Newly-published Việt
Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, by Ben Kiernan explores the history of the
different peoples who have lived in the three major regions of Viet Nam over
the past 3,000 years. It brings to life their relationships with these regions'
landscapes, water resources, and climatic conditions. It addresses head-on the
dramatic impact of changing weather patterns from ancient to medieval and
modern times. The central importance of riverine and maritime communications
and systems to life in Việt Nam is a key theme.
Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney
Griswold Professor of History at Yale University. He founded the University's Cambodian
Genocide Program, which later became the Genocide Studies Program, and has served as Chair of
Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies. He has written extensively on South
East Asia, on genocide worldwide, and on genocide in Cambodia.
Here he discusses Việt Nam as an
aquatic culture.
“The mountains are
like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,” wrote a Vietnamese geographer
in 1820. The country’s many rivers,
large deltas, and long coastline have always played a key role in its
agriculture, trade, and communications. The central
significance of water, not only in the economy but in Vietnamese society,
culture and politics, is one of the themes of my book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present.
The book
demonstrates several perennial themes - ecological, linguistic, and
genealogical - that permeate the millennia-long histories of the multi-ethnic lands
that now comprise Việt Nam.
First is the importance of the environment, landscape and climate, changing
over time as heavy rains swept silt downstream and new sea levels transformed
coastlines. Second is the history of languages spoken in the region. From the
first millennium BCE, people in the north spoke Vietic languages, linguistic
ancestors of Vietnamese. Inhabitants of the center and south spoke early forms
of Cham and Khmer. And third, while many people migrated or switched languages,
some of their genealogical heritage and cultural affinities persisted in family
archives and ancestor cults. The identities of many Vietnamese are deeply
rooted in the land where their forbears lie buried. Those moving south brought
family cults from the north, while many Cham and Khmer maintained family names
and some ancestral cultural practices even when they adopted Vietnamese.
Yet change has
matched continuity. Deep transformations, also charted in the book, have drastically
altered Vietnamese history, from Chinese rule to French colonization.
Vietnamese have adapted external religious, cultural, and political influences,
from Buddhism, Confucianism, Catholicism, and communism, to human rights.
Here, though, I
will address the persistent significance of water in Vietnamese culture.
The first recorded
name for the Vietnamese people is Lạc, a word meaning an aquatic creature,
which appears in the name of the mythical Lạc Long Quân (“otter dragon lord”),
who came from the sea and purportedly introduced the Vietnamese to agriculture.
Some suggest that the name Lạc comes from the Vietnamese word lạch or rạch,
meaning “ditch, canal, waterway,” and
that farming in the Red River delta involved the draining of swampland. Huỳnh
Sanh Thông (1926-2008), a leading scholar of the Vietnamese language and
culture, argued that lạc is “a variant of nác, an archaic or
dialectal form of nước, or ‘water,’” and that many other Vietnamese
words referring to water “sound very much like lạc.”
The earliest
appearance of “Lạc” comes in a Chinese statement directly linking aquatic
agriculture to Lạc ethnic identity (in its Chinese form Luo) in the Red
River plain, which the Chinese called Jiaozhi. A description of that region in
a lost third- or fourth-century text is quoted in the sixth-century Commentary on the Waterways Classic: “[I]n
Jiaozhi, there were Luo [Lạc] Fields, which appeared or disappeared in
accordance with the flooding of the tide. Local people reclaimed these lands
and lived on them. Therefore, people there were called Luo people.” If Huỳnh
Sanh Thông’s etymology is correct, the Vietnamese were then the “water people,”
those who cultivated the “water fields.”
Vietnamese came to
call their homeland non nước, their “mountains and waters” – even just nước
(waters). In his study, “Live by
Water, Die for Water (Sống vì nước, chết vì nước),” Huỳnh Sanh Thông
documented and analyzed the frequent use, from earliest times to the present,
of aquatic metaphors in poetry, writing, and folklore. He wrote: “The ancestors
of the Vietnamese attached far more importance to ‘water’ than to either
‘hills’ or ‘land’ in their idea of a homeland.” Aquatic metaphors recurred in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. In Vietnamese literature, water could
represent far more than just the idea of a homeland. “The sea and streams,
ponds and lakes, water plants and beasts, barges and bridges, fisher folk and
boaters, all serve as graphic metaphors to embody harsh facts or base desires
as well as noble truths or deep thoughts.” Huỳnh Sanh Thông characterized the
Vietnamese worldview itself as “Water, water everywhere.”
In the early
fifteenth century, during the war against the Ming dynasty’s annexation of the
kingdom of Đại
Việt, the Vietnamese leader Lê Lợi and his
scholar-counselor Nguyễn Trãi deployed guerrilla
warfare. In letters to the Ming commander, Nguyễn Trãi
used a Việt water metaphor to assert that “scooping up a dipper of water will not
empty the sea; pouring in a dipper of water will not overflow the ocean.
Therefore, [those] who [know how to] use armies well are not pleased over a
minor victory nor terrified of a major defeat.” Nguyễn Trãi
apparently popularized a slogan that drew upon another Việt aquatic metaphor: “Like
the ocean which supports a ship but can also overturn it, so the people can support
the throne or sink it.” In Nghệ An, rebels challenged the Chinese: “Overturn the
boat and then you will believe that the people are like water.” Lê Lợi’s army drove
out the Chinese in 1428.
In a Vietnamese-language poem in the
demotic nôm script, Nguyễn Trãi
wrote: “A bond attaches you to hills and streams. Make use of leisure—nourish
your true self.” His phrase for “hills and streams” was non nước (mountains
and waters), the Vietnamese term for one’s “country.”
The Lê dynasty
lasted, at least in name, until 1788. The second ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty, Minh
Mạng, an ideologically rigid Confucian, ascended the throne in 1820 feeling
apprehensive - as he put it, “like sitting on a boat.” With a nod over the side
at Nguyễn Trãi’s reflection, he added: “The king is
the boat and the people are the water beneath. So, water can overturn the boat and
the king can lose his position.”
Minh Mạng’s
coronation coincided with a plague that reduced the population by 200,000. Yet
one of his first acts was to ban the nôm script. Chinese became the sole
language of administration. Confucian rigidity would disarm the country on the
eve of Western colonial invasion.
Water metaphors
remained important in Vietnamese culture and governance through the twentieth
century. Today, in an era of global warming, with droughts and upstream dams
restricting the flow of water in the Mekong River, while sea levels rise and conflict
simmers in the South China Sea, water is still the life blood of Việt Nam.
Details: Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present is published
by Oxford
University Press, in hardback and eBook, priced in local currencies.
