7 - Vietnam Emerges

Summary

Vietnam’s experience in the tenth and eleventh centuries was remarkably similar to that of Korea and Japan. The adoption of Confucian traditions as preferred modes of governance, in particular, reflected strong state bureaucratic practices that made Vietnam stand out from its neighbors in continental Southeast Asia. By 973 the Vietnamese state had been recognized as a Song tributary, and within a century, the Vietnamese state had created centralized provinces, founded a Royal Confucian Academy, used Chinese in all its writings, implemented a national tax, and created a national military based on universal conscription. By 1075, the Vietnamese court had instituted civil service examinations based on Chinese Confucian classics. The civil service examination would be used for the next nine hundred years, and it was only the arrival of French imperialists that transformed the government. Confucianism penetrated to the level of economic and family organization at the village level, affecting patrilineal inheritance and even dress. Vietnamese retained their indigenous language for unofficial uses, and indigenous social and religious customs, chief among them Buddhism.