Suite101 e-Book
Episodes of Vietnamese History

Introduction

Vietnam is a country in mainland Southeast Asia with a long coastline and an equally long history. Many peoples occupy its borders and many more have passed through in years past. For many hundreds or thousands of years, those peoples found themselves more or less united by their desire to resist the pressure of sinicisation – becoming Chinese through force of proximity – while developing their own culture. This influence meant that the nature of the early Vietnamese state was different from that of the rest of mainland Southeast Asia. While Tai, Lao, Cambodian and Burmese states created mandala-style polities, which were spaced remotely from each other and relied upon mutual relations and dependencies between each other, the Vietnamese state was a pyramid style hierarchy, with the king or emperor at the pinnacle and successive layers of subsidiary officials arranged beneath him (or conceivably her). The emperor was, therefore, removed from the mass of the people and it was officials at different levels who could be held accountable for any failures in climate or governance.

In later years, the external threats came from the Mongols and later from the Europeans, especially the French, who colonised and exploited the county and its people. The attempt by the French to re-establish their empire after they had been driven out by the Japanese in the Second World War led to an inevitably more bitter and bloody conflict. The success of the Communist revolution in China inspired the Vietnamese resistance to adopt the same politics – as indeed did the apparent absence of any suitable alternative ideology. The success of the revolutionary war, however, resulted only in the American-led invasion that destroyed so many lives and which is remembered in the western world largely through its impact on the service personnel who fought and died there.

In this collection of essays, I have tried to give a flavour of each of these aspects of Vietnamese life, being of course conscious that it is hardly possible to do justice to a proud nation in such a comparatively small number of pages. I have included, therefore, pieces on such important issues as the battle of Dien Bien Phu that led to the expulsion of the French, as well as the character of Uncle Ho – Ho Chi Minh, the great leader who brought independence for his people, at such a terrible cost. I have also included other items which relate to the cultural and societal nature of Vietnam – the role of sticky rice as a food, for example, the importance of the Mekong river and a folk legend, The Origin of the Mosquito, which has a lot to say about the character of the Vietnamese. The conclusion makes some comments about doi moi, the policy of economic openness and reconstruction that is intended to bring prosperity to the long-suffering Vietnamese in the future. I am indebted once again to Suite 101 and my editors for their assistance in enabling this work to be published. I look forward to any comments from readers.

John Walsh, Shinawatra International University, November 2004.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Chams
• The Origin of the Mosquito: a Vietnamese Legend
• The Trung Sisters and Vietnam’s First Resistance
• Hanoi: A Brief History
• Dien Bien Phu
• Uncle Ho
• The Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979
• The Achievement of Communism
• Sticky Rice
• The Mekong River
• Cau Dai
• Conclusion: to the Future with Doi Moi
• Bibliography