Response to the Commentaries by Tạ Chí Đại Trường and Keith Taylor

Author(s): Liam C. Kelley

Source: Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 163-169
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/vs.2012.7.2.163 .
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FORUM (3)

LIAM C . KELLEY

Response to the Commentaries by

Tạ Chí Đại Trường and Keith Taylor

I would like to sincerely thank Tạ Chí Đại Trường and Keith Taylor for taking
the time to read and comment on my paper, “The Biography of the Hồng
Bàng Clan as a Medieval Vietnamese Invented Tradition.” An anonymous
reader of the essay pointed out that this topic has long been neglected for various
reasons. As the comments of both of these scholars make clear, this is not because
there is little to say about the subject. To the contrary, there is a great deal that can
and still needs to be said. The problem is finding an effective way to do so.
From the late s to the early s, there were many issues concerning
the early history of Vietnam that Vietnamese, French, Japanese, American,
and Chinese scholars debated. As Tạ Chí Đại Trường, Keith Taylor and I have
all indicated in various ways, these debates largely ended in the s, but
there was much left unsaid. Today, some thirty years later, it is difficult to
revisit these issues. In Vietnam, politics and nationalism, among other factors,
make this all but impossible. In America, the type of philology-based scholar-
ship necessary for dealing with this topic has fallen out of fashion and the
number of people who engage in such scholarship is limited.1 I also cannot
imagine that many publishers today would be excited to see a manuscript
arrive on their desks looking like Keith Taylor’s The Birth of Vietnam, with its
fifteen appendixes following three-hundred pages of text. However, it is

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. –. ISSN -X, electronic ISSN -.
©  by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: ./vs.....



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 KELLEY

extremely difficult to find a better way to deal with the complexities of this
topic, especially with all of its related issues and sub-debates.
With these problems in mind, when I wrote this paper I deliberately tried
to find a way to address some core issues in a focused and limited manner.
I attempted to write a paper that readers unfamiliar with the minutiae of early
Vietnamese history could follow, and one that would not try to cover all of the
issues that need to be revisited. Some of those issues include the ideas of Jean
Przyluski, whom Keith Taylor mentions, and whose work scholars who focus
on areas and issues other than Vietnam and its traditions have criticized.2 The
solution, I decided, was to focus on a single important text and try to demon-
strate that this text does not contain information that has been passed down
from the first millennium BCE, and that it is, therefore, not about actual rulers
from that period. The next obvious issue to consider is why this information
was produced in the medieval period. This is precisely one of the issues that
Tạ Chí Đại Trường turns to in his essay, and I am extremely grateful to him
for having done so.3
Tạ Chí Đại Trường provides some of the core information for what I see as
subsequent studies that need to be conducted. Among them should be a study
that delves deeper into the historical context in which these texts were pro-
duced and one on the way later generations of scholars and political figures
manipulated information on the “Hùng kings” for various purposes. This is
where what Taylor refers to as “the messy confusions of real life” needs to
come into play. And indeed, I think life in medieval Vietnam, not to mention
the Vietnam of the s–s, was definitely messy.
I realize that the limited focus of my essay could lead one to surmise that
I think stories such as the “The Biography of the Hồng Bang Clan” are, to use
Taylor’s terms, “acts of pure imagination or cloistered recondite musings.”
But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and I am to blame for not
making this more evident in the essay. Instead, I would argue that many of the
stories from this period are definitely related to real life issues, such as margin-
alization and domination.
Tạ Chí Đại Trường mentions that in a source called the Annan zhiyuan,
which contains materials obtained during the Ming occupation in the
early fifteenth century, the Ming Chinese noted the existence of a “Lạc
King Palace” [Cung Lạc Vương] and a spirit on Mount Tản Viên called

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 RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTARIES BY TẠ CHÍ ĐẠI TRƯỜNG AND KEITH TAYLOR 

Mị Nương, who was the daughter of a Hùng king. The passage on the Lạc
King Palace is as follows:
An old treatise states, “In the past, before there were commanderies and
districts, there were Lạc fields. They followed the rising and falling of the
floodwaters. Those who cultivated these fields were Lạc people. He who
controlled these fields was the Lạc king. Those who assisted him were Lạc
generals. They all had bronze seals on green ribbons. It was called the king-
dom of Văn Lang. Customs were pure and simple, and rule was by means
of tying knots.4 After eighteen successive generations, it was destroyed by
the Thục king.” The remains of the Lạc palace still exist.5

What is fascinating about this passage is that it appears to show the “tradition
of the Hùng kings” in the process of its medieval creation. The passage begins
by basically following the early text, the Record of the Outer Territory of Jiao
Region [Jiaozhou waiyu ji], which of course did not mention Hùng kings.
It then brings in information that eventually came to be associated with the
tradition of the Hùng kings during the medieval period, such as the kingdom
name of Văn Lang and its eighteen successive generations of rulers. In other
words, it appears that some Vietnamese in the medievel period began to create
a tradition of Lạc kings, and then at some later point, perhaps in the fifteenth
century, it became a tradition of Hùng kings.
At the same time that the remains of this Lạc King Palace existed, however,
the very same text informs us that on Mount Tản Viên lived a spirit called Mị
Nương who was reportedly the daughter of a Hùng king. This passage then
goes on to tell what is now a very well-known story in Vietnam about how the
Hùng king sought a suitor for his daughter and held a competition in which a
mountain spirit defeated a water spirit and then took his new bride to live on
Mount Tản Viên. This text, which was compiled from sources that Ming
Chinese collected during their occupation, then goes on to note that “Mị Nương
is also a numinous monster [linh quái]. She often reveals her form as a person
with long hair and a long robe, and looks just like a beautiful woman.”6
This information about Mị Nương appears at the end of Annan zhiyuan in
a section on “random records” [tạp chí], and a local gazetteer is cited as the
source. Meanwhile, the information about the Lạc King Palace appears in the
middle of the text in a respectable section on “ancient remains” [cổ tích].
Hence, the Chinese who compiled this text characterized this information

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 KELLEY

about Mị Nương, the Hùng king and Mount Tản Viên as somewhat
peripheral and alien. Entries about Mount Tản Viên in the Complete Book of
the Historical Records of Đại Việt [Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư] give a similar sense.
On the one hand, we find that early Vietnamese rulers apparently felt that
Mount Tản Viên possessed some form of supernatural efficacy. During a
period of constant rains in , for instance, Emperor Lý Nhân Tông had a
Buddha image from Pháp Vân pagoda brought to the capital so that he could
seek its power in praying for clear skies, and also made offerings on Mount
Tản Viên. Then in  a spirit shrine was constructed on Mount Tản Viên.
On the other hand, after these entries in the Complete Book we then find other
references to Mount Tản Viên that mention the “savages” [man] who lived
around it. In , Mount Tản Viên “mountain savages” [sơn man] plundered
villages in the area, and in , they fought with neighboring savages.
Who were these savages? That is difficult to say for certain, but it is signifi-
cant to note that the name “Mị Nương” is of Tai origin. “Mae nang” in Tai
languages refers to a “lady” or “princess.” However, it is a term that appears
to have been adopted by people whom we would today classify as Mường and
Vietnamese speakers as well. These peoples were part of a multi-ethnic and
multilingual world in the greater Red River Delta region during the medieval
period, and I would argue that the people who created the Arrayed Tales of
Selected Oddities from South of the Passes [Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện] were
part of a group seeking to dominate this messy and confusing world. As they
did so, they appear to have marginalized certain peoples whom they deemed to
be “savages.” In the process, however, perhaps they also appropriated certain
spirits that these “savages” worshipped, and then incorporated some of the sto-
ries or motifs about these spirits into the new tales they created about the forces
they had domesticated. In this regard, I wonder if the reference to Mị Nương as
a numinous monster in this Ming-era text is a remnant from a time before
Vietnamese incorporated the “ savages” of Mount Tản Viên into their realm,
when they were aware of this spirit but depicted her in negative terms as they
sought to marginalize and then dominate the people in that region. In any case,
I agree with Keith Taylor that we need to look at “the way that culture is pro-
duced by interaction between non-elite and elite stories,” but I would add that
we also need to consider the role that power played in these interactions, for it
is unlikely that contact between the elite and non-elite was always friendly.

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 RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTARIES BY TẠ CHÍ ĐẠI TRƯỜNG AND KEITH TAYLOR 

These are some of my views. Are they similar to Nguyễn Phương’s, as

Keith Taylor suggests? Not really. Tạ Chí Đại Trường and Keith Taylor both
make positive statements about Nguyễn Phương’s scholarship, and these
comments are warranted. However, they do not mention his main argument.
Yes, Nguyễn Phương shared with me the belief that the stories about the Hùng
kings were invented and that the “Biography of Liu Yi” was an important
source for the stories that were created. However, his main argument about
early Vietnamese history was that the Vietnamese migrated to Vietnam from
China in the first centuries of the common era and were thus different from
the “Indonesians” who already inhabited the Red River Delta region.7 There-
fore, according to Nguyễn Phương, the people who made the Đông Sơn bronze
drums were not Vietnamese, nor were the Trưng Sisters. The Vietnamese, or
what he actually called “the Chinese,” came later. As he explained, “the Chinese
population, only a minority in the beginning, became a majority after centuries
of colonization, and finally the inhabitants of the countryside of the whole
territory were Chinese.”8
Ultimately, what Nguyễn Phương did was conflate biology with culture.
He saw that the people of say the tenth century were different from the people
depicted on bronze drums in the first millennium BCE, and he attributed this
change to the arrival of a new population from China. Needless to say if
Nguyễn Phương’s scholarship had been better known, more scholarship
would still have been necessary. However, his approach made up for what his
ideas lacked. Nguyễn Phương was accused in the s of being “odd” [lập dị],
“anti-nationalist” [phi dân tộc], and even “anarchical” [vô chánh trị]. However,
I would agree with one of his reviewers that what really characterized Nguyễn
Phương was his “dry rationalism” [duy lý khô khan].9 Nguyễn Phương tried to
be impartial and to examine the past in a logical manner. If more scholars had
taken this approach at that time, then regardless of what Nguyễn Phương
argued, our understanding of early Vietnamese history today would be very
different.
However, larger historical events prevented this from happening. The
result is that many scholars were unable to examine early Vietnamese history
with “dry rationalism.” Tạ Chí Đại Trường’s career as an historian was cut
short by the Second Indochina War. Scholars in the North were pressured by
their government to “prove” the existence of the Hùng kings during the height

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 KELLEY

of that same war. And in the war’s final years and its immediate aftermath, as
well as in an institutional environment keen on overturning colonial scholar-
ship and creating a space for Southeast Asian Studies, Keith Taylor, having
served as a soldier in Vietnam, researched and wrote his dissertation, which
later became The Birth of Vietnam.
Today when I look back at the scholarship from that period, its weak-
nesses are readily apparent. The personal investment of scholars in their
work at that time, however, is equally manifest. This, I would argue, is
yet another factor that has led to the neglect of this topic in recent dec-
ades. The lives of scholars like Tạ Chí Đại Trường, Keith Taylor and
many others in Vietnam today are deeply entwined with their work.
Finding a way to disentangle scholarship from recent history and the
lives of individual scholars, so that “dry rationalism” can be applied to it
once again, is not easy. I am extremely grateful to Tạ Chí Đại Trường
and Keith Taylor for doing so here. And like the anonymous reviewer
whom I mentioned at the outset of this brief essay, I hope that one day
soon scholars in Vietnam will begin to do the same.

LIAM C. KELLEYis Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the

University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The author would like to thank the
anonymous reviewer, Tạ Chí Đại Trường and Keith Taylor for their
suggestions and insights.

Notes
. On a side note, I would like to thank Keith Taylor for pointing out the
complexity of the term “Ren Huang,” meaning the “human emperor.” There
were numerous traditions concerning Ren Huang. One can find Ren Huang
referred to as a single ruler, as a ruler who is one of nine brothers, and as a clan
of nine brothers. Steven Sage, writing about the imagined connection between
the Sichuan region and ancient mythical Chinese rulers that we find in the
Treatise on the Kingdoms South of [Mount] Hua, stated that “It starts with the
Human Emperor, one of nine brothers, dividing all territory into nine partitions
(jiu you), on succeeding the Earthly Emperor.” See Steven F. Sage, Ancient
Sichuan and the Unification of China (Albany: State University of New York
Press, ), . For the sake of simplicity, I chose to follow Sage but omitted

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 RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTARIES BY TẠ CHÍ ĐẠI TRƯỜNG AND KEITH TAYLOR 

reference to the brothers. His work is the main study on early Sichuan and is a
logical source for someone to consult should anyone wish to learn more about
Sichuan and the Treatise on the Kingdoms South of [Mount] Hua. I doubt that
such a decision will diminish confidence in my philological work, or that of
Steven Sage.
. See, for instance, Richard B. Davis, Muang Metaphysics: A Study of Northern
Thai Myth and Ritual (Bangkok: Pandora, ), ; and Judy Ledgerwood,
“Khmer Kinship: the Matrilinly/Matriarchy Myth,” Journal of Anthropological
Research , no.  (Autumn ): .
. This is an issue that Tạ Chí Đại Trường has also examined in greater detail in
his book, Thần, người và đất Việt [Spirits, People and the Land of the Việt]
(Westminster: Văn Nghệ, ).
. These are code words that indicate a pre-literate society.
. “昔未有郡縣時有雒田，隨潮水上下，墾其田者為雒民，統其田者為雒
王，副貳者為雒將，皆銅印青綬，號文郎國，以純樸為俗，結繩為治，
傳世十八，為蜀王所滅。今雒宮故址猶存.” See Léonard Aurousseau, ed.,
Ngan-nam tche yuan [Annan zhiyuan] (Hà Nội: École Française d’Extrême-
Orient, ), .
. Ibid., –. The quote is on .
. Nguyễn Phương, Việt Nam thời khai sinh [Vietnam at the Time of Its Birth]
(Huế: Phòng Nghiên Cứu Sử, Viện Đại Học Huế, ). The conference
paper that he presented in Hong Kong in , “Chinese Origin of the
Vietnamese People,” which Tạ Chí Đại Trường mentions in his essay, is
appended to this book, and is a concise English-language summary of Nguyễn
Phương’s ideas.
. Ibid., .
. Bùi Hữu Sủng, “Di tích Lạc Việt trong xã hội Việt Nam” [Traces of the Lạc Việt
in Vietnamese Society], Bách Khoa [Encyclopedia]  (): .

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