Sources of Vietnamese Tradition

Through a range of primary-source materials -- many translated into English for the first time -- Sources of Vietnamese Tradition provides an essential guide to two thousand years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors and ethnic groups. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present. Divided into three parts that group the seven chapters chronologically into premodern, early modern, and modern Vietnam, Sources of Vietnamese Tradition begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.--939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009--1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian ideology and bureaucratic governance (1407--1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600--1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Organized thematically, each chapter provides an introduction and features readings that reveal the views, routines, outside influences, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West. A chronology of Vietnamese history from the prehistoric period to the early twenty-first century contextualizes selections, along with an explanation of Vietnamese conventions of naming monarchs and dating their reigns.