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Towards an environmental history of the eastern Red River Delta, Vietnam, c.900–1400

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2014

Li Tana
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Abstract

This article focuses on the eastern region of the Red River Delta, Vietnam, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. This area was an important centre of economic and population growth in Đại Việt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and nurtured Đại Việt's sophisticated and renowned ceramics industry, hosted leading schools of Vietnamese Buddhism and bred a rising class of scholars and bureaucrats. The region's rapid rise as an economic and political centre was, however, also the key to its undoing. The sudden spike in population density, and the intensive logging carried out for ceramic production, and temple and ship building, overtaxed the area's natural resources. The burden on the local ecology was exacerbated by the Trần dynasty's dyke building project, which shifted the river's course. The ensuing environmental deterioration might have been one major reason for the Vietnamese forsaking the large-scale ceramic production in Chu Đậu, deserting their main port, Vân Đồn, and for the Chinese abandoning a historical maritime invasion route.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 315 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2014 

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59 Quoted from Momoki Shiro, The formation and transformation of the medieval state of Đại Việt, p. 90; Whitmore expressed a similar view, that each locality worked out its own hydraulic system, sufficient to allow such cultivation to take place. Whitmore, John K., ‘“Elephants can actually swim”: Contemporary Chinese views of late Lý Đại Việt’, in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, ed. Marr, David G. and Milner, A.C. (Singapore: ISEAS and Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986), p. 129Google Scholar.

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69 ‘Yi li yao, shi li jiao’.

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73 Ngan-nan tche yuan, pp. 88–9, 127.

74 During the Tang and Song periods in China, salt was made by boiling sea water and therefore required fuel. It is therefore likely that the same technique was used for salt-making in the Red River Delta during the Trần period. The technique of evaporating seawater in salterns to make salt was not used in Guangdong before the Ming era.

75 Lê Quát, ‘Bắc Giang Bái thôn Thiệu Phúc tự bi ký’ [For the inscription on Thiệu Phúc temple in Bái village], in Thơ văn Lý-Trần, vol. 3, p. 144.

76 This explains a fourteenth-century Chinese envoy's description of the Vietnamese: ‘everyone is barefoot, whether his status is high or low; everyone shaved his hair, whether he is old or young’ [尊卑雙跣足,老幼一圓顱]. He must have seen a large percentage of monks, which made him believe that everyone was a monk. See [Yuan] Chen Gangzhong, ‘Poetry of Chen Gangzhong’, in Qinding siku quanshu, part Ji, vol. 5.

77 Cited in Tấn, Hà Văn, Kự, Nguyễn Văn and Long, Phạm Ngọc, Chùa Vietnam, Buddhist temples (Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội, 1993), p. 111Google Scholar.

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79 Quoted in Ibid., p. 85.

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82 I am grateful to Professor Đỗ Bang for this information.

83 Vickery, Michael, Society, economics, and politics in pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th–8th Centuries (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for UNESCO/Toyo Bunko, 1998), p. 292Google Scholar.

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85 Lập, Vũ Tự et al. , Văn hoá và cư dân Đồng bằng Sông Hồng [Culture and people in the Red River Delta] (Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội, 1991), p. 26Google Scholar.

86 Toàn Thư, p. 347.

87 Quoted in Momoki Shiro, The formation and transformation of the medieval state of Đại Việt, p. 91.

88 For a more detailed analysis of the changes to river courses and the waterscape of the Red River Delta, see Li Tana, ‘The sea becomes mulberry fields and mulberry fields become the sea: The Red River and environmental history’, paper presented at the 8th Water History Conference of the International Water History Association, Montpellier, 24–29 June 2013.

89 Lịch sử Việt Nam, p. 257; Taylor, A history of the Vietnamese, pp. 150–52.

90 Ngô Bế rose from Kinh Môn in 1344 and was active until 1360. Toàn Thư, pp. 421, 430, 431.

91 Sakurai, Betonamu Sonraku no keisei, p. 262.

92 Ibid., p. 254.

93 Gourou, Pierre, The peasants of the Tonkin Delta, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1970), pp. 176–7Google Scholar; see also O'Connor, Richard, ‘Agricultural change and ethnic succession in Southeast Asian states: A case for regional anthropology’, Journal of Asian Studies 54, 4 (1995): 982Google Scholar.

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95 Sakurai, Betonamu Sonraku no keisei, pp. 261, 266.

96 Toàn Thư, p. 421.

97 Ibid., p. 432.

98 Li, ‘The sea becomes mulberry fields’.

99 Champa's political and cultural advances into the highlands were made during these periods. J. Whitmore, ‘The last great king of classical Southeast Asia: “Che Bong Nga” and fourteenth-century Champa’, in Trần Kỳ Phương and Bruce M. Lockhart, The Cham of Vietnam, p. 194. Some authors refer to the Cham polity as ‘Nagara Cāmpa’; its extent and structure are still being debated.

100 Whitmore, ‘The last great king of classical Southeast Asia’, p. 186.

101 Nishimura Masanari, ‘An essay on the formation of enclosed-type dykes in the Red River plain, northern Vietnam’, MS, p. 6. The excavation at Ngói, another important ceramic centre of fifteenth and sixteenth century Hải Dương, revealed that this location was unoccupied between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

102 The Ming invasion of Đại Việt in 1407 came by two routes, neither of them involving water. A Taiwanese travel account recorded clearly why: ‘From Taiwan to Tongking by waterway takes 89 geng … although the port is wide, the further up to the west the narrower the river became.’ [由台至东京水程八十九更，自东京渡海十二更抵安南，其两海自港口横渡，虽甚广，渐西渐隘，而海亦尽，盖皆海之支汊] Taiwan tongzhi [A complete gazette of Taiwan] (Taipei: Taiwan sheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 1956), p. 33Google Scholar.