The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 23 | Number 1 | Article ID 5089 | Dec 01, 2017

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Stretching the Sinitic Interpretation of Vietnamese History

Ben Kiernan

Viet Nam’s indigenous environment has longplayed a key role in its history and culture. Mynew book, Việt Nam: A History from EarliestTimes to the Present, begins with a quotation:“‘Mountains are like the bones of the earth.Water is its blood,’ wrote a Vietnamesegeographer in 1820. Lowland Viet Nam isaquatic.”1

Interestingly, the Vietnamese geographerwrote that passage in a work that he composedin classical Chinese. In the Introduction to mybook, I argue that nine centuries of Chineseimperial rule during the first millennium CEhad been a “first transformative influence onVietnamese history.” It led to “the localadoption of what became a shared classicalhigh culture” in which “Chinese politicalmodels and vocabulary and China’s writingsystem and literary canon all helped shapeVietnamese culture.”2

Nonetheless, this northern imperial influenceblended with the lifeways of the inhabitants ofthe south. For example, the aquatic nature ofthe Vietnamese landscape influenced the localeconomy, politics, military affairs, and culture.Vietnamese came to call their homeland nonnước, their “mountains and waters,” and evenjust nước (waters), which became the word forone’s “country.” In his study “Live by Water,Die for Water (Sống vì nước, chết vì nước),”Huỳnh Sanh Thông, the founder of Vietnamesestudies in the United States and the translatorof a vast corpus of Vietnamese literature,documented and analyzed the frequent use,from earliest times to the present, of aquaticmetaphors in poetry, writing, and folklore. Hewrote: “The ancestors of the Vietnameseattached far more importance to ‘water’ than to

either ‘hills’ or ‘land’ in their idea of ahomeland.” Aquatic metaphors recurred innineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.3 InVietnamese literature, water could representfar more than just the idea of a homeland. “Thesea and streams, ponds and lakes, water plantsand beasts, barges and bridges, fisherfolk andboaters, all serve as graphic metaphors toembody harsh facts or base desires as well asnoble truths or deep thoughts.” Huỳnh SanhThông characterized “the Vietnamesewor ldv iew” i t se l f as “Water , watereverywhere.” 4

Other distinguished scholars of Vietnamesehistory, who know the country’s Chinese- andVietnamese-language sources equally well,have written in similar vein. The late O.W.Wolters of Cornell University noted numerousallusions to water in the records of the Trầndynasty (1225-1400): “Every source is colouredby reference to rivers. Rivers are the scene ofnaval manoeuvres, warfare, floods, dykes,canals, commercial transport, rafting, markets,and entertainment held on bridges, princelyescapes and escapades, legends, and landscapepoetry.” Trần emperors meditated, and poetsextolled their “land of rivers.”5

Some scholars, however, argue that a moreSinitic culture has defined Vietnam. LiamKelley, Associate Professor of History at theUniversity of Hawai’i at Manoa, writes a blogusing a Vietnamese pseudonym, “Le MinhKhai.” His blog is subtitled “Always Rethinkingthe Southeast Asian Past.” Kelley’s M.A. andPh.D. degrees, however, are both in Chinesehistory from the University of Hawai’i atManoa. One of “Le Minh Khai’s” corearguments is that Vietnamese history cannot be

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fully understood without its Chinese culturalbackground. As I argue in my book, there ismuch truth there.

But that is not enough for Kelley. In his view,we fail to understand Vietnamese history, if not“the Southeast Asian Past,” unless we arefamiliar with Chinese texts, and therefore wemust learn classical Chinese. In a recent six-month series of posts about my book, hestrained to show that it is flawed for its allegedmisunderstanding of Chinese language andhistory, even as he disregards and diminishesVietnamese scholars’ contributions to the field.What he has achieved instead, however, is areckless misreading of that key Chinese-language quotation about Vietnamesegeography with which I open the book, andeven of the work of its French translator. Kelleymade the false, even libelous, allegations that Ihad “willfully” mistranslated the French andhad fabricated the quotation. He is wrong onboth counts. Based on such false allegations, hedemanded that Oxford University Press “recall”my book. Six months later, he admitted that mytranslation from the French was correct, but hebur ied h is re tract ion deep wi th in arecapitulation of his original defamatorystatements. At that point, Kelley again attackedthe long-dead French author for supposedlymistranslating the original Chinese passage.Kelley worked hard to disguise his originalerror but in his retraction, astonishingly, hemistranslated the published extant Chinesetext. All this falls short of proving theimportance of knowing classical Chinese for thestudy of Vietnamese history.

Kelley launched his critique of my book onMarch 25, 2017. Although we have never metor corresponded, he immediately announced inhis blog: “Kiernan does not know Vietnameseor classical Chinese.” A few days later,however, he inserted a correction after theword “Vietnamese”: “[Correction: I’ve beeninformed that Kiernan does know someVietnamese…]”6 Kelley would have known that

beforehand, either from a cursory glance at mybook or from comparing it with his, Beyond theBronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship (University of Hawai’iPress, 2005), which does not use Vietnamesediacritics.

It was precisely cursory glances at my bookthat propelled him into the fray. As he wrote ina second blog post, “I have been trying myhardest not to comment on Ben Kiernan’srecent book, Việt Nam: A History from EarliestTimes to the Present. However, a sense ofmorbid curiosity keeps leading me to open thecovers of that book, and each time I look insideI can’t believe what I see . . . For instance, Irecently opened the book to the followingpassage (pg. 173). . . ”7 After publishing fiveblog posts on the book, and two days aftercalling for it to be pulped, Kelley, a specialiston premodern Viet Nam, admitted on May 10:“I haven’t looked at the parts on the colonialand post-colonial eras…”8

Why that hesitation to actually read the book?Kelley rushed into digital print before readingit through. Over six months from March toSeptember, he showed himself to be just thekind of scholar against whom he was warninghis readers: one uninformed about basicprimary and secondary sources and apparentlyunable to deploy the languages needed to makehis points convincingly.

One of “Le Minh Khai’s” prime targets, forinstance, was the leading scholar ofVietnamese language and culture, Huỳnh SanhThông. After noting in my book that Lạc is “theearliest recorded name for the Vietnamesepeople,” I quoted Huỳnh Sanh Thông’sargument that lạc is “a variant of nác, anarchaic or dialectal form of nước, or ‘water’,”and that many other Vietnamese wordsdenoting water or its qualities “sound verymuch like lạc.”9 Kelley tackled the firststatement by writing in his May 4 blog that“Kiernan . . . cites an undocumented claim that

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the late Huỳnh Sanh Thông made that “lạc is ‘avariant of nác, an archaic or dialectical [sic]form of nước,” ([p.]41) which means “water,” inan effort to show that this term “lạc” can beseen to symbolize the supposed “aquaticculture” of the Vietnamese.” Kelley then wenton to assert that there was no evidence of ahistorical connection between the words lạc,nác, and nước:

There is a big difference betweensaying a word is “archaic” or thatit is “dialectical.” Huỳnh SanhThông d id not prov ide anylinguistic evidence to support hisclaim that nác might be archaic.This dictionary here indicates thatit is dialectical, from the area ofVinh.

Huỳnh Sanh Thông likewise did notprovide any linguistic evidence tosupport his claim that “lạc” is avariant of nác.

While Huỳnh Sanh Thông mayhave possessed many other talents,he was not an historical linguist.10

Well, he was a better one than Liam Kelley. Hewas also a more careful scholar than Kelley,who not only misquotes Huỳnh Sanh Thông butmisrepresents “his claim.” Thông specificallywrote that nác is “an archaic or dialectal formof nước” (my emphasis), a correct statement. Itis indisputably dialectal, at the least. But asThông likely knew, the fact that nác means“water” in the Vinh dialect is itself evidencethat nác might also be an archaic Vietnameseterm, and a variant of lạc. The Vinh area, ormore precisely the nearby uplands of Nghệ Anprovince (of which Vinh is the capital), QuảngBình province, and an adjacent area of east-central Laos, is precisely the region wherehistorical linguists locate the ancestralhomeland of the Vietic language family. Had

Kelley read two pages beyond page 41 of mybook, he would have found this pointdocumented.11 There is therefore good reasonto see historical connections between thewords lạc, nác, and nước, as Huỳnh Sanh Thôngdid.

As I mentioned, Huỳnh Sanh Thông made asecond point linking these three Vietnameseterms. He wrote: “Indeed, many words thatdenote water or its characteristics sound verym u c h l i k e l ạ c : l ạ c h ( ‘ a c r e e k o r astream’), lạt (‘to taste bland like water’), làn (‘awave’), lan (‘to spread like water’), lạnh (‘to feelcold like water’).”12 Kelley passed over thisevidence in silence.

In his fifth blog post on May 8, Kelley turnedback to the first sentence of my book: “Thatsentence is the perfect sentence to open thisbook, as it perfectly symbolizes how flawed thescholarship in the pages that follow is.” As I’venoted, my opening sentence quoted theVietnamese geographer Trịnh Hoài Đức’s 1820work, Gia Định Thành Thông Chí, written inclassical Chinese. My English rendering,“Mountains are like the bones of the earth.Water is its blood,” is a correct translation of theprecise passage in Trịnh Hoài Đức’s text, whichwas reprinted in Biên Hòa, Vietnam, in 2005.Unaware of that edition, in my endnote I citedG. Aubaret’s 1863 French translation of Gia ĐịnhThành Thông Chí (unfortunately that endnotecited page 111 instead of p. 115 of thetranslation, where the relevant sentenceappears).

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Fig. 1. Histoire et Description de la BasseCochinchine (“History and Description ofLower Cochinchina,” a translation ofTrịnh Hoài Đức, Gia Định Thành ThôngChí, 1820), trans. G. Aubaret, Gia-Dinh-Thung-Chi (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale,1863), p. 115.

First, Kelley asserted that Aubaret’s translationof Trịnh Hoài Đức’s 1820 work was “really bad,”conveying the impression that Kelley hadcarefully read both the Chinese and Frenchtexts. He then levelled a serious charge:“Kiernan willfully twisted Aubaret’s badtranslation yet further.”13 But, more than fourmonths later, in a September 15 “Addendum”to his fifth blog post, Kelley reversed himself.Without mentioning or apologizing for hisallegation that I “willfully twisted” thetranslation, he wrote that a “passage on page115 of Aubaret’s translation appears to be whatKiernan translated. So his English translationof Aubaret’s French text is accurate.”14

Despite his reluctant acknowledgement of myaccuracy – without retracting the allegation thatI had “willfully twisted” Aubaret, a falsehoodwhich as of this writing (Nov. 18, 2017) remainsonline and uncorrected in Kelley’s May 8 post –Kelley now argues that his error did not matter.He goes on: “What does all of this tell us? It tellsus that “‘The mountains are like the bones ofthe earth. Water is its blood’” is an accurateEnglish-language translation of a passage in aFrench text from 1863.” The sole issue, Kelleynow implies, is what Trịnh Hoài Đức wrote in1820, and whether Aubaret translated thatcorrectly in 1863. If Aubaret mistranslated it,then not only is he at fault, this argument goes,but so is Kiernan for citing and translating himaccurately; and then Kelley, despite hisegregious libel, can be vindicated.

Before proceeding to examine Trịnh Hoài Đức’s

1820 Chinese-language original, it is worthprobing how in the first place Kelley could havemissed the sentence on p. 115 of Aubaret thatreads “Les montagnes sont comme les os de laterre; l’eau en est le sang” (Fig. 1, above) whichas he eventually conceded, I translatedcorrectly. If he had read through Aubaret beforedeclaring it a “really bad” translation, mightn’tKelley have remembered that sentence? If not,then while checking my incorrect endnote,looking up p. 111 and not finding the sentencethere, wouldn’t it have been normal practice fora serious scholar to scan a few pages further on,perhaps even sighting the heading in themargin on page 115 that reads “Montagnes etcours d’eau”? Kelley apparently missed that onboth readings. Next to it he would have seenthe sentence whose existence he onlyacknowledged four months later, on September15.

In the meantime, Kelley insisted that such asentence couldn’t be found in Aubaret’stranslation of Trịnh Hoài Đức. Kelley asserts notonly is the passage absent from Trịnh HoàiĐức’s original, but it couldn’t be there: he wouldnever have written such a statement. As Kelleyput it in his blog post on May 8, anotherpassage in Trịnh Hoài Đức

repeats something that was writtenin Wang Chong’s 王充 first-centuryCE Balanced Discourses (Lunheng論衡) where it explains how tidesare created:

“Water constitutes the earth’sarteries. Tides are created by theintrusion or extrusion [in theearth’s arteries] of khí/qi.” …

If we could go back in time and getWang Chong to understand whatKiernan wrote, I suspect that hewould be very surprised, as wouldTrịnh Hoài Đức, as “The mountainsare like the bones of the earth.

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Water is its blood” is not whatthese men thought or wrote.

Instead, it’s a “double-distortion.”Aubaret did not understand whatTrịnh Hoài Đức had written andKiernan willfully twisted Aubaret’sbad translation yet further.15

Here Kelley’s argument is that Trịnh Hoài Đứccould not have written what he actually wrote,apparently because he “repeats” views of thefirst-century Chinese scholar Wang Chong. Thusboth “these men . . . would be very surprised”by the words I (correctly) attribute to Trịnh HoàiĐức. Kelley restates this position even towardsthe end of his blog post of September 15: “Andwhat does “‘The mountains are like the bones ofthe earth. Water is its blood’” tell us aboutVietnam or Vietnamese history? Absolutelynothing because these words have nothing todo with anything that was written by Trịnh HoàiĐức, the “Vietnamese geographer” who wroteabout the Mekong Delta in the early nineteenthcentury, or by any other Vietnamese ever.”16

Note that Kelley has put the term “Vietnamesegeographer” between quotation marks,implying that Trịnh Hoài Đức was in some sensenot Vietnamese. He then adds, to my purportedlist of mistakes, an additional error, that of“citing a statement by Trịnh Hoài Đức toindicate something significant aboutVietnamese history.”

I’m not sure if Kiernan is aware ofthis but Trịnh Hoài Đức was veryproud of the fact that he wasdescended from a family of Chinesescholar officials from FujianProvince who fled to the MekongDelta in the seventeenth centuryrather than submit to the rule ofthe invading Manchus.

He was also very proud of the

education that he received as ayoungster in the Chinese classics.

And he had good reason to be asTrịnh Hoài Đức was one of the mosterudite scholars of his day. His GiaĐịnh thành thông chí attests to allof this as it is filled with themarkers of the worldview of ahighly accomplished member of thepremodern East Asian elite. TrịnhHoài Đức’s ideas about mountainsand rivers, and the ways in whichthe powers of Heaven and Earthinteracted with them, were ideasthat members of that elite grouphad upheld for some two millenniaby the t ime Tr ịnh Hoà i Đứccompiled his text.

As such, if his statement that“Mountains [sơn 山] are the earth’sbones, and rivers [xuyên 川] arethe earth’s blood” in some waydemonstrates to us somethingessential or significant about whothe Vietnamese are, then one couldeasily use it to make an argumentthat the Vietnamese are 100%Sinitic in their worldview. 17

“100% Sinitic.” Kelley’s position here seems tobe that Trịnh Hoài Đức’s worldview was scarcely“Vietnamese.” To me that would suggest thatthe many nineteenth-century Vietnamese whowere indeed “highly accomplished members ofthe premodern East Asian elite” could “easily”be considered “100% Sinitic in their worldview.”That surely overstates the case, even for thoseVietnamese descended from seventeenth-century Chinese immigrants. After nearly twocenturies even their worldview combined bothVietnamese and Chinese cultures. If Trịnh HoàiĐức, who wrote about the geography ofsouthern Vietnam, might not be fairly called a“Vietnamese geographer,” could it really bemore cor rec t to ca l l h im a “Ch inese

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geographer” or “100% Sinit ic”?

But it is not only Trịnh Hoài Đức who cannot bevery “Vietnamese.” Kelley informs us that thewords “The mountains are like the bones of theearth. Water is its blood” have “nothing to dowith anything” wr i t ten “by any otherVietnamese ever.”18 It would seem that allVietnamese, of all eras, could “easily” beconsidered “100% Sinitic.”

Kelley winds up where he began six monthsbefore, on March 25, playing the classicalChinese “linguistic skills” card: “I don’t thinkthat was Kiernan’s point in beginning his bookby quoting an inaccurate translation ofsomething Trịnh Hoái Đức wrote, but Kiernandoesn’t have the linguistic skills to figure thatout. That, as I stated before, is why this book isirredeemably flawed.”

Thus, finally, we come to Kelley’s extraordinaryblunder in arguing that I misrepresent TrịnhHoài Đức’s words. He asserts that the relevantsentence from Trịnh Hoài Đức should insteadread: “Mountains [sơn 山] are the earth’sbones, and rivers [xuyên 川] are the earth’sblood.” In his September 15 blog post, Kelleyrepeated that English translation three times,on each occasion inserting those same twoChinese characters. The first time, he precededthe sentence with the following assertion: “Thetwo extant versions of Trịnh Hoài Đức’s text thatI’ve consulted state the following at thebeginning of a chapter on “mountains andrivers” [sơn xuyên 山川]…” After giving hisEnglish translation of the relevant sentence, hethen keyed in the following ten characters inclassical Chinese:

山為地之骨，川為地之血，...

Kelley keyed in the character for “mountains”(山) first on the line, followed by, in sixth place,the character for “rivers” (川).

Recall that Kelley went on to conclude hisSeptember 15 blog by asserting that the words Iused, “The mountains are like the bones of theearth. Water is its blood,” have “nothing to dowith anything that was written by Trịnh HoàiĐức.” Yet, assuming no dispute over thedistinction between metaphor and simile, heeffectively concedes that my rendering iscorrect except for the word “water.” Comparingit with what Kelley claims Trịnh Hoài Đức wrote(see the previous paragraph), we may infer thatthe character for the word “rivers” [川] isextremely important to Kelley, and that totranslate Trịnh Hoài Đức’s term as “water,” as Idid, and as Aubaret did with “l’eau,” is for Kelleya serious historical error. By stressing theaquatic, it seems I allegedly betray Trịnh HoàiĐức’s “Sinitic” culture and render him too“Vietnamese.”

Where, then, might Kelley have found TrịnhHoài Đức’s original text with the character for“rivers” [川] , rather than “water”? HisSeptember 15 blog post doesn’t tell us. Kelleysays only that it appears in what he calls “Thetwo extant versions of Trịnh Hoài Đức’s text thatI’ve consulted.” He doesn’t name or cite those,nor post them as illustrations (as he often doeswith other documents in his blog). He merelykeys in the character for “rivers” [川] himself.However, between these first and secondquotations of his own translation (using“rivers” [川]), Kelley inserts an untitledillustration of a classical Chinese text, withoutgiving his readers any caption or citation.

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Fig. 2. Page 16 of Trịnh Hoài Đức , GiaĐịnh Thành Thông Chí, posted by LiamKelley on his blog on September 15,2017, with no caption or citation.

The historian C. Michele Thompson, author ofVietnamese Traditional Medicine: A SocialHistory (NUS Press, 2015), had already locatedthis text in the book published in Biên Hòa in2005.19 The untitled illustration that Kelleyposted in his blog of September 15 is in fact ascanned image of page 16 (the opening page ofChapter 2, “Mountains and Rivers”) of TrịnhHoài Đức’s Gia Định Thành Thông Chí,handwritten in classical Chinese. The 2005v o l u m e , b e a r i n g t h e s a m e t i t l e ,photographically reproduced Trịnh Hoài Đức’s

text with an accompanying modern Vietnamesetranslation. Because Kelley has posted ascanned image of page 16 of the classicalChinese between his own typed-in versions ofunnamed “extant versions of Trịnh Hoài Đức’stext,” it is possible to compare it with those. Theopening sentence is almost the same, but notquite. In the scanned image that Kelley posts ofthe extant text published in Vietnam in 2005,after the two-line chapter title, the firstcharacter in the third line is “Mountains” (山).But the sixth character in the third line is not“rivers” [川] as Kelley asserts on his blog. It isthe character for “water” (水).

This republished extant text clearly shows that,as I stated in the opening sentence of my book,Trịnh Hoài Đức did write: “Mountains are likethe bones of the earth. Water is its blood.”Moreover, it shows that Aubaret translated himcorrectly in 1863. In his blog on September 15,2017, Kelley posted clear proof of those facts,but still publicly denies them. Against the veryevidence he himself has displayed, Kelleycontinues to insist falsely that “the text wecurrently have” uses the character for “rivers.”Nor does he include, among what he calls the“extant versions of Trịnh Hoài Đức’s text thatI’ve consulted,” the published extant text whoserelevant page he posted on his blog – but hasapparently not “consulted.” Kelley has yet toidentify the text(s) he has apparently consulted– but did not post.

Let us assume for a moment that Kelley reallybelieved that Trịnh Hoài Đức wrote “rivers” [川],not “water”. Why for six months did he placesuch emphasis on my alleged mistranslation of“rivers” by “water”? This is no deep search forthe truth. Conceding along the way that in afirst-century text even “Wang Chong literallymentioned ‘mountains’ and ‘water,’” Kelley thenasserted that “the term for ‘water’ in theopening phrase (thủy 水) can also mean ‘river,’so perhaps that is the meaning that WangChong intended by using that term anyway.”20

In other words, Kelley knows the character for

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“water,” failed to acknowledge its presence inthe key 1820 passage from Trịnh Hoài Đức thatKelley himself posted on the same day, andcannot object to it being correctly translated as“water” – even if a first-century Chinese authormight “perhaps” have used it to mean “river.”One conclusion we are legitimately entitled todraw from all this is that Kelley’s real objectionis to a historian of Southeast Asia trespassingon his so-called ‘Sinitic’ territory. Academichistorians are sometimes accused of not seeingthe forest for the trees. Kelley sees only turf topatrol.

Liam Kelley owes Huỳnh Sanh Thông, G.Aubaret, me, his readers, and the field ofSoutheast Asian Studies an apology. He hasdone a disservice to Vietnamese historiographyand dealt a setback to the efforts of honestscholars who believe that Chinese culture hasplayed a key role in Vietnamese life. Ratherthan resort to a Vietnamese pseudonym, aclipped “correction,” and a reiterative“Addendum,” Kelley should acknowledge hisown egregious errors and the damage theyhave caused. That damage includes the risk ofdiscouraging new scholars from entering thefield. Kelley can only expect such an effect fromhis self-description “as one of the fewacademics in the English-speaking world whoworks on pre-modern Vietnam and who canread the sources in classical Chinese.”21 Heseems attached to rarified status.

After six months of publishing false assertions,retractions, and errors on his blog, Kelley thenreviewed my book in the Sydney MekongReview (November 2017). This time he wrotenot as “Le Minh Khai” but under his real name,and stated that “it would be a dereliction ofduty for me to stay silent.” Here, his moremuted tone demonstrates more dramatically hisscholarly failures. For example, in thispublished book review, he still shows no sign ofhaving read the last third of the book. Heselectively quotes passages from earlier parts,but fails to mention adjacent sentences,

paragraphs, and pages that belie his criticisms.He cuts key words from quotations to changethe meaning of sentences, and actuallymisquotes me in passages that he reproduces.

Kelley is also ready to criticize those “fewacademics” who work on pre-modern Vietnam“and who can read the sources in classicalChinese.” He singles out John K. Whitmore,Alexander B. Woodside, and Lê Thành Khôi, for,respectively, “a garbled translation” that“introduced some inaccuracies,” a supposederroneous date, and a “woefully outdated”(1981) book.22

For example, Kelley claims I cite “a problematicpassage from an article by historian JohnWhitmore.” Translating a passage from thechronicle Đại Việt sử ky toàn thư referring tothe period 1505-09, Whitmore wrote: “Even themountainous areas of Thái Nguyên and TuyênQuang, stripped of trees for houses, had nowood to control the springs.” Citing andfollowing his translation, I wrote (p. 213): “By1505-09, according to DVSKTT, the cutting oftimber for housing construction had denudedthe upland regions of Thái Nguyên and TuyênQuang, leaving “no wood to control thesprings,” apparently leading to flooding anderosion.” In support of the latter clause, I citedLê Thành Khôi’s 1981 work Histoire du VietNam des origines à 1858, stating: “Almostevery year from 1512 to 1517 brought eitherdrought or Red River flooding. The floods of1517 affected the whole lower delta east of[Hanoi].” Objecting to my use of Lê ThànhKhôi’s book, Kelley complains that “thedynastic chronicle does not show there was aflood that year” (1517). He neither quotes nordisputes Lê Thành Khôi’s or my statementscovering the previous five years. Of thepre-1517 period, Kelley says Whitmore shouldhave translated DVSKTT metaphorically, thus:“In building mansions,” [corrupt officials inthose] upland areas “did not have the trees tosatiate their desires” – but, Kelley implies, hadnot cut them down or caused erosion or

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flooding.

Kelley’s misleading practices of selectivelyquoting and misquoting are clear in his critiqueof my assessment of possibly one of the mostSinicized Vietnamese emperors, Minh Mạng(r.1820-1841). He says I describe Minh Mạngfrom the start “as “aggressive”, “ideologicallyrigid”, “repressive”, “haughty”, “an unusuallyinflexible ruler”…” Kelley rises to the defence:“Minh Mang’s first acts as emperor wereactually to forgive back-taxes” from his father’sreign and to announce a tax exemption. Headds that then “Minh Mang reportedlydistributed more than 730,000 strings of cash…forgiving taxes and distributing money topeople in need do not strike me as the actionsof a “haughty” and “unusually inflexible ruler”.”

To defend Minh Mạng, Kelley misrepresentswhat I wrote. As Fig. 3 shows, he misquotes mydescription of Minh Mạng’s accession (p. 277)by omitting the words in italics here: “MinhMang was more aggressive and ideologicallyrigid than his father. Repressive and haughty,but deeply concerned with agricultural welfareand development…” In the next paragraph, Iadded that “he would prove an unusuallyinflexible ruler,” not that he started out as one.Kelley distorted the meaning of my descriptionby selectively quoting it.

Fig. 3. Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History fromEarliest Times to the Present, p. 277.

Kelley’s defence of Minh Mạng distorts history.Apart from facing well over one hundredrebellions, Minh Mạng is known for his massexecutions of Christians and his brutalsuppression of Cambodians who revoltedagainst his invasion and annexation of theircountry. All that, as well as his concern foragricultural welfare and development, isdetailed in pp. 277-288 of my book.

Kelley misquotes me to defend Minh Mạng’srule over Cambodia from 1834. He says I “wroteabout a supposed attempt by Minh Mang to“impose his agrarian vision on” Cambodia. Aspart of this vision,” Kelley goes on, “we are toldthat in the late 1830s Minh Mang’s officials“brought Vietnamese crops to Cambodia andsupervised their systematic cultivation”.” Kelleythen asserts that I got the date wrong, that itwas not “in the late 1830s” (his phrase, notmine) but in 1834. He uses that date to assertthat Minh Mạng’s regime was making “an effortto stave off starvation” in Cambodia in theaftermath of its invasion. “In other words, thefood shortage “emergency” was not the resultof some impractical agrarian vision of MinhMang’s, but the product of the previous years ofwarfare and a condition that the Vietnamese,Minh Mang included, sought to alleviate.”

Here Kelley has misquoted me to make his casethat I missed this supposed key point: that MinhMạng began agricultural programs in Cambodiato deal with the immediate aftermath of the1833-34 war. Kelley avoids quoting me on thedating, and instead alters what I wrote – “By thelate 1830s” (p. 284, see Fig. 4 below) – to “inthe late 1830s.”

Let us assume that the year Minh Mạngimposed agricultural reforms was 1834, that ofthe Vietnamese invasion following the 1833Thai invasion of Cambodia and Vietnam. If 1833constitutes “previous years [sic] of warfare,” itdoes not exonerate Vietnam’s invasion ofCambodia, nor does it necessarily prove thatMinh Mạng’s purpose was to al leviate

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Cambodia’s emergency rather than feed histroops there; nor, if aiding Cambodians was hispurpose, does it contradict my argument thathe was bent on doing so by imposing hisagrarian vision on Cambodia. I had alreadystated that Minh Mạng was “deeply concernedwith agricultural welfare and development,” andI showed that this extended to Cambodia. Mypoint is that he was “imposing” his vision there,and that Cambodians came to resent thatimposition. Like Minh Mạng himself, Kelleyapparently can’t see their case.

I made the point in its context, stating that MinhMạng enjoined Vietnamese officials in Cambodiato “teach them our customs” but that he “alsomeant to impose his agrarian vision on theland” (p. 284). As Fig. 4 shows, I then providedextensive documentation. In making his falseclaim about my work, Kelley passed over nearlya page of evidence, from my initial assertion tomy sentence, “By the late 1830s Minh Mạng’sofficials brought Vietnamese crops to Cambodiaand supervised their systematic cultivation.” Ifthe actual date was 1834, it does not at allcontradict but conceivably strengthens my pointabout Minh Mạng’s agrarian vision, andcertainly does nothing to undermine myprevious detailed discussion of it, which Kelleyignores.

Fig. 4. Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History fromEarliest Times to the Present, p. 284.

Kelley is right on one key point. As he says onhis blog, “It is impossible to write a survey ofVietnamese history (or of the history of anysociety for that matter) if one does not have theability to understand and evaluate thehistorical sources (both primary andsecondary).” His own unprofessional practicehas proven that. He might have been in abetter position to criticize had he written adefinitive, synthetic history of Vietnam. It isclear why Kelley has written no such work,despite claiming the field as his own.

What can we learn from this discussion aboutVietnamese history? Where for instance did theidea, “Mountains are like the bones of the earth.Water is its blood,” come from? Despite Kelley’s

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insistence that no “Vietnamese ever” wrote anysuch thing, and that it “is not what” WangChong and Trịnh Hoài Đức “thought or wrote,”we know that Trịnh Hoài Đức did write thatpassage in 1820. It may have been his ownoriginal depiction of the aquatic Vietnameseenvironment. Alternatively, though, might hehave borrowed the passage from Wang Chong –or another Chinese author? If Trịnh Hoài Đứcderived his analogy from such a source, wouldthat make him either “100% Sinitic,” or a

copyist who “repeats” the work of Chinesepredecessors? Not at all. Trịnh Hoài Đức was aVietnamese geographer who followed a time-honored Vietnamese practice, which was notalways a creative or successful one, of selectingand adapting elements of Chinese culture to fitthe indigenous Vietnamese landscape.

Huỳnh Sanh Thông might have approved ofthat.

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University, and hasserved as Chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies and as Founding Director of theGenocide Studies Program at Yale. He is the author of Việt Nam: A History from EarliestTimes to the Present (Oxford, 2017), How Pol Pot Came to Power (Yale, 2004), The Pol PotRegime (Yale, 1996), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination fromSparta to Darfur (Yale, 2007), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2008).

Notes1 Ben Kiernan, “Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present” Asia PacificJournal, May 15, 2017, Vol. 15, Issue 10, No. 22 Ben Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, New York, OxfordUniversity Press, 2017, 1, 13.3 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Live by Water, Die for Water (Sống vì nước, chết vì nước): Metaphors ofVietnamese Culture and History,” Vietnam Review 1 (Autumn-Winter 1996), at 121, 152–53.4 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “The Vietnamese Worldview: Water, Water Everywhere,” VietnamReview 2 (Spring-Summer 1997), 16.5 O.W. Wolters, “On Telling a Story of Vietnam in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,”in Wolters, Early Southeast Asia, ed. Craig Reynolds, Ithaca, 2008, 227, 230.6 See here.7 See here (accessed Sept. 25, 2017).8 Main blog; May 10th post; Reply (accessed June 23, 2017)9 Kiernan, Việt Nam, 40-41, quoting Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Live by Water, Die for Water,” 139.10 See here (accessed Oct. 26, 2017).11 Kiernan, Việt Nam, 43, and sources cited.12 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Live by Water, Die for Water,” 139.13 See here (accessed Sept. 14, 2017).14 See here (accessed Sept. 16, 2017).15 See here (accessed Sept. 14, 2017).

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16 See here (accessed Sept. 16, 2017).17 See here (accessed Sept. 16, 2017).18 See here (accessed Sept. 16, 2017).19 Trịnh Hoài Đức, Gia Định Thành Thông Chí, Ly Viet Dung, Huynh Van Tơi (eds.), Biên Hòa,Nhà xuất bản Tổng hợp Đồng Nai, 2005, p. 16 from the back of the book. See here.20 “Going Backwards: An Addendum,” (accessed Sept. 16, 2017).21 Liam Kelley, “Lost in Translation,” Mekong Review, Issue 9, November 2017.22 Kelley, “Lost in Translation.”