley or level ground between cliffs beside a stream. ‘Where to Draw the Line?’ In James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore (eds), China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), p. 65. 62 James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore (eds), China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), p. 15.

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exchange fabrics for private salt from Jiaozhi … therefore, the grotto people were also engaged in trading Jiaozhi salt.’63 The role of local chiefs in this ‘private salt’ traffic cannot be underestimated, for the lucrative gains from local coastal–hinterland exchanges made the leadership of the region’s local chiefs possible, as Oscar Salemink points out.64 So the relationship between the Dong chiefs and the coastal Jiaozhi had gone back a long way. We learn, for example, that many of those who lived in the Guangxi–Viet border region sheltered many of the Tang officers who had fled from Dali troops when they attacked La Thanh, the capital of Annam, which they did twice, and occupied for three years, between 863 and 866 ce.65 This was an example of the ‘negotiated alliances’ between the local chiefs and the central kingdom.66 As they turned a blind eye to the salt traffic from which both Viet officers and local chiefs could profit, Viet courts turned their attention to political considerations. Le Trac in the fourteenth century revealed why in a comment about the local products of Dai Viet: ‘Salt is made by boiling the sea water and it is as white as snow. Border peoples chose to serve Annam [rather than China], because [they could make] profits from salt and iron.’67 In the Dong World, as Bradley Davis points out, the balance of power between local powerbrokers and different forms of state administration was ‘never completely settled.’68 Being in the buffer zone, the loyalty of these border communities 63

The complete citation reads: ‘邕州賣官鹽, 並緣紹興間一時指揮, 於江左永平、太平兩寨 置場, 用物帛博買交趾私鹽, 夾雜官鹽出賣, 緣此溪洞之人, 亦皆販賣交鹽, 近雖改行鈔法, 其本州尚仍前弊’. Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Xu zizhi tongjian 續資治通鑑 [Continuation to the Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government], completed 1801, chapter 150 (https:// ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=961884, accessed 2 July 2020). The magnitude of salt trade between the Gulf of Tongking and the upland area to Yunnan and Guangxi could be seen from a report by the Guangxi officer in 1744: ‘Jiaozhi is on the coast and produces salt abundantly. Moreover, they do not ban on private salt, and allows their people to produce their sun-dried sea salt and sell it at their own will. All the seller needed to pay is 20 cash [of tax] and then he was allowed to carry the salt to sell. When the salt reached the Inner land (i.e. QingChina), every jin (V. can, 500 grams) of salt could be sold for one to 6 fen (0.38 to 2.27 grams) of silver. All that stands between the Van Ninh prefecture of Jiaozhi and our Nanning prefecture is the mountains called Mount Shiwan (“Mount Hundred Thousand”). The people on this border are so keen on this trade for its profit that they would find all of kinds of ways to evade drafting for army.’ Qing Gaozong shilu [Records from the Qing palace: Gaozong], (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1985–1987), vol. 11, p. 827. 64 Oscar Salemink, ‘A View from the Mountains: A Critical History of Lowlander-Highlander Relations in Vietnam’, in Thomas Sikor et al. (eds), Opening Boundaries: Upland Transformations in Vietnam (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 27. 65 The complete citation reads: 安南寇陷之初, 流人多寄溪洞。其安南將吏官健走至海門者 人數不少…其安南溪洞首領, 素推誠節, 雖蠻寇竊據城壁, 而酋豪各守土疆. ‘Benji’ 19, in 劉昫. Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Book of Tang], completed 945 CE (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 3:654. 66 Anderson and Whitmore, ‘Introduction’, in China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest, p. 17. 67 Le Trac, Annam chi luoc [A brief history of Annam] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), p. 361. 68 Bradley Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China–Vietnam Borderlands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), p. 9.

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shifted between China and Dai Viet. What kept the Tai-Kadai speakers loyal to Dai Viet were the profits that they could obtain from the free traffic in salt from the kingdom’s coast. The private salt business between Dai Viet coast and Guangxi raises an important question about the source of the Tran clan that had risen to power in the late twelfth century and seized the throne of Dai Viet in 1225. Tran kings declared that ‘We rose from coast’;69 but fishing was the trade most denigrated in Southeast Asian and southern Chinese societies.70 So how did the Tran rise from such low status? It is tempting to speculate that the Tran engaged in salt making and trade with upland societies. According to Tran Quoc Vuong, the Tran had wandered around the eastern coast before moving to Thien Truong.71 The fact that the huge ancestor temple complex of the Tran royal family is situated in the mountainous An Sinh, Dong Trieu district, Quang Ninh confirms this. Dong Trieu is an ideal place through which to connect the coast to Lang Son, Cao Bang, and Yunnan. Proof awaits, but this could have been the Tran clan’s source of their fortune.72 A Brief History of Viet (Viet su luoc), compiled in the thirteenth century, reveals that as late as 1206, a large part of Dai Viet’s coastal area was under the rule of local chiefs. The eastern Red River Delta such as Hong (Hai Duong), Khoai (Hung Yen), and Dai Hoang (western Nam Dinh and northern Ninh Binh) areas were beyond the control of the Ly court.73 Interestingly, a Chinese text compiled during the Qing dynasty claims that the Dan people, a historical boat culture long widespread across coastal Guangdong, descended from Jiaozhi.74 An earlier source from the twelfth century refers to these people as the ‘Jiaozhi Dan’; typically living on their boats, they regularly travelled to Qinzhou across the gulf with fish and other sea products to exchange for 69

Toan Thu, p. 378. In Vietnam, fishing villages were despised, and fishermen were called Hạ, meaning ‘inferior people’. They were excluded from the local affairs taking place in the đình. Edyta Roszko, ‘Spirited Dialogues: Contestations over the Religious Landscape in Central Vietnam’s Littoral Society’, PhD dissertation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (2011), p. 126. 71 Tran Quoc Vuong, ‘Xu Dong: Hai Hung nhin tu Ke Cho’ [The Eastern region: Hai Hung viewed from Ke Cho], in Tran Quoc Vuong, Theo dong lich su [Tracing the stream of history] (Hanoi: Nxb Van Hoa, 1996), p. 259. 72 Tong Trung Tin et al., ‘Di tich Den Thai qua tu lieu khao co hoc’ [Archaeological data of the temple of ancestors], Khao co hoc [Vietnam Archaeology] 5 (2011), 5–22. The article points out that An Sinh was the original homeland (que goc) of the Tran (20–21). The Nghieu Phong harbour in Quang Yen could shelter 300–400 junks. See Vu Duong Luan and Nola Cooke, ‘Chinese Merchants and Mariners in Nineteenth-Century Tongking’, in Nola Cooke, Li Tana, and James Anderson (eds), The Tongking Gulf through History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 150–151. 73 Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi [Vietnamese land throughout history] (Hanoi: Van Hoc, 1964), pp. 91–93. 74 Mao Qiling, Mansi hezhi [A complete account of the barbarians and their institutions], in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, section History 四庫全書存目叢書: 史部227 (Taipei: Zhuangyan wenhua shiye, 1996), chapter 15, p. 698. 70

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rice and cloth.75 Others, like the people of Quang Ninh, the province bordering Song China, indiscriminately colluded with refugees, smugglers, bandits, and pirates, ignoring any pretence of a strong political border.76 It is not clear whether these were the same people as those described in the nineteenthcentury Unified Gazetteer of Vietnam (Dai Nam nhat thong chi), who also subsisted on fishing and salt-making.77 Those who documented these people had difficulty understanding their dialect of Vietnamese, so they dubbed it tieng vung be, the ‘language of the sea zone’.78 It appears that some did migrate to south-coastal China and eventually identified as Dan. The descendants of Mac Dang Dung, the founder of the Mac dynasty in sixteenth-century Dai Viet, who rose from the coast of today’s Hai Duong, admitted that their ancestors were Dan people from Guangdong.79 Whatever their general situation, the nature of the littoral sometimes presented opportunities for extraordinary bids for power over the political centre. This very dynamic explains the trajectory of a coastal clan surnamed Tran from Fujianese mariners to a Dai Viet dynasty. In short, the littoral society that inhabited the eastern delta during the early years of the Ly dynasty consisted largely of outsiders  – Kam-Tai speakers, recent migrants from Fujian, Viet and Dan fishermen, and the Sino-Viet Vu clan – people that the political centre left to their own devices on coastal margins.80 This forgotten coast was to become a different place in the decades the followed Ly Thanh Tong’s death in 1072. The cause originated in China, specifically Fujian, and arrived in Dai Viet through the mediation of the inhabitants of the Jiaozhi Sea (Jiaozhi Yang). Resurgence of the Gulf While the early Ly court’s south-western orientation left the eastern coast and its adjacent delta channels marginalised, the twelfth century Ly court adopted a decidedly different approach to the region. A passage in the Chronicle of Dai Viet dated 1349 states this straightforwardly:81 During the Ly dynasty, when the ships from China came to visit, they had used the seaports of Dien Chau and Tha Vien as entry points. Since [1148 ce] the sea routes 75

Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida, p. 196. James A. Anderson, The Rebel Den of Nung Trí Cao: Loyalty and Identity along the SinoVietnamese Frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 77 Dai Nam nhat thong chi [Unified Gazetteer of Dai Nam] (Hue: Thuan Hoa, 1992), 3:334. 78 Vu Tu Luc et al., Van hoa va Cu dan Dong bang Song Hong [Culture and inhabitants of the Red River Delta] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1991), p. 160. 79 Yan Congjian, Shuyu zhouzi lu [Notes on the surrounding countries] (Compiled 1574, Repr. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1993), p. 233; cf. the statement by Mac Kinh Thu to Qing officials that ‘my ancestors came from Chaxiang village, Dongguan district, Guangdong’. National Archives No.1, Beijing, vol. 7775, doc. no. 25. 80 Anderson, ‘Slipping through Holes’, pp. 94–95. 81 Toan Thu, p. 424. 76

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have changed, and these seaports become dry and shallow. [Therefore, merchants] have tended to gather at Van Don, and this was why [the court] ordered them to set up [government offices] there.

Beginning in the middle of the twelfth century, then, a major shift occurred, in which the centre of Dai Viet’s maritime commerce shifted from the southwestern to eastern half of the Red River Delta. In the twelfth century an event happened in a remote part of northern China that profoundly changed the Tongking Gulf coast. In 1127, the Song dynasty suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Jurchen, a semi nomadic people from northeast Asia. The Song court retreated, crossing the Yangzi River to today’s Hangzhou, where it re-established itself as the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). To halt any further advance of its northern enemy, with their strong cavalry, the Southern Song needed horses to match it. Unfortunately, these had always come from the very northern territories the Song court had lost. Cut off from these superior horses, the southern court saw only one alternative: the Yunnan pony of southwestern China. Now, ‘the court’s business of obtaining horses is concentrated in the district of Yong [Guangxi], and it is in Yong [prefecture] where valuables and curiosities are gathered’, the Guangxi scholar Zhou Qufei pointed out.82 The market for horses greatly expanded in Yunnan, as the flow of government silver into the gulf region increased, and merchants expanded the market for horses to tap into it. This boosted the trade across the borders between Yunnan and neighbours like Guangxi province and the Kingdom of Dai Viet, or to the Chinese, Jiaozhi. To illustrate this market, Map 4.3 shows the horse–salt trading routes of the twelfth century, and its relations with Qinzhou, Thang Long, and Van Don. This route network was to play a more important role in Dai Viet during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when demand for cobalt blue for ceramic and copper for coins and firearms created new commodity flows that changed Dai Viet’s economic fortunes as well as the political map of the mainland Southeast Asia. Horse-trading now became the main driver of regional commerce, stimulating and structuring bilateral trade between Guangxi and Dai Viet, Dai Viet and Hainan Island, and Dai Viet and Champa. The term of this trading area ‘Jiaozhi Sea’ never appears in any official set of Chinese records or chronicles, nor do informal sources cite it before the twelfth century. It had been created precisely because travel had increased, and trade opportunities had arisen in the Gulf of Tongking region. The once nearly deserted northern gulf coast and depopulated Red River Delta of the late Tang era, nearly forgotten for about 300 years, was resurrected in the twelfth century, all thanks to the Yunnan pony. 82

Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida, p. 47.

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Map 4.3  The horse–salt trading routes and the trading sites of silk-aromatics in Qinzhou. Enlargement: Ceramic making areas.

For one and half centuries after its independence, Dai Viet’s main port lay in Nghe An, close to Champa – Dai Viet’s archival but also its main trade partner. Then, in 1149, the situation changed. Only twenty years after the Song court moved to southern China, the name ‘Van Don Port’ appears in a Vietnamese chronicle, in a report that merchant ships from Java, Lopburi, and Siam had arrived there.83 The Chronicle of Dai Viet, in the same passage listing the primary ports under the early emperors, revealed: ‘Since then [1148 ce], the sea routes changed and [the older]seaports became dry and shallow; [therefore, merchants] tended to gather at Van Don, which is why [the Ly court] ordered them to set up [the government offices] there.’84 A major shift had occurred; the pivot of Dai Viet trade had shifted from the south-western to north-eastern ends of the coastal delta. Van Don is an island less than 150 kilometres from Qinzhou, a Chinese port city set along the gulf’s northern shore and the main exchange centre of the Jiaozhi Sea, which lay at the intersection of lucrative mercantile routes whose traffic inhabitants of the coast facilitated. In addition to horses from Yunnan, 83

Toan Thu, p. 290.

84

Ibid., p. 424.

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Van Don also facilitated commerce in silk from Sichuan and a variety of places in Southeast Asia. It’s main trading partner lay to the east, across the gulf, in Qinzhou. Zhou Qufei described Van Don’s tight relationship with Qinzhou thus: All Jiaozhi’s everyday wares depend on Qinzhou, so ships constantly go back and forth between the two [ports] … Those who come with sea products to exchange for rice and cotton fabric in small quantities are called the ‘Dan of Jiaozhi’. Those rich merchants who come to trade come from [Dai Viet’s] border area of Vinh Yen prefecture to Qinzhou: these are called ‘small shipping’ (xiaogang). ‘Large quantity shipping’ (dagang) refers to the envoys sent by the court [of Dai Viet] to trade here [in Qinzhou]. The goods they trade are gold, silver, copper coins, aloeswood, varieties of fragrant wood, pearls, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros’ horn … Rich merchants buy brocades from Shu [Sichuan] to trade for aromatics in Qinzhou once a year, often involving thousands of quan of cash … [When the deal is made], the officers [at the markets] weigh the aromatics and deliver the brocade for both sides to finish the deal. At the trading site the [Song] officers only levy taxes on the merchants of our side.85

In a short time, a rich interregional commerce grew in the gulf, with Qinzhou at its centre and Van Don in its orbit. Clearly, horses did not provide Dai Viet its only incentive to nurture sea trade. Commercial revolution in southern China further intensified it. Its appetite for goods from Southeast Asia during the Southern Song dynasty far outweighed that during the Northern Song. While the latter imported 70 to 80 types of commodities annually, the Southern Song imported 1330. Some onethird of these were aromatics, many of which Dai Viet produced or relayed.86 In Qinzhou, the reputation of old Jiaozhi had grown so strong that the aromatics shipped there for trade became known as ‘Jiaozhi aloeswood’ (C. Jiaozhi chenxiang). In the markets of Jiaozhi Sea, however, it was public knowledge that in fact ‘all the so-called “Jiaozhi aloeswood” traded in Qinzhou came from Champa’ to the south.87 Whatever the facts, the name ‘Jiaozhi’ seems to have conjured nostalgia for the glorious Han dynasty and its exotic southern portal. But the Jiaozhi Sea differed very much from earlier trading systems in the Tongking Gulf. Perhaps the most consequential difference could be found in the Fujianese, whose growing prominence ultimately brought one of their kind to the throne of Dai Viet at the expense of the Ly. The Tran Coup d’État The aftermath of Dai Viet’s reengagement with resurgent gulf commerce through the Jiaozhi Sea demonstrates the ambiguous consequences of 85

Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida, pp. 196–197. Guangdong shengzhi [Guangdong provincial gazetteer] (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004), p. 11. 8 7 Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida, p. 241. 86

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engagement with the sea. While it enriched the Ly court, maritime commerce also contributed to its downfall in 1225, because that wealth also enabled the rise of a new political elite centred along the Dai Viet coast, represented most visibly by the Tran clan, who would overthrow the Ly and establish their own dynasty. The story of this upheaval begins four generations before, across the gulf in the port city of Qinzhou, Van Don’s principal trading partner. According to a legend created during the late Song period, when a member of the Tran clan migrated to Dai Viet from Changle district in the prefecture of Fuzhou on Fujian’s central coast. It happened like this. One day, having gambled his family wealth away, he wandered overseas and eventually landed in Qinzhou. Given its relationship to Dai Viet, Vietnamese frequented the city; even Viet aristocrats travelled there often to conduct trade. It was here in Qinzhou that the Fujianese wanderer met a Dai Viet’s princess. She fell in love with him, and he appears to have fallen in love with her, because after they met, he moved to ‘Jiaozhi’, or Dai Viet. He must have done so without doubt and some knowledge or form of assistance from the granddaughter or other local elites because after his arrival he immediately set about to study for the kingdom’s civil-service examination, which he passed. This led to marriage with the princess, and entry into Dai Viet’s elite society as a new minister of the Ly court. In another three generations, his descendent would seize the throne.88 This Chinese account is a fairy tale but contains enough facts to confirm Vietnamese accounts of the Tran family’s ethnic origins, which assert that the first emperor was a fourth-generation descendent of Fujianese immigrants, and whose ancestors settled in the coastal area and worked as ‘fishermen for generations’.89 Perhaps, too, they shipped salt, as speculated above. In any case, the Tongking Gulf would have seemed quite familiar to the Tran, as it did to other Min mariners, for he was a product of a similar littoral society deeply invested in fishing and sea trade and securely able to ‘fuse together earthbound and sea-drift worlds’.90 As part of the growing South China Sea network of Chinese commerce, this sector began to wield increasing power within Ly Dai Viet. It was this littoral society that played a crucial role in the transition of power from the Ly to the Tran, and from inland control to coastal dominance by the thirteenth century. The rise of the Tran and their overthrow of the Ly resulted from a series of causes mediated in part through maritime society. It began with China’s Song commercial revolution, which intensified in the twelfth century and affected 88

Zhou Mi 周密, Qidong yeyu 齊東野語 [Ridiculous words by a person from Shandong], completed late thirteenth century, chapter 19 (http://book.sbkk8.com/gudai/qidongyeyu/113098​ .html, accessed 8 June 2012). 89 Toan Thu, p. 321. 90 Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of Thuạn̂ Quảng, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37 (1), 133.

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the greater Asian macro-economy through Southern Song China’s increased engagement in sea trade. It also tilted the balance of economic power in China towards the south-eastern coast.91 This surge in coastal power occurred all over Southeast Asia, as increased sea trade translated into greater power for the region’s coastal elites. On mainland Southeast Asia, inland central powers suffered upheaval by polities centred on coastal entrepôts: Pegu in the Irrawaddy domain, Ayudhya in the Chao Phraya, and the Phnom Penh region in the Mekong. A similar upheaval occurred in twelfth-century Dai Viet, too, as John Whitmore perceptively observed, however, Ly dynasty managed to delay their demise by linking their fortunes to the growing power of the Tran clan on the coast. As a result, they held onto power, at least for a few more decades. Together, they formed a coalition that through the 1210s and 1220s defeated various of challenges by mid-delta rivals in today’s Hung Yen province, between Thang Long and the coast.92 With this victory, Whitmore relates, citing the Chronicle of Dai Viet – upper, middle, and lower reaches of the Red River Delta integrated, and ‘the state (quoc) became one’.93 Their fortunes now tied to their Tran allies, the Ly clan opened itself to greater alliance with coastal elites and the influence of coastal culture. This transition is reflected in Hai Duong local history, like the history of the Vu clan of Mo Trach, descended from Vu Hon, who served the Tang Dynasty as a protectorgeneral of Annam in the 840s. None of the Vu family members served in the Ly court during the first two centuries of Dai Viet’s independence, but beginning at the turn of the thirteenth century, and over the four centuries that followed, the family produced three government ministers and eighteen doctoral students (tien si), a clear sign of changed status, for the Vu clan and for the eastern delta at large. The causes of this lay generally in the important role played by coastal societies in the political economy of Ly Dai Viet but specifically in the renaissance of the Gulf of Tongking – the ‘Jiaozhi Sea’ – as a commercial region, enhancing the power of the coast and the Fujianese sea merchants who settled there and changing the kingdom’s regional balance of power in their favour, with profound consequences for the fate of the Ly dynasty. This altered the evolution of elite society at the centre of Dai Viet politics in two significant ways. First, the pivot of Buddhist culture shifted. Both Ly and Tran clans practiced Buddhism, however, the Ly looked to India for its inspiration; while the Tran, with its coastal ties, looked to China’s Thien (C. Chan 91

Mark Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), Part 2. Revealingly the leader of a major rival of the Ly court was a Chinese surnamed Phí 费郎, who was based in Dai Hoang (Ninh Binh). His group was termed as ‘people of Dai Hoang’ (nhan Dai Hoang) in the Viet chronicles. Toan Thu, p. 308. 93 John K. Whitmore, ‘The Rise of the Coast: Trade, State and Culture in Early Dai Viet’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37 1 (2006), 103–122; Whitmore, ‘Ngo (Chinese) Communities and Montane–Littoral Conflict in Dai Viet, ca. 1400–1600,’ Asia Major 27 2 (2014), 56. 92

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or Zen) sect. Additionally, the Tran elite cultivated classical Chinese thought, especially Confucianism. Second, the newly empowered coastal culture used this latter body of ideas to promote a new government form. As members of the Tran clan and other coastal elites entered the halls of Ly government, they promoted Nho (C. Ru) or Confucianist literati culture hoping to use institutions like the civil-service examination to cultivate a strong official class. With their ascent to the pinnacle of power, the Tran and their supporters could institute their interpretation of Sinic agrarian policies. The examinations, beginning in 1232, 1239, and 1247, produced graduates almost exclusively from the coastal zone – in particular, today’s eastern and southern provinces of Hai Duong, Son Nam, and Thanh Hoa. Elites of the eastern coast were most likely excluded from the Ly inner circle, according to a survey of Poetry and Essays of the Ly and Tran (Tho Van Ly Tran), a ‘who’s who’ manual that covers the four centuries of Ly and Tran rule. Out of the 26 people listed under the Ly, only two, both monks, came from the eastern delta. During the Tran era (1225–1400), this situation radically changed: under this dynasty, 29 of the 35 people listed in the anthology came from the eastern delta.94 It initiated the system of regularly registering the population and maintaining official dike systems on both the Red and Ma Rivers that formed the main arteries of Dai Viet. Perhaps equally important, the scholarly class under the Tran produced the first distinctly Vietnamese histories, first by Tran Pho with A Brief History of Viet in the first few decades of the Tran, then by Le Van Huu with his Dai Viet Chronicles in 1272.95 Both wrote during the thirteenth century, and ironically, both came from littoral communities, making them ‘scholars from without’, to use Keith Taylor’s term.96 The shift of Dai Viet’s economic gravity to the coastal area is clear if we look at the sites of royal estates that opened only four decades after the founding of the Tran dynasty in 1225. Dai Viet population doubled to three million between 1200 and 1340, according to Sakurai.97 This means that the Tran king was 94

Tho Van Ly Tran [Poetry and essays of the Ly and Tran], 3 vols. (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa Hoi, 1977–1978). 95 Le Trac stated in his Annam chi luoc (A brief history of Annam) that ‘Tran Pho wrote Viet Chi’ (History of the Viet), and ‘Le Huu edited Viet Chi’. Le completed Annam chi luoc in 1330. See Le, Annan zhilue (Han original of Annam chi luoc, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), pp. 353–354. Scholars generally accepted that Tran Pho’s Viet chi was in fact Viet su luoc, on which basis Le Van Huu compiled a more complete history, which became Dai Viet su ky. See Chen Chingho, ‘Daietsu Shiki Zensho-no senshuu-to dempon 大越史記全書の撰修と傳 本 [The compilation of Dai Viet su ky Toan tu and the editions], in Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan Thu [The Complete Annals of Dai Viet] ed. Chen Chingho (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyobunka kenkyujo, 1986), 1: pp. 1–3. 96 Keith W. Taylor, ‘Voices Within and Without: Tales from Stone and Paper about Do Anh Vu (1114–1159)’, in K. W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (eds), Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995), pp. 59–80. 97 Yumio Sakurai, ‘Age of Commerce’, unpublished ms., cited in Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context. c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1:368.

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Map 4.4 The Tran’s royal farms on the coast, thirteenth to fourteenth centuries Source: For these locations, see Truong Huu Quynh, Che do ruong dat o Viet Nam: The ky XI -XVIII [ Land tenure regimes in Vietnam from XI to XVIII centuries], 2 vols (Hanoi: Nxb Khoa hoc Xa Hoi, 1983), 1:156–160; Nguyen Thi Phuong Chi, ‘Vai net ve tinh hinh dien tran thoi Tran’ [Some points about the Tran’s estates], Nghien cuu lich su [Journal of Historical Studies] 2 (2002), 52–56.

facing population pressures as soon as he ascended to power. In 1266, the Tran court issued a somewhat desperate plea to the aristocracy, asking all ‘princes, princesses, king’s sons-in-law, and court ladies’ gather ‘landless and drifting’ people to become their slaves on open royal estates called dien trang.98 Most of 98

Toan Thu, p. 345.

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these dien trang lay along the coast, as a later record elaborated: ‘In the earlier period, the royal families tended to make their slaves build dykes and weirs on the coasts to stop the salty water. After two to three years, the land would be ready to cultivate. Those slaves would marry each other and live on the lands. [This was how] many of the dien trang were founded.’99 Map 4.4 shows the locations of these royal estates. Vietnamese chronicles report that the Tran royal farms lay on the coast. Yet as Map 4.4 shows, none of the farms was on the coast, and geological studies indicate that the land of the Red River plain had formed sometime around 2000 bce.100 This suggest that these estates lay in a miasmic belt of coastal swamp with only limited higher ground in the Hung Yen area. This means, then, that the work of reclaiming the salty coastal area began sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century, about 300 years after Dai Viet established its independence from China. Once reclaimed, this newly opened estate land proved useful to the state, for the new land could accommodate a fifth-month rice harvest (V. lua chiem, i.e. pre-monsoon harvest) and endure the saline-alkali soil of the coast while demanding less fertiliser. Sakurai points out that while crop cultivation under the Ly was relatively small in scale, the Tran court’s expansion to the coast led to remarkably increased agricultural productivity thanks to the boost received from the fifth-month rice harvest.101 Tellingly, cultivation of this fifth-month rice in previously swampy or swidden coastal areas seems have a direct linked to the population boom of the Tran era. A nineteenth-century Vietnamese scholar noted: ‘Villages were as numerous as sand in the river or stars in the sky, and [they] spread evenly. No longer would people survive like in the previous periods when everyone had to find higher ground on which to live’.102 If Dai Viet did not move its capital towards the coast like its Southeast Asian neighbours, it appears to have covertly transferred it there, at least partially, under the Tran. The new Tran rulers in fact spent most of their time in their Thien Truong palaces on the coast than in Thang Long, effectively displacing the old Ly capital as the de facto centre of power.103 The Tran had not moved the capital to the coast, but the coast had certainly seized control of the capital, 99

Ibid., p. 473. Susumu Tanabe et al., ‘Song Hong (Red River) Evolution Related to Millennium-scale Holocene Sea-level Changes’, Quaternary Science Reviews 22 (2003), 2353; Ayako Funabiki et al., ‘Natural Levees and Human Settlement in the Song Hong (Red River) Delta, Northern Vietnam’, The Holocene 22, no. 6 (2012), 642. 101 Quoted from Momoki Shiro, Chusei Daietsu kokka no seiritsu to hen’yo, p. 90. 102 Nguyen Van Sieu, ‘Dieu tran ve de’ [Suggestions to the emperor on dykes], in De chinh tap [Collection of the documents on the policies of dykes], MS, Han-Nom Institute, Hanoi, shelf number A.615. 103 John K. Whitmore, ‘The Secondary Capitals of Dai Viet: Shifting Elite Power Bases’, in Kenneth R. Hall (ed.), Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 158–161. 100

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as Whitmore points out. In this way, Dai Viet fit the pattern of its Southeast Asian contemporaries. The following description of the Tran coastal palaces in Thien Truong (today’s My Loc district, Nam Dinh): ‘surrounded by tidewater, and on the coast full of fragrant trees and flowers. Gaily painted pleasure boats went back and forth … like [in] a fairyland’.104 As in previous chapters, the maritime adds a missing factor to the formulation of Vietnam’s history that reveals a new facet not appreciated. In the chapter that follows, we will see the long-term consequences of this maritime penetration of Dai Viet society and state through the littoral, which arrive from distant and unexpected places and produce surprising consequences. Conclusion The transition from Ly to Tran dynasties in the early thirteenth century marks a fundamental shift in political power from the upper-mid Red River valley to the coast. Although the heritage of the Ly royal family never lay far from the sea, as evidenced by the Fujianese lineage in the Ly genealogy, the centre of early Ly political gravity lay squarely upriver. The Ly Dai Viet therefore constituted a mid-river principality that ruled no more than half of the delta. Its limited population afforded a degree of manpower that restricted the kingdom’s financial base largely to what it could glean from its planters, who focused predominately on dry rice sowed on the delta’s higher ground, and what it could reap from naval raids on neighbouring regions. That changed. By the middle of the twelfth century, Ly Dai Viet was looking increasingly seaward. Changing external factors played a major role in accelerating this transition. It is helpful to make comparisons to similar contemporaneous shifts elsewhere in the region. Looking to the other end of the Indochina Peninsula at the Khmer court, Michel Vickery pointed out that King Suryavarman II (r.1113–45/1150) and Jayavarman VII (r.1181–1220) initiated a new type of expansion towards the east and the coast of Champa, ‘credibly in the interest of participating in the growing maritime economy’ in response to the change of Chinese commercial policy.105 While the Khmer’s shift resulted in its attacks on Dai Viet and Champa, the latter of which Jayavarman VII occupied for twenty years, in Dai Viet an internal struggle which developed when maritime commerce intensified the struggle between the court and mid-river forces in the territories of Hung Yen, Hai Duong, and Ninh Binh, which must have benefited from easier access to the sea and its trade. The Ly enlisted the help 104 105

Le Trac, Annam chi luoc, p. 18. Michel Vickery, ‘Cambodia and its Neighbours in the 15th Century’, in Geoff Wade & Sun Laichen (eds.), Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), p. 276.

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of the Tran clan, which helped them to crush these mid-river forces and unite the capital region with the coast. This helped to guarantee the rising fortunes of the Tran and their overthrow of the Ly. Here, littoral society played a crucial role in a key transition in Vietnamese political history. The Tran ascension to the throne in 1226 directly resulted from the development of the Jiaozhi Sea trading zone. Another comparison can be made between Dai Viet and its mainland Southeast Asian neighbours regarding population. The Tran court continued to open coastal areas to cultivation and adopted Cham rice in response to growing population pressures, and however it may have alleviated population pressures, in the long run it functioned as a catalyst in the dramatic population growth that followed. This was significant in the long term. Victor Lieberman has pointed out that, to the west, the Tai adopted Tay-style wet rice cultivation as they gravitated towards the Gulf of Siam, and therefore by the late 1500s the population of Ayudhya had become ‘two or three times more populous than the comparably-sized Cambodian realm’.106 This comparison could be applied to Dai Viet, whose population doubled to three million between 1200 and 1340. But significantly, Dai Viet’s population boom occurred about two centuries earlier than the Siamese kingdom. This paved the way for the land covered with deep, lush tropical forest of the first millennium to became one of the most densely populated regions in the world by the middle of the second millennium. The increasingly intensive human activity on the coast is testified by the gradual retreat of the elephants from the delta which seemed to have virtually disappeared by the thirteenth century, in the Tran era. This seemed to be four to five centuries earlier than Siam, as the seventeenth-century Siam was still filling India’s demand of elephants in large numbers.107 The rise of the Jiaozhi Sea and resurgence of the Tongking Gulf placed Tran-era Dai Viet in a strategic position to respond to greater macro-regional changes, not only on agriculture and the population but also the expansion of Islamic trade networks, which would have a revolutionary impact on the structure of Vietnamese history, thanks to an important but overlooked historical trading partner, the Muslims.

106 107

Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1:254. Li Tana, ‘Swamps, Lakes, Rivers and Elephants: A Preliminary Attempt towards an Environmental History of the Red River Delta, c. 600–1400’, Water History 7 (2015), 204.

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5

Winds of Trade from the Middle East Champa in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries

Examining sources related to the Tongking Gulf in the context of previous chapters, it might not be an exaggeration to say that much of the cosmopolitanism that developed in Jiaozhi during the first millennium, as revealed in Chapter 2, owes much to Champa, not only its neighbour and famed political rival but also a key trade partner. If this is so, then Champa  – including its predecessor Linyi, long its most important political and commercial centre – played a key role in bringing material cultures and religions from South and Southeast Asia to Jiaozhi during its early centuries of the Chinese territory’s existence. Sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries, however, the Cham nagaras south of these better-studied northern regions of the Champa became important relay stations in Sino-Arabian shipping routes, thanks to the arrival of Arab and other Muslim traders.1 This injected crucial energy into Cham coastal societies and politics. By the tenth century, Amaravati followed the lead of the southern nagaras in opening its ports to Muslim traders, allowing them to become major players in the sea trade between Champa and Song China. As they mingled in Cham ports with merchants from China, the Khmer kingdoms, and of course Jiaozhi – soon to become Dai Viet – did more than conduct trade and advance interests; they created a synergy that profoundly influenced Cham politics, economy, and culture in ways that would shape future developments in the history of Tongking Gulf for years to come. Until recently this important history has been long submerged with the rest of Vietnamese history in favour of narratives of Cham chiefdoms and their raids or wars on their Viet and Khmer neighbours. The new scholarship that has emerged over the last three decades paints a different picture: that of a complex of small commercial centres set in the major river estuaries of the Cham coast, where fluid plural communities created a more colourful Cham history than the one we have long accepted. As the next two chapters demonstrate, this forces 1

A new interpretation on the nature of Cham principalities suggests a model of an ‘integrating kingdom’ with a series of principalities. See Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy and Geoff Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2019).

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us to reconsider not only Champa’s own history but its place in the history of both Vietnam and the world at large. This chapter examines the Muslim traders that expanded across the Indian Ocean and, in doing so, entered the Gulf of Tongking, thereby becoming key catalysts in the creation of the Jiaozhi Sea trading world. This linked gulf ports directly to global markets, including the ports of not only Champa but also Dai Viet, giving producers and consumers of the Red River Delta and Cham coastal regions greater access to crucial shipping networks and ready markets. Without this Muslim network, the Jiaozhi Sea would have functioned less like a globally connected gulf and more like a marginal lake away from the currents of trade in the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and Arabian Sea. This long-submerged Muslim factor is critical to grasping the history of the Gulf of Tongking between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, particularly as Cham power rose and Jiaozhi transformed into Dai Viet. It explains a major transformation in the nature of the Chinese relationship to trade in the region thanks to this new channel of influence that Muslim merchants provided. This theme has been obscured for various reasons, so it is difficult to reconstruct, demanding of historians an appreciation for if not facility with archaeology whose fruits provide important context to historical texts, which yield data only when one carefully reads between the lines. The results so far suggest an abundance of potential evidence, and firmly establishes the significance of Muslim merchants to Vietnam’s maritime history. To illustrate, we delve into this submerged history of Arab and Muslim trade in two parts. The first part, this chapter, examines the rise of Arabian merchants on the Cham coast and the important circulation of shipping, Muslim merchants, and commerce between the Gulf of Tongking and the southern ports of Song China, not to mention the evolution of a new merchant elite developed from a synthesis of Muslims, Chinese, and Cham that by the thirteenth century played important roles in politics in their respective host societies. Chapter 6 demonstrates the extension of these Muslim networks into the northern gulf and Red River, which by the thirteenth century had fashioned new and enduring commercial bonds between Dai Viet, Yunnan to the west, and Hainan to the east, nourished and fed by a new level of commercial circulation between Dai Viet, Champa, and China through the Gulf of Tongking. An Eighth-Century Itinerary Reading the itinerary, it is not difficult to imagine. A spring day in Guangzhou, a day like any other spring day in the eighth century. Along the wharf, a fully loaded Arab ship makes ready for its return journey. Once embarked, it will sail five days across the South Sea to reach the Cham Island. Forsaking the great emporium of Champapura nearby, the ship heads south, following the coastline another two days to reach a coastal island now called San Ho,

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opposite Cri Banoi port of modern-day Quy Nhon.2 Throughout the first seven days of travel, the Arab ship stopped at no port. However, continuing south the ship makes stops at every port that follows – at the Cham ports now called Tuy Hoa, Nha Trang, and Phan Rang,3 before it heads across the Gulf of Siam to Sumatra, Sri Lanka, India, Iran, and Basra, after which it heads upriver to Baghdad, its destination, after eighty days of sailing at sea. There was nothing unusual about this. In fact, it was quite common: Arab and Persian seafarers were anything but strangers to eighth-century China. With sailors came merchants, of course. Diplomats, too: A steady stream of envoys of Umayyad Caliphate travelled to the Tang capital of Chang’an between 661 and 750, while the succeeding Abbasid Caliphate dispatched no less than twenty embassies to the Middle Kingdom between 751 and 798.4 The regular circulation of such embassies between Guangzhou and Arab countries encouraged the production of a rich body of geographical information that culminated in the account of Jia Dan (730–805), a senior officer of the Tang dynasty, who recorded his carefully plotted Arabian itinerary. Court historians later took this itinerary and added it to a history of the dynasty, the New Book of Tang or Xin Tangshu, under the title ‘Route from Guangzhou to the Maritime Foreign Lands’ (C. Guangzhou tong haiyidao), latter dubbed ‘Jia Dan’s Itinerary’ by later historians.5 Jia Dan’s itinerary offers a rare insight into the sea travel and trade in the eighth century, into the Indian Ocean trade at large as well as the Gulf of Tongking in particular, providing an opportunity to investigate the place of gulf states like Champa and Annam, soon to be Dai Viet, in the larger streams of pan-Asian commerce. Two points are important to note here. First, it provides an itinerary for large capacity, deep-draught, ocean-going ships. Just as interesting, it differs 2

I am following Fujita Toyohachi who located this place in San Ho, off the port of Quy Nhon. See Fujita Toyohachi, ‘A study on the Langyaxiu’ 狼牙修國考 trans. He Jianmin, Zhongguo nanhai gudai jiaotong congkao [Collected essays on the maritime history of the South Sea] (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1936), pp. 5–6. This 陵山 Lingshan is not to be mixed with the Lingshan 靈山 which is the Cape Varela, which would be too far south on this itinerary. 3 ‘Kundrang’ in the original text. According to Pham Thi Thanh Huyen, this name in Islamic texts is associated with Panduranga-Ninh Thuạn̂ , Bình Thuạn̂ today. See Pham Thi Thanh Huyen, ‘Champa and the Islamic World, 7th–15th Centuries’, PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore (2021), p. 13. Since the name Bentuolang (Phan Rang) is already mentioned in the itinerary ahead of ‘Kundrang’, the latter could be Phan Thiet, or maybe even further south, in Vung Dau. 4 John W. Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China: The History of a Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 16. 5 Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, Xin Tangshu [New book of Tang], chapter 43 (https://zh.wikisource.org/ wiki/新唐書/卷043下, accessed 20 May 2020). One of the sources Jia Dan obtained could be from Yang Liangyao, a Tang eunuch who was sent as envoy to the Abbasids (“Black-dressed Tajik”, i.e. the Arabs) in 785. See Rong Xinjiang, ‘New Evidence on the History of Sino-Arabic Relations: A Study of Yang Liangyao’s Embassy to the Abbasid Caliphate’, in Victor Mair and Liam Kelley (eds), Imperial China and its Southern Neighbours (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), pp. 239–267.

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entirely from the preferred itineraries of smaller vessels that defined postfourteenth-century Chinese shipping, when carriers more typically conducted short, port-to-port travel along the coast. Significantly, none of the once betterknown Cham ports of the north in Indrapura or Amaravati appear. Second, and by contrast, according to Jia Dan’s itinerary large vessels sailed across the gulf at least 4–5 days before they anchored at Cham Island; however, along this way ships started anchor at a string of small southern Cham ports on a daily basis. This placed the southern Cham ports on the map of the longest global travel route of the time. Following the itinerary south from Qui Nhon, we come to Tuy Hoa (Phu Yen), just north of the major city and port of Nha Trang. Here, we find that the most recent archaeological excavations undertaken in the city’s environs reveal the ruins of a big site at the very location Jia Dan plotted it, exactly one day sail from Quy Nhon to the north and Nha Trang south, as Map 5.1 shows. These ports or stopping points appear on the itinerary for a good reason. Access to fresh water was a major concern of the sailing ships. Arab ships would have stored enough water on board to last the first five days at sail and re-supply water on the way. The Lingshan was on the route perhaps for the same reason.6 And so was Mendu at today’s Tuy Hoa. Located next to the Da Rang River, recent archaeological projects have revealed many ancient wells scattered across an inhabited area only a hundred or so metres from Tuy Hoa’s beach, near a knoll where brick fragments were discovered, indicating the previous existence of a building. Their quantity, concentration, and location suggest that these wells were dug specifically to provide fresh water to passing ships.7 Corroborating evidence is easy to find. To illustrate, the Cham name for Tuy Hoa, the capital of Phu Yen, is ‘Aia Ru’; ‘Aia’ means ‘water’ or ‘country’.8 The word du in ‘Mendu’ may have derived from the word ‘Ru’. The Da Rang River valley, the largest river valley in central Vietnam, penetrates deep into the highland interior and no doubt provided an important route for travel and trade.9 Southworth points out that the Da Rang River valley may have 6

An eleventh century Chinese source specifically indicates ‘sweet water is found here’. Zeng Gongliang, Wujing zongyao 武經總要 [Complete essentials for the military classics], written between 1040 and 1044, vol. 1, chapter 21 (https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/武經總要/前集/卷二十一, accessed 21 January 2019). 7 Federico Barocco, Nguyen Tien Dong, and Andrew Hardy, ‘The Archaeological Territories of Champa in Quang Nam and Phu Yen: Two New Maps’, in Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy, and Geoff Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom, pp. 77–78. 8 The word ‘Aia’ is also where Nha Trang’s ‘Nha’ comes from. Its Chinese pronunciation, ‘Ya’, is closer to ‘Aia’. The Vietnamese ‘Nha’ seemed to have come from Chinese. Thanks to Nicholas Weber for the information. 9 Henri Parmentier, Inventaire descriptif des Monuments Cams de L’Annam: Planches d’après le relevé et les dessins de l’auteur (Paris: L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1918), p. 9; Michael Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, in Andrew Hardy, Mauro Cucarzi, and Patrizia Zolese (eds), Champa and Archaeology of My Son (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), p. 48.

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Map 5.1  Stopping points of Arabian ships in the eighth century

been the main competitor of the Thu Bon valley in the Linyi period.10 As Rila Mukherjee points out in her study of India, the networks created by this shipping traffic and the ports they served were adaptable, and thus able to trigger corresponding agility among participating agents. If they found it difficult to access one port, a ship would then try a different one nearby. A shift of ship traffic from one port to another in sufficient numbers affected the wealth, and by extension power, in the regions of both ports. They could even foster new political formations. Politics and networks were thus imbricated.11 Based on 10

William Southworth, ‘River Settlement and Coastal Trade: Towards a Specific Model of Early State Development in Champa’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), pp. 109–110. 1 1 Rila Mukherjee, India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE (Singapore: Springer, 2022), p. 221.

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An Eighth-Century Itinerary 145

their extensive land surveys of the Da Rang River valley, Barocco, Nguyen, and Hardy reckoned that there existed a political entity, perhaps independent from Kauthara, which could be the ‘country’ of Mendu mentioned in eighthcentury Chinese sources.12 The Arabian ship would next stop at Guda kingdom or Kauthara, today’s Khanh Hoa. Anyone who visits Nha Trang today would be struck by the beauty and magnificence of its Po Nagar temple. Its sheer size and imposing structure make it immediately comparable to some major Cham temples in My Son. Builders most likely erected the temple in 591 but not later than the beginning of the eighth century, when a Javanese fleet ransacked it.13 Like Mendu, Kauthara also faces the sea. The Po Nagar temple reveals the intimate bonds between aromatics and the sea in the Kauthura region’s politics, economy, and culture. Everything about the Po Nagar temple involves the sea. The name of its mythical founder, Vichatrasagara, means ‘the marvellous ocean’.14 It is as if the temple once functioned to enshrine Nha Trang’s economic basis of prosperity. It served practical functions as well, for the temple’s imposing silhouette must have also served as a landmark for ships nearby, and fresh water is ready from the Cai River. Before being in contacts with the Arabian ships, these southern Cham nagaras were the earliest ones in contact with Indic culture. It is no coincidence that the oldest Sanskrit inscription of Southeast Asia is from Vo Canh, dated fourth–fifth centuries, near Nha Trang, and another old one, Cho Dinh, is found at the Da Rang River mouth at Tuy Hoa,15 the Mendu country discussed above. The architecture tradition of the southern Cham nagaras are also various in the eighth and ninth centuries. The towers of Pho Hai in Phan Thiet and Hoa Lai in Ninh Thuan, for example, have distinctive Khmer features.16 Moreover, these Cham settlements followed ‘a precise urban plan’ like those discovered in Quang Nam, suggesting a more extensive Champa cultural landscape than previously imagined.17

12

Barocco, Nguyen, and Hardy, ‘Archaeological Territories of Champa’, p. 78. The Khmers pillaged the Po Nagar temple two centuries later, in the tenth century. Abel Bergaigne, ‘L’ancien royaume de Campā, dans l’Indo-Chine d’après les inscriptions’, Journal Asiatique, series 8 11 (1888), 67. 14 Anne-Valérie Schweyer, Ancient Vietnam: History, Art and Archaeology (Bangkok: River Books, 2011), p. 102. 15 Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, pp. 46–47. 16 Tran Ky Phuong, ‘Architecture of the Temple-Towers of Ancient Champa’, in Andrew Hardy, Mauro Cucarzi, and Patrizia Zolese (eds), Champa and Archaeology of My Son (Singapore: NUS Press), p. 178; also see Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, p. 47. 17 Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, pp. 64, 65, and 78. Andrew Hardy argues that the tenthcentury Quang Ngai formed a political territory in its own right, and was ruled by its own elite, that formed alliances with elites in other territories and with the royal dynasty. See ‘The Archaeological Territory of Quang Ngai and the Geopolitics of Champa’, in Andreas Reinecke 13

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These southern Cham negaras, not unlike a string of pearls linking maritime trade with the river valleys and upland, must have enjoyed a golden era in maritime commerce in the eighth century. That Nha Trang was attacked by Sailendras, ruler of Java and Srivijaya in 774, and in 787 another Cham polity further south, Panduranga, today’s Phan Rang, probably due to competition for the new shipping between China and its maritime neighbours south and west. A Panduranga general left inscriptions boasting of victorious raids into Cambodia around 813–817 ce, returning with treasure which he offered to the Po Nagar temple in Nha Trang, suggesting an alliance or client relationship between the two. Indeed, the prosperity of these southern nagaras, Vickery argued, may have influenced the move of the Cambodian political centre from the Mekong Delta region south towards Angkor in the ninth century.18 Despite sometimes violent competition among Champa’s different nagaras, periods of frequent trade and cultural exchanges dominated the coastal political economy, so much so that visitors and scholars thought of them as one kingdom. This, in Vietnamese scholar Do Truong Giang’s opinion, was a source of Champa’s strength: Based on different natural and geographical conditions these nagara Champas took time to establish a network of port-cities which became the vanguards pushing into the regional and international commercial networks, as well as establishing connections with the mandalas around in the region, and meanwhile connected to the centres of civilizations such as China, India and Arab.19

The prosperous trading period of the southern Cham nagaras coincident with a booming trade period of Annam, whose primary port was in Nghe An. Only when one situates Arabian/Middle East trade in the context of the eighth century would one understand why Kang Qian, a super-rich merchant of Sogdian background from central Asia would become the Tang governor of Annam Commendary in the mid eighth century,20 and why the trade there went so well that it caused serious jealousy of Guangzhou. In 792 the Governor of Lingnan (based in Guangzhou) reported that ‘recently most of the ships coming from afar carrying precious and curious cargo tended to go to Annam [instead of (ed.), Perspectives on the Archaeology of Vietnam (LWL-Museum for Archaeology, Herne, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums in Mannheim, State Museum of Archaeology of Chemnitz, & German Archaeological Institute, Berlin/Bonn), pp. 259–290. 18 Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, p. 49. 19 Do Truong Giang, ‘Bien voi luc dia – Thuong cang Thi Nai (Champa) trong he thong thuong mai Dong Nam A’ [Sea and land: The trading port of Thi Nai (Champa) in the Southeast Asian trading network], unpublished paper (www.academia.edu/4019184/The_Port_of_Thinai_ Champa_in_Vietnamese, accessed 2 October 2019). 20 Liu Xu 劉昫, Jiu Tangshu [Old book of Tang], chapter 186, first published in 945 ce (https:// zh.wikisource.org/wiki/舊唐書/卷186下, accessed 6 March 2000). His successor was Abe Nonakamaro, a scholar-officer from Japan and served as the Annam Governor in 766–767 ce. Le Trac, Annan zhilue (V. Annam chi luoc) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), p. 216.

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Guangzhou]’. Guangzhou lost so much revenue because of this that its governor wanted to send officers to Annam to collect trade taxes from there.21 Annam’s trade policy and environment must have been more favourable to the foreign ships that the latter diverted their trade route for better deals. Just a century before Amaravati, now in control of both sides of land of the Hai Van Pass, was strong and prosperous. It is not surprising, therefore, that a peak of monument constructions occurred. Both Jean Boisselier and Tran Ky Phuong date of the first wave of construction of the ‘My Son E.1 style’ and the ‘Early Tra Kieu style’ to the late seventh to early eighth centuries. The combined aromatic resources from the old Linyi and agriculture from the fertile Thu Bon valley would have provided a firm economic catalyst for such burst of energy inspired directly by Indian civilisation. Seventh-century Champa seems to have been an important centre for Buddhist studies. The models of Buddhist terracotta votive tablets could have come from peninsular Malaysia as well as Thailand or Java. Some rare Buddha images show influences from Southern India, Sri Lanka, and Dvāravatı̄.22 By Jia Dan’s day, however, Amaravati appears to have all but vanished, making way for its resurrection in the tenth century. No monument was built in the eighth century in My Son. No signs of activity in Tra Kieu appear in any of the artefacts found in the important excavations of 1985 and 2002. Archaeologists point out that this region, long the centre of the Cham rule, was most likely abandoned between the eighth and tenth centuries. In their words: There is currently no evidence to suggest that the site was occupied at all during the eighth to tenth centuries. The site was re-occupied during the northern Song and Southern Song periods (960–1279), most probably during the eleventh century.23

Two major setbacks for Champa in the Thu Bon area might be accounted for this rupture. Still referring to the area as Linyi, Chinese court historians reported that, in 756, a subject named Mohomanduokadu assassinated the ruling king, whom they called Fan Zhenlong. This event hurled Champa into chaos.24 A half-century later, in 809, Zhang Zhou, governor of the Annam 21

Sima Guang 司馬光, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒 [Comprehensive mirror to aid in government], published 1084 (https://zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hans/資治通鑒, chapter 234, accessed 20 September 2016). 22 Schweyer, Ancient Vietnam, p. 54. 23 William Southworth and Ruth Prior, ‘History and Archaeology at Tra Kieu’, in Bérénice Bellina et al. (eds), 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of Ian Glover (Bangkok: River Books, 2010), pp. 191–192; Vickery agreed that there was a sudden end of epigraphic and architectural remains in My Son area in the mid-eighth century but said that the northern Cham rulers maintained authorities suffered the economic decline of the period until 875 ce when a new ruling group emerged in Dong Duong. Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, p. 50. 24 Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒, chapter 219.

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Protectorate under the Tang empire, attacked ‘Huanwang’, capturing the Cham governors and killing 30,000 Cham.25 For all the reasons stated above  – internal unrest in mid-eighth century Amaravati, Annam’s attack on the region in the early ninth century, and the geographical location of these southern ports in the logic of long-distance maritime travel – the eighth century southern Cham nagaras fostered the earliest contacts between Chinese and the merchants of West Asia and the Middle East. Soon after, as Amaravati appears to have resurrected, Arab seafaring and Muslim trade expands further north into the Gulf of Tongking. The Rise of Arab Seafaring and Muslim Trade in the Gulf of Tongking The rise of Islam in the seventh century transformed both the overland and maritime trade networks of Eurasia in the following centuries that followed. This is the context in which we should examine Cham history from the eighth century on. As Pierre-Yves Manguin points out, ‘the study of Cam history has suffered for long from being treated as a sort of appendage to Vietnamese, or at best “Indo-Chinese studies”’.26 Scholars these years have moved on and realised that Champa had prospered in a much larger context. As the itinerary of the eighth century above shows, it was only one of the links in a long chain, which connected the Middle East with Africa and China. Along this long chain, according to Paul Wheatley, Arab and other Muslim traders collected Asafoetida from the Makran coast [Iran and Pakistan], oak-galls from Mosul [Iraq], bezoars from North Persia, gardenia flowers from Isfahan, myrrh from Mubat [Oman?] and frankincense from the ports of the Hadhramaut coast [Yemen], together with aloes, liquid storax, madder, rosewater, and Dracaena resin (the socalled dragon’s blood) from other parts. These were all shipped in Arab vessels from the emporia of Arabia and the Persian Gulf to Sri Vijaya, whence they were carried to China.27

This inventory signifies that Arab and other Muslim merchants collected the above-mentioned products in a down-the-line fashion through a relay of ports on their way to China, on the Arabian Sea and in West, South, and Southeast Asia. This maximised the value of their cargo and created opportunities to

25

Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, Xin Tangshu 新唐書 [New book of Tang] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 222, 20:6298. 26 Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Campa’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 58 1 (1985), 1. 27 Paul Wheatley, ‘Geographical Notes on Some Commodities in Sung Maritime Trade’, Journal of Malayan Branch of Royal Asiatic Societies 42 part 2 (1959), 201.

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negotiate new partnerships and other strategic relations in every port that they frequented during their travels.28 When the first Muslim merchants landed in the ports of eastern Asia, local regard for long-distance traders led them directly to local elites. Soon after their arrival in Tang-dynasty China in the eighth century, West Asian merchants quickly developed a colony in a separate quarter of Guangzhou, adding similar colonies in key ports cities like Quanzhou, Yangzhou, Hangzhou, and Mingzhou. According to Abu Zaid, by 878 about 120,000 foreign merchants had settled in China.29 While this figure might be an exaggeration, it reflected the reality of a huge number of west Asian merchants in Tang China, and as Angela Schottenhammer points out, they were mostly Persian and Arab merchants, carrying long-distance maritime trade to China and initiating the age of active maritime trade there.30 They were the recipients of liberal government policies of the Tang China and were able to settle and flourish on China’s coast.31 Wherever they settled, these merchants appeared wealthy in Chinese eyes: clothed in silk and gauze, adorned with gold and pearl jewellery, and dining off gold and silver plates. Of a Muslim merchant surnamed Pu (in Arabic ‘Abū’, about whom much will be said below), one Chinese observer claimed he ‘regards gold as dirt’, and left ‘pearls, aromatics, and shells scattered all over the seats in his house’.32 In medieval Chinese literature, Arabs, Persians, and other Muslims often appear synonymous with foreign merchants of unimaginable wealth. They soon became close friends of the Tang court, officials, and elites.33 Wealth and prestige won the Arab and other Muslim merchants over to the Cham elite in similar ways and ascended only faster. They soon became so indispensable to Cham trade and court politics that they began to appear in Cham embassies and, increasingly, to lead them as envoys. As Geoff Wade shows, almost all of the Cham envoys leading embassies to the court of the Song dynasty (960–1279) bear the surnames ‘Li’ (written 李) and ‘Pu’ (蒲) – typical 28

Charles Wheeler, ‘Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the Early Modern Era’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2001, 46. 29 Gerald R. Tibbetts, ‘Early Muslim Traders in South-East Asia’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 1 (1957), 1–45. See also Gerald R. Tibbetts, A Study of Arabic Texts Containing Material on Southeast Asia (Leiden & London: E. J. Brill for the Royal Asiatic Society, 1979). 30 Angela Schottenhammer, ‘The “China Seas” in World History: A General Outline of the Role of Chinese and East Asian Maritime Space from its Origins to c. 1800’, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures 1, 2 (2012), 74. 31 Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China, pp. 49–50. 32 Yue Ke 岳珂, Chengshi 桯史 [Pillar histories], quoted from Kuwabara Jitsuzo, Pu Shougeng kao [A study on Pu Shougeng], trans. Chen Yujing (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1929), 71. For the original text see Chengshi 桯史, chapter 11 (https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/桯史, accessed 28 September 2018). 33 Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

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transliterations for the Arab names Alı̄ and Abū.34 For example, Chinese court records identify Champa’s first ambassador to the Song court, who led several embassies to China between 961 and 972, as Pu Hesan, a transliteration of the name Abū Hassan.35 One of his Arab associates climbed even higher in the Cham court to become a viceroy; a Chinese court chronicle for the year 968 identifies him as Li Nou, which has been tentatively reconstructed as Alı̄ Nūr.36 According to Geoff Wade, ‘These merchants, some of whom were apparently Sino-Arab, had thus either adopted a surname to accord with Chinese expectations, or provided an “origin” or “genealogy” name – such as Pu or Li to identify their ethnicity – which Muslims, Chinese chroniclers and other officials, or all of them could use to identify the merchants in a Chinese context’.37 This represents a significant development and highlights the importance of the tenth century in the history of maritime trade in the Gulf of Tongking.38 These Arabian surnames appeared so frequently and conspicuously in the Cham embassies to Song China that they could only indicate the strong

34

Hirth, Rockhill, Kuwabara, and Lo Xianglin all agreed that the Chinese character ‘Pu’ represented the Arabic ‘Abū’. Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Campa’, 3. For more on the surname Li, see Geoff Wade, ‘Early Muslim Expansion in Southeast Asia from 8th to 15th centuries’, in Michael Cook (ed.), New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World 11th–18th Centuries, (eds.) David Morgan and Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 372–375. 35 Manguin, ‘Introduction of Islam into Campa’, 3. 36 Wade, ‘Early Muslim Expansion in Southeast Asia’, p. 369. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., pp. 403–408 and Songshi, chapter 489: Cham envoys with Li/Ali ‘surname’

Cham envoys with the Pu/Abū ‘surname’

Year

Name(s)

Year

Name(s)

963 968 971

Li Ban Li Ban Li Nou

960 972 1011

977

Envoy Li Pai; deputy envoy Li Ma-na administrator Li Tu Li Mu-zha-duo Li Chao-xian Li Zhen Li Liang-pu Li Bo-zhu Li Bu-liang Li Gu-lun Li Pu-sa Li Pu-sa Li Pu-sa Li-zhan-pa

1053

Pu He-san Pu He-san Pu Sa-duo-po Deputy envoy Duopo-di, trade officer Chen Yi Pu Si-ma

1056 1068 1073

Pu Xi-tuo-ba Pu Ma-wu Pu Ma-wu

979 986 990 992 995 997 999 1029 1030 1071 1105

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presence of an Arabian merchant elite in the Cham court; however, it is not clear in which Cham court they were enjoying such a privilege. Some of the mid-tenth century missions could have been sent by southern nagaras such as Panduranga or Kauthara. As Vickery pointed out: These different Champa centres were never unified into a single state or kingdom. The far south, ancient Panduranga including Phan Rang, perhaps Phan Thiet and sometimes Nha Trang, was always independent of the Thu Bon valley polities. The Vijaya-Quy Nhon region was often independent of both Panduranga and the Thu Bon. Each of these centres called itself Champa. When the Viet chronicles refer habitually to Chiem Thanh or the Chinese histories to Zhan-cheng, it is not always possible to know which Champa they meant.39

At any rate, the integration of Arab merchants into the multiple Cham trade and elite societies in the tenth century also profoundly affected Cham foreign relations as its polities more closely interlinked, directly or indirectly, with other trading polities across maritime Asia through Muslim networks. Arab connections, for example, improved Champa’s trade relations with long-time trade partners like China, whose ports hosted many Muslim merchants. It also appears to have encouraged new diplomatic alliances with Muslim states in Island Southeast Asia. In 14 of the 40 years that ranged between 971 and 1011, for example, envoys from Champa, Arabia, and the archipelagic portpolity of Sri Vijaya visited Song China during the same year, as Figure 5.1 demonstrates. Such a pattern of overlapping missions suggests this was no coincidence. Many of the envoys represented in Figure 5.1 had Arabian backgrounds, practiced Islam, and at the very least knew each other as fellow ship passengers (as those sailing aboard Southeast Asian ships did when they visited Ming China in the fifteenth century). Moreover, they shared a common network through which circulated not only commercial but also information exchanges that the maritime networks of Arab seafarers and merchants could facilitate. Kenneth Hall points out that networks of multiple trading and religious diasporas shared a variety of ship, coastal, and port space along the passageways.40 As often happened, merchants not only participated in diplomatic missions, but they sometimes may also have organised them, seeking to use tribute as a front for a more important trade mission. Merchants of Arabian background could surely have orchestrated such endeavours. There is nothing unusual about this in the history of Chinese trade and diplomacy, as the chapter on Linyi shows. 39

Michael Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, p. 48. Kenneth Hall, ‘Commodity Flows, Diaspora Networking, and Contested Agency in the Eastern Indian Ocean, c. 1000–1500’, TRaNS: Trans Regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia 4 (2016), 388.

40

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0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

Srivijaya

Arabia

Figure 5.1  Overlapping missions to Song from Champa, Srivijaya, and Arabia, 960–1116 Source: ‘Fanyi 4’, in Song huiyao.

Champa

960 963 967 972 975 978 982 985 990 994 998 1001 1005 1009 1012 1016 1019 1025 1029 1034 1040 1044 1050 1055 1058 1061 1065 1069 1073 1076 1081 1084 1087 1090 1093 1096 1099 1105 1108 1111

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Arabs on the Cham Coast 153

Arabs on the Cham Coast Arab artefacts have mystified Vietnam specialists for almost a century. In 1922, for example, Paul Ravaisse deciphered two ancient inscriptions discovered in Vietnam. Both were inscribed in Arabic script. Pierre-Yves Manguin, investigating the origins of Islam among many Cham communities in Vietnam, summarised Raivaisse’s analysis as follows: The first stele, dated the 21st November 1039, marked the tomb of a certain Abū Kãmil, ‘The Guardian of Roads’. The lettering is ‘pure Fatimid Kufic, planned and executed according to the classical tradition’. The second is in very rudimentary Kufic and much damaged, but Ravaisse could nonetheless deduce that it concerned ‘a public instruction designed to advise members of a colony of Arabs, Persians and Turks, how they should behave with the people of the country in their trade, exchange of money and payment of contributions’. Its date is lacking, but it would appear to be contemporary with the previous one.41

In other words, the French scholar hypothesised from the two inscriptions that a Muslim community existed in Champa during the eleventh century. The provenance of the steles was unknown, so scholars remained sceptical until Manguin revisited the question of Muslim influence sixty years later. Recent archaeological excavations in the coastal zone and on the islands of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces – the old Cham region of Amaravati – have yielded firmer evidence of a Muslim presence on this part of the Cham coast at the very time the two steles were made. On the northern banks of Quang Nam’s Thu Bon estuary, whose sands abound with the artefacts of ancient trade, archaeologists excavated a large volume of intermixed Chinese and Islamic ceramics manufactured between the ninth to eleventh centuries, contemporary with Ravaisse’s steles.42 Japanese archaeologists working on a tenth-century shipwreck in Quang Ngai salvaged Changsha ceramics in Indic inscriptions bearing the name Ambārak, a place northwest of ancient Persian port of Siraf, a well-known trading hub during the Tang period (618–905), suggesting Arab and Iranian merchants or passengers aboard the ship.43 Moreover, Vietnamese archaeologist Do Truong Giang asserts that most of the inscriptions end with a six- or five-pointed star, which an 41

Manguin, ‘Introduction of Islam into Campa’, 1. Lam My Dung, ‘Archaeological Findings on Cu Lao Cham Island’, in Sakurai Kiyohiko 樱井 清彦 and Kikuchi Seiichi 菊池诚一(eds), Kinsei Nichi-etsu kōryū-shi: Nihon-machi, Tōjiki 近 世日越交流史: 日本町陶瓷器 [A history of contacts between Japan and Vietnam: Japanese street and ceramics] (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobô, 2002), pp. 142–144. 43 Nishino Noriko, Aayama Toru, Kimura Jun, Nogami Takenori and Le Thi Lien ‘Nishimura Masanari’s Study of the Earliest Known Shipwreck Found in Vietnam’, Asian Review of World Histories 5, no. 2 (2017), 118; ‘It appears that all the pieces with bits of Arabic on them carry the same text’ – namely, ‘amdada dadu muhammad wa dafa’, possibly translatable as ‘to aid Dadu[?] Muhammad and to resist/ward off …’. Do Truong Giang, ‘Diplomacy, Trade and Networks’, Moussons 27 (2016) (https://doi.org/10.4000/moussons.3521, accessed 12 July 2019). 42

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expert of Islamic history interprets as ‘seal of Solomon’.44 This was an ubiquitous emblem throughout the Muslim world during medieval and early modern times, which people considered to possess talismanic qualities. Another Arabic coin discovered a few miles inland was confirmed by the British Museum to be a dinar minted in the Abbasid Caliphate during the reign of caliph al-Muktafi billar (r.902–908), roughly a century before the other coins.45 Such evidence keeps adding up. In 2014, two anchors were retrieved off the coast Quang Ngai, their age and type were similar to the one found in the Belitung wreck in Indonesia, the latter an Arabian ship lost around 830 ce.46 The tenth century saw another surge of Muslim commerce in the Asian waters and introduced forces into maritime Asia that reconfigured the region’s commerce. By this time, Amaravati had recovered its energy and no doubt welcomed this resurgence. As John Chaffee points out, ‘with the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, the result was throughout the maritime world there were more states participating in long-distance commerce, more merchants’ groups, and more goods being traded’.47 As early as 1891 Etienne Aymonier suspected that Muslim Chams already existed in the ninth and tenth centuries.48 ‘This hypothesis, otherwise startling and incredible’, remarked Edward Schafer, ‘would explain the statement in the History of the Five Dynasties (907–960 CE) that the customs of the Chams are “the same as those of the Arabs [Dashi or Tajik]”’.49 The Song chronicles gives more details on a Champa heavily influenced by Arabs. For example, the Cham king, ­‘whenever he goes out, he wears large shirts of Arab (Dashi) brocades or Sichuan brocades’. It further recorded the prayer in Arab before an animal slaughter: [In Champa] There are also mountain cattle, but they cannot be used for ploughing. They are only killed in sacrifice to the spirits. When they are about to be slaughtered, a medium is instructed to offer prayers, which sound thus: ‘Alla*hu Akhbar’. In translation, this means: ‘May he be early reborn.’50 44

Do Truong Giang, ‘Diplomacy, Trade and Networks’. Ibid.; Islamic ceramics are also found in the Con Dao and Cu Lao Re Islands, Hoi An and Tra Kieu area in central and southern Vietnam. Lam Thi My Dung, ‘Bien dao mien Trung Viet Nam: Mot so van de khao co hoc’ [The islands in the central Vietnam: Some issues of archaeology], in Nguyen Van Kim (ed.), Nguoi Viet voi Bien [Vietnamese and the sea] (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2011), p. 64. 46 The style of the alignment of these anchors is found throughout the Indian Ocean and East Africa. Ian Kenneth McCann, ‘The Binh Chau Anchors: A 7th–8th CE Composite Conundrum’, MS dissertation, University of New England, 2019, 105. 47 Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China, p. 76. 48 Etienne Aymonier, ‘Les Tchames et leurs religions’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 24 (1891), 206. 49 Edward H. Schafer, The Vermillion Bird: Tang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 75; Wang Pu, Wudai huiyao 五代會要 [Institutions of the Five Dynasties Period] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998) pp. 30, 367. 50 ‘Fanyi 4’, in Song Huiyao. Here I use Wade’s translation in ‘Early Muslim Expansion in Southeast Asia from 8th to 15th Centuries’, p. 379. 45

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The Mystery of Luu Ke Tong: Arab Circulation in Dai Viet? 155

That there was a sizeable Arabian or Muslim community in Champa in the Song era (960–1127) seemed to be beyond doubt. Aside from traders, there were also a group of Shi’ite Arabians fleeing Sunni persecution during the mid eighth century (c. 740s) settled in Champa.51 An Arabian author Al-Dimashki recounted this several hundred years later in 1325: The country of Champa, with its principal town of the same name … is peopled by Muslims, Christians and idolaters. The Muslim religion went there in the time of Othman … and the Alids, expelled by the Omeyyads and by Hajjaj, took refuge there.52

To assess its significance, it is worth revisiting Ravaisse’s interpretation of the second ‘rudimentary’ Kufic inscriptions as ‘a public instruction designed to advise members of a colony of Arabs, Persians and Muslim Turks, how they should behave with the people of the country in their trade, exchange of money and payment of contributions’ [italics added].53 In other words, a network of merchants, hemispheric in scope and rooted in Islam, had developed a volume of trade sufficient to merit the creation of dedicated merchant quarters in Cham ports of trade. By the tenth century Arabs and other Muslim merchants were established in gulf trade and the heart of Cham trade and diplomacy. Whether they expanded their range of trade activity to Dai Viet, still yet fully formed, activities in the Cham kingdoms must have affected its relationship with gulf trade and politics, if only indirectly. Consequently, Dai Viet could easily have tapped the benefits of inter-Asian trade, by raid if not by trade – which puts a whole new light on Chapter 4’s discussion of Dai Viet’s strategy of sea raiding. This also linked the two countries – Champa directly, Dai Viet perhaps indirectly – to the vast network of Muslim trading colonies that extended into Island Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in one direction and China in another. From the interaction between merchant and host societies in Champa, Cham Muslims evolved. Muslim trade colonies in South China encouraged the migration of Cham Muslims to places like Hainan beginning in the tenth century, which set in motion a series of other events that changed the equation of commerce in the Gulf of Tongking and the balance of power in the Viet–Cham contest for the coast. The Mystery of Luu Ke Tong: Arab Circulation in Dai Viet? The story of Luu Ke Tong (C: Liu Jizong) begins in a curious entry for the year 983 ce that appears in the Complete History of Dai Viet (Dai Viet su ky Toan thu): In the previous year [982] when the king [Le Hoan of Dai Viet] attacked Champa, an army officer called Luu Ke Tong snuck into Champa and stayed there. This year 51

Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China, p. 21. Quoted in Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Champa’, 2. Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Champa’, 1.

52 53

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(983), the king sent his adopted son [to Champa], [who] arrested Ke Tong and killed him.54

That would seem to have been the end of Luu Ke Tong. However, a Chinese court history identifies Luu as none other than the king of Champa in an entry dated three years after his alleged execution. Perhaps, then, this subject of Dai Viet, assumedly Vietnamese, outwitted his rivals and stole the Cham throne. Fortunately for Le Hoan, this Vietnamese pretender to the Cham throne apparently met his doom sometime between 986 and 988, when the Complete History of Dai Viet reports that a new king ascended the Cham throne.55 Still, this passage raises many questions, for such a passing reference to a major coup by some previously unknown Vietnamese in the country of Dai Viet’s top rival seems out of place. So does the statement that Luu, a Dai Viet officer, ‘snuck’ into Champa in the wake of Le Hoan’s raid there. Stranger still that Le felt so threatened by Luu that he ordered his assassination, a task so important he dispatched his adopted son. No answer to the mystery of Luu Ke Tong appears to be forthcoming, unless one considers an apparent bit of trivia that adds a new twist to Wade’s inventory of transliterated Arabic names listed in footnote 38. A Chinese court history relates that in 986, shortly before his alleged death, Luu Ke Tong as the Cham king dispatched an envoy to the Song court. His name was Li Chaoxian.56 Obviously, ‘Li’ merely transliterates the envoy’s Arabic surname, Alī. Luu’s Cham envoy was Arab; could Luu have been associated with Arab, too? Arab identity may not be all that far-fetched for Luu. French Sinologist Arnold Vissière a century ago observed that most well-known Chinese Muslim authors bore the surname Liu (written 劉), pronounced ‘Luu’ in Vietnamese.57 In the 1930s, Japanese scholar Fujita Toyohachi went further, and argued that the name Liu/Luu came from Arabian name Al. Curiously, the dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of the Southern Han (917–971) – which controlled South China and the northern gulf as far as the Red River Delta region until Ngo Quyen drove them away in 938 – bore the surname Liu/Luu. More striking, the family’s non-Han lineage was so well known that a Han noble family once 54

The characters for Luu Ke Tong are 劉繼宗. Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [A complete history of Great Viet], ed. Chen Chingho, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyobunka kenkyujo, 1986), 1:190. 55 Dai Viet su ky Toan thu, 1:192. While Vietnamese chronicle reported the new Cham king with a title in Sanskrit, Chinese chronicle Songshi recorded that in 990, a ‘new Cham king’ sent his envoy Li Zhen from Foshi City. Songshi [History of the Song dynasty], completed 1345, chapter489 (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/宋史/卷489, accessed 3 September 2016). Could Li Zhen be a Chinese transliteration of ‘Alī Zayn’? 56 Ibid. 57 Arnold Vissière, Études Sino-Mahomètanes (Paris: E.Leroux, 1911), 1:106–133, quoted in Kuwabara Jitsuzo 桑原騭藏, Pu Shougeng kao 蒲壽庚考 [A study on Pu Shougeng], trans. Chen Yujing 陳裕菁 (Shanghai, Zhonghua shuju, 1929), pp. 16–17.

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rejected them as ‘not of our race’ – suggesting the heritage was different.58 To the Chinese it appears, in contrast, that the Cham elite did not consider Liu/ Luu as an outsider. Luu Ke Tong, for his part, would surely have understood what Wade and others have shown, that Arab and other merchants from the Islamic World began joining the ranks of the Cham elite as early as the 960s.59 Perhaps he descended from remnants of the Luu clan who remained in Dai Co Viet after Ngo Quyen expelled the armies of the Southern Han and established his new kingdom in 938. Perhaps Luu was nothing more than a pretender to the Cham throne. This is plausible given the fragmented nature of Cham polities, as William Southworth illustrates so well for us in Chapter 3. In 1069, for example, Dai Viet attacked Champa, captured King Che Cu, and spirited him back to Thang Long, where they kept him captive until he agreed to cede three northern districts of Dia Ly, Ma Linh and Bo Chinh of the present-day Quang Binh and Quang Tri area. Returning home, he discovered that ten chiefs in different parts of his kingdom had claimed his royal title and sparked what would become a long civil war.60 Perhaps Luu had seized a similar opportunity to appropriate the land of ancient Linyi for himself, if the current archaeological and historical records are accurate reflections. He would not have been the first outsider to do this. One immediate such example is the Linyi king Fan Wen, discussed in Chapter 3. Another example is Ngo Quyen’s son Ngo Nhat Khanh, one of the Twelve Warlords (Su quan) of the tenth century. He was angry with Dinh Tien Hoang, who had married his mother therefore stormed into Champa. He led the Cham navy to attack Hoa Lu in 979 ce, but the fleet was lost in a storm and Khanh was drowned, and only the ship of the Cham king escaped.61 It is striking to note that the Cham king of 982 CE was called ‘Sri-tuo-pan Wu Rihuan’ in the Song Chronicle.62 This would be Ngo Nhat Hoan in Vietnamese, who would have highly likely been Ngo Nhat Khanh’s brother and Ngo Quyen’s son. Only this would explain why the ‘Cham king’ would be willing to send 1,000 ships and boats to help a Viet rebel. So, who were the Ngo Quyen family anyway? It is well known that the family was big in Nghe An, the very area that some Linyi aristocrats moved to after the mid-seventh century, discussed in Chapter 3. Could the Ngo have Cham blood? Could they be Chinese descents 58

Fujita Toyohachi 藤田豐八, Zhongguo Nanhai gudai jiaotong congkao 中國南海古代交通叢 考 [Collected essays on the maritime history of the South Seas] trans. He Jianmin (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1936), pp. 141–146. 59 See Cham vice king Li Nou in 971; and Pu-he-san in 961. 60 A Cham inscription in the Po Nagara temple records this story. See Inscription No. 64, ‘Inscription of Po Nagara temple of Paracmabodohisatva’, dated 1084 ce, in R. C. Majumdar, Champa: History and Culture of an Indian Colonial Kingdom in the Far East, 2nd–16th Century AD (Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1985), pp. 168–169. 61 See Toan Thu, pp. 184–185. 62 ‘Fanyi 4’, in Song huiyao.

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as their surname suggests? Or were the Ngo family Viet but usurpers of the Cham throne? Yet what evidence do we have to suggest that they were Viet? All these possibilities indicate that the thousands of kilometres of coastal belt around the Gulf of Tongking to the southern coast to the edge of the Mekong delta throughout the first millennium was a mosaic-like landscape providing multiple identities, affiliations and opportunities to the daring adventurers, be they Cham, Viet, Chinese, Khmer, Indian, or Arabian. The seemingly strange affiliations, loyalties or usurps to the modern eyes and minds were ways of life of the time. The discussion in this chapter seems to suggest that Champa polities from the first millennium to the second were consistently more accepting of the aliens to its court. Nowhere else in Southeast Asia do we see such a thorough acceptance to the Cham court from China (Fan Wen to Linyi), from India (fourth century on), from Arabia from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and from Khmer court in the late twelfth century.63 Cham polities seemed to be an open system, which at the time was its strength and at other times, its weakness. The Cham Capital Moves to Vijaya Among all the southern nagara Champa, the Vijaya region was closest in relation to the nagara Amaravati. A town centre called Thanh Cha had existed at the southern bank of the Con River, from where archaeological excavation revealed that its size, structure, and even age are all comparable to that of Tra Kieu.64 There was a rupture, however, in the tenth and eleventh centuries when there were no cultural layers suggesting human activity.65 This made the space for the rise of Vijaya to political pre-eminence in the early twelfth centuries, when the Viet pressure had been felt intensely, as shown in Table 5.1. The table indicates that Champa began to take Ly Dai Viet seriously politically in the 1020s. Figure 5.2 shows that the rate of Cham’s missions to Song China decreased inexorably beginning in the 1050s, in sharp contrast to the accelerated frequency of Cham tribute to Dai Viet. Indeed, the decline in the 63

Vickery, ‘Short History of Champa’, 54–55. Yamagata Mariko points out that an end tile with a human face decoration was found in Thanh Cha, concurrent with tiles of the same pattern in Tra Kieu in Quang Nam, Co Luy in Quang Ngai, and Thanh Ho in Phu Yen, suggesting that it was a manifestation of an ‘alliance’ of these political centres. Yamagata Mariko, ‘Construction of Linyi Citadels: The Rise of Early Polity in Vietnam’, in Karashima Noboru and Hirosue Masashi (eds), State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Society (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2017), p. 37. 65 Do Truong Giang, Tomoki Suzuki, Nguyen Van Quang, and Mariko Yamagata, ‘Champa Citadels: An Archaeological and Historical Study’, Asian Review of World Histories 5, no. 2 (2017), 102. 64

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The Cham Capital Moves to Vijaya 159 Table 5.1  Numbers of Cham tributes to Song and Dai Viet, 960–1100

960–990 991–1020 1021–1050 1051–1080 1081–1100

To Song

To Dai Viet

23 13 3 9 3

0 0 5 9 13

For the Viet tributes to the Song see Song huiyao, ‘Fanyi 4: Jiaozhi’; Song Shi, chapter 488 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 40:14057–14072; Yamamoto Tatsurō 山本達郎 (ed.), Betonamu Chūgoku kankeishi: Kyukushi no taitō kara Shinhushu sensōmade ベトナム中国関係史：曲氏の台頭 から清仏戦争 [A history of Sino-Vietnam relations: from the Khuc family to the Sino-French War] (Tokyo: Yamakawa, 1975), appendix; For information on Cham tributes to Dai Viet, see Viet su luoc and Toan thu.

number of Cham tribute missions to Song China reached its lowest point as missions to Ly Dai Viet reached their peak. Beginning in the twelfth century, Champa inscriptions regularly mention a newly established nagara/bhumi of Vijaya in modern Binh Dinh and Phu Yen provinces. Archaeological excavations of 2015 and 2016 show that most of the monuments in Vijaya region were built from the mid twelfth century onwards.66 Cham’s new capital Cha Ban (or Do Ban) was the largest city of the central coast, only smaller in size than Thang Long of the Red River Delta.67 All this suggests considerable wealth of the kingdom. The sources of wealth that we are yet to grasp. It is all the more impressive considering Cham’s continuing war with its southern neighbour, Cambodia. Vijaya bought a different world to the previous court of Amaravati. Suddenly the Amaramati Cham found themselves face to face to the peoples of two directions, the Khmers at the south and the peoples in the modern central Highland at the west. None of them had been strangers in the previous millennium, but this time it was much closer and the contacts more frequent and intense. Almost immediately, this new, southern-based Champa engaged in wars with Khmers, which lasted a century. As Vickery pointed out, during the Suryavarman II (1113–1145/50), Cambodia experienced a period of expansion towards the east, motivated by the desire of the Khmer king to participate 66

Ibid., 101–102.

67

Ibid., 98.

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Figure 5.2  Champa’s missions to Dai Viet and the Song, 960–1169 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009237628.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Cham Capital Moves to Vijaya 161

in maritime trade.68 This put Champa in direct competition with the Khmer kingdom. Both countries repeatedly invaded into each other, destroying each other’s capitals, and taking prisoners from each other. Huge resources poured into the wars. Among all the mainland Southeast Asian countries few wars of the pre-modern era seemed to be more damaging than the non-stop Champa– Khmer wars of the twelfth and thirteenth century. John Whitmore reasonably suspects that these wars probably involved trade routes and ports.69 Each almost bled to death which ultimately contributed to their exhaustion. In 1177 Champa even sent its troops up the Mekong River and Tonle Sap, as far as the Great Lake. Angkor was captured and pilfered. This destruction shook the faith of the Khmer in the Hindu tradition, as Lafont pointed out.70 Yet Khmer influence in Vijaya is strong, perhaps strongest on the entire Cham coast. The twin tower of Phap Doi, for example, built between the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, resemble exactly twelfth-century Khmer temple style.71 The need of trading goods – aloeswood, elephant tooth, rhino horns, gums, and so on brought the Chams to the uplanders closer more than anywhere else of central Vietnam. Perhaps only the An Khe area, from where the Tay Son rose, could be compared favourably with Cam Lo of Quang Tri in its easy access to the Truong Son Range, with its linkages to Bahnar, Jarai, Choreo, and other peoples in the Quy Nhon, Quang Ngai, and Phu Yen regions.72 It might not be a coincident that in Gia Lai Cham towers were built in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, soon after the Cham capital moved to Vijaya.73 68

Michael Vickery, ‘Cambodia and Its Neighbours in the 15th Century’, in Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (eds), Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), p. 276. 69 John Whitmore, ‘The Fall of Vijaya in 1471’, in Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy, and Geof Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom (Paris: École française d’ Extrême-Orient, 2019), p. 182. 70 Pierre-Bernard Lafont, ‘On the Relations between Champa and Southeast Asia’, in Proceedings of the Seminar on Champa, trans. Huynh Dinh Te (University of Copenhagen 23 May 1987, Rancho Cordeva, CA: Southeast Asia Community Resource Center, 1994), p. 67. Vickery said that the Cham invasion to Angkor was led by the Khmer king Jayavarman VII (‘A History of Champa’, p. 55). 71 Schweyer, Ancient Vietnam, p. 119. 72 William Southworth and Tran Ky Phuong recently pointed out, however, that there is currently no archaeological evidence to support the idea of a Khmer road system that directly connected Angkor to Vijaya in Binh Đinh across the southern Truong Son range. Instead, they suggest that the main route from Angkor to Campā was achieved by the road leading northeast from Angkor to Wat Phu in the Champassak region of southern Laos. See ‘The Discovery of Late Angkorian Khmer Sculptures at Campā Sites and the Overland Trade Routes between Campā and Cambodia’, in Griffiths, Hardy and Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom, p. 340. 73 Nguyen Huu Manh, ‘Khao co hoc Champa o Binh Dinh va moi lien he voi he thong trao doi thuong mai cua chinh the Vijaya the ky X–XV’ [Archaeology on Binh Dinh and Vijiya’s connections with trading and exchange networks between the tenth and fifteenth centuries], Khao co hoc [Archaeological studies] 1 (2018), 11.

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The Ba river valley was a likely route of entry into the mountains.74 This observation is confirmed by the name Deo Mang for An Khe. In the Bahnar language it means ‘passing door’, that is, a gateway between the plain and the mountains.75 It is indeed a pass for the route between Quy Nhon port to the east and Strung Treng on the Cambodian side of the Mekong to the west, passing via Pleiku and the land of the Jarai and Bahnar, among others. Conclusion The Arabian maritime network offers an important aspect through which to observe Cham polities and economy between the eighth and the twelfth centuries, a global background of which has been overlooked and marginalised in Cham historiography. Without this angle however much of the histories of the southern nagaras and the sources of their wealth, the sudden boom of their monuments and inscriptions of the eighth century cannot be understood. That merchants from Arabia were able to make their entry to Cham courts and became mercantile elite seems to be clear from the evidence above, meanwhile Indic style of monuments and Sanskrit inscriptions also boomed in this period, in the northern Cham nagaras in My Son and Mahayana architectures and arts of Dong Duong. This seemed to suggest that the elites of different backgrounds existed side by side in the various Cham courts. Did they manage to stay in different spheres of court lives and sustain their different lifestyles and cultures on the Cham coast? If other Southeast Asian countries can be the guide this would have been the case. According to Anthony Reid: Though Muslim shipping was dominant, every port needed also the financial services of specialist Hindu casts and therefore the Hindu temples essential to their operations. Every port also welcomed the Chinese merchants with their plural religious traditions. It was said of Melaka that 84 languages could be heard in its streets. Frequently voyages were equipped using crews who were Muslim and Buddhist, and finance capital that might be Hindu or Jewish. In this early stage even port-states with Muslim rulers were plural and permissive, with legalist Muslims a tiny minority.76

Putting Muslim network back into the history of the Cham coast of the eighth to twelfth centuries is putting flesh and blood to the bones of Cham history, 74

Gerald Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 116. 75 Tay Son Nguyen Hue (Nghia Binh: Ty Van hoa va Thong tin Nghia Binh, 1978), p. 48. This could be compared to a Rhade name, Tvea Phreah Nakor, which means ‘The Gate of the Capital’. This marked the frontier between the Cambodian kingdom and the highlands (Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, p. 141). 76 Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 105.

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Conclusion 163

without which all we have is fragmented pieces of Chinese texts and limited numbers of Sanskrit inscriptions. Two fields are promised to offer us new insights: the field of archaeology, which has enriched our knowledge significantly as shown in this chapter; and epigraphic studies on the huge collections of inscriptions from the southern coast, being done by the French scholars. They will reveal a colourful and vibrant coast which sustained multiple principalities and possibilities. It was this coast and the vital Muslim networks that boosted the trade of ceramics, as next chapter will show.

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6

Muslim Trade and the Conquest of the Coast The Mystery of the Topkapi Vase

Proof of alternative Vietnams has appeared in the most unlikely of places. In one case, the evidence revealed itself half a world away, in a surprising way. It happened in Istanbul. One day in 1980, when Makato Anabuki, a Japanese diplomat visiting the city’s famed Topkapi Palace Museum, encountered a fine blue-and-white ceramic vase. The inscribed place of manufacture on the base revealed that it was made in Nam Sach in Hai Duong, a province in the north of today’s Vietnam, in 1450.1 The news of this vase’s provenance surprised everyone. None were more taken aback than the people of Chu Dau, in the vicinity of ancient Nam Sach where this fine vase was made. No one there had even the slightest knowledge of ancient ancestors who once upon a time made wares reposed in such fine places as the palaces of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and Egypt half a world away. In time, this motivated scholars to investigate the mystery in earnest. In the 1990s, Vietnamese and Japanese archaeologists began to undertake excavations of suspected ceramics kilns, commercial sites, and shipwrecks. Then, between 1997 and 1999, Oxford University archaeologists working with Vietnamese authorities in the waters off Cu Lao Cham (Cham Island) in Central Vietnam along the shores of the South China Sea excavated over 240,000 pieces of intact ceramic wares. Out of the entire hoard, 150,000 items comprised blue-and-white ceramics, similar in colour and style as the vase in Istanbul. Their dates of production range between the mid and late fifteenth century.2 Only an operation of industrial scale could have produced volume this large. The same can be said about the scale of sophistication, the earliest evidence for which came initially from various museums in Japan. One type of Vietnamese blue-and-white ware particularly caught the eyes of ceramics experts: large plates, also dated sometime in the 1400s, most of them collected

1

The inscription reads Dai Hoa bat nien tuong nhan Nam Sach Chau Bui thi hi but 大和八年匠 人南策州裴氏戲筆 [Made for fun by the artisan surnamed Bui of the Nam Sach prefecture in the eighth year of Dai Hoa]. 2 Treasure from the Hoi An Hoard: Important Vietnamese Ceramics from the Late 15th–Early 16th Century Cargo (San Francisco: Butterfields, 2000), p. 2.

164

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165

in Indonesia. These were no ordinary large plates: indeed, they were so large, ranging in size from 37 to 44 centimetres that they were clearly made specifically for communal eating, a practice more common among Middle Eastern communities than those in China, Japan, or Vietnam.3 These plates were made by kilns capable of creating designs for niche markets, something scholars had found hard to imagine for the 1400s, and even more so for Vietnam. The evidence was irrefutable: The Chu Dau vase at Topkapi Palace was no anomaly, but in fact a typical product of a large ceramics industry geared for export, on which no Vietnamese chronicles or local histories mentioned a word of it. Vietnamese export ceramics was a vestige of a different and longsubmerged Vietnam. As perspectives changed, the evidence of this alternative Vietnam appeared everywhere. Take, for example, the name ‘Chu Dau’ itself, which simply means ‘wharf’. Then consider its geography. Two to three metres higher in elevation than its surroundings, the old Chu Dau overlooks the Luc Dau River that leads to the Gulf of Tongking. In this once long-forgotten place, lingering in obscurity underground and now unearthed for the world to see, researchers found traces of the industrial hub that once served a long-lost export network crucial to the prosperity of the Viet kingdom. This fits the narrative that had been developing among a cohort of scholars inspired by Anthony Reid’s recognition that an ‘Age of Commerce’ had prevailed throughout Southeast Asia in early modern times. Geoff Wade further argued that the period of 900– 1300 ce constituted an ‘early age of commerce’ for Southeast Asia.4 From the 1990s, historians and other specialists began to confirm, elaborate, and expand on this ever-increasing treasure-trove of archaeological evidence. Centuries before any European sailor, merchant, or industrialist set foot on Vietnamese soil, ancestors of modern Vietnamese had developed a flourishing commercial society well integrated into the networks of inter-Asian trade, not only by land but also by sea. The Chu Dau story reveals an important aspect of Dai Viet’s trade of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The Song government’s creation in the twelfth century of a state-sponsored market designed to procure cavalry-grade horses from Yunnan helped to spark the development of the gulf’s ‘Jiaozhi Sea’ trading zone, which helped to invigorate commerce and long-distance land and sea trade in the young Vietnamese kingdom, evidenced in part by the creation of a new seaport at Van Don, which Chapter 4 illustrates. For all 3

Such as the Matsuoka Museum of Art in Tokyo; Machida City Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Oriental ceramic, Osaka; and Fukuoka Art Museum. 4 Geoff Wade, ‘An Earlier Age of Commerce in South-east Asia: 900–1300 C.E.?’, in Fujiko Kayoko, Makino Naoko, and Matsumoto Mayumi (eds), Dynamic Rimlands and Open Heartlands: Maritime Asia as a Site of Interactions, Proceedings of the Second COE-ARI Joint Workshop (Osaka: Research Cluster on Global History of Maritime Asia, 2007), pp. 27–81.

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its benefits, however, the Jiaozhi Sea alone fails to provide sufficient context to explain the provenance of the Topkapi vase, because it turns out China was only part of the story. Vietnamese ceramics have now resurfaced in archaeological sites all over the Indian Ocean region, including the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, two important bodies of water in the heart of the Islamic World. To grasp the vase’s significance, our attention must turn there. Central to this story are players as surprising to historians of the country as the long-vanished ceramics, potteries, and wharves of Chu Dau: The Muslim traders and trading ships of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The primary agents of sea trade between eastern and western Afro-Eurasia between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, they were a major presence in the ports of southern China, not to mention Champa, especially in its southernmost regions. Despite their obvious significance, the word ‘Muslim’ hardly ever appears in any book on Vietnamese history. This chapter demonstrates both that Muslim merchants and trade ships operated in Dai Viet and the Gulf of Tonking and also, by doing so, they contributed to the resurgence of the gulf as a zone of sea trade. Together with the trading networks that created the Jiaozhi Sea and port of Van Don in the twelfth century, these Muslim connections helped to integrate Dai Viet and its northern gulf trade zone into the larger maritime exchange networks that extended to southern China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. This affected the course of early Dai Viet’s development in significant ways. First, it catalyzed a contest for control of the coast that began between Jiaozhi and Linyi in the third century, as Chapters 2 and 3 describe, and by the tenth century took the form of Dai Viet and the various kingdoms of Champa. Second, the integration of Muslim networks into the Jiaozhi Sea trading zone created a string of trading bases that lured merchant clans from Fujian south along the Chinese coast to Hainan Island and the Leizhou Peninsula before turning west to reach Dai Viet by way of the northern gulf coast. Instigated by Muslim networks which then overlapped their pattern of operation established in strategic places like Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Hainan, the northern gulf, and Cham coast, Fujianese clans like the Chen settled into Dai Viet coastal society in the twelfth century, initiating an ascent to power, first commercial and then political, that led to the Tran (C. Chen 陳) Dynasty in 1225. Third, access to inter-Asian trade poised both Dai Viet and the Cham kingdoms, rivals for control of the coast, to successfully sponsor the development of export industries in the fifteenth century when Chinese commodities disappeared from Asian markets in the wake of the Ming court’s ban on exports (1381). Countries overseas like Dai Viet and Champa responded to this ‘Ming Gap’ by sponsoring substitute industries, which gave birth to the kilns of Chu Dau and various kilns in the Red River Delta. The regional trade this boomed

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eventually led to the creation of an arms industry that gave Dai Viet the military upper hand in its contest for the Cham coast, so much so that in 1471 it destroyed Champa as a rival commercial and sea-trading power. Coastal rivalries continued, to be clear, but the principal adversaries thereafter were Vietnamese. Muslim Traders of the Jiaozhi Sea Scholarly understanding of Dai Viet’s western connections and their significance remained somewhat less clear until recently. But like the Topkapi vase, the first key clues were detected in unlikely places, the art, artifacts, and architectural vestiges littered along the thousand-kilometre coastline inhabited by the ancient Cham kingdoms. In the downriver estuaries, archaeologists have exhumed relics of an affluent commerce that suggest a complex system of trade sustained by a synergy of traders of diverse cultural origins: alongside the vestiges of Indian elites or Cham notables with Indian ancestors – not to mention Muslim or Fujianese, principle players in this history of maritime trade – indeed, a diversity of or any number of traces of another cultural infusion from without appear, this time from the Muslims of western Asia thousands of kilometres away. The ongoing dynamic encouraged a long-time rivalry focused on control of the coast and its coveted commercial aromatics and other exotic fauna. Whatever their role in this competition, Muslims certainly influenced it as a result of their insertion into gulf trade at a moment of profound change along the Viet and Cham coasts. They affected the political dynamics of Viet– Cham relations through four key factors: tribute; the exodus of Muslims from Champa; aromatics and the growth of Hainan in Dai Viet trade; and the rise of a Min merchant class in both Dai Viet and Champa. Tribute and the Contest for the Coast It should be clear by now that the tenth and eleventh centuries were a dynamic period for the Gulf of Tongking. New regimes formed in the wake of a Chinese retreat from the Red River Delta. The new elites of Dai Viet, no longer on the periphery of the northern empire and therefore free to assert itself as an autonomous centre of power, were free to vie more aggressively for control of the coast and its commerce particularly its southern coast. Capturing and controlling the coast’s long string of estuaries and its offshore flow of trade was essential to anyone seeking to build a secure base of power over the coast since at least the rise of Linyi centuries previous. In this context, it is small wonder that Dai Viet looked at their southern neighbour as a rival. This contentious

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Muslim Trade and the Conquest of the Coast Table 6.1  Visits by Cham and Viet Envoys to Guangzhou, 960–999 Year

Viet to Song

960–969 970–979 980–989 990–999 Total

0 3 5 6 14

Cham to Song 8 7 4 5 24

Source: Dai Viet su ky Toan Thu, 180–195; Song Shi [Song Chronicle], ­chapter 488; Song huiyao, chapter 197.

dynamic persisted for the next five centuries, ceasing only with Champa’s decimation in the 1470s, but tilted in Dai Viet’s favour appears to have begun almost immediately after independence arrived in the tenth century. Diplomatic records indirectly reflect the beginning of this shift in the balance of Viet–Cham power. Chinese historical records show that during the 960s, Cham embassies began to arrive regularly in the port city of Guangzhou, seeking to pay tribute to the emperor of the new Song Dynasty, and they continued to send missions to the imperial court every year thereafter, as Table 6.1 shows. A decade later, embassies from the newly created Kingdom of Dai Viet also began to arrive in Guangzhou. A new state in the Gulf of Tongking could only have posed a threat to Champa’s place in the Chinese tributary order. Whatever their political concerns, both Viet and Cham embassies operated to maintain and improve trade relations with the Song China at the expense of competing states. Comparing with Figure 5.2, it seemed that Dai Viet began to undermine Champa’s position in China’s diplomatic order. From this perspective, it did not take long for Dai Viet to diminish their rival’s status in the Chinese court. Table 6.1 reveals that, between the 980s and 990s, Cham missions to the Song court dropped by about half. By the 980s, Dai Viet had established formal relations with China and superseded its rival in tribute. Juxtapose this with the data comparing Cham tribute missions to Dai Viet and China in Figure 5.2 (see Chapter 5). Read together, the shift in diplomatic pre-eminence from Champa to Dai Viet is hard to miss. A Muslim Exodus Dai Viet’s encroachment on Cham interests led to an exodus of Muslim merchants from Champa to China, this diffusion in turn helped to invigorate commerce in the gulf, including the development of Hainan Island, the long-term consequences of which affected Viet and Cham politics in profound ways. Many merchants moved to ports in China and established trading bases there.

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To illustrate, a collection of annotated statutes called the Institutional History of the Song Dynasty (Song huiyao) reports that in 986, an official in Danzhou, situated on China’s Hainan Island, advised the Song emperor that a merchant named ‘Pu (Abū) Luo-e had been forced [from Champa] by Jiaozhou [Dai Viet] and led over one hundred members of his clan [to China] pledging allegiance’.5 Two years later, another Muslim from Champa named Huxuan (Hussain) led three hundred members of his clan to Guangzhou to resettle there.6 Dai Viet, now an independent power on the gulf coast, began to influence the politics of regional trade more assertively, to which individual merchants like the Pu had to respond. Hainan Island is significant in this story of the long-term effects of Muslim Cham migration. Chinese records show that, from the beginning of the Song era in 960, Cham envoys frequently stopped first at Hainan Island before proceeding to the mainland to conduct their diplomatic missions. This was not done simply to shelter or resupply: Cham groups were already long settled along the island’s coast to the west, east and south. Hainan was a rich Water Frontier in the Tang era. It’s gold income from maritime revenue was more than that of other southern provinces.7 The western coast of Hainan, which faces the Gulf of Tongking, was most populous during the Tang era. In other words, Muslim merchants from Champa migrated to a prosperous place just as the Indian monks moved to Later Han Jiaozhi in the third and fourth century CE. Evidence of their earlier presence there still reveals itself on the island’s east coast in the vestige of a temple that once stood where overseas ships paid tribute before travelling to the mainland. People called the deity of this temple ‘Bozhu’ 舶主, ‘shipmaster’. More telling perhaps, they specifically forbade anyone to offer their divinity pork.8 Two abandoned Muslim cemeteries were discovered in Hainan with numerous tombs and stalae with Arabic inscriptions. These may well be associated with the Muslim into Hainan in the eleventh centuries, as Charffee points out, and could be even earlier.9 Despite Hainan’s sparse population, the government’s trade revenues from the island soared during the Song period, thanks no doubt to its prosperous overseas trade and the 5

Geoff Wade, ‘Champa in the Song Hui-yao’, Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series No. 53, Singapore, November 2005, p. 10. See also Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Champa’, in Alijah Gordon (ed.), The Propagation of Islam in the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001), p. 295. 7 ‘瓊守雖海渚，歲得金錢，南邊經略使不能及.’ Fang Qianli 房千里, Touhuang zalu 投荒雜 錄 [Miscellaneous records from the wilderness], in Taiping Guangji 太平廣記 (https://ctext.org/ taiping-guangji/, accessed 6 June 2019). Schafer points out that Hainan only became poorer after the eleventh century. Edward H. Schafer, Shore of Pearls: Hainan Island in Early Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 83; for its registered population see Chapter 1. 8 Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成 [Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times], chapter 138. 9 John W. Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China: The History of a Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 45. 6

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trading groups, including Cham Muslims like Pu Luo-e or perhaps Arabs like Hussain and their clans, who helped to develop it there.10 Over the next century and a half, this growth of Cham trading communities on Hainan Island affected Dai Viet, too, because it strengthened the kingdom’s trade ties with northern gulf Chinese ports, most importantly Qinzhou, and opened the doors to a new market in aromatic woods. The Southern Song court’s creation of a massive market in Yunnan horses in the 1100s increased shipping traffic along the northern coast greatly, nurturing the Jiaozhi Sea trade network that in turn compounded the power of Dai Viet’s coastal Chinese or Ngo merchants profiled in Chapter 4, a development that led ultimately to the downfall of the Ly Dynasty in 1225. Muslim Trade in Aromatics and the Rise of Hainan and Qinzhou (Tenth to Twelfth Centuries) What originally attracted the Arabs to Champa, like that of the Chinese centuries earlier, was aloeswood. Indeed, Arabs nearly equated the two: the Arabic name for Champa, Sanf, derives from the incense, Sanfı̄.11 As they established a foothold in the market for the coveted aromatic wood, they reaped great fortunes. This is evident in Chinese accounts of Muslim Chams who immigrated from Champa to Chinese port cities. A Yuan-era book referring to Song events in Guangzhou, for example, recalls: Many sea people (hailao) lived scattered about in the city. The most prominent among them was a man surnamed Pu (Abū) who was by birth a noble of Zhancheng [Champa]. Later on, he took up his permanent residence in China in order to attend to his import and export trade. He lived inside the city where his home was furnished in the most luxurious fashion, for in wealth he was the richest of the time.12

In time, Pu resettled his family, which grew in fortune to become an important mercantile power in southern China. Whatever their motives behind immigration, Cham Muslims who resettled in Song China soon came to function as indispensable intermediaries between Islamic communities in Southeast Asia and China, not to mention between Muslims and Chinese. 10

Kobata Atsushi 小葉田淳, Hainan daoshi 海南島史 [A history of the Hainan Island], trans. Zhang Xunzhai 張迅齋 (Taipei: Xuehai chubanshe, 1979), p. 50. Kitab al-masalik wa’l-mamalik [The book of roads and kingdoms] of Ibn Khurdadhbih and in the Akhbar al-Sin wa’l-Hind [An account of China and India], which dates to around 850 ce. Gerald Randall Tibbetts, A Study of the Arabic Texts Containing Material on South-East Asia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), pp. 25–29. 12 Cited in Wade, ‘Early Muslim Expansion in Southeast Asia’, p. 376. ‘Sea Lao’ is written as 海 獠. Chaffee similarly translates both man and lao as ‘southern peoples’. Both translations, by Wade and Chaffee, seem appropriate to me. Although they literally mean ‘barbarians’, in many contexts these terms have no derogatory meaning (Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants, p. 37). 11

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After the above-mentioned migration of merchant Pu (originally Abū) to Guangzhou in the tenth century, he and his clan began to cultivate a prominent sea-trading business that enjoyed a long heyday during the Song and Southern Song eras (960–1279). From Guangzhou, they expanded their bases of operations in China and moved their centre of operations to Quanzhou, the most important sea trade centre during both the Song and Yuan (1271–1368) eras. In time, their power expanded into the political sphere: Their most famous son, Pu Shougeng (1245–1284), transcended mercantile status to become the governor of Quanzhou. Pu ships, an observer noted, ‘went back and forth at sea, made a huge fortune and employed several thousand servants’ in its bases in China and Champa, and perhaps elsewhere. ‘All the South Sea countries obeyed him.’13 This includes the Jiaozhi Sea network in the Tongking Gulf. Surviving Pu genealogies make it clear that clan operatives were quite active throughout the Gulf of Tongking: This can be verified in family genealogies in not only sea-trading centres of the Chinese southern coast like Dehua in Fujian (also a key commercial hub for ceramics) and Guangzhou, but also Chinese ports of the eastern gulf like Yaizhou on Hainan Island and Qinzhou in present-day Guangxi – critical ports in the trade of Dai Viet and Champa that would play major roles in Vietnamese trade and sometimes politics into the nineteenth century.14 From these gulf port centres, Pu clan members maintained goodwill with each other while they in turn nurtured good relations with local producers of key commodities. By the eleventh century, aromatics began to emerge as an export commodity in Hainan, and the consequent growth of aromatics harvesting eventually led the island to become an important player in the commerce of the Jiaozhi Sea. No evidence exists that aloeswood trade had ever existed in Hainan before the Song era.15 This hardly seems incidental: The island’s aloeswood was likely discovered or cultivated by the very Cham refugees who settled in Hainan at the end of the tenth century. By the twelfth century historical sources report that the Li people ‘lived by trading aromatic woods’.16 13

‘Inscription of Dong Wenbing, District officer of Gaocheng 藁城令董文炳遺愛碑’, in Gaocheng xianzhi 藁城县志 [Gazette of Gaicheng district, Hebei], chapter 8. 14 Luo Xianglin, Pu Shougeng zhuan [A biography of Pu Shougeng] (Taipei: Zhonghua wenhua chuban shiye weiyuan hui, 1965), pp. 2–3. Although some have expressed doubts about the Muslim origin of the Pu, Pierre-Yves Manguin has pointed out that pieces of Chinese and Arabic evidence ‘establish beyond cavil that at the beginning of the eight century there were links between Campa, the colonies of Muslim merchants in South China, and the Pu families’ (‘The Introduction of Islam into Campa’, p. 3). 15 Hainan was known as ‘Island of Aromatics’, Xiangzhou 香洲 in the sixth-century source Shuyiji 述異記, where ‘all sorts of strange aromatics are produced’ (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/ 述異記 accessed 6 June 2019). This source did not mention aloeswood, although those from Linyi had been known since the fourth century. See Schafer, The Shore of Pearls, p. 41. 16 Zhao Rukuo 趙汝括, Zhu fanzhi buzhu 諸蕃志 [Supplementary annotations to Zhu fanzhi]. Completed 1225. Annotated version by Han Zhenhua 韓振華, Zhu fanzhi buzhu 諸蕃志補註 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000), p. 443.

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It would not be surprising that Cham Muslim merchants played a crucial role in organising aromatics harvesting, processing, and trade throughout the South China Sea. Merchants from West Asia had traded in aromatics there since the trade began in the third century (see Chapter 2). When Muslim networks became predominant in the eighth century, this lucrative market naturally remained in their hands. After all, their ships were large for their day; the biggest ones could reportedly carry over 300 ton of cargo and 500 to 600 people.17 Thus, the aromatics-loaded ships owned by the Pu Family criss-crossed the rim of the Tongking Gulf, connecting as they did the ports of the Jiaozhi Sea network and the South China Sea. We can appreciate the scale of the Pu clan’s trade thanks to a shipwreck near the old port of Quanzhou that Chinese archaeologists raised in 1973. This Song-era wreckage yielded some 2,350 kilograms of aromatics, including aloeswood, sandalwood, frankincense, ambergris, and pepper, despite nearly a millennium of exposure to the sea, whose currents must have washed a large quantity of material away.18 The ship measured about 30 metres in length and 10 metres in width, giving it the capacity to carry 100 tons of cargo and as many as 60 sailors – not as large as the biggest Song junks, but probably more representative of the Chinese junks serving the ports of the Jiaozhi Sea. Therefore, it gives us a better idea of the kind of sailing craft owned by merchants like those working for the Pu clan (see Figure 6.1). The Muslims Factor in the Rise of Fujianese Merchant Networks From the perspective of Vietnamese history, it is safe to say that an important, if not the most important, legacy of these Muslim traders of the Jiaozhi Sea was the Chinese merchants from southern Fujian (Hokkien) who followed in their wake. Muslim sea-traders essentially established the networks that Fujian Chinese would come to dominate, making them ‘merchants without empire’, as Wang Gungwu accurately termed, and legendary pioneers of maritime China for which they are known today.19 Indeed, the early links between the two groups are closer than we have assumed. In many cases during the formative years of Fujianese expansion, Fujianese and Muslim merchants were 17

Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida [Representative answers from beyond the mountains], completed 1178 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), p. 219. 18 ‘Quanzhouwan Songdai haichuan fajue jianbao’ 泉州灣宋代海船發掘簡報 [Report on the excavation of the Song shipwreck in the Quanzhou Bay], Wenwu 文物 [Antiquities] 10 (1975), 1–21; Zhuang Weiji 莊為璣 and Zhuang Jinghui 莊景輝, ‘Quanzhou Songchuan xiangliao yü Pujia xiangye’ 泉州宋船香料與蒲家香業 [The aromatics found in the sunk ship in Quanzhou and the aromatic business of the Pu family], Journal of Xiamen University Z1 (1978), 170–177. 19 Wang Gungwu, ‘Merchant without Empire : The Hokkien Sojourning Communities’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 400–421.

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Figure 6.1  Qing navigational map, route next to the Jiaozhi Sea Source: Qian Jiang and Chen Jiarong 錢江,陳佳榮, ‘Introducing Maps of South and East Sea of the Qing Dynasty, a sister series map held by the Yale University, of the Seldon Map of the Ming dynasty, held by the Oxford’ 牛 津藏⟪明代東西洋航海圖⟫姐妹作———耶魯藏⟪清代東南洋航海圖明 代东西洋航海图⟫推介, Haijiaoshi yanjiu 海交史研究[Journal of Maritime History Studies] 1 (2013), chart 90, p. 85. The text describes navigation, distance, time and directions for sailing from the Yazhou (today’s Sanya, Hainan) to the Con Dao (Kunlun) area. On the left-hand side one finds comments ‘This landmass is next to the Jiaozhi Sea’. Qian and Chen think that the charts were made between the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century. Wing-Sheung Cheng held that these maps could be copies of late sixteenth century, when the Cham capital Phan Rang was the base of trade by Hokkien merchants. Wing-Sheung Cheng 鄭永常, ‘Yelu cang shanxing shuishitu de wudu yu shangque’ 耶魯藏山形水勢圖的誤讀 與商榷 [Misread and discussions on the maps maritime charts held by the Yale], Haiyangshi yanjiu 海洋史研究 [Maritime History Studies] 9 (2016), 175–192.

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one and the same. Muslim migration along the coast of the South China Sea created an opportunity for Fujian merchants to enter the growing markets this nurtured, which is exactly what the seafaring merchants of southern Fujian began to do.20 As early as the beginning of the eleventh century, Fujianese merchants had situated themselves in key ports along the long littoral between Quanzhou and Champa, which they exploited to capture the market in aromatics exports to China. In 1011, an officer surnamed Chen was already on board of the Cham mission to Guangzhou, a delegation led by the Muslim envoy and deputy envoy Pu Sa-duo-po and Pu Duo-po-di.21 By the middle of the twelfth century, during the Song era, they apparently held sway in both Cham trade and politics. In 1155, a Cham official named Sadama led a diplomatic mission to China on behalf of the ‘King of Champa’ bearing the weighty sum of 33 tons of aromatics as tribute. A Fujianese merchant named Chen Weian accompanied him. Chinese court records cite the Cham ambassador, who explained: ‘Chen Weian comes to trade in our country every year. He is fluent in both languages and is also very familiar with our king, who specifically asked that Chen be a part of this mission.’22 He presented the emperor with gifts of ‘aromatics from O and Ly’, a name that Viet have long applied to the northern Cham regions of Indrapura, roughly equivalent to old Linyi, and specially to the region of Thua Thien-Hue where aromatic forests used to grow.23 Twelve years after the Chen mission of 1155, another Chinese merchant Chen led a delegation from Champa to give tribute and do business. In 1167, this Chen boarded a richly laden ship bound for Guangzhou carrying 57 tons of cargo, nearly all of which were aromatics.24 This was no ordinary commercial cargo, however; Chinese officials soon discovered that this mega-rich ‘tribute’ in fact was booty looted from an Arab ship. A Song court record explains: The Cham king first dispatched Cham and locally born Chinese (tusheng Tangren) 20

With maritime trade the Chinese participated in the Islamisation of Java. Denys Lombard and Claudine Salmon, ‘Islam and Chinese’, in Alijah Gordon (ed.), The Propagation of Islam in the Indonesian–Malay Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001), pp. 183–208. 21 Xu Song 徐松, Song huiyao jigao 宋會要輯稿 [Drafts for the administrative statutes of the Song dynasty]. Completed c. 1796–1820 (www.daizhige.org, accessed 7 July 2019). Here after Song huiyao. ‘Fanyi’ 4. 22 Song huiyao: Fanyi 4. 23 This also confirms that the Cham capital in the mid-twelfth century still lay in Amaravati, that is, the Quang Nam area, in the vicinity of Tra Kieu. See Michael Vickery, ‘Champa Revised’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), pp. 386–389; John K. Whitmore, ‘The Last Great King of Classical Southeast Asia: ‘Che Bong Nga and Fourteenth-century Champa’, in The Cham of Vietnam, p. 173. 24 An inventory in Fanyi 7 of the Song huiyao lists 7795 jin of ivory, 20,453 jin of frankincense, 80,295 jin of mixed aromatics, 990 jin of aloeswood, 300 jin of calambac, and 2000 jin of other kinds of aromatics, which makes a total of 113,111 jin (56,555 kilograms).

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seafarers to lure the Arab crew ashore; when they landed, he arrested them, intent on executing them. Afterwards, the monarch dispatched Sadama and Chen to present the stolen cargo to the Song court as tribute. By luck, one of the Arab prisoners escaped and later in the same month arrived in Quanzhou to tell his story.25 Merchant Chen, the leader of the twelve Cham merchants presenting the stolen goods, a locally born Hokkien or southern Fujianese, was also one of the tusheng Tangren. As a local, he was likely fluent in a language the victims could understand, like Arabic. This time, the Cham mission set sail from Vijaya rather than Amaravati, in the wake of the court’s shift south. While members of the Chen merchant family actively engaged in Champa’s aromatic trade and piracy, another man from Fujian surnamed Chen made his way to Vietnam via Qinzhou in the eastern gulf, to become the founder of the Tran (C. Chen) dynasty that ruled Dai Viet from 1225 to 1400, as Chapter 4 revealed.26 Vietnamese chronicles states that the first emperor was a fourth-generation descendent of Fujianese immigrants. This would mean that the first generation of the Tran family migrated to Dai Viet at about the same period that Chen Weian was conducting his annual trading voyages to Champa. A source written by a Yuan envoy to Dai Viet claims that the first-generation ancestor of the Tran royal family was named Chen Jing who became the son-in-law of the Ly royal family.27 There seemed to be numerous Chinese surnamed Chen active during the twelfth and thirteenth century in the Jiaozhi Sea trading zone, and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to speculate that they were connected to each other in some way. These Fujian merchants and seafarers like the Chen are important to the story of Viet–Cham competition, because they connect the politics of trade between the northern and southern gulf, the Viet and the Cham, in a very interesting way when viewed from the sea. This raises the important question: did the Tran (Chen) family rise to power due to one individual and a series of lucky incidents, as the chronicle and the legend suggest, or to a more sophisticated process facilitated by the regional networks they built? John Whitmore has long maintained that the flexibility of Southeast Asian social and political systems wherein successful rulers typically achieved supremacy through competition among rival chiefs or land-based elites, each with his own network of allies.28 In this context, the gulf’s Jiaozhi Sea trading zone provided the strategic advantages in which Tran commercial 25

26 Song huiyao: Fanyi 4. Toan thu, p. 321. Chen Fu 陳孚, ‘Annan jishi’ 安南即事 [Records on the visit to Annam], in Yuanshi jishi 元 詩紀事 [A record of Yuan poems], chapter 9 (https://so.gushiwen.cn/shiwenv_f7640bbf750b .aspx, accessed 8 August 2018). 28 John K. Whitmore, ‘Elephants Can Actually Swim’, in David Marr and Anthony Milner (eds), Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies & Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986), p. 131. 27

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links to China through Chen kinship networks allowed the clan to exploit Dai Viet politics to rise above its competitors to achieve political supremacy. Such behaviour became common to this phase of Southeast Asian history in which Fujianese merchants captured informal political power. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit tell a similar legend about the founding of Ayutthaya and numerous cities in Southeast Asia: ‘The most elaborate of the several foundation myths of Ayutthaya, recorded by Van Vliet, concerns the son of a Chinese provincial ruler. Exiled from home for sexual misadventures, he travels with a fleet of junks to the peninsula; establishes first Langkasuka and then Ligor; achieves mercantile success; marries the Chinese emperor’s daughter; and then moves gradually north founding Kui, Phetchaburi, Bangkok, and other places before establishing Ayutthaya.’29 Ceramics and the Conquest of the Coast Muslims and the Min Factor? In the wake of the Tran coup of 1225 and rise of a new dynasty in Dai Viet, Muslims continued to flourish, both generally throughout the gulf and in Dai Viet. When Mongol envoys visited the kingdom in 1266, they found among the residents a significant number of Muslim people, whom Chinese and Viet labelled with the characters Huihu (回鶻). This discovery prompted the Mongol emperor Kublai in 1267 to send a letter to the Dai Viet king: In it, he criticises the king’s court for preventing the numerous Huihu living there from talking to the Muslim governor of Yunnan, al-Sayyid Shams al-Din’Umar, during his visit to the capital, Thang Long.30 The next year, Kublai followed up with another attempt to approach the Huihu living in Dai Viet, demanding that king Tran Thanh Tong (r.1258–1278) send his kingdom’s Huihu merchants to China so that he could ask them about the situation in the Middle East. Tran Thanh Tong excused himself evasively, claiming that there had been only two Muslim merchants in the whole country, and both had died, a claim that the emperor angrily denounced as a lie.31

29

Chis Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siamin the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 56. 30 Documents collected by Le Trac in Annam Chi Luoc [A short history of Annam] (comp.1330s, repr. Hue: Vien Dai hoc Hue, 1961), p. 33. The characters for Saidianchi are 賽典赤. 31 Song Lian 宋濂 et al. (eds), Yuanshi 元史 [History of Yuan], finished 1370, (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), pp. 635–636. In most Chinese sources, the term ‘Huihu’ refers to the Uighur kingdoms of the eighth through eleventh centuries in today’s Xinjiang along the ancient Silk Road. According to Igor de Rachewiltz, the authority on Yuan history, ‘Huihu’ could indicate Uighur, Khorezm, or Muslim Turks and other peoples from the Middle East. My thanks to Igor for his help on this term.

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Figure 6.2  Muslim three tip counterweight trebuchets, c. 1187 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet, accessed 28 April 2022.

Kublai was correct, as the Vietnamese chronicle Complete History of Dai Viet proves. Muslim commercial connections did exist between Dai Viet, Champa, China, and the Middle East. The chronicle recorded that in 1274, not long after the event mentioned above, a fleet of some thirty seagoing ships sailing from China arrived in Dai Viet. On the ships there were immigrants who brought along their treasure and their families. The Vietnamese chronicle recorded that ‘they called themselves Huiji’ (回雞, ‘returning chicken’) which is most certainly mistaken for ‘Huihu’ (回鶻), the same people to which the merchants mentioned above belonged.32 A considerable number of fellow Muslims had to already be living and operating in Dai Viet for the Huihu merchants to make such a bold move. Champa’s Muslim connections were more evident. When a Mongol naval fleet attacked Vijaya in 1282, the Chams built a wooden citadel along the coast to defend their capital. In this wooden fort, they constructed more than a hundred counter trebuchets, a feat that Chinese court historians recorded in the Yuan History as ‘Huihui sanshao pao’, ‘Muslim three-tip counterweight trebuchets.’33 There was little doubt that Muslim artisans or military experts directly supervised this huge project (see Figure 6.2). 32

‘In 1274, Song people came to Dai Viet. They came in thirty sea ships carrying treasure and their families, and were allowed to settle in Pho Tuan Phuong, Thang Long. They called themselves Huiji (Hồ i Kê in Vietnamese, lit. “returning chicken”). This was because we refer to the Song as Kê Quôć (the country of chicken), [and] because they have brocades and medicines to sell and have formed markets.’ Toan Thu, pp. 348–349. 33 The Huihui pao had been introduced to China in 1268, when two Muslims, Ismail and Al-audDin, travelled to South China from Iraq and built trebuchets for the Mongol siege of Xiangyang city. Song Lian, Yuanshi 元史, vol. 15:4544. Paul E. Chevedden et al., ‘The Trebuchet’, Scientific American (July 1995), 66–71.

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Blue-and-White and the Cham Collapse We have now come full circle in our investigation. By the early decades of the thirteenth century, Muslim Fujianese trade coalitions were flourishing; aromatics cultivation had expanded overseas from Champa to Hainan Island; and commerce of aromatics increased. The cultural presence of the Middle East in Tran Dai Viet is apparent in the same source. The Complete Annals of Dai Viet (Toan thu) reports that in the year 1268, the very year that the Mongol emperor requested the company of Hu or West Asian merchants from Dai Viet, that the dynasty’s ‘junior’ king Tran Thanh Tong and his brother reportedly danced in the royal palace in ‘Ho’ or Hu style to amuse their father, the ‘senior’ king, Tran Thai Tong. The Complete Record states:34 The senior king is dressed in a white cotton gown, and Prince Tinh Quoc (Thanh Tong’s brother) performed a Ho (Hu) style dance (V. Hồ nhân võ) for him, to whom the senior king undressed his own [white cotton] gown for Tinh Quoc to perform the Ho dance. [His brother] Tran Thanh Tong also performed Ho dance and asked Prince Tinh Quoc for the white gown.

The reference to a Hu- or Arabic-style tunic here is quite clear. In the seventh century, the Tang-era Chinese monk Xuanzang noted that the custom of peoples ‘when in celebration’ on the overland Silk Road in Western Asia ‘dress in white, while at funerals [they] dress in black’.35 The Tran king was clearly donning West Asian attire, different from China, where white is only for funerals. The Tran court also played a drum from Champa called Fanshi drum and this was only used by the king. This drum was the very drum called Jiegu 羯鼓, popular during the mid–late Tang era and from the Silk Road.36 Interestingly, these activities coincided at a time when merchants of Cham Muslim background with extensive western Asian contacts like the merchantcum-governor Pu Shougeng (1205–1290) were ‘dominating the South Sea’, a situation ‘which lasted three decades’, from the 1250s to 1280s.37 The strong, complex long-distance connections between places and people sparked by Muslim commerce now permeated local cultures in places like Fujian, Champa, and Dai Viet, deepening their impact in ways we are only beginning to detect. 34

Toan Thu, pp. 346–347. See ‘Preface’, Xuanzang 玄奘, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions 大唐西域記 Da Tang xiyuji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), p. 45. 36 Le Trac, ‘Among the musical instruments there is a fanshi drum, which originally came from Champa. Its shape is round and long … these instruments could only be used by the king.’ Le Trac, Annam chi luoc [A brief history of Annam], completed 1430 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), p. 42. 37 A passage in the Songshi states: ‘[Pu] Shougeng was [once] the chair of custom officer of Quanzhou and was able to monopolise the profits of maritime commerce for 30 years’ (‘壽庚提 舉泉州舶司, 擅蕃舶利者三十年’). ‘Yingguogong benji 瀛國公本紀’ [Biography of the Duke Ying], in Toqto’a 脱脱 et al., Songshi 宋史 [History of the Song], published 1345, chapter 47 (www.quanxue.cn/ls_zhengshi/SongShi/SongShi47.html, accessed 7 July 2010). 35

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Figure 6.3a  Scroll of the Master Truc Lam coming down from the mount Yen Tu Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mahasattva_of_Truc_Lam_ leaves_the_Mountain, accessed 25 January 2018.

Figure 6.3b  Scroll of the Master Truc Lam coming down from the mount Yen Tu

Thus, appropriated Hu fashions began to assume local meanings. King Thanh Tong’s son, Tran Nhan Tong, remembered most as the creator and patriarch of Vietnam’s Truc Lam School of Buddhism, repeatedly visited Champa as a devoted individual paying respects to its Buddhist masters. In addition to Buddhists, he would have met many Cham Muslims and people from the Middle East, at a time when Champa had apparently opened its doors to Hu cultural influences. In contrast to the fashion of dynasties past and future, the Tran court of the thirteenth century reserved the colour white for the royal family thus excluding all common men.38 This can be witnessed thanks to a silk painting entitled ‘Truc Lam dai si xuat son do’ (Scroll of the Master Truc Lam coming down from the mount Yen Tu), done in the later Tran era. See Figure 6.3a and b, and note that only King Tran Nhan Tong, his son Tran Anh 38

Le Trac, Annam chi luoc, p. 328.

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Tong, and a few royal family members don white robes, in contrast to the officers of the royal entourage dressed in a darker colour, perhaps purple or red.39 Tran Nhan Tong is followed by some Hu monks (V. Ho tang), as the end of the scroll shows. Only in such a multi-cultural context can we makes sense of the seemingly isolated or incidental passages recorded in the Complete Annals of Dai Viet or Toan Thu, such as one dated 1311, which describes the arrival of a ‘Hu monk’ (Ho tang) who claimed to be 300  years old, and whom people said could walk on water and perform other supernatural deeds such as such as turning himself inside out to expose his entrails.40 Interestingly, this was his second visit to Dai Viet, and an important one, for this time he brought along his daughter, who he brought to offer in marriage to the King Anh Tong.41 It might be far-fetched to say that this was a case of intermarriage between West Asian Muslims and the Tran royal family in the fourteenth century – but then again, it might not. This seems all the more plausible since members of Dai Viet’s court enjoyed frequent contact with Champa and beyond. Tran aristocrats exhibited multilingual skills that they acquired thanks in part to the intermediary position of Dai Viet in maritime travel. General Tran Quang Khai, for example, mastered several languages, as did his brother, Tran Nhat Duat,42 who was known to converse with envoys from Temasek (today’s Singapore) in their language, according to the Toan Thu.43 This fact is even more interesting when we consider that they could have been speaking Malay or even Arabic. Blue-and-white ceramic was a product made to meet Muslim tastes. Its production developed during the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century. The 39

‘Zhulin daifu chushan zhitu’ 竹林大士出山之圖 [Scroll of Truc Lam master comes from the mountain], kept in the Liaoning provincial Museum, China. For the analysis of this painting, see Liu Zhongyu, ‘Zhongyue wenhua shiyuxia de Zhulin dashi chushantu’ [The painting of Truc Lam Master coming down from the mountains in the context of Sino-Viet culture], Yishushi Yanjiu [Journal of Fine Arts studies], Guangzhou 22 (2019), 247–279. 40 Toan Thu, p. 392, year 1311: ‘Taken in the daughter of the Hu monk Yu-chi-po-lan into the palace (i.e. in relation with her). This monk used to come in during the Nhan Tong reign, he looked very old, and claimed to be 300 years old, he could walk on water, and turn himself inside out to expose his entrails and made his belly completely empty but his skin and backbones. He only eats sulphur and vegetables. He stayed quite few years before leaving home. In this year (1311) he came again, and the emperor took his daughter named Da-la-sing [as wife]. This monk surprisingly died in the capital [Thang Long]. Footnote: during the Ming Tong reign there was another Hu monk whose name was Bodesri who came. He could also travel on water but by lying on water [instead of walking], and this was the difference between them.’ 41 Toan Thu, p. 392. 42 Ibid., p. 373 (for Tran Quang Khai), pp. 414–415 (for Tran Nhat Duat). 43 Ibid., p. 415. Tran Nhat Duat was the governor of Thanh Hoa province in central Vietnam, where he would have experienced greater exposure to people from overseas. He was also reportedly very friendly with Chinese merchants, with whom he allegedly chatted with for days.

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preference in the Islamic World for the colour blue stimulated the production of blue-and-white ceramics in China. The earliest evidence of this distinctive ceramic came from a ship, identified as Arab, which had sunk off the coast of Belitung in Indonesia in 830.44 Blue-and-white ceramics could not have existed in China without the facilitation of Muslim sea-trading networks. Cobalt blue – the key ingredient for making blue-and-white – could not be found anywhere in China before the fifteenth century. Muslims first had to import the colour to China from the Middle East via Sumatra; this is why Chinese called the best cobalt blue ‘Muslim blue’ (hui qing) or ‘Sumatra blue’ (Sumali qing). Thanks to Muslim and Fujianese merchants, blue-and-white found their way into markets all over Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Wang Dayuan, a traveller from Quanzhou who between 1330 and 1339 travelled twice overseas, reported after his return to China that demand for blue-andwhite ceramics could be found in over ten ports across the Asian maritime spanning Southeast to West, such as Ligor, Terengganu, Kelantan, Siam, Songkhla, Kedah, Java, Singapore, Aceh, Ussa (in Burma), Pondicherry, the Malabar coast, Bengal, Sing (in Pakistan), Persia, Damascus, and Hormuz.45 The Ming Gap and the Development of a Blue-and-White Industry in Dai Viet In the 1990s, Roxanna Brown, a specialist in Southeast Asian ceramics, analysed the inventories of 150 excavated shipwrecks sunk in Southeast Asia between 1974 and 2007. She discovered that while almost all ceramics exported to Southeast Asia before 1352 were carried by Chinese ships, the percentage of Chinese trade ceramics in the cargo plunged from 100 per cent in 1368 to about half in 1424. By 1487, that share had collapsed to a mere 1 per cent. Thus, Southeast Asia experienced a severe shortage of Chinese ceramics for over a century between 1368 and 1470.46 In fact, archaeologists have recovered a

44

For a general description of the wreck and its excavation, see ‘Belitung Shipwreck’ (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belitung_shipwreck, accessed 12 September 2019). 45 The ports where blue-and-white ceramics were used for barter (numbers are page number for each port) include: Palawan p. 23; Malacca p. 38; Ligor p. 79; Terengganu p. 102; Chumphon p. 106; Siam p. 109; Songkhla p. 120; Kedah p. 123; Java p. 159; Singapore p. 181; Pondicherry p. 254; Aceh p. 261; Persia p. 282; the Malabar Coast p. 321; Bengal p. 331; Damascus p. 353; Sind p. 356; Hormuz p. 364; and Ussa (Burma) p. 376. Wang Dayuan 汪 大渊, Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略 [A brief account of island barbarians]. Annotated. Su Jiqing (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981). 46 Roxanna Brown, ‘Shipwreck Ceramics and the Fall of Melaka: Recently-discovered Shipwrecks Are Casting New Light on Southeast Asian History’, talk to the Southeast Asian Ceramic Society, West Malaysia Branch, at Muzium Negara, Kuala Lumpur, on 21 July 2007 (https://maritimeasia.ws/topic/melaka.html, accessed 20 June 2019).

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mere eight pieces of Chinese blue-and-white that they can date to a time that falls within this century-and-a-half period Brown dubbed the ‘Ming Gap’.47 The cause of this decline was easy to explain: A new dynasty had taken over in China. The Mongols were gone, and the Ming Hongwu emperor adopted a radically different direction in policy. He repeatedly issued imperial edicts in 1370, 1374, 1381, 1390, 1394, and 1397 banning overseas trade, ‘not a single plank is allowed out to sea’.48 This abruptly destabilised the maritime trading world. Initially, exports nearly vanished. Eventually, however, the greater trade economy adjusted. Suddenly, Vietnamese kilns began to produce large quantities of blue-and-white ceramics to fill this gap in Chinese exports. The 240,000 pieces retrieved from the Cu Lao Cham shipwreck were blue-and-white from these same Dai Viet kilns. In fact, specialists claim that the ship sank sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, at exactly when the effects of the Ming ban were at their most punishing and Asian markets suffered their most severe shortage of blue-and-whites.49 Why was there a sudden boom of Dai Viet blue-and-white production in the fifteenth century? Japanese scholar Yuriko Kikuchi suggests that Chinese ceramic workers who were brought to Dai Viet during the twenty-year Ming occupation stayed in Vietnam after the Ming army withdrew. This led to a big improvement in the quality of Viet ceramics.50 47

Roxanna M. Brown, ‘A Ming Gap? Data from Southeast Asian Shipwreck Cargoes’, in Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (eds), Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (Singapore and Hong Kong: NUS Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2010), p. 360. Chinese archaeologist Qin Dashu questions this hypothesis, saying that the incorrectly dated Longquan ceramics led to the wrong concept of the Ming Gap, while a decline of export existed between only 1430 and 1470. Qin Dashu 秦大树, ‘Zai Kenniya chutu ciqi Zhong jiema Zhongguo gudai haishang maoyi 在肯尼亚出土瓷器中解碼中國古代海上貿易’ [Decoding ancient Chinese maritime trade based on the ceramics unearthed from Kenya], Zhongguo zhongxiao qiye 中國中小企業 [China’s small and medium enterprises] 10 (2018), 61–65. However, a question remains unanswered: why there was a severe lack of Chinese blue-and-white among ceramic finds in Kenya despite their popularity during the Yuan dynasty. 48 Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉, Mingshi 明史 [History of Ming], completed 1739 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), chapter 205, vol. 18:5403. ‘Zhuwanzhuan’ 朱紈傳 [Biography of Zhu Wan], which cites the famous quote: ‘片板不得下海.’ 49 Bui Minh Tri and Kerry Nguyen-Long, Vietnamese Blue and White Ceramics (Hanoi: Social Sciences Publishing House, 2001), p. 143. 50 Kikuchi Yuriko 菊池百合子, Việt-Nam hokubu-ni okeru bōekikō-no kōkogaku-teki kenkyū: Vân-Đô` n-to Phô´-Hiê´n-o chūshin-ni ベトナム北部における貿易港の考古学的研究——— ヴァンドンとフォーヒエンを中心に [A study on the ports of northern Vietnam, focused on Van Don and Pho Hien] (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 2017), p. 157. Centuries earlier than this, as Nishino Noriko points out, Vietnamese ceramic producers copied the Yaozhou ceramic style during the Ly dynasty, led by some Chinese migrants. Nishino Noriko 西野範子, ‘模仿陝 西耀州窯系與廣西嚴關窯青瓷的越南陶瓷 − 以河內郊外 Kim Lan 遺跡、and Nam Dinh 省出土資料為中心的分析’ [An Analysis of Vietnamese Ceramic Imitations of Shanxi Yao Zhou Kiln Produced and Guangxi Yanguan Kiln Produced Celadons: Focusing on Excavated Materials from the Kim Lan Remains on the Outskirts of Hanoi and the Nam Dinh Province] Journal of Art History 國立臺湾大學美術史研究集刊 25 (2008), 113.

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Viet Blue-and-White in Island Southeast Asia in the Fourteenth Century In this new economy defined by the Ming Gap, where did these Vietnamese ceramics go? Judging from the distribution of archaeological excavations, fifteenth-century Vietnamese blue-and-white ceramics are widespread across Island Southeast Asia.51 In addition to archaeological artifacts, a variety of Vietnamese blue-and-white wares have been spotted all over the eastern archipelago: a pilgrim bottle in Ternate, a fish-shaped dish in Hamahera, and grave goods in southern Luzon.52 The inventories and distribution of Vietnamese wares in Southeast Asia suggest a much broader market than simply luxury demand could meet. The sophistication of this market in Vietnamese blue-and-white can be seen by the 1976 excavation that took place in Trowulan, Java, where the vestiges of the old Majapahit capital lay. Here in the ruins of the old Javanese kingdom, archaeologists unearthed 300 kilograms of ceramic fragments – 20 per cent of them Vietnamese of the fifteenth century.53 In these shards, analysts have noticed compelling signs of Islamic influence. Most telling of all are the blueand-white wall tiles. As Japanese archaeologist Sakai Takashi points out, the Trowulan tiles depart from the Vietnamese convention of the time, which had followed Chinese style. Indeed, they belong to an entirely different tradition.54 They distinguish themselves from the Vietnamese norm in both their cross shape and geometric motifs. Sakai’s study of these tiles traces the hexagonal and diamond line presented on Vietnamese tiles to styles that flourished in early fourteenth-century Iran, as well as precursor forms of many Vietnamese tiles that can be identified in South, Central, and Western Asian Islamic tiles. Sakai concludes from this that Vietnamese blue-and-white wall tiles were ‘related to certain long-distance connections among several Asian cultural areas’.55 These tiles were specially ordered, in other words, manufactured in Dai Viet and then exported to Java far across the sea over 4,000 kilometres away. Evidence for this is not far

51

Roxannna Brown and Sten Sjostrand, Maritime Archaeology and Shipwreck Ceramics in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Department of Museum & Antiquities, 2001), p. 33. 52 Bui and Nguyen-Long, Vietnamese Blue and White Ceramics, p. 169. Indeed, Vietnamese blueand-white wares can be found all over the Spice Islands. 53 Roxannna Brown, ‘Vietnamese Ceramics’, in Roxannna Brown and Sten Sjostrand, Maritime Archaeology and Shipwreck Ceramics in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Department of Museum & Antiquities, 2001), p. 33. 54 Sakai Takashi 坂井隆, ‘Yinni Zhaowa de Yuenan zhuangshi cizhuan chu tan 印尼爪哇的越 南裝飾瓷磚初探’ [Preliminary study of Vietnamese decorated tiles found in Java, Indonesia], Guoli Taiwan daxue Meishu shi yanjiu jikan 國立臺湾大學美術史研究集刊 [Journal of Art History, National University of Taiwan] 25 (2008), 155. 55 Sakai Takashi, ibid., 133.

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Figure 6.4  Vietnamese tiles found in Tuba (a) and Demak (b), Java Source: Sakai Takashi 坂井隆, ‘Vietnamese glazed tiles and Persian tiles’, paper for 21st Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, Hue, 2018. Courtesy of Sakai Takashi.

away, however. From the Thang Long citadel archaeologists found two different sizes of blue-and white tiles resembling the tiles of the Figure 6.4 found in Java. They were likely the samples for export.56 This finding adds a significant 56

Sakai Takashi 坂井隆, ‘Vietnamese Glazed Tiles and Persian Tiles’, paper for the 21st Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, Hue, 2018, p. 14.

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dimension to the story: it suggests that the blue-and-white exports to Java might have some kind of involvement by the Viet court officials. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Dai Viet ceramics could have found their way to Majapahit through Champa’s close connections with Java. As Anthony Reid points out, between the eighth and fourteenth centuries when Java was united and prosperous enough to send missions to China, it also was the strongest in Champa’s connections with the greater Austronesian world of Insular Southeast Asia. He observes: In the fourteenth century the connection between Champa and Java (now flourishing under Majapahit) was again close and associated in Javanese tradition with the first appearance of Islam … More wide traditions assert that it was through a Cham princess married to the king of Majapahit, and her brother Raden Rahmat, that Islam entered the Javanese court [emphasis added].57

The finest Vietnamese blue-and-white ceramics were destined for the most discerning of all Asian markets, including the Islamic courts of the Middle East. As Vietnamese ceramics have been excavated from sites in the regions of both the Red Sea, in Fustat, and Persian Gulf, in Hormuz,58 a fact that could only have been made possible with the help of the Indian Ocean’s well-functioning sea-trade network, it is reasonable to assume that such a network of exchange also extended to so well connected a place in the Muslim world as Java, and that the merchants of Champa, with their hybrid mix of Cham, Fujianese, and Muslim identities, provided the means. Dai Viet was not alone in this ceramic export business. For one, there is little doubt that their coveted ceramics were channelled through Cham intermediaries, who in the thirteenth century began to trade increasingly eastward, to places like Java and Mindanao, as Anthony Reid pointed out.59 At the same time, Sukhothai exported ceramics, too. Yet no blue-and-white ceramics have materialised in Thai ceramics, despite the great demand from the Muslim ports. Craftsmen in Thailand thus did not make this sought-after style; but why? Again, the Muslim factor provides key context that completes the historical picture. This time, however, the missing pieces to the puzzle come not from the Middle East but from the neighbouring Chinese province of Yunnan.

57

Anthony Reid, ‘Chams in the Southeast Asian Maritime System’, in Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 1999), pp. 45–46; ‘in Javanese texts Champa is always associated with the spread of Islam’, Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Champa’, Journal of Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society,58, 1 (1985), p. 295. 58 Heidi Tan (ed.), Viet Nam: From Myth to Modernity (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2008), p. 20. 59 Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2015), p. 45.

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The Colour Blue and the Yunnan Factor Bui Minh Tri was stunned. In 1998, the leading Vietnamese scholar on ceramics viewed a set of ceramics produced in two sites called Jianshui and Yuxi, both of which lie in Yunnan province, which borders north-western Vietnam. In his words, they were ‘extremely similar to fifteenth century Vietnamese blue-and-white, whether in shape or style’.60 In fact, they were so similar that some collectors in Vietnam placed Jianshui ware directly in the genealogy of Vietnamese blue-and-white; some of them appeared in three exhibitions held in Hanoi and presented as Chu Dau wares. These Jianshui and Yuxi ceramics from Yunnan (hereafter ‘Yunnan ware’) have been found in the burials located in Lao Cai, Yen Bai, and Tuyen Quang, all of which lie along the route to Yunnan where non-Viet speakers historically resided. Yunnan blue-andwhite also found its way to Dai Viet’s capital, Thang Long, as evidenced in the newly excavated Thang Long citadel.61 While potentially mistaken with a Vietnamese style, Yunnan blue-and-white producers initiated manufacture in the mid-fourteenth century, slightly earlier than Vietnamese production began.62 That Yunnan and Chu Dau wares bear such close similarity suggests that they shared the same raw material: namely, cobalt blue from the Jianshui district on the Sino-Viet border. The cobalt blue pigment from Jianshui made possible the development of blue-and-white ceramics in both Yunnan and Dai Viet. Although Jianshui developed a ceramic industry during the Song period, it did not produce blue-and-white wares before the Yuan (1271–1368). Given this timing, the discovery of cobalt blue in Yunnan would most likely have happened under the tenure of Yunnan’s governor, al-Sayyid Shams al-Din’Umar, the Muslim from the Middle East mentioned above. The governor was not unusual in Yuan China; soldiers from other parts of the Mongol empire like the Middle East numbered among the Yuan soldiers stationed in Yunnan.63 Perhaps one of them was knowledgeable in the blue-and-white technique and developed the use of cobalt blue there. No blue-and-white wares were produced in Vietnam before the fourteenth century.64 In addition to the lack of cobalt blue before its discovery in Jianshui 60

Bui Minh Tri, ‘Do gom Van Nam (Trung Quoc) phat hien okhu di tich Thang Long va Bac Viet Nam’ [Yunnan ceramics discovered in the Thang Long citadel and northern Vietnam], Khao co hoc [Journal of Archaeology] 1 (2006), 54. 61 Bui Minh Tri, ‘Do gom Van Nam’, 54. 62 Xu Guofa, ‘Lun Jianshui qinghua de qiyuan’ [On the origin of Jianshui blue-and-white], Zhongguo taoci [Chinese ceramics] 6 (1984), 47. 63 Michael C. Brose, ‘Yunnan’s Muslim Heritage’, in James A. Anderson and John Whitmore (eds), China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), pp. 141–142. 64 Bui and Nguyen-Long, Vietnamese Blue and White, p. 137.

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during the Yuan era, political factors mattered. The Yunnan route provided central China with one of the three major routes that historically connected it with farther-flung provinces in present-day Guangxi, Guangdong, and Vietnam during the Qin, Han, and Tang eras, which lasted from the third century bce to the ninth century ce. In the twentieth century, the French relied on this ancient route to build its Yunnan–Vietnam railway. Interruptions occurred, however. In the ninth century, a powerful kingdom called Nanzhao rose to power in Yunnan, which put a stop to previous traffic. By the time the Song dynasty formed in the tenth century, travellers and transporters chose to travel from China and Dai Viet by land through Guangxi and by sea through the Gulf of Tongking. The two governments did not begin to use the Yunnan route as an official passage until 1253, when the Mongols subjugated Nanzhao’s successor, the Dali kingdom, and incorporated its territory into the Chinese empire as Yunnan, although the court did not use the route until its armies invaded Dai Viet in 1258.65 In contemporary north-western Vietnam, in the Black River Valley (V: Song Da), there used to be a kingdom or principality called Heshui guo in Chinese – the ‘Kingdom of Black River’. Its location lay between the Dali kingdom and Dai Viet, according to a twelfth-century Chinese source.66 The name of this kingdom might have actually been construed to refer collectively to the region’s variety of Tai-speaking chiefdoms; not quite the same as Tai chronicles, which reflect a somewhat different scenario in which diverse movements and episodic expansions collectively look back to a point of origin located in the area of Muang Thieng (today’s Dien Bien Phu).67 Although they no doubt traded and interacted with Viet for many centuries, these principalities maintained their autonomy and did not fall under Dai Viet’s rule. During its occupation of Dai Viet (1400–1427), a disastrous attempt to conquer Dai Viet and make its territory once again a Chinese province, China’s Ming dynasty subdued some of the principalities that surrounded the kingdom’s established territory. For example, the area of Moc Chau in today’s Son La province fell to the Ming as a result of its campaign against tribes in 1416.68 After Dai Viet regained its independence in 1427, it behaved more ambitiously along its northwest border than it had before and focused many of its 65

See Chen Yulong, ‘Lidai Zhong-Yue jiaotong daoli kao’ [A study on traffic routes between China and Vietnam throughout the centuries], in Dongnanya shilun wenji [Collected studies on the history of Southeast Asia] (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1987), p. 115. 66 Zhou, Lingwai daida, p. 75. 67 John Whitmore, ‘Colliding Peoples: Tai/Viet Interactions in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, Association of Asian Studies, San Diego, 2000, p. 3. 68 ‘In the sixteenth year of Yongle (1416), [Fang Zheng] defeated the barbarian Xe Tam Chung (Che Sanzhong) of Simang’, Ngannan tche yuan, 2:119. For the location of Simang (Tu Mang), see Dao Duy Anh, Dat nuoc Viet Nam qua cac doi [Vietnamese land throughout history] (Hanoi: Khoa hoc, 1964), p. 111.

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early frontier expeditions on the Moc Chau area. In 1432 and 1433, before his death, king Le Loi led two ‘punitive expeditions’ (chinh) against the Muong Le in the Black River region. His successors repeatedly carried out ‘punitive ­expeditions’ – in 1434, 1437, 1439, 1440, and 1441 – as well as another two in 1440 and 1448 against chiefdoms in the Tuyen Quang area.69 The Le court’s strategic plan clearly focused on control of the frontier between Dai Viet and Yunnan. The aim was both strategic and territorial, and the means technological. Sun Laichen has demonstrated in detail that in 1429, Dai Viet began to smuggle a large quantity of copper from Yunnan, and that this activity allowed the kingdom to pursue an advanced form of firearm development throughout the fifteenth century.70 This copper would have travelled along the same route as the cobalt blue pigment supplying Chu Dau kilns. The need for large quantities of cobalt and copper alone turned Yunnan into a strategic place in Dai Viet’s political economy. Thus, Yunnan became the major source of a key ingredient in Viet blue-and-white ceramics; such an assertion is supported by the patent similarity in tone between Viet and Yunnanese glazes, which share the same pale blue-greyish colour, distinct from all the bright blues found in blue-and-whites manufactured in Jingdezhen and Zhejiang.71 So, this is not a story about pottery alone. These two metals signify the source of a new economic and military power that came to Dai Viet directly or indirectly through the sea. The influx in wealth from ceramics no doubt helped to provide the capital necessary to create a firearm-weaponised military. Conversely, Dai Viet’s military supremacy during the fifteenth century also nurtured its lucrative ceramics industry, by securing its north-western frontier with Yunnan to guarantee the flow of cobalt to the kilns around Chu Dau. The implications are unavoidable: That the Le Dynasty’s military campaigns had commercial motives. This also explains why no other Southeast Asian kilns produced blue-and-white wares: Dai Viet’s access to Yunnan’s cobalt was unique in Southeast Asia. This leads us to question the motives behind its other major campaigns, including the famed conquest of Champa in 1471. The Ming Gap and Ceramic Production in Champa Sometime during the mid-to-late fifteenth century a ship sank near Pandanan Island off the coast of Southern Palawan. Archaeologists recovered the craft 69

Toan Thu, pp. 10–13. Sun Laichen, ‘Chinese Military Technology and Dai Viet: c. 1390–1497’ in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 96. 7 1 John Guy, Oriental Trade Ceramics in South-East Asia 9th to 16th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 47. 70

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400 years later, in 1995. Their excavations retrieved 4,000 ceramic pieces; 74 per cent of them are Cham celadon and brown wares manufactured in Go Sanh near Vijaya, the Cham capital at that time. In addition to its political function, Vijaya operated as both a port and a ceramics-producing centre. The Pandanan junk most likely originated there.72 Archaeologists have suggested that ceramics production and export from Vijaya may have lasted less than a century.73 Go Sanh wares dispersed widely across the region, according to research on unearthed pieces from several burial, habitation and coastal sites located throughout Island Southeast Asia. These excavations showed that people used Cham trade ceramics for religious, ceremonial, or symbolic purposes, and that some wares even became treasured heirlooms.74 Go Sanh wares have also been discovered in the Hoi An area, indicating that Vijaya supplied the old northern Champa with ceramics during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries.75 Long before the Ming gap ended in the later fifteenth century, seafarers followed the trade routes from Champa to the seas of Palawan, Borneo, and Sulawesi in Island Southeast Asia. For thousands of years, this sea region sustained large markets for both Cham and Hainan cotton cloth. Cotton very likely found its way from Champa to Hainan during the thirteenth century before migrating on to mainland China. A century earlier, in the 1350s, Wang Dayuan reported that, in Johore and Timor, both men and women wore cotton cloth from Champa.76 Most interestingly, Wang witnessed trade in Cham cottons and blue-and-white ceramics in Terengganu, Kedah, Kelantan, Sulawesi, and Sarawak, suggesting that the two items constituted principal bulk trading goods throughout the Indonesian Archipelago.77 Kain Chepa (Cham cloth) is still a well-known Malay term in the Malay Peninsula.78 Production and trade in cotton cloth and ceramics in the South Sea area made mid-fifteenth century Champa, although weaker and poorer than its glorious predecessors, still a

72

Allison Diem, ‘Ceramic Evidence of Ancient Maritime Relationships between Central Vietnam and the Philippine Archipelago’, in Victor Paz (ed.), Southeast Asian Archaeology: Wilhelm G. Solheim II Festchrift (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2004), pp. 477, 478, 481. 73 Allison Diem, ‘Ceramic Evidence of Ancient Maritime Relationships’, p. 476. 74 Allison Diem, ‘The Significance of Ceramic Evidence’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 210. 75 Sakurai Kiyohiko 樱井清彦 and Kikuchi Seiichi 菊池诚一 (eds), Kinsei Nichi-etsu kōryū-shi: Nihon-machi, Tōjiki 近世日越交流史: 日本町陶瓷器 [A history of contacts between Japan and Vietnam: Japanese street and ceramics] (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobô, 2002), p. 120. 76 Wang Dayuan, Daoyi zhilue, pp. 209, 227. 77 Ibid., pp. 93, 99, 102, 123, 173. 78 Danny Wong Tze Ken, ‘Vietnam-Champa Relations and the Malay-Islam Regional Network in the 17th–19th Centuries’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 5 (2004) (https://kyotoreview.org/ issue-5/vietnam-champa-relations-and-the-malay-islam-regional-network-in-the-17th-19thcenturies/, accessed 20 June 2022).

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kingdom of sizeable wealth. This is confirmed by the diary of Ming envoy Wu Hui, dispatched to Champa in 1441.79 When his mission arrived in the capital Vijaya, he learned: The king sent his senior officer to receive the imperial letter, while many strings musical instruments were performed, many drums were beat, many banners and strands of commanders waved, bringing fragrant air. Wearing fine cotton cloth and hair made into a knot, [the Cham officer] led the way with a fast pace to the king’s travelling lodge where a feast was to be held. The king arrived on an elephant to this gate of the kingdom. He wore a golden flower crown with long bracelets all over his body. Around the lodge many ge (dagger axe) and ji (long handled spear) are displayed and many elephants are lined up as guards. After the imperial letter was read, the king lowered his head to receive the letter. Although the time is the twelfth lunar month, it is as hot as summer. Commoners were [half] naked, while the literati wore cotton clothes. On the night of shangyuan festival (the fifteenth of the first lunar month), the king treated us with fireworks. Aloeswood and sandalwoods were nicely arranged and burst into flaming trees while music and dances are performed.80

This was the last piece of Chinese writing describing Champa as it had appeared to countless foreigners for nearly a millennium, a wealthy society with a rich culture. In thirty years, the guns of Dai Viet would lay it to ashes. The Conquest of the Coast Observing the cargo of a junk wrecked off Pandanan Island in the mid-late fifteenth century, Allison Diem realised that she may have been looking at one of the last major shipments of Cham ceramic exports to Island Southeast Asia.81 In 1471, the armies of Dai Viet’s king, Le Thanh Tong, invaded Champa, captured its capital Vijaya, and destroyed its commercial capacities. What follows in the late fifteenth century is interesting: inventories of Dai Viet ceramics dated after this period contain specific Cham elements (such as a telling form 79

This Cham king whom Wu met was a king of the Vrsu dynasty. Arlo Griffiths points out that the Vrsu dynasty lasted from Che Bong Nga’s death in 1390 well into the 1440s, and that Champa was not so weak and divided in the post-Che Bong Nga times as we have believed. See Arlo Griffiths, ‘Études du Corpus des Inscriptions du Campā VI: Epigraphical Texts and Sculptural Stelae Produced under the Vı̄rabhadravarmadevas of 15th-Century Campā’, in Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy, and Geoff Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom (Paris: EFEO, 2019), p. 219; The Ming chronicle identifies the Cham king as Mo-he Bi-gai (V: Ma Ha Bi Cái). See Andrew Hardy, ‘Champa, Integrating Kingdom Mechanisms of Political Integration in a Southeast Asian Segmentary State (15th Century)’, in Griffiths, Hardy and Wade (eds), Champa, p. 223. 80 Wu Hui, ‘Diary’, quoted in Zhang Xie, Dongxi yangkao [A study of the Eastern and Western Oceans] (comp. 1640, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 23; a more complete version of this document is found in 嚴从簡 Yan Congjian, Shuyu zhouzilu [Records on foreign countries] (published in 1574, reprint Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), pp. 253–254. 81 Allison Diem, ‘Ceramic Evidence of Ancient Maritime Relationships’, p. 482.

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Ceramics and the Conquest of the Coast 191

of bowl). Someone knowledgeable in Cham ceramics integrated them into the Vietnamese styles, of course. Roxanna Brown thinks they were Cham, that the soldiers of Dai Viet not only destroyed the Go Sanh kilns of Vijaya but also seized Cham potters and relocated them in the eastern delta of the Red River. In other words, the innovators were Cham captives. Thus, the Le invasion seized not only Cham territory to perpetuity, destroying Champa as a viable commercial or political power in the southern gulf region but it also seized Vijaya’s place in the Jiaozhi Sea trading system as a trade hub and provider of commercial goods.82 Japanese archaeologists working in Hoi An determined that the size of Cham settlements dramatically declined between the fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. This, they could only conclude, correlated with the ruin of Vijaya.83 Considering the factors surveyed above – the Ming gap, the rapid growth of population, Chinese migration, technology transfer, and the re-opening of the Viet-Yunnan border area – all of which happened in a space of two hundred years – ceramics manufacture and export provided Dai Viet’s population with the ability to fully explore the potential of their Yunnan and Leizhou connections, absorb the knowledge of local Chinese craftsmen, employ surplus Viet labour, subsumed Cham–Muslim trade networks, and develop its own sea– river transportation system. Although never recorded in any official history, the facts about this commerce in Viet ceramics – one that played an important role in generating wealth in the eastern Red River Delta during the fifteenth century – were recovered. But this commerce lost its vitality when the gulf’s Jiaozhi Sea trading system lost its crucial Muslim trading link. Although Van Don continued as a port after the fifteenth century, its golden era was over.84 From an international port of the day, it declined into a port on the ‘country road’, as Ptak terms the traffic between the Guangxi coast and the Red River Delta.85 Le Thanh Tong’s fateful invasion of Champa in 1471, which left the ceramics centre and capital of Vijaya in ruins, and the Le court’s 1508 purge of Cham prisoner-ofwar communities in the Red River Delta, broke the chain of connections that linked Dai Viet with the Islamic world.86 Cham sea traders dispersed. Khmer 82

John Whitmore, ‘Van Don, the “Mac Gap”, and the End of the Jiaozhi Ocean System: Trade and State in Dai Viet, c. 1450–1550’, in Nola Cooke, Li Tana, and James A. Anderson (eds), The Tongking Gulf in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 110–112. 83 Sakurai and Kikuchi, Kinsei Nichi-etsu kōryū-shi, p. 120. 84 Nguyen Van Kim, Van Don – Thuong cang quoc te cua Viet Nam [Van Don: The International Commercial Port of Vietnam] (Hanoi: Vietnam National University Press, 2014). 85 Roderich Ptak, ‘Some Glosses on the Sea Straits of Asia: Geography, Functions, Typology’, Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World 1/2 (2010), 93. 86 Toan Thu, 2:786–787; Nola Cooke, ‘Later-Seventeenth-Century Cham-Viet Interactions: New Light from French Missionary Sources’, Annalen der Hamburger Vietnamistik, 4–5 (2010), 13–52.

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historical sources report the arrival of large groups of Chams during both the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.87 Cham merchants had been intermediaries between the Dai Viet trading world and the Malay Archipelago; losing them damaged Dai Viet, which generally relied on outsiders to transport its commodities. Losing these Muslim and southern connections also denied the gulf the precious trading alternatives that Jiaozhi and early Dai Viet had enjoyed for centuries. As Keith Taylor noted, it was access to trade with Cham and Khmer – both well-developed non-Chinese cultures – that had broadened the cultural perspective of the Dai Viet ruling class for centuries.88 Considering this abandonment of a millennial advantage created by the southern and western orientation of Jiaozhi and early Dai Viet, the transformation made the postfifteenth century Vietnamese state and its educated elite look a lot more similar to the state and society inhabiting the other shore of the Chinese portion of the Tongking Gulf than it had done for nearly half a millennium, even if the impact of these changes at the popular level took much longer to be felt and were far from uniform in effect. Perhaps the links were already brittle and close to breaking. Kenneth Hall has pointed out that during the eleventh century, rather than covering the entire sea journey between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, merchants began to ‘specialise in one portion of the route, and transferred their goods to and interacted with merchants from other sectors of the route in a sea polity’.89 This meant that losing the agents serving one section would break the whole chain of trade. Scholars have pointed out that in the sixteenth century several forms typical of fifteenth-century Vietnamese ceramics suddenly disappeared, such as ty ba bottles, covered boxes, and significant to this chapter, kendi, a particularly important item among Muslims.90 The fall of Vijaya was a major event in Southeast Asian history and signalled a significant retreat by the Muslim community in the eastern Indochina Peninsula. It was mentioned not only in Chinese and Viet chronicles but also in the Melaka annals called Sejarah Melayu.91 The rupture of Viet–Cham– Archipelago connections coincided with the decline of the ancient western route that had long been the preference of merchants from South and West Asia seeking eastern markets. As Denys Lombard noted, ‘the 1471 taking

87

Nicolas Weber, ‘Cam Narrative Sources for History of the Cam Diaspora of Cambodia’, unpublished paper, p. 2. 88 Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press) p. 299. 89 Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Local and International Trade and Traders in the Straits of Melaka Region, 600–1500’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, 2 (2004), 235. 90 Bui and Nguyen-Long, Vietnamese Blue and White Ceramics, pp. 149–150. 91 Many Cham Muslims moved to the archipelago, particularly Aceh, where a hybrid variant of their languages, Acehnese, developed. This is the most widely used surviving Chamic language today. Reid, A History of Southeast Asia, p. 4.

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Conclusion 193

of the Cham capital Vijaya by the Vietnamese confirmed the decline of the western route’.92 A system had vanished; but commerce would go on. It would take a new form, however, with different commodities and some new players, but it would play out in surprisingly similar ways. Conclusion As this chapter shows, Muslim-facilitated connection was important to trade in the Tongking Gulf at a time when, beginning in the tenth century, elites of the Red River Delta were establishing their independent Kingdom of Dai Viet and a new iteration of the Kingdom of Champa arose in Central Vietnam. For the next five centuries, the two kingdoms competed for control of the coast until Dai Viet’s decisive decimation of their rival in the 1470s. The circulation of Muslim traders through ports in the Tongking Gulf and South China also helped Dai Viet to profit from China’s sudden demand for horses in the twelfth century as well as develop deeper trade relations with eastern gulf ports like Qinzhou that drew on new aromatics production on Hainan Island. This opened the way for greater Fujianese investment in Dai Viet commerce, and greater meddling in Dai Viet politics as evidenced in the rise of the kingdom’s second dynasty, the Fujian-born Tran dynasty, in 1200. Indeed, the connection between Muslim trade and Vietnamese (and Cham) political economy appears so strong that a clear line of causation can be drawn between the disappearance of Islamic merchants and the decline of trading activity in the gulf during the sixteenth-century Gulf of Tongking. Yet saying that the sixteenth century was an empty page of maritime history is not correct either.93 As Vietnamese historian Dinh Khac Thuan shows, the Mac dynasty (1527–1592), long overlooked, was actually a prosperous period in Vietnamese history.94 Archaeological surveys in Van Don indicate that ceramics trade was carried out from the latter half of the sixteenth century to the seventeenth century.95 This seems to indicate that Dai Viet’s ceramic trade was somewhat revitalised during the Mac reign. Because of the commercial connection, what happened in China mattered to Tongking. What mattered to China commercially in the sixteenth century was silver. During this century, silver poured into China, then under the rule 92

Denys Lombard, ‘Another “Mediterranean” in Southeast Asia’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 1 (2007), 8. Kathlene Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2016). 94 Dinh Khac Thuan, ‘Contribution a l’histoire de la dynastie des Mac au Viet Nam’, PhD dissertation Universite de Paris, 2002. 95 Kikuchi Yuriko 菊池百合子, A Study on the Ports of Northern Vietnam, ‘Summary’, p. 7. 93

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of the Ming dynasty. The flow came from two sources, Japan and the New World, in such quantities that Ming China became the ‘ultimate sink of world ­silver’.96 As much as three-quarters of the world’s silver flowed into China – and stayed there. Looking at northern Vietnam from the vantage of its maritime commercial connection with China, it becomes clear that the Mac’s prosperity resulted, at least in part, from the spillover effect of the flood of Japanese and American silver into China. But when the Qing replaced the Ming and enforced another sea ban on the Chinese coast, there came another commercial boom in Tongking, as Chapter 7 will show.

96

Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 115.

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7

Silks and Society Tongking in the Age of Commerce

The chief riches, and indeed the only staple commodity, is silk, raw and wrought. – Samuel Baron (1685)

The new commercial opportunity arose in the seventeenth century that surpassed in magnitude those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. If the ceramic production and export of the earlier centuries was organised primarily by private merchants belonging to or driven by Muslim networks, this new opportunity of the seventeenth century attracted the keen grasp of the court. The reason for this change is three-fold. First, between 1533 and 1592 a protracted civil war tore Dai Viet into three political camps led by strong elite clans: 1) the Mac, which in the early 1500s held the upper hand from its based in the Red River Delta from which it fled in defeat in 1592; 2) the Trinh, originally based in Thanh Hoa south of the delta, rose to vanquish the Mac and become the new power behind the Le throne in Dong Kinh (‘Eastern capital’ in contrast to Tay Kinh, ‘Western capital’ in Thanh Hoa) – hence the name Tongking, the most common European alias for Dang Ngoai, ‘Outer route’ or ‘Outer region’, a common Vietnamese name; and 3) the Nguyen, also from Thanh Hoa as Trinh ally but relocated to the southern frontier territories of Thuan Hoa and Quang Nam in 1557, which the clan transformed into an independent realm known by names like Cochinchina or Dang Trong, the ‘inner’ route or region. Once the Nguyen made its desire for autonomy clear, war was inevitable. The civil war returned to Dai Viet in 1627, and for the next half-century, the two realms clashed, until 1672, when the Trinh lord tacitly accepted the Nguyen lord’s de facto independence. During that difficult half-century, no one could foresee the outcome of this renewed war for Dai Viet. Three factors mattered most. First, both wars 195

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demanded enormous resources to sustain each of the rival clans; in the end, they would have to field large, technologically sophisticated militaries for a very long time. Second, although the Ming loosened its ban on Chinese overseas trade in 1567, the emperor allowed Chinese junks to trade in Southeast Asia, except (on pain of death) for Japan, a policy designed to suppress the so-called woko or ‘Japanese pirate’ crisis that had plagued the coastal China since 1374. Third and equally important, Japan persisted in its pursuit of commerce overseas through its own sea traders, Europeans, and an ever-increasing number of clandestine Chinese operators. Most of all, it seems, Japanese markets wanted silk in large volumes and varieties. This favoured the Viet lords, because the endemic political chaos in coastal China meant that even its large smuggling could meet little of the demand overseas, and Vietnamese were the only alternative for silk products. Cochinchina could do little to compete with Tongking, which possessed more mulberry fields, a large labouring population, and centuries of collective experience in cultivation, processing, and export, far more than its southern rival. So, unlike ceramics, which its fifteenth-century heyday encouraged many competitors in neighbouring countries like Sukhothai, silk production in the seventeenth century concentrated largely in Tongking. Perhaps the Trinh lord saw this too, building fortunes from trade in hopes of assuring the fortunes of war they desired. To this end, Japan proved key. Building trade ties with Japan, Tongking’s silk exports attracted a new and strategically important import commodity: silver, by now the basic currency of trade in the recently created global economy. The Japanese produced a lot of it. Moreover, silver ingots proved an excellent currency of trade, not only for silk but also for military hardware, which they could find in places like Macao. So as long as ships sailed from Tongking harbours, the Trinh court could expect them to return flush with silver to pay for its wars. This silk-for-silver exchange did more than build a war machine, however. It propelled wealth circulation to a new level of magnitude in Tongking, causing widespread and profound change in many facets of Vietnamese society, as this chapter shows. This exchange helped to draw northern Vietnam into inter-Asian commerce and the global economy. And naturally, it empowered the Trinh of Tongking to pursue war against the Nguyen of Cochinchina, whatever the outcome. Scholars have much to say about this important inter-Vietnamese rivalry, but in order to understand it, a good place to start is the story of silk in Tongking, a story driven by its connection to the sea. The rise of silver influx led to growth of sericulture, silk industry, cash cropping, commodities trade, and of course a giant growth in the silver and copper money supply. This led to four major societal effects: (1) construction; (2) domestic market networks; (3) d ̄ình halls; and (4) books, literacy, and literati.

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Historical Background 197

Historical Background Imagine a day in 668 ce. A young monk departs the walls of Luy Lau, Jiaozhi’s capital city.1 Known to posterity as Yunqi (V. Van Ky), he must travel many kilometres to the seaport downriver, where he will board a ship that will lead him to the South Sea and Koling (Kalinga, in today’s Java) thousands of kilometres away. A local Jiaozhi monk, he is returning to Java to reunite with his master, a great teacher from Chengdu in the north, Huining, and his fellow disciples.2 A modern observer might not expect such a monk to be accompanied by several hundred bolts of silk fabric, but there it is, a gift sent by Jiaozhi’s wealthy elite, so large that it must have travelled to the wharf on the backs of porters. It was no coincidence that such a large amount of silk was brought by one monk to ports tens of thousands of miles away. Centuries before the rise of Islam, Persian merchants monopolised China silk export. They shipped silk first to Sri Lanka ports and then to the Middle East. In the sixth century, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) tried to break the Persian monopoly but failed, perhaps due to the combined resistance of West and South Asian merchants.3 Silk could even find its way west in the baggage of pilgrims travelling aboard Persian ships, just one example of how the two purposes of religion and economics merged seamlessly on the South Seas. That Yunqi could board a ship with so much luggage suggests that he may have boarded a Persian ship. Yunqi’s journey to the gulf progressed mostly by waterway. First, he sailed the Dau River, a name coined in reference to the many mulberry (V. dau) trees that lined its banks. The word dau was also the origin of the two places important to Vietnamese history: Luy Lau, Jiaozhi’s administrative centre, and Dau Temple, the most ancient Buddhist temple in the delta. By this time, silk production was already centuries old in the region. The Red River Delta could 1

Luy Lau, today’s Thanh Khuong village, Thuan Thanh district, Bac Ninh province. ‘Master Huining went to Kolinga (Heling) where he co-translated the Agama with a learned monk of Kolinga. He sent his student Yunqi to bring the mantra to Jiaozhi to be presented to the capital Chang’an … On his returning voyage, Yunqi stopped in Jiaozhi, reported to the monastery and officers and was given several hundred bolts of small silk before returning to Kolinga again … Yunqi was in the South Sea region for over ten years. He spoke proficiently Kunlun (likely a form of Malay) and mastered Sanskrit. In later years, he settled in Srivijaya.’ Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaosengzhuan 大唐西域求法高僧傳 [Biographies of Buddhist Monks of the Great Tang in the West in Search of the Dharma] (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/大唐西 域求法高僧传, accessed 8 June 2005). In the seventh century, Kolinga was the centre of Tantric Buddhism, patronised by the empire of Srivijaya (650 ce–1377 ce) and attracted pilgrims and scholars from other parts of Asia. 3 Rila Mukherjee, India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE (Singapore: Springer, 2022), p. 67. 2

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produce enough rice to support a relatively dense population that could in turn sustain sericulture capable of export much earlier than Guangdong, its better studied northern neighbours.4 Indeed, as Yunqi reached the port with his heavy cargo, silk industry had grown highly specialised, which helped Jiaozhi society to meet a variety of needs. He was transporting a higher grade of juan, a thin and fine silk; the record called it xiaojuan or ‘small juan’. A thousand years later, Chinese scholar Zhang Xie recalled that, during Han times, ‘Jiuzhen [Thanh Hoa] produced cocoons eight times a year’ that were ‘small, light, thin and produced only thin silk, which is soft and fine’. This fabric was ‘used mainly by painters, as the silk colour had an ancient look’.5 Given the importance of silk to painting in China and beyond, Jiaozhi silk must have travelled afar. Suddenly, evidence for it seems to lie everywhere. Take, for illustration, Figure 7.1, a painting from the famed Mogao caves near Dunhuang in north-western China, a great centre of Buddhist practice in Yunqi’s time and the Chinese terminus of the famed Silk Road. Many such paintings were made with mojuan (抹絹), a silken fabric wiped with a white pigment and sometimes alum to render it into a white, stiff matte suitable for painting.6 Fine silks from Jiaozhi were suitable for this kind of gongbihua (工笔画) or ‘meticulous painting’ on display in Mogao. It makes 4

The ‘Record of Food and Commodities’ in the New Book of the Tang notes: ‘The taxes on Yangzhou were paid in cash; on Lingnan [Guangzhou and Guangxi] in rice, and Annam in raw silk and Yizhou [Sichuan] in silk fabric and satins.’ Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, Xin Tangshu 新 唐書 chapter 51 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), vol. 5:1345. The high population density could be seen as an indicator of levels of resources according to Skinner. G. William Skinner, ‘Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History’, Journal of Asian Studies 45, 2 (1985), 288; Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, & Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 62–66; Marks points out that the Pearl River Delta in the first millennium was still an open sea. See his map of the Pearl River Delta c. 2, 742, 1290, and 1820. At Yunqi’s time the Xiangshan district was an island, and Macao was still under the sea. 5 Zhang Xie 張燮 (1574–1640), Dongxi yangkao 東西洋考 [A study of the eastern and western oceans], comp.1617 (reprint Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 14. ‘Juan’, according to Cihai [An Ocean of ancient words], quoting Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581–645), was weaved using raw silk, to make the fabric stiff so it could be painted on. Cihai 辭海 (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1977), vol. 2:1257. 6 ‘敦煌絹畫破解失傳古畫技’ [Lost method of painting on juan silk found in the Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves]: ‘From some areas where paints are thin, it is obvious that white colour was wiped into the silk [before it was painted on]’ (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2005-01-24/09144928785s .shtml, accessed 15 August 2019). From the mid-Tang era, painters developed a method of making ‘unprocessed juan silk’ (sheng juan 生絹) into ‘cooked juan silk’ (shu juan 熟絹) for painting. One mixed white colour with hot water and then pressed and pounded the mixture into the unprocessed juan until it looked like a silver board, ready for fine sketching. Such a style of painting resembles the process behind preparing Western medieval paintings. The ‘cooked’ juan could be the white mojuan described in the Viet source on Le Hoan described below. For a somewhat contemporaneous description of this method, see Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107) Huashi 画史 [A history of painting] (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/画史, accessed 15 September 2019).

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Figure 7.1  Silk painting from the Mogao cave, tenth century Source: Bodhisattva as Guide of Souls, early tenth century, ink and colors on a silk banner, from Cave 17, Mogao, near Dunhuang, Gansu province, China. Courtesy of the British Museum. Over a thousand silk paintings from Dunhuang are kept in the major museums in the world.

sense, then, that the usefulness of mojuan silk extended to diplomacy, too. Three hundred years after Yunqi, in 985 ce, king Le Hoan sent 10,000 bolts of white mojuan or ‘white wiped juan’ 白抹絹 to the new imperial court of the Song.7 By then, silk had been a currency of government and diplomacy for centuries. Zhang Xie noted almost a thousand years later that juan silk remained an item tribute from Jiaozhi.8 Perhaps, then, Yunqi’s silk served multiple purposes: As gifts or tribute, as a form of payment to magistrates or merchants, and as art supplies for his fellow monastics to pursue the arts that have always played a central role in Buddhist material culture.9 7

Le Trac, An Nam chi luoc [A Brief History of Annan] (compiled c. 1330, reprint Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), p. 284. 8 Zhang Xie, Dongxi yangkao, p. 11. 9 John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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Whether Yunqi knew that he was a pioneer of silk export from the Red River Delta, he could not have imagined that a millennium later the region would flourish in a golden age of commerce in silk exports worldwide, after Jiaozhi had become better known to the world as Tongking. International Trade and the Rise of Silk-for-Silver Exchange Juan silk remained a mainstay of silk production in the Red River Delta. When visiting Qinzhou in the eastern gulf in the twelfth century, for example, Dai Viet envoys offered a single bolt of ‘Annan juan’ to each singing girl who performed for them.10 ‘Juan’ became the champion of Tongking’s seventeenthcentury trade in silk-piece-goods. Its popular trade name in Japan, ‘hockin’ or (V. lụa, C. huang juan ‘yellow juan’, or bei juan ‘northern juan’) appeared on almost every manifesto of the ships that sailed from Tongking to Japan, be they Japanese, Chinese or European.11 Japanese observers listed it as the country’s top import from Tongking in well-known works like the Wakan Sanzai Zue or ‘Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia’, published in the early eighteenth century. Tongking’s southern rival Cochinchina also exported silks, however, hockin or yellow juan was generally not among them.12 This gave Tongking a distinct edge in the silk trade of the seventeenth century, given that Chinese exports were largely curtailed. Surely, policies in China affected silk in ways not wholly unlike the ceramics during the Ming Gap. Silk made Tongking a major site of international commerce, bringing Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, and English into competition to control its market. It started in Japan. Between 1604 and 1635, the country’s ruling shogunate issued official licenses, dubbed ‘red seals’, that permitted travel and commerce overseas; the ships protected under this license became known as ‘Red Seal ships’. Those that travelled to Tongking returned mostly with silk, both raw silk and weaved piece goods, which earned them profits lucrative enough to attract some of Japan’s most distinguished merchant families, such as the Suminokura 角倉 family, a major player in the Red Seal trade.13 10

Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida [Representative answers from the region beyond the mountains in the south]. Anno. Yang Wuquan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), p. 226. 11 See Nagazumi Yoko 永積洋子, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran 1637–1833 唐船輸出入 品數量一覽 1637–1833’ [A comprehensive catalogue of the quantities of the cargo imported by Chinese junks, 1637–1833] (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1987). For an identification of hockin, see the glossary in Naoko Iioka, ‘Literati Entrepreneur: Wei Zhiyan in the Tonkin-Nagasaki Silk Trade’, PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore, 2009, p. xviii; see also the reference to the VOC’s 1645 shipment of ‘5000 pieces of Toncquinse hockins’ in Appendix 5 of Hoang Anh Tuan, Silk for Silver: Dutch-Vietnamese Relations, 1637–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 12 Wakan sanzai zue 和漢三才図会 [Illustrated Sino-Japanese encyclopedia], first published 1713 (reprint Tokyo: Nihon zuihitsu taisei kanko kai, 1929), 1:226–227. 13 Suminokura Ryōi and Chaya Shirojir were among the three most prominent merchants closely associated with Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), all three were fully fledged samurai as well as

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Sea traders from Japan, China, and Europe played an important role in shaping Tongking’s export market. It was not Europeans per se but Christians who played a key role in stimulating Tongking’s silk trade. In 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate’s ban of Christianity in Japan pushed many Japanese Christians to migrate overseas. By the 1620s, so many Japanese Christians had resettled in Tongking that a Jesuit missionary named Pedro Marques was sent to Tongking from Macao because he ‘knew the language of Japan, [and would be able] to assist the Japanese residents in that kingdom [of Tongking]’.14 It may have been his moment, thanks to the Japanese Christian community, that the Portuguese of Macao and Viet of Tongking (and later Cochinchina) began to form an association that would matter for some time to come. This international market for silk no doubt pleased the Trinh court, which in the days of the Red Seal trade proved more than eager to permit Jesuit missionaries, in ‘whose shadow should continue the Macao trade’.15 As the Trinh court added the Portuguese to its list of licensed trading ships, many of them Jesuit-owned, subjects began to accept baptism.16 By the 1630s, Japanese, many of them close to the Jesuits, resided in both Tongking and Macao and controlled a large part of Tonking’s silk trade thanks to their investments in Portuguese shipping, so that between 1636 and 1638 Macao transhipped much more Tongkingese than Chinese raw silk to Japan.17 But by that time, however, the Tokugawa shogunate was already executing its new sakoku policy that effectively banned Japanese overseas travel (1635) and Portuguese (1639), not to mention Christians (earlier) while restricting overseas trade to Nagasaki. To save their silk business, Portuguese and Japanese Christian merchants, with the support of their customers in Tongking and Cochinchina, turned to Chinese merchants to act as intermediaries.18 In this way, Japanese, Europeans, and Chinese each played a part in creating a triangular trade relationship with Japan and Macau that assured Tongking the markets it needed to keep their silk-for-silver trade cycle in motion.

merchants. E. S. Crawcour, ‘Changes in Japanese Commerce in the Tokugawa Period’, Journal of Asian Studies 22, 4 (1963), 389–390. While Suminokura and his son traded with Tongking, Chaya Shirojiro traded with Cochinchina. See Chapter 8. 14 Madalena Ribeiro, ‘The Japanese Diaspora in the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin of PortugueseJapanese Studies 3 (2001), 67. 15 Ibid. 16 The Portuguese visited Tongking annually between 1626 and 1669. George Brayan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 113; Naoko Iioka, ‘Literati Entrepreneur’, p. 58. 17 Nagazumi Yoko, ‘17 seiki chūki no nihon-Tonkin bōeki ni tsuite’ [The Tongkingese–Japanese trade in the mid-seventeenth century], Jōsai daigaku daigakuin kenkyu nenpō 8 (1992), 32. 18 See Kwashima Motojirō, Shuinsen Boeki-shi [A history of the commerce of the Red Seal ships] (Osaka: Kojinsha, 1942), pp. 452–453.

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Tongking’s silk-for-silver trade began long before these new coalitions of sea traders arrived. A recent study by Hasuda Takashi and Yonetani Hitoshi reveals that it began with a letter written by the governor of Nghe An in 1590 to the ‘Japanese king’ inviting trade through a Chinese merchant surnamed Chen.19 Chen would most likely have been a sea merchant of the South China Sea region, the authors reason.20 The Japanese ships, which sailed until 1635, sailed from the Seagate of Hoi Thong (Cua Hoi) in Nghe An up to the Gulf of Tongking to a port called Pho Hien and up the Red River to the capital Thang Long (Hanoi). Tongking’s silk-for-silver exchange lasted for over 80 years, and the silver that the country received from overseas in this new environment was unprecedented in Vietnamese history. According to Hoang Anh Tuan, between 1637 and 1680, the VOC injected an annual average of 278,900 guilders – the equivalent of 90,000 taels of silver – into Tongking’s silk market.21 Before the VOC’s factory came into existence in 1637, Japanese silver dominated the market; between 1604 and 1629, it totalled about 2.1 tons, or about 58,000 taels.22 Although in the 1640s the VOC did brilliantly with its Tongking silk trade, from 1647 Chinese carriers of Tongking silk took up the lion’s share of the shipping trade.23 Iioka’s data (Figure 7.2) shows that between 1649 and 1661 Chinese exports of Tongking silk to Nagasaki ranked consistently onethird higher in volume than that of the VOC.

19

Hasuda Takashi 蓮田隆志 and Yonetani Hitoshi 米谷均, ‘Dawn of the Japan–Vietnam Relationship in the Early Modern Period’, Tonan Ajia Kekyu 東南アジア研究 [Center for Southeast Asian Studies] 56, 2 (2019), 127–147. 20 Ibid., 133. The port that the Japanese visited was Hung Chau, in Hung Nguyen district, Nghe An. The VOC officers described why this harbour was chosen by the Japanese who tried both the port in Thanh Hoa and Nghe An and found that this port, although further away, was the most favourable for sailing to the Red River Delta. Guo Hui, trans., Badaweiya cheng riji 巴 達維亞城日記, a translation of Dagh-register gehouden int Casteel Batavia, vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India (Taipei: Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 1970), vol. 1:161. See also the Japanese translation by Naojirō Murakami 村上直次郎, Batabia-jō nisshi バタヴイア城日誌 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1970–1975). 21 Hoang, Silk for Silver, Appendix 3. Hoang’s estimation of average was based on the period between 1637 and 1699, while the annual average would be much higher for the period 1637 and 1680, the period this article focused on. 22 According to Momoki Shiro, Tongking’s trade with Hirado and Nagasaki before 1640 was over 700 kan (1 kan = 3 kilograms of silver). This would give us 2.1 tons of Japanese silver. See Momoki Shiro, ‘Japan and Vietnam in the Asian Trade System in the Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, in Pho Hien: The Centre of International Commerce in the XVIIth–XVIIIth Centuries (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1994), p. 44. Another way of calculating this is according to the share of Red Seal ships. Japanese export of silver to Southeast Asia was 20 tons per year between 1604 and 1629, and Tongking’s share of Red Seal ships was 12.4 per cent. This would give us a figure of 2.5 tons of silver. See Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), vol. 2:18, 24. 23 Iioka, ‘Literati Entrepreneur’, p. 226.

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foreign-silver income was about four times its reported agricultural revenue of 2.5 tons.26 This is significant, given the long-time emphasis of historians on Vietnam’s agricultural base. The comparison grows more exaggerated if we look at the rest of Tongking’s tax base. Figures for the seventeenth century are unavailable; however, using data for the 1730s reveals that this silver income dwarfed the kingdom’s combined revenue from all taxing stations, ferries, and markets by a factor of 8:1.27 An equally important question is this: throughout the seventeenth century, the Le-Trinh regime cast few coins, yet all taxes except for land tax were paid in cash.28 What constituted Tongking’s money supply, and who issued the coins that fed it? A large percentage of coins were the imitation of Chinese coins cast in Japan, which the Tokugawa government banned in Japan in 1608.29 The constant demand of coins in the country provided some with a great opportunity to profit in both Tongking and Cochinchina. Merchants of all countries competed to carry coins, which they saw as a positive investment in Tongking silk.30 The Dutch VOC sent Japanese copper coin zeni in the 1660s and soon championed it. Between 1660 and 1679 the VOC imported 356,354 quan of zeni to Tongking, making in some years a 40 per cent profit on their investment.31 Japanese zeni, particularly the imitation of the Song coins genbo tsuho minted for export, ‘played an indispensable role in balancing the monetary system of Tongking of the third quarter of the 1600s’, according to Hoang Anh Tuan.32 hoc Xa hoi, 1992), 2:243. Here I take a mean figure of 1 tael:1,300 to reflect fluctuation of the tael:cash ratio. Between 1638 and 1700, the VOC 90,000 tael and Chinese 110,000 tael would be worth 433,000 quan of cash. 26 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:217. This export income was also comparable to Tongking’s southern rival Cochinchina, Dang Trong, in terms of revenues. The Nguyen’s revenue of the mid-eighteen century was an average of 380,700 quan. See Li Tana and Anthony Reid (eds), Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen: Documents on the Economic History of Cochinchina (Dang Trong, 1602–1777) (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 118. The silver–cash ratio was 1:2 quan. 27 Taxes collected from passes (1732):26,731 quan; taxes from ferries (1732):2,737 quan; Taxes from markets (1727):1,660 quan. Total:31,128 quan. Phan Huy Chu, Lich trieu, pp. 268–270. 28 Nguyen Anh Huy studied 13 types of coins supposedly cast by the Le kings between 1557 and 1705, and concluded that only three were cast by the Le in Tongking; namely the Gia Thai thong bao (1573–1577), Vinh Tho thong bao, and Vinh Tho chi bao (1658–1661). All the rest were either cast in eighteenth-century Cochinchina or in China. Lich su tien te Viet Nam: So truy & Luoc khao [Initial research into Vietnamese numismatics] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb Van Hoa Sai Gon, 2009), pp. 128–134. 29 Richard von Glahn, ‘Chinese Coin and Changes in Monetary Preferences in Maritime East Asia in the Fifteenth-Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57, 5 (2014), 639. 30 In the mid-seventeenth century the scarcity of the local copper coins was such that it led to the fall of the silver/cash exchange ratio of 1 tael for 1,600 cash to 1/800 even 1/500. Hoang, Silk for Silver, pp. 134–135. 31 Hoang Anh Tuan, Cong ty Dong An Ha Lan o Dang Ngoai (1637–1700) [The Dutch East India Company in Tonkin, 1637–1700] (Hanoi: Nxb Ha Noi, 2019), p. 165. 32 Hoang, Silk for Silver, p. 137.

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The Silk Boom and Its Consequences 205

The Portuguese had their own way of profiting from Tongking’s silk trade. Banned in Japan in 1639, ten years later Portuguese arranged the manufacture of coins (P. caixas) with Chinese residents in Macao and shipped them to Tongking at the severe shortage of coin at the time. The profits they made in Tongking grew large enough to make the VOC merchants envious, enough so as to suggest that the Company employ Chinese in minting their coins in Batavia for Tongking.33 The balance between overseas and domestic commerce no doubt shifted in seventeenth-century Tongking. All this suggests that, throughout most of the seventeenth century commerce injected a tremendous amount of foreign money into Tongking’s economy on a scale that could only have had a profound, widespread impact on its society. To test these alleged consequences, it is necessary to begin with the following: Once such a massive quantity of silver and coin entered the country, where did it all go? To answer that, the sections below examine the available evidence in the hope of tracing the dissemination of foreign silver throughout Tongking, to see which aspects of the kingdom’s economy and society it affected, from exchange to production and consumption and beyond, and to measure those effects. The results show that silver drove a ‘coherent arc of change’34 which unfolded in seventeenth-century Tongking society as a consequence of this massive influx of silver and is evident in the constant interactions between foreign and domestic trade, between commerce and the state, and between commerce and society. These discussions will hopefully help in our collected endeavour to contextualise the country’s different economic activities and their inter-relations with seventeenth-century Tongking society, and to execute a qualitative analysis of the effects of foreign trade on the structure of the kingdom’s economy and society during the seventeenth century. The Silk Boom and Its Consequences Thanks to data from VOC and Japan records, we now have a consistent series of figures on silk export, which has provided a clearer picture of seventeenthcentury Tongking’s capacity for silk production. That picture had changed very much. The data reveals that by the late 1640s, the kingdom’s raw silk production grew considerably larger, stimulated by demand in Japanese, Dutch, and Chinese markets. To illustrate, a 1641 VOC report claims that company ships could procure 60,000–70,000 jin (30–35 tons) of the best raw silk plus 33

Souza, The Survival of Empire, pp. 118–119. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xvii.

34

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piece goods from Tongking.35 By the mid seventeenth century, the production capacity of raw silk in Tongking had risen to 200–300 tons annually, while the number of piece goods averaged about 10,000 per year.36 In the late 1660s, the Red River Delta annually exported 500,000 can (250 metric tons) of raw silk (see Figure 7.2). If we use the productivity of seventeenth-century Yangzi Delta, China’s silk-producing centre as guide, such a volume of output would require no less than 50,000 households and 75,000 mau of mulberry trees to produce.37 In addition, Tongking also exported around 10,000 piece-goods. This would add another 5,000 can (2.5 tons) of raw silk or 500 households and 750 mau of orchards in silk production.38 The households that were involved in the silk production of seventeenth-century Tongking would number between 10 and 12 per cent, a large portion of Tongking’s economy.39 As home to the majority of Tongking’s population and economy, the Red River Delta produced the lion’s share of silk. The bulk of the region’s silk villages were concentrated in Bac Ninh and Son Tay, located in the upper middle of the delta.40 In 1682, Dutch merchants reported to VOC in Java that ‘all the silk, such as Twill (lings 綾), Pongee, a soft thin woven cloth (shew 綢), hockins (juan 黄絹), chemonges (unidentified) penniascoes (unidentified), five 35

Dagh-register gehouden int Casteel Batavia, Chinese trans., vol. 2:331. Iioka, Literati Entrepreneur, 222. In the 16th century, the VOC in a good year exported 90 tons of raw silk and 6,000 silk pieces (Hoang, Silk for Silver, pp. 181–182). Souza estimated that Tongking’s total capacity of silk production in the 1630s was 3,000 piculs or 200 tons (Souza, The Survival of Empire, 117). This means that the VOC was only able to export less than half of the total raw silk produced in Tongking. This confirms Iioko’s data on the Chinese export to Japan. 37 In the Ming-Qing era in the Yangzi River delta, one couple on average cultivated 1–2 mu (V. mau) of mulberry grove, with a harvest of 8–12 jin (V. can) of raw silk. It might be realistic to estimate that an average household in seventeenth-century Red River Delta produced 10 can of raw silk per season. Li Bozhong 李伯重, ‘Cong “fufu bingzuo” dao “nangeng nvzhi” – Mingqing Jiangnan nongjia funv laodong wenti tantao zhiyi’ 從「夫婦並作」到「男耕女 織」 – 明清江南農家婦女勞動問題探討之一明清江南农家妇女劳动问题探讨之一 [From both husband and wife worked in the field to male farming women weaving: Research into female peasant labour in Jiangnan during the Ming and Qing era] Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu 中國經濟史研究 [Journal of Chinese economic history] 3 (1996), 104. The land devoted to mulberry plants in seventeenth-century Red River Delta is hard to calculate, as many trees were planted on the riverbanks. The figures I have calculated here should be seen as an indication of the input of silk production rather than accurate. 38 In the Song dynasty Jiangnan, 1 bolt of small juan (xiao juan) needed 0.5 can of silk to weave. Chen Fu 陳旉 (1076–1156), Nongshu 农书 (https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/ /zh-hans/農書, accessed 4 May 2012). 39 If we adapt Li’s estimate of taxpayers of the four Delta provinces of the late 15th century of 450,000, and add another 20 per cent of tax-free households (90,000 households), the four provinces would have around 540,000 to 550,000 households in the seventeenth century. Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asian Program, 1998), pp. 169–171. Productivity of the twenty-century Thai Binh was ten kilograms of raw silk per household per season. Hoang Anh Tuan, Silk for Silver, p. 205. 40 Son Tay, nowadays is a part of Ha Tay Province, is still the most famous area in Vietnam for its silk making. ‘Ha Tay que lua’ [Ha Tay is the home of silk], as people say. 36

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coloured thin silk (thaes 綵), [and] velvet (nhung 絨) are produced in Shuback (Xu Bac, Bac Ninh) and Shutay (Xu Tay, Son Tay)’.41 Even the capital region of Thang Long (Hanoi) possessed good land for making high-quality silk. A village near West Lake named Nghi Tam, or ‘good for silkworm’, has existed since the Ly dynasty, perhaps even earlier. Its livelihood for centuries came from its part in the region’s thriving silk economy,42 as ancient as rice. While we cannot interview silk workers of seventeenth-century Tongking to see what that was like, the account of a Vietnamese woman today in the province of Bac Ninh helps us to at least imagine a booming silk manufacturing village in the seventeenth century:43 The happiest sight was to see that everyone in the village has got a job to do. From old women to the young and beautiful to children, everyone was spinning silk thread. Go to anyone’s house what you heard was nothing but shuttles going back and forth, and the booming sound of the weaving machine … At the time (late twenty century), mulberry trees were trees of the highest value, being planted along the Cau River. People could abandon planting rice, but no one would abandon planting mulberry trees.

Production like this could only have been done on a village scale before the industrial age. The work required – tending orchards, cultivating mulberries, raising silkworms, unreeling cocoons, spinning thread, weaving fabrics, not to mention the ancillary work of allocating resources, negotiating with the market, or transporting finished goods – implies a large labour pool. Mulberry trees, to cite just one example, had to be pruned every winter so they would regenerate in the spring, sprouting good-quality leaves to maximise the number of silkworms as well as the quantity and quality of their silk.44 This alone would involve considerable work, not to mention multiple forms of specialised knowledge, from horticulture to sericulture to the mechanics and mathematics of weaving. To meet the demands of local buyers so as to capture some of the silver flowing into their country required large-scale mobilisation of village Vietnam. Thus, a large portion of seventeenth-century Tongking’s population devoted their daily toil to making silk. The income from silk production during the seventeenth century was handsome. A Vietnamese proverb echoes the lady of Bac Ninh: ‘Planting rice for 41

VOC report of 18 March 1682, cited in Hoang Anh Tuan (ed.), Tu lieu cac cong ty Dong An Ha Lan va Anh ve Ke Cho-Dang Ngoai the ky XVII [Archival material of the VOC and EIC on seventeenth century Hanoi and Tongking] (Hanoi: Nxb. Ha Noi, 2010), p. 373. 42 Philippe Papin, Lich su Ha Noi [A history of Hanoi/Histoire de Hanoi] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb My Thuat, 2010), p. 66; Another village devoted to silk production in the West Lake area was Quan La. See Yao Takao, ‘The State Farm system in the Red River Delta in the first half of the Le Dynasty Vietnam’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 64 (2002), 180. 43 https://nhandan.com.vn/xahoi/item/24660402-nguoi-gin-giu-thuong-hieu-to-tam-viet.html, accessed 16 March 2020. 44 Hoang Anh Tuan, Silk for Silver, p. 29.

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three years is not as good as raising silkworms for one season.’45 The sizeable income from silk production encouraged labour diversification. Villages could specialise. For example, some obtained cocoons from mulberry tree growers and then specialised in silk spinning.46 As mulberry leaves were scarce in winter, eager silk producers went a step further, importing white cocoons from China – in contrast to the yellow cocoons common to the sub-tropical Red River Delta – to spin white yarn for white and better quality silk.47 Likewise, many silk weavers would buy raw silk thread rather than produce it themselves, while other villages specialised in dyeing.48 The complex steps of cloth production and the consequent diversification of silk varieties led to ever more complex layers of production, circulation, and export; each factor relied on the other, and each demanded a degree of co-ordination with the other factors in order to function successfully. The complexity of silk production and export processing meant that it relied on the reliable productivity of commercial sectors, such as agriculture, transportation, and commerce, which provided the raw materials, food, carriers, and transactional means necessary for production to exist, much less thrive. The government was aware that its society was commercialising and responded through policy. The high influx of silver and expansion of commercial silk production made this inevitable as the new handicrafts drew more and more people into complimentary ones. With so many livelihoods relying on commercial production, the Trinh court abolished tax-collection stations in 1658 and two years later forbade the officers from charging high ferry and market fees.49 That same year the government ordered the country to build highways (duong thien li, ‘roads of a thousand li’) in order ‘to facilitate travel’.50 This would in turn further stimulate both the domestic and export sectors of the economy.

45

‘Lam ruong ba nam, khong bang cham tam mot lua.’ Vu Tu Trang, Nghe co nuoc Viet [Ancient crafts of Vietnam] (Hanoi: Nxb. Van hoa Dan toc, 2001), p. 346. 46 Phan Van Kinh, ‘Thu cong nghiep va lang xa Viet Nam’ [Manufacturing and Vietnamese village], in Nong thon Viet Nam trong Lich su [Vietnamese countryside in a history] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xahoi, 1977), vol. 1:228; Duong Duy Bang, ‘Tieu thu cong nghiep o Ninh Hiep: Lich su va hien dai’ [Handcraft industry in Ninh Hiep: past and present], in Philippe Papin and Olivier Tessier (eds), The Village in Questions (Hanoi: Ecole francaise d’Extreme Orient; Trung tam Khoa hoc xa hoi va nhan van Quoc Gia; Dai hoc Quoc gia Ha Noi, 2002), p. 555. 47 Hoang Anh Tuan, Silk for Silver, p. 29. 48 Such practices were not restricted to silk alone. Some villages also specialised in cotton thread to supply fabric weaving villages. Vu Duc Thom, ‘Buoc dau tim hieu ve cay bong trong doi song cua nguoi nong dan truoc nam 1945 o Quynh Coi’ [Preliminary understanding on the cotton industry in Quynh Coi before 1945], in Hoi thao khoa hoc nguoi dan Thai Binh trong lich su [Proceedings of conference on demography in Thai Binh’s history] (Thai Binh: Dang tinh uy Thai Binh, 1986), p. 417. 49 Phan Huy Chu, ‘Quoc dung chi’, 267; Keith W. Taylor, ‘Literati Revival in SeventeenthCentury Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 18, 1 (1987), 12. 50 Toan Thu, p. 965.

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Such policies, when combined with silver and commerce, stimulated settlement expansion. New villages emerged, making the seventeenth century an important period in the history of the settlement formation of the Red River Delta. Archaeological findings unearthed by Sakurai Yumio’s project on the history of village formation in the Nam Dinh area reveal that Vietnamese created a new landscape there during the seventeenth century, most likely in the form of both land expansion by older villages and the establishment of new settlements.51 In response to a growing money supply, overseas market connections, and commercial demand, Vietnamese began to cultivate new cash crops that quickly became profitable and popular. In 1660, tobacco was introduced to Tongking from Laos, and soon commercial growers were planting it everywhere and making it an essential part of ordinary Vietnamese lives. ‘Officers, common people and women all compete to get addicted to it, so much so that there is a saying: One can do without eating for three days but cannot do without smoking for one hour.’ The court repeatedly prohibited its planting and smoking, but all its efforts failed.52 Perhaps people in government and society’s elite were just as addicted to the newly globalising drug: Tobacco even sold publicly at a shop in the front of the civil examination site in Hanoi in 1670.53 Second, from Guangdong arrived a Siamese method of brewing rice wine. It was to ‘add aromatics into the wine, and it was called a-la-khac (arrack)’.54 It kept the original pronunciation of its name, and soon it became the dominant method of brewing rice wine in Tongking. Corn was also introduced during the seventeenth century. Although its Viet name is lua ngo (the ‘crop of Ngo’, i.e. the Chinese), the method of planting using a knife to dig a hole in which to plant the seed suggests that the grain might have been first transported to Tongking via overland by mountain peoples. This makes sense, given that both corn and sorghum became important crops in the bordering provinces with China. Indeed, the Son Tay region even came to rely on corn as its staple food by the eighteenth century.55 First Consequence: A Peak of Construction There is no doubt that a large percentage of the silver earned in the seventeenth century went to the war effort against Cochinchina. Hard cash was 51

Nishimura Masanari and Nishino Noriko, ‘Archaeological Study of the Settlement Formation in the Red River Plain: A Case of Bach Coc and the Surrounding Areas’, in Sakurai Yumio and Yanagisawa Masayuki (eds), Thong tin Bach Coc, so dac biet [Newsletters on Bach Coc village, special issue] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2006), p. 10. 52 Son cu tap thuat 山居雜述 [Miscellaneous records in a mountain residence], unpublished mss., shelf number A.822, Han-Nom Institute, Hanoi, p. 38; Le Quy Don, Van Dai loai ngu [Classified discourse from the library] (Saigon: Phu quoc vu khanh dac trach Van hoa, 1973), 3:34b–35a. 53 Son cu tap thuat, p. 18. 54 Le, Van Dai loai ngu, p. 40a. 55 Ibid., p. 49b.

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used to purchase advanced weapons from the Dutch, Portuguese, and English. According to Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651, Tongking possessed at least five hundred galleys, outnumbered Cochinchina’s fleet by more than three times, and were also superior in size, armaments, and decor. The Jesuit missionary in 1627 accompanied a royal expedition to the south with 200,000 men and 200 war galleys ‘glistening with gold and decorated with rich paintings all moving in perfect precision, and followed by 500 more vessels carrying supplies’.56 More than forty years of war helped to greatly modernise Tongking’s armed forces. While de Rhodes reported in the 1650s that the army skilfully used a variety of weapons, like the pistols and arquebuses ‘they fire with admirable skill’,57 by the 1660s–1670s Chinese reported that the people of ‘Jiaozhi’ were ‘good at firearms, and Jiao guns (Jiao qiang, or Jiao chong 交銃) are the best in the world’.58 In the 1670s Samuel Baron stated that the Trinh army possessed ‘guns and cannons of all sorts’, some of them were made locally but ‘the greatest part bought of the Portuguese, Dutch and English’,59 while a decade later in 1688 William Dampier reported that Tongking had 70,000 soldiers armed with handguns.60 A large part of those weapons would have been made locally, using imported materials. Warships and weapons were by no means the only sectors which boomed from Tongking’s large inflow of silver. As silk manufacturing in Tongking developed to a higher level of sophistication and size, numerous silk-producing centres developed and flourished in and around the capital Thang Long. The Trinh court thus spent considerable sums of wealth on construction and renovation in the capital, beginning with palaces.61 The city’s population expanded 56

Cited in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 2, p. 230. Much money was also spent on buying cannons from overseas. A letter by Lord Trinh Tac (r.1657–1682) to the English East India Company (EIC) in 1673 is in the British Library. In the silken scroll letter, he asks the English, in addition to buying two cannons, to send cannon-casting artisans, and to purchase either a 50 hoc (= 50 kilograms) sized amber or 5,000 pieces of stringed amber 寄買巨琥珀五拾斛琥珀串五千粒. The latter would no doubt have been for the court ladies. ‘A Vietnamese Lord’s letter to the East India Company’, 15 October 2018, Asian and African Studies Blog, British Library (https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/10/a-vietnameselords-letter-to-the-east-india-company.html, accessed 15 October 2018). 57 Alexandre de Rhodes, Histoire du royaume du Tonkin, first published 1650, Jean-Pierre Duteil (ed.), (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1999), pp. 33–36. 58 ‘交人善火攻，交槍為天下最’. Liu Xianting 劉獻廷 (b.1648–d.1695), Guangyang zaji 廣陽雜記 [Miscellaneous records by Guangyangzi], chapter 4 (www.easyatm.com.tw/ wiki/廣陽雜記, accessed 2 March 2019); Sun Laichen, ‘Vietnamese Guns and Chinese Warfare (c. 1550–1680s)’, work in progress. I am grateful to Laichen for sharing this work with me. 59 Samuel Baron, ‘A Description of the Kingdom of Tonqueen’, in Collection of Voyages and Travels (London: A. & W. Churchill, 1732), vol. 6, p. 665. 60 Cited in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 2, p. 226. 61 Toan Thu, p. 975; See also the stele ‘Nam Giao dien bi ky’ 南郊殿碑記 [Stele on the palace of the Southern Suburb], no. 161, Han-Nom Institute, Hanoi.

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The Silk Boom and Its Consequences 211

beyond the historical centre’s 36 streets, each specialising in different commodities. Soon, even areas far away from the town centre such as the royal school (Quoc tu giam), built in the late-fifteenth century, and which also provided boarding for students, by the mid-seventeenth century were surrounded by shops.62 Altogether, Thang Long made an impressive sight for de Rhodes, who described Ke Cho, or Thang Long, as ‘a very large, very beautiful city where the streets are broad, the people numberless, the circumference of the walls at least six leagues (33 kilometres) around’.63 The link between silk trade income and domestic construction is clear. Because the Trinh lords who ruled Tongking did not monopolise the silk trade and gave it largely a free hand, the market offered enough space for ordinary people to enter and create profit. In 1644, for example, a breakdown of the 64,515 catties (1 catty = 600 gram, 38709 kg) of raw silk the VOC purchased from Tongking shows that its merchants obtained only 13,803 catties, or 21 per cent, from the Tongking court and local mandarins – which means that they bought nearly 80 per cent of the company’s raw silk that year from local people outside the royal court.64 The income yielded from silk production by ordinary Tongking households amounted to around 60 guilders per year per family, or about 39 piculs (or 2,331 kg) of rice, enough for a household of five to live on.65 The trace of silver income is clearly reflected in the new constructions and renovations carried out in this period. In the absence of information on the civilian residences, the steles recording construction and renovation of temples ` (chùa), communal halls (d ̄ình), markets (chợ ), bridges (câu), and ferries (d ̄ò) show without a doubt that a construction boom occurred in Tongking between 1500 and 1680. As the Figure 7.3 shows, the peaks of construction coincided with the influx of foreign silver. It cannot be overstated: Silk-manufacturing households in Tongking during the seventeenth century produced for overseas markets, not for their own surplus. Although the producers continued to live in farming households, they specialised in parts of the production process by relying on markets to provide for a portion of their income. Thus, Tongking’s urbanisation during the Age of Commerce is better characterised by the country’s mushrooming village markets, expanding market networks, and more frequent commercial exchanges than by the construction of large cities. These markets will be the focus of the next section.

62

Son cu tap thuat, p. 9. Rhodes of Viet Nam: The Travels and Missions of Father Alexander de Rhodes in China and Other Kingdoms of the Orient, trans. Solange Hertz (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1966), p. 64. 64 Hoang, Silk for Silver, p. 140. 65 These yield and income figures are based on Hoang, Silk for Silver, pp. 181–182. 63

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Figure 7.3 Construction and renovation of temples, markets and bridges, 1500–1840

Second Consequence: Densification of Market Networks Although people in Tongking did not generally engage in sea commerce, their trade in ports and rivers was frequent, and their profit considerable, according to de Rhodes: Yet without leaving the Kingdom … merchants do a lot of business, thanks to the convenience and multitude of the ports, and in a manner so advantageous for them that they double their capital two or three times in a year without running the risks so common everywhere at sea.66

Travel by land grew frequent and easy, facilitated by the many inns or guesthouses that proliferated during this Age of Commerce.67 A map of the midseventeenth century, Thien Nam Tu chi lo do (Traveller’s map of Thien Nam), accompanied an interesting itinerary of the routes that extended throughout the Red River Delta with suggestions for places to stay, not unlike a present-day Lonely Planet:68 Find a nice day to start the journey from the capital, in the early morning. Travelling for a day, you stay at the Le Inn (quan); the second day at the Cot Inn; third day at the Cat Inn; fourth day at Van Inn; fifth day at Bo Tuc Inn; sixth day in Hoang Mai village; seventh day at So Inn; eighth day at Vinh Market (cho); ninth day at Nha Bridge (cau). On the tenth day you stay at Lac Inn; the eleventh day at Khe Lau Inn;

66

De Rhodes, Histoire du royaume du Tonkin, p. 58. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2 vols 1988, 1993. 68 Thien Nam Tu chi lo do [Traveller’s map of Thien Nam], c. 1630–1653, according to Truong Buu Lam. See Truong (ed.), Hong Duc ban do [Maps of the Hong Duc era] (Saigon: Bo Quoc gia Giao duc, 1962), p. 72. 67

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The Silk Boom and Its Consequences 213 twelfth day at Phu Luu Market; and on the fifteenth day and a half, you stay at Lu Dang Inn.

Finally, the twenty-first day of the journey finish in present-day Thanh Hoa province. These inns suggest the existence of fairly dense and evenly distributed regional marketing networks, which reflects that entrepreneurial people had set up inns to service a steady stream of travellers along well-established trading routes, all a single day’s distance from each other. What is important is that people must have frequently conducted a variety of transactions around these inns, the nature of which is hinted at by some of the toponyms on the seventeenth-century map, such as Quan duoc (Medicine inn) and Quan gao (Rice inn).69 The map also reveals the importance of waterways. Given the number of markets that sat along the banks of regional waterways and their proximity to respective production sources of rice, cotton, ceramics, and silk, waterways clearly mattered as much to agriculture as they did to commerce. On a ten-kilometre stretch of the Red River, ‘there was a whole string of riverside markets’, according to Nguyen Duc Nghinh. Among the seventeen temple markets revealed in surviving documents, fifteen came into being during the seventeenth century.70 Pham Thi Thuy Vinh, a Vietnamese scholar who has researched over a thousand stone inscriptions from Kinh Bac (today’s Bac Ninh and Bac Giang provinces), points out that most of the markets recorded on these steles were established in the seventeenth century, during this ‘peak of commercial economy in pre-modern Vietnam.’71 Because of the financial benefit that village markets fostered, conflicts erupted frequently over possession. For example, when the villagers of Co Loa resolved to fight a lawsuit arguing the ownership of the market against the neighbouring village of Duc Tu, they agreed that ‘the population of Co Loa unanimously pledged to see the lawsuit through to the end, whatever the costs’. Should the lawsuit be lost, and the representative of Co Loa sentenced to be flogged at the court, ‘the population of the village would raise money to indemnify them, at the rate of 2 tien (or 120 cash) for each lash received’ by the poor man.72 69

Thien Nam Tu chi lo do, pp. 74–75. Nguyen Duc Nghinh, ‘Markets and Villages’, in Phan Huy Le et al., The Traditional Village in Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1993), pp. 331, 353; in fact, Vietnamese historian Nguyen Thua Hy points out that the word ‘phô ’́ (market) came from the word 浦, and this made ‘phô’́ both means ‘market’ and ‘port’. This seems to suggest a direct connection between market and river. Nguyen Thua Hy, Thang Long-Ha Noi the ky XVII-XVIII-XIX [Thang Long/Hanoi in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] (Hanoi: Hoi Su hoc Viet Nam, 1993), p. 97. 71 Pham Thi Thuy Vinh, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac vas u phan anh sing hoat lang xa [The stele of the Kinh Bac Region during the Le period: Reflections on village life] (Hanoi: Bibliotheque vietnaminne-VIII and École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2003), p. 166. 72 Cited from Nguyen, ‘Markets and Villages’, pp. 326–327. 70

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The number of vendors of all sorts of goods grew rapidly. De Rhodes had a unique way of estimating their total, by way of counting the betel nuts traders in Thang Long73: The more comfortable people have servants who prepare the packet [of betel nuts], but to supply the rest of the people … who have no one in their service to prepare it for them, we count up to 50,000 dealers who for a modest price sell it in various parts of the town; from which it is necessary to conclude that the number of people who buy it is inestimably great.

To do good business, as a Vietnamese proverb goes, the best place is to be close to the market, and the second best close to a river (Nhat can thi, nhi can giang); these vendors must have circulated widely. Most, if not all, of these betel nut vendors were women. We cannot know the details about the everyday lives of these women peddlers, such as how freely they travelled. But we can gauge their effect to some degree. It was those women traders, according to Olga Dror, who were able to travel around the country and profess Lieu Hanh’s cult as they plied their trades. This female deity, once a singing girl, a geisha, or a prostitute when she was alive, emerged from the coast as a most powerful female spirit in seventeenth-century Dai Viet, equally as potent as other (male) deities such as Tran Quoc Tuan.74 Interestingly, this female deity who became popular in seventeenth-century Tongking gradually surpassed and replaced the worship of the Four Goddesses of the South Sea, which had been venerated all along the coast from Nghe An north to Hung Yen.75 Lieu Hanh was not the only one engaged in the trade of entertaining; clearly, commerce led to social behaviour that the government frowned upon. For example, a government edict of 1663, issued when the Confucian literati began to take the upper hand in the Trinh court,76 stipulates 47 rules for maintaining social order that curiously reveal the importance of travel in the everyday lives of ordinary people. For example, rule number 20 cautions, ‘inns should be careful not to provide venues for illicit sexual activities, while not to reject guests who were seeking accommodation’. Rule number 18 defines norms of 73

De Rhodes, Histoire du royaume du Tonkin, p. 27. Olga Dror, Cult, Culture, and Authority: Princess Lieu Hanh in Vietnamese History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 81. 75 The Four Goddesses (V. Tu vi thanh nuong) of the South Sea were believed to be the last empress of the Song dynasty, her sister and two daughters, who jumped into the sea when they were pursued by the Mongol army in the thirteenth century. Niu Junkai 牛軍凱, ‘Haiwei wubo: Yuenan haishen Nanhai siwei shengniang de chuanshuo yu xinyang’ ‘海為無波”: 越南海神 南海四位聖娘的傳說與信仰’ [Calm the sea: the legend and worship of the Four goddesses of the South Sea], Haijiaoshi yanjiu [Journal of Maritime Studies] 1 (2011), 56. 76 Taylor, ‘Literati Revival’, 1–22; Nola Cooke, ‘Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization in Historical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations (1463–1883)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 25 2 (1994), 294. 74

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behaviour in a public space: ‘that men and women not indulge themselves extravagantly with sexual pleasures (肆淫風)’.77 Though these rules do not specifically relate to peddlers, this intersection between sex and commerce does indicate that women were a part of the everyday life of a commercial Tongking. The picture of women busy along the rivers or crossing the ferries was portrayed by Tu Xuong, a Vietnamese writer of late nineteenth century, when he described his wife: All year round you busy yourself trading at the riverside, Earning enough to feed five children and one husband. Sleeping alone, you toss and turn in bed, Crossing the ferry, you chat happily on the river.78

A practice not uncommon to Vietnam today. But in seventeenth-century Tongking, it took many forms and extended to many facets of maritime and commercial life. Commerce in sex migrated beyond the barracks, like the ones reportedly concentrated around the military barracks in Hanoi’s Hang Chai and Hang Trau areas.79 The arrival of male foreign merchants and their need for sexual partners during the five to six months they remained in Tongking awaiting the shifting winds created such practices called ‘hiring Misses’, in the words of William Dampier. ‘The young women, who offer themselves of their own account to any strangers, who will go to their price (from 100 to 5 dollars) … even the great men of Tonquin will offer their daughters to the merchants and officers’.80 In the eyes of the VOC factors, this was not dissimilar to the situation in Japan, where in Nagasaki Japanese women offered their services to their Dutch male counterparts as temporary wives, or in Ayutthaya where Siamese and Mon women similarly transacted with male company employees. As Reid points out, such interracial unions were a feature in all the commercial cities of Southeast Asia, and clearly, Tongking was no different.81 77

Toan Thu, p. 974. ‘Thư ơ ng vợ ’, by Tú Xư ơ ng (Tran Te Xuong, 1870–1907). Here is the full original Vietnamese:

78

Quanh năm buôn bán ở mom sông, Nuôi d̄ủ năm con với một chồ ng. Lặn lộn thân cô khi quãng văń g, Eo sèo mặt nước lúc d̄ò d̄ông. Một duyên hai nợ âu d̄ành phận, Năm năń g mườ i mưa há quản công. Cha mẹ thói d̄ờ i ăn ở bạc, Có chồ ng hờ hữ ng cũng như không. (https://scr.vn/tho-tu-xuong.html, accessed 2 April 2020). Son cu tap thuat, p. 43. These two streets existed in the eighteenth century but are no longer among the current 36 streets. Locations unknown. 80 Quoted from Hoang, Silk for Silver, p. 196. 81 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 1:155. 79

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The silver flow to the seventeenth-century Tongking created a wide and dense market network which reflected the prosperity that had not been seen in the previous two centuries nor the two centuries to come. The long-term effects on Viet society and culture proved deep and widespread. In two telling examples, we can see how the rise of commerce led to the development of a new institution, the d̄ình hall, that would reorganise village life, and an influx of books from China, together which helped to consolidate the power of the kingdom’s village-based literati, fashioning the society of village Vietnam into something more familiar to observers today. Third Consequence: The Rise of the Đình While the impact of silver can be observed in many aspects of Viet society in Tongking, it appears more profound and easier to trace with the founding of đình. As communal halls, the đình constituted both an important byproduct and the symbol of the ancient autonomous Viet villages where they operated. This seems at odds with the evidence: the earliest stele inscriptions found in any communal halls date only as far back as the late sixteenth century; indeed, most well-known đình halls date only as far back as the seventeenth century, while most appeared even later. This phenomenon contrasts sharply with Buddhist temples, whose stele inscriptions date as far back as 618 ce.82 Such evidence hardly supports the common view today that dinh halls symbolise Vietnam’s ancient villages. Before the sixteenth century, d̄ình halls operated as shelters for travellers. This is reflected in the actual meaning of its Chinese character 亭 (C: ting, ‘pavilion’),83 a building built along the route for travellers to rest. The book An Nam chi luoc (A brief history of Annam), compiled in 1333, refers to d̄ình named Phan Dich 粉驛亭 as ‘a painted courier station/pavilion’. Under this entry, the author explains:84 Because the [country] is hot, there is often a pavilion (d ̄ình) built along the big roads for travellers to rest [italics added]. Before the first Tran king became a king, when he was but a teenager, he met a Buddhist monk who predicted that he would become influential when grown up … when he became the king, he ordered every đình in the country to build a statue of Buddha in thanks to the monk.85

Not even one piece was collected from d ̄ình in the earlier stele inscriptions. See Phan Van Cac and Claudine Salmon, Épigraphie en chinois du Viêt Nam – Văn khác Hán Nôm Viêt Nam (Paris: Presses de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient; Hà Nôi: Viện nghiên cứ u Hán Nôm, 1998). 83 Ha Van Tan and Nguyen Van Ku, Đình Viet Nam: Community Halls in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb. Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, 1998), p. 75. 84 Le Trac, Annam Chi luoc [A brief history of Annam] (Hue: Uy ban phien dich su lieu Viet Nam, 1961), p. 27. 85 See Ha and Nguyen, Đình Viet Nam, p. 83. The Buddha statue in the pavilions seems to have disappeared in the fifteenth century, perhaps in Le Thanh Tong’s reign. 82

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From the above information, before the sixteenth century the d ̄ình constituted a simple building that combined the functions of a traveller’s rest house with that of a courier station. Ha Van Tan has pointed out that the d ̄ình were often built along rivers, facing the water, not at all a placement that accords with the classic closed village model.86 Official Ming documents written in 1417 list 339 courier stations or tram in northern and central Vietnam.87 These trams were identical to d ̄ình, as the Toan Thu reveals: In the seventh year of the Kien Trung reign (1231), the senior emperor proclaimed a royal edict that throughout the kingdom all places with post stations (d ̄ình tram) must erect Buddha statues to be worshipped. Formerly, it was commonly said: in our kingdom, because of the oppressive heat, many d ̄ình were built for travellers to rest, usually painted with whitewash, and were called post stations (d ̄ình tram).88

According to Nguyen Van Huyen’s careful investigation made a century ago, the village elders of earlier twentieth century recalled: All the d ̄ình in the former times were resting places for the king when the king went on tour of inspection through the region … villages lying along the roads where the royal vehicles often passed also constructed buildings with the function of royal stopping places … later, royal tours of inspection became less frequent and more hurried, and villages eventually took possession of these ‘royal stopping places’ in order to worship deities.89

The above sources make it clear that the early d̄ình fundamentally functioned as a means of facilitating links between different places through travel, which in turn fostered trade and other desirable forms of economic or social activity. Moreover, no one placed deity statues in d̄ình halls before the Tran era, and when people did allow them, they restricted the deities to Buddhist ones.90 A  well known Vietnamese proverb indicates the much more ancient connections between Buddhist temples and villagers: ‘The land of the king, the [Buddhist] temple of the village’ (Dat vua, chua lang).

86

The Annals of Dai Viet (Toan Thu) records that in 1522 the Lê king stopped in one dinh on his way into exile. Toan Thu, p. 828; Ha and Nguyen, Đình Viet Nam, p. 80. 87 Kao Hsiung-cheng, Ngannan tche yuan (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1932), pp. 61–63. 88 Toan Thu, p. 325. 89 Nguyen Van Huyen, ‘Contribution a l’etude d’un genie tutelaire Annamite Ly Phuc Man’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 38 (1938), 36. 90 Ha Van Tan insists that two sorts of đình existed before the sixteenth century: one was resting pavilions and the other communal halls. His evidence was that the former did not have accommodation facilities. Ha and Nguyen, Đình Viet Nam, p. 74. But as the name ‘Phâ ń Dịch d̄ình’ recorded in 1333 indicates, pavilions (d̄ình) and courier stations (dì̄ nh or tram) were the same one. Courier stations in the Ming period did provide free accommodation, food and transport labour to those bearing travel permits, and were spaced along routes every 60 to 80 li, or 35–45 kilometres. Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, p. 35.

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The d̄ình had its second incarnation in the seventeenth century. While its first-phase incarnation consisted of a simple building with four rows of pillars, its seventeenth-century incarnation featured a larger space that exhibited six rows of pillars. Just a century before, inscriptions indicated that some đình donned thatched roofs; not so in the seventeenth century, when tiled roofs became the norm.91 Contrast to the previous centuries when no other deities resided in early d̄ình halls, many thanh hoang or tutelary spirits appeared in the d̄ìnhs. The term thanh hoang acts as a collective name that refers to thousands of local deities or spirits, which allows each village to select their own spirit for their local d̄ình. During the same century, the earliest signs of tutelary spirit worship inside d̄ình halls appear. This added religious function attracted local followers and, importantly, donations, another sign of increased currency or general wealth circulation. This inspired more widespread construction and renovations of pavilions. Analysing data accumulated in Bac Ninh, scholar Pham Thi Thuy Vinh has shown that 58 per cent of all local d̄ình pavilions in the province were built in the seventeenth century; the rest came later.92 As shown in the book Đình Viet Nam (The d̄ình of Vietnam), majority of d̄ìng built in Tongking during the seventeenth century and after. Thus, it seemed that d̄ình began to assume a central role in village life only in the mid-1660s. But this later construction linked directly to the past. As Paul Mus pointed out, the definition of the local divinity, as ‘the expression of the energies of the earth is common to the god and the local chief. The latter is the medium of the divinity’.93 The d̄ình therefore, embodied the earth-god, land, and ancestor worship that had been crucial to the Vietnamese for thousands of years. Certain classes of people became d̄ình patrons in the seventeenth century. The d̄ình became so popular in the 1600s that they offered a glorious opportunity for a man, his wife, and his deceased relatives to ensure that they would become deities of fortune or happiness (phuc than, or after-Buddha) in their respective d̄ình. Or their mothers did.94 This ensured government officials 91

Ha and Nguyen, Đình Viet Nam, p. 82. My calculation is based on Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, pp. 573–587. 93 Paul Mus, India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, trans. Ian Mabbett, Ian W. and David Chandler (eds) (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 1975), p. 29. Mus observed that India kept similar village cults, thus, in his words, there was ‘correspondence between the two wings of monsoon Asia’. Mus, India Seen from the East, p. 33. 94 For example, the ‘Hau than bia ky’ in year 1682, in Mai Dinh village, Hiep Hoa district (see Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, p. 575); the ‘Phung su hau than’ of 1694, no.3905-3912-13; the ‘Cam on duc bi’ of 1683 in An Tru village, Luong Tai district, Bac Ninh province, no.600811; ‘Phung su hau than bi’, no.3905; 3912–3913, all in Han-Nom Institute. Nhung Tuyet Tran also shows that widow donors tasked local leaders with electing them as an after-spirit/afterbuddha that would receive ancestral offerings from the community after their death. Nhung Tuyet Tran, ‘Gender, Property, and the “Autonomy Thesis” in Southeast Asia: The Endowment of Local Succession in Early Modern Vietnam’, Journal of Asian Studies 67 1 (2008), 64–65. 92

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continued influence on the cultural life of their village and raised the social status of the individual post-mortem and his family or clan. In this way, and seeking this same end, many court eunuchs became deities of fortune or protectors of their village đình through their large donations of silver. Court eunuchs were able to secure a number of strategic positions that made them an important part of the Le-Trinh bureaucratic machine in the mid-seventeenth century, a feature that distinguished them from all other Vietnamese dynasties except the Ly.95 Foreign commerce was one of them. Their ability to secure payments from the foreigners won them enormous wealth that they could then parlay into patronage, including the d̄ình halls of their home villages. They had the ear of the Trinh lords and were directly involved in collecting taxes and conducting negotiations, both of which affected foreigners’ business.96 This put the eunuchs in the best position to put a constant squeeze on the company for silver. In 1650 alone, the VOC paid 10,000 taels to the royal Le court’s five chief eunuchs in addition to 25,000 taels to the Trinh lord and another 10,000 to his crown prince.97 As a result of their advantageous position between foreign traders and the Trinh lord, eunuchs became the richest group in Tongking society, second only to the lord and perhaps the Le emperor. Many eunuchs took this great wealth and invested it into their home communities through donations. A senior eunuch named Nguyen Thai Duong, for example, donated some 500 taels of silver to his village in 1657 for d̄ình construction, and just as importantly, so that his ancestors could be worshipped alongside the local deity.98 Before he died in 1667, he donated another large amount of money and land to three nearby villages and consequently became the thanh hoang at all three.99 In 1670, another eunuch named Truong Tho Kien donated 120 taels of silver together with land to

95

While the earlier period only saw two kinds of officers in court, namely civil (van) or military (vo) officers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century a Tongking eunuch (giam) became the third force and in many cases more powerful than the other two. See Tran Trong Kim, Viet Nam su luoc [A concise Vietnamese history] (reprinted Paris: Institut de l’Asie du Sudest, 1987), vol. 2:54. Hasuda Takashi 蓮田隆志, ‘17世紀ベトナム鄭氏政権と宦官’ [The eunuchs in the Trinh regime of the seventeenth century Vietnam], Machikaneyama-Ronso: History 39 (2005), 1–39. 96 Taylor, ‘Literati Revival’, 9. A eunuch even married a granddaughter of a Japanese firearms trader in the ceramic village Bat Trang. Ueda Shin’ya points out that the involvement of eunuchs often caused the reorganisation of Red River Delta communities. Ueda Shin’ya 上田 新也, ‘On the Financial Structure and Personnel Organisation of the Trịnh Lords in Seventeenth to Eighteenth-Century North Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, 2 (2015), 248. 97 Hoang, Silk for Silver, p. 90. 98 No. 2355–2356, Han-Nom Institute, ‘Hung tao Minh dih bi’; see also Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, p. 610. 99 No. 2345–2347, Han-Nom Institute, ‘Vinh Tran Am bi’; Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, p. 612.

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his village in order to build a d̄ình for the same purpose.100 Looking at Bac Ninh province might illustrate this. Among the donations made to d ì̄ nh halls, temples, and other public properties during the seventeenth century, fortyfour were made by queens and ladies of the court, seventy-one by Le-Trinh government officers, and another ninety-nine by eunuchs. The quantity of donations in this example is striking. While the seventy-one officers identified above donated less than 200 mau, in the year 1655, one eunuch alone donated forty-four mau and 300 taels of high-quality silver, in addition to 210 strings of copper coins.101 Thus, a portion of Tongking’s silver income from overseas trade flowed almost directly from court officers and eunuchs to villages, where the money could help finance the construction of d̄ình pavilions in addition to other cultural endeavours, such as building and renovating temples and communal halls. The Han-Nom Institute in Hanoi holds 411 certificates granted to local deities (than sac) by different Vietnamese courts. Most of the deities in question were housed in d̄ình or Taoist temples (den, mieu), and none of the documents were issued before the seventeenth century.102 Many d̄ình halls could not have been built without the direct involvement of some of the court’s eunuchs, as the examples above indicate. Interestingly, the effect of these enterprises could come full circle to the commercial realm in the villages where the d̄ình were proliferating, for the amount of silver invested in building temple markets was also remarkable. In the seventeenth century, the construction of temples and temple markets seemed to proceed hand-in-hand, as Nguyen Duc Nghinh pointed out.103 From this, it might be argued that the impact of ostensibly cultural patronage contributed to the development of commerce in Tongking at the local level. In other words, a large amount of silver flowed from the commerce of the Gulf of Tongking into the pockets of the rich and powerful of Tongking and, from them, into Tongking society where it contributed to the transformation of the d̄ình and the local religious life. From there, it flowed into temple buildings and temple practices advanced in tandem with investments in temple markets. Deliberately or not, the transformation of the d̄ình served to generate financial income as it promoted religious functions. The lines of economic and cultural effects trace back to the sea commerce.

100

101 Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, p. 613. Ibid., p. 610. Liu Chunyin, Lin Qingzhao, and Tran Nghia (eds), Yuenan Hannan wenxian mulu tiyao [Abstracts of Han-Nom material in Vietnam] (Taipei: Asia-Pacific Studies Centre, Academic Sinica, 2004), supplement vol. 1, pp. 1–127. 103 In 1632, for example, a marquis from Hai Hung founded a market and offered it to a pagoda; in 1650 another marquis named Vo also bought a plot of land to set up a market, which was later donated to a pagoda. Nguyen, ‘Markets and Villages’, p. 333. 102

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Fourth Consequence: Books and the Formation of the Village Literati It is puzzling that the above-mentioned trends of the seventeenth century – relatively rapid commercialisation, easier travel, more frequent mobility, expanding choice of local cults, and relaxing social structures – developed into a village-based structure of Vietnamese society by the end of that century. On this note, the view of a well-known Vietnamese scholar, Phan Dai Doan, seems worth pondering: that the Confucianism of seventeenth–eighteenth century Tongking was typically rural, in a way that set it apart from its contemporary and more urban-based counterpart in southern China.104 In this way, the literati of seventeenth-century Tongking also contrasted sharply with their forefathers of the Ly and Tran period, men who were mostly aristocrats and urban-based. Several factors might have contributed to this situation. Some of the factors may have originated in the century that preceded Tongking’s seventeenth-century commercial ascent. The dramatic political upheavals of the sixteenth century forced drastic changes on the elite level of society in the Red River Delta region. The upheavals of internecine war in the latter half of the century led to the collapse of two dynasties – as Le gave way to Mac and Mac to Le-Trinh – which each time produced a new and different class of aristocrats. In Tongking, nothing less than ‘hierarchical disorder’ occurred. The Mac was the most open commerce-friendly dynasty since the Tran, under which considerable wealth was accumulated.105 When the Mac lost the Delta to the Le-Trinh in 1592, villages seized the local temples they owned – indeed, any temples held as private property by a vanquished Mac aristocrat (quy toc).106 Under the new regime, these village temples played an important role in integrating Tongking society. In other words, wealth from overseas trade consolidated the village power throughout the seventeenth century. As observed in Chapter 4, ceramic export allowed a huge army of literati to be created under Le Thanh Hong. Keith Taylor has explained how, from the 1640s there surged a new form of power held by educated men of Tongking’s mid delta and by the 1660s they came into the court. Men in the service of the Trinh felt confident enough to propose (and fight for) reforms to state and 104

Phan Dai Doan, ‘Introduction’, in Pham, Van bia thoi Le xu Kinh Bac, p. 208. Dinh Khac Thuan, Lich Su trieu Mac qua thu tich va van bia [A history of Mac dynasty through books and inscriptions] (Hanoi: Nxb Khoa hoc xa hoi, 2001); Nguyen Hai Ke points out that the Confucian ideology-driven Le under Le Thanh Tong neglected the eastern coast of the Haiphong and Quang Ninh region, and this directly led to the rise of the Mac on the coast. Nguyen Hai Ke, ‘Hai Phong – Vung dat ‘bi lang quan’ thoi Le so’ [Haiphong – the forgotten land of the early Le era], in Nguyen Hai Ke voi Lich su va Van hoa Viet Nam [Nguyen Hai Ke on Vietnamese history and culture] (Hanoi: The Gioi, 2014), p. 156. 1 06 Dinh Khac Thuan, Lich Su trieu Mac, p. 237. 105

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society that would challenge the military ethos sustaining Thanh-Nghe dominance among the country’s elites while at the same time working to revive Neo-Confucian values and discipline in society.107 In the ninety  years that passed between 1592 and 1682, twenty-eight palace examinations were held, in which 308 scholars graduated (tien si) and tens of thousands received the coveted cu nhan degree.108 It is telling that four out of the five examinations of the seventeenth century occurred between 1652 and 1686, when the silk-forsilver trade was in full swing.109 Yet the stronger position of the more numerous literati cannot have been completely separated from the easier access to wealth to ordinary people of the seventeenth century, particularly the cheap printed books brought into Tongking by Chinese merchants.110 From the late sixteenth century on, the cost of print in the Yangzi River delta dropped so dramatically that 100 characters could be carved on a woodblock typeset for next to nothing. As one scholar commented: ‘When I was young and preparing for the civil examinations there was no printed material to use … Now you see printed material everywhere. [This is] also an index of prosperity.’111 Thanks to growing sea trade, the growth in Chinese print culture overflowed beyond China to countries with populations able to consume Chinese literature, such as Japan and Korea, or Cochinchina and Tongking. It is interesting and no coincidence that, in contrast to other Southeast Asian countries, which primarily attracted junks from Guangdong and Fujian, after the Zheng family fell in 1683, ending Chinese resistance to the new Qing dynasty, Tongking received Chinese ships primarily from Ningbo, a major port in the Yangzi River Delta that also fostered a major printing industry.112 Since the Trinh government did not tax the realm’s book trade, ships from Ningbo must have traded Chinese books for yellow silk (juan, mentioned above) before they headed for Nagasaki to procure copper and silver. Cheap and abundant 107

Taylor, ‘Literati Revival’, 1–22. Based on the big volumes of stales published recent years, Ueda Shi’ya proves that the Trinh lords began to replace the Thanh Hoa military officers which flooded into the Red River Delta in the late sixteenth century with the Red River Delta literati after the 1650s. Ueda, ‘On the Financial Structure and Personnel Organisation’, 253. 108 Cooke, ‘Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization’, p. 300. The examinations were held in 1628, 1652, 1661, 1675, and 1686. 109 Ueda, ‘On the Financial Structure and Personnel Organisation’, 253. 110 Much the same way that Christopher Goscha described in early twentieth-century Vietnam. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), pp. 96–97. 111 Li Xu 李詡, Jie an manbi 戒庵老人漫筆 [The flowing brush from an old man’s hut] cited in Xie Guozhen, Mingdai shehui jingji shiliao xuanbian [Excerpts of primary sources on the socio-economic history of the Ming dynasty] (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1980), 1:333. For the cost of carving, see Ye Dehui, Shulin Qinghua 書林清話 [Plain talk on the forest of books], cited in Xie, vol. 1, p. 327. 112 Chen Chingho, ‘Chinese Junk Trade at Nagasaki at the Beginning of the Qing Dynasty’, Xinya xuepao [New Asia Journal] 1, 3 (1960), 273–332.

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Chinese books therefore played an important role in raising literacy levels and enlarging the base of the literati. From this point of view, the literati revival of the late seventeenth century in northern Vietnam was at least partially rooted in Tongking’s links to the print culture that simultaneously flourished in the Yangzi River Delta; it was no less tied to the Japan trade, which was the main driver of Asian trade in general and of book exports in particular. As Whitmore points out, the increased wealth from such commerce ultimately produced greater and more widespread literacy as well as a probable proliferation of rural schools, all of which would have helped to disseminate literary culture.113 The emerge of the d̄ình which became a fundamental institution of village intimately connected to the rising power of the village literati. Malarney points out that there were two hierarchies in a traditional Vietnamese village: While men congregated in the d̄ình and performed public, Confucianinspired rituals on the d̄ình’s spirit altar, public female religious activity centred on the Buddhist temple (chua).114 But if the d̄ình as a communal hall emerged only in the seventeenth century, as the above discussion shows, then this tradition was recent, and was built upon the silver flow into the country as well as the mass production of China’s print industry from the late sixteenth century onward, which in turn was predicated, in part at least, on sea commerce. The books brought to Vietnam by merchants formed the material base of knowledge from which intellectuals developed new approaches to textual interpretation, biography, and historiography in the eighteenth century.115 The building and transformation of the d̄ình as the political institution of the village gave the local literati an alternative, a base to gather around, a focus on which they could concentrate, and a whole arena within which to perform leading roles. Each celebration of the village reinforced the ideal of the community as an isolated, self-contained political and religious unit. The most important force in galvanising this new village structure developed from the merger of 113

John Whitmore, ‘Literati Culture and Integration in Dai Viet, c. 1430–1840’, Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997), 673; Alexander Woodside points out that nineteenth-century villagers in the Red River Delta exhibited a high degree of comprehension of the Chinese classics, and Claudine Ang reveals that in Sai Vai, an important historical document of the seventeenth-century Cochinchina, all the historical examples cited were of the Chinese history but Vietnamese literati would have regarded them as a part of the shared Han tradition. Alexander Woodside, ‘Conceptions of Change and Human Responsibility for Change in Late Traditional Vietnam’, in David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside (eds), Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Series, 1982), pp. 112–113; Claudine Ang, Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), p. 52. 114 Shaun Malarney, ‘Ritual and Revolution in Viet Nam’, PhD dissertation, The University of Michigan (1993), p. 46. 115 Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 404–405.

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the d̄ình, patriarchy, and literati interests. The voices of the literati, ‘this male voice’, as Whitmore points out, would grow as the Vietnamese state itself grew—this one cohort in Vietnamese society taking over the role as spokesman for the elite. While there would be other voices pointing to other aspects of the reality of this land and people, the literati moved both to build the early modern state in Vietnam and to fill its structure with their own meaning. This literati definition of their land would blind subsequent scholars well into the twentieth century to the earlier Vietnamese reality.116

What we see here is that, instead of integration between the Buddhist temples and the village hierarchy as seen in Thailand or Burma, Viet villages and by extension the state integrated the d̄ình and literati during and after the seventeenth century. This integration strengthened and empowered villages, as the small group of literati claimed the top statues and the ‘autonomous’ village that was believed to be ancient started from this period – ironically, or so it seems, during Tongking’s ‘age of commerce’.117 A direct product of these village literati was the huong uoc or village regulations. It has been celebrated as the embodiment of Confucian culture in the countryside. Ironically, the model of huong uoc (C. xiang yue) most likely came instead from Tongking’s seacoast from Guangdong and Fujian, when the Ming and Qing government encouraged such a campaign as an important means to control the grass roots society. Among the 5,000 copies of huong uoc in existence in Tongking, there is only one copy that claimed to be compiled in the Hong Duc period [1470–1490], and the remainder of the earliest remaining copies were all done in the seventeenth century, particularly from the late seventeenth-century onward.118 As Japanese scholar Shimao put it, a ‘khoan uoc compiling campaign’ began in the Canh Tri and Chinh Hoa periods (1663–1690).119 This coincided with the peak of đình development. Village regulations were produced to co-ordinate the interests of major families and legalise the rules that would bind the members together, so that the village 116

John Whitmore, ‘The Literati Voice in Early Modern Vietnam’, in Barbara Watson Andaya (ed.), Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), p. 225. Japanese scholar Takeda Ryuji 竹田龍児 pointed out that Vietnam’s autonomous village largely appeared during the Later Le era when the court lost its control over villages during the political chaos of the eighteenth century. Cited from Wu Qingqiao, trans., ‘The Construction of Vietnam’s Power Structure Viewed from Village Xa’, Zhiyue 知越 [Understanding Vietnam] 19 (2020), n.p. 117 For an excellent discussion on the role of the d̄ình, the state and the villages see Ta Chi Dai Truong, ‘Mot tru so Viet cua than linh: Cai Đình làng’ [The Dinh of the village: Residence of the spirits], in Nhung bai da su Viet [Some articles on the unofficial history of Vietnam] (California: Thanh Van, 1996), pp. 17–73. 118 My gratitude to Professor Shimao Minoru 鳩尾稔 for his enlightenment on this issue. Vu Duy Men, 'Vai net ve hinh thuc van ban huong uoc lang Viet co truyen [On huong uoc of traditional Vietnamese villages] Tap Chi Han-Nom [Journal of Han Non Studies] 42 (2000):23. 119 Personal communication with 鳩尾稔 Shimao Minoru.

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The Silk Boom and Its Consequences 225

leadership could interfere and control socio-economic activities and redistribute resources. Such an ideal village was surely manufactured to assume its place in a developed political and economic culture. It was anything but a ‘natural’ and ‘autonomous’ form.120 The ‘traditional’ Vietnamese village is a topic that looms large among historians, but any study of maritime Vietnam makes it impossible to dichotomise between one aspect of Vietnamese society dominated by land, bureaucracy, and peasantry, and another dominated by sea, urban society and merchants. This preliminary study of the commercial impact on village society and literati culture suggests that the two groups were more closely related than previously thought, even interdependent. Tongking’s age of commerce began to decline as soon as the war with Cochinchina ended in 1672; in just two more decades, it was completely over. Several factors were at work. First, the last quarter of the 1600s saw regular natural disasters struck, causing crop failures; second, by the late 1600s there was a power transfer from military officials to Confucian literati who were scornful of trade. Xenophobia was on the rise, exacerbated by the court’s suspicions of the activities of Christian missionaries. All this augured ill for the foreign merchants doing business with Tongking.121 The external environment also dramatically changed. In 1685, the Qing government opened Guangdong to trade, and consequently, Chinese silk products instantly captured the attention of the London market. Better quality Guangdong silk products sold for much cheaper than Tongkingese silk, and moreover, English merchants found Chinese suppliers more willing to adapt to European fashions.122 Lacking a reason to keep a factory in Tongking, the English closed the doors of their factory in 1697.123 Three years later, the Dutch shut down its VOC operations in Tongking.124 Although Chinese merchants continued to trade with Tongking, gone were the days when they invested large amount of silver to silk production, as the Japanese market began to ignore Tongking silk for the same reason as the English merchants did.125 Last but not least, we must consider a consequential event in environmental history, the shift of the course of the Red River. Pho Hien, Tongking’s international port during the seventeenth century, by the early nineteenth

120

John Kleinen, Facing the Future, Reviving the Past (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), p. 28, on the Vietnamese courts’ efforts in controlling the villages. 121 Hoang Anh Tuan, ‘The Dutch East India Company in Tonkin (1637–1700)’, 50. 122 Anthony Farrington, ‘A New Source for Chinese Trade to Japan in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25 (1985), 189. 123 Hoang Anh Tuan, ‘From Japan to Manila and Back to Europe: The Abortive English Trade with Tonkin in the 1670s’, Itinerario 29 (2005), 73–92. 124 For a comprehensive study of seventeenth century Tongking–Dutch relations, see Hoang, Silk for Silver. 125 Momoki, ‘Japan and Vietnam in the Asian Trade System’, in Pho Hien, p. 46.

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century the river moved 500 to 800 metres away. (Today it lies two ­kilometres west away.)126 From a seaport of the thirteenth century to a river port of the seventeenth century, Pho Hien was reduced to a place described as ‘khong song, khong nui, khong bien’ (no river, no mountain, and no sea),127 a sleepy provincial capital with only memories of its former prosperity. Conclusion The seventeenth century shaped Dai Viet in major ways. Like their counterpart in Cochinchina (see Chapters 8 and 9), the Le-Trinh regime was actively and directly involved in the maritime trade. No court could ignore such a massive volume of silver, least of all the war burdened Le/Trinh. Silver’s consequences on society far surpassed its effects on the war economy. The silk-for-silver trade brought the wealth of the nation to a new level. It is worth noting that no major rebellion plagued northern Vietnam during the entire century, a phenomenon rarely seen in Vietnamese history. Commerce changed culture in many ways, from the introduction of Christianity to the emergence of Lieu Hanh, a new religious figure connected to trade, especially women traders who were not at đình. It modernised Tongking’s firearms and financed the seven campaigns against Cochinchina. It stimulated the import of Chinese books and prints, which had become much more accessible and affordable to the literati class. Add to this the new wealth in circulation more broadly, a construction boom, and increased participation of women in the economy all seem to point to a more relaxed and prosperous era. This all had to come to an abrupt end at the end of the seventeenth century. Right in the middle of the silk-for-silver trade boom, something new and significant happened that affected the government structure. Beginning in the mid-1600s, the Trinh lords began to replace military officers from the ThanhNghe region who, after the Le restoration in the late sixteenth century, had been flooding the delta and occupying government positions, with massive numbers of literati from the Red River Delta. This was particularly in the Trinh lord’s own newly founded parallel government in the form of the Six Departments (Luc Phien 六番). During the rest of the seventeenth century, the Thanh-Nghe military group and the literati of the Red River Delta seem to have gradually merged.128 One is reminded of the situation of the thirteenth century, when upper, middle, and lower Red River Delta elites integrated, and the ‘state became one’ (Chapter 4). It may not be a coincidence that both eras 126

Le Ba Thao, ‘Geographical Aspects of Pho Hien’, in Shiro, Pho Hien, p. 27. Termed by the officers in Hung Yen, collected from the author’s fieldwork in Pho Hien October 2019. 128 Ueda Shin’ya, ‘On the Financial Structure and Personnel Organisation of the Trinh Lords in Seventeenth to Eighteenth-century North Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, 2 (2015), 246–273. 127

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Conclusion 227

saw the development of extensive and intensive maritime commerce, both in domestic and overseas markets. The seventeenth-century Tongking experience sits well with the marked expansion of seaborne commerce throughout Southeast Asia. As the Andayas point out, given that the kingdom’s predominantly interior agricultural communities also actively participated maritime commerce, ‘it would be misleading to categorise Southeast Asian polities in terms of ‘agricultural’ and ‘trade-based’ dichotomy’.129 Yet it was precisely the synergy introduced by maritime wealth that created a more systematically Confucianist institution from the village up.130 Here, the d̄ình became the embodiment of male power in a closed village where men performed public, Confucian-inspired rituals on the đình’s spirit altar, a development that ultimately consolidated Confucian values and the position of Viet literati and patriarchy in the village. The dynamic and open society of the seventeenth century withered and turned inwards into something more suitable to adherents of the peasant model. The autonomous village could now become the fixed image of Vietnam. Looking at this unique century of Vietnamese history one cannot help but recall a saying in Chinese, canghai sangtian, ‘The sea becomes mulberry fields, and the mulberry fields becomes the sea.’

129

Barbara Andaya and Leonard Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 87. 1 30 Although it does reflect a long-term process, as Lieberman points out. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, p. 402.

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8

Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong A Maritime Entity

The seventeenth century brought even more dramatic changes to the southern coast, on the former land of Champa. On the global level, Portugal’s conquest of Melaka in 1511 forced an exodus of Muslim traders to other ports of Southeast Asia such as Patani (1520), Banten (1525), Ayutthya (1540), Cebu (1565), and Makassar (1605), from which they spawned new networks able to adapt to the expanding European competition to come. Muslim trade communities received an extra boost in the 1550s after a major new Muslim trade artery opened between Aceh and the Red Sea, thanks to the growth of Ottoman interest in the Indian Ocean barely a century after their conquest of Constantinople.1 Expanding regional and global networks stimulated new growth in places like Cambodia, which attracted Muslims of multiple ethnicities, including Chams fleeing Viet persecution in their homeland, settling along the Mekong River from the upriver capital regions of Lovek and its successor Oudong near the Tonle Sap to the downriver regions fed by its massive delta.2 This would seem to augur Champa’s resurrection. More than once, as this book shows, new formations in Asian trade had caused new Cham states to arise phoenix-like from the ashes of a previous regime’s destructions.3 However, in a strange twist, the expanding web of merchant society and trade built in the sixteenth century proved unexpectedly beneficial to the Vietnamese in the century that followed, as we shall see in this chapter and the following one. The Viet ‘southern advance’ (Nam tien) into Champa sealed its fate, of course. But the reasons are complex. As we now know, conquest did not suddenly cause all Cham to disappear or disperse. Cham elite did seem keen to take the new expansion of Muslim networks as an opportunity for it revitalising the kingdom. In 1594 the Cham king sent help to assist the Sultan 1

Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 120–121. Reid, A History of Southeast Asia, pp. 107–108. French missionary sources mention that during the thirty years prior to the fall of Champa to the Nguyen in 1693, there were many Malay scribes and missionaries in the court of Champa. Their main task was to propagate the Islam faith to the Chams. It is likely that these Malays became involved in the Cham struggle against Vietnamese encroachment into Cham territories, resulting in several anti-Vietnamese movements.

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of Johor in his combat with the Portuguese of Melaka. The succession of Cham kings sent ships to Manila, Batavia, and Melaka between the 1630s and 1680s, to compensate trade diverted from their ports by the rise of Hoi An (see below).4 Yet losing its major port Thi Nai and largest plain of Quy Nhon did hurt and hurt badly. Groups of Cham fled, and Dai Viet authorities periodically forced others to migrate inland, away from valuable cropland and downriver commercial centres. Just as many, if not most, remained where they were, assimilating over time through modes – like intermarriage, enslavement, conversion, or coercion – leading to a kind of hybrid society Viet–Cham so typical of conquest societies.5 The further south travelled, however, the greater the proportion of Cham settlement, language, and culture. Efforts to resist and restore appear episodically in the Viet historical record, which grimly assures us Dai Viet forces crushed unmercifully, leading to further dislocation and disempowerment. The evaporation of Champa’s long-standing relevance both politically to the Tongking Gulf region and economically to inter-Asian long-distance trade, was a watershed moment in Vietnamese maritime history. Originally undertaken to root out Mac supporters to assist the Trinh lords’ efforts to restore the Le dynasty in 1558, by 1600, Nguyen Hoang accepted the hopelessness of the prospect of regaining power in Thang Long and fled south, to his younger sons and their family bastion in the old lands of northern Champa.6 Over the next two hundred years, chance and genius appear to have favoured his clan, which swallowed remaining Cham territories and seized southern Cambodia to fashion a powerful Viet state, a de facto kingdom in every way the rival of the Trinh ruling his ancestral home. Its most important legacy lies in the modern-day regions of central and southern Vietnam. So, a maritime Cham legacy survived under the new lord who would ensure the Cham phoenix would never return, by exploiting the very advantages that had for so long offered the Cham their political lifeline, Asia’s sea trade. 4

Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam into Champa’, in Alijah Gordon (ed.), The Propagation of Islam in the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001), pp. 305–307; That the Nguyen married a Nguyen court lady to the Cham king Po Rome in the 1620s proves that the Cham was still a force to be reckoned with. Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 89. 5 Charles Wheeler, ‘One Region, Two Histories: Cham Precedents in the History of the Hoi An Region’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 163–193. 6 Keith Taylor, ‘Nguyen Hoang and the Beginning of Viet Nam’s Southward Expansion’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 42–65; Nola Cooke, ‘Regionalism and the Nature of Nguyen Rule in Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong (Cochinchina)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, 1 (1998), 122–161; Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p. 37.

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This new regime began in a thin strand of territory between mountains and sea. Here, for ten centuries, Cham ports had harboured the great maritime trading ships of China, India, and the Middle East, while Cham armed forces battled their Vietnamese foes for control of that trade. It was here, too, that Viet and Cham people interacted and, in so doing, permeated each other’s cultures. Geography and economics combined to create a strong echo of Dai Viet’s centuries-long rivalry with the coastal kingdoms of Champa under the seventeenth century Nguyen, although politically in a new form, with the players on both sides now being Vietnamese. Like their predecessors, the two Vietnamese realms competed for control of the coast, both commercially and militarily. Technically, Cochinchina remained a part of Dai Viet, though by 1624 it stopped paying taxes to the court and acted independently.7 This led to intermittent warfare between 1627 and 1672, in which the Trinh court of Tongking launched seven major military campaigns by land and sea. Trinh failed, despite the apparent weaknesses of its adversary. In its early days, the Nguyen state faced a much more powerful foe in the Trinh, in almost every way. Tongking had a well-established state system, which allowed the Trinh lords to control three or four times more land than the Nguyen possessed and maintain armed forces three to four times as large. Thanks to their power base in the Red River Delta, the Trinh lords also enjoyed the advantage of support from a large and populous territory long occupied and governed by Vietnamese, while the Nguyen court grappled with territory long inhabited by Cham and other ethnicities with languages and cultures distinct from the Vietnamese in many ways. Yet the Nguyen decisively repelled all seven of the Trinh invasions and were able to push their southern border to the Mekong Delta, permanently occupying the Cham remnant and much of southern Cambodia, the Khmer Krom – ‘Lower Cambodia’ (see Map 8.1).8 When the Trinh court finally gave up its ambition to subjugate its southern rival in 1672, the Nguyen clan secured its de facto autonomy. Centuries of rivalry along the long coast between the fourteenth and eighteenth parallels, first between Vietnamese and Cham and now between Vietnamese, ended. The destiny of the former Cham territories now lay squarely in Vietnamese hands. Thus, it was Vietnamese, not Chams, who were able to take advantage of the upswing in trade and commerce that characterised the seventeenth century.9 7

Dai Nam thuc luc Tien Bien [Chronicle of Greater Vietnam, Ancestral Edition (of the Nguyen)] (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Culture and Linguistic Studies, 1961), p. 34. Here after Tien Bien. Mak Phoeun, Histoire de Cambodge: de la fin du XVIe siècle au début du XVIIIe (Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 1995), pp. 294–410; For the bloodshed of ordinary peoples of both the Khmers and the Cochinchinese, see Ben Kiernan, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 250–251. 9 Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asian Program, 1998). 8

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Map 8.1  Viet expansion southward Courtesy of Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 182.

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A quick look at Cochinchina’s geography helps to explain why all this happened. Most of the territory of seventeenth century Cochinchina’s long, narrow strips of land tucked between the Truong Son Mountains and the South China Sea. Sometimes the distance between mountain and the sea measured only 15 kilometres.10 On the whole, then, Cochinchina’s geography positioned Viet society in Cochinchina much closer to the sea than occurred in its northern counterpart. Wealth and power lay in controlling the string of river-mouth estuaries through which upriver and coastal producers did business, directly or indirectly, with sea traders. Such geography made sailors, pilots, porters, boat-builders and innkeepers indispensable, and provided livelihoods to fishermen, salt-makers, petty merchants, prostitutes, labourers, predators, and smugglers.11 These people were essential to the supply, distribution, and overall function of both the port and the trading system that served it. Without them, there would not have sea trade. As the sea directly impacted upon the lives of so many people living there, it mattered enormously to the formation of the Cochinchinese state. To appreciate the power of the sea in the making of Nguyen Cochinchina, this chapter focuses on four revealing facets of Nguyen strategy for establishing and securing power: The court’s administrative geography, its promotion of overseas commerce, its exploitation of piracy and other forms of sabotage and alliance with the maritime Chinese Zheng, and its exploration of the forest. These factors proved critical to Nguyen success in forming a new Vietnamese state in the land of the Cham, conquering the southern lands of the Khmer, and securing permanent Vietnamese settlement and sovereignty there, as Chapter 9 will show. Boats and the Nguyen Power Sea battles are no stranger to Vietnamese history. All the major battles that determined the fate of a certain Vietnamese state or dynasty happened at sea, specifically, in coastal waters and river deltas and estuaries. There, Dai Viet fleets defended their kingdom against invasion by mostly Chinese navies, specifically of the empires of Southern Han, Song, Yuan, and Ming. At other times, Dai Viet expeditions mobilised by the Ly, Tran, and Le dynasties battled 10

Charles Wheeler, ‘Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the Early Modern Era’, PhD dissertation, Yale University (2001), p. 42. 11 Charles Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of Thuận-Quảng, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, 1 (2006), 123–153. An exemplary work on Guangzhou trade taking this approach is Paul van Dyke’s The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

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Champa for control of the coast. None of these previous experiences, however, compares with Nguyen Cochinchina in terms of the mobilisation of society, and the scale of its effect on society and economy.12 Thus, Cochinchina’s commitment to the sea as a political strategy was a new departure in Vietnamese history. The strong naval aspect of Nguyen power was recognised almost as soon as Nguyen Hoang’s clan embarked down their path to autonomy. Zhang Xie wrote about it as early as 1617, in his Study of the Eastern and Western Oceans (Dongxi yangkao), in which he describes the ‘chief of Quang Nam’ (perhaps Nguyen Hoang’s son Nguyen Phuc Nguyen) and his effectiveness at controlling the coast:13 The chief of Quang Nam wields power over all the southern peoples (yi) in the region. The ports of Xinzhou (Thi Nai) and Tiyi (Nuoc Man) are both subjugated to him. All the ships visiting these two ports must travel several days to Quang Nam to pay their tribute. The chief of Quang Nam also set up wooden placards [along the coast]. Those who pass the plates must show respect before continuing with their travel, and no one dares to make a noise. The awe they inspire is felt surrounded the region.

The Nguyen’s warfare rested on the ships and boats. Although ‘thuyen’ (boat/ ship) had also been a basic military unit in Tongking, it was in Cochinchina that such a unit realised its full meaning. The soldiers were conscripted and many came from a boat culture, so they proved readily adaptable to naval service.14 Galleys were stationed in each province (separated by the major rivers) and patrolled the coast.15 A seventeenth-century map shows that five docks were built on both sides of the two harbours of Eo and Tu Khach in Hue alone.16 Within ten years of its war with the Trinh, the number of war galleys

12

Cochinchinese society demonstrates this par excellence. Charles Wheeler, ‘Maritime Subversions and Socio-Political Formations in Vietnamese History: A Look from the Marginal Center (mien Trung)’, in Kenneth R. Hall and Michael Aung-Thwin (eds), New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 141–142. 13 Zhang Xie, Dongxi yangkao [A study of the Eastern and Western Oceans with annotations and footnotes]. Annotated Xie Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 20. 14 Shilian Dashan, ‘Haiwai jishi’ [Overseas journals], in Chen Chingho (ed.), Shiqishiji Guangnan xinshiliao [New historical material on Quang Nam in the seventeenth century] (Taipei: Committee of Series of books on China, 1960), chapter 23. See also Tien Bien, p. 55, cited below. 15 Rhodes of Viet Nam: The Travels and Missions of Father Alexandre de Rhodes in China and Other Kingdoms of the Orient, trans. Solange Hertz (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1966), p. 88; Li Tana and Anthony Reid (eds), Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen: Documents on the Economic History of Cochinchina (Dang Trong), 1602–1777 (Canberra and Singapore: ANU/ Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 31. 16 ‘Soan tap Thien Nam tu chi lo do thu’ [A compilation of the travel directions of Thien Nam], in Hong Duc ban do [Maps of Hong Duc era] (Saigon: Bo Quoc gia Giao duc, 1962), p. 93. The harbours from Quang Tri to Hue seemed to have changed locations during the Nguyen era. See

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in Cochinchina doubled from 100 of the 1620s to 230 by 1642, indicating the Nguyen capacity to mobilise labour and material resources.17 The most telling of the Nguyen’s naval power was in 1643. In a decisive battle, about fifty Nguyen galleys destroyed a Dutch fleet of three warships, blowing up the flagship with loss of all aboard.18 As Anthony Reid comments, this was ‘probably the most humiliating Dutch naval defeat at Asian hands before the 1940s’.19 Boats were indispensable for overseas trade, the backbone of the Nguyen economy. This is shown in the famous Japanese scroll ‘Chaya’s sea trip to Cochinchina’.20 On the scroll merchant Chaya’s ship was towed by three boats towards Thanh Chiem, the Quang Nam administration office, where Nguyen Hoang’s son Nguyen Phuc Nguyen resided.21 On this scroll at least four occupations of Cochinchinese were presented: the traders, the pilots, the interpreter, the coastal guards in the watchtower, if we are not sure about the nature of the galley outside the office which reads ‘pleasure boat’. All of them were part of Cochinchina’s maritime world. To this landscape painting of Dang Trong we must add ghe bau, a Malaystyle boat found widely throughout Cochinchina between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly from Hoi An south to Thuan Hai, an area with strong Cham influence. Ghe bau could carry between 70 and 120 tons and were mainly used in the coastal trade.22 Vietnamese scholars suggested that both technology and name were borrowings, most likely directly from Cham boat builders and coastal traders who enjoyed long-standing relations with Malays, since gai is Malay for the rope or stay that holds a mast and bau Li Tana, ‘The Former Linyi in the Provinces of Quang Tri and Thus Thien-Hue’, The NalandaSriwijaya Centre Working Paper Series 30 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2019), 1–18. 17 For 1618 see Christoforo Borri, Cochinchina (London, 1633. New York: Da Capo Press, facsimile republished, 1970), p.H5; for more on 1642, see W. J. M. Buch, De Oost-indische Compagnie en Quinam: De betrekkingen der Nederlanders met Annam in de XVIIeeeww (Amsterdam, H. J. Paris, 1929), p. 29. 18 Buch, De Oost-Indische Companieen Quinam, p. 122. Cochinchina lost seven junks and seven or eight hundred men in this battle, according to the Dutch (ibid.). 19 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (New Haven: Yale University Press 1993), 2:230. 20 This scroll depicts the journey from Nagasaki to Hoi An of a Red Seal ship owned by the family of Chaya, one of the three richest merchant family in Kyoto in the seventeenth century. ‘Chiyaya shinroku koushi to kouzu kan’ 茶屋新六交趾渡航図巻, kept in Jomyoji, Nagoya. 21 Although Thanh Chiem today is in the middle of rice fields, Abe Yuriko points out that in the seventeenth century it was facing a big river which was over 10 metres deep, where Chaya’s ship, carrying 300 people and cargos onboard, could sail right to it. Abe Yuriko, ‘Lich su khu vuc Hoi An nhin tu goc phan bo di tich’ [Hoi An’s regional history from the view point of the distribution of archaeological sites], in Ky yeu Hoi An Khao co-Lich su [Proceedings of Conference of Hoi An’s history and archaeology] (Hoi An: Trung tam Bao ton di san, di tich Quang Nam, 2002), p. 46. 22 Thach Phuong and Doan Tu (eds), Dia Chi Long An [Long An Gazette] (Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc xa hoi, 1990), p. 401.

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is a corruption of the Malay word prau.23 The mariner John Barrow saw them around Da Nang in the late eighteenth century, after several types of them had evolved, saying that ‘many … resembled the common proas of the Malays, both as to their hulls and rigging’.24 Like Malay praus the ghe bau in Dang Trong did not use iron nails, a typical Southeast Asia shipbuilding feature, but unlike Malay prau, on all the ghe bau eyes are painted. This is like Chinese junks. Eyes are so important to ghe bau that its builders believe that a ghe bau with no eyes cannot be called a ghe bau.25 Ghe bau thus were the embodiment of the hybridity of the maritime culture of the Dang Trong society. Ghe bau were built for going into the sea for big commerce rather than for peddlers; only the richer people could own them and hire sailors to sail (V. lai) them. Here, a specific occupation was created, and a name coined: ‘Cac lai’ or ‘lai ban’, both refer to a group of people whose occupation was to sail ghe bau. According to Tran Van An, yearly herds of ghe bau would depart from the areas around Hoi An to sail to the south, carrying Quang Nam’s local products such as cinnamon and sugar to trade for rice and fish sauce.26 Ghe bau was so related to the merchants of Thuan Quang who traded in the south that southerners in the Mekong Delta have a name for them: ‘Bon Ghe Bau’ or the ‘crowd (gang?) of ghe bau’. Vuong Hong Sen, a leading historian on the Mekong Delta stated in his Dictionary of Southern Dialect: ‘The boat with a big belly and rising nose is called a ghe bau; it is built for going to sea. The term bon ghe bau means “people from the central [Vietnam]”.’27 Cochinchina followed Champa’s tradition of carrying out two key rituals, mo nui (opening the mountain) and cau gio (praying for a good sea wind). Some version of the first ritual, which was closely related to collecting aloeswood, probably existed in the region among the Cham for centuries, while the second developed from a southern Fujian practice since the Song dynasty, which could have been shared by or learned from Cham principalities.28 These two 23

Nguyen Boi Lien, Tran Van An, and Nguyen Van Phi, ‘Ghe bau Hoi An-Xu Quang’ [Ghe bau in Hoi An and Quang Nam] in Do thi co Hoi An [Ancient Town of Hoi An] (Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1991), p. 141. 24 John Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina in the years of 1792 and 1793 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 319. 25 Thieu Thi Thanh Hi, ‘Ghe Bau Xu Quang trong Mang Luoi Thuong Mai Bien o Dong Nam A the Ky XVI– XVIII’ [The Ghe Bau of Quang Nam in the maritime trade networks of the 17th– 18th centuries], MA thesis, National University of Hanoi, 2014, 45–47. 26 Tran Van An, ‘Co mot vet van hoa ghe bau ven bien mien Trung’ [There is a culture of ghe bau in central Vietnam], cited in Thieu Thi Thanh Hi, ‘Ghe Bau Xu Quang’, p. 59. 27 Vuong Hong Sen, Tu Vi Tieng Viet Mien Nam [Dictionary of the Southern Dialect] (Ho Chi Minh City: NXB Van Hoa, 1993), p. 394. 28 In 1243 the prefecture officer prayed for the wind, the text reads ‘Pray for the southern winds for the returning ships, [this is] follow the foreign customs. ‘禱回舶南風, 遵彜典也.’ See Lin Tianwei 林天蔚, Songdai xiangyao maoyishi 宋代香藥貿易史 [History of aromatics and herbs of the Song dynasty] (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua daxue chubanshe, 1960), p. 20.

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rituals were carried out by the Nguyen court, and each year money was allocated for the rituals, according to Le Quy Don.29 They seemed to be the most important rituals directly related to Nguyen’s economic activities and must have participated widely by the communities. As Chang Pin-tsun described the southern Fujian of the Song era on praying for good sea wind, ‘People of all ranks and trades had a stake in maritime trade. The convention that took the sea as a deterrent was replaced with a new convention that took the sea as a source of economic opportunities.’30 For the same reason a local cult of the whale, the Fish of Benevolence, became especially popular, because it ‘help people in storms at sea … but is only effective in the south, from the Gianh River to Ha Tien’.31 The reason, according to Le Quang Nghiem, was that northerners did not believe in Ca Ong – hence, the popular saying in the south: tai Bac vi ngu, tai Nam vi than (a fish in the north, a deity in the south).32 It is telling that the image of Ca Ong is presented in the temple of Le Van Duyet, the governor-general of the South (Gia Dinh tong tran), different from majority of temples in Vietnam. Even today, cult ceremonies to welcome the Great Fish of the South Sea are still held annually in southern Vietnam.33 A nineteenth-century martyr, Nguyen Trung Truc, is believed to be an incarnation of this whale god, Ca Ong, who in turn is an incarnation of the God of the South Seas.34 Other rituals that indicate Cham origins or associations were recorded as late as the early twentieth century. Some Vietnamese fishing villages in Khanh Hoa province used to venerate two sacred Cham yoni and linga, Hindu concepts that celebrated male and female generative power.35 In the twentieth century, Vietnamese in

29

Le Quy Don, Phu Bien tap luc [Miscellaneous records when the southern border was pacified]. (Here after Phu Bien, Saigon edition unless stated otherwise), q. 4, pp. 9a, 10b, 11b, 25b, 41a. 30 Chang Pin-tsun, ‘The Formation of Maritime Convention in Minnan (Southern Fujian), c. 900– 1200’, in C. Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (eds), From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), p. 152. 31 Dai Nam nhat thong chi: Luc tinh Nam Viet [Unified gazetteer of Dai Nam: The Six Provinces of southern Vietnam] (Saigon: Nha Van hoa, 1973), vol. 1:43–44; Some scholars recently pointed out that this worship is also observed on the coastal Thanh Hoa. See Hoang Minh Tuong, Tuc tho ca ong o lang Diem Pho – Ngu Loc, Huyen Hau Loc, tinh Thanh Hoa [Whale worshiping ritual at Diem Pho village, Ngu Loc, Hau Loc district, Thanh Hoa province] (Hanoi: Nxb Khoa hoc xa hoi, 2015). This area was, however, precisely where the Cham captives had been resettled in the early Le era. See Yao Takao, 八尾隆生 ‘The State Farm system in the Red River Delta in the First Half of the Le Dynasty Vietnam’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 64 (2002), 189. 32 Le Quang Nghiem, Tuc tho cung cua ngu-phu Khanh Hoa [Rites of offering in the fishing region of Khanh Hoa] (reprint. Los Alamitos, CA: Xuan Thu, n.p.), p. 36. 33 Nguyen Cong Binh et al. (eds), Van hoa va cu dan Dong bang Song Cuu Long [The culture and population of the Mekong delta] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb Khoa hoc xa hoi, 1990), p. 385. 34 Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), p. 3. 35 Le Quang Nghiem, Tuc tho cung, p. 110.

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other former Cochinchinese provinces were also recorded as inviting Cham shamans to perform ceremonial offerings to a Cham spirit called dang (pronounced yang) in Vietnamese. The word dang is a Vietnamese corruption of the Cham word yang, cognates of which appear in both Javanese and Malay languages meaning ‘divinity’. Among all sorts of activities in the Dang Trong water world that helped to define and protect Nguyen Cochinchina, one other type of maritime activity needs mentioning here, if only because of its importance early in Nguyen rule. It is maritime salvage, involving the organised or opportunistic pillaging of countless ships and boats from elsewhere wrecked along Cochinchina’s unforgiving coast. From long before the Nguyen arrival, this comparatively short strip of coastline had formed one of the most treacherous sections of the South China Sea maritime trade route. Some archaeologists estimate that up to one thousand ships might have perished here, with eight wrecks discovered on a single Quang Ngai beach alone.36 Nguyen Hoang early recognised the potential value of the long-established salvage operations he discovered here and organised certain villages into what were effectively licenced salvage brigades whose members regularly rowed out to the shoals and sandbars off the coast to collect gold, silver, and other valuable or useful goods from wrecked ships. But for Nguyen Hoang, the most welcome items salvaged by his littoral dwelling subjects would have been weapons, in particular cannons. Large European artillery pieces were as expensive as they were essential, and the sea supplied the Nguyen with them for free and in considerable number, a precious advantage at a time when a steady supply of large cannons could not always be guaranteed. We know this from the account of the Jesuit missionary Cristoforo Borri, who lived in Cochinchina for several years in the 1610s. He reported that the Nguyen had ‘in a short time got together a great many pieces of cannon, off the wrecks of several Portuguese or Dutch ships, cast away upon these rocks, which being taken up by the country people, there are about 60 of the biggest, at this time, to be seen in the king’s palace’.37 In other words, a portion of the advanced artillery so important to Nguyen military power, particularly in its early period, might represent the accumulated prizes of Nguyen salvage. Even in this unexpected manner, access to boats and the sea proved its worth in the struggle for survival of the fledgling state. The seventeenth-century Nguyen went on to expand their haul from the sea by progressing from salvage operations to organised plundering that fell little short of piracy at times. Hemmed in between the coastline and the shifting shoals and sandbanks of the Paracels and Spratlys, in an area plagued with 36

So many ships were lost there that some Vietnamese collectors today call it ‘a shipwreck cemetery’. ‘The Wreck Detectives’, BBC; available online at www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/ newsspec_8704?index.html, accessed 7 May 2018. 3 7 Borri, Cochinchina, p.H3.

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changeable winds, this difficult passage nevertheless remained the only safe route available in the age of sail for merchant shipping to and from China. One European who sailed this coast in 1695 reported so many wrecks occurred here every year that Nguyen galleys were always prowling about, seeking to profit from a distressed ship lost in the shoals.38 By the early eighteenth century one Chinese source even reported that the Nguyen had extended their predatory activities to include extortion carried out against vessels that had been blown off course. It cautioned mariners that: ‘For those ships that had intended to sail to other ports but accidentally arrived at Quang Nam, [the court] sees [them] as Heaven-sent. They would double tax [them] and would not be happy even if they shared half the cargo on board.’39 These unsavoury but profitable activities echoed Cham behaviour along the same coastline in earlier years,40 whether the Nguyen knew it or not. What we see here, I believe, is the opportunism and flexibility that the Vietnamese newcomers needed to cultivate to survive a life-and-death struggle in a little-known land, where mastering its water world and maritime dimension genuinely meant the difference between the survival or demise of the Nguyen regime. Ports and the Southern Expansion of Coastal Power Geographically, Nguyen expansion projected chiefly along the coast. Based on her research on the archives of the Missions-Étrangères de Paris (MEP), Nola Cooke points out that in the early stages of expansion, the Nguyen state and its subjects primarily targeted the natural resources of the Cham via their maritime trading networks while concerning themselves less with Cham agricultural lands until a later stage.41 Missionary Bénigne Vachet, who moved in very high court circles of Chua Hien (r.1648–1687) described Vietnamese encroachment on Champa not in terms of land annexed but with regard to the control of ports and markets. The Cochinchinese, he wrote, first ‘established colonies in all the market places’ of Champa and then, after making the Cham king his vassal, the Nguyen ruler ‘obliged him to accept Cochinchinese to guard his ports, being no longer allowed to have his own army corps’.42 Cooke 38

Quoted from Charlotte Pham Minh Ha, ‘A Maritime Cultural Landscape of Cochinchina: The South China Sea, Maritime Routes, Navigation, and Boats in Pre-colonial Central Vietnam’, PhD dissertation, Murdoch University (2016), pp. 267–271. 39 Chinese sources mentioned that Western ships in particular avoided sailing too close to the Guangnan Shan (Culao Cham). Chen Lunjiong, Haiguo wenjianlu [A record of things heard and seen among the maritime states] (1730, reprint. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1985), pp. 49–50. 40 Pham, ‘A Maritime Cultural Landscape of Cochinchina’, pp. 267–271. 41 Nola Cooke, ‘Later-Seventeenth-Century Cham-Viet Interactions: New Light from French Missionary Sources’, Annalen der Hamburger Vietnamistik 4–5 (2010), 16. 42 Ibid., 17.

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Ports and the Southern Expansion of Coastal Power 239

points out, ‘the Nguyen desire to control Cham markets and ports is probably the key to understanding events in the seventeenth century Cham-Nguyen relations’.43 Thus, the key to control was the port. As Wheeler points out, it ‘catalyzed economic development, political consolidation, social reorganization and cultural transformation in Cochinchina and integrated its archipelago of alluvial plains along an axis defined by a coastal stream’.44 Focus on harbours, ports, and markets helped the Nguyen defend itself against the north, so it seems likely that they also saw it as the key to expansion to the south. As a consequence, the geography of Nguyen administrative control in each of its provinces looked something like this: Provinces – literally ‘garrisons’ (dinh) – were formed around individual riversheds and headquartered in the lowland river plain.45 The central regional market (chợ ) sat nearby. ́ oversaw both primary and secondary ports, while Downriver, forts (trâ n) upriver, headwater stations (nguồn) protected markets where downriver traders, typically Viet and Chinese, could transact with upriver non-Vietnamese peoples. This wedded the mountainous hinterlands to the rivershed’s primary port in the river mouth harbour below. Overland passages linked Cochinchina to societies of the Mekong and beyond, as well as Tongking and Yunnan in China. The coast acted as the realm’s primary artery, integrating its com̀ partmentalised regions through downriver ports. Extensive lagoons (đâm), canals (kênh) and offshore islands (hòn, culao) provided sites for anchorage, customs stations, navigational markers, and bases from which to monitor and discipline traffic along the coast.46 Galleys anchored near harbour forts, which interlinked them with neighbouring forts along the coastal and connected them with inland waterways served by a variety of royal ships, reflecting an integrated administrative and exchange network in harmony with the revised Bronsonite pattern.47 43

So many Cochinchinese Christians moved to Phan Ri, the Cham capital in the 1680s, that the French Missions Étrangères built three churches to accommodate them. Benigne Vachet confirmed the existence of a large Christian community at the time in ‘Vie de messier Guillaume Mahot’ (MEP, vol. 735, p. 678). Thanks to Nola Cooke for sharing this information and the footnote 49 below. 44 Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea’, 134. 45 For a review on the Nguyen administration and the functions of Dinh, see Han Zhoujing 韓周 敬, ‘Yuenan guangnanguo zhengqu d xingcheng yu fazhan: Jianlun qi quanceng jiegou wenti 越南廣南國政區的形成與發展: 兼論其圈層結構問題 [The administrative formation and development of the Quang Nam Kingdom: Comments on its structure of circles], 海洋史研究 Haiyangshi yanjiu [Journal of Studies of Maritime History] 9 (2016), 101–124. 46 Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea’, 141–142. This structure is beautifully illustrated in the maps featured in John Whitmore’s study of Vietnamese cartography, see ‘Cartography in Viet Nam’, in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, pt. 2: Cartography of the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 478–508. 47 Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea’, 150.

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In the context of this political geography, the significance of social institutions becomes clear. For example, Map 8.2 shows the locations of markets and guesthouses, key to supporting trading hubs (as well as military), in

Map 8.2  Locations of markets and guesthouses of the Nguyen Cochinchina, c. 1690

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Ports and the Southern Expansion of Coastal Power 241

Cochinchina in about 1690. Nearly all of them sat near harbours where ports, forts, and trading ships lay.48 Ports were also located where religious centres were built. According to Jean de Courtaulin, after visiting Champa in the later 1670s, he found that there was ‘a Church in each port’, for resident and visiting Christians, who have, he wrote:49 the custom of going there to get commodities, for the trade is good, for this kingdom has brought great wealth to the King of Cochinchina and to all the merchants who, notwithstanding the prohibitions of the King of Cochinchina, have gone there to do business.

The same has also been said for Buddhist temples  – the Nguyen court and other Cochinchinese elites sponsored many during the 1600s.50 As the central hubs of social and economic activity in each of Cochinchina’s subregions, downriver ports further served the political ends of the Nguyen. In them lay the key to control of the resources, populations, and traffic of the interior and the coast. Geographical determinism is not everything in the creation of territorial states, but it does play a part, as Fernand Braudel points out.51 The geography of Nguyen power in many ways reiterates features of its predecessors. For example, even the locations of the Nguyen capitals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were either at or near the old Linyi capitals, as Map 8.3 shows. Within its 200-year history, the Nguyen court shifted its capital five times but none of them far from the Linyi capital, according to Map 8.4. Intriguingly, Cochinchina’s contemporaries saw the geographical factor in the country’s political economy quite clearly. Two hundred years after its founding, Karl Gützlaff (1803–1851), an experienced traveller of the early nineteenth-century South China Sea, summarised why this Viet state was particularly different from its predecessors and the Empire of Dai Nam that came after it: ‘Cochin-China, comprising only a narrow strip of land along the seacoast, could never become a powerful state if it did not take advantage of its maritime position.’52 This could easily be said of Linyi or Champa, the 48

Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, p. 47. Jean de Courtaulin, ‘Cochinchine. Relation depuis 1678 jusqu’en 1682’. MEP (the Archives des Missions Étrangères de Paris), vol. 728:10. 50 Indeed, Buddhism played a pivotal role in the function of Cochinchina’s maritime economy. See Charles Wheeler, ‘Buddhism in the Re-Ordering of an Early Modern World: Chinese Missions to Cochinchinese in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 303–324; see esp. 322. 51 Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century (London: Fontana Press, 1979), 3:287–288. 52 Charles Gutzlaff, ‘Geography of the Cochin-Chinese Empire’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 19 (1849), 127. 49

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Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

Map 8.3  Linyi citadels of the first millennium and capitals of the Nguyen lords

N

Cua Viet

Nguyen Capitals 1558 to 1777

E S

Nguyen Capital Harbour

1570-1600 Dinh Tra Bat

Cat Dinh 1600-1626 Ai Tu 1558-1670 U A N G

W

n

ch

ng

Ha

a Th

So

Thuan An Quang Phu 1712-1738 Song O Lau Quang Tho 1626-1636 Phu Xuan 1667-1711, 1736-1777 1636-1687 Kim Long

0

5 10

20

30

40 Kilometres T

hua Thien Hue

Tu Hien

Map 8.4  Locations of Nguyen lords’ capitals

previous masters of this narrow strip of land. Geography certainly ensured that Cochinchina would maintain a strong continuity from the region’s previous regimes. Its ability to assimilate this maritime political ecology saved the Nguyen. Nguyen Cochinchina was essentially a maritime power, and this maritime character was fundamental to its history.

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A Hybrid Society 243

A Hybrid Society The 1471 attack had arisen directly from Le Thanh Tong sweeping NeoConfucian reform agenda that sought to transform the politics, administration, education, culture and intellectual life of Dai Viet. Until this extraordinary process of change and renewal, Viet kings had been but one among several local rulers whose offspring had intermarried and who addressed each other in kinship terms. But Le Thanh Tong consciously disowned this long tradition when he resolved to punish the Cham king for the heinous crime of ‘being so wildly arrogant that he called himself the uncle’ and Thanh Tong his nephew.53 If the Dai Viet state sought to distance itself from local influences under Le Thanh Tong and his successors, this was not true for all Vietnamese people, especially not for those living in the former Cham lands of Thuan-Quang. There is little written evidence for this beyond a 1499 edict forbidding Viets from marrying Cham women, which strongly implies the practice persisted until at least the sixteenth century;54 but much can be inferred or reconstructed from other sources about the roots of the hybrid society that Nguyen Hoang and his followers discovered after 1558. The first set of evidence is linguistic. In 1931, Léopold-Louis Cadière, a keen observer of all people and things Central Vietnamese, discussed how the various dialects of the region revealed its ethnically mixed past. According to him, the dialect spoken by ordinary people from Da Nang south had undergone so much change that if one transcribed a text directly from popular speech in this area ‘it would be absolutely incomprehensible’. Among other changes he identified, initial guttural sounds and labial Vs had softened so much the local speech here that he believed it had undergone ‘a transformation comprising very many elements’ which was ‘undoubtedly due to the assimilation of pre-existing populations’ in this region.55 More recent research by Ho Trung Tu supports Cadière’s view, describing a situation where, for seven or eight generations before Thanh Tong’s great victory, Viets had been living as a minority in Cham lands, using Cham as the lingua franca, and freely intermarrying with Cham women.56 This was especially the 53

This assertion of superiority underlay the several campaigns he also undertook against Lao and other mountain kingdoms as well. See Li Tana, ‘The Ming Factor and the Emergence of the Viet in the 15th century’, in Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (eds), China Factor: Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century (Singapore and Hong Kong: NUS/Hong Kong University Press, 2010), p. 85. 54 Dai Viet su ky Toan thu, 2:763. As the Le dynasty fell in the 1520s, and the kingdom was in turmoil for over a decade beforehand, this edict was probably never enforced in southern frontier provinces. 55 L. Cadière, ‘Ethnography’, Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hué [BAVH], 1–2, 1931:75. He concluded his discussion by remarking that in Central Vietnam ‘a great part of the Cham population could persist even now, under a Vietnamese exterior’ (p. 96) 56 Ho Trung Tu, Co nam tram nam nhu the: Ban sac Quang Nam tu goc nhin phan ky lich su [There were 500 years like this: Characteristics of Quang Nam in different phases of history] (Hanoi: NXB Thoi Dai, 2011), p. 45.

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Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

case for Quang Nam, where this long intermingling gave rise to a unique dialect called the ‘tone of Quang Nam’ (giong Quang). It is found in the area Cadière discussed above, mostly south of the Thu Bon River, a place that had been the Viet–Cham border region. Tran Quoc Vuong adds that this dialect arose from was ‘the way that Cham mothers spoke Vietnamese. They passed on this way of speaking to their children, and generation after generation it [finally] became giong Quang!’57 The intermarriage between Viet men and Cham women not only gave rise over time to a unique local tone but also to a localised hybrid population. Sometime after the 1558 arrival of Thanh Hoa-Nghe An incomers under Nguyen Hoang, both the new rulers and the local Cham people began to differentiate between long-resident Vietnamese or Vietnamised Chams and these newcomers. In the Cham Royal Archives a variant of the term ‘Kinh’, or Viet – Kinh Cuu dan  – appears repeatedly: in 1748, for example, it was recorded that the king of Panduranga gave a Kinh Cuu dan named Lai Chau (‘shippertrader’ Chau) money to trade on his behalf in Ha Tien.58 The colonial French official Etienne Aymonier later defined these Kinh cuu dan as ‘Métis Tjames (Cham) Annamites’, adding that ‘they speak the two languages interchangeably, and their customs are those of the two races’.59 Aymonier was describing a process that he saw happening before him here, so it seems more likely that this same term when used in the Cham Royal Archives meant ‘Kinh of the former era’, that is, people who identified as Viet whose local roots predated Nguyen Hoang. In the context of Cham archival texts, these people were most likely either Viets with Cham ancestors or Cham men who had Vietnamised before the influx of Kinh after 1558, if only because the numbers of such people would have been very much greater than of only those in the process of Vietnamisation as described by Aymonier. Elsewhere, and to a much lesser extent, it might also have referred to people with captured tribal women among their ancestors. In the absence of any direct evidence for precisely who these people were, it is worth considering briefly what indirect evidence might exist regarding them. For instance, just such culturally transitional people might possibly lurk in an interesting fact that Ho Trung Tu came across when he was 57

Ho Trung Tu, Co nam tram nam nhu the, 113. Chan royal archives file No. 90-H (File 23-8), quoted in Shine Toshihiko, ‘Montagnards and the Cham Kings: Labor and Land Administration as seen in the Documentary and Oral Archives’, paper to the International Conference ‘Modernities and Dynamics of Tradition in Vietnam: Anthropological Approaches’, 15–18 December 2007, Binh Chau Resort, Vietnam:4; Chen Zhichao 陳智超, ‘Shiba shiji zhanpo wangfu dangan mulu ji shuoming 十八世纪占婆王府 檔案目錄及說明’ [Catalogue of and notes on the eighteenth-century Cham royal archives] Shehui kexue zhanxian [Social sciences front], 2 (1984), 193. 5 9 Étienne Aymonier, Notes sur l’Annam, Le Khanh Hoa (Saigon: Imprimerie colonial, 1885– 1886), 81. 58

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Nguyen Overseas Trade: The Backbone of Cochinchinese Economy 245

studying the genealogies of thirteen Viet clans that were revered as the pioneers of Tra Nhieu, an area near Hoi An. All the documents claimed the clans had come to the area in 1471, with Thanh Tong’s armies, yet no genealogy he examined contained more than 12 generations, suggesting the families had to have arrived almost a century later, after Nguyen Hoang.60 Other indirect evidence might also lie in the form of women’s dress. In the mid-1550s, before the arrival of Nguyen Hoang, a local scholar, Duong Van An, produced a precious text on the Thuan Hoa region in which he described Thuan Hoa women as dressing in the Cham style. What this meant was spelt out by a seventeenth-century Fujianese account, Dongxi yangkao, which described the women in the Thuan Hoa markets: ‘They loosen their hair and let it fly in the air; they wear a scarf on one shoulder in much the same way as the clothing style of a bodhisattva; when one enters the door they present betel nuts to show hospitality.’61 This sounds more like Lao, Thai, or Khmer women than anything traditionally Viet, and indeed can still be seen among Cham women today. Nguyen Overseas Trade: The Backbone of Cochinchinese Economy Cochinchina was created at exactly the right time, during an ‘age of commerce in Southeast Asia’.62 It was this lucky conjunction between internal political struggle and external economic development that enabled the new southern Vietnamese state, in a few short decades, to grow wealthy and strong enough to be able to secure its independence from the north and to fund its expansion to the south. All these advances largely rested on maritime wealth, without which the Nguyen could never have mobilised its successful defeats of northern attacks in the seventeenth century, let alone pushing into the Mekong Delta, sealing off Cambodia’s maritime access and competing against Dai Viet’s most powerful rival of the eighteenth century, Siam. Control of overseas trade proved central to Nguyen state affairs during its first century of existence. Given the maritime economic geography, the Nguyen looked upon the world largely from its entrepôts, which also functioned as its urban centres. Its ports – Hue, Hoi An, Nuoc Man, and Quy Nhon, became centres for organising production from the uplands and surrounding region for export. More favourably than the archipelago in the bottom line of Southeast Asia, these trade centres were conveniently juxtaposed between East 60

Ho Trung Tu, Co nam tram nam nhu the, 167. Zhou Kai 周凯et al. Xiamen Zhi [Local records of Xiamen], compiled 1839, in Zhongguo fangzhi congshu [Serials of Chinese local gazetteers] (rep. Taipei, Chengwen Press, 1967), p. 151. 6 2 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. 61

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Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

Asian and Southeast Asian ports. This placed Cochinchina’s ports in a highly strategic position to play a major role in a flourishing triangular trade between Japan, China, and Southeast Asia that thrived during the seventeenth century, a position whose significance the patriarch Nguyen Hoang and his followers were quick to grasp. Between the founding of Tokugawa Shogunate of 1603 and the mid-1630s, Japan’s economy, particularly its mining industry, expanded vigorously, feeding an export economy in which Japanese ships, both licensed and unlicensed, carried silver that the country exported to Southeast Asia in large quantities on its Red Seal Ships.63 This provided the Nguyen house with a great opportunity. By the early 1600s, Cochinchina had begun promoting itself as an important intermediary market for an indirect trade between Japan and China. As one Ming officer pointed out in 1630: Trading with Japan is banned by the [Chinese imperial] court, so nobody dares to trade with it, yet the cunning people carried their cargos to Jiaozhi (Cochinchina) and other places. Therefore, although the Japanese trade in those places, they are in fact trading with China.64

The opportunities this presented attracted not just Japanese, but Japanese Christians in particular. ‘For those who are now [in 1619] so persecuted in Japan, this land is a place of refuge.’65 From the various records it seemed that Japanese Christians were keen traders and that religious as well as commercial tolerance were what the Japanese Christians in Hoi An were looking for. By the 1640s Cochinchina had become Japan’s number-one trading partner and a major player in wider pan-Asian commercial exchanges (see Table 8.1). Given its favourable position in this Asian trade triangle, the new Vietnamese realm structured its policies to maximise its attraction to merchants, starting with taxes. For example, the Nguyen court maintained low taxes on port duties – about 1 to 2 per cent lower than most of Southeast Asian ports of the time66 – to make its ports the most convenient points of access to Southeast Asian products.

63

Ralph Innes, ‘The Door Ajar: Japan’s Foreign Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan (1980), pp. 106, 381; William S. Atwell, ‘Another Look at Silver Imports into China, c. 1635–1644’, Journal of World History 16, 4 (2005), 478. 64 He Qiaoyuan, ‘Kaiyang haiyi’ [On opening the ocean for trade], in Fu Yiling (ed.) Mingqing Fujian shehuijing jishiliao zachao [Sources on socio-economic history of Fujian during the Ming and Qing era] (http://economy.guoxue.com/?p=2330&page=14, accessed 18 July 2012). From 1608 on, the term ‘Jiaozhi’ began to be reserved for Cochinchina, rather than Tongking. This was clear from the reports of Japanese Red Seal ships. See Li Tana, ‘The ‘Inner Region’: A Social and Economic History of Nguyen Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries’, PhD dissertation, Australian National University (1992), p. 62. 65 Jason M. Wilber, ‘Transcription and Translation of a Yearly Letter from 1619 found in the Japonica Sinica 71 from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu’, MA thesis, Brigham Young University (2014), p. 75. I am grateful to George Souza for sending me this work. 66 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:218.

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Nguyen Overseas Trade: The Backbone of Cochinchinese Economy 247 Table 8.1  Forest products exported to Nagasaki from Southeast Asia and the share of Cochinchina, 1641–1650 67

1641 total Cochinchina % 1646 total Cochinchina % 1648 total Cochinchina % 1650 total Cochinchina %

Deer skin

Black Sappanwood Sharkskin Aloeswood Calambac sugar

can

can

piece

can

can

can

can

23,730 4,050 17 41,800 26,800 64 23,490 19,350 82 32,975 26,900 81.5

20,650 3,000 14.5 83,500 70,000 83.8 25,406 24,983 98 725,921 555,970 76.5

42,700 33,800 79 4,000 3,000 75 1

670 650 97 200 200 100 2,400 2,386 99.4 470 470 100

100 100 100

89,160 40,400 45.3 91,000 56,000 61.5 10,000 10,000 100 530,000 16,3500 31

51,000 20,000 39 15,300 3269 10,300 3261 67 97 42,100 4,600 11

3,852 3,000 78

97 97 100 23 22 96

Pepper Tin can

According to Willem Buch, who wrote about the first half of seventeenth century, Cochinchina was popular with Chinese merchants because68 they found here a centre for trade with various nearby countries and places. Pepper was brought here from Palembang, Pahang, and neighbouring areas, camphor from Borneo, sappanwood, ivory, serongbourang, gumlac, and against which the Chinese brought their lankins (nankin or cotton cloth), coarse porcelain and other wares. With what remained, they bought further Quinam’s pepper, ivory, cardamom etc., so that their junks mostly returned full to China.

Table 8.1 shows that among the Southeast Asian ports in the 1640s Cochinchina exported the largest forest products to Japan. The upstart Vietnamese realm did more than simply export natural resources, however. Analysing the Nagasaki customs allowed us to picture Cochinchina’s participation in the triangular trade between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia that took two forms. First, Cochinchinese ports developed into hubs for the collection of trade items from other Southeast Asian countries. Here, ships from other Southeast Asian countries gathered and traded with each other. The Nguyen court took advantage of its geographic position to promote ports like Hoi An as a convenient mart for Chinese and Japanese merchant ships seeking Southeast Asia wares, 67

Nagazumi Yoko 永積洋子, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran 1637–1833 唐船輸出入品 数量一覧 1637–1833 [A comprehensive catalogue of the quantities of the cargo imported by Chinese junks, 1637–1833] (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1987), pp.36–47. 6 8 Buch refers to Cochinchina as Quinam, the popular name among Dutch and some other European traders. Buch, De Oost-indische Compagnie en Quinam, p. 68.

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Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

by relieving East Asian traders of the need to sail further south in search of the region’s riches. Thus, merchants based in Cochinchina could purchase suitable commodities from both East and Southeast Asian sources and add to them the country’s own forest products such as calambac and aloeswood, providing the trading ships with a profitable mix of exports and re-exports overseas. This mixed activity became an important, if not crucial, part of the Nguyen economy. Judging from Japanese customs reports, the Japanese Christian merchants of Cochinchina found a substitute in southern Cambodia, specifically at a landing in the Mekong Delta that the Khmer called Daung Nay – to the Viet, Dong Nai, later known as Bien Hoa.69 This name means ‘deer country’, for – as a latenineteenth century Vietnamese source recalls, ‘There used to be many deer in this area.’70 In 1656 alone, Nagasaki processed 37,086 pieces of deerskin in their merchant warehouses, most of them from this region.71 This made the Japanese merchants important to the Nguyen court, even more so considering their role as intermediaries for the Nguyen court’s direct investment in the trade. In 1632, for example, the VOC reported that three Japanese junks came to trade in Ayutthaya from Cochinchina, one of them being ‘sent by the king and some high officials of Cochinchina, intending to invest in the business of deerskin’.72 Between 1646 and 1656, Cochinchina exported 72,550 pieces of deerskin (one-seventh of the total), not the produce of seventeenth-century Cochinchina,73 in which the rich and powerful of the Nguyen played a big role. Given the variety of provenance, one can see why, among the Nagasakibound ships declaring goods from Southeast Asian countries, the cargos of the junks arriving from Cochinchina consistently demonstrated a greater variety. It also explains why the highest numbers of Chinese junks visiting Japan departed from Cochinchina, as shown in Table 8.2. Looking at the second aspect of this triangular trade, export-oriented cashcrop production composed a significant part of Cochinchina’s land and labour utilisation that had developed from the early Nguyen period. Black sugar and pepper were key local products of Cochinchina, as Table 8.1 shows; silk was another. Raw silk from Quang Nam and cotton cloth were also exported to Manila between 1662 and 1680.74 The market for all these commodities 69

Sakurai Yumio, ‘Eighteenth-Century Chinese Pioneers on the Water Frontier of Indochina’, in Nola Cooke and Li Tana (eds), Water frontier: commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 37. 70 ‘Cho Dong Nai’ [Dong Nai Market], in Dai Nam nhat thong chi: Luc tinh Nam Viet, 1:129. 71 Nagazumi Yoko, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran, pp. 69–72. 72 Iwao Seiichi, Shuinsen bōekishino kenkyū [A study of the Red Seal Ships] (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1958), p. 264. 73 Nagazumi Yoko, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran, pp. 40–84. 74 Fang Zhenzhen 方真真, Huaren yu lvsong maoyi (1657–1687); shiliao fenxi yu yizhu 華人與 呂宋貿易:史料分析與譯註 [Chinese trade with Luzon (1657–1687): Analysis on the archival material and annotations] (Taipei: Guoli Qinghua daxue chubanshe, 2012), pp. 74–339.

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Nguyen Overseas Trade: The Backbone of Cochinchinese Economy 249 Table 8.2  Number of Chinese junks to Japan from Southeast Asian countries (1647–1720) Tongking Quang Nam Cambodia 1647–1650 1651–1660 1661–1670 1671–1680 1681–1690 1691–1700 1701–1710 1711–1720 TOTAL

7 15 6 12 12 6 3 2 63

11 40 43 40 29 30 12 8 203

4 37 24 10 9 22 1 1 108

Siam Pattani Melaka Jakarta Bantam 28 26 23 25 20 11 5 138

1 20 9 2 8 7 2 49

2 4 2 2 10

4 2 12 31 18 16 5 88

1 1 1

3

Source: Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, p. 68.

would have been stimulated by demand from overseas, and all of them came from labour-intensive enterprises whose productive population could only have been sustained by a steady supply of inputs into the cultivation of rice. (Cochinchina’s rice and cash crop production will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9.) The foregoing discussion has noted that the triangular trade between China and Japan, with Nguyen Cochinchina at its apex, was vital to the Nguyen. It brought considerable wealth directly to certain clan and favoured court members, but more importantly it helped fund the import of military materials like copper, gunpowder, and weapons. These in turn helped preserve the budding Nguyen state against the Trinh at a time when its war with the North was far from decided. When major external political changes occurred, then, first in Japan and subsequently in China, when the Ming dynasty fell in 1644 and its Qing successor banned sea travel from China in 1646, Cochinchina’s situation should have been bleak. Yet it did not fail or even falter; indeed, it thrived in the face of what could have been an impossible situation. Charles Wheeler insightfully asked, why was this? The broad answer is that, in the face of potentially disastrous historical contingencies – the near closure of Japan followed almost immediately by the fall of the Ming and increasing chaos in southern China, Nguyen Cochinchina was saved by its maritime connections, by the interests and actions of a powerful Fujianese clan based in Taiwan, the Zheng. The ‘informal, shadow economy’ of smuggling and piracy in the Asian waters was the chief weapon by Ming loyalist forces, led by the Zheng clan, sought to resist the Qing.75 75

Robert Antony (ed.), Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater South China Seas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 1–2.

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Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong: A Maritime Entity

The Chinese traders/smugglers the Zheng controlled, especially those based in Nagasaki, were vital to Nguyen economic survival. The Nguyen were never recognised by Chinese imperial courts, whether Ming or Qing, so pursuing their own interests when dealing with rebel Chinese groups presented little problem. On the contrary, exploiting Zheng-controlled commercial opportunities, whether legitimate or not, aligned neatly with the Nguyen’s own vital interests and would have been an obvious move.76 Not only Cochinchina’s wars but also its remarkable seventeenth-century commercial and demographic growth overlapped with and benefited from the government’s self-interested association with the simultaneously growing Zheng ascendancy in maritime China. This fortuitous alignment of interests explains, in Wheeler’s words:77 why Cochinchina’s shipping remained steady in the face of war, trade bans, and violent coastal evacuations that scourged seventeenth-century China. Zheng ships guaranteed Cochinchina continued access to Chinese and Japanese markets, thanks to their connections with the elaborate smuggling networks and undertow shipping trade that survived the Qing conquest.

Export of Forest Products and Their Effects Having sketched Cochinchina’s place and role in the seventeenth-century trading world, it is time to consider in more detail some of the principal items of trade that passed through its markets. As a base line, in Table 8.3 is information on the commodities that mid-1550s Chinese junks might have sought in Cochinchina, as reflected in the forest products paid yearly in taxes to the Le Restoration government just before the arrival of Nguyen Hoang. The data suggest that forest products were undoubtedly the major source of revenue for the region that would evolve into Nguyen Cochinchina the arrival of Nguyen Hoang and his followers a few years later. Even after the Restoration court absorbed its share, such a large quantity of ivory, rhino horns, and peacock tails would still have yielded excess for export. Of the above items, calambac, the most fragrant part of the aloe tree, was king. The Nguyen court could exploit this existing demand to earn much-needed revenue for its fledgling realm. Its value was high: In the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit Borri assessed its worth at ‘50 cruzados a catty among the Portuguese, while in its own kingdom it passe[d] weight for weight with silver’.78 China and 76

When the Zheng lost Taiwan, the last Zheng king Zheng Keshuang planned to seek refuge in Cambodia. Yumio Sakurai and Takako Kitagawa, ‘Ha Tien or Banteay Meas in the Time of the Fall of Ayutthaya’, in Kennon Brezeale (ed.), From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s Maritime Relations with Asia (Bangkok: Toyota Thailand Foundation, 1999), p. 154. 77 Wheeler, ‘Re-Thinking the Sea’, 150. 78 Quoted from C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos, 1963), p. 195, n. 24.

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Export of Forest Products and Their Effects 251 Table 8.3  Forest products from Thuan Hoa paid as taxes in the mid-1550s, areas from Quang Binh to Hue Ivory Rhinoceros horn Peacock tail Pheasant tail aloeswood Inferior aloeswood deerhide kg 670

kg 84

piece 6960

piece 1740

kg 96

kg 1316.5

piece 42

Source: Duong Van An, O Chau can luc [Present records of O Chau] (Saigon: Van hoa A-Chau, 1962), 21–24. ‘Calambac’ did not appear in this source, instead it must have been included in the category ‘aloeswood’. The term ‘calambac’ seemed to be known mostly from the seventeenth century.

Japan provided Cochinchina’s best customers for calambac. It was so profitable that Chinese traders would wait up to a year to buy it before exporting it to Japan where its value was highly inflated. In the 1620s, for instance, calambac that cost about five taels per pound at its source, then commanded fifteen in Hoi An, fetched in Japan forty times its original price, or about 200 taels per pound.79 By the late-seventeenth century, Japanese records increasingly complained about strict government control over the calambac trade, as well as its diminishing supply.80 Other precious woods were also key items on the list of Cochinchina’s staple export commodities. In 1696, Thomas Bowyear remarked that the country possessed so much good-quality commercial woods for the Spanish in Manilla to import it to build their galleons.81 Fifty years later, the French traveller Pierre Poivre also gave special attention to aloeswood in his long inventory of prized woods, including rosewood, ironwood, sappan wood, cinnamon, and sandalwood.82 So plentiful was the supply of exotic woods that virtually all of them actually sold cheaply before the 1770s. Thus, the Phu Bien tap luc or Frontier Chronicles reported for 1776 that Cantonese traders from Guangdong could buy fifty kilos of ebony for six-tenths of one quan. For thirty quan, it added, people could buy enough high-quality wood to build a five-room house.83 This timber industry must have employed large numbers of people, from woodcutters and transporters to the merchants and other intermediaries who contributed

79

Borri, Cochinchina, p.D2. Borri valued the calambac in ducats, which were worth 4–5 taels of silver each at the time. For calambac in Japan, see Hayashi Harukatsu and Hayashi Nobuatsu (eds), Kai hentai [Reports of Chinese junks on China and Southeast Asia, 1644–1728] (Tokyo: Tōyō̄ Bunko, 1958–1959), 3:1804. 80 See Kai-hentai, records from 1686 onward. 81 Alastair Lamb, Mandarin Road to Old Hue: Narratives of Anglo-Vietnamese Diplomacy from the 17th Century to the Eve of the French Conquest (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 55. 82 Pierre Poivre, ‘Memoiresdivers sur la Cochinchine’, Revue d’Extrême-Orient II (1883–1884), 328. 83 Phu Bien, q. 6, p. 205b.

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to its export, not to mention carpenters and builders in the domestic economy. Access was easy, even without the use of wheeled transport since forest stands extended well beyond the mountains into the plains below. Until the 1770s, ‘there used to be plenty of old tropical trees throughout the Hue area’ – which of course lay in the middle of the Perfume Riverplain in the heart of historical Rinan, Linyi, and Champa – ‘with many tree trunks measuring ten arm spans around’, Le Quy Don remarked.84 This remained the case until 1774, when the northern Trinh army invaded Cochinchina and captured Hue. With their arrival, more than 30,000 soldiers and servants settled into camps around the city and remained there for a year. During that time, they used whatever wood came in handy for cooking, sometimes even ‘precious wood such as trac (Siamese rosewood) and giang huong (lakawood), [enough to] fill a whole house’.85 This must have damaged timber industry around Hue in no small measure. Indeed, a piece of old folklore suggests that the over-exploration of the forest in search of exotic woods grew apparent to ordinary people’s eyes as early as the mid-1600s. A Cham legend relates that while the remnant Cham kingdom (in Binh Thuan province today) prospered under the reign of king Po Rome (r.1627–1651), himself a highlander, a Churu  – half Cham, half Roglai/Koho. He possessed an iron tree (Cham kraik) which was the source of prowess. He married a beautiful Vietnamese princess who pressed him to kill the ironwood tree. When the tree was eventually cut down, ‘the blood of the ironwood ran out all over the face of the earth, for three days and three nights’.86 The Vietnamese then invaded and wrenched the land away from the Cham and gone was their prosperity. This legend of ironwood might only be a hint indicating forest products being widely exploited during Po Rome’s reign of the seventeenth century. After visiting Kelantan several times, Po Rome began going by the Muslim name Po Gahlau – ‘King of the aloeswood’.87 The Cham legend hints at the connections between the destruction of the forest and Cham’s loss of prosperity. The Cham view of forests seems like that of the Khmers, who saw the forest as the ultimate source of power and protection.88 This lore seems to allude to the country’s complete loss of sovereignty in 1695, a few decades after the monarch’s death, when the Nguyen court 84

Ibid., p. 211b. 85 Ibid., p. 208a. Shine Toshihiko, Vietnam-no shōsū-minzoku teijū-seisaku-shi [A History of Settlements of Minority Peoples in Vietnam] (Tokyo: Fū kyō sha, 2007), p. 146; William Noseworthy, ‘The Cham’s First Highland Sovereign: Po Romé (r.1627–1651)’, Asian Highlands Perspectives 28: Collection of Papers (2013), 170. 87 Sakaya, ‘Historical Relations between Champa and the Malay Peninsula during 17th to 19th Century: A Study on the Development of Raja Praong Ritual’, MA Thesis, Department of History, University of Malaysia Kuala Lumpur, 2008, pp. 91–92, quoted from Noteworthy, ‘The Cham’s First Highland Sovereign’, 162. 88 Philip Taylor, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology and Sovereignty (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), p. 265.

86

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Conclusion 253

diminished this remnant of a once great kingdom to a mere Vietnamese prefecture, belittlingly dubbed Thuan Thanh (City of Obeying).89 While the Viet started worshipping the sea Goddess Po Nagar (V. Thien Y A Na), with the Cham loss of the coast in some Cham villages Po Nagar became the Goddess of agriculture.90 Nicolas Weber summarises what the end of Pandurangga, the once strong maritime power on the southern Indochina coast, meant to the Cham people, once the proud sons of the ocean: There are no more Cham villages by the coast. The Chams have totally lost their knowledge of boat building. The vocabulary of boats still exists in the Cham language, but the Chams can no longer tell the difference between the various types of boats.91 The only connection with the maritime past of the Champa kingdom is the religious ceremony called palao sah which is held on the seashore of Binh Nghia (Ninh Thuan) in the fourth month of the Cham calendar. This ceremony is meant to thank the gods and the ancestors for the rain. Two Bani religious dignitaries, Ong Maduen and Ong Ka-Ing, lead the ritual: the Ong Maduen sings hymns to ocean deities while playing a flat drum; the Ong Ka-Ing dances with a paddle miming the movements of people in a boat.92

Conclusion The seventeenth-century Cochinchina’s maritime experiences remind us of Chapter 3, which shows how, a thousand years earlier, Linyi championed maritime commerce in the South China Sea region. Standing on the coasts of seventeenth-century Cochinchina and casting our eyes back to the ancient societies of Linyi and Champa, one becomes acutely aware of the crucial importance of overseas trade to Champa’s existence, and the disaster that befell it when it lost its northern territories piecemeal to Dai Viet. Similarly, the proximity and environment of seventeenth-century Cochinchina allowed the ambitious Nguyen clan to play the role of middleman bridging Southeast Asia with East Asia, laying the foundations for a wealthy commercial economy. The Nguyen Cochinchina was a maritime power. Its Archipelago-like landscape facing the South China Sea gave it a special character and made it stand out from all the Vietnamese dynasties. The synergy of its economy, the

89

Manguin, ‘The Introduction of Islam’, p. 307. Ngo Van Doanh, Thap co Champa: Su that va Huyen Thoai [Cham towers: Facts and legends] (Hanoi: Nxb Van Hoa thong tin, 1994), p. 146; Edyta Roszko also observed that the Cham goddess became the protector of the fertility of the land and is particularly popular among the high-class Vietnamese women. Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), p. 102. 91 Po Dharma, Le Panduranga (Cāmpa), 1802–1835 : ses rapports avec le Vietnam (Paris : École francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 1987), vol. II:40. 92 Nicolas Weber, ‘The Vietnamese Annexation of Panduranga and the End of a Maritime Kingdom’, in Danny Wong Tze Ken (ed.), Memory and Knowledge of the Sea in Southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Malaya, 2008), p. 74. 90

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hybridity of its population and culture should all be seen against this background. Such circumstances prompted Viet to be more open and spontaneous, to be risk takers like Nguyen Hoang, whom Keith Taylor described as daring ‘to risk being pronounced a rebel, because he had found a place where this no longer mattered’.93 The Nguyen Cochinchina’s history challenges the conventional version of a single Vietnamese past, and the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea encouraged people to seek a much freer way of being Vietnamese.94 In such a way it was little surprise that Cochinchina became the historical engine of change and pulled the national Vietnamese centre of gravity – whether seen in political, economic or even cultural terms – southwards from the seventeenth century. Overseas trade defined seventeenth-century Cochinchina and regulated its labour and cash crop production on the coast and penetrated all sectors of local production and consumption and accelerated its interactions with the uplanders. This was to be seen more clearly in the eighteenth century, when Nguyen expansionists, Chinese merchants, and Viet settlers encounter a new ‘water frontier’ in the Cambodian south, the topic of Chapter 9.

93 94

Keith Taylor, ‘Nguyen Hoang’, p. 64. Li Tana, ‘An Alternative Vietnam? The Nguyen Kingdom in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29 (1998), 111–121.

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9

The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth-Century Water Frontier

Relations with China had been a torturing question for every Vietnamese dynasty since independence in the tenth century. In contrast, Cochinchina never had this problem, so it was doubly blessed. First, it did not share any border with China like Tongking did. Being a rebel state, China’s Ming and Qing courts never recognised the Nguyen kingdom, and so the two countries lacked diplomatic relations. This freed Cochinchina from the millenniumold preoccupation with the northern behemoth, effectively giving it both autonomy from and equality with China. Second, the political chaos of the Ming–Qing transition benefited the Nguyen with the arrival of the Ming refugees who expanded and strengthened the Nguyen’s commercial networks in the South China Sea. As a result, Cochinchina enjoyed a large volume of trade with the countries of the sea, including China, and did so without becoming another tributary of the Middle Kingdom. This had never happened in Vietnamese, nor even in Southeast Asian, history. Moreover, the Ming refugees provided a crucial element in Nguyen’s territorial expansion into seventeenth-century Mekong Delta. Uniquely in Vietnamese history, the ‘China factor’ played a refreshingly new role in Cochinchina during a ‘Chinese Century’ in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia, in which Chinese catalysed commercial expansion and political upheaval throughout the region, leading in part to the rise, survival, and expansion of Cochinchina.1 Leonard Blussé points out that ‘it is not too far-fetched to suggest that this state formation may have been directly related to the great increase and expansion of China’s overseas trade’.2 1

Anthony Reid and Carl Troki, ‘The Last Stand of Autonomies in Southeast Asia and Korea: Problems, Possibilities and a Project’, Asian Studies Review 17, 2 (1993), 110. Yumio Sakurai and Takako Kitagawa, ‘Ha Tien or Banteay Meas in the Time of the Fall of Ayutthaya’, in Kennon Brezeale (ed.), From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s Maritime Relations with Asia (Bangkok: Toyota Thailand Foundation, 1999), pp. 150–220; Yumio Sakurai, ‘EighteenthCentury Chinese Pioneers on the Water Frontier of Indochina’, in Nola Cooke and Li Tana (eds), Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880 (New York and Singapore: Rowman & Littlefield/NUS Press, 2004), pp. 35–52. 2 Leonard Blussé, ‘Chinese Century. The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea Region’, Archipel 58 (1999) 114, 107–129.

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The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth-Century Water Frontier

Two characteristics made this so. First, the Qing dynasty, having destroyed a maritime-based resistance under the aegis of the Zheng clan and banner of the fallen Ming in 1683, created a new trade regime governing Chinese commerce overseas to catch up with the revenue deficit created by the four-decade sea ban that preceded it, and in 1722 it further legitimated private Chinese rice trade to cope with a rice shortage caused by population pressure.3 The new trade regime sparked explosive growth in Chinese commercial shipping, which facilitated the Chinese Century’s second characteristic: Chinese travel and immigration overseas in great numbers, primarily to destinations in Southeast Asia, like the Mekong Delta. These Chinese came into an increasingly crowded water frontier. In Cambodia the post-Angkorian power migrated south, first to a series of fifteenthto eighteenth-century capitals that flanked the Tonle Sap Lake (Srei Santhor, Pursat), then to the Oudong and Longvek area, 35 kilometres of Phnom Penh.4 British country traders had an increasing presence in the Malay Peninsula in Terengganu and Riau, which stimulated the rise of a series of new polities along the coastal areas from the Mekong Delta to the Malay Peninsula.5 As the eighteenth century progressed, the circulation of ships, goods, and people throughout the South China Sea exponentially grew, leading to unprecedented growth in Chinese trade, industry, and settlement. Arguably, one of the Chinese Century’s greatest legacies may be Vietnam’s mien Nam, the ‘South’, by the end of the eighteenth century, there appeared the country’s largest and most commercially important city, Saigon. In the new South, Vietnamese power expanded into a new ‘water frontier’, a fluid transnational and multiethnic economic zone overlapping a sparsely settled coastal and riverine frontier region of unsettled identities and loose alliances in which waterborne trade and commerce formed an essential component of local life.6 By the early 1700s, the expanding junk trade led to the creation of new seaports strung along the coast between Bien Hoa and Ha Tien, and operated 3

Qing’s revenue was in deficit for decades since it came into power in 1644. Chen Kuo-Tung, Dongya haiyu yiqiannian [East Asia’s maritime space in a millennium] (Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2006), pp. 198–199; for rice trade see Ng Chin-keong, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983), p. 60. 4 Kenneth Hall, ‘The Coming of the West: European Cambodian Marketplace Connectivity 1500– 1800’, in T. O. Smith (ed.), Cambodia and the West, 1500–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 11. 5 Peter Grave et al., ‘The Southeast Asian Water Frontier: Coastal Trade and Mid-fifteenth CE Hill Tribe Burials, Southeastern Cambodia’, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (April 2019), 2 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00842-3, accessed 25 September 2019). They show that the stoneware jars excavated from fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Cardamom Mountains sites originated exclusively from maritime trade. This illustrates the close links between upland groups in the Khmer kingdom and a larger South China Sea maritime network. 6 Li Tana, ‘The Water Frontier: An Introduction’, in Cooke and Li (eds), Water Frontier, pp. xii, xi.

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257

by highly diverse networks of Chinese, Cham, Malay, and Vietnamese transporting people and goods on river, coast, and sea, thereby integrating this new frontier into the greater Asian commercial economy. By the middle of the eighteenth century, with the creation of the Canton system, this new region had integrated into exchange networks spanning the Gulf of Siam, island Southeast Asia, and Asia at large, through the Chinese junk trade financed by the merchant houses that formed the heart of the Canton or Hong system.7 Rice was the key to the South’s growth, thanks to growing overseas demand, the cultivation of which was facilitated by the Vietnamese peasant labours, cattle from inland Cambodia and slaves captured or fled from the Central Highland.8 The volume and varieties of exports grew enormously, as did transhipments of commodities in transit across the gulf. In less than a century, a new region formed in the water frontier. Seeing this makes both the destruction of the Tay Son Uprising and policies of the Nguyen empire of the nineteenth century seem all the more tragic. This chapter examines the expansion, destabilisation, and collapse of Cochinchina’s water frontier through the prism of the Canton system and key commodities in that system of trade that not only expanded the reach of the Nguyen state and economy but also, by 1775, contributed to their demise. It analyses the development of key ports in the Mekong Delta and along the coast in the Canton system of Sino-Southeast Asian junk trade, and the principal commodities in that trade. It then goes on to analyse how the south’s spectacular growth destabilised the political economy, contributing to the rise of the Tay Son and subsequent vast destruction. A puzzling question is how we consider the Tay Son in terms of its relations with the coast. Was it the most ferocious opponent of the water frontier? Evidence seemed to point to this direction. The Tay Son seems to confirm a classic theme in Vietnam’s history – the contest between the mountains, where the Tay Son rose, and the sea, where the more powerful maritime-based Nguyen drawn its strength. Yet the picture was not that black and white, as we will see at the last section of this chapter. 7

Paul van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), p. 10. 8 Le Quy Don, Phu Bien Tap Luc [Frontier Chronicles] (Saigon: Phu quoc vu khanh dac trach Van Hoa, 1973) q. 6, p. 243. For more on slaves fleeing from their Cham masters, see documents from the Cham royal archives, P90–20, year 1745, in Chen Zhichao 陳智超, ‘Shiba shiji zhanpo wangfu dangan mulu ji shuoming 十八世紀占婆王府檔案目錄及說明’ [Catalogue of and notes on the eighteenth-century Cham royal archives], Shehui kexue zhanxian [Social sciences front], 2 (1984), 191. Saigon’s old name, Ben Nghe, came from the Khmer name ‘Kompong Krabei’, or ‘ferry for young buffalos’. For a more detailed discussion of the use of draft animals for opening the Mekong Delta, see Li Tana, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University Press of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 152–153.

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Cochinchina’s New Frontier It can be hard to believe that the land Vietnamese today call mien Nam, ‘the South’, consisted largely of swamp until little more than five centuries ago. Indeed, that might be true for virtually today’s Bassac River south and around the northern rim of the Gulf of Siam.9 Yet by the later eighteenth century, two great political, commercial, and urban centres arose near the point where the two great rivers meet the sea, Bangkok on the Chaophraya, and Saigon near the Mekong. Between these two hubs, a string of smaller ports had grown, too. A new frontier society formed, evident in the names of these ports, which often included the word ‘frontier’ – can in Khmer,10 bien in Viet – in their names. In addition to Vietnamese and Cham from Cochinchina, these new ports attracted a variety of itinerant merchants but were serviced primarily by junk traders from southern China, financed primarily by capital invested by the great trading houses of Canton, popularly known as the Hong(行), but whose working capital came from western merchants based elsewhere. The cycle of trade between China and Southeast Asia that these new ports facilitated attracted immigration, not only from northern Cochinchina but also southern China. Both migrant groups had helped the Nguyen court secure its claims to the Mekong Delta in the seventeenth century and by the turn of the eighteenth century were helping it to expand its territory and zone of influence into the Gulf of Siam. Within decades, the old Khmer lands of the Lower Mekong and Ca Mau Peninsula had fallen irretrievably under Vietnamese dominion and the region of mien Nam was formed. The major sources of this dynamism no doubt derived from the coastal regions of the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta is a low-lying flatland along the two great fault lines of the Mekong running from north to south and on the 9

Charvit Kasetsiri points out that until about the eleventh century, the region of Ayutthaya was still covered by seawater or brackish swamp. Although the shoreline receded to the south over the next few centuries, the land was still subject to salination caused by the tides and was probably infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Arab works dating between 1462 and 1511 call Ayutthaya ‘Shahr-I Naw’, meaning ‘New capital’. Charvit Kasetsiri, ‘Origins of a Capital and Seaport: The Early Settlement of Ayutthaya and Its East Asian Trade’, in Kennon Brezeale (ed.), From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s Maritime Relations with Asia (Bangkok: Toyota Thailand Foundation, 1999), pp. 56–59. See the map on page 57. It seems that the coastline between the Mekong Delta and the Gulf of Siam lay around 100 kilometres inland from its present location until at least the eleventh century, though it remained uninhabitable until few centuries later. 10 Tam Hoan, ‘Tim hieu chu “Can” trong dia danh Can Duoc’ [Understanding the word ‘Can’ in the place names of Can Duoc], in Can Duoc dat va nguoi [The land the people of Can Duoc] (Long An: So Van hoa va Thong tin Long An, 1988), pp. 326–332. Some people held that ‘Can’, which is found in many place names throughout the Mekong Delta, such as Can Tho, Can Gio, Can Duoc, Can Giuoc, etc., derived from the Khmer words ‘Kin, Kam, Kan, An’. Huong Nang Thom, ‘Tu to Can Cần trong dia danh Nam Bo’ [The word ‘Cần’ in the place names of the South]’, blog (https://sites.google.com/site/huongnangthom/di-tich/can-duoc, accessed 20 September 2020).

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Cochinchina’s New Frontier 259

Tongle Sap from west to east. Both meet at Phnom Penh and expand southeast to form the Mekong Delta. Its western part, from the Dong Nai highlands to the Tien Giang River and the sea, went into Vietnamese hands in 1698, while the western part, run from the Cardamom Mountain in Cambodia along the Bassac River (Hau Giang) to the sea, did not become Vietnamese land until 1754. Yet even then the Nguyen’s effective control of the Bassac area was nominal until the 1770s.11 By the 1740s, a three-fold network structure of trade had formed in Cochinchina’s water frontier. At the heart of this structure was the rice trade. Rice travelled in three general directions, or through three networks: To Hue, whose populations had grown dependent upon them for survival;12 To the Gulf of Siam, where merchants exchanged rice for tin and other valuable commodities in coastal pockets that from the 1720s became increasingly settled by Chinese immigrants. The major port of this stream was Bassac on the Hau Giang River.13 This port became commercially important only after the Khmers lost access to the Tien Giang River, their major access to the sea, at the end of the seventeenth century.14 This autonomous port helped to attract business. The English, Dutch, and Portuguese all recorded Bassac trade separately, distinct from Cochinchina (see below). The bulk of the third stream travelled to Canton, where traders found ready demand for rice and willing supplies of finished wares and new capital to 11

Sakurai, ‘Eighteenth-century Chinese Pioneers on the Water Frontier of Indochina’, in Cooke and Li (eds), Water Frontier, pp. 36–41; Shawn McHale, ‘Ethnicity, Violence, and KhmerVietnamese Relations: The Significance of the Lower Mekong Delta, 1757–1954’, Journal of Asian Studies 72, 2 (2013), 369. 12 A trader reported that an ordinary trip from the Mekong Delta to Hue took ten days. Li Tana and Anthony Reid (eds), Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen: Documents on the Economic History of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) (Canberra and Singapore): Economic History of Southeast Asia, ANU/Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 1993, p. 101. 13 The seventeenth-century Portuguese navigators knew little of the Bassac River as a possible route to Phnom Penh and only used the upper Mekong stream (Tieng Giang). Chinese travel log Shunfeng xiangsong also reports no port on the west coast. Sakurai, ‘Eighteenth-century Chinese Pioneers’, p. 39. The location of the port ‘Passack’ is not clear. According to Vuong Hong Sen, Vàm Tâ ń (Đại Ngãi) used to be called Peam Senn, ‘peam’ means ‘big river mouth’. This was where the Khmers met merchants overseas who went up to Tonle Sap afterwards. There was a large Khmer temple near this river mouth. Vuong Hong Sen, An com moi, Noi truyen cu: Hau giang Ba Thac [Eating new rice, telling old tales: The Hau Giang Bassac area] (Hochiminh: Nxb. Tre, 2012), p. 21. Foreign merchants of the eighteenth century might be calling a port at the mouth of the Bassac River, while today’s Soc Trang seemed to be rather far from the river mouth. 14 During this period, the Khmer king Outey-Reachea III (r.1758–1775) allied with Mac Thien Tu in Ha Tien (Cancao), who controlled a maritime network on the eastern part of the Gulf of Siam. Ha Tien occupied a strategic location: it was the only waterway that both linked to the Bassac River and to Phnom Penh by a small river. This means that the Mac effectively controlled the Bassac region and maintained close connection with the Khmer capital. Kitagawa Takako 北川香子, ‘Kampot of the Belle Epoque: From the Outlet of Cambodia to a Colonial Resort’, Tonan Ajia Kenkyu [Southeast Asian Studies] 42, 4 (2005), 398.

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finance further voyages that in turn fuelled more commercial growth in the Mekong. Bien Hoa seemed to be the key point of this stream, which linked ports on the Tien Giang and the Hau Giang rivers with itself to function as the centre of commerce in cash crops such as sugar and betel nut production. Therefore, this was also where rich merchants concentrated.15 The long stream of coastal trade thus connected the region to inter-Asian trade in two directions: north, to which goods like Mekong rice travelled to feed the older regions of Cochinchina and southern China; and in the other direction, south and west to Thailand and the Malay Peninsula. Medium- and small-sized boats were the backbone of the trade.16 Together, these three networks captured a large portion of the Chinese junk trade centred in Canton, as the commerce of the Mekong Delta under Cochinchina reached its peak of activity in the 1760s. System Functions: Exports, Capital, and Transshipping Exports: The Engine of Southern Trade Rice. Rice had been produced in virtually every region where Vietnamese resided. However, before they occupied the Mekong Delta, it had never been produced on such large a scale as a trade commodity. This transformation of the agricultural pattern in the Mekong Delta was undoubtedly one of the most momentous episodes in eighteenth-century Cochinchina and a significant event in Vietnamese history. As Victor Lieberman points out, in Cochinchina, as in Southeast Asia, the export economy shifted its priority from luxury goods in the late seventeenth century to bulk commodities for mass consumption in the eighteenth.17 Pepper. Pepper production had been important to Cochinchina since its creation as a de facto Vietnamese state under the Nguyen lords in the early 1600s. Chams might have initiated its cultivation in the fifteenth century, at about the same time as people began to grow it in Sumatra across the sea.18 A Dutch merchant bought 290 piculs (17,400 kg) of pepper in 1602 from two elderly women who represented the Nguyen lord and ‘spoke excellent Portuguese and Malay’.19 By the eighteenth century, both the English and Dutch East India 15

Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading tongzhi chengchi zhi zhushi’ [Annotations to ‘Towns’ in Gia Dinh Gazetteer by Trinh Hoai Duc], in Nanyang xuebao 12, no.2 (1956), 17. 16 Li Tana, ‘Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth- Century Mekong’, in Water Frontier, pp. 77–78. 17 Victor Lieberman, ‘Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies Structuring Southeast Asian History, c.1350–1830’, Modern Asian Studies 27, 3 (1993), 490. 18 Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 77. 19 ‘The Trial of a Foreign Merchant’, trans. Ruurdje Laarhoven, in Li Tana and Anthony Reid (eds), Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), pp. 7–26.

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System Functions: Exports, Capital, and Transshipping 261 Table 9.1  Sugar exported from Cochinchina in 1767 (tons)

To Canton To Nagasaki Total

Crystal sugar White sugar

Black sugar

Sub-total

648 1,233 1,881

0 295 295

734 1,908 2,642

87 380 467

Companies reported that the total weight of Cochinchinese pepper landing every year in Canton at no less than 3,000 piculs (1,800 metric tons).20 Sugar. The production of sugar was particularly vital to the delta’s system of trade. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cochinchina exported three kinds of processed sugar: black, white, and crystal sugar, the latter the highest grade. Until the mid-seventeenth century, Cochinchina primarily exported black sugar to the Japanese market (300–400 piculs per year).21 However, the country’s sugar market changed as the eighteenth century progressed and demand for white and crystal sugar surged. In the 1750s Poivre reported that Hoi An alone dispatched 40,000 barrels (1,200 metric tons) of white sugar to China every year. The volume of this export commodity jumped in the 1760s judging on two set of data for the year 1767, one from English ships doing business in Canton and another from Japan (see Table 9.1).22 Cochinchina’s sugar exports during the 1760s and early 1770s could have reached a level somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 metric tons a year, and sugar producers were concentrated on making higher grade sugar. In eighteenth-​ century Java, to produce this amount of sugar required about 100 mills.23 The numbers of mills operating in Cochinchina would have been similar.24 20

Alexander Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory (London: East India Company, 1808), 1:281–283: Pepper to Canton (in 1767, in piculs) from Passack (Bassac):372; Cochinchina:2777, Cancao (Hatien):148 and Cambodia:51; On the VOC report, see van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’. 21 300–400 piculs equal to 180–240 metric tons. See sugar imports to Japan in 1663 by Siam, Cambodia, Quang Nam, Tongking and Taiwan, in Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: SEAP, Cornell University, 1998), p. 81. 22 For Nagasaki see Nagazumi Yōko 永積洋子, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran 唐船輸出 入品数量一覧 [A comprehensive catalogue of the quantities of the cargo imported by Chinese junks, 1637–1833] (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1987), pp. 153–154. For the English records, see Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 1:281–283. 23 David Bulbeck et al. (eds), Southeast Asia Exports since the 14th Century (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), p. 109. Batavia export of sugar in 1705 was 2,910 tons. See p. 115. 24 Cochinchinese crystal sugar was popular at the Canton market. English East India Company’s records on Canton for 1764 indicate that crystal sugar from Quanzhou (known to Europeans as Chinchew, in Fujian) cost 5.6 taels (211.68 grams) per picul, while the same crystal sugar from Cochinchina cost only 5.2 taels (196.56 grams). Hosea B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834, trans. Ou Zonghua 區宗華 and Lin Shuhui 林 树惠 as Dong yindo gongsi duihua maoyi biannian shi (Guangzhou: Sun Yat Sen University

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While crystal sugar cost 20 per cent higher than white sugar in the local markets of Cochinchina,25 the same crystal sugar would yield 1.66  times more on the Japanese market – three times more than that of black sugar. A Canton merchant trading to Hoi An confirmed this when he reported the price ratio of crystal to white sugar at four quan to two, ignoring the black form altogether.26 Interestingly, the boom in white sugar production between the 1680s and 1740s coincided with the peak of Chinese migration to Cochinchina discussed below. The increased sugar production in China and Southeast Asia was mainly driven by the massive increase in European sugar consumption. In the eighteenth century England expanded its imports from roughly 10,000 to 150,000 tons a year,27 and this demand was enthusiastically responded to by the sugar growers in Cochinchina. Merchants in eighteenth-century Asia and Europe were familiar with the high quality and low price of Cochinchinese sugar. Even Adam Smith enthused about it when he compared it with its counterparts in the British colonies:28 In Cochin-china the finest white sugar commonly sells for 3 piasters the quintal … not a fourth part of what is commonly paid for the brown or muskavada sugars imported from our colonies, and not a 1/6 of what is paid for the finest white sugar.

A comparison of the volume of sugar exports in 1650, when it first arrived in Hoi An from Nagasaki, with the volume in 1745 reveals a forty-fold increase. Remarkably, the volume of Cochinchina’s sugar production appears to have doubled again by 1767, in little more than two decades. This two-fold increase in volume would have been three- to five-fold in real income considering the production was upgraded from low to high quality sugar, which in turn must have significantly increased Cochinchina’s trade income thus its wealth. Upgrade production needed large capital. Refined forms tended to be in towns, while black sugar was produced in the countryside.29 White sugar was not a venture that one could initiate without intensive capital investment, which Press, 1991), 4–5:535. The incentive behind upgrading its sugar production reveals itself in the prices listed in 1701 Nagasaki (per picul in Japanese kan): Black sugar, 5; White sugar 9.25; Crystal sugar 15.4. See Nagazumi, Tōsen yushutsunyūhin sūryō ichiran, p. 378. 25 Poivre, ‘Description of Cochinchina, 1749–50’, in Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, pp. 86–87.p. 93. 26 Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, p. 117. 27 Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life, trans. S. Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 225. 28 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), pp. 142–143. Smith’s source was Pierre Poivre: ‘Sugar is the most plentiful item of trade actually available. It is white and of a good grain … The Chinese buy a great deal which they pulverize and on which they earn 30 or 40 per cent in their country.’ Poivre, ‘Description of Cochinchina’, p. 93. Thanks to Shawn McHale for sharing this with me. 29 Yang Yanqi, Taiwan bainian tangji [Centuries of sugar production in Taiwan] (Taipei: Maotou Ying chubanshe, 2001), p. 22.

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System Functions: Exports, Capital, and Transshipping 263

favoured wealthy elites and merchants.30 In Cochinchina, the large supply of capital needed to produce such a large quantity of white sugar was ensured by an advance-credit system. This scheme developed during the seventeenth century when the local producers spun silk and delivered it to Japanese merchants to trade in Nagasaki. By the eighteenth century, Canton emerged as the champion of this system, providing credit advances promised to secure prompt delivery and the lowest possible prices.31 This happened as the response to decreasing land supply in Guangdong and increasing demand for white sugar in Europe and Japan. The sugar economy in this part of Cochinchina thus should be seen as an extension of the greater international sugar economy, whose primary hub lay in the great commercial and financial city of Canton (see below). Maritime income played a crucial role in the Nguyen’s consolidation of its political power. As Lieberman points out, although the income of Mainland Southeast Asian states depended on agricultural taxes, it is doubtful that rural output of this period grew as rapidly as did maritime trade. Moreover, since dispersed in-kind resources were more difficult to monitor and tax than maritime revenues, each increment of foreign commerce yielded disproportionate benefits to imperial authorities. In such a way, ‘Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese officials milked international trade through customs duties, commercial monopolies, and overseas trading expeditions. The proceeds were used to centralise political patronage, to magnify the religious and architectural glory of the capital, and to finance military campaigns.’32 Canton: Cochinchina’s Source of Capital The Nguyen seemed to have gone further than its mainland Southeast Asian counterparts in their roles in encouraging exports. It might not be an exaggeration to say that the Nguyen court acted as the agent of the Canton junks trading in its realm, collecting, and sometimes organising production for Canton and other overseas markets, which gained them enormous wealth. The Nguyen lords profited handsomely from this relationship, as did the officers and merchants who supported them. A statement by a captured Chinese pirate kept in 30

In Canton, processing the cane that covered 4.9 acres of land required 17 labourers, 12 oxen, and a variety of specialised utensils from large iron pans to jars, not to mention the most expensive machine in sugar processing, the cane crusher. This alone cost a producer 145 taels (54.8 kg of silver) to buy, plus another 95 taels (35.9 kg of silver) per year to operate. See Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), pp. 122, 283, 288. 31 Van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’, MS; Li Tana and Paul A. van Dyke, ‘Canton, Cancao, and Cochinchina: New Data and New Light on Eighteenth-Century Canton and the Nanyang’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 1 (2007), 15–17. 32 Lieberman, ‘Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies Structuring’, 490.

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the Qing archives shows the magnitude of this relationship. According to this pirate, in 1774 they robbed ships of the Cochinchinese king and his family as they fled south from the Tay Son army. From one ship they robbed several hundred taels of gold and silver, but by far the most significant part of the treasure, weighing 27,190 taels, consisted of huabian fanyin (花邊番银, ‘silver coins with decorated edges’), that is, Spanish reals.33 Cochinchina benefited from the foreign money that flowed into Canton’s merchant houses during the eighteenth century thanks to its important position in the Chinese junk trade with Southeast Asia. The business of Chinese merchants and supercargoes in Canton was so intertwined with overseas investors that, in 1779, English creditors in Canton found that 32 per cent of Chinese debts were owed to consignors who resided in Indian settlements and had invested via supercargoes in Canton.34 How did English and other European capital flow into Southeast Asia? A prominent Hong merchant of eighteenth-century Canton demonstrates the connections between foreign silver, the Hong merchants, junk captains in Canton, and the trade and cash crop productions in Southeast Asia. Yan Family, a Key Contact between Eighteenth-Century Canton and Cochinchina On an early spring day in 1765, a Canton junk called the Hing Tay was getting ready to set sail for Cochinchina. The day before, ship captain Wu Heguan had signed a contract with a Swedish supercargo, Jean Abraham Grill. The interest rate was set at 40 per cent (see Figure 9.1):35 Wu Heguan, captain of the junk Hingtay, borrowed 500 taels (18.9 kg) of silver from Jean Abraham Grill for sailing to Cochinchina, at interest of 40 percent. The principal and interest are to be repaid two months after the junk returns to port [Canton]. If the wind and water are not smooth [i.e., a misfortune happens], each party will accept fate and is not permitted to trouble the other.

The ‘wind and water’ was indeed not smooth that year: the Hing Tay burned and destroyed in Cochinchina. Because the loan was protected by the bottomry 33

Qing Archives of the Grand Council, file 7777, no.15, National Archives Number One, Beijing. For 花邊番银 or 花邊錢 ‘hwa pëen tsëen’, see Robert Morrison, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts (Macao: East India Company’s Pr., 1823), p. 128, under ‘Dollar, Spanish’; see Man-Houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies, 1808– 1856 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), pp. 44–46. Lin notes that this kind of silver coins was only to be used in the Yangzi River Delta after 1775, but in Fujian by 1769–1772 foreign silver dollars had replaced silver ingots (shoes) for paying taxes. 34 Morse, Dong yindu gongsi, vol. 1, 368–369. 35 Pau Van Dyke, ‘The Yan Family: Merchants of Canton, 1734–1780s’, Review of Culture, International Edition No. 9 (January 2004), 56; the Swedish supercargo had borrowed the silver from an Armenian merchant in Canton. Ibid.

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System Functions: Exports, Capital, and Transshipping 265

Figure 9.1  Wu Heguan’s contract with Swedish supercargo for trading to Cochinchina, 1765 Source: Courtesy of Nordiska Museet, Stockholm.

contract, Grill accepted his fate.36 This contract behaved like a de facto insurance policy in which the investor assumed all the risks of sea hazard to the insured vessel for the length of a voyage. Bottomry bonds thus enabled investors and sea-trading merchants to share the risk and kept the cycle of Chinese junk trade in the region turning. The guarantor of the Hing Tay and a co-signatory to this contract was a prominent Hong merchant from Southern Fujian who operated in Canton, Yan Hongsia 顏享舍. He operated six of the thirty-seven junks that belonged to the Canton Hong in the 1760s. He appears regularly in Swiss and Dutch records, as a sponsor to half of the Canton junks sailing to Southeast Asia every year.37 36

Van Dyke, The Canton Trade, p. 152. This was why the contract survived and found in the Swedish National Archives. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade, p. 152.

37

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Table 9.2  Destinations of Canton Hong junks, 1764–1774

Cochinchina Cancao Passack Cambodia Siam Batavia

1764

1766

1767

1768

1770

1773

1774

9 3 0 4 7 2

13 7 10 2 0 2

6 2 13 0 0 1

12 4 10 1 6 1

11 4 10 0 5 0

6 0 0 2 7 2

0 0 4 1 5 0

Source: Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao, p. 290. I removed the data of 1769 since van Dyke points out that the 1769 data is incomplete.

Hongsia employed hundreds of people under him, and his Canton junks manned crews of a hundred men or more. These agents were spread in the teaproducing areas in China and the cash-crop-producing areas in Cochinchina, Cancao, Bassac and Batavia.38 But Yan was not the only Hong merchant interested in this water frontier. The rapid increase of Cochinchina’s cash-crop production in the mid-eighteenth century was closely connected to the influx of capital that the Canton trade provided. Of the thirty-seven Hong junks based in Canton, 75 to 80 per cent had a particular interest in trading with Cochinchina, Cambodia, Cancao, and Bassac (‘Passack’) in the 1760s (see Table 9.2).39 The combination of long-term connections between Cochinchina and Canton and adequate capital to finance sea voyages created a mature market and services industry for merchants on both ends of the interregional trade cycle. Trinh Hoai Duc, a Fujianese descendent and senior Nguyen officer of the early nineteenth century, recalled the heyday of this trade in Cochinchina’s new southern lands with nostalgia when he discussed Bien Hoa where his grandfather lived:40 When ships [from overseas] anchored and merchants settled they would give the list of their cargoes to the local merchants … The local merchant … would repackage the cargoes so that better and inferior items would all be sold … [If] the merchant wanted certain cargoes, he would sign a contract with the local agents so the latter could buy the goods on his behalf … The accounts were always kept as clear as they should be. When purchasing was carried out [by the local merchants], the overseas merchant needed to do nothing but go to the theatres and enjoy himself. Drinking water was clean, and the ships were well looked after. When the monsoon came and it was time to leave, the merchant needed only to sail back with a fully loaded ship. 38

Pau Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), p. 164. 39 Li and van Dyke, ‘Canton, Cancao, and Cochinchina’, 13. 40 Trinh Hoai Duc, ‘Chengshi’ [Towns], in Gia Dinh Thanh thong chi [Unified gazetteer of Gia Dinh], repr. in Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading cheng tongzhi’, 24.

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System Functions: Exports, Capital, and Transshipping 267

Mixed capital and production were clearly linked in the eighteenth-century water frontier. What James Jackson observed regarding the mixed ‘Chinese’ capital in early nineteenth-century Singapore could well be applied to later eighteenth-century Mekong Delta, that ‘without a system of financing of this type, extensive agricultural colonisation could never have occurred in early nineteenth-century Singapore’.41 The Canton trade required a variety of other imports from Southeast Asia to facilitate the packaging of its central export, namely, tea. English consumption of tea virtually doubled between the early and mid-eighteenth century.42 The commodity was delicate, however, and thus difficult to transport from inland China, where it was cultivated and processed, to distant Canton. Tin containers were light and thus easier to carry over mountain passes and float down China’s rivers. Producers in the tea-producing regions of China therefore consumed large quantities of tin canisters.43 Here, we can see the indirect, long-distance effects of increased consumption of an import commodity in one part of the world, Chinese tea in Great Britain, upon demand for another commodity in a third region, Southeast Asia. Tin, essential to China’s domestic and overseas tea trade, had first to be imported from Southeast Asia before it could be consumed in or re-exported from China. The surge in British tea consumption during the eighteenth century thus indirectly nurtured a massive commerce in Southeast Asian tin, mediated through the markets of Canton. The most important tin-producing site in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia lay on Bangka Island off the south-eastern coast of Sumatra. Controlled by the Sultan of Palembang nearby, the island’s seventeen-plus Chinese tin-mining settlements annually exported all its production – as much as 73,000 piculs of tin – to buyers overseas.44 The Dutch purchased the lion’s share of Bangka’s tin. As for the rest, much Bangka tin reached Canton’s markets by way of Cancao or Cochinchina.45 The island’s mines developed and grew thanks to an influx of migrant Chinese labourers, whose numbers surged during the eighteenth century.46 41

James Jackson, Planters and Speculators: Chinese and European Agricultural Enterprise in Malaya, 1786–1921 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968), p. 13. 42 James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 18. 43 Reginald Hanson, A Short Account of Tea and the Tea Trade (London: Whitehead, Morris & Lowe, 1876), pp. 70–76. 44 Barbara Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993), p. 190. 45 Mary F. Somers Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper: Chinese Settlement on an Indonesian Island (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), p. 20. 46 The labourers were brought in directly from Canton through an extensive Chinese network. ‘Annually … a confidential and competent Chinese agent [went] by the junk returning from Palembang to China, to invite efficient and select men.’ Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper, pp. 30–31.

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As the number of Chinese labourers grew, the demand for a whole host of commodities important to their livelihood grew with it. These migrant settlements never became self-sustaining economic entities, essential commodities were supplied by the Chinese merchants brought in from elsewhere. To survive, each labourer consumed on average half a picul or 30 kg of rice per month.47 This means that the sustainability of tin production in Bangka depended upon the import of at least 100,000 piculs or 6,000 metric tons of rice per year, plus salt, dried fish, and vegetables. Here, Cancao found its niche market.48 The Mekong Delta had become a major centre of rice production by the 1740s, providing Cancao merchants with easy access to the large-scale rice surpluses to meet export demand. By mid-century, the harbour kingdom could supply rice that the Bangka miners needed to supply tin for Canton. Although none of the three ports – Bassac, Cochinchina (here likely Hoi An or Bien Hoa), and Cancao – produced an ounce of tin, in 1767 they exported nearly two-thirds of the quantity of tin that they sourced from Palembang.49 This volume roughly equalled the amount of tin shipped by the English East India Company from Southeast Asia to Canton in 1775.50 Thanks to this trade, demand for staple items in Bangka fuelled the growth of riziculture in the Mekong Delta. Echoing the early days of Jiaozhi and of Dai Viet, sea commerce had stimulated the development of the agrarian economy in Vietnamese history.

47

Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper, p. 35. Anthony Reid, ‘Flows and Seepages in the Long-Term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 15–50. 49 Canton Tin Imports from Select Ports in Southeast Asia 1758–1774 (in piculs) 48

Year 1758 1762 1763 1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770 1773 1774

Siam

Passiack Cancao

Palembang

Terengganu Macao

7,000 5,000 10,000 8,000 10,000 100

3,163 1,000

300 1,984 2,700 6,000 2,000

1,500

1,500 11,000

320 5,000

7,000



Data from Paul van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’; The 1767 figures for Passiack and Cancao were drawn from Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 1:281–283. Morse, Dong Yindu gongsi duihua maoyi, vols. 1–2, p. 328.

50

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Tensions in the System 269

The concurrent phenomena of rice production in the Mekong Delta, tin production in Palembang/Bangka, and tin trade via Cancao to Canton existed interdependently as three functions in a trade cycle that was a subset of Canton’s Southeast Asian maritime trade. Mary Heidhues points out that ‘Bangka’s inhabitants later recalled the reign of Sultan Ahmad Najamudin (r. 1757–74) of Palembang’ – which coincided with the peak of tin production in Palembang – ‘as a golden age’.51 These years marked a golden age for both Cancao and Cochinchina as well. It is striking to think that Palembang, a thousand miles away from Cancao and Cochinchina, could have served as an important engine for their economic growth in the 1760s, but this seems to have been the case. The volume and frequency of the rice and tin trade that travelled across the Gulf of Siam must have been considerable. Indeed, Cochinchina had become a significant competitor in the tin trade in the eighteenth century. Chineseoperated Cochinchinese junks also carried tin often to Amoy.52 It was no coincidence that Cochinchina’s main port, Hoi An, levied an import tax rate in the 1760s that specifically targeted Palembang and Cancao,53 which suggests both regular and frequent trade between Cancao, Palembang, and Cochinchina of this period. The 1760s provided the golden opportunity for Cancao and Cochinchina, both of which responded quickly and prospered greatly. As a result, they became major players in Southeast Asian trade. But none of these commercial activities could have existed or developed by themselves without the Canton factor, a situation which seems different from the inter-Southeast Asian trade that had been carried out in the Age of Commerce (1450–1680). Indeed, eighteenth-century Canton seems to have played a similar role in financing production and then trade between Southeast Asia and China as Singapore, Melaka, and Penang played a century later. Tensions in the System Tensions began to build in Cochinchina even as it entered a period of prosperity in the 1750s. In just two decades, it grew to breaking point, toppling the longstable state, destroying the entire political order, and hurtling Cochinchinese society into the chaos of the Tay Son Uprising that engulfed the entire Vietnamese-speaking world for the next thirty years. Three commodities seem to have contributed most to this tension. The first of these factors, zinc, caused a 51

Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper, p. 17. One Dutch record indicates the role of Cochinchinese junks played in moving tin to Canton: ‘1763, Aug 18: Concerning the outlook on tin, they [the three Hong merchants] … added further that the tin brought by the Cochin Chinese junks would make up for that which has failed to appear here directly from Palembang’. NAH: Canton 74, quoted van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’. 5 3 Le Quy Don, ‘Phu bien Tap Luc’, in Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, p. 116. 52

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dangerous inflation when the Nguyen court began to mint coins with it, a policy that invited speculation among government officials, wealthy elites, and important merchants in the Canton trade. The same appears to have been true for gold, the second factor, which affected the country largely through its export. Thanks to such practices, corruption grew. Rattan, the third factor, added to the country’s economic and political tensions after the Nguyen began to squeeze his upland subjects who procured the item escalating taxes. Together, these three tensions created the conditions that made the Tay Son Uprising inevitable. This section examines these three economic factors to understand why. Speculation, Corruption, and Over-taxation: Zinc, Gold, and Rattan Zinc coin casting. During the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century, the coins that circulated in Cochinchina came from two sources, namely old or counterfeit Japanese coins, and Chinese coins.54 Trouble for Cochinchina started in the late seventeenth century when the Tokugawa government imposed limits on its copper exports and Chinese demand for copper grew, both of which affected coin minting and, consequently, Cochinchina’s currency supply.55 To meet the growing cost of currency, the Nguyen court adopted zinc as its solution to the monetary crisis it faced. The metal was cheap and abundant and therefore its supply was sufficiently large to meet the requirements of the country’s rapidly growing commercial economy. In 1745, Lord Nguyen Phuc Khoat took this course, casting 72,396 quan (strings) of zinc coins between 1746 and 1748.56 To meet its needs, the court permitted select subjects to undertake private casting. The Mac clan in Cancao (Hatien) obtained permission to cast coins in the 1730s.57 It appeared that this solution would solve the kingdom’s coin supply problem. 54

Between 1633 and 1637 the VOC imported 105,834 strings of Japanese coins into Cochinchina. Chinese merchants also brought large quantities of Japanese coins to Cochinchina. See Chapter 4, ‘Money and Trade’, in Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, pp. 78–98. 5 5 The zinc:copper ratio in Chinese coins (which included zinc, copper, lead, and tin) changed as follows: 1550–1650 1684 1727

30:70 40:60 50:50



Yang Duanliu 楊端六, Qingdai huobi jinrong shigao 清代貨幣金融史稿 [A draft on the history of currency and finance of the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1962), p. 59. 56 Dai Nam thuc luc Tien Bien [The Nguyen chronicles, ancestral period] (Tokyo: The Oriental Institute, Keio University, 1961), chapter 10, p. 141 (hereafter Tien Bien). 57 Tien Bien, p. 132.

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The problem grew worse. Soon after the policy began, more and more of the country’s notables got into the profitable business of private minting. This not only affected currency values but also commerce, particularly the junk trade, as Poivre reported after his visit to Cochinchina in 1749–1751: ‘The huge profit they [the Chinese] make on this substance has led them to abandon or suspend trade in all other articles.’58 By 1767, zinc formed the single most important item of cargo shipping from Canton to Cochinchina (9,868 piculs = 592.08 tons) and the related territories of Bassac (5,890 piculs = 353.4 tons), Cancao (1,589 piculs = 95.34 tons), and Cambodia (1,014 piculs = 60.84 tons), a total of 18,361 piculs or 1,100 metric tons.59 From the country’s seaports, much of the metal appears to have travelled to the private mints. The volume of private casting reportedly swelled to eight to ten times the three-year total produced by Nguyen official minting two decades before.60 By the 1760s and 1770s, the concentration of minting activity seems to have expanded beyond Cancao to other places in the Mekong Delta, particularly the Bassac region (Soc Trang). By 1768, the continuing growth in zinc coin minting had begun to put acute pressure on Cochinchina’s monetary system. Two years later, in 1770, the scholar and court official Ngo The Lan wrote an urgent petition to the Nguyen lord, asking him to prohibit coin casting in Bassac. Court officials – who most likely had interests in zinc mints – withheld his petition so it would never reach the lord.61 Less than a year later, in 1771, the Tay Son rebellion that would destroy the Nguyen state erupted in Qui Nhon. Four years later, the kingdom completely vanished. Gold speculation. Nguyen Cochinchina’s zinc policy generated several important ripple effects – most importantly, speculation in other monetary metals like gold. As with zinc, the court and officials sought to profit from it. In one case, Lord Nguyen Phuc Khoat used the zinc cash at his disposal in 1750 to ‘buy up all the gold in his kingdom’, according to Poivre.62 The gold then travelled to China where it was used for speculation. An English source on gold in Canton published in 1763 reported: ‘This valuable commodity [gold] is not altogether the produce of China but is brought in great quantities by their junks from Cochin China, in return for the goods sent thither’ (emphasis added).63 Indeed, the quantity of gold flowing out of the country could grow 58

Poivre, ‘Description of Cochinchina’, p. 85. Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 1:286–287. 60 Li Tana, ‘Cochinchinese Coin Casting and Circulating in Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia’, in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (eds), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 132–133. 61 Tien Bien, chapter.11, pp. 156–157. 62 Poivre, ‘Description of Cochinchina’, pp. 86–87. 63 Samuel Jackson, An Authentick Account of the Weights, Measures, Exchanges, Customs, Duties, Port-Charges (London: C. Hendersen, 1763), p. 51. 59

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Figure 9.2  Cochinchinese gold bullions in Nagasaki, 1767 Source: Katō Shigeshi 加藤繁, Tang–Song shidai jinyin zhi yanjiu 唐宋時代 金銀之研究 [A study on gold and silver in the Tang and Song eras], a translation of Tō Sō jidai ni okeru kingin no kenkyū 唐宋時代に於ける金銀の研究 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), p. 251.

large. Merchants shipped as many as 386 gold shoe ingots (= 52,804 taels or 1,996 kg of silver)64 to Canton from Cochinchina in 1767 alone – a year when reportedly ‘gold from Cochinchina is extremely limited’, according to the officers of English East India Company in Canton.65 In fact, Le Quy Don’s 1776 report on Cochinchina for the Tongking court estimates that no less than 1,000 gold shoes (136,000 taels or 5,140.8 kg of silver) shipped to Hoi An from local sources every year for sale to Chinese buyers.66 Some of the ‘gold shoes’ that Le Quy Don mentioned in his 1776 report showed up in Japan in 1767 accounting for a portion of the Cochinchinese gold export that year (see Figure 9.2). The court’s efforts to buy up all the gold in the country with greatly devalued zinc coins could only have exacerbated the inflation already affecting Cochinchina.67 This helps to explain why the Tongkinese official Le Quy Don, when reviewing the Nguyen archives after Tongking destroyed the kingdom in 1775, singled out one man for the Tay Son rebellion and the kingdom’s collapse: Truong Phuc Loan, an uncle of Lord Nguyen Phuc Khoat and a powerful and famously corrupt mandarin. It began with the minister’s monopolisation of 64

There were 136.8 taels of silver in each. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, vols. 4–5, 562. For the different rate of gold over the period see David Bulbeck and Kristine Alilunas-Rodges, ‘Exchange Rates and Commodity Prices’, in Li and Reid (eds), Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, p. 137. 65 66 Ibid. Le Quy Don, Phu bien Tap Luc, q. 4, 27b. 67 By 1772 gold speculation in Cochinchina had spun far out of control, causing Dutch traders to report that ‘silver and gold are now so high in price that it is now better to import those rather than export them’. Van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’: DAH, Canton 35.

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the country’s gold production areas in the 1760s.68 Truly, gold speculation did seem to destabilise the financial order of Cochinchina, as the Canton Records above suggest. A Portuguese merchant based in Cochinchina at the time reported that ‘Outa Ngoai’ (i.e. Ong Ta Ngoai, Truong Phuc Loan), known as ‘a friend of the Dutch’, was the reason why European ships no longer called at ports in Cochinchina.69 Amidst the unfolding fiscal crisis, connections between the corrupt senior officers of the Nguyen and Canton Hong merchants appear. The nineteenthcentury Nguyen Chronicle points out that a Chinese merchant surnamed Cai (Tsja in Hokkien dialect) colluded with Truong Phuc Loan to control the kingdom’s main ports.70 He would have belonged to Hoi An’s Cai (or Tsja) clan, one of the top four Chinese families of eighteenth-century Hoi An (in addition to Yan, Zhou, and Huang – Oey in Hokkien dialect), who in turn most likely related to Tsia Hunqua, a Canton Hong merchant.71 The clan was closely tied to the Yan, the prominent Hong merchant clan mentioned above. The Portuguese report that Truong Phuc Loan being ‘a friend of the Dutch’ might be well founded, as the Yan family was the most trusted friend of Tsia Hungqua and extremely close to the Dutch.72 Their close associate in Canton, Beau Khequa, traded extensively in Cochinchinese gold.73 Hong junks, particularly those of the Yan family and their associate merchants, even flew the VOC flag, as shown in Figure 9.3. Rattan. The last – but not least important – commodity, rattan, caused economic hardship and political tensions in Cochinchina not through speculation but through the increasingly heavy tax burden that the Nguyen government imposed on the country’s upland producers. This is revealed in a list of taxes paid by the uplanders in the 1760s. It is highly valuable given the scanty data that the Nguyen state left behind in the wake of its destruction. The tax report seems trivial on face value but in fact reveals the profoundly serious cracks 68

Tien Bien, p. 152. The statements by the captured Chinese pirates who had served the Tay Son also confirm that the uprising was caused by the tyrannical ‘brother-in-law of the King and his sister’. Qing Archives of the Grand Council, file 7777, no.14, National Archives Number One, Beijing. The Tay Son cast a seal in its early years containing the phrase ‘Phung Thien pha bao Nguyen Phuc’ [Following Heaven’s order to punish the tyrant Nguyen Phuc]. Ngo Duc Tho, ‘Nghien cuu chu huy Viet Nam qua cac trieu dai’ [Research into tabooed characters in Viet Nam throughout the dynasties] (Hanoi: Nxb Van Hoa, 1997), p. 108; George Dutton, The Tay Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), p. 139. 69 70 Van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’: DAH, Canton 35. Tien Bien, p. 152. 71 Van Dyke, ‘Yan Family’, 68. 72 Between 1757 and 1780 the Yan supplied the Dutch an average of 52,000 taels of the merchandise per ship, and this amounted to 27 per cent of total Dutch trade of Canton at the time. Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao, p. 152. 73 On Beau Khequa’s trade in gold, see Cheong Weng Eang, The Hong Merchants of Canton (Copenhagen: NIAS Curzon Press, 1997), pp. 56–57.

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Figure 9.3  Canton junk flying VOC flag, c. 1747/48 Source: Journal kept on the journey to the East Indies, by Carl Johan Gethe, 1746–1749. National Library of Sweden, MS M 280; van Dyke, The Canton Trade, plate 9.

in the kingdom’s political integrity. The enormous quantities of rattan needed to pack tea in Canton seems to have created a push factor that compelled the Nguyen court to increase its taxes on the upland suppliers. Before 1769, a grade-one taxpayer (trang), who paid less than 2,000 pieces of rattan per year as tax; after 1769 that number increased to 3,920 pieces – a virtual doubling of the tax74 – at a time when tin and gold were wreaking havoc on currency values and pushing Cochinchina’s commercial economy to the brink of disaster. In 1769, the court extracted 156,900 pieces (1,569 bundles) of rattan as tax from mere 47 taxpayers living in the uplands of Quang Nam tterritory.75 Why did the Nguyen court need so much rattan? The answer once again lies in Canton, specifically, in its tea and silk exports to European-controlled ports. Rattan was ideal for loose packaging (dunnage): 74

Le Quy Don, Phu Bien Tap Luc, q. 4, pp. 11a–b.

75

Ibid.

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War and Retrogression: The System Destroyed 275

thin and strong, they had no aroma that could infect tea, bound around the raw silk bundles, and be easily resold at destination.76 Judging on all the aspects on trade and agency in eighteenth-century South China Sea trade, it might not be an exaggeration to say that the Nguyen court was one of the biggest agents for the Canton Hongs in Southeast Asia. Far too many new destabilising factors developed in eighteenth-century Cochinchina. Although Cochinchina fought seven wars with its rival Vietnamese state of Tongking during the seventeenth century, it was able to cope thanks to its overseas trade income and better weaponry. The eighteenth century proved to be much more challenging than the previous century despite many promising new conditions: abundant rice from the Mekong Delta, Cancao’s submission as a vassal state, the large influx of capital from Canton for cash-crop production, and the increase of local and Chinese immigrant populations. While these elements brought Cochinchina unprecedented growth and prosperity, they also engendered tensions that eventually challenged the existing social, political and economic order. Added to all these was, moved ever farther south, Nguyen administration became overextended, a victim of its own success.77 All it took was one violent push, and Cochinchina was thrown out of its once-stable orbit, destroying the prosperity that it had built. War and Retrogression: The System Destroyed The Tay Son Uprising The Tay Son destroyed both Vietnamese states, Tongking and Cochinchina, particularly the latter, with its societies and everything they had created with the wealth they had amassed over their two centuries of commercial prosperity. Three decades of continuous warfare turned Vietnam into the most damaged zone in Asia. A simple comparison between Vietnam and its neighbours reveals its horrible enormity. The Siamese–Burmese War of 1765–1769 laid waste to the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya and damaged much of Siam, but the war lasted little more than three years, about one-tenth of the Tay Son war, which raged for thirty years. China’s catastrophic Taiping Rebellion crippled the flourishing Yangzi River Delta region, and although tragically prolonged – 14 years (1851–1865) – it lasted half as long as the war in Vietnam. In 1600, King Philip IV of the Spanish–Portugal Empire said, ‘we know that no empire, 76

Morse, Dong Yindu gongsi duihua maoyi, 1:205–206; A typical Dutch East India Company ship might use 2,000 bundles of rattan for bracing and dunnage important to securing cargo in a ship’s hold in a single voyage. Li and van Dyke, ‘Canton, Cancao, and Cochinchina’, 10–28. This explains why rattan never appeared on the imports in Japan, even though Japan imported many other items from Southeast Asia – this was simply because Japan did not export tea and silk. 7 7 Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, chapter 7, ‘The Tay Son’.

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however great, has been able to sustain so many wars in different areas for long’.78 This proved exactly true all-over eighteenth-century Vietnam, in what is now the nation’s South, the Centre, and North. The violence in Cochinchina proved so vicious that it rendered the country unrecognisable in just a few years. In 1778, at Cape Saint James (Vung Tau), the former gateway to the Mekong Delta, Asia’s rice granary in the eighteenth century, an English captain named Charles Chapman who visited the place saw this:79 Two or three of the most miserable objects I ever beheld, upon the very point of perishing with hunger and disease. A fleet of Ignaac’s [Nhac, the Tay Son leader]in its way to Donai, which it is now blockading, had two months before paid them a visit and plundered them of the scanty remains left by a horrid famine, supposed in the preceding year to have carried off more than half of the whole inhabitants of Cochinchina.

This report sharply contrasts with an account written only four years earlier by Le Quy Don, a Tongking officer who reported on Cochinchina about its wealth and living standards:80 The common people also wore satin shirts with flowers and damask trousers as their daily wear. To be dressed in plain cotton was considered a disgrace. The soldiers all enjoyed sitting on mats, with incense burners in their hands, having good tea with silver or china cups. Everything came from China, from spittoons to chinaware, even the food. For every meal they had three big bowls of rice. Women all dressed in gauze, ramie and silk, with embroidered flowers around a round collar. People here looked upon gold and silver as sand, millet and rice as mud; their lives could not be more extravagant.

In 1774, a Spanish missionary observed the Tay Son army loot Hue and Da Nang and their environs, and his recollection provides a glimpse into the society that two hundred years of commercial wealth had brought: Before they departed, the rebels devastated the entire region, without leaving a single chicken alive … the rebels also took 45 elephants, numerous arms, the drums and flags, and an infinite number of other objects. Each mandarin left with more than 12 large boats filled with riches, which they took by sea to the province where they are based [emphasis added].81

What was the most damaging was this: Like the Taiping Rebellion sixty years later, which concentrated most of its destruction on China’s most prosperous region, the Yangzi River Delta, the Tay Son rebellion in its first decade focused 78

Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 254. 79 Alastair Lamb, The Mandarin Road to Old Hue: Narratives of Anglo-Vietnamese Diplomacy from the Seventeenth Century to the Eve of the French Conquest (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970), p. 90. 80 Le Quy Don, Phu bien Tap Luc, q. 6, p. 227b. 81 Dutton, Tay Son Uprising, p. 143.

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on Cochinchina, the most economically developed part of the Vietnamesespeaking world, where cash-cropping had spread by attracting big money from overseas. This material foundation crumbled in the face of persistent and massive looting, burning, and killing, not to mention the mass famine that reduced society in the rebellion’s first few years. Even twenty years after the war’s end, the country had not fully recovered. This fact leaves little doubt that the Tay Son rebellion and civil war that followed caused Cochinchina to retrogress for half a century. Before the Tay Son, Nguyen Cochinchina achieved a remarkable degree of urbanisation. Numerous towns flourished, as recalled by Trinh Hoai Duc in the early nineteenth century. Traditional cities and towns such as Thang Long in Tongking Hue and Hoi An of Cochinchina had been based on relatively dense populations under government surveillance. By the eighteenth-century, a different kind of port town appeared in the Mekong Delta, purely commercial in character and relatively free of government control. This chapter finishes with a view of those towns, which, thanks to the Tay Son war, existed less than a century. The Vanished Commercial Towns and Dispersed Merchants A native of the Bien Hoa region, Trinh Hoai Duc provides a vivid example of the prosperous commercial town of Dong Nai Dai Pho (‘big market of Dong Nai’) in Bien Hoa and its tragic demise:82 The houses were brick and walls painted, row upon row of houses of different stories were shinning along the river and against the sun. The houses stretched for five li (1 li = 500 metres) … the entire town was curbed with stones … As such a big metropolis this place saw the concentration of the richest merchants … When the Tay Son bandits came in 1776, they dismantled the houses and took bricks and the stones paving of the town. They shipped all of them along with goods and treasures to Quy Nhon [where they were based], and this place was left in ruins. From the Restoration [1802] there has been a recovery of population but was not one tenth of a hundred or a thousand.

The size of Bien Hoa almost doubled that of Saigon of the 1820s,83 and it was here that Yan Lipsia, the captain of the last Canton junk sponsored by the Yan family, met his death at the hands of the Tay Son.84 The Yan family, one of the most successful Hong merchants in eighteenth-century Canton, bankrupted by 1774,85 soon after the Tay Son occupied Quy Nhon in 1773, hinting the intimate connections between Cochinchinese trade, its town culture and the family’s fortune. 82

Trinh Hoai Duc, ‘Chengshi’, 24. Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading tongzhi’, 17. The size of Bien Hoa would triple the size of Saigon after 1834, when the older and larger citadel was torn down and replaced by a smaller one at the emperor Minh Mang’s order after the Le Van Khoi Rebellion. 84 Qing Archives of the Grand Council, file 7777, no.14, National Archives Number One, Beijing. 85 Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao, p. 167. 83

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In contrast to Bien Hoa, which was based mainly on cash-crop production of such goods as sugar and betel nuts, My Tho thrived as the major rice-distribution centre serving the eastern Mekong Delta. ‘This was where the big rice merchants lived and where rice buying junks must stop’, Trinh wrote:86 [It was] covered with richly ornamented brick houses, big pavilions, and huge temples. All sorts of ships and boats from the ocean or from the river arrived and departed back and forth like shuttles waving fabrics. It was a big town, prosperous and lively. When the Tay Son bandits rose, this place became the battlefield, and everything was burnt down.

The English merchant Charles Chapman never had the chance to see Bien Hoa and My Tho. Both towns had been destroyed before he arrived Cochinchina in 1778–1779. The urban centres of Cochinchina suffered such wretched conditions that they led Chapman to believe that all Cochinchina had ever possessed was a few village-like towns. However, he encountered surprising anomalies in places like the large city in Hoi An (Faifo):87 On arriving Faifo we were surprised to find the recent ruins of a large city; the streets laid out on a regular plan paved with flat stone and well-built brick houses on each side. But, alas, there was not little more remaining than the outward walls …

The street layout of Hoi An that Chapman described resembles the description by Trinh Hoai Duc for Bien Hoa and My Tho. Hue had a similar structure, according to Poivre: ‘The houses are built in the style of those of China and form a wide, well-paved street.’88 Yet, as Father Labartette reported on Hoi An by 1776: ‘Everywhere there is death from starvation, all are covered in rags, infected with sores and other similar maladies. The country, formerly so rich, so fertile, is almost totally bankrupted.’89 The urban centres were the very targets of the Tay Son, because, unsurprisingly, they were perceived as centres of political and economic power that had contributed to the problem of the countryside. Yet, as Dutton points out, ‘the Tay Son armies did not merely loot urban centres, but also appear to have specifically directed attacks against ethnic Chinese population living in them’. In Saigon between four thousand and twenty thousand of the Chinese were killed in 1782.90 The Tay Son leader, Nguyen Hue91 86

Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading tongzhi’, 27. 88 Lamb, Mandarin Road, p. 105. Poivre, ‘Description of Cochinchina’, p. 77. 89 Quoted in Charles Wheeler, ‘Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the Early Modern Era’, PhD dissertation, Yale University (2001), p. 192. 90 Dutton, Tay Son Uprising, p. 203. The Tay Son’s killing of Chinese started in the mid-1770s, as soon as they had attacked Da Nang and Hoi An. Right after the Bien Hoa massacre in 1782, when the Tay Son forces entered Cambodia, ‘they went out to search for the Chinese who had fled from Cochinchina [and] they exterminated them without any other reason than having embraced the party of the king’. Dutton, Tay Son Uprising, p. 202. 91 Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading tongzhi’, 18. 87

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War and Retrogression: The System Destroyed 279 Ordered that all the Chinese be killed, whether they were former residents or ­newcomers, soldiers or merchants. More than 10,000 were killed. Bodies were scattered from Ngu Tan to Saigon, some of them thrown into the river, which stopped the ­river’s flow … Every family discarded Chinese items that they used to possess. Things [Chinese] like silk fabrics, tea, Chinese medicine, joss sticks and paper were scattered everywhere on the roads, but no one dared to pick them up.

Without knowing it, the Tay Son acted much as had Le Loi, the non-Viet leader who defeated the Ming invasion in 1427 and founded the Le dynasty. As Whitmore points out, ‘more than defeating the invading armies of the Ming regime, Le Loi and his mountain army opposed the thriving shared Sino/ Vietnamese coastal culture of the previous three centuries’ [emphasis added]. Whitmore analysed this situation convincingly:92 The effort by Le Loi and his mountain followers was not just to drive the Northerners (Chinese) out, as had been done before in Vietnamese history, but to resist this Ngo (Chinese) culture that tied together the coasts of Dai Viet and southeast China. Their campaign, I argue, was to be anti-Ming, anti-Ngo, anti-Tran/Chen, and anti-coastal—to contest Ngo control of the lowlands lying between them.

As in fifteenth-century Dai Viet and the Jiaozhi Sea, this dynamic encouraged the outmigration of Chinese from eighteenth-century Cochinchina. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cochinchina was one of the most popular destinations for Chinese trade and migration to Southeast Asia. In the 1640s, Hoi An’s Chinese population equalled that of Ayutthaya and was ten times that of Melaka. In the 1770s, the size of the Chinese population in Cochinchina roughly equalled Siam around 30,000.93 By 1822, however, when Crawfurd visited Bangkok and Saigon, the Chinese in Saigon numbered only two to three thousand, a striking 1 per cent of Bangkok’s 230,000 (see below), and only half of Hoi An’s in the 1640s. The catalyst of such decimation could only have been the Tay Son.94 The commercial trade at the once prominent port Ha Tien or Cancao had diminished to a trickle of rice, dried fish, and pepper trade, according to a report by French naval hydrographer Jacques Rénaud in 1879.95 Ha Tien’s decline would have occurred at least half a century before. 92

John Whitmore, ‘Ngo (Chinese) Communities and Montane/Littoral Conflict in 15th–16th Century Dai Viet’, Asia Major 27, 2 (2014), 66. 93 Reid, A History of Southeast Asia, p. 184. 94 According to a 1795 registration, the China town in Hue, the Thanh Ha village had 792 registered taxpayers in 1789 but the number was reduced to a mere sixty in six years, due to the Tay Son policy towards the Chinese. Chen Chingho, ‘Chengtian mingxiang she yu qinghepu’ [The Minh Huong Village and Thanh Ha Market in Thua Thien], Xinya xuebao [New Asia journal] 4, 1 (1959), 319. 95 David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), p. 4.

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One notes that Chinese emigration from Cochinchina coincided closely with the rapid growth of the Chinese population in Siam, ‘which soared from perhaps 30,000 in 1767 to 230,000 by 1825’, Victor Lieberman observed.96 Whereas maritime trade supplied late Ayudhya with one-fourth to one-third of its cash revenues, he continues, it provided Taksin and Rama I with more than one-half. In Hong Lysa’s view, after the disasters of Burma invasion, the China connection essentially saved the kingdom from the fate of its Vietnamese neighbours.97 The people of fallen Cochinchina faced the opposite situation. The departure of Chinese merchants dealt a heavy blow to the territory’s commerce, Trinh Hoai Duc’s account of Bien Hoa makes clear:98 Now when the junks come, since there are no longer prominent local merchants to be the agents for them, they must do retail trade themselves and at the same time collect local products, both at extreme pain … This made trade increasingly difficult for the merchants overseas.

The ‘prominent merchants’ of the Chinese community were those who used to organise trade and credit, and who perhaps also financed sugar and pepper production and the transport of settlers. In this capacity, they played a key structural role in holding the water frontier society together. The coastal port cities of eighteenth-century Cochinchina had been motivated by networks, contracts, and special ‘trust’ relations. The outmigration of the big merchants from the Mekong Delta had the most damaged long-term effect on the overseas trade of the Mekong Delta, as well as its local trade and cash crop production, which was organised around exports for overseas. Cochinchina’s sugar industry, the leading industry that made eighteenthcentury Cochinchina known to Europe, suffered. Most of the 100 mills that would have existed in the mid-eighteenth century,99 if not all of them, disappeared from the Bien Hoa area by the early nineteenth century. Sugar, according to Crawfurd100: [was] produced in Quang Ngai and Quang Nam but not much in Cambodia and still less in Tonquin. No assistance from the Chinese, arise the inferiority of the Cochinchinese sugar, rank below Siam, Philippines, and of Java, being dark in colour and badly granulated.

The ‘assistant’ from the Chinese here would certainly have included both the skilled workers and the financiers. Both had vanished during the years of the 96

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Southeast Asia in Global Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1:303–304. Ibid., p. 304. 98 Chen Chingho, ‘Zheng Huaide zhuan Jiading tongzhi’, 15. 99 Bulbeck et al., Southeast Asia Exports, p. 109. 100 John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China (London: Reprinted Kula Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 474. 97

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War and Retrogression: The System Destroyed 281

Spanish dollars

Cochinchina, Siam, Manila and Java's sugar prices on Singapore market 8.00 7.00 6.00 5.00 4.00 3.00 2.00 1.00 0.00

Cochinchina Siam Manila Java

13-31830

11835

11837

11839

11845

1-11848

51850

11852

1-11854

years

Figure 9.4 Vietnam, Siam, Java, and Manila’s sugar prices in Singapore, 1830–1854 Source: Database of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (www.iisg.nl/hpw/singapore/prijs-east2.xls, accessed 9 August 2013).

Tay Son. Despite the Nguyen dynasty’s post-war encouragement of sugar exports throughout the new empire of Dai Nam, Vietnam’s sugar competed badly on the Singapore market, and was generally priced lower than sugar from Siam, Java and Manila, as shown in Figure 9.4. Bangkok benefited from the political chaos of the Tay Son in two major ways. First, the intake of Chinese migrants boosted the revenues from Chinese tax farms and poll taxes. In the period spanning roughly 1780 to 1840, Bangkok assumed the role of Chinese shipping base for the Nanyang trade, a role played earlier by Manila and Batavia and later by Singapore. They made the Siamese capital the redistribution point for the commerce of southern Indochina, the Gulf of Siam and most of the Malayan Peninsula.101 Lieberman points out that these changes allowed average annual royal income to rise over ten-fold between 1824 and 1851, compared to the period 1809 to 1824.102 Second, local traders of the Trans-Mekong area from Laos and Cambodia were discouraged from going to war-torn Vietnam and instead be attracted to carrying their products to the Chao Phraya basin.103 The new frontier of Chinese cane-growing was opened around 1810 by Teochiu migrants to the southeastern provinces of Siam, who were particularly encouraged by Rama I and Rama II. Siam’s 101

Anthony Reid, ‘A New Phase of Commercial Expansion’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 69. 102 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1:309. 103 Puangthong Rungswasdisd, ‘Siam and the Contest for Control of the Trans-Mekong Trading Networks’, in Cooke and Li (eds), Water Frontier, p. 105.

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sugar production expanded to 20,000 tons in the 1850s, which was Siam’s largest export earner before the rise of commercial rice exports from midcentury.104 In the early 1820s when maritime statistics first become available, Bangkok’s shipping was five times greater than that of Rangoon and twice that of Vietnamese ports. With its pragmatic, cosmopolitan outlook, Siam harnessed growing maritime trade more effectively than did Vietnam. This, coupled with Nguyen policies (see Chapter 10), prevented the resurrection of Cochinchina’s once world-renowned sugar economy, an indication of the serious setback from which Vietnam’s maritime commercial economy would need a very long time to recover. Conclusion By the early 1700s a new Cochinchina was beginning to take shape in the waters of the Mekong Delta and its surrounding coastline. The vast shipping network laid the basis for much of the new system that defined the eighteenth-century Chinese junk trade, centred in merchant houses of Canton’s Hong merchants and by the 1760s operating on a much grander scale than ever before. The ports and commercial enterprises of the delta and its water frontier depended on a continuous circulation of commodities, primarily rice, capital, and a variety of transshipped goods like tin, gold, and rattan for its prosperity and growth. The rush to settle this region begun in the seventeenth century, attracting the attention of the expansionist Nguyen lords, initiating the region’s gradual political incorporation. As copper prices rose in Asia, a factor beyond the Nguyen control, it led to zinc currency, which fuelled massive speculation and excessive minting. By 1771, the consequences of these and other developments culminated in the kingdom’s destruction from within. The Tay Son rebellion destroyed the rebel realm, decimated its population and obliterated the old Canton trade. When Alexander Woodside points out that the Tay Son rebellion inaugurated modern Vietnamese history,105 he seems to suggest that it was a point of no return for Vietnam and particularly for the eighteenth-century Cochinchina. Why was the Tay Son so powerful and irresistible? No one in 1771, including the Tay Son themselves, could have imagined that a band of local mountaineers in a mere dozen years would be able to wipe out two long-established regimes – of the northern Le (357 years old) and the southern Nguyen (roughly 200 years old). The Tay Son rebels succeeded so spectacularly, and the thirtyyear war it perpetrated proved so thoroughly destructive, literally decimating the states and societies of the two Vietnams. 104 105

Bulbeck et al., Southeast Asia Exports, p. 109. Alexander B. Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1988), p. 3.

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Conclusion 283

In another way, the eighteenth-century Tay Son uprising resemble most the fifteenth-century Le war: Both grew from upcountry grievances and smallscale guerrilla bands into formidable military powers – in the latter case, a maritime power. It is hard to think otherwise. Equally hard is imagining that they transformed themselves so rapidly. That the Tay Son could rob the Nguyen lord’s ships in 1774, discussed below, and massacre at sea the royal family in 1776 proved that the Tay Son acquired maritime prowess early. This was certainly evident in 1786, only fifteen years after their uprising, when a northern scholar named Ngo Thi Chi provided a spectacular view of the Tay Son navy the very year that the Tay Son hero Nguyen Hue led his attack on Tongking. Passing the Nghe An coast:106 [Nguyen Hue] led thousands of ships [that] appeared from the sea. Nghe An folks climbed the mountain and watched the ships as the vessels and banners passed by, and they signed: ‘This is “bringing a poisonous snake to bite one’s own chicken”’. Chinh (the northerner who induced the southerners to attack the north) is indeed guilty, but we have never seen a scene this magnificent before.

Yet the Tay Son was no more than a military maritime power. The Nguyen’s well-developed, two-hundred-year maritime policy that favoured and encouraged commerce is missing from the Tay Son’s forty-year history, during its rule from the centre under Nguyen Nhac, the north under Nguyen Hue, or the south under Nguyen Lu. Their most remarkable maritime policy was simply the promotion of piracy in the South China Sea by recruiting allies among Chinese pirates.107 This policy appeared to be a desperate measure to save the Tay Son regime at its later stage but does reflect the true colour and the essence of the Tay Son regime throughout its life span, which was fundamentally established on brutality. The Tay Son left a legacy, or in Woodside’s words, inaugurated modern Vietnamese history, in that they developed the military elements of the

106

Ngo Thi Chi, Hoang Le Nhat thong chi [The unification record of the Imperial Lê]: ‘平…自 引船千艘，從海而出。乂安土民登山，望海外樓船旗幟，嘆曰：諺云： “負蛇咬家雞” 。彼誠有罪, 然亦曠世之舉也。’ In Sun Xun 孫遜, Trinh Khac Manh 鄭克孟, and Chen Yiyuan 陳益源 (eds), Yuenan hanwen xiaoshuo jicheng 越南漢文小說集成 [A collection of novels produced in Vietnam] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2011), vol. 8, p. 51. See also George Dutton, ‘The Hoang Le Nhat Thong Chi and Historiography of Late Eighteenth-Century’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36, 2 (Jun 2005), 171–190. 107 They recruited a new group of Chinese from the coastal China, after the 1782 massacre in the Mekong Delta. Dian H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Robert Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, 2003). Towards the end of the war Chinese pirate junks were the main navy forces of the Tay Son. In 1802 the battle at the Nhat Le harbour the Tay Son navy had over 100 Chinese pirate junks. Dai Nam Thuc Luc Chinh Bien [Chronicle of Greater Vietnam, Principal period] (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Culture and Linguistic Studies, 196), vol. 2, p. 556.

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Nguyen regime to the extreme,108 and left this to colour modern Vietnamese history. It is no wonder that Vietnamese nationalists found a treasure trove, or more accurately, a weapons trove, in the Tay Son. It fulfilled the requirements of both nationalist and Marxist historiography by embodying all the martial qualities most appealing to advocates of the twentieth-century Vietnamese revolution.109 The Tay Son’s strength grew out of, and reacted to, two hundred years of Nguyen rule. The economic gravity shifted to the south in such a way that the thirty-year civil war was fought ultimately between the two rival southern powers of Cochinchina, while the northern power Tongking had little say about its outcome. The helplessness of the northern power was highlighted by the gross humiliation of the Le emperor, Le Chieu Thong, in 1786 by the Tay Son conqueror, Nguyen Hue.110 In the Mekong Delta overseas Chinese played their most important, and sometimes pivotal, political and economic roles since the 1680s. Their active participation of Dang Trong politics could be seen in the beginning of the Tay Son rebellion, when the Chinese fought for opposing sides. The Tay Son murderous turn against Chinese stemmed more out of their hatred of their coastal and urban culture, as mentioned above, and it could also be viewed as the result of their wish to eliminate potential manpower they deemed alien, uncontrollable, and potentially useful to their enemies. Whatever the motive, the Tay Son proved to be the agent that significantly removed the Chinese as one of the key forces that had shaped the political landscape of the Mekong Delta for a century. As George Dutton points out, as a point of historical rupture, the Tay Son represented ‘the final drama in the gradual shift of political and economic power away from the northern Red River delta region’. Its eventual conquest of Tongking brought an end to that region’s political economy and commenced the process whereby southern power would come to ascendance on a territory that by 1802 would be known as Viet Nam.111

108

The Tay Son ‘enlisted all the male between 12 and 60 years old of Quy Nhon as soldiers’, Dai Nam Thuc Luc Chinh Bien, vol. 2, p. 549. 109 Li, The Nguyen Cochinchina, pp. 139–140. 110 When learned that the Le emperor offered him the hand of sixteen-year-old princess Ngoc Han, Nguyen Hue jokingly replied: ‘I have tried the women of the South but have never had women of the North. This time I would like to see how good they are!’ Nguyen Hue’s Tay Son generals responded with ‘a roar of laughter which was heard throughout the palace’. See Hoang Le Nhat Thong Chi, p. 64. 111 Dutton, Tay Son Uprising, p. 3.

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10

Ships and the Problem of Political Integration Transporting Rice in the New Empire

In the first volume of his monumental comparative study of Southeast Asia, Strange Parallels, Victor Lieberman compares three geographically based regions of Mainland Southeast Asia: namely, the western, central, and eastern mainlands. Lieberman saw coherence among these three regions because, he observed, each had integrated politically, economically and culturally as the result of a series of synchronised cycles in play between 1000 and 1830. Between about 800 and 1250 ce, all major states exhibited the characteristics of urbanism, commercial development, above-average population growth, territorial expansion, and political integration, creating conditions in which all states could then evolve into their modern form. Vietnam was different, according to Lieberman’s analysis. In contrast to its two neighbours, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam had historically failed to fully achieve sustainable political integration. Instead of three sustained imperial integrations, then, Lieberman sees only two, Thailand and Burma. Vietnamese integration remained incomplete. If true, his conclusion profoundly affects any interpretation of Vietnamese history that follows, not only its early modern phase but also by extension its modern phase as well. The causes were many. Among these, geography was perhaps one of the most important. The Empire of Dai Nam that emerged from the ashes of civil war in 1802 represented the unprecedented union of two regions long divided into rival Vietnamese states: Tongking or Dang Ngoai – associated with the North (Tongking) – and Cochinchina or Dang Trong – associated with most of the Centre and the South. In reality, this was a union of three regions, for Cochinchina had wrested it away from Cambodia little more than a century before. As a single political entity, the territory of this new state, which would be called Viet Nam, spanned fourteen parallels in longitude – about 1,650 kilometres from north to south in a straight line. To glance at a map, one might think this new territory resembles Burma, another very long country. And yet the two were actually very different. Most importantly, Vietnam historically has lacked a dominant, integrative river system like that of the Irrawaddy, which is 2,170 kilometres long. Of course, it does possess two great rivers – the Mekong and Red rivers, along with their massive deltas  – that form 285

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an important part of Vietnamese geography. But these two rivers serve only to integrate the northern and southern regions, leaving out the central region with its small rivers and high mountains. One can thus appreciated the longtime characterisation of Vietnam as, in Lieberman’s word, ‘fissiparous’. Interestingly, this was not always the case. After it won independence from China in the tenth century, the Kingdom of Dai Viet, whose territory roughly conformed to the North, relied on the integrative function of the Red River watershed (1,149 kilometres in total, about 410 in Vietnam), particularly its great delta, in much the same way Siam depended on the Chao Phraya (372 kilometres). It had inherited this dynamic from its political predecessor, Jiaozhi/ Jiaozhou, and the Annam Protectorate (see Chapters 1 and 2). But Dai Viet’s expansion south beyond the delta brought the rise of the de facto kingdom of Cochinchina in the seventeenth century (Chapter 8), which expanded further to the Mekong Delta by the eighteenth century. The commercial economy of the Mekong Delta was facilitated by the criss-cross of the various branches of the Mekong during the eighteenth century (Chapter 9). Thus, these two great rivers in Vietnamese geography serve well the purpose of territorial integration, but only regionally. What then encouraged unity across regions so newly bonded? In fact, some could argue that Vietnam did possess one potentially integrative alluvial feature: a 3,260-kilometre-long coastline. This book makes its role in the history of Dai Viet’s territorial formation between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries clear. And the conditions of Viet Nam’s formation in 1802 would suggest the primacy of this coastal artery, given that a single Vietnamese state now controlled it without hindrance from rivals or foes, a situation without precedent. Early nineteenth-century Vietnam continued its long maritime tradition, including a powerful navy. And yet, as this chapter shows, the coast played little unifying role, precisely as Lieberman alleges. Why did these potentially positive geographical, military and economic features fail to promote closer integration of the new state? This chapter investigates nineteenth-century Vietnam’s challenge of fully realising political integration by focusing on one of the most important economic factors, the imperial rice transportation. This system formed a major cornerstone of Nguyen policy, but the practical costs it assumed and operational failures it suffered combined to ensure that its coastal sea-lanes played a lesser unifying function performed by the major river systems of Burma and Siam. Coming to power in 1802, the Nguyen court immediately faced a number of unprecedented and intractable difficulties, several of which were to complicate and undermine the imperial rice transportation system, whose purpose the emperor and his ministers directed at political integration and the centralisation of power, not economic redistribution. The wider economic setting of the early nineteenth century however shaped the new regime’s predicament and over time undermined the new government’s hopes for a strong unitary state.

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The Economic Setting 287

The Economic Setting Having declared its existence in 1802, the Nguyen dynasty began to rule over the largest territory ever seen in traditional Vietnam’s history. Indeed, so large was its new kingdom that, for nearly three decades, the Nguyen court in Hue divided its peripheries into two autonomous regions. The Northern Citadel (Bac Thanh) ruled the territory of old Tongking from inside the old Le-Trinh capital of Thang Long; the Southern Citadel (Gia Dinh Thanh) governed from Gia Dinh over the ‘six provinces’ of the Mekong Delta and their immediate neighbours. The Nguyen court exerted only indirect oversight over these two regions from its capital (Kinh) in Hue, located in the central region. Nguyen Anh set up this ‘two citadels, one capital’ administration to recognise the geographic reality of the newly acquired S shape of the country on the one hand, and to break the North–South division of Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai of the previous two centuries on the other.1 Although he never spelled it out in any document, it is clear from sources that Gia Long assigned specific economic tasks to each of the different regions of his empire. It would seem that the new emperor would look to the South to economically support his new regime. After all, in his earlier days as Nguyen Anh, he knew the region well. He spent three decades in the lower Mekong Delta and Gulf of Siam regions, first as a refugee fleeing the Tay Son and later as the leader of the force that eventually crushed them. His fortunes reversed and power rose in these very lands and waters of southern Vietnam. Obviously, he understood the South’s potential to create wealth and had decades of experience successfully turning that wealth into power; therefore, he also understood its potential to create and maintain economic vitality to the benefit of the new state. Together, Vietnamese populations in the lower Mekong and Gulf of Siam formed a ‘water frontier’ (discussed in Chapter 9) that strategically placed them close to Penang, Melaka, and Batavia, the main suppliers of Western arms to the Nguyen in the 1780s and 1790s. Local produce paid for these imports: Sugar, pepper, salt, bird’s nest, betel nut, forest products, and dried fish all shipped to overseas markets. Dwarfing them all in volume was rice, whose export the Nguyen Anh prohibited in theory but tolerated in practice because he and his court recognised it was a mainstay commodity. In other words, he had seen the potential of Mekong rice to produce wealth and power great enough to vanquish his rivals and create his Vietnamese empire. It seems only logical, then, that Nguyen Anh would then use it to sustain himself as the Gia Long emperor. 1

Han Zhoujing, Guo Shengbo 韓周敬， 郭聲波 ‘Yuenan ruanchao chuqi “jing-cheng” zhengqu tizhi de neihan yu xiaowang 越南阮朝初期’京̶城’政區體製的內涵與消亡’ [The context and demise of the ‘Capital-Citadel’ division of the early Nguyen dynasty], Yunnan daxue xuabao 雲 南大學學報 [Journal of Yunnan University] 18, 1 (2019), 69.

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After he unified Vietnamese-speaking territories into his Empire of Viet Nam, the new emperor did not divert the flow of Saigon rice from overseas markets to feed his new capital, Hue, in central Vietnam. Instead, Gia Long looked to the north, assigning the job of rice supply to the people of the populous Red River Delta. Gia Long’s plan, then, was to supply the heavy demands of his court and the rice-poor region surrounding his capital by transporting rice from the north while allowing the south to continue developing its overseas markets. In this way, both regions would sustain the political centre – one with rice, the other with revenue. This strategy seems to have been designed not only to fund the state and strengthen the political centre but also to redistribute wealth to the Centre and thereby reduce the regional divisions of the previous two centuries. Both these tasks needed maritime muscle. The early nineteenth century was an unpropitious time for such experiments, however. Although Gia Long would never know it, a global downturn in commodity markets triggered by the Napoleon Wars (1798–1815) depressed the world markets which had seen a near century expansion, and the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) reduced the silver output by half (see Table 10.1).2 This decline in world silver output had consequences on world trade. As Lin Man-houng points out, Western silver shipments to India began to decrease in the early 1800s when the trade began to take the form of merchandise rather than silver export.3 Silver from India had been a crucial source of capital invested in the Canton trade, as revealed in Chapter 9. The entire context of the world trade had changed but there was no way that the emperor Gia Long could have known. He must have assumed that the prosperous export commodities trade, buoyant throughout the eighteenth century, would maintain its resilience into the nineteenth. Table 10.1  World silver production 1781–1820s (million ounces) (1781–1810 = 100) 1781–1810 1810s 1820s

28 17.4 14.8

100 62 52.8

Source: Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920 (London: NLB, 1976), p. 331. 2

Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘The Worldwide Economic Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006), p. 130. 3 Man-Houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), p. 112.

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The Economic Setting 289

The massive contraction in silver circulation could only have hurt Gia Long’s state-building ambitions. After all, the new Dai Nam emperor and his advisors committed to a strategy not unlike his ancestors, which depended in large part on revenue streams flowing from the export markets of Vietnam’s southern water frontier at precisely the moment the world’s eighteenth-century commercial boom began to collapse. This could only have undermined the Nguyen empire’s ability to achieve the same level of political integration as its mainland neighbours. Southeast Asia in general was the exception in this global economic downturn, according to David Bulbeck. Its clove, pepper, and sugar exports actually grew. Sugar export, for example, doubled between 1788 and 1805, and pepper almost doubled between 1802 and 1804, though not a kilogram of these commodities originated in Vietnam.4 One key cash crop produce which mattered greatly to the Mekong Delta was betel nuts. China’s annual consumption of areca nuts in the 1820s was between 30 and 40,000 piculs,5 while we do not have the figure for the eighteenthcentury consumption, in 1767 alone the three ports of Bassac, Cochinchina, and Cancao exported 27,200 piculs.6 This suggests that Cochinchina likely supplied two-thirds of the areca nuts consumed in China in the late eighteenth century if the demand was similar.7 Indeed, betel production ranked second only to rice in volume.8 This production attracted considerable wealth to the region and explains why it, along with rice and other key commodities, formed the basis of the broader Cochinchinese economy until its demise in 1774. It should be no surprise that Nguyen Anh, descendent of the old Nguyen lords of Cochinchina, followed the precedent of his ancestors and taxed commercial exports as the major source of his new state’s revenue. Symptomatic of the general commercial decline, however, by the 1820s the price of betel nuts had dropped by over 80 per cent.9 4

David Bulbeck et al., Southeast Asian Exports Since the 14th Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), p. 88 for pepper, p. 119 for sugar. 5 Penang Register, 14 May 1828, quoted in Canton Register 1, 25, June 1828. 6 Alexander Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory (London: East India Company, 1808), vol. 1:281– 283. This might not be the highest amount that Cochinchina exported in the eighteenth century. In 1758–1759, the Dutch in Canton reported to the Directors that ‘an extraordinary amount’ of areca nuts had been brought there from Cochinchina, causing the price to fall. Paul van Dyke, ‘Canton Record’, MS, p. 2. 7 Crawfurd said in the 1820s that the most productive place of this article was in Sumatra, but its products seemed to have been brought to India rather than to China. John Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Island and Adjacent Countries (1856) (reprint Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 20. 8 Le Quy Don, Phu bien tap luc, q. 6, p. 244a. 9 ‘Its price dropped from six to one’, noted Crawfurd, in Journal of an Embassy from the GovernorGeneral of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China (1826, reprint Kuala Lumpur: Oxford

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Pepper prices fell just as dramatically during the same decades: In Canton, pepper from Cochinchina sold in 1767 for 12.54 taels per picul; by 1836, pepper from the same region attracted less than half that price, a mere 5.78 tael per picul.10 Trinh Hoai Duc reported that the Mekong Delta exported 100,000 can (50 tons) of pepper per year,11 yet one is not sure which era he was reporting on. Jean Chaigneau, who made his report in the same year as Trinh, said that the taxes on pepper had been so high that its cultivation areas had been greatly reduced, and its prices fluctuated most irregularly.12 Sugar was most damagingly affected. Eighteenth-century Cochinchina had exported a considerable volume of this commodity, discussed in Chapter 9. By 1822, however, it failed to even make the list of the Vietnamese exports that John Crawfurd compiled during his famed embassy to Asia because it was under government monopoly and the quality was inferior to that of Siam, of the Philippines, and of Java.13 Here, Crawfurd pinpoints a crucial factor: The South’s continued loss of Chinese expertise and capital. Vietnamese historian Nguyen Dinh Dau points out: ‘Among all the six provinces of the South, Bien Hoa had the highest amount of land for sugar cane cultivation. There used to be many sugar refineries in Bien Hoa making white sugar (Duong cat). The famous white sugar exported overseas had been from Bien Hoa.’14 What the Mekong Delta used to produce was indeed extraordinarily rich and enormous. What Trinh Hoai Duc reported (see Table 10.2) seemed to have reflected the former Gia Dinh than the one in the early nineteenth century. Yet evidence suggests that the export economy upon which Cochinchina had built its strength in the eighteenth century had been seriously eroded by the opening decades of the early nineteenth century. As a result, the Nguyen emperors could not rely on the Mekong Delta as Gia Long and his advisors had hoped, because it was simply less economically dependable than it had been in the days of his forefathers. University Press, 1967), p. 520; J. B. Chaigneau, ‘Le commerce en Cochinchine vers 1820, d’apres J. B. Chaigneau’, in Georges Taboulet, La Geste Francaise en Indochine (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1955), vol. 1:297. 10 For 1767, see Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 1:281–283. For 1836, see The Canton Press, 17 September 1836. 11 Trinh Hoai Duc, Gia Dinh thanh Thong Chi [Unified gazette of Gia Dinh] (Hanoi: Nxb Giao Duc, 1999), p. 417. 12 Chaigneau, ‘Le commerce en Cochinchine vers 1820’, p. 297. 13 Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy, p. 474. 14 Nguyen Dinh Dau (ed.), Nghien cuu dia ba trieu Nguyen: Bien Hoa [Cadastral studies of Nguyen Dynasty: Bien Hoa] (Hochiminh City: Ho Chi Minh City Press, 1994), 130. As late as ̀ land for rice cultiva1836, 93 per cent of land for cash crop production (thô ̉, differ from d̄iên, tion) of Bien Hoa was kept for sugar cane cultivation. Dau, Nghien cuu dia ba trieu Nguyen: Bien Hoa, p. 129. What is not clear is the species of sugar cane the 1830s Bien Hoa produced. According to Trinh Hoai Duc, only one kind of sugar cane produced white sugar and this type was only found in Bien Hoa. Gia Dinh Thanh Thong Chi, 412.

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Official Rice Shipping from the North to the Capital

291

Table 10.2  Cash crops export from the Mekong Delta (early nineteenth century?) Commodity

can (1 can = 500 grams)

Sugar Cardamom Amomum Pepper Cotton Yellow wax Trepang Shark fin Fish maw

600,000 20,000 80,000 100,000 4,000,000 30,000 50,000 50,000 50,000

Source: Trinh Hoai Duc, Gia Dinh Thanh Thong Chi, 412–417.

Climatic downturn in the early nineteenth century compounded the empire’s difficulties. Between 1802 and 1820, when Gia Long reigned, Vietnam suffered almost continuously bad weather. For those nineteen years, court records note fourteen droughts, sixteen floods, and nine typhoons.15 By contrast, the first twenty years of the eighteenth century saw only two droughts, four floods and two typhoons, this included both Tongking and Cochinchina.16 The combination of climatic and commercial woes proved debilitating for the Nguyen. Nothing illustrates this better than the empire’s rice transport system, upon which the function of the state and survival of the dynasty depended. Tao Van: Official Rice Shipping from the North to the Capital Before the Nguyen court imposed it in 1802, the people of Tongking probably had never heard the term of the new imperial grain shipping system, ‘Tao Van’. The old northern capital of Thang Long had never needed such a scheme. Located in the heart of the Red River Delta, where a myriad of rivers and waterways crisscross, the capital simply procured the rice it needed 15

Dai Nam thuc luc Chinh Bien [Chronicle of Greater Vietnam, Principal period (of the Nguyen)], (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Culture and Linguistic Studies, 1968), I (Gia Long Reign); Phan Thuc Truc, Quoc su di bien [A collection of lost history] (Hong Kong: New Asia Research Institute, 1965), pp. 6–109. 16 Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [The complete annals of Dai Viet]. Completed 1479. New edition, ed. Chen Chingho (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyobunka kenkyujo, 1986), pp. 1030– 1040; Dai Nam thuc luc, Tien bien [Chronicle of Nguyen Dynasty, premier period] (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Linguistic Studies, 1961), pp. 108–117.

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through the region’s markets, from private merchants who procured the rice through a vast network of small-boat transporters from producers in the vast rice fields of the surrounding plain.17 The people of the central and southern regions, in the old domain of Cochinchina, knew the word tao van all too well. It had existed there under the old Nguyen lords a full century before their descendent Gia Long resurrected it for his new dynasty. The land surrounding the old Cochinchinese capital in Hue had historically been poor for riziculture, so population growth quickly outstripped rice yields, encouraging the Nguyen lords from the earliest days of their kingdom to look further south for rice. Early in the seventeenth century, they looked to the neighbouring countries of Siam and Cambodia. After settlers of the Mekong Delta had begun producing commercial rice, in 1768 the court assigned over 341 boats to transport grain north to Hue.18 Major differences existed between the Tao Van system of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth, however. First, eighteenth-century rice shipments to Hue were largely handled through commercial networks,19 in contrast with the early nineteenth century when the task fell mainly to the navy. Second, the Tao Van rice in the eighteenth century flowed from the South to the Centre, in contrast to the nineteenth century when it flowed in the opposite direction, from the North to the Centre. In other words, the source of government rice switched from the Mekong Delta to the Red River Delta. This switch from

17

Vietnamese historian Nguyen Thua Hy described this situation as: ‘Situated on the crossroads of both river and land transportation, the existence of the dense population and a huge civil and military machine with their daily needs of consumption, a vast number of peasants would rush to all the markets of Thang Long so that they could sell directly to the consumers. Rice was the number one important commodities of these agricultural products.’ Nguyen Thua Hy, Thang Long-Ha Noi the ky XVII-XVIII-XIX [Thang Long-Hanoi in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] (Hanoi: Hoi su hoc Viet Nam, 1993), p. 89. 18 Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: SEAP, Cornell University, 1998), p. 146. The earliest record citing tao van 漕运 is dated 1701, when the court ordered junks from different provinces to hang flags of different colours. Dai Nam thuc luc Tien Bien, p. 104. 19 One example is found from the Qing archives: ‘Lunar 26 March 1761: Tran Van Tuy from Quang Ngai of the Quang Nam Protectorate bought a two-rudder junk and hired the helmsmen Le Van Minh. Together with the 10 women of his family Le Thi and Nguyen Thi, they set sail on the lunar 10th of January 1760 from the port of Quang Ngai to the port of Gia Dinh prefecture of the same Quang Nam Protectorate. With their empty junk they loaded another 20 people, including some farmers and Le Van Nhu and women Dang Thi and Vo Thi. On the 4th of May these [30] people carried 400 piculs of rice and sailed for Hoi An. On their way, they met fierce wind and huge waves. Being afraid of sinking, they threw away half of the rice on board and drifted at sea. On the 4th of June they arrived at Baisha port in Qiongshan district [Hainan Island].’ See ‘Liang Guang zongdu Li Daixian tibao Qianlong 25 nian fenfa yinan fangui qiben’ [Liang Guang governor’s Li Daixian memorial of the year of Qianlong 25th on issuing a time for returnees from the south], in Zhongguo di yi lishi dang’an guan (ed.), Xiangshan Ming–Qing dang’an jigao [Ming and Qing archival material kept in the Xiangshan District] (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 2006), p. 429. The four women on board would most likely have been traders of rice.

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Official Rice Shipping from the North to the Capital 293 Table 10.3  Taxpayers (đinh) in the Red River Delta and Mekong Delta, 1819 Red River Delta

đinh 丁

Mekong Delta

đinh丁

Bac Ninh Son Tay Hai Duong Nam Dinh Ninh Binh Total

43,900 35,400 23,900 58,003 9,100 170,303

Bien Hoa Gia Dinh Dinh Tuong Vinh Long An Giang

10,600 28,200 19,800 37,000 ? 95,600

Source: Dai Nam nhat thong chi [Gazetteer of Dai Nam] states that these figures on taxpayers were created during Gia Long’s reign, but it does not specify the year they were produced. The stated number of taxpayers – 612,912 – allegedly represents all registered dinh in the entire country for 1819. See also Nguyen The Anh, Kinh te va xa hoi Viet-Nam duoi cac vua trieu Nguyen [Vietnam’s economy and society in the Nguyen dynasty] (Saigon: Lua Thieng, 1970), pp. 25–26.

the south to the north made sense from Gia Long’s point of view. Table 10.3 shows that the official number of taxpayers in the Red River Delta doubled that of the Mekong Delta, although the actual demographic gap between the two populations most likely was much wider.20 Moreover, Vietnamese had been cultivating northern lands for thousands of years, and over time they had become subject to elaborate forms of classification and tax registration before Gia Long. Much of the land tax in the Mekong Delta region, by contrast, was assessed not according to actual size, but simply on the basis of generic parcels (khoảnh in Vietnamese) as Table 10.4 shows. Most provinces of the South did not measure landholdings before 1836, more than three decades into the empire’s existence and sixteen years after Gia Long’s death. Relatively light taxation in the South reflects not only the emperor’s practical interests but also his political sentiment. For thirty years, the South had supported Nguyen Anh, the future Gia Long, in his wars against the Tay Son, with rice, ships, iron, cannons, artilleries, silk, and labour, all of them crucial to the ultimate victory over his rival. Southerners had endured heavy taxes 20

The number of potential taxpayers in both delta regions were most likely underestimated, although it shows the impacts of the thirty-year civil war. In the early 1830s, the French missionary Marette had a list given to him that showed 611,219 registered tax payers for 1830, but he then added, ‘people assure me that perhaps more than two-thirds of the men who should be inserted are not on it; this trickery is known to the king as well as to the villagers; but the law would be intolerable if there was not this means of eluding it, and the peasants would have to abandon their fields [if everyone was subjected to the tax regime], given the weight of the exorbitant taxes that overwhelm this subjugated or impoverished people.’ Annales de la propagation de la foi 6 (1832–1834), 50–51. Thanks to Nola Cooke for this information.

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Ships and the Problem of Political Integration Table 10.4  Registered lands (dien) of the Red River Delta and Mekong Delta before 1831 Red River Delta

mau

Mekong Delta

mau

Bac Ninh Son Tay Hai Duong Nam Dinh Hoai Duc

448,382 355,096 376,397 489,190 4199

Bien Hoa Gia Dinh Dinh Tuong Vinh Long Ha Tien

1,977 627 6,566 lots 9,269 57 lots

Total

1,673,264

Total

?

Source: ‘Thong quoc dinh dien san vat thue le’ 通国丁田产物税例 [Taxpayers, lands, products and taxes of the entire country], in Nam bac cac hat chu phu huyen xa thon [The hamlets, villages, districts and prefectures South to North]. MS, Han-Nom Institute, shelve number VHv.1720. The year of this document produced would have been before 1836, when Ming Mang carried out a programme measuring the land and population in the entire country.

during every year of this three-decade war and, in two cases, even had to pay levies two years in advance.21 In his first year as emperor, 1802, Gia Long reduced the Mekong region’s land taxes by one-fifth for the next three years (1803–1805) and waived its taxes on cash-crop production and trade for the next five years (1803–1807).22 Thus, it fell to the North to shoulder the burden of nourishing the royal family, court, military, and officials of Hue while also paying the monthly salaries of Nguyen officials all over the Vietnamese empire. This was an unprecedented set of affairs for the once powerful Tongking. The Danger of Typhoons for the Northern Convoys Hue’s dependence on the North for its vital supply of rice created a form of vulnerability that nature compounded because north-to-south coastal transit faced the constant danger of unpredictable and intense storms. Northern and central Vietnam both lie in a geographical position highly exposed to typhoons, much more so than southern Vietnam or the greater Gulf of Siam region, two areas Gia Long remembered well from his early wartime days. Unfortunately, the chief northern ports of the imperial rice transportation system, concentrated in the major rice production, storage, and distribution province of Nam 21

In 1794, not only did Gia Long levy taxes for 1794 but also for 1795. In 1800, he did it again, collecting taxes for 1801 from the southern region. Dai Nam thuc luc Chinh bien (here after Chinh Bien), I, 407–408. 2 2 Chinh Bien, vol. 1, q. 19, 603.

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The Danger of Typhoons for the Northern Convoys 295

Dinh, had to bear the greatest number of typhoons.23 Then and now, the entire Red River-Day River estuarine area that feeds northern ports like Nam Dinh regularly faces storm-induced incursions from the high seas. Between 1990 and 2000, for instance, eight to ten typhoons struck this area, generating wind forces of a magnitude of nine to ten on the Beaufort scale. This fact places Nam Dinh among the top ten coastal provinces in Vietnam affected by typhoons.24 The storm season varies from region to region as well. The North faces its typhoons between June and August, the Centre between August and October, and the South between November and March. This put Gia Long’s navy in a difficult position because they had to carry out the imperial rice transportation during regional storm seasons. Nguyen regulations dictated that the navy would supply the capital in two convoys; the first would leave the capital sometime around lunar 19–21 April and return in late lunar May while the second departed on lunar 21–22 June and returned on lunar 23–24 July.25 The entire process took time: boats had to first pick up rice at provincial collecting points located throughout the region and then transport it to the downriver port of Nam Dinh for loading onto the maritime transports. The convoys often got held up, were sometimes late on arrival, and all too frequently sailed straight into the middle of unexpected typhoon storms. Charles Gutzlaff, an experienced traveller of the nineteenth-century South China Sea region, described the typhoons in the Tongking area: Those who have never witnessed the typhoons which sweep this country from one extremity to the other, will look upon a faithful description of this fearful visitation as overdrawn. Though earthquakes and the eruption of volcanoes may be far more terrific, still if one wishes to form an idea of the last moment when heaven and earth shall pass away, he may take the initiation of a typhoon. It is as if everything were devoted to destruction, and the world were again to return to a chaos. No words can convey an idea of such an awful moment, and the violence of the tempest in which man is scarcely an atom.

‘Such is the scourge with which Tunkin is frequently visited’, he concluded, ‘and in which northern Cochin-China occasionally participates.’26 23

‘Tan Lieu is in the district of Dai An, which is the entrance of Tao van ships and Chinese junks’ 遼汛 在大安縣，京艚北艚出入之道. Dong Khanh Dia du chi [The descriptive geography of the emperor Dong Khanh], ed. Ngo Duc Tho, Nguyen Van Nguyen, and Philippe Papin (Hanoi: École francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 2003), vol. 1:299. 24 John Kleinen, ‘Access to Natural Resources for Whom! Aquaculture in Nam Dinh, Vietnam’, Maritime Studies 2, 2 (2006), 42–43 (www.marecentre.nl/mast/documents/artikel32.2.pdf, accessed 20 September 2008). 25 Kham dinh Dai Nam Hoi dien su le [Official compendium of institutions and usages of Imperial Vietnam], Tao Chinh [Policies of imperial grain shipping] (Hue: Nxb. Thuan Hoa, 1993), vol. 15:345–355. 26 Karl Gutzlaff, ‘Geography of the Cochin-Chinese Empire’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 19 (1849), 127.

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Table 10.5  Monthly frequency of typhoons which struck the district regions of Vietnam, 1954–1991 Region

Jan

Feb

Mar Apr May Jun

Jul

Aug Sep

Oct

Nov Dec Total

Northern Central Southern Vietnam

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 3 3

24 0 0 24

28 14 0 42

7 35 6 48

1 6 20 27

0 1 1 2

0 2 1 3

15 0 7 22

22 23 3 48

0 0 6 6

97 81 47 225

Source: Fumihiko Imamura and Dang Van To, ‘Flood and Typhoon Disasters in Viet Nam in the Half Century since 1950’, Natural Hazards 15, 1 (1997), 77.

To make the situation worse, Nguyen naval officers had little experience or knowledge of this phenomenon. The northern and southern regions of the empire had been separated for 200  years when Gia Long took the throne. His naval officers all came from the Mekong Delta and the Gulf of Siam – the water frontier of the far south – where typhoons rarely struck and utterly lacked familiarity with the northern coasts they now had to regularly navigate. It was no coincidence, then, that the very first imperial transportation fleet met a typhoon and suffered heavy losses. The disaster stunned Gia Long:27 Last autumn (1802) when transporting by the sea, ships were struck by a big wind and sank between Bac Thanh and Thanh Hoa. Over 500 soldiers of different divisions drowned. When this was reported to the emperor he was saddened and ordered that the dead be compensated with money. [He also ordered officers to] set up an altar to pray for them in the Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue.

As Table 10.5 shows, the tragedy of autumn 1802 happened at exactly the time of the year when typhoons occurred most frequently in central Vietnam. These factors combined to make the imperial rice transportation system a chronically risky operation that suffered heavy losses. More tragically, this fifth-month rice harvest and its prompt shipment to the central region ran counter to the logic of the monsoons. In July, monsoons changed direction from the north-east to the south-west. This was the time that Chinese junks started sailing back from Southeast Asia to home ports on the Chinese coast. In contrast, Vietnam’s imperial shipping sailed in the opposite direction – from north to south – just as all other junks were transiting from south to north. As a consequence, many ships met with storms and were lost on their way back, taking imperial rice and human lives with them. 27

Chinh Bien, I:611.

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The Danger of Typhoons for the Northern Convoys 297 Table 10.6  Numbers of ships in official shipping and shipwrecks, 1849–1883 Year

Lost

1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1857 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1883

24 11 34 45 46 15 17 11 52 12 25 17 50 3 45 11 19

476 370 540 612 613 493 650 418 362 440 298 317 583 59 290 213 69

437 806

6,803 11,322

Subtotal Total

Total

Year

Lost

Total

1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881

17 14 52 51 9 25 40 20 9 9 22 30 10 15 10 36

96 304 362 226 249 224 416 324 273 403 458 345 150 257 156 276

%

369 7.11%

4,519

Source: Dai Nam Thuc Luc, reigns III and IV.

The hazard of coastal sea travel is verified by the consistent annual data on ships lost during a later period of the dynasty’s history, from 1849 to 1883 (see Table 10.6). Of the 11,322 junks that the Nguyen court employed in all state shipping, most of which travelled between northern and central Vietnam, 806 were reportedly lost at sea. This translates into 7 per cent of the total shipping fleet. These figures can be compared to those of the Chinese maritime grain transportation system operated by the Qing government during the same century. Average Chinese shipwreck in Qing operation was 2.05 per cent with its coastal and 0.5 per cent with the Grand Canal shipping.28 Vietnam therefore suffered shipping losses about four times greater than those borne by their northern neighbour. Yet such risk was to take for the survival of the Nguyen dynasty which depended on the steady flow of strategic commodities from the North, key among them rice, coins, and labourers. 28

Ni Yuping, ‘Daoguang 6 nian caoliang haiyun di jige wenti’ [Several issues on the maritime imperial grain transportation in 1826 CE], Qingshi yanjiu [Studies in Qing history] 3 (2003), 73; Li Wenzhi and Jiang Taiqin, Qingdai caoyun [The imperial grain transportation of the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995), p. 49.

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Rice, Coins, and Labour from the North Every year, convoys of between 120 and 180 imperial ships sailed from Hue to Nam Dinh to supply the government and the capital region with rice.29 The rice nourished not only the people of the Nguyen court and the central region but also the political stability of the empire. During the 1840s the Nguyen requisitioned 60,000 phuong (2,000 metric tons) of white rice and paddy per year from the south, compared to 450,000 phuong (13,500 tons) of paddy annually from the north.30 In other words, the rice-rich South fulfilled a mere 13 per cent of the state’s aggregate quota, while the North carried the burden of meeting well over 80 per cent of that total. Rice was not the only commodity the Nguyen state appropriated from Tongking. Specie also flowed in a steady stream from the North to the Centre. During the nineteenth century, Tongking mints cast coins that supplied Vietnam’s currency needs thanks to their proximity to Yunnan and the zinc mines of the North’s mountains. In addition to the mints, the entire production process involved mining, fuel harvesting, and transport – signifying altogether a long and large supply chain and a huge undertaking. On top of this, during the early nineteenth century, the court dispatched 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers from Tongking to Hue each year during the dry season to build the new palace. This practice had not existed in either Tongking or Cochinchina during the previous two centuries; in fact, Gia Long had probably learned this practice in earlier days from the Chakkri rulers of nearby Siam.31 Since the Red River Delta did not produce as much cash crop as the Mekong Delta, these three items – rice, specie, and labour – became the North’s principal contribution to the dynasty. In China, the imperial transport system integrated with domestic commerce to give it a greater role in the Chinese economy. Whenever transport ships visited ports, they exchanged grain grown in southern China for local commodities such as cotton, silk and silk fabrics, fur, and beans from northern China to name a few. The seventeenth-century Qing court allowed each commercial junk owner registered with the rice tribute system to carry 60 dan (3,600 kg) of goods aboard his junk and to sell in the north; this increased to 100 dan (6,000 kg) in the 1730s; by the 1820s, that allowance had increased three-fold to 180 dan (10,800 kg).32 The private cargoes carried by over 3,000 junks thus itself 29

Later, southern Vietnam also shipped rice to the capital, but only once a year, departing around 22 May and returning in late June, well outside the storm season (Kham dinh Dai Nam Hoi dien Su le, ‘Tao chinh’ [Policies on the imperial grain transportation], pp. 345–355). 30 Kham dinh Dai Nam Hoi dien Su le, ‘Tao chinh’, p. 345. Judging from the records, this largely reflects the situation of the previous decades. 31 Larry Sternstein, ‘The Growth of the Population of the World’s Preeminent “Primate City”: Bangkok at its Bicentenary’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, 1 (1984), 59. 32 Jiang Taiqin and Su Jinyu, ‘Caoyun yü Huai’an Qingdai jinji’ [Imperial shipping and Huai’an’s economy in the Qing era], Xuehai zazhi 2 (2007), 57.

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How Large Was the Northern Drain? 299

formed a considerable addition to the existing commerce that circulated along the China coast. Thus, the state-sponsored convoys actually played a stimulative role in China’s domestic interregional trade. It is still premature to make any firm comparisons with Vietnam, as this commercial aspect deserves careful further study. However, none of the present data suggests that the Vietnamese system allowed the commercial functions accepted in China.33 In the Gia Long era, operational control over the system largely fell into the hands of the imperial navy, which did not allow private ship owners to participate.34 Essentially, the flow of goods moved in a unidirectional flow from North to Centre as the naval convoys hauled rice and other requisitioned goods from north to south without simultaneously generating interregional circulation. To sum up, the Nguyen court allowed only a limited range and volume of commodities to flow between northern, central, and southern Vietnam through its imperial shipping system. This proved disastrous for the historically prosperous North, for whom the system proved to be a slow but constant drain on its resources. By bleeding the Red River Delta region of its commercial lifeblood rather than invigorating it, the Nguyen court appears to have been undermining its political viability through its own policies. This may have benefited the Nguyen court in the short term, but in the long run, siphoning northern resources could only have undermined the empire’s commercial base, undermined an important source of political power. It is important, then, to determine the severity of this drain on the North by quantifying the size of the imperial requisitions of goods – most important among them, rice. How Large Was the Northern Drain? What percentage of the rice produced in the Red River Delta did the imperial rice transportation system monopolise? Statistics quantifying land areas and taxpayers do exist, but they can only be regarded as indicative rather than definitive.35 Additionally, the lack of figures that indicate yields (in Vietnam yield per mau) make it impossible to gauge productivity. However, since this question is important to the overall understanding of early nineteenth-century Vietnam, I will try to use available data to estimate the rice output of the early 33

There is no such indication in either the Nguyen chronicle or the Nguyen Archives. See Muc luc Chau Ban trieu Nguyen [Catalogue of the Nguyen Archives (1802–1825)], 2 volumes (Hue: Ban Phien-dich su lieu Viet-Nam, 1962). 34 Muc luc Chau Ban trieu Nguyen, vol. 1. 35 In his monumental work Peasants of the Tonkin Delta, Pierre Gourou repeatedly warns against the dangerous reliance on figures given by the mandarins without a critical examination. See Peasants of the Tonkin Delta (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1955).

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nineteenth-century Red River Delta, so as to conceptualise the magnitude of the Tao Van and to what extent it affected people’s lives in Tongking. In 1936 the yields from fifth-month and tenth-month rice (lua chiem and lua mua), both produced on irrigated and unirrigated land in the Red River Delta, totalled 2.2 million tons and averaged 2,248 kilograms per hectare.36 Tongking’s output compares to neighbouring Guangxi province, whose yields during the Qing dynasty averaged 2,340 kilograms per hectare.37 Java’s average rice output in 1815 reached 1,650 kilograms per hectare per harvest.38 If 2,000 kilograms acts as a benchmark for estimating Tongking’s cultivable area during the early 1830s (2,143,681 mau or 142,768 hectares), then the average yield at that time would have equalled about 285,000 tons per year. This figure – 2,000 kilograms per year per hectare – was intentionally kept low in order to take into consideration the ‘drifting villages’, where villagers deserted after the war, and their half-abandoned fields, adjusting for the wide variations in yields between the best and worst cultivated land.39 Before 1831 the cultivated land on the Red River Delta plains totalled about 142,000 hectares. This total most likely represents an underreported figure. However, accepting it as a general guide, it becomes possible to estimate that the rice being shipped out of the Red River Delta would have averaged fewer than 5 per cent of the total harvest. Assuming a lower level of productivity – say, 1,500 kilograms per hectare – suggests that production could have reached 214,000 metric tons per year. From this, it is possible to estimate that the Nguyen court expropriated 5 to 6 per cent of Tongking’s total rice production.40 In either case, the rice shipped out of the Red River Delta region would have constituted a modest portion of total production. 36

Pierre Gourou quoted the exact measurements of a few localities in 1933 and 1934: Son Tay, 2,360 kg; Bac Giang, 1,795 kg; Lang Giang, 1,783 kg; Vinh Yen, 1,694 kg; and Thuong Tin, 2,040 kg, per crop and per hectare. See Gourou, Peasants of the Tonkin Delta, 1:428–439. Rice yields in the Red River Delta of the 1990s could reach between 4 and 6 tons per crop per hectare. See Le Trong Cuc and Terry Rambo, Too Many People, Too Little Land (Honolulu: East West Center, 1993), pp. 104–105. 37 Luo Lixin, ‘Guangxisheng di mijia ji miliang liutong (1714–1784)’ [Rice price and circulation in Guangxi, 1714–1784], Xingda renwen xuebao [Chung Hsing University Journal of Humanities] 34 (2004), 779. 38 Peter Boomgaard and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Changing Economy in Indonesia, vol. 10, Food Crops and Arable Lands, Java 1815–1942 (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1990), p. 41. 39 The problem of drifted villages after the Tay Son era was serious. This was reflected in many districts in Tongking recorded in 1813. See Vien Nghien cuu Han-Nom, Ten lang xa Viet Nam dau the ky XIX [Village names of the early nineteenth century] (Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1981), pp. 35, 52–54, 69–82, 84–93, 99–103, 111. For analysis see Yumio Sakurai, ‘Peasant Drain and Abandoned Villages in the Red River Delta between 1750 and 1850’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 133–152. 40 The average was 1,400 kg per hectare (Gourou, Peasants of the Tonkin Delta, p. 432).

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How Large Was the Northern Drain? 301

And yet by some measures, this quantity may not have been so harmless. Contemporary Siam, the primary rice exporter of the region, exported but 2.5 to 3 per cent of its rice production annually and only rarely reached 5 per cent of the crop.41 If 5 per cent proved too much for rice-rich Siam to ban rice export in its bad years, then the Nguyen court’s annual expropriations from the much poorer and more populous Red River Delta would be anything but insignificant. This 5-per cent portion of rice that the Nguyen now requisitioned from the Red River Delta had long been the major cash earner for the peasants of the region. Indeed, in some cases, rice was the only major commodity for sale. That rice could be obtained from the Red River Delta freely is confirmed by the Chronicle of Dai Viet (Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu), which offers a 1758 report as follows: Merchant ships from China often gather at the sea gates of the southeastern part of the country (Dong Nam Hai Mon, i.e. the eastern coast of the Gulf of Tongking). [They] use small boats to buy rice from the local people. Because the profit is big, masses of people come to sell rice to them and everywhere they went became a market. [The court] thus ordered officials to find appropriate locations to open markets and make sure that the weighing was fair and that the markets opened and closed at the right times.42

The Le-Trinh court of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly encouraged rice exports. Checking the Good Policies of the Le (Le Trieu Chieu Lenh Thien Chinh), one of the main sources on seventeenth-century Le policies, there was not a single record, statute, or edict in which the court forbade rice export, even during the 1660s, a time revival among Confucian literati, when the state imposed many restrictions on trade and travel.43 In short, the ban on rice exports from the Red River Delta seems to have been a nineteenth-century phenomenon that occurred for the first time under the Nguyen dynasty. The policy’s rationale lay in the first emperor’s perspective on the political economy of rice in his new empire. His view makes sense, given the key role the grain played as a crucial strategic good in his long and arduous rise to power, during which he skilfully used it as a political tool to, among other things, attract Western and Chinese merchants who could provide him with a steady supply of arms, zinc, saltpeter, and a host of other military hardware and raw materials.44 In other words, Nguyen Anh learned early 41

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 1: 305–306. 42 Ngo Si Lien, Dai Viet su ky Toan Thu, p. 1145. 43 Le Trieu trieu linh Thien Chinh 黎朝詔令善政 [Good policies contained in the imperial edicts of the Le Dynasty], compiled 1705–1709, trans. Nguyen Si Giac (Saigon: Binh Minh, 1961). 44 Li Tana, ‘The Late 18th and Early 19th Century Mekong Delta Regional Trade System’, in Nola Cooke and Li Tana (eds), Water Frontier: Commerce and Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880 (New York and Singapore: Rowman & Littlefield/NUS Press, 2004), pp. 77–78.

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to consider rice as a political commodity the state could exploit to maximise its power to coerce and control, a lesson Gia Long clearly had not forgotten. Viewing rice trade from a political point of view could be said to be a military legacy of the thirty-year Tay Son War. This marks a departure from the policies of previous dynasties based in the Red River Delta. Rice had been traded freely in the region before the Nguyen arrived, so the ban deprived the region’s peasantry of a longtime primary cash earner and thereby considerably reduced cash income in the region. This would have combined with other local resentments over other conditions, such as the heavy burden of forced labour, the imposition of a very unpopular taxation system in 1806, and the ongoing eighteenth-century heritage of growing private land ownership – which helps to explain why 47 rebellions, big and small, broke out in the North under Gia Long (1802–1819), including rebellions that from 1807–1808 often proclaimed Le Restorationist aims. This compares with barely seven revolts in the former Nguyen provinces of southern and central Vietnam during the same period.45 It also helps to explain why the two major rebellions led by Phan Ba Vanh and Nong Van Van in the 1820s and 1830s both involved Chinese, which might have been due to the commercial restrictions on rice.46 Crawfurd seemed to have been the first person to see imperial rice transportation as a technique of political control: In reference to this subject, the pernicious practice, on the part of the government, of hoarding enormous quantities of grain as provision against scarcity, but in fact as a remedy against insurrection, ought not to be passed over. Immense granaries of corn, belonging to the government, are to be found in all parts of the kingdom, from which, out of its assumed parental tenderness, food is dispensed to the people, when hunger and its own misgovernment bring them to the brink of rebellion. This practice, well calculated to maintain the despotism of the sovereign, effectually destroys a free trade in corn, and is without doubt one great cause of those scarcities for which it pretends to be a remedy. The legal prohibition of export rice to foreign countries, and the actual difficulty of exporting it, except clandestinely, or through favors, contribute too obvious to the same effect.47

The act of ‘[h]oarding enormous quantities of grain … as a remedy against insurrection’, as Crawfurd pointed out, aptly describes the purpose of Gia Long’s rice transportation system. Clearly, Nguyen Anh’s experience with the Mekong rice trade of the late 1700s taught him that rice was too important 45

Bien nien lich su co trung dai Viet Nam: Tu dau den the ky 19 [Chronicles of Vietnam in ancient and medieval eras: from the beginning to the 19th century] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1987), pp. 412–426. 46 A Nguyen officer stated in 1857: ‘I went to examine Nang Mountain in Quang Yen, where I saw over 400 boats had embarked … they were mostly gian thuong (cunning merchants) trading rice’. Chinh Bien, Reign 4, p. 6066. 47 Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy, pp. 524–525.

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The Cost of Tao Van and Shipbuilding 303

a strategic item to leave to his political enemies. He could not perceive that the new world of the 1800s, when applied to the Red River rice economy, he weakened his enemies at his own expense.48 Gia Long designed this scheme because northern Vietnam was considered ‘a conquered country’, as Crawfurd pointed out.49 In this attitude, Gia Long differed little from his old enemy, the Tay Son rebels, who also treated Tongking ‘less as a recovered national territory than as a conquered province to be despoiled’.50 Both apparently calculated that however much resentment such exactions engendered in the North, relatively minor challenges from impoverished provinces were more easily contained than well-funded revolts by a flourishing regional elite. Denying the region access to outside sources of income while draining its surplus helped to do that. However, the people of Tongking were not the only people negatively affected by the Nguyen court’s Tao Van policy. Shipping from the north also ensured a constant burden on the people of central Vietnam, which is evident below. The Cost of Tao Van and Shipbuilding In contrast to China, whose imperial grain transportation relied on the Grand Canal to function as a kind of inland river transportation system, Vietnam’s Tao Van relied mainly on maritime coastal shipping. Since the majority of Vietnam’s rice-producing areas lie close to the sea or to rivers, the cost of Tao Van in Vietnam was lower than that for grain transport in China or Europe. In Baltic trade during the early eighteenth century, the freight charge hovered around 40 per cent of the price differential between Danzig and Amsterdam.51 For China, estimates indicate that the real cost of transport for the nineteenth century averaged 25 per cent of the grain shipped and as much as 50 per cent for more complex itineraries such as that from the Yangzi Delta to Beijing through the Grand Canal.52 This made transport much more expensive than it was in Vietnam at the same time. In the early years of the Nguyen the Tao Van was carried out by the navy and thus did not involve direct shipping costs, but even when the Tao Van started to be done by private shippers, the cost to the 48

Truong Vinh Ky was shocked to see the poverty of Tongking with his first trip to there. Truong Vinh Ky, Voyage to Tongking in the Year At-Hoi (1876), P. J. Honey (ed.), (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1982), p. 123. 49 Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy, p. 491. 50 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1:424; see also Nola Cooke, ‘Southern Regionalism and the Composition of the Nguyen Ruling Elite (1802–83)’, Asian Studies Review 23 (1999), 215–228. 51 Carol H. Shiue and Wolfgang Keller, ‘Markets in China and Europe on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution’, The American Economic Review 97 4 (2007), 1189–1216. 52 Laurence Evans, ‘Junks, Rice, and Empire: Civil Logistics and the Mandate from Heaven’, Historical Reflections 11 3 (1984), 298–299.

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court was limited. In 1807, for example, ships charged on average ten phuong of rice for every 75 phuong of rice shipped, that is, a rate of roughly 13 per cent.53 Considering the cost of time and labour spent packaging, loading, and re-loading cargo at riverbank junctions, not to mention transhipping it between boats and shipping junks, this price seems very low. It is hard to see how such low payments would ever have encouraged trade and circulation. Enviably price of transport grew and continued to grow over the decades. In 1838, the government paid 70,000 to 80,000 strings (quan) of coins to hire boats from Hung Yen to ship 60,000 phuong of rice south to Hue. This would mean a price of 1.25 quan per phuong of rice. Since that roughly equalled the market price for rice at the time, then the ration of cost to earnings would have been 1:1.54 Shipbuilding and constant repairs, essential to the shipping system, created another heavy burden. As mentioned above, typhoons often threatened Nguyen imperial shipping in transit along the coast, so shipwrecks happened almost every year, causing great damage to both cargo and human lives. The tragic storm of 1802 took over 500 soldiers with the 80 to 90 vessels it sank.55 In 1825, 63 vessels disappeared in a typhoon, along with all the people and cargo.56 In the following year, another 36 vessels vanished.57 When these ships were lost, they needed to be replaced quickly to meet the court’s demands for the following year. There is a clear indication of just such a situation happening in 1840, as the Nguyen Chronicle relates. In that year, the grain transports

53

A court record for 1803 reports 1 phuong = 30 dau of rice for every 100 phuong shipped (Muc luc chau ban Trieu Nguyen, trieu Gia Long, p. 14). The figures for the cost of freight, recorded in Dai Nam Hoi Dien Su Le are as follows: 1807: 10 phuong for every 75 phuong. Freight 13% of the rice shipped. 1836: 11.4 quan for every 100 phuong. (2.8 quan = 1 tael silver, Quoc su Di Bien, p. 281) = 4 tael of silver, rice price 1–2 quan per phuong (1834 Thuc luc, II, vol. 9, p. 3399). See Kham Dinh Dai Nam Hoi dien Su le [Collections of the regulations of Dai Nam] (Hue: Nxb. Thuan Hoa, 1993) vol. 15, pp. 360–366. 54 In 1838, Nguyen Cong Chu, the Governor General of Hai Duong and Quang Yen, stated that it took 70,000–80,000 quan of money to hire boats to ship the imperial rice from Hung Yen [to Hue?] (Chinh Bien, II, vol. 175, p. 3983). Hung Yen shipped 60,000 phuong of rice that year (Dai Nam Hoi dien Su le, vol. 15, pp. 349–350). 55 The Hai van thuyen carried 2 sailors, 1 officer, and 30 soldiers on board; those ships’ names started with ‘An’: 2 sailors, 1 officer and 50 soldiers; those ships’ names started with ‘Tinh’: 2 sailors, 1 officer and 40 soldiers. (Kham dinh Dai Nam Hoi dien Su le: tao chinh, vol. 15, p. 356). The tao van ships were divided into two groups. Those from Thua Thien south were called Nam tao (southern ships), and from Quang Tri north were called Bac tao (northern ships). Both are in 9 doan (groups) each. Officers: one Quản lıñ h (5A), two deputies (5B), one Doc Van (6A), one Linh van Thien tong (7B) (p. 345). Each of the nine doan had twenty ships. = 180 ships (p. 355). 56 Muc luc Chau ban II, trieu Minh Mang [The Nguyen archives, Minh Mang reign] (Hue: Uy ban phien dich su lieu Viet-Nam Dai hoc Hue, 1963), p. 609. 57 Muc luc Chau ban II, p. 877.

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lost thirteen hai van thuyen in a typhoon, so the court ordered the southern provinces to build it an extra thirteen ships.58 The lion’s share of the work fell to the province of Nghe An. Below are examples of the province’s endeavours during six years under Gia Long: 1804: An officer from the Ministry of Construction (Bo Cong) was sent to Nghe An to supervise the building of 100 o thuyen [black ship?], and 100,000 phuong of rice was to be shipped from Bac Thanh to feed the craftsmen.59 1805: Nghe An reported that 20 ghe tau ships have been built and 19,400 iron nails cast.60

Although the court ordered all the provinces to undertake the task of repairing damaged ships, it paid little for their work. In a record for 1817, the quota reads as follows: Binh Dinh, Quang Nam, and Nghe An must repair ten ships each; Quang Binh, Quang Ngai, Phu Yen, Binh Hoa, and Binh Thuan five each; and Bac Thanh (northern Vietnam) twenty-five. A mere 200 quan of coins was paid for each vessel repaired.61 Such frequent levies and poor pay provided little incentive to the craftsmen involved. In 1826, five shipbuilding villages and two iron-casting villages petitioned to the court to say that 17 to 18 per cent of the craftsmen had fallen ill, died, or fled their villages.62 The Nguyen archives also reveal the tremendous stress this caused among the boatmen. Here is one example in the Nguyen Archives: Quang Binh, 28 October 1826: Among the Tao Van ships, there were 36 that encountered a typhoon and sank. The ship owners do not build ships themselves and had to buy ships from shipbuilders. When we demanded they pay for the rice they had lost, they were in tears and cried that they had no money left to pay for the damage. We now ask your majesty’s permission to delay the compensation until the next year when the new ships are built and when they can pay back the rice. Comments of Minh Mang: Record the names of the 23 owners and let them pay in the next year 40 percent of the damage they caused.63

The Nguyen imperial rice transportation was the largest state operation in pre-modern Vietnam. It lasted for the duration of the Nguyen dynasty and involved annually up to 500 ships and vessels (if shipping was done twice a year) and tens of thousands of people. The government invested a large quantity of available natural resources and administrative manpower in order to make this operation possible. Clearly, such a costly political and economic programme signified its importance to both the Qing in Beijing and Nguyen courts in Hue. It was important to the Qing because they needed a northern base 58

Chinh Bien, III, q. 24, p. 5087. 59 Chinh Bien, I, q. 24, p. 659. 61 Muc luc Chau ban trieu Nguyen I, trieu Gia Long, p. 20. Chinh Bien, I, q. 45, p. 876. 62 Muc luc Chau Ban Trieu Nguyen, trieu Minh Mang (Hanoi: Nxb. Van Hoa, 1998), pp. 367–368. 63 Muc luc Chau ban trieu Nguyen, tap II, p. 877. 60

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like Beijing where they could be close to their roots in Manchuria.64 The same logic likely applied to Nguyen Anh when he chose the location of his capital. The Thuan-Quang region had been the base of Nguyen power for two centuries, and among all of Vietnam’s provinces, it was arguably most cohesive and, as far as the Nguyen was concerned, the most spiritually potent. Therefore, the grain transportation system was no less critical to the nineteenth-century Vietnamese court than it was to its Qing counterpart, of whom it was said that ‘there were but two issues for the country: military action and the official transportation of grains’.65 The two transport systems differed in important ways, however. In China, from the Song dynasty on, the state moved grain from the warmer, fertile, and productive south to the colder, more bureaucratic machine-based north. This seems a logical historical development that reflects the shift in the centre of economic gravity from northern to southern China. The situation could not have been more different in Vietnam. Like China, migration and economic development also shifted the economic centre of gravity in Vietnamese society from north to south, as Chapter 8 shows. In stark contrast, the Nguyen emperor forced the burden of feeding the rice-poor capital region and the empire’s bureaucratic apparatus on the shoulders of the North. This defied logic, given the reality of the situation.66 Conclusion What conclusions can one draw from this study of the issue of national integration from the complex picture I have tried to sketch above? First, there seems little evidence that the imperial rice shipping system played a significant role in integrating the national economy. The different modes of river and maritime 64

In the case of China, both the Southern Song and early Ming dynasties proved through their actions that the Chinese imperial capital did not have to be located in the cold and less fertile north, where great effort had to be expended just to feed the emperor and his court. The Yongle emperor of the Ming moved the capital to Beijing in spite of the burden, because the pressure from the Mongols to the north demanded it. 65 ‘Guo zhi dashi, wei bing yü zao 國之大事，惟兵與漕 [There are only two big state issues: war and the imperial grain transportations].’ Lin Qilong 林起龍, ‘Qingjue liangchuanbangao shu 請寬糧船盤詰疏’ [Petition for relaxing check points of the rice ships], in Shao Zhitang 邵之 棠, comp., Huangchao jingshi wen tongbian 皇朝經世文統編 [Comprehensive collection of statecraft essays from our august dynasty] (Shanghai: Shen ji, 1901), vol. 46:51. 66 One of the major causes of Tongking’s great famine in 1944–1945 was US bombardment on the south to north rice shipping lines. According to David Marr, the only way that the mass famine could have been averted would have been to arrange supplies of 60,000 tons relief from Cochinchina by October 1944 which failed. David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 99–100; Geoffrey Gunn, Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 225–230.

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shipping mattered greatly, as we see when we compare imperial rice shipments in China and Vietnam. In China, rice shipping via the Grand Canal significantly stimulated the birth and growth of a string of urban centres, ultimately making the regions along the Grand Canal the economic heart of the empire.67 In Vietnam, it was difficult for imperial maritime shipping to play a comparable role. While consuming tremendous amounts of resources from northern and central Vietnam, it played hardly any role in stimulating urban growth or economic development. Its economic value was low compared to its cost, and its impact on the country remained marginal. The lack of a single river did play a negative role in integrating Vietnam. For this reason, Vietnam indeed differed from Burma and Siam. Second, imperial rice transportation did not help to resolve the old divisions that persisted between the two formerly hostile and unconnected rival kingdoms, Tongking and Cochinchina. These two economic zones remained largely uninvolved with each other during the nineteenth century under Gia Long and his heirs. Of course, even if he and his successors had consciously sought to promote the economic integration of the country, the early nineteenth century would have been a bad time to start. The global silver shortage of the early nineteenth century had loosened economic ties throughout the South China Sea region generally and had weakened the Nguyen dynasty’s economic base in the Mekong Delta particularly. Gia Long tried to protect the delta and to encourage it to maintain its vigour as the economic powerhouse driving his regime. But to do this, the heavy task of supplying rice to the capital region and the imperial bureaucracy fell to the less-well regarded Red River Delta of the North. The Nguyen dynasty persistently and zealously prohibited commercial rice export from the Red River Delta while tolerating the Mekong’s ‘nominal’ adherence, as Crawfurd aptly put it. This affected the North profoundly. Rice exports had been the major currency earner of the Red River Delta for centuries. Expropriating all local rice surpluses while banning their export to China created a double stranglehold that only weakened and impoverished the Red River Delta economy. And that, in turn, ironically undermined the Nguyen dynasty. This conclusion surprised me. In my first forays into the nineteenth century, I expected to find integrative elements that suggested a maritime unity. Instead, my research took me repeatedly to evidence of regionalism, one of the key disintegrative elements of Vietnamese history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century and beyond. Scholars like Philippe Langlet, Keith Taylor, and Nola Cooke, among others, have discussed this issue at length. For the early- to the mid-nineteenth century, Langlet and Cooke both concur on the importance 67

Due to the siltation of the Yellow River, the Qing dynasty started coastal transportation in 1825 and chiefly used it by 1855.

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of southern regionalism in the politics of the new realm. Langlet’s painstaking examination of the official Nguyen history revealed how regionally based cultural and intellectual divisions strained relations between the Nguyen court and many of its northern literati subjects for much of the century. At the same time, Cooke concludes her study of the imperial examination system under the Nguyen with this frank observation:68 From 1802 to the 1880s, biographical data consistently indicate that men from the delta north, the bastion of Sino-Vietnamese traditional elite culture and classical learning … endured a level of discrimination within the Nguyen bureaucracy that can only be called systemic. [Italics added]

My research only confirms the results of my peers. The imperial rice shipping system as examined above reveals a distinct economic favouritism towards the south and little concern for the North by the new dynasty. From its inception, the system in its design and operation seems to have been an economic expression of southern regionalism in the imperial government. It provides one more piece of evidence of the absence of genuine national integration in Vietnam during the first half of the nineteenth century. This was a consequence of not only geography – like the absence of one major river – but also history and politics. Indeed, the three reinforced one another, condemning the Nguyen state to fail in its ambition to integrate its territories in the same way that Siam and Burma had done at the same time. At what point did this disintegrative factor vanish? It is hard to say. Even in the twenty-first century, a leading Vietnamese economist could still say that ‘trade between northern and southern Vietnam is less significant than Sino-Vietnamese trade’, which leaves historians to ponder.69

68

Cooke, ‘Southern Regionalism and the Composition of the Nguyen Ruling Elite’, 227. See also Cooke, ‘The Myth of the Restoration: Dang-Trong Influences in the Spiritual Life of the Early Nguyen Dynasty (1802–47)’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 269–295; ‘Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization in Historical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations (1463–1883)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 25 (1994), 270–312; Philippe Langlet, L’Ancienne historiographie d’état au Vietnam (Paris: EFEO), 1990, vol. 1; Keith Taylor, ‘Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region’, Journal of Asian Studies 57 5 (1998), 949–978. 6 9 Vo Tri Thanh, in Yazhou Zhoukan [Asian Weekly], Hong Kong, 28 May 2006.

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Conclusion Some Reflections on a Maritime Vietnam

This book casts a new light on the history of the land that encompasses modern Vietnam. To do so it has used a new perspective, one rarely concerned with politics, war, or the rise and fall of dynasties and powerholders. Instead, it primarily focuses on traders and merchants from various communities whose activities for millennium helped to create many economic networks that bound the mountainous hinterland to the littoral shores and, through maritime links, to realms and peoples far away. It is thus a borderless history rather than a history of states, the story of people who interacted in a space between the ocean and the mountains rarely circumscribed by political boundaries. Even so, our journey through the book’s ten chapters shows repeatedly that it is only when viewed against this expansive background that some of the more important, sometimes even determinative, features of Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. The area that makes up modern Vietnam, consisting historically of Dai Viet, Champa, and the lower Khmer lands, lies for the most part along the world’s longest and oldest maritime route from China to the Mediterranean. But as Denys Lombard perceptively argued, it also belonged to its own Small Mediterranean. During the last two millennia at least, the lands surrounding the South China Sea were so interwoven by overlapping networks of exchange and cultural interactions that they formed an ensemble which can fruitfully be compared to the Mediterranean of Fernand Braudel. Modern archaeological evidence strongly supports this view, as does my exhaustive survey of ancient Chinese and other sources. Two thousand years ago, we now know that two large-scale, cross-regional networks simultaneously linked different shores of the South China Sea: North–South, Dong Son drums can be found radiating out from their source in Mainland Southeast Asia as far afield as Sumatra, Java and Bali; while East–West, the Sa Huynh-Kalanay network served Taiwan, the Philippines, and most of Borneo. Place names from this region, Funan, Champa, and particularly Linyi, appear so frequently in first millennium ce Chinese sources that they appear to outnumber all references to other South, West, and Southeast Asian ports combined. This early Vietnam and its histories thus belonged to a much larger natural, economic, and cultural space than 309

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narrow imperial, colonial or post-colonial Marxist and nationalist ideologies have ever allowed. This is because it was a space nurtured in part by the sea. I did not begin my research into Nguyen Cochinchina three decades ago with an intention of placing the sea and maritime trade routes at the centre of Vietnamese history. My journey to this conclusion has been a long and sometimes circuitous one, but at every step I followed the sources wherever they led me and, as time passed, wherever other scholars had begun to dig new ground. In this respect, I would like to pay tribute to the pioneering studies of John Whitmore, Momoki Shiro and Charles Wheeler, among a growing field which is happily now too numerous to acknowledge here by name. The more I researched, the more the sources jumped out at me and led me to the belief that a key feature of Vietnam’s long history is its interconnectedness with the world. The discussion of the salt trade, for example, probed the mystery behind Dai Viet’s no salt monopoly along the lines of that in China, where it was a major fiscal institution of state. I have argued that a network of interested parties – Viet officials on the coast, Song officials in southern China, and Tai-Kadai chieftains in between – facilitated to their own benefit a lucrative commerce in salt, produced along the coast but trafficked through Yunnan or Guangxi into inland China, without the knowledge or consent of the court. Similarly, another, even more hidden, trade network made possible fifteenth-century Dai Viet’s transformation into a Southeast Asian ‘gun powder empire’, even though the country itself contained none of the ingredients essential for gun powder production, with sulphur coming from Melaka and saltpetre and copper arriving from Yunnan. The Chinese province’s importance for Dai Viet did not end there, either. Yunnan also provided cobalt blue, a crucial ingredient in the blue-and-white ceramics produced by Dai Viet potteries and exported in merchant ships as far afield as the Middle East before the fourteenth century. Such a Vietnam where maritime was an organic part of the politics and economy was something I could not have imagined thirty years ago. Such clear evidence of trades like these, at times crucial to Dai Viet’s military prowess and political economy, indicate that the older narratives that overlooked or dismissed the importance of the maritime in Vietnam’s history are utterly inadequate. The investigations in this book concretely implicates maritime commerce in many of the key events in pre-modern Vietnamese history: The fifteenth-century Le dynasty could not have built their gunpowder kingdom and revolutionised their relations with their neighbours without it; the seventeenth-century Le/Trinh could not have funded seven large-scale military campaigns against their Nguyen rival; nor could the Nguyen have repulsed these assaults and pushed its southern borders beyond the old Cham territory into the Mekong Delta. One might even argue that Southeast Asia’s eighteenth-century water frontier and the Nguyen lords’ deep involvement in

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the Asian commercial system triggered the Tay Son Uprising, just as the water frontier’s commercial system helped Nguyen Anh to defeat the Tay Son and found a unified Vietnam in 1802. As Anthony Reid noted: The remarkable achievement of unifying this improbably long stretch of coastline was not in fact, and arguably could never have been, the result of a relentless ‘march south’ from the historical Dai Viet state in Tongking. Rather it was the messy, multicultural dynamism of the south that managed to march north at the end of the eighteenth ­century.1 [Italics added]

The implications of this maritime perspective on the history are far reaching, so much so that it will, I hope, inspire reinterpretations of events in Vietnamese history beyond those I have offered here. I will leave it to readers and future historians to reflect on the extent of the maritime perspective’s influence on Vietnamese history. For now, I wish to reflect on the themes directly related to this book: Maritime trade and elites. Elites obviously participated in the profitable maritime trade, and they started early. Both Philippe Papin and Erica Brindley point out how, early on, local aristocratic figures presented mixed identities and offered varied responses to Han influence as well as intimidation for their own benefit.2 Through commerce, their desire to better their lifestyles would have propelled an important motive force behind the improvement of existing technologies. Ceramics have been helpful in suggesting this connection between elite society, technological development, and long-distance exchange. Wei Weiyan notes that there exists evidence of a distinctively fine pottery made in Han-era Jiaozhi whose firing reached such a high temperature that it closely resembled porcelain in quality. Archaeologists have exhumed large numbers of fragments of this pottery from Han tombs in Hepu in Guangxi, Gejiu and Dali in Yunnan, and Guizhou in deeper inland China.3 This high level of technology at this time seems to reflect the development of a manor economy, a common feature at that time in what is now southern China, a territory that in Han times encompassed Jiaozhi, that is, northern and much of central Vietnam.4 A manor 1

Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 185. Philippe Papin, ‘Géographie et politique dans le Viêt-Nam ancien’, Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 87, 2 (2000), 609–628; Erica Brindley, ‘Representations and Uses of Yue Identity along the Southern Frontier of the Han, ca. 200–111 BCE’, Early China 33 (2011), p. 2. 3 Wei Weiyan 韋偉燕, ‘Yuenan jingnei hanmu de kaoguxue yanjiu 越南境內漢墓的考古學研究 [The archaeological research on Han style tombs in Vietnam], PhD dissertation, Jilin University, 2017, pp. 226, 227, and 232. 4 Geng Huiling 耿慧玲, Yuenan shilun: Jinshi ziliao zhi lishi wenhua bijiao 越南史論: 金石資 料之歷史文化比較 [Views on Vietnamese history: Historical and cultural comparisons on the epigraphic materials] (Taipei: Xinwenfeng Press, 2004), p. 287; Keith Taylor indicates that there was a well-defined ruling class in the Red River plain during the Tang era, and that the post Tang period shows a strong continuity with the Tang provincial system. Keith Taylor, ‘The “Twelve Lords” in Tenth-Century Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, 1 (1983), 61. 2

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was typically owned by a big family with enormous land which they cultivated using slaves, who also handcrafted a variety of items such as ceramics, metal work and silk, to name a few. Indeed, the best artisans were often found only in aristocratic manors, who produced to sell. It is not difficult, then, to see how aristocratic interests could have propelled local production of potential export commodities. It is not hard to imagine that list of manor-driven commodities including the aromatics cultivation and refinery discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In such a scenario, the production and trafficking of high-quality commodities depended on the contribution of the elite’s capital, organisation, and supervision. Geng Huiling points out that from the Han era to the tenth century the local big men formed consistently the major political forces of Jiaozhi. This should be a key to understand the economy and culture of the era. Jiaozhi society and its outlook thus significantly differed from the ‘traditional Vietnam’ which demanded that communal land was equally redistributed among villagers every three years. Instead, I argue that the plurality of Jiaozhi between 200 and 400 ce reminds people of nineteenth and twentieth century Hong Kong, where ships circulated goods between the South Seas and China proper; where people from different parts of Asia met beyond the empire’s political core; where new ideas like Buddhism and Brahmanism migrated from the southern seas through Jiaozhi’s port hubs; where a primary centre of aromatics refining developed to serve Chinese markets to the north; and finally, where as a cosmopolitan centre many leading Chinese scholars sought refuge. All these people came to Jiaozhi, not because it was remote, isolated and backward, but precisely because it was the opposite: a wealthy commercial society where diverse peoples and ideas could intermingle.5 It is also clear that Jiaozhi’s cosmopolitan feature and maritime orientation could not have been realised without the simultaneous existence of Linyi/ Champa. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 reveal the overall level of commercial interaction and degree of economic interdependence that defined the relationship between Jiaozhi/Dai Viet and Linyi/Champa. Few things better illustrate early Dai Viet’s dependence on Champa than the Cham network through which the Viet kingdom’s ceramics travelled to Java as described in Chapter 6. One could say that Jiaozhi was fortunate to have Linyi/Champa – ‘THE harbour and THE gateway to all countries’ – as its neighbour. Without the nourishment of religions, ideas, lifestyles, and commodities from or by way of Champa, there would have been little plurality, little hybridity, and no cosmopolitan 5

It fits perfectly into Anthony Reid’s definition of ‘cosmopolitan’: ‘It is a happier catch-all word than polyglot, migrant, refugee, hybrid, peranakan, bicultural, and it appears to allow for that cultural ambiguity and plurality as an asset rather than a handicap to full participation … free of national attachments and prejudices.’ Anthony Reid, ‘Closing remarks’, ISEAC Cosmopolitan Conference, Australian National University, 18 February 2012, p. 1.

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atmosphere in Jiaozhi. Because of this, the vast area of today’s Ha Tinh and Nghe An in which the shifting frontier between Linyi/Champa and Jiaozhi/Dai Viet sat thus deserves more serious attention. The sea and the mountains. The absence of salt and its traffic in official records reveals less a lack of sea trade or state interest in it and more an important aspect of Vietnamese history, namely the Dai Viet court’s limited ability in controlling the eastern coast and its adjacent upper Red River Delta. As we see in Chapter 4, the eastern coast lay largely beyond the control of the Ly dynasty between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Both the Tran and early Le dynasties held a better grasp of the coastal area, but later on, in 1720, the court of the Trinh lord tentatively established a salt monopoly in Tongking, only to abolish it in 1732 due to the soaring price of salt and the widespread resentment it caused. It was not until 1759 that the Le/Trinh government created an office in charge of salt traffic (quan diem dao), which it established in Tuyen Quang and Hung Hoa, through which the routes to Yunnan lay.6 Downriver, the important route that had connected the eastern coast to inland Guangxi during the Ly era remained outside Le/Trinh control.7 Yet the inability to control this crucial link between the eastern coast and the mountains might have worked in Dai Viet’s favour: As shown in Chapter 4, the Dong chiefs who dominated the mountains often maintained their political loyalty to the Dai Viet court over the Song and Ming Chinese courts, because they could trade salt freely in Dai Viet. The importance of linking with Dai Viet’s coast surely influenced the mountain chiefs’ political choices. This story alone tells us how naturally the societies living in mountain and sea environments interacted with each other throughout this S-shaped landscape, a reoccurring theme of this book encapsulated in the Vietnamese phrase non nuoc, which means both ‘mountains and water’ and ‘country’. The relationship between the eastern coast and the royal court during the Le era deserves to be studied more carefully. Is it a coincidence that the Le records barely mention the ceramics makers of Chu Dau, or even the port Van Don? By the same token, did coincidence cause the Mac clan to arise in coastal Hai Duong to challenge the Le, supported by their political base in Thanh Hoa? It was definitely not a coincidence of the rampant Chinese piracy that continued to plague the nineteenth-century Tongking Gulf. A paradox seemed to be here: Northern Vietnamese regimes supposedly grew most suspicious of Chinese and tried hard to keep them away as far as possible; yet until the nineteenth century the deepest involvements of the Chinese 6

Phan Huy Chu, Lich trieu hien chuong loai chi [A reference book to the institutions of successive dynasties] (Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 259–260. 7 Li Tana, ‘Vietnamese Mints and Chinese Miners in the 18th Century’, paper for the international conference of the International Convention of Asian Studies, Singapore, 23–24 August 2003.

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appear in this region: the Song coins that circulated in Ly society, the raw material firearm and the blue-and-white ceramics trades in the fifteenth century, both of them happened right under the nose of the Confucian king Le Thanh Tong.8 The geography of the Tongking Gulf made it historically a den of pirates and smugglers. The upper Tongking Gulf region seemed to be a historical primary base for a range of Dai Viet state-designated contraband trades, and the border was penetrated by a variety of interested parties.9 All these stories told above continued right into the twentieth century. As Christopher Goscha reveals, in the Gulf of Tongking, ‘the Viet Minh worked clandestinely through Vietnamese and Chinese smugglers in Haiphong, Cat Ba, and Mong Cai to reach Beihai, Canton, Macau, and Hong Kong. Inside Bac bo, the central government had a particularly good overland opening to southern China via Cao Bang, That Khe, and Ha Giang until late 1947’.10 The division between ‘foreign trade’ and ‘domestic economy’ in this area was always obscured, and it was a source of both constant chaos and unrecorded vitality all at once. The once-hidden routes described in this book demonstrate most profoundly how the polemical narratives of nation-state and the fundamental ‘internal/external’, ‘insider/outsider’ divisions inherent in their binary world view have hidden evidence of an immensely vibrant historical Vietnam. The word ‘Chinese’ alone offers a case in point. According to Vietnam’s nationalist historiography, ‘Chinese’ has long constituted a northern pole against which the southern ‘Vietnamese’ pole has negatively defined itself. In cultural terms, China constituted nothing more than an outside ‘influence’ (anh huong), a term which Philippe Papin has criticised sharply as having ‘no historical depth’. The most powerful challenge to this once unshakeable belief has come recently from John Whitmore, whose study of ‘Ngo (Chinese) Communities and Montane-Littoral Conflict’ during the Early Le puts forth a more plausible dynamic driven by two key components: first, an ‘Ngo’ category freed of the repressive ahistorical political trap of ‘Chinese’ identity cast permanently outside and against ‘Viet’ to consist instead of a more specific, nuanced, fluid, and mutable littoral community that for centuries had engaged the peoples of the Gulf of Tongking coast, where some from as far north as Fujian integrated with local littoral communities to form a littoral 8

As Iioka Naoko shows us, Chinese investment in the silk-for-silver trade in the mid-seventeenth century was also consistently one-third higher in volume than that of the VOC. Naoko Iioka, ‘Literati Entrepreneur: Wei Zhiyan in the Tonkin-Nagasaki Silk Trade’, PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore, 2009, p. 226. 9 Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 186. 10 Christopher Goscha, ‘The Borders of Vietnam’s Early Wartime Trade with Southern China: A Contemporary Perspective’, Asian Survey 40, 6 (2000), 998.

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society in what became the Jiaozhi Sea trading zone.11 Second, and equally important, following Charles Wheeler and Keith Taylor, Whitmore pointed out the dialectic of montane–littoral, highland–coastal societies, a constant feature of Vietnamese history in his view. Coastal culture was Ngo culture, Whitmore asserts forthrightly, a genuinely new and illuminating insight for the field of Vietnamese history. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the culture of this Ngo society that flourished in early Dai Viet suffered great damage during the early 1400s at the hands of not only Le Loi but also the invading Ming dynasty – the most hostile of all Chinese dynasties to maritime trade and the communities associated with it. It is telling that the Le dynasty, the very force that drove out the ‘Ngo’, adopted the most comprehensively Chinese bureaucratic institutions almost as soon as it seized power over Dai Viet. But the movement of people, goods through littoral communities continued, eventually to produce a new synthesis in Nguyen Cochinchina. Whitmore’s vision stands out among the new revisionist works that in the last decades have begun to shift the grand narrative from a singular to multiple versions of Vietnamese history.12 Maritime wealth and the government. How important was long-distance maritime trade to Dai Viet’s wealth? Lin Man-houng’s view on the case of China is also useful for understanding Dai Viet. To a human body, she points out, the weight of the arteries and veins does not need to be heavier than the organs that they link. By the same token, the number of elements that connect different sections of an economy does not need to surpass those they connect.13 In this book we observe at least two important political transformations caused by the vitality of maritime commerce. In the seventeenth century silver surged into Tongking and caused a significant political change in the structure of the Dai Viet government structure. According to Japanese scholar Ueda Shin’ya, in the mid-seventeenth century the Trinh lords began to replace the Thanh Hoa military officers who had occupied government positions with ‘massive number of the literati’ who hailed from the Red River Delta (Chapter 7). This was particularly true in the case of the Trinh government’s newly founded parallel 11

Michael Pearson asks, ‘Does … shorefolk have more in common with other shorefolk thousands of kilometres away on some other shore of the ocean, than they do with those in their immediate hinterland?’ Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 38. 12 Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds). Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 19. 13 Lin Man-houng, ‘Yin yu yapian de liutong ji yin gui qian jian xianxiang de quyu fenbu (1808– 1854): shijie jingji dui jindai Zhongguo kongjian fangmian zhi yi yingxiang’ 銀與鴉片的流 通及銀貴錢賤現象的區域分佈 (1808–1854)——世界經濟對近代中國空間方面之一影響 [The circulation of silver and opium and the regional distribution of the silver appreciation phenomenon, 1808–1854: A case study of the spatial impact of the world economy on China], Jindai yanjiusuo jikan [Bulletin of Modern History, Academia Sinica] 22, 1 (1993), 134.

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departments, collectively known as the Six Department (Luc Phien 六番).14 The timing is important: the seventeenth century seemed to be the very century when the military elites of Thanh Hoa and the literati of the Red River Delta gradually merged. One is reminded of the situation of the thirteenth century, when the upper, middle, and lower Red River Delta elites integrated and the ‘state became one’ (Chapter 4). It may not be a coincidence that both eras saw the extensive and intensive maritime commercial circulation both within and beyond Dai Viet’s frontiers. Maritime trade, seemingly marginal to Dai Viet’s institutions but actually central to their functions, reveals a Vietnamese history that has for the most part lain submerged, hidden from view. This is different from other kingdoms of Southeast Asia, like the island realms where maritime activities were open and obvious. By adopting a maritime perspective, we can now make fruitful comparisons. Like the island states, for example, Dai Viet grew vulnerable to changes in international trade that could influence and even alter its policies. Memories of Tay Son’s destruction of Cochinchina’s prosperous economy and the global economic downturn of the early nineteenth century (Chapter 10) could have hardened Minh Mang’s negative attitude towards commerce. By the same token, the improved Southeast Asian trade of the 1840s might have provided Thieu Tri with an important motivation to be more open in its trade with Singapore.15 Thus, maritime trade in Vietnam fluctuated in its political importance; it was powerful at times yet fragile in nature, vulnerable as it was like any sea trading society to the vicissitudes of world trade. The changing coast and its changing names. One characteristic of Vietnam’s northern and central coast is that the names of the sea gates often changed. None of today’s names for sea gates in the Red River Delta region existed before the seventeenth century. One name appeared in history once or twice and then disappeared completely; the eleventh-century Long Thuy Hai and twelfth-century Calan (a non-Viet name) sea gates, both facing the Gulf of Tongking, are cases in point. New names appeared, but no one is yet sure if they replaced the old names or even applied to the same location. As emphasised in the book’s early chapters, the coast’s highly mutable nature matters historically, for in this case the changes in sea gate names could have been caused by the shifting river or the opening, closing and relocation of sea gates themselves – though one cannot discount the actions of the many 14

Ueda Shin’ya, ‘On the Financial Structure and Personnel Organisation of the Trı̣nh Lords in Seventeenth to Eighteenth-century North Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, 2 (2015), 246–273. 15 Li Tana, ‘Rice Trade in the Mekong Delta and Its Implications during the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Thanet Arpornsuwan (ed.), Thailand and Her Neighbors II: Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia (Bangkok: Thammasat University Press, 1995), pp. 198–213.

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Conclusion: Some Reflections on a Maritime Vietnam

317

peoples who named and recorded them. The role of environment is obvious in the case of the famed Bo Hai Khau sea gate which today is a part of Thai Binh city, about 40 kilometres away from the sea. In the latter case, we need look no further than the fifteenth-century names: Some names of sea gates and river mouths appeared more frequently during this time, thanks to the sea battles between Ming and Vietnamese navies, while others vanished completely from historical records. This changeability is similar for the Cham coast, where both factors above applied. We are not sure whether the current Thuan An sea gate, supposedly the site of the major harbour of Linyi of the third century, was geomorphologically the same two hundred, let alone two thousand, years ago. The ferocity of floods produced by the region’s short, steeply sloped rivers caused persistent siltation that spelled the end for many sea gates. No Cham or Mon-Khmer names for these sea gates can be identified because the peoples who used to live along the coast either moved upland or southward, or they integrated with Viet and over generations lost historical memory.16 We know some Khmer names for sea gates and their locations on the southern coast, only because Vietnamese occupation of this land is only 300 years old. Along Vietnam’s 3,000 kilometres of coast, we will no doubt find numerous vestiges of the multilingual, multi-cultural complexities of the past. The name of a larger area, the Jiaozhi Sea, tells a similar story. This name never appeared in any official Chinese record or chronicle before the thirteenth century. It seemed certain that the term was coined by the local peoples who lived around it and whose livelihoods depended on it. Horses from Yunnan and salt from the eastern coast of the Red River Delta, silks from Sichuan and aromatics from Champa (Chapters 4, 5, and 6), the staple exchange commodities of the traffic between coast and hinterland most likely defined the context in which the term ‘Jiaozhi Sea’ (Jiaozhi Yang) was coined. However, it could be older than the thirteenth century, perhaps coined by traders and smugglers of the eleventh century right after the founding of Dai Viet only to be revealed after the horse trade became official in the 1200s.Whatever the case, the historical nomenclature of the coast should provide clues to important inroads to further revelations about Vietnam’s maritime history. 16

The name ‘Re’ in Culao Re (Dao Ly Son) might have come from Hrê, a Mon-Khmer speaker group who used to live on Quang Ngai coast. Andrew Hardy and Nguyen Tien Dong, ‘The Peoples of Champa: Landscape History Evidence for a New Hypothesis from the Landscape History of Quang Ngai’, in Arlo Griffiths, Andrew Hardy, and Geoff Wade (eds), Champa: Territories and Networks of a Southeast Asian Kingdom (Paris: École Française d’ExtrêmeOrient, 2019), pp. 128–133. Charles Wheeler points out some current Vietnamese placenames indicates the traces of the Cham in the Hoi An region. Charles Wheeler, ‘One Region, Two Histories: Cham Precedents in the History of the Hoi An Region’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds), Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 184–185.

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To conclude, this maritime history of Vietnam mirrors back to us a Vietnamese history even more rich, subtle, and exciting than its already remarkable established form. I see it as an escape from the rigid nationalist historiography which has blinded us from deep and important traditions that ran counter to its world view. I fully realise however, that what I revealed here could very likely be only one layer and one window of Vietnamese history, that many layers might still be buried somewhere, in the mountains or along the valleys, rivers, and coasts. I am thrilled to see that in the last two decades the young Vietnamese archaeologists and historians who have moved away from such historiography to fashion vibrant and visionary historical projects freed from the suffocating straitjacket of nationalism. I hope somehow this modest book acknowledges this important turning point, the achievements of my many peers who helped to lead us here and the new generations of innovators who will take it far into the horizon. If I have done this, then I have realised the goal in some small way. But before I conclude, I would like to indulge in a poem by a Song poet named Xin Qiji, introduced to Japan by the seventeenth-century merchant Wei Zhiyan of Chapter 7 and revealed to us by Iioka Naoko. Aromatics was an important lead in the search that led me to this hidden history of maritime Vietnam, for it evokes something of the centuries-long aromatic trade that for millennia shaped the succession of ancient maritime economies that laid precedents for modern Vietnam; but it also suggests that the consequences of this maritime Vietnam extended well beyond the economic realm emphasised in this book. In this poem, Xin describes how he tried to trace the path of a beautiful lady during the night of the Mid-Autumn festival by following her fragrance:17 Up and down the main streets, I must have run— A thousand times or more in quest of none, Who, I have concluded, cannot be found; For, everywhere, no trace of her can be seen, When, all of a sudden, I turn around, That’s her, where lanterns are few and far between.

17

Transl. Xu Zhongjie. 辛棄疾,‘眾裏尋香千百度,驀然回首,那人卻在,燈火闌珊處.’ While most of the current versions of the first sentence did not have the word ‘fragrance’, an earlier, Ming dynasty version clearly does. This version, along with 200 pieces of music, was introduced to Japan by Wei Zhiyan, the merchant of Iioka Naoko’s PhD dissertation. Those pieces were lost in China and have only been introduced back to China in the late twentieth century. This sentence (with no word ‘fragrance’ but ‘him/her’) has been used to describe the highest realm of research among the Chinese scholars, since the publication of Wang Guowei’s Renjian cihua 人間詞話 in 1910. I am citing this sentence not because I am outrageously arrogant, but because the two words ‘fragrance’ and ‘search’ reflect both the journeys of the seventeenthcentury merchant and my own, both crossed many seas.

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Bibliography

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320 Bibliography Hayashi Harukatsu and Hayashi. Nobuatsu, eds. (1958–1959) Kai hentai 華夷変態 [Reports of Chinese junks on China and Southeast Asia, 1644–1728]. Tokyo: Tōyō Bunko, 3 vol. He Changling 賀長齡 and Wei Yuan 魏源, comps. Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝 經世文編 [Collected essays about (Qing) imperial statecraft]. [1826]. Ji Han 嵇含. Nanfang caomu zhuang 南方草木状 [Herbs and trees of the south]. Completed 304. ‘Jiaozhou yinan waiguo zhuan’ 交州以南外國傳 [Biographies of the countries south of Jiaozhou]. Excerpted in Li Fang 李昉, comp., Taiping Yulan [Readings of the Taiping Era]. [977–983 CE]. Li Daoyuan 酈道元. Shuijing zhu 水經註 [Commentary on the Water Classic]. [386–534 CE]. Li Shangyin 李商隐. Wei xingyanggong lun Annan xingying jiangshi yueliang Zhuang 為滎陽公論安南行營將士月糧狀 [A report on grain rations of the soldiers in Annam on behalf of Lord Xingyang]. In Quan Tangwen 全唐文 [Complete Prose of the Tang]. Completed 847. Collected and edited by Dong Kao, 1819, j.772. Li Tao 李燾. Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian 續資治通鑒長編 [Continued compilation of sources as a comprehensive mirror to aid in government]. [1183]. Li Wenfeng 李文鳳. Yueqiao shu 越嶠書 [Accounts and documents on the Viet]. Completed 1540. Reprint, China Digital Library. Li Xinchuan 李心傳. Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu 建炎以來繫年要錄 [Chronological record of important events since 1127]. [Compiled c. 1250s.] Liu Xu 劉昫. Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Book of Tang]. [945 CE]. Liu Xun 劉恂. Lingbiao luyi 嶺表錄異 [Strange Records From Beyond the]. [c. late 9th century CE]. Ma Duanlin 馬端臨. Wenxian tongkao文獻通考 [Comprehensive Examination of Literature]. Comp.1307. Mao Qiling 毛奇齡. Mansi hezhi 蠻司合誌 [Combined gazetteer of Barbarian states]. Completed c.1662–1722. In Mansi hezhi jiaozhu 蠻司合誌校註, annotated by Yang Dongfu 楊東甫 and Yang Ji 楊驥 Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2015. Ming-Qing shiliao 明清史料 [Archival materials of the Ming and Qing eras], 20 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1960; reprint Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修. Xin Tangshu 新唐書 [New Boof of Tang]. Completed 1060. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013. Qu Dajun 屈大均. Guangdong xinyu 廣東新語 [A new commentary on Guangdong]. Annotated by Li Yuzhong 李育中 et al. Completed 1687. Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1991. Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508). Shuyiji 述異記 [Accounts of curiosities]. Completed 978. Cited in Li Fang 李昉 et al., Taiping guangji 太平廣記 [Extensive gleanings from the era of Great Harmony, j. 414. Ryōan Terajima. Wakan Sanzai Zue 和漢三才図会 [Illustrated Sino-Japanese encyclopedia]. First published 1713. Reprint Tokyo: Nakakondo, 1929. Shilian Dashan 石濂大汕. Haiwai jishi 海外記事 [Overseas journal]. Completed 1699. In Shiqi shiji Guangnan zhixin shiliao 十七世紀廣南之新史料 [New historical material on Quang Nam in the seventeenth century]. Edited by Chen Chingho 陳荊和. Taipei: Committee of Series of Books on China, 1960. Sima Guang 司馬光. Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒 [Comprehensive mirror to aid in government]. [1084].

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322 Bibliography Zhao Rukuo 趙汝括. Zhu fanzhi buzhu 諸蕃志 [Supplementary annotations to Zhu fanzhi]. Completed 1225. Annotated version by Han Zhenhua 韓振華. Zhu fanzhi buzhu 諸蕃志補註. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000. Zhenghe hanghai tu 鄭和航海圖 [Zheng He’s navigation charts]. Completed c.1425–1430. Edited by Xiang Da. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000. Zhou Jiazhou 周嘉胄. Xiangsheng 香乘 [On perfumes]. Completed 1641. In Qianlu 錢錄 [On numismatics], compiled by Liang Shizheng 梁詩正, first published 1750. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991. Zhou Kai 周凯. Xiamen zhi 廈門志 [Local records of Xiamen]. First published 1839. In Zhongguo fangzhi congshu [Serials of Chinese local gazetteers], no. 80. Reprint Taipei: Chengwen Press, 1967. Zhou Mi 周密. Qidong yeyu 齊東野語 [Ridiculous words by a person from Shandong]. Completed late thirteenth century. Zhou Qufei 周去非. Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 [Representative answers from beyond the mountains]. Completed 1178. Annotated by Yang Wuquan. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999.

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Bibliography 323 Le Quy Don. Phu bien tap luc [Miscellaneous records when the southern border was pacified]. Completed 1776. Reprint in Le Quy Don Toan Tap [Complete works of Le Quy Don], Hanoi: Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 1977. Le Quy Don. Van Dai Loai ngu [Classified discourse from the library]. Completed 1773. Reprint Saigon: Phu quoc vu khanh dac trach Van hoa, 1973. Le Trac. Annam chi luoc [A brief history of Annam]. Completed 1430. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000. Le Trieu chieu linh Thien chinh [Good policies contained in the imperial edicts of the Le Dynasty], compiled 1705–1709, trans. Nguyen Si Giac. Saigon: Binh Minh, 1961. Muc luc Chau Ban Trieu Nguyen [The Nguyen archives], trieu Minh Mang. Hanoi: Nxb. Van Hoa, 1998. Muc luc Chau Ban trieu Nguyen [Catalogue of the Nguyen Archives (1802–1825)], 2 vols. Hue: Uy ban Phien-dich su lieu Viet-Nam, 1962. Ngo Si Lien. Dai Viet su ky Toan thu [The complete annals of Dai Viet]. Completed 1479. New edition, edited by Chen Chingho, Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka kenkyujo, 3 vols, 1986. Phan Huy Chu. Lich trieu hien chuong loai chi [A reference book to the institutions of successive dynasties]. Completed 1819. Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1992. Phan Thuc Truc. Quoc su di bien [A collection of lost history]. Completed 1851. Hong Kong: New Asia Research Institute, 1965. Son cu tap thuat [Miscellaneous essays written in the mountains]. Unpublished manuscript, Han-Nom Institute, shelf number A.822. Sun Xun 孫遜, Trinh Khac Manh 鄭克孟, and Chen Yiyuan 陳益源. eds. Yuenan hanwen xiaoshuo jicheng 越南漢文小說集成 [A collection of novels produced in Vietnam], Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 20 vols, 2011. Tham gia the pha [Genealogy of the Shen clan]. Unpublished manuscript, Han-Nom Institute, Hanoi, shelf number A.758. Thong quoc dinh dien san vat thue le [National statistics of taxpayer, land and products]. MS, Hán-Nôm Institute, Hanoi. Tho van Ly Tran [Poetry and essays of the Ly and Tran], 3 vols. Hanoi: Nxb. Khoa hoc Xa Hoi, 1977–1978. Trinh Hoai Duc. Gia Dinh Thong Chi [Unified gazetteer of Gia Dinh]. Hanoi: Nxb Giao Duc, 1999. Vien Nghien cuu Han-Nom. Ten lang xa Viet Nam dau the ky XIX [Village names of the early nineteenth century]. Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc Xa Hoi, 1981. Viet su luoc [A brief history of the Viet]. Completed 1377. New edition, annotated by Tran Quoc Vuong, Hanoi: Van su dia,1960.

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Index

agriculture, 3, 42, 113, 147, 208, 213, 253 Ai Lao Pass, 83, 100, 101 aloeswood, 10, 65, 67, 69, 70, 89, 90, 93, 132, 161, 170–172, 174, 235, 248, 251, 252 Annam, 32, 74, 78, 110, 142 Annamese Middle Chinese, 25, 123 Anuradhapura, capital of Sri Lanka, 59 Arabs, 2, 149, 153–155, 170 aromatics, 11, 53, 54, 63–67, 69–71, 73–79, 89–93, 94, 120, 132, 145, 149, 167, 171, 172, 174, 178, 193, 209, 312, 317 cultivation, 312 artillery, 237 ‘auspicious dragon brain’, 67 ‘Australo-Papuans’, 22 Bach Dang River, 44 Bangka Island, 267 Bangkok, 176, 258, 279, 281 Batavia, 205, 229, 266, 281, 287 Bien Dong. See South China Sea; South Sea blue-and-white ceramics, 164, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 310, 314 Borneo, 69 Brahmanism, 11, 56, 122, 312 bronze drums, 24, 39, 43, 101 Buddhism, 11, 53, 56–58, 64, 78, 179, 312 mixture, 122 Ca Ong, 236 Cai Beo, 18 calambac, 65, 69, 248, 250, 251 Cancao, 259, 261, 263, 266–271, 275, 279, 289 cau gio (praying for a good sea wind), 235 Central Highland, 88, 159, 257 Cham, 15, 81, 89, 140, 157, 166, 228, 252 wells, 103, 104 Champa, 9, 120, 168, 190, 253 Chu Dau, 164–166, 186, 188, 313

Chuc Lam school, 78 Co Loa, 19, 45, 47, 213 Cochinchina, 102, 195, 196, 201, 204, 206, 234, 235, 239, 241, 246, 248, 251, 255, 257, 275, 282, 284–286, 289–292, 298, 307, 310, 315, 316 coin, 120, 204, 205, 271 Confucianism, 13, 71, 79, 135, 221 Cua Hoi, 36, 202 Cuu Chan, 40, 43, 62 Da But, 21, 34 Da Rang River, 143, 145 dang Cham spirit, 237 Dang Ngoai. See Tongking Dang Trong. See Cochinchina Day River, 36, 44, 295 dien trang, 136 Đình village hall, 211, 216–220, 223, 224 Dong Nai, 248, 259, 277 Dong Son, 21, 22, 24, 49, 101, 309 Dunxun, 52, 65, 91 Dvāravatı̄, 59, 108, 147 Fujian, 31, 111, 122, 123, 129, 133, 166, 171, 172, 178, 193, 224, 235, 265, 314 Funan, 59, 66, 68, 75, 82, 99, 309 gandha. See aromatic ghe bau, 234, 235 Giao Chi. See Jiaozhi Guangdong, 22, 23, 77, 198, 209, 225 Guangxi, 29, 123, 126, 182, 313 Guangzhou, 12, 29, 33, 59, 114, 142, 146, 149, 168–170, 174 Gulf of Siam, 9, 53, 99, 139, 142, 257–259, 287, 294, 296 Gulf of Tongking, 9, 18, 32–34, 56, 59, 171, 202 ‘gunpowder empire’, 1

339

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340 Index Ha Tien. See Cancao Hainan Island, 36, 40, 130, 166, 168–171, 178, 193 Hemudu culture, 20 Hepu, 38, 40, 42, 85 Hồ , 178 Hoa Binh, 17, 21, 39 Hoa Loc, 18 Hoi An, 84, 109, 154, 164, 189, 191, 229, 232, 234, 235, 246, 247, 251, 261, 262, 269, 272, 273, 278, 279 Hong Kong, 11, 49, 54, 77, 312, 314 Hu. See Hồ Hue, 7, 89, 92, 106, 174, 233, 245, 252, 276–278, 287, 288, 292, 298, 304 Hunan, 24, 25, 29 ‘Hundred Yue’, 20 Hung Vuong, 20, 26, 45 huoxiang, 52, 75 imperial grain shipping. See Tao van India, 4, 10, 11, 33, 47, 53, 55, 57–61, 77, 80, 81, 85, 91, 99, 105, 111, 122, 134, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 158, 288 Indian Ocean, 10, 12, 51, 78, 86, 98, 141, 142, 155, 166, 185, 192, 228 Indianisation, 4, 82, 97 Japan, 2, 10, 67, 75, 99, 146, 153, 164, 189, 194, 196, 200–205, 215, 225, 246–251, 261, 263, 272, 275, 318 Java, 2, 59, 60, 70, 78, 85, 91, 131, 146, 147, 181, 183, 185, 197, 206, 261, 280, 281, 290, 300, 309, 312 Jiaozhi, 27, 28, 31, 82, 114, 140, 197, 198 Jiaozhi Sea, 12, 129–132, 134, 139, 141, 165, 166, 170–172, 175, 191, 279, 315, 317 Jiaozhou, 52, 53, 58, 59, 66, 114 Kang Senghui, 56–59, 71 kendi, 56, 192 Khmer, 9, 13, 60, 82, 140, 145, 158, 159, 191, 230, 232, 245, 248, 258, 309, 317 Kinh Cuu dan, 244 ‘Kunlun’, 67 Lac, 5, 19, 21, 27, 28 Lac Long Quan, 21, 26 Lach Truong, 31, 34, 36, 40, 43, 44, 51, 81 Laos, 6, 8, 12, 83, 101, 107, 209, 281, See also Ai lao Pass; Muong Phuan Late Middle Chinese, 28 Le Loi, 36, 188, 279, 315 Le Thanh Tong, 1–3, 7, 13, 190, 191, 243, 314 Leizhou, 191 Leizhou Peninsula, 33, 36, 40, 43, 166

Li and Lao, 5, 114 Ling Canal, 29, 31, 51 Lingnan, 22, 49, 146 Linyi, 9, 10, 11, 40, 68, 69, 80, 82, 87, 98, 108, 140, 144, 147, 151, 157, 158, 166, 167, 174, 241, 252, 253, 309, 312, 317, See also Champa literati, 8, 14, 63, 64, 135, 190, 196, 214, 216, 221–227, 301, 308, 315 Lo River, 48 Long Bien, 55, 60 Luu Ke Tong, 155–157 Luy Lau, 11, 34, 36, 51, 55, 56, 58, 61, 65, 197 Ma Vien, 31, 87, 118 Ma Yuan. See Ma Vien Man Bac, 21 Melaka, 2, 53, 162, 192, 228, 229, 269, 279, 287, 310 Ming, 2, 8, 36, 90, 151, 166, 187, 189, 191, 194, 196, 200, 217, 224, 232, 246, 249, 255, 256, 279, 313, 315, 317 ‘Ming Gap’, 182 Ming Mang, 7 Mon-Khmer, 9, 27, 87, 89, 106 Muong Phuan, 1 Muslim, 10, 12, 141, 149, 153–156, 166, 167, 172, 174, 176–178, 180, 185, 186, 191, 192, 193, 228, 252 Nagasaki, 7, 201, 202, 215, 222, 247, 248, 250, 262 Nanyue, 24, 49 Nanzhao, 187 Neolithic, 9, 18, 20, 22 Nghe An, 18, 39, 95, 107, 116, 124, 131, 146, 157, 202, 283, 313 Ngo Quyen, 156, 157 Nôm, 24 Oli, 91, 96, 97 Oli (Ulik) Qusu, 92 overland Silk Road, 57, 178 patchouli, 64, 65, 75, See also huoxiang Pearl River Delta, 41, 49, 73, 114, 198 pepper, 67, 172, 247, 248, 260, 279, 280, 287, 289, 290 Persians, 149, 153, 155 Phap Van Temple, 60, 122 Philippines, 280, 290, 309 phuc than, 218 Phung Nguyen, 21, 48 Po Gahlau – ‘King of the aloeswood’, 252 Po Nagar, 145, 146, 253

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Index 341 Portuguese, 2, 4, 8, 200, 201, 205, 210, 229, 237, 250, 259, 260, 273 post-Angkorian power, 256 proto-Tai, 25 Pu Shougeng, 149, 171, 178 Qing, 8, 11, 54, 224, 225, 249, 250, 255, 256, 264, 297, 298, 300, 305 Qinzhou, 29, 116, 118, 126, 128, 130–133, 170, 171, 175, 193, 200 rattan, 273, 274, 282 Red River Delta, 26, 300 rice, 21, 26, 40, 42, 66, 125, 129, 132, 137–139, 198, 207, 211, 213, 249, 259, 268, 269, 275, 276, 278, 282, 286–289, 291–294, 296–308 Rinan, 33, 66, 68, 80, 82, 83, 85, 90, 97, 105, 107, 108, 114, 252 Sa Huynh, 84, 86, 89, 101, 309 salt, 14, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 232, 268, 287, 310, 313, 317 saltpetre, 2, 7, 310 Sanskrit, 11, 57, 58, 62, 64, 69, 71, 106, 145, 162, 163 Shi Xie (Si Nhiep), 56 Siam, 131, 181, 245, 259, 268, 269, 279–281, 286, 290, 292, 298, 301, 307, 308 Sichuan, 45, 47, 49, 59, 132, 154, 317 Simhala, 58 Sogdian, 57–59, 68, 146 South China Sea, 10, 17, 18, 20, 28, 33, 36, 51, 57, 81, 83, 86, 141, 164, 174, 192, 202, 232, 237, 241, 255, 256, 283, 295, 307, 309 South Seas. See South China Sea “southern advance” (Nam tien), 228 southern Cham negaras, 146 Southern Liang dynasty, 64 Southern Qi dynasty, 33 Sri Lanka. See Simhala Srivijaya, 59, 66, 99, 146 storax, 75, 148 Storax Oil, 10, 75 sugar, 61, 67, 235, 248, 260, 261, 262, 278, 280–282, 289 sulphur, 2, 3, 6, 310 Sumatra, 2, 66, 68, 99, 142, 181, 260, 267, 309

Tai-Kadai, 14, 29, 53, 61, 125, 126, 128, 310 Tang dynasty, 33, 78, 103, 111, 119, 142 Tantric school of Buddhism. See Vajrayana Tao Van, 291, 292, 300, 303, 305 Taoist temples (den, mieu), 220 taxation, 120, 293, 302 Tay Son, 16, 161, 257, 264, 269, 271, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281–284, 293, 302, 303, 311, 316 ‘THE port and THE path’, 12 Thang Long, 37, 110, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 130, 134, 137, 157, 159, 176, 177, 180, 184, 186, 202, 207, 210, 213, 214, 229, 277, 287, 291 Thanh Hoa, 18, 34, 36, 59, 86, 95, 107, 123, 124, 195, 296 thanh hoang, 43, 111, 218, 219 Thu Bon River, 83, 86, 244 Tongking, 171, 207, 211, 291 Tongking Gulf. See Gulf of Tongking Tra Kieu, 31, 84, 91, 105, 147, 158 Tran dynasty, 12, 193 ‘upper road’ (thuong dao), 36 urbanism, 10, 12, 285 Vajrayana, 58–60, 78 ‘esoteric Buddhism’, 60 Van Don, 130–133, 165, 166, 182, 191, 193, 313 Viet Khe, 22 Vietnam War, 16, 102 VOC, 202–207, 211, 215, 219, 225, 248, 270, 273 water frontier, 124, 169, 255, 256, 267, 280, 287, 296, 310 West Asia, 10, 12, 47, 148, 172 women, 14, 75, 76, 116, 189, 206, 207, 209, 214, 215, 226, 243, 244, 245, 260 Xitu, 88, 96 Xom Ren, 48 Xuwen, 33, 36, 38 Yangzi River Delta, 20, 21, 275 yazhang, 9, 48 Yue, 20, 22, 23, 26–28, 63, 80, 81 Yunnan, 47, 165, 170, 176, 188, 317

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