Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T08:18:23.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Assertions of Cultural Well-being in Fourteenth-Century Vietnam: Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

O. W. Wolters
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Phạm Sū Mạnh's name first appears in the annals during the 1340s, and by 1358 he is described as a hanh-khǐên. Several of his surviving poems were written when he was travelling on duty in northwestern Vietnam, perhaps in the 1360s. In 1364 and 1365, military precautions were taken on the northern border to safeguard Vietnam from consequences of the civil warin southern China on the eve of the Ming dynasty's accession in 1368.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 74 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 He came from Hiêp-thạch village, Hiệp-só n huyện, Hai-dúệng province. The dates of his birth and death are unknown.

2 TVTL, q. 3, p. 10a.

3 The tales include those of the TnTng sisters, Lý Ông Trong, Sệ n Tinh and Thuy Tinh, and the Bach-Hac spirit.

4 The Chinese sources are cited in Émile Gaspardone, “Champs Lo et champs Hiong”, Journal Asiatique 243, no. 4 (1955): 461–69Google Scholar.

5 Tan-Viên mountain is about 60 miles west of Hanoi.

6 Maspero, Henri, “Études d'histoire d'Annam. IV. Le royaume de Van-lang”, Bulletin de I'École francaise d'Extreme-Orient 18, no. 3 (1918): 7Google Scholar.

7 See Gaspardone, “Champs Lo et champs Hiong”. “Hung” also means “heroic”.

8 Shui-ching chu-shih, facsimile reproduction of the Wên-yüan-kô pên (Taipei, 1972), ch. 37, p. 8Google Scholar, quoting the Chiao-chou wai-yü chi. Vietnamese historians believe that Thục is not a toponym but the, patronym of a ruler of a federation of Âu Việt tribes: Viện, Nguyðn Khắc, Le Vietnam traditionnel —quelques étapes historiques, Études vietnamiennes, no. 21 (Hanoi1, 1969), p. 21Google Scholar.

9 Khuê, Dú ó ng-Diňh, Les chefs d'oeuvre de la littérature vietnamienne (Saigon, 1966), pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

10 TVTL, q. 3, p. 46, The scholar invokes MỴ-nú ó ng's protection.

11 The ťung-tien and the Tai-pïng huan-yü chi; Maspero, , “Le royaume de Van-lang”, pp. 2–3Google Scholar. The second character in Vān-lang differs in these texts. The ťung-tien gives and the ťai-p ïng huan-yü chi gives Pham SúMạnh gives

12 Maspero, , “Le royaume de Vn-lang”,’ p. 3Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 4.

14 TVTL. q. 3, p. 14b. The poem was probably written in 1369/70. See note 29 below.

15 Mạnh happened to be in the region where Vietnamese archaeologists duringthe last twenty years have excavated numerous neolithic sites, collectively known as the Phùng-nguyên culture zone. In the second millennium B.C., the Phùng-nguyên culture was advancing into its bronze-working phase without stimulus from Chinese technology. The archaeologists' unanimous conclusion is that the developed bronze culture of the first millennium B.C., also indigenous, represents the material achievements of the Van-lang kingdom, ruled by its Hung kings. They reject Maspero's suggestion that Van-lang is a Chinese scribal error for Yeh-lang in southern China in Han times. Van-lang may represent the ancient Vietnamese word “Viang”, the name of a great hunting-bird and perhaps a totem whose name was given by the Hung kings to their kingdom; Long, Nguyên Phuc, “Les nouvelles recherches archéologiques au Việtnam…”, Arts Asiatiques, Numero special, 31 (1975): 17-18Google Scholar.

16 Gaspardone, E., “Bibliographic annamite”, Bulletin d'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient 34, no. 1 (1934): 50Google Scholar.

17 Prof. Tatsuro Yamamoto has suggested that the text was compiled in 1377-88; “The Yüeh-shih- lüeh and the Ta-Yüeh-shih-chi: A Bibliographical and Historical Comparison”, Tóýo Gakuhō 22, no. 4 (1950): 433–56Google Scholar.

18 Three editions of the text exist. I have used the Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng edition and have followed Prof. Ch'ên Ching-ho's advice in emending all editions to read “Lac”.

19 Việt su lúó c, p. 1. Kou-chien (496-465 B.C.) was the great ruler of Yüeh, situated in Chekiang province.

20 Yu-lan, Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. Bodde, Derk (Princeton, N.J., 1952), pp. 381–82Google Scholar.

21 Legge, James, The Sacred Books of China, Part II: The Yi King[The Sacred Books of the East, ed. Muller, F. Max, vol. 16 (Oxford, 1882)], App. Ill, sec. II, par. 23, p. 385.Google ScholarMinh-tôn, wrote a poem on “Readme the Book of Changes”, TVTL, q. 1, p. 21bGoogle Scholar.

22 This text cannot have been written earlier than Chín or Han times; Yu-lan, Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 370Google Scholar.

23 Legge, James, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism. Part IV: The Li Ki. Book 28 [The Sacred Books of the East, ed. Muller, F. Max (Oxford, 1885)], vol. 28, s. II, par. 43-44, p. 324Google Scholar.

24 For Su Hy Nhan's dates, I follow Anthologie de la litterature vietnamienne, p. 99.

25 Anthologie de la littérature vietnamienne, p. 100.

26 TVTL. q. 3, p. 10a. He was travelling in the Thao river province.

27 The phú is preserved in the Qùân Hìên Phú Tᾷp and is reproduced in Chi, Nguyên Đông, Việt nam čô vān hoc siu, pp. 337–39Google Scholar. For a translation, see Anthologie de la littérature vietnamienne, pp. 106-8.

28 Nghệ-tôn had a sense of the past. He withdrew in 1383 with some scholars to “enquire into the thingsof old”, and a record was promptly compiled in eight chapters for the benefit of rulers; TT under this date. Could this record have been the Việt su lú óc The latter ends with an elaborate justification of the passing of the Mandate from the Lý to the Trân.

29 His poems are in TVTL, q. 3, pp. 13b-15a. They were offered to a Ming envoy, described as idling on the Nhị river between the border and the Vietnamese capital.A Ming mission was sent late in 1369 but halted on the Nhi river to await the request from Dị-tôn'ssuccessor to be accepted by the Ming as the vassal king; Ming-shih, ch. 285, p. 9b. Dị-ton's successor, Nhᾷt Le, was a ruffian with doubtful claims to Trân blood. The Trân princes, after a moment of indecision, overthrew him and installed Nghệ’-tôn.

30 TVTL, q. 3, p. 28a. The poem is translated in Anthologie de la litlérature vietnamienne, p. 123.

31 TVTL. q. 3p. 25b. The poem refers to the Ming dynasty, announced in 1368. The first examination held after 1368 was in 1374, when a banquet was given to the graduates.

32 TVTL, q. 3, p. 18b.

33 TT under date of 1377.

34 Nguyðn Ðông Chi, Việt-nam cô van hoc su pp. 203-4.

35 Nam ông mộng luc, p. 4b.

36 1 do not know when the poem was written.

37 He is probably referring to his efforts to keep the Chams at bay.

38 TVTL, q. 1, pp. 25a-b. The last two lines are an allusion to Han Ying's Han-shih wai-chuan. See Han-shih wai-chuan, Han Ying's illustrations of the Didactic Application of the Classic ofSongs: An Annotated Translation by James Robert Hightower (Cambridge, 1952), p. 244Google Scholar. Lê Quý Ly implies that he chooses officials with care.

39 I have consulted the 1960 Saigon edition by Lê Hú u Mục andthe 1960 Hanoi edition by Đinh Gia Khańh and Nguyên Ngọc San.

40 Lê Hũu Mục supposes that some tales were written in late Trân times; op. cit., pp. 13-15. According to the editors of Anthologie de la littératurevietnamienne, p. 45, these tales began to be collected in Trân times.

41 Linh, Nguyêh, “Phài chang Hùng vú ó ng thuộc dòng dõi Thân Nông? [Were the Hùng rulers descended from Thân Nong?],” Nghiên cú'u lịch su 111 (1966): 24–35Google Scholar.

42 Lê Hũ u Mục's ed., p. 7.

43 Ibid., p. 7.

44 Ibid., p. 5.

45 Ibid., pp. 17-18.

46 Lich su Việt Nam, Uy Ban Khoa Học Xa Hôi Việt Nam (Hanoi, 1971), vol. 1, 218Google Scholar.

47 The exception is in 1237, when Thái-tôn fled from the capital to seek refuge with the quôc su. He had been ordered to discard his wife in favour of his sister-in-law.

48 TVTL, q. 1, p. 22b.

49 Tu Bình, who served Du-tôn and Nghệ-tôn, is a notorious example of a venal official. In 1376, he stole the gold offered by the Cham ruler as tribute, thereby precipitating the fatal Cham campaign of 1377.

50 Vietnamese scholars have recently studied fourteenth-century rhymed prose (phú), preserved in the Quân hiên phú tâp. The text is unavailable tome. The scholars' view is that the literati officials who wrote the phú saw themselves as a powerful prop to centralized government and were concerned to emphasize the personal moral qualities that rulers and officials should exemplify. They were, because of their education in Chinese literature, men with a sense of social responsibility. See, e.g., Sáng, Trân Lê, “Tìm hiêu vãn phú thòi ky Trân Hô [A study of phú writings of the Trân-Hô period]”, Tap chi van học 6 (1974): 93–105,142Google Scholar. I am sure that diligent officials required the highest qualities from their rulers and colleagues, but I also believe that they were originally disturbed by the breakdown of authority in the countryside when Minh-tôn was still on the throne. The reason why Minh-tôn's successors were criticized was that now the court itself had to be reformed before the task of reforming the peasants could be undertaken. In the last decades of the Tràn dynasty, Court reform was the first priority until Lê Quý Ly deprived the Trân family of independent authority.

51 Dr. Keith Taylor has reminded me of these episodes in a letter dated 29 Oct. 1978.

52 I believe that elsewhere in Southeast Asia personal performance was perceived as the result of a shared assumption that people could exhibit different levels of innate spiritual quality. Self-regulating social processes could then take effect to mobilize followers behind those who, from time to time, seemed to exhibit spiritual qualities necessary for exercising authority. For an exposition of an un-Vietnamese sociopolitical situation elsewhere in Southeast Asia, see Kirsch, A. Thomas, “Kinship, Genealogical Claims, and Societal Integration in Ancient Khmer Society”, in Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays presented to D.G.E. Hall, (ed. Cowan, C.D. and Wolters, O.W. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), pp. 190–202Google Scholar.

53 Even the Chinese belief that a dynasty could lose its Mandate from Heaven seemsto have been disregarded. The annals, when they deal with the decline and fall of the Tran dynasty, donot invoke the Mandate to explain and justify Lê Quý Ly's success. Ly is always condemned as an usurper, and the annals supply instances of people dying to prevent him from seizing power. In 1399, more than 370 Trân princes and officials were executed after a plot against Ly's life.

54 The witnesses were feeling their way towards what Prof. Woodside has written: “What made the large family unsurpassed as a unit of social control and responsibility was not merely its own hierarchical self-regulation but also its typical localization in a particular village” — Woodside, Alexander B., Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 TT under date of 1357.

56 TT under date of 1380. Tiên was shocked that honours were paid to Đo Tu Bình in the Hall of Literature.

57 See Part I of this essay (published in Journal ọf Southeast Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (1979): 446)Google Scholar.

58 The annals contain other instances of Phan Phu Tiên's respect for the witnesses and honourable officials. He included Tru ọng Hán Siêu, Lê Quát, and Phạm Su Mạnh in a list of thirteen men of “refined talent” who graced Minh-tôn's reign; they were the only ones in the list who served during the final years of the reign; TT under date of 1323. The annals state that Le Quát and Pham Su-Manh were happy when they conversed with Chu Van An; TT under date of 1370. Nguyên Ðán is compared with a “superior man of old”, who did not hesitate to warn Nhgệ-tôn against Lê Quý Ly; TT under date of 1390. The annạls, under the date of 1377, state that Tru o ng “His sons and grandsons became officials and had the same reputation.”

59 This is why I am satisfied that the Việt su-hrσc, whichcontains the earliest extended account of Van-lang attributable to the Trân period, could not have been compiled at any other time than towards the end of the 14th century. I would not be surprised if the stories about Van-lang in the Lĩ nam chích quái were written in the same period.

60 Lê Van Huu invested Triěu σà, the first Vietnamese emperor, with the attributes of a Northern emperor to emphasize the equal status of his own emperor.

61 Lê Van Huu invoked Mencius to construct his composite sketch of the ideal Vietnamese emperor, and in 1258 Thái-tôn invoked Mencius to lend textual authorityto the appointment of his heir. For these episodes, see Wolters, O.W., “Historians and Emperors in Vietnam and China: Comments Arising out of Lê Van Hu u's History, Presented to the Trân Court in 1272”, Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid, Anthony and Marr, David (Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, 1979)Google Scholar.

62 Ngô Sī Liên, who edited the Vietnamese annals towards the end of the 15th century, senses the witnesses' anomalous position when he observes how officials before Chu Van An were influenced by personal considerations such as earning a “meritorious name”; see his comment in TT under date of 1370. Liěn writes of Chu Van An that he alone “made his concern a devotion to principle so as to lead the ruler to benefit the people”. Ngô Sî Liên wrote from the point of view of a scholar-official at the otherside of the watershed that began with the witnesses.

63 See Part I of this essay, p. 436.

64 See Part I of this essay, p. 436.

65 Wright, Arthur F., Buddhism in Chinese History (NewYork, 1968), p. 11Google Scholar. The “Confucianization” of Vietnam up to the end of the 14th century seems to me to be even less plausible a proposition than the “Hinduization”” of Southeast Asia. India generated different kinds of Hinduism, and the Southeast Asian historian's task is to try to identify the kind of Hinduism that could be understood in specific parts of Southeast Asia and what happened to itwhen it was locally construed. But Confucianism, set forth in the books available in Vietnam, professedto exhibit a coherent, inherent, and indivisible corpus of teaching on political, social, and moral behaviour and therefore an ensemble of prescriptive wisdom. I do not believe that the Vietnamese literati approached the corpus in this way.

66 Dr. Insun Yu, writing on the Lê code, puts the practical value of the Vietnamese quota of Confucianism in accurate perspective when he says: “Vietnamese law was basicallyconcerned with the maintenance of the ruler's position rather than with implementing the ultimate social ethics of Confucianism”; Yu, Insun, “Law and Family in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Vietnam”(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1978), pp. 126–27Google Scholar.

67 TT Tunder date of 1353.

68 TT under date of 1378.

69 See note 29 above.

70 TVTL, q. 3, p. 6a, on “The Turtle Pool”. One of Phḁm SuMḁnh's poems mentions his tears when he visited the Cam-lḁ temple, beloved by Minh-tôn; TVTL, q. 3, p. 16a.

71 Úc-Trai Iu óng-công di tập: Du dậa chi (Van-hóa tùng-thu só 30; Hanoi, 1966), p. 5Google Scholar.

72 U c-Trai tập (HM 2210 in the Société; Asiatique; first preface dated 1825), q. 3, pp. 9a-b.

73 Whittnore, John K., “Chiao-chih and Neo-Confucianism: Ming Attempt to Transform Vietnam”, Ming Studies 4 (1977): 51–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Nguyên Trãi illustrates what Prof. Man has written: “One of the most important messages of Vietnamese history seems to be that enough of the elite had enough in common with the mass peasantry to pool their talents at appropriate times in ultimately victorious struggle against a foreign invader”; Marr, David G., Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley, Cal., 1971), p. 21Google Scholar.

75 To take just one example, Lê Lói reminded his heir that “thepeople cherish those who are humane. Those who carry the ship or overturn it are the people. Heaven helps those with virtus”; Úc- Trai tập. q. 3, p. 32b; Anthologie de la littérature vietnamienne, p. 169.

76 L& circ; Loi urged his heir to promote men whose words and remonstrance he would accept; Úc-Trai tậap, q. 3, p. 32a; Anthologie, p. 169. In an edict of 1430, issued to his officials, Lê Lói condemned the self-indulgent behaviour of Trãn officials in words that recall me TT's description of Dụ-tôn's court; Úc-Trai tâp, q. 3, 15b-16a. Here is evidence of how Chu Van An's indignation survived in his admirers' memories.

77 TVTL, q. 5,30a; Anthologie, p. 208. The poem was written in 1494.In the same year Thánh-tôn wrote a poem on the ideal official: “He gets close to theruler to give security to the people. His sense of duty is complete…[For him] suffering comes before happiness. His mind is concerned with succouring the world…”, TVTL, q. 5, p. 30a. These sentiments are similar to Ngô sĩ Liên's, when he passed judgment on Chu Van An; see note 62 above.

78 See Part I of this essay, p. 448.

79 TT (Bǎn ky thuc luc) under the date of the 26th day of the 11 th month in the 16th year of the Hong-dirc reign period = 1 Jan. 1486.