Vietnam officially has fifty-four different ethnic groups, but modern notions of Vietnamese national identity are based overwhelmingly on the kinh people of the lowlands and on their history. That history has been written in the twentieth century along the two themes of resistance to foreign invasion from the north (Bac cu) and March Forward in the south (Nam tien). The current designation of non-kinh populations as ethnic minorities does not do justice to their importance in the making of Vietnam as we know it today. The papers in this panel seek to disrupt the conventional modern historical narrative and highlight the importance of ethno-cultural differences in Vietnamese history. Before the advent of modern nationalism and its attendant notions of citizenship, majority and minority populations, Vietnamese rulers sought to control populations of diverse ethnic origins and culture while fending off threats to their own power from inside and outside their borders. Over time, notions of Vietnameseness came to be defined as much through cultural distance from non-kinh peoples of the Indochinese peninsula as through difference from China. The papers focus respectively on the Tai in northern Vietnam since the eleventh century, of the Muong in the struggle against the Ming Occupation in the fifteenth century, on the role of Banar and Cham people of Central Vietnam in the rebellions of the late eighteenth century, and on post-1975 efforts to write the history of the Mekong Delta and of Saigon more specifically with the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmers or Chinese as its center.

Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University

In the twentieth century, the Muong linguistic and ethnic category was defined by modern scholars as an upland minority identity related to Vietnamese. I propose to consider how this identity was invented for modernist and nationalist purposes and, by way of contrast, will look at what annals say about relations between the imagined ancestors of modern Muong and Vietnamese in earlier centuries. In particular, I propose to consider the people who, in the early fifteenth century, followed Le Loi in a movement that founded the Le dynasty and brought to prominence a group of clans that ruled until modern times. I am interested in three ideas: one is that Le Loi’s army was primarily recruited from among people whom modern theories would now categorize as Muong; one is that those who opposed the rise of Le Loi acknowledged solidarity with the Ming dynasty and represented the interests of the lowland agricultural population; and finally, I want to inquire about archival resistance to the representation of Le Loi’s followers as patriotic heroes in subsequent historiography. I am curious about how the contemporary historiographical fashion to incorporate the role of minorities in national history may compare with earlier historiographical fashions that do not feature the category of either ethnic minority or nation.

John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan

Forgetting boundaries, especially recent ones, allows us to focus on peoples of similar cultural and linguistic patterns and the contacts between differing peoples, irrespective of modern definitions of statehood. By pursuing a multiethnic/cultural approach to a modern state’s history, we may be able to realize how certain groups have managed to establish ‘states’ and others have been segmented among such ‘states.’

Here I shall examine the dynamics of both the Tai and the Viet peoples as they came in heavy contact with each other intermittently for a century and a half (1330s–1480s). At a time when Tai peoples were actively emerging across the northern mainland of Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese were vigorously transforming their polity into an early modern state based on that of contemporary Ming China.

The result was a series of conflicts between the Vietnamese government and a variety of Tai muang in scattered locations to the west of Dai Viet. The culmination came in the 1470s following the transformation of the Vietnamese polity into a sinic bureaucracy. Having crushed Champa to the south, the Vietnamese directly confronted the Tai muang with their first invasion of the Mekong Valley. In time, Vietnamese claims to Tai hill territories would help bring Tai ethnic groups into a modern Vietnam and keep the Tais splintered among a number of states.

Nguyen Quoc Vinh, Harvard University

Modern interpretations of the Tay Son Wars (1771–1802) are largely based on the career of Nguyen Hue, the best-known Tay Son leader. Nguyen Hue was responsible for ousting the Trinh lords from power in Hanoi in 1786, ending the long reign of the Le dynasty in 1788, and defeating a Qing punitive expedition in 1789. These interpretations make of the Tay Son wars the precursors of peasant collective action and nationalism in the twentieth century. Indeed, the figure of Nguyen Hue is often associated with that of Ho Chi Minh and his followers with Communist revolutionaries. The Tay Son wars, however, were started by Nguyen Hue’s older brother, Nguyen Nhac, whose agenda differed significantly from that of his younger brother. While Nguyen Hue waged war through the whole country, Nguyen Nhac stayed in Binh Dinh where he proclaimed himself ruler. He located his capital on the ruins of the former capital of Champa. By exploring the career of Nguyen Nhac, in particular the role of the Banar highlanders in his army and of the Cham legacy in his short-lived kingdom, this paper seeks to underscore the importance of region and ethnicity in the Tay Son wars.

Maureen Feeney, University of Michigan

In 1998, Vietnamese state officials organized a year-long celebration of the 300-year anniversary of Saigon with the cooperation of local historians. As Vietnamese historians acknowledge, however, the region was already populated by a number of ethnic groups, in particular the Khmer and Chinese. Why, then, did the authorities declare that Saigon was exactly 300 years old? This paper argues that by selecting 1698 as the originary year of Saigon, the authorities were able to downplay the foundational roles of non-Vietnamese settlers.