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Familial Properties
Southeast Asia
Politics, Meaning, and Memory
David Chandler and Rita Smith Kipp
Series Editors
Familial Properties
Cover art: Eighteenth-century stele inscriptions, Khôi trì bi ký and Trí bi hậu phật, courtesy of the
Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies at the Việt Nam Academy of Social Sciences, Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
This book is dedicated to the memory of
my late father, Trần Văn Bảng (1930–2002),
and to my mother, Lâm Thị Kiêm,
who defied gendered models, Vietnamese and American.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Conventions xiii
Chronology xv
Introduction: Vietnamese Women at the Crossroads of
Southeast Asia 1
1. Articulating the Gender System: Economy, Society, and
the State 26
2. Dutiful Wives, Nurturing Mothers, and Filial Children:
Marriage as Affairs of State, Village, and Family 52
3. Female Bodies, Sexual Activity, and the Sociopolitical
Order 86
4. Inheritance, Succession, and Autonomy in the Property
Regime 127
5. Buying an Election: Preparing for the Afterlife 165
6. Visions of the Future, Constructions of the Past:
Paradigms of Vietnamese Womanhood 180
Conclusion: Structure, Limitations, and Possibilities 191
Notes 197
Glossary of Terms in Sino-Vietnamese and in the
Demotic Script 225
Bibliography 233
Index 249
Acknowledgments
It has been many years since I began working on this book, and so my debts
are many. Matthew Sommer inspired me to study history when I was an
undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he has been an
ideal teacher, mentor, and friend. My doctoral supervisor at UCLA, An-
thony Reid, taught me to have vision, opening my eyes to the wider world of
Southeast Asia and the broader implications of my work. His compassion
and patience are boundless. He and his spouse Helen welcomed me into
their home and provided constant support. My coadvisor, Geoffrey Robin-
son, demanded detailed analysis and taught me that a scholar has a moral
responsibility to take a stand in an unjust world. Other teachers with whom
I worked in graduate school, including Kathryn Bernhardt, Fred Dickinson,
and Lynn Lees, made it possible for me to continue my studies, and have
provided important moral support and friendship since then.
I began my academic career at the University of Toronto, where a vibrant
community of scholars welcomed me, provided intellectual stimulation, and
took me under their wing. Jane Abray guided my career with compassion.
Nicholas Terpstra, my mentor, has only ever been generous, personally and
professionally. Doris Bergen’s unfailing friendship, support, and mentorship
sustained me. Eric Jennings, a mentor if not by name, could not have done
more for me. Andre Schmid, Nakanyike Musisi, and Lynne Viola always
took the time to watch out for a junior colleague. Natalie Zemon Davis re-
minded me that there was more to life than work. I do not have the ability to
express the debt of gratitude I owe Tania Li and Victor Li, from the Depart-
ments of Anthropology and English, who opened their home and cared for
me when I became ill and I was far from my family.
Beyond U of T, a community of women scholars guided my scholarship
and personal development. Barbara Watson Andaya demonstrates by exam-
ple what it means to be generous, graceful, and supportive in equal measure.
I am in awe of Huệ Tâm Hồ-Tai’s accomplishments and her unwillingness
to accept anything less than the best from herself and her mentees. Though
never formally my teacher, I am grateful she allowed me to learn from her. Li
Tana’s and Anne Hansen’s friendship, advice, and compassion reminded me
x : Acknowledgments
that there would be light at the end of the tunnel. These women have been
models of brilliance, integrity, productivity, and generosity. They are the
“women of prowess” to whom I owe my allegiance.
My teachers, mentors, and interlocuters in Vietnam made my research
possible. These include professor Phan Huy Lê and his family. The late pro-
fessor Lê Anh Tuấn introduced me to the study of the Vietnamese demotic
script when I was a student without funding. His generosity will forever be
remembered. Professor Trần Nghĩa, the founding director of the Hán Nôm
Institute, guided my studies to advanced levels. Đinh Khắc Thuân opened
my eyes to the possibilities of using stele inscriptions as historical sources,
and Nam Nguyễn helped me see how literature would enrich my work and
saved me from some embarrassing mistakes. Chu Tuyết Lan, archivist ex-
traordinaire and an even more remarkable friend, nourished me with sources
and food during my years in Vietnam. I thank also the many staff members
who facilitated my research there and at the National Library in Hanoi. In
Saigon, the late professor Vũ Văn Kính gave me access to his notes and his
treasure trove of materials. In France, the late Père Gérard Moussay and
Mme Brigitte Appavou welcomed me into the archives at the Missions
Étrangères. In Rome, Fathers John Decock and Francis Reddy were always
helpful and welcoming. I also gratefully acknowledge the guidance of the
archivists at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Vatican Secret Ar-
chives, the Propaganda Fide in Rome, and the British Library in London.
My friends have helped me move along in this process, in big and small
ways. I thank Mark Bradley for his persistent confidence and support. Đinh
Khắc Thuân (again), George Dutton, Christoph Giebel, Bruce Lockhart,
Shawn McHale, Nam Nguyễn (again), Oscar Salemink, Trần Thị An,
Claire Tran, Trương Huyền Chi, John Whitmore, and Tracy Barrett. Đinh
Khắc Thuân and Nam Nguyễn (again) went through each of my Sino-
Vietnamese and nôm translations. Bruce Lockhart and Hue-Tam Ho-Tai
both read through the entire manuscript in its early form, giving me critical
substantive feedback. Kristen Chew provided early editing assistance. In
Lawrence, KS, Thu Cao, and Vũ Hồng took care of my children, even
though they had their own work and children, so that I could complete the
manuscript. The late Roxanna Brown was an acerbic and warm housemate,
friend, and mentor. I miss her dearly.
At the University of Toronto graduate students Katie Edwards, Duc
Huynh, Meaghan Marian, Phuong Nguyen, and George Teodoro provided
insightful feedback and criticism. My research assistant, Yanfei Li, read
through hundreds of inscriptions. Siew Han Yeo created the map of early
Acknowledgments : xi
My spouse, Glenn Adams, has lived with this book nearly as long as I
have. Halia Hoà, Kojo Kiên, and Nat did what they could to delay the pro-
duction of this book. For many years, they had to wait until I finished this or
that before I could stop my work and play. This book is about gender expec-
tations, strategies of survival, and cultural practices. My mother, Lâm Thi
Kiêm, and my late father, Trần Văn Bảng, defied and embodied so many
Vietnamese and American gender norms. As a disabled man, my father
stayed at home and took care of nine kids in Texas, a fish out of water in so
many ways. Yet he somehow figured out it was important to our emotional
development that he save a little bit of money for that ice cream cone, birth-
day cake, or Christmas tree. My mother worked long hours, toiling at a res-
taurant in downtown Houston so that her children would have options. It is
in their honor that I dedicate this book.
Conventions
In this book, I have avoided use of the term “Việt Nam” to refer to the spaces
about which I speak, for the state took that name only in 1802. For consis-
tency with other sources, I use the name “Vietnam” to refer to the contempo-
rary nation-state, as is common in English-language studies. For the period
under discussion, I rely upon the geographical names “Northern Realm” and
“Southern Realm” to refer to the two states that were governed by the Trịnh
and the Nguyễn families from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centu-
ries. At the time, they were known as Đàng Ngoài and Đàng Trong, which
literally mean “Outer Realm” and “Inner Realm,” and as Tonkin and Cochin
china by Europeans. I use a geographic designation to make it more accessible
to nonspecialists. While I include complete diacritics for Vietnamese words
and names, I have relegated the original Sino-Vietnamese or demotic charac-
ters to the glossary for readers who wish to consult them. When unable to
reproduce the exact character in typescript, I indicate so in the endnote. I
also note when I have drawn on materials that have been translated or trans-
literated into modern Vietnamese. All translations from the demotic script,
classical Chinese, Vietnamese, and European languages are my own unless
otherwise indicated.
Chronology
1009–1225 Lý dynasty
1225–1400 Trần dynasty
1400–1407 Hồ dynasty
1407–1427 Ming occupation
1428–1788 Lê dynasty
1460s Lê dynasty legal reforms
1527–1592 Mạc dynasty
1533–1783 Trịnh Family rule in the Northern Realm
1558–1778 Nguyễn Family rule in the Southern Realm
1773–1802 Tây Sơn Uprising and dynasty
1802–1945 Nguyễn dynasty
1858 Cochinchina ceded to France
Figure 1. Early modern Vietnam, fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Map by Siew
Han Yeo.
Introduction
Vietnamese Women at the
Crossroads of Southeast Asia
upper-class women faced greater restrictions because their families had Chi-
nese moral values. Other studies have fit Vietnamese women’s experiences
within the metanarrative of the inevitable emergence of the nation. Cus-
toms deviating from idealized Confucian models symbolized the tenacity of
Vietnamese culture in the face of a millennium of Chinese imperialism and
a century of French colonization.6 Linked to this notion of Vietnamese ex-
ceptionalism, another group of scholars has suggested that cultural practices
valuing Vietnamese women had been preserved until the Nguyễn dynasty
(1802–1945), when the country’s final ruling family faithfully implemented
Chinese cultural and bureaucratic models. By the early twentieth century,
when Vietnamese women and men debated the “woman question,” the “tra-
ditional practices” to be preserved or destroyed were really ones implemented
by the neo-Confucian Nguyễn dynasty.7 Though these studies addressed
different periods of the Vietnamese past, they find common ground in the
suggestion that, during the Lê dynasty, women enjoyed a golden age of au-
tonomy before the nineteenth-century backlash.
This book challenges the claim that Vietnamese women’s social condi-
tions from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century reflected authentic tradi-
tions. It examines how gender was central to the articulation of power in
northern Vietnamese society during the Lê and Mạc dynasties. Though the
Vietnamese state was fragmented at the time, these four centuries are cen-
tral to any study of gender in Vietnamese history because the period has
been reified as one in which the country had a relatively gender-egalitarian
society. This construction implicitly compares Vietnamese women with an
idealized, ahistorical image of Chinese women, whose bound feet represent
the oppressiveness of Confucian culture. Although the scholarship on Chi-
nese gender history has demonstrated that Chinese women’s experiences
varied greatly among class and regional divides, they have not yet been incor-
porated into discussions on the history of Vietnamese gender relations.8
My argument is both historiographical and empirical. Since the early
modern period, discourses on gender have been central to the state’s rela-
tionship with local areas. While the construction of “traditional” Vietnam-
ese gender relations has framed discourses on the historical identity of the
country in the twentieth century, the representational form it took has de-
pended on which model of Vietnamese womanhood the author adopted. If
Vietnamese women were represented as subordinated by Confucian moral-
ity, then the country belonged to the Chinese cultural world.9 If they ap-
peared in the scholarship as leading relatively autonomous lives, then their
status reflected the cultural commonalities of the Southeast Asian region.10
Introduction : 3
within the family performed the role appropriate to his or her station in so-
ciety. A husband led the family in the ritual offerings and served as the fam-
ily’s representative to the state, while a wife tended to matters within the
household. The husband, the erstwhile subject in whom the emperor had
cultivated humaneness, owed his emperor absolute political loyalty. Inside
the household, a wife’s sexual loyalty to her husband was likened to her hus-
band’s loyalty to the state, without which each would crumble into ruins. As
the following chapters will demonstrate, officials often used penal law to
enforce these rules regulating family behaviors and sexual morality. In this
way, the state relied upon the reproduction of the Confucian repertoire to
define and to regulate the primary familial relationships: husband-wife,
father-son, and parent-child. In the fifteenth century, at the dawn of the Lê
dynasty, as John Whitmore has argued, “the need for centralized adminis-
trative control led to the establishment of a series of law codes and historical
chronicles that attempted to apply structure to the material and moral as-
pects of the realm.”21 Defining gender norms was central to this process.
This vision of cosmic order depended on the proper regulation of wom-
en’s bodies, which figuratively and literally reproduced Confucian morality.
Women’s bodies nurtured and gave birth to male children, who, by siring
more sons, would extend the patriline. As residents of the “inner chambers”
of the household, women bore the responsibility of the moral education of
their children, especially that of their daughters. As future wives and moth-
ers, daughters needed to learn Confucian morality properly so that they
could teach their own children how to display filial piety toward their par-
ents and ancestors, and in turn secure moral and social order.22 As key play-
ers in the reproduction of Confucian normative behaviors, women were cen-
tral to the state’s efforts to define and regulate the moral order. To maintain
this vision, the state periodically issued edicts that highlighted the para-
mount power and prestige of the father, reaffirmed the importance of patri-
lineal succession to social order, and defined the proper parameters of female
morality.
These efforts began most clearly in the fifteenth century, when the
Lê dynasty literati elite created a bureaucratic state that relied upon neo-
Confucian morality as its philosophical foundation. During emperor Lê
Thánh Tông’s (1460–1497) reign, these reformers tried to implement their
vision of a neo-Confucian moral order following a period of intense rivalry
between the regional military commanders who had sworn personal loyalty
to his father and a coterie of literati officials intent on imposing their bu-
reaucratic vision.23 The literati elite sought a sound fiscal basis for the new
Introduction : 7
Confucian teachings to a young generation of Vietnamese students. Many
of the officials that the Lê state relied upon to establish their bureaucratic
state probably began their educations in these academies, and when tasked
with forming the foundations of the new state, they modeled the dynasty’s
legal regime on that of the Chinese Tang Code (618–907).
The code was established in the 1430s, but many of the most important
rules elaborating the state’s gender system were promulgated during the end
of emperor Lê Thánh Tông’s reign, when he took the reign titles Quang
Thuận (1460–1469) and Hồng Đức (1470–1497). Collectively known as
the Hồng Đức, or Lê Code, these regulations helped to establish a sound
fiscal and philosophical foundation for the new dynasty. In subsequent cen-
turies, the Mạc, Trịnh, and Nguyễn ruling families reaffirmed these rules to
affirm their control of local communities and to regulate popular behavior
during their own times of turmoil. How these laws regulated and affirmed
proper feminine behaviors and the ability of some women to navigate these
structures are the topics of this book.
During the Mạc dynasty, after Mạc Đăng Dung emerged from a hum-
ble fishing background to usurp the throne and establish his own dynasty,
his successors sought to justify their rule by reaffirming the Confucian rep-
ertoire. They also tried to extend state power over local areas by promulgat-
ing laws that reinforced the Confucian world.24 With this end in mind, Mạc
officials issued the “[Book] of Good Government from the Hông Đức
Reign” (Hồng Đức thiện chính; hereinafter the Book of Good Government), a
collection of edicts, laws, and legal cases to be used as a “best practices” man-
ual for governance, ostensibly first issued during the reign period of its
namesake. Promulgated sometime between 1541 and 1561, the collection rep-
licated the rules found in Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals, provided guidance on the
adjudication of violations of sexual morality, and reiterated a property re-
gime based on the principles of patrilineal succession.25 Mạc officials did
not intend the manual to be a simple iteration of “exemplary laws” from the
Hồng Đức reign but rather an articulation of their vision for proper moral-
ity of the times. They included new regulations to meet these needs, and
likely intended this compilation to serve as the country’s legal code.26 In the
newly annexed lands of the Cham peoples, in what is now Quảng Nam
8 : Introduction
Province, the Mạc state also made efforts to promote neo-Confucian moral-
ity by erecting monuments to celebrate virtuous women who died preserv-
ing their chastity.27
Champa, as the area is popularly known, was a loose grouping of sea-
oriented polities that occupied the area that is now central and south-central
Vietnam from at least the second century C.E. The Cham peoples who in-
habited these spaces shared linguistic connections to Austronesian speakers
more common in the Southeast Asian islands, and their reliance on oceanic
trade and island-like communities along the coast forged old connections
with the Indic cultures of the insular world. In the fourteenth century, Viet-
namese speakers began to move into these lands, and destroyed the Cham
capital at Vijaya, near the contemporary city of Hội An, in 1471.28 The
cultural links between Champa and other Southeast Asian polities in the
premodern period have made the region a key dividing line between a
Chinese-oriented northern Vietnam and a Southeast Asian–oriented south.
Mạc attempts to extend a Vietnamese understanding of neo-Confucian mo-
rality in these lands were recorded, to some extent, in the sixteenth-century
travelogue, the Record of Ô Châu.
Recalling earlier strategies of the Lý dynasty (1009–1225), which made
Buddhism the state religion and relied on the authority of the sangha to
consolidate their rule, the Mạc family simultaneously appealed to Maha
yana Buddhist adherents by representing themselves as patrons of the
sangha, or the Buddhist community. Mạc princesses and consorts donated
large tracts of land and money to village pagodas, and the communities ac-
knowledged this generosity by erecting stone steles that highlighted the do-
nors’ virtues.29 These donations served the interests of the Mạc state in three
ways. First, they reflected a quasiofficial nod to the importance of Buddhist
belief in the daily lives of the populace. Imperial patronage of local pagodas
enabled the family to represent itself as supporting local beliefs and prac-
tices. Second, this extension of royal power into local areas enabled the state
to influence local governance. Finally, these monuments valorized Mạc
princesses and consorts as paragons of both Confucian feminine virtue and
Buddhist morality, whom young girls could emulate, providing yet another
mechanism to extend and reinforce state gender ideology in local areas.
While the Mạc family tried to consolidate their rule, they also had to
contend with resistance from factions fighting to restore the Lê family to
power, under the leadership of Nguyễn Kim and Trịnh Kiểm, the patriarchs
of two influential aristocratic families. After half a century of resistance,
these families finally “restored” the Lê family to the throne at Thăng Long
Introduction : 9
(Hà Nội) in 1593, though real power lay in the hands of Trịnh Tùng, the new
head of the family. By that time, rivalry between the two families encour-
aged Trịnh Kiểm to dispatch his ally and rival’s surviving son, Nguyễn
Hoàng, southward in Thuận Hóa Province, as the southern garrison com-
mander in 1558.
Hoàng went southward, establishing his headquarters near the contem-
porary city of Quảng Trị.30 Kiểm had hoped that, by sending this new rival
away, he would be able to enjoy unchallenged de facto power over the North-
ern Realm. He unwittingly helped to establish a new Vietnamese state in the
south.31 By the end of that century, the Nguyễn family had established and
expanded their influence over the local populations in Đàng Trong (lit. “In-
ner Lands,” hereinafter the Southern Realm).
Meanwhile, in 1592, in the Red River delta, the successor to the Trịnh
family, Tùng, with continued assistance from the Nguyễn family in the
south, chased the Mạc forces from the imperial capital at Thăng Long (Hà
Nội) to the northern mountainous outpost of Cao Bằng Province. The Mạc
eviction permitted the Lê emperor to return to the capital city a year later,
but the Lê emperors ruled only nominally from then until the downfall of
the dynasty in 1788, while the Trịnh family continued to enjoy real power in
the Northern Realm. Meanwhile, with the official recognition of the Chi-
nese Ming dynasty, the Mạc loyalists held off the Trịnh armies from their
base in the northern mountains until 1677.
When the Trịnh and Nguyễn families ruled in the northern and south-
ern parts of the country following the “restoration” of the Lê dynasty in
1593, they too turned to neo-Confucian morality to justify their rule. They
issued “reminders” to the population of the proper moral behaviors befitting
women and men in their realm. Most notably, in autumn 1663, during the
first year of the Cảnh Trị reign, the state issued an edict outlining the proper
behaviors that the population should follow. Comprised of forty-seven arti-
cles, rules about how people were to behave, the state required that they were
posted in all “villages and prefectures.”32 The Trịnh family also patronized
local pagodas in the natal villages of its royal consorts and princesses. How-
ever, by the time the ruling Trịnh family pursued this strategy in the seven-
teenth century, following the lead of the Mạc princesses, local women had
been supporting their own communities for nearly a century, establishing
relationships with leaders and other community members alike. Neverthe-
less, the Trịnh family employed this two-pronged strategy to demonstrate
their fidelity to both the Confucian repertoire and to community practices
to try to project their power into these village communities.
10 : Introduction
turn had devastating effects on local communities. Both realms had become
highly militarized societies, and women had long borne the economic bur-
dens of the wars.
Women who stayed behind in the Northern Realm also reaped the eco-
nomic benefits of the civil wars. Because they had become responsible for
household production at all stages—from planting and harvesting rice to
trading sideline products at both local and faraway markets—they accumu-
lated monetary capital. Although there are no exact figures, it is also reason-
able to expect that the high death rate in the military meant that daughters
probably inherited the household property that had once been earmarked
for their brothers. After all, state law ordained that in the absence of sons,
daughters were to inherit the household property.39 The need to protect this
newly acquired monetary and landed property in the face of state laws that
privileged male relatives led some women to seek the assistance of local com-
munity leaders.
The deaths of so many men, fighting far from home, added to the social
anxieties of the time, for there would be no one to perform the proper death
rituals for them, and they would become discontented ghosts. Added to this
instability, the young men who died were not able to make offerings to their
parents or ancestors, whose spirits would remain hungry and would wreak
havoc on the living. Social anxieties about these souls made the need to sati-
ate them, through any means, an important goal in local communities. The
concentration of monetary capital and landed property in the hands of
women and the social anxiety about wandering ghosts created a matrix of
possibilities for women living in the Northern Realm.
In the face of a restrictive state-gendered morality, economic privation
in their local communities, and social anxiety about dissatisfied ghosts wan-
dering the Vietnamese landscapes, women employed strategies that satisfied
their temporal and spiritual needs. To protect their livelihoods, they do-
nated money to rebuild markets and bridges that had been neglected by the
state. They also transferred money and land to local communities in ex-
change for a guarantee that their spirits would be fed in perpetuity. The
community’s promise to maintain a donor’s spirit found expression in a
practice called “electing an after-spirit / after-buddha” (bầu hậu thần / hậu
phật), whereby (male) local officials and (male) village leaders “elected” do-
nors to positions just beneath the community’s pantheon of tutelary saints
or Buddhist bodhisattvas. In Mahayana tradition, a bodhisattva has the po-
tential to become enlightened but chooses to remain in the temporal world
to help others reach enlightenment. Sometimes these local patrons were rep-
12 : Introduction
Sources
How does one investigate lives of those who left little evidence of their
extraordinary experiences, much less mundane ones? In Vietnamese society,
commercial expansion did not lead to the proliferation of private printing as
it did in southern China in the late imperial period.40 No corpus of legal
cases exists that is comparable to that of Ba County during the Chinese
Qing dynasty, in which thousands of documents involving capital punish-
ment offenses were preserved; nor does there exist a collection of remission
letters that might help us to imagine how everyday individuals might have
wanted their stories to be heard, as is the case for sixteenth-century French
supplicants to the throne.41 Rather, what we have for this period in Viet-
namese history is an eclectic mixture of local and foreign sources that can be
broadly classified as prescriptive and descriptive. When read against and
alongside one another, these sources illuminate how individuals mediated
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teidän ratkaistavaksenne lankeeva.