SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Soatheost Asia Vol. 26. ¡Vo. 1 (2011), pp. 128-Í8 DOI: 10.

1355/sj26-lg
© 2011 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic

"Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Views of

Vietnam's Pre-history

LONG S. Le

Until recentiy, nortiiem Vietnam was beiieved to be a receiver or a ioan

cuiture of a unidireotionai diffusion and migration trom the advanced
Ciiinese oivilization. By the eariy 1980s, a new prehistory ot northern
Vietnam was becoming increasingiy apparent. Yet, new discoveries
by both Vietnamese and Western schoiars possess existing biases,
interestingly, as a response to the above, today's Western schoiars are
attempting to "resoue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam.
iHowever, it is not ciear whether this new schema would oniy carve out
a topic of expertise for Western historians or oniy further marginalize
particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that did not neoessariiy constrain
"independent histories",

Keywords: Chinese history, civilization, nationalist history, postcolonialism, Vietnam.

In surveying its pre-history, Vietnamese ancestries — in terms

of culture, language, and genotype — is firmly grounded in the
Southeast Asian region (Glover and Bellwood 2004). Yet having
such ancestries has not always been positive, at least before the mid-
1960s. That is, scholars writing before the mid-1960s had regarded
Southeast Asian civilization as having no roots — a prehistoric
backwater stuck fast in the Stone Age (Heine-Geldren 1937; Karlgren
1942; Janse 1958; Chang 1964; Graham Clark 1961; Fisher 1964).
These scholars, on the one hand, believe each civilization possessed
its own genius. On the other hand, they believe the importance of
studying Southeast Asian history is its "classical" period in which
the region's transition to statehood was owed to Indian cultural
and Chinese economic and political influences (Coedes 1968,
"Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Views of Viefnam's Pre-history 129

pp. 252-53). In this view, Vietnam was fortunate. That because it

was a meeting ground of both interior riverine and maritime trade
links, Vietnam became a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional
diffusion and migration from advanced civilizations. From such
contact, state formations in what is now Vietnam were thought
to have been established and flourished in the early Christian era,
whereas the tribes in Southeast Asian prehistory did not know how
to rule (Coedes 1966, p. 268; Coedes 1968, p. 403). So that areas
of northern Vietnam were considered "Sinicized", "little China",
or "the smaller dragon". Meanwhile, the early states in southern
Vietnam, such as Champa and Funan, were depicted as Indianized
states or colonies.
At best, historians writing before the mid-1960s like John Cady
and Joseph Buttinger held that Southeast Asian civilizations were
imported but evolved as individual adaptations. In some cases the
modifications illustrate local genius of the more advanced culture
of China or India and of which is precisely what makes them
Indochinese and why the territory may properly be called Indochina
(Cady 1964, p. 4; Buttinger 1958, p. 19). However, such a prevailing
view essentially kept at bay postulations that civilizations in Vietnam
could have been a makers of history able to emplace or replace
foreign influences that would be considered integral to their cultural
core across time and space. By implication, colonialist study on
prehistory or colonialist archaeology wherever practiced serves "to
denigrate native societies and peoples by trying to demonstrate that
they had been static in prehistoric times and lacked the initiative to
develop on their own", as argued by historian archaeologist Bruce
Trigger (1984, p. 363). To what degree is this true of colonialist
studies on Vietnam's prehistory by the Chinese, French, and the
Americans?
To be sure, by the early 1980s, a new prehistory of northern
Vietnam was becoming increasingly apparent. Northern Vietnam
was shown to have cultivated rice by the late third or early second
millennium BC, and its culture and identity began to converge into
Vietnam's first prehistoric civilization (Bellwood, 1979, p. 96). The
130 LONGS. Le

so-called Dong Son Culture starting about 800 BC represents a major

technological achievement in which the proto-Viet race created
more than 200 bronze kettledrums of Heger I type. Such a finding
not only solidifies Vietnam's Bronze-Iron Age traditions but also
suggests that the roots of the Dong Son Culture antedate any
significant Chinese influence (Nguyen Khac Su et al., pp. 188
and 200). Meanwhile, Vietnam's pre-Dong Son cultures support
internal evolution rather than a replacement of one culture by a new
ctiltural group.
Yet it is also undeniable that new discoveries in Vietnam
conducted by state-run research institutions have existing biases.
For example, after 1954 a new independent but resource-poor
North Vietnam put forward a nationalist archaeological campaign to
counter a colonial view of Vietnam history. In fact. North Vietnam
surveyed, recorded, excavated, and published more than all the other
newly independent countries of the region put together (Glover and
Bellwood 2004, p. 340). The ends were not only to establish an
unbroken chain of succession linking contemporary generations of
Vietnamese to the Dong Son people, but also that succession was
of evolutionary progression leading to Ho Chi Minh's revolution. At
the time, some Western scholars utilized North Vietnam's findings
to deconstruct the "Orientalist" framework, which had dominated
the study of history in the region. Interestingly, as a response to
the above, today's Western scholars are attempting to "rescue" the
"casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. However, it is not clear
whether this new schema would only carve out a topic of expertise
for Western historians.

Vietnamese History as a Branch of Chinese History

Until recently, according to Chinese historians and Western
Sinologists, Vietnam was believed to originate from the refugee
population of Yueh (pronounced as Viet in Vietnamese), located
along the coast where the Yangtze River enters the sea, and infused
with Chinese culture. In 333 BC, the state of Yueh was conquered
by the state of Chu'u that was supposedly dispatched by the Chou
"Colonial" and "Rostooloniai" Views of Vietnam's Rre-history 131

court based in central China (1027-256 BC) in order to "colonize"

the "southern barbarians" (Blakeley 1999, p. 10). Consequently, the
Yueh rtiling class migrated southward, including the area of northern
Vietnam, and established small kingdoms and principalities. This is
referred to by Chinese historians as "Hundred Yueh", where Nan
Yueh (pronounced as Nam Viet in Vietnamese) was at its centre
and was flanked by Eastern and Western Ou (pronounced as "Au"
in Vietnamese), which represented the frontier. Such is the basis that
the origin of Vietnamese people lay in the arrival of migrating Yueh
people (Taylor 1983, pp. 14-16).
According to Chinese traditional views. An Duong, a descendent
of the Ou Yueh (Au Viet) population, conquered northern Vietnam
and built a kingdom {257-207 BC) near modern day Hanoi. An
Duong is the first figure to be recorded in Vietnamese history by
reliable sources, when his kingdom was conquered by the Ch'in
state. That is, when the state of Chu'u was conquered by Ch'in Shih
Huang Ti, the builder of the Great Wall and first emperor of Ch'in
(221-206 BC), half a million Ch'in soldiers were ordered to invade
the Yueh southern lands. By 207 BC. Chao T'o, a Ch'in general,
was able to establish a Chinese southern state that commanded
the Kwantung and Kwangsi Provinces, and the Red River Delta of
northern Vietnam. As the state of Ch'in was being conquered by
the advancing Han dynasty. Chao T'o proclaimed himself King of
Nan Yueh or Nam Viet (207-111 BC) and established his capital
near modern Canton.
Eventually, the order of Nam Viet was reversed to Viet Nam in
1802 when northern Vietnam was reunified with central and southern
Vietnam. However, before and after the order of Viet Nam, there
has been a Vietnamese view that Nam Viet, in terms of etymology
(or the history of the word), symbolizes the physical, psychological,
cultural, and intellectual displacement of an indigenous civilization;
that the earliest references to the people of northern Vietnam were of
Lac not Yueh, though the knowledge of the Lac civilization is mostly
from legend and oral history. From this view. An Duong was from
the north and founded a kingdom known as Au Lac. In fact, recent
132 LCNG S. Le

Studies suggest that An Duong's rtUe had subdued the Lac ruling elite
but did not disinherit them (Taylor 1983). There is also no evidence
An Duong's arrival left any mark on the Vietnamese language or
caused any demographic change. Meanwhile, during Chao T'o's
reign, the priority was overseeing trade routes and presiding over
commercial centres. Therefore administrative control did not have a
wide application "for the Lac lords largely remained in control of the
land and people during this time", and when Lac lords submitted to
Western Han rulers who invaded northern Vietnam in 111 BC, "the
Lac lords ruled the people as before", according to historian Keith
Taylor (1983, p. 29).
And until Western Han rule was replaced by Eastern Han in
24 BC, the traditional Dong Son Culture appears to have continued
below the prefecture level (Nguyen Khac Su 2004, p. 202). When
Eastern Han implemented a policy of reorganizing the agrarian
economy as a stable source of tax revenue along with establishing
a patriarchal society that would respond to Han-style government,
two local daughters of a Lac lord, known as the Trung Sisters, led
an uprising. In AD 40, the Chinese settlements were overrun, and
the elder sister Trung Trac had "established a royal court at Me
Linh [the original area of Dong Son Ctilture] and was recognized as
queen by sixty-five strongholds [fiefs]", and "it is recorded that for
two years she adjusted the taxes" (Taylor 1983, p. 39). Moreover,
Trung Trac's reign may have taken place while her husband was
still alive. However, by AD 43 the matriarchic reign was quelled, the
system of the Lac lord was revoked, and direct Han rule imposed.
Consequently, key remnants of the Lac society (e.g., greater role of
women in social fields, individualistic tendencies, and bilateral family
system) were displaced, at least among the elite. Moreover, the local
population began to shift their identity from Lac to Viet. That is,
for the local population, their name Lac was no longer of account,
whereas the Viet identity was forced but also carried some social
status with it.
From the Chinese traditional view, Yueh was to express the
conquered people's place within the "middle kingdom", but it was
"Coioniai" and "Postcoioniai" Views of Vietnam's Pre-history 133

to be temporary since these people would eventually be civilized

and become Chinese, as was the case for other Viet cultures in
southern China. Even by the mid 1980s, well-known Chinese
scholars still regarded the Yueh peoples, including those occupying
northern Vietnam, as branches or "brotherly ethnic groups" of the
Chinese race who were civilized solely by the expansion of Ch'in
Shih-Huang-Ti and his Han successors (see Xiaorong Han 2004,
pp. 24-25; Chang 1981; Watson 1981; Chang 1977). However,
according to renowned archaeologist Kwang-Chih Chang, after the
Cultural Revolution when the central control of archaeology was
short-circuited, "local archaeology revealed some very rich cultures"
which "yielded radiocarbon dates earlier than those of the cultures
in the so-called nuclear area" (Kwang-Chih Chang 2002, p. 9). Yet
Chang himself did not include these southern regions and their rich
cultures until his fourth edition of The Archaeology ofAncient China
in 1986. In retrospect, he stated that, "I was certainly aware of the
danger of my own nationality and nationalist tendencies ... caused by
the national education I had received.... But I was, when I wrote the
first two editions [1963 and 1968], unconsciously trapped" (Kwang-
Chih Chang 2002, p. 8).
To date, there appears to be a new view on "Chinese-ization".
That is, contemporary Sinologists or East Asian scholars, on the
one hand, are in agreement that there was undoubtedly a vibrant
and independent local culture in prehistoric Vietnam, as well as
some degree of "southernization" among some of the Chinese elite
in the early history of northern Vietnam. On the other hand,
scholars like Charles Holcome still see "Sinification" as "the force
that gradually shaped the various emerging civilizations", including
Vietnam, "out of what had been a mosaic of Stone Age tribes" in
which their "final differences are, in part, the very product of their
sustained interaction" (Holcombe 2001, p. 223). For Holcombe,
"Sinification" did not mean becoming "Chinese" (except within the
borders of the Chinese empire itself) > but it did help sire a new and
uniquely "Sinified" Vietnamese state, which after its independence in
AD 939 gradually absorbed Cham and Khmer and other populations
134 LCNCS. Le

and regions (Holcombe 2001, p. 219). At least on the surface, it

appears that Holcombe's unapologetically Sinocentric sphere is more
about representing an East Asia civilization that is "the single most
important major alternative historical evolutionary track ... with a
continuing history of success that can rival what we call the West"
than about Vietnamese history as a branch of Chinese history
(Holcombe 2001, p. 3).

"Mission Civiliatrice" and the "American War"

French intellectual support for its "mission civiliatrice" in Vietnam
(1883-1954) — before its association policies in the 1930s —
seemingly drew on the observation that Vietnam was once relatively
progressive and intelligent due to Chinese cultural influences, but
of which had relapsed. Vietnam's "imitativeness" became nothing
more than a somewhat eccentric and stunted extension of (but now
a fallen) China. Interestingly, early Western religious missionaries in
Vietnam during the seventeenth century, following the lead of French
Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, sought the origins of "Tonquinese"
(northern Vietnamese) society no earlier than its separation from
China in AD 939.
Meanwhile, during the colonial period, French historians
concluded that Vietnam made no progress after separating from
China. For example, Adrien Launay suggested that "the complete
absence of progress that the Annamites [Vietnamese] had on Chinese
civilization and the neglible development in the arts and sciences,
far inferior to that of the Chinese" illustrated that without Chinese
domination "Giao-chi [northern Vietnam] of old times would have
rested in savage tribal communities, just like the Muong who live on
the frontiers of their country" (cited in Tran and Reid 2006, p. 6).
By implication, Vietnamese, like other peoples, will "progress only
when provided with the necessary stimulus: they require contact
with people of a more refined culture" (cited in Lieberman 2003,
p. 8). Even the uniqueness of the Vietnamese village and Vietnamese
"march to the south" in colonizing the western and southern realms.
"Colonial" and "Rostoolonial" Views ot Vietnam's Rre-history 135

were traced to the Chinese village and to the Annamites' adaptation

of Chinese institutions, respectively (Tran and Reid, p. 6). However,
this view was later redefined in which "mission civiliatrice" must also
break Vietnam's links to China. That is, French colonial officials
became "convinced that to achieve permanent colonial success
required harsh curtailment of Chinese infiuences", including the
writing system and the ritualized mandarin examination, in order
"to isolate Vietnam from its heritage and to neutralize the traditional
elite" (Marr 1981, pp. 145).
Either because French scholars were usually Sinologists or
Indologists, they generally interpret Dong Son archaeological
materials as fundamentally Chinese, due to Chinese infiuences, or
foreign imports. For example, Olov Janse, who was in charge of
heading the Dong Son excavations (1934-38) under the auspices
of the Government-General of Indochina and the Ecole Française
d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), argued that "Chinese pioneers", "sinicized
Thais", or "sinicized Indonesians" brought "elements of a relatively
high civilisation with them", as they migrated south to northern
Vietnam (Janse 1958, p. 91). In southern Vietnam, fascinated by the
Muslim Cham population, French archaeologists and art historians
devoted much of their research on the major monumental sites of
Champa civilization from 1900 to 1918; and thereafter their focus
was increasingly given to the monuments at Angkor. In effect,
Vietnam, overshadowed by the belief that the Dong Son culture
was the result of cultural diffusion from China in the north and the
fascination with the Hinduization process and the "Indonesian" world
in the south, received "litde attention in her own rights" (Davidson
1979, p. 98).
This is not to say that the above is simply an example of French
racism or derogatory denial of Vietnamese identity. Yet clearly few
French researchers looked at the long-term developmental processes
that may have allowed French colonial scholarship to see indigenous
continuities in settlement and in technology from the transition
between prehistoric and historic periods, or studied Vietnam's early
historiography through patient analysis of local vocabulary (Stark
136 LCNC S. Le

and Allen 1998). Moreover, most of the prehistoric excavations were

executed by "amateurs". For instance, Emile Pajot, a former ship's
cook and a circus artist who bought bronze articles from a local
fisherman, began excavations at the Dong Son site in 1925 on behalf
of EFEO (Cherry 2004). Noteworthy is that Olov Janse, a Swedish
archaeologist, was hired in 1934 apparently to quell criticisms that
French archaeology investigations were to hunt for treasures and to
improve the management of what was referred to at the time as
amateur archaeology undertaken with no specific pretensions at all.
In general, excavations were executed by "amateur" pre-historians
who naturally found what they expected to find, as noted by Donn
Bayard (1980). As such, this contributed to the French "unashamedly
colonialist slant" in the interpretation of historical sources and
cultural materials of Vietnam's past.
By contrast, Vietnamese Studies in the United States from 1954
to 1975 was to frame Vietnam in the context of the rapid post-war
decolonization, as well as a stistained American attempt to replace the
Japanese as the single regional hegemon in order to save the whole
postcolonial region from the "communist spectre" (Anderson 2000,
p. 7). While under French colonial rtile the name Viet Nam had
virtually disappeared, America's creation of SEATO (the Southeast
Asia Treaty Organization) in 1954 to contain communism in the
region had suddenly put Vietnam in the forefront of the world
scene. Just as the French produced substantial bodies of scholarship
framed for its "mission civiliatrice", the basis of Vietnamese studies
was to advance the American anticommunist hegemony. As such,
the concentrated disciplinary fields were quite different than those
of their colonial-era predecessors; great emphasis was placed on
political science but also on modern history and anthropology, as
opposed to archaeology, ancient history, and classical literatures. A
representative of this work was a 1967 Rand Corporation study
by Gerald Hickey, "Accommodation in South Vietnam: The Key
to Sociopolitical Solidarity". Synthesizing the current conflicts as
a result of historical conflicts from regionalism and the "march
to the south", Hickey argued the need to accommodate different
"Colonial" and "Rosfoolonial" Views of Viefnam's Pre-hisfory 137

socio-political groups/parties (including the "Viet Cong") through

honest elections and meaningful representation in the central
government, which would do much to bridge between the city and
the countryside as well as the opportunity to build the Vietnamese
in a peaceful setting.
Another noted study of the same emphasis is Alexander Woodside's
Vietnam and Chinese Model, which placed modern Vietnam at the
crossroads between East and Southeast Asia without needing to reify
any of Vietnam's varied heritages. For Woodside, "Sino-Vietnamese
culture and politics constituted something of a mosaic of adjustments
and surprises" (Woodside 1971, p. 281). As such, this would better
explain why, on the one hand, the Vietnamese court of the 1830s
was much more receptive than the Chinese to the idea of borrowing
technological and military innovations from Western civilization. Yet,
because the court's scholars were inclined to imitate the products
of Western science in the same way that they imitated Chinese
institutions, the court was not able to find a suitable response
to Western pressures or attain "true modernization" at the time.
According to Woodside, such inquiry "is a crucial one" because
"even today [1971], in Vietnamese thought and politics. East Asian
conceptual categories, new and old, are vastly more dominant than
French ones" (Woodside 1971, pp. 1-2).
As noted by Terry Rambo, millions of U.S. dollars during the
Vietnam War were spent on "surveys, interviews, field studies,
and documentary translations, all designed to inform the higher
government echelons about the Vietnamese enemy and the immediate
sociopolitical context in which the conflict was being waged" (Rambo
2005, p. 266). As a result, there has been little archaeological
digging in southern Vietnam since 1954. Though there were a few
American scholars whose focus was on early Vietnamese history, such
as geographer Paul Wheatley from University of Chicago. Wheatley's
key argument was that "urban genesis" in northern Vietnam "took
the form of urban imposition, the establishment of Chinese-style
settlements in a colonial context" (Wheatley 1979, p. 288). That
systems interaction emerged in which Chinese roots developed and
138 LONGS. Le

survived in the local society, even after independence, which "was

ultimately elaborated into the mature urban era of the Nguyen
dynasty" (pp. 294). Consequently, it is implied that Vietnam under
a colonial hegemony could not pursue a course of independent
development, at least until after the Nguyen dynasty (p. 295).
Though later when new discoveries challenged many of the previous
findings by the early 1980s, Wheatley (1982) stated that "the more
I have to do with ancient texts, the more convinced I become that,
when we fail to reconcile the different bodies of evidence, only too
often the fault is in ourselves, in our own technical expertise or, more
likely, in our imagination" (p. 19).
At least before 1970, the U.S. decision makers did not consider
the study of Vietnam's early history relevant to achieving victory
against commtmist forces. While U.S. officials rejected formal theories
about a Western "mission civiliatrice", their policy was "not derived
from any serious study of Asia, but from their own limited historical
experience", according to British scholar Ralph Smith (1968, p. 171).
For Smith, the Americans "fell into the trap of supposing that
Asians, for all their apparent differences from Westerners, are at
heart simply people who have not yet attained the level of progress
as that achieved by the Americans themselves". Therefore, they
were not equipped to understand the problems which tradition
posed for their allies, the non-communist Vietnamese. Meanwhile,
on U.S. college campuses, Vietnam in the context of the Cold
War was more real in the 1950s and 1960s than a Vietnam as an
ancient and evolving civilization. In a 1967 speech, John Fairbank
lamented that it would take another ten years for the English-
speaking world to understand Vietnamese society and culture, as
already attained in the fields of China and Japan. Indeed, it was
not until after the Vietnam War that Vietnamese studies began to
flourish at particular institutions. One of the post-1975 Vietnam
scholars who led this movement was Keith Taylor, who served in
Vietnam and who after coming home wanted to know: where did
Vietnamese come from?
"Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Views of Vietnam's Pre-history 139

The "Real" Vietnam: New Discoveries and Challenges

Vietnamese dynastic histories began in the first half of the twelfth
century AD, although Vietnamese dynastic collection of antiquities
such as the bronze drums started as early as the eleventh century
(Taylor 1983, p. 354). To be sure, Vietnamese rulers — before,
during, and after one thousand years' Chinese rule — have always
claimed a Vietnamese identity, such as tracing their identity to a
mythical hero Lac Long Quan (Lac Dragon Lord). The word Lac
was the earliest recorded name for the Vietnamese people and it was
also used to describe the paddy fields that were irrigated by taking
advantage of the change in the level of the rivers in accordance with
the tides, according to the oldest Chinese descriptions of the ancient
Vietnamese economy and society (Taylor 1983, Appendix B). From
a traditional Vietnamese view. Lac people are believed to be the
inventors of the wet-rice cultivation technique and the bronze drums
that gave rise to the Hung Vuong (Hung King) and its kingdom
Van Lang during the Dong Son period. Hung as the title of a line
of kings and the Van Lang kingdom are attested in Chinese (Ch'in
and T'ang dynastic) sources (Taylor 1983, Appendix B and C). Using
Chinese dynastic sources and employing their historical tradition of
origin myths and genie worship, Vietnamese dynastic histories made
the Hung kings the cornerstone of their national identity in defiance
of, equal with, and/or superior to China.' Lac society also served
as the link between the Hung kings and the early historical period
down to the Trung sisters. As noted by Keith Taylor, while Vietnam's
early history is indebted to Chinese scholarship, "we cannot deny that
important aspects of Vietnamese history are not accounted by that
tradition, else there would be no such thing as a Vietnamese nation
today" (Taylor 1983, p. 307).
By the second half of the twentieth century, new discoveries
have decisively rejected many of the colonialist interpretations put
on the archaeological data, and of which are further supported by
recent literary, linguistic, and ethnographic studies (Bayard 1980;
Bayard 1984; Mabbett 1977; Bentley 1986; Clover 1999, p. 597;
140 LONGS. Le

Taylor 1983). For prehistoric northern Vietnam (about 13,000 years

ago), it was a key site of the Hoabinhian ctiltures in which most
of the cultural evolution was internal rather than a replacement of
one ctilture by a new ctiltural group (see Higham 1989, p. 22).
Evidence suggests that Hoabinhians were hunters. Bone materials
from a wide range of mammal species were found, including
pig, deer, dog, elephant, rhinoceros, and cattle. Perhaps with the
exception of pigs and dogs, none of these species appear to have
been domesticated. Late third or early second millennium BC (known
as Phung Nguyen culture), there is more evidence for ctiltivation of
rice, along with a broader range of cultural material, such as stone
arrowheads and knives, baked clay spindle whorls and bow pellets,
and pottery with incised and comb-stamped decoration (Bellwood
1979, p. 96).
Pottery in this period has been considered to be directly ancestral
to the pottery of the Dong-Son civilization of the first millennium
BC, which gives further support to a cultural continuity throughout
the prehistoric occupation of the Red River valley (Higham 1989,
p. 193). During the second millennium BC, Vietnamese sites suggest
a complex regional division of labour and the existence of loosely
knit multi-ethnic confederations long before Chinese infiuence was
felt in the region (Bayard 1984; Higham 1982; Davidson 1979). In
regard to the Dong Son culture, its "roots" may well extend back to
at least 1000 BC, antedating any significant Chou influence. Given the
cultural materials "there is no doubt that the Chinese encountered a
society controlled through paramount chiefs of high status", according
to Charles Higham (1989, p. 193).
Yet, at the same time, it is also undeniable that new discoveries
from Southeast Asia, which continue to regtilarly occur, do have
existing biases. One of the key problems, as noted by a number of
scholars, is the tendency of particular scholars or state institutions
oriented in looking for "firsts" or "oldests" in the region, or
employing grand schemes of regional political evolution. An
example of this is the replacement of a colonist archaeology
model with a nationality archaeology type in which a government
"Coioniai" and "Rostccionial" Views of Vietnam's Rre-history 141

employs archaeology as a means of cultivating national dignity and

confidence, either because it feels politically threatened by more
powerful nations or feels it necessary to make appeals for national
unity to counteract potential serious internal division (Trigger 1984,
pp. 359-60).
For the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,
archaeological methods are utilized to correct the errors and fallacies
of earlier colonial or non-Vietnamese histories in order to establish
"correct" accounts of the past, to solve historical problems raised
by the needs of building up the nation, and to help validate a new
ideological line whenever one is promulgated (Hakari and Kaneko
1990; Nguyen The Anh 1995, p. 122). As a case in point, in the
late 1970s when relations with China soured, Vietnamese historians
under a government programme, and who had already pubHshed
a massive volume on The Founding of the State by the Hung Kings
in 1970, openly debated and attempted to prove that Dong Son
bronze drum was the oldest and its origin lay with the ancient Viet
people. Vietnamese archaeologists went as far as dating one bronze
drum between the thirteenth and tenth centuries BC based on its
style, whereas the earliest date for a bronze drum excavated in China
by Chinese archaeologists was carbon dated to the seventh century
BC (see Xiaorong Han 2004, p. 16). Under much criticism from
Chinese scholars, Vietnamese historians have discarded this date and
alternately maintained that the Dong Son drum can be dated to the
seventh or the eighth century BC in their recent volume compilation
on the Dong Son Drum.
Another source of bias is the unspoken attempt by some Western
scholars to deconstruct the "Orientalism" framework, which was
invented by early Westerners to dominate or to have authority
over the "Orient" (Said 1978, p. 3), Thus, there might have
been an emotional investment by some historians in reclaiming a
past overridden and devalued by Western imperialism (Reynolds
1995). Though such emotional investment can lead to accepting
new discoveries without additional validation, and of which would
essentially replace the traditional diffusionist model based on
142 LCNG S, Le

unidirectional influences from China and India to Southeast Asia

with one based only on innovation in Southeast Asia. For example,
Jeremy Davidson, who in his survey of archaeological activity in
both northern and southern Vietnam from 1954 to 1970, may have
pursued too enthusiastically the conclusion of North Vietnamese
archaeological findings; that the Phung Nguyen culture not only
provided the genesis for the Van Lang kingdom of the Dong Son
period to have existed in 2800 BC, but also provided the framework
that the Cham and Khmer cultures of southern Vietnam could have
been receivers of Dong Son culture (Davidson 1979). Today, Western
archaeologists are more likely to accept carbon 14 testing that the
Dong Son culture began around the seven century BC, and the
argument that the Cham or the Khmer civilization is a loan culture
of the Dong Son culture is not taken seriously.

Conclusion: Vietnam's Pre-history Still a Western, Postcolonial

Project?
Recently, Vietnamese archaeologists have corrected many of their
earlier carbon tests and now see the roots of the Dong Son culture
starting as late as 1100 BC, in which developments of political
centralization and the establishment of the Van Lang kingdom had
their beginnings (see Nguyen Khac Su et al. 2004, p. 292). To be
sure, historical research in Vietnam is closely bound to politics.
At the same time, however, politics in Vietnam is dynamic. So
as party politics rejuvenates in order to sustain political authority
and legitimacy, historical research has been in line whenever a
new ideological line is promulgated. In fact, historical research has
been affected by the doi moi reforms since 1987 in which research
programmes have focused on the rural economy, trade, and even the
economy of the former Republic of South Vietnam; however, the
new emphasis of research has been to provide historical support for
the regime to "indigenize" a commodity or market economy. Some
believe that the consequence of doi moi for historical research in
Vietnam will put Vietnamese historians in "a better position to revise
by themselves the ideological representations that distort the reality.
"Ooioniai" and "Postooioniai" Views cf Vietnam's Pre-history 143

and finally to re-establish the country in its historical continuity"

(Nguyen The Anh 1995, p. 132). Others, like Ian Glover, see
Vietnam's archaeology being affected by the grov^ah of the country's
heritage management industry in which the past is made into
something that is "re-invented, sanitized, simplified and packaged for
tourist consumption by both internal and foreign tourists" (Glover
2004, p. 599). For Glover, this is likely to have a greater efiect on
the way the past is investigated and presented than any shifts in
academic paradigms.
Perhaps the most interesting perspective on Vietnam's modern
historiography comes from v^merican scholars, specifically Keith
Taylor and his former students. According to this perspective, "the
authority of what is thought to have happened in the past" by a
master, national, or regional narrative that justifies the violence of
dominance and resistance should be explicitly avoided (see Tran and
Reid 2006). It is argued that such a paradigm not only adheres to
neutrality which does not constrain "independent histories" but also
has the capacity to feature histories that go beyond nation and region
that have been ignored or marginalized. Yet, it is not clear whether
this narrative is supposed to be provocative rather than definitive. To
be sure, the irony in this revisionist movement is that its principal
leader, Keith Taylor, had been one of the pioneers in the 1980s that
shaped "Vietnamese history as a nation building" in which Chinese
colonial rule (however important in shaping Vietnamese state and
society) was primarily a foreign phase; in addition, Taylor argued
that northern Vietnam could have existed as a separate nation "even
if they had never heard of China".
By some accounts, Taylor's seminal work. The Birth of Vietnam
(1983), represents an enterprise whose preoccupation with origin has
"to do with the effort to authenticate Southeast Asia as a region and
a field of study" (Reynolds 1995). Moreover, Taylor's proficiency in
classical Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese languages has
enabled his works to be seen as definitive. That is, unless a scholar
has proficiency in the above languages, it is difficult to challenge some
of Taylor's assumptions. Taylor has also maintained that works by
144 LONGS. Le

Joseph Buttinger or D.G.E. Hall on early Vietnam history should not

be included in any modern Vietnamese historiography, since neither
scholar is proficient in any of Vietnam's old languages. Like his earlier
enterprise, Taylor's reaction against (though not of his works on) the
grand narrative of the nation may also be assumed as another effort
to carve out a topic of expertise that links the study of Southeast Asia
to the current wave of globalization. That is, most of the lexicon in
Taylor's new project — for example, borderless histories or histories
beyond nation and region — seem to reflect Western perspectives
on the current wave of globalization.
Such a revisionist project would also appear to further marginalize
particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that were necessarily
political but yet did not necessarily constrain "independent histories".
This is to note that the previously mentioned shifts in paradigm on
early Vietnamese history both in Vietnam and in the United States
have not spurred an interest in re-examining the works of Vietnamese
historians associated with the former Republic of South Vietnam
(RSV). Because the RSV (1954-75) has been considered either an
illegitimate state or not to have been a state at all, historical research
associated with the RSV is thought by the communist regime to
have had colonialist, anti-national, and ahistorical perspectives (Pelley
2002, p. 37). Until recently. Western scholars rarely considered any
work linked to the RSV to be that of a highly modern history of
Vietnam. Perhaps as a result no works by these historians been
translated into English, and works by the RSV historians that were
in English have been rarely used as required or recommended texts
in the college classroom.
For southern Vietnamese intellectuals, there was a cutting-edge
synthesis of the country's history — that of Tran Trong Kim's
Summary of Vietnamese History — which was originally published
in 1920. Kim's text in romanized script or quoc ngu was among
the first to account, analyze, and interpret historical documents in
Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. Unlike his Western and Vietnamese
peers, Kim did not deploy a master, national, or regional narrative.
Instead, his study was framed in the narrative of continuity and
"Coioniai" and "Rostoolonial" Views of Vietnam's Rre-history 145

change, which in many ways allows for "more open ends, windows,
and adjoining corridors" than previous works. This is the reason
it became the single most authoritative source during the RSV
period. Such a modern framework allows for the legitimacy of the
RSV; a framework that did not need to conform to the theme of
national unity or social cohesion necessary for building a socialist
state. Although necessarily political, the works by RSV historians
also appear to avoid an essentialized version of a unified Vietnam, a
village Vietnam, a Confucian Vietnam, a revolutionary Viet Nam, or
the idea of Vietnam composed of two rice baskets held together by a
pole. For example, an English language historiography by the auspices
of RSV's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1967 was quick to admit that
the origins of the Vietnamese people are of a complex nature and
involve an ongoing debate in which one has to take into account
both the social scientific evidence at a given time and Vietnamese
traditions that "foreigners" find hard to intimately relate to (MFA
ROV 1967). For the RSV historians, Vietnam as "an ancient culture
with its own rivers and mountains, ways and customs" was not at
stake. What was at stake was the continuity in the longer trajectory
of Vietnamese history, which at the time was a reality, a responsibility,
and a political choice.
In sum, there appears to be a consensus in the current study of
Vietnam's prehistory that there was a Vietnamese civilization before
the arrival of the Chinese, although when this originated and the
degree of indigenous innovation and evolution are not known with
certainty. In the United States there has been an academic paradigm
shift in investigating Vietnam's past, led by Keith Taylor and his
former students. This new paradigm implies the need for historians to
"rescue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. Meanwhile,
the current research of Vietnamese history under the supervision of
the Democratic Socialist Republic of Vietnam has been shown to
be closely linked to politics. However, party politics can be quite
dynamic. For example, the country's current open-door policy has
facilitated a considerable degree of international exchanges between
Vietnamese historians and historians in various countries. Yet, neither
146 LCNC S. Le

of the above shifts have yet led to a serious re-evaluation of the

contributions of works by historians associated with the RSV; whereas
doing so would dislodge arguments of a contemporary Western,
postcolonial project or a rigid Vietnamese nationalist narrative that
still excludes any "independent history".

NOTE
1. For example, in the thirteenth century, to ward off any wish of Yuan China
to recapture its former colony, historian Le Van Huu sought to demonstrate
the antiquity of the Vietnamese state as well as to illustrate that the current
Vietnam's trihutary relationship with China was a fiction hy demarcating the
starting point of Vietnamese history to Chao T'o's Nan Yueh in 207 BC.
Although he would have known about the other Vietnamese leaders who
ruled hefore Chao T'o, they would have appeared pale to Chao T'o's defiance
of China. In contrast, Ngo Si Lien in the fifteenth century predated the
origin of Vietnamese civilization (via the Hung kings) to 2879 BC, in order
to construct an identity of Vietnam that was equal if not superior to the
mythical emperors of China. This was done hy employing a royal genealogy
with a northern (China) and a southern hranch (Vietnamese), tracing Lac
Long Quan's heredity to the northern imperial hranch so as to claim a
more ancient lineage for the Hung kings than that of China's first emperor,
Huang Ti.

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Long S. Le is a visiting scholar and director of intematicnal initiatives for Global Studies at
the University of iHouston, where he is also a co-founder/lecturer of the Vietnamese Studies
course.
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