BEN KIERNAN
Ethnic Khmer children at Wat Somrong, Vinh Long province PHOTO/Ben Kiernan, 1975
(Ben Kiernan introduces his new book published by Oxford University Press, 2017)
“The mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,” wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Viet Nam is aquatic, but it is also multiregional and polyethnic. The country’s three historic lowland regions are bounded by extensive uplands, all linked by interrelated landscapes, economies, and cultures. Throughout the plains, water plays a key role in the economy and communications. In the north and south, the Red River and the Mekong River form wide deltas and flow into the South China Sea. Linking the two deltas is the central region, many hundreds of miles of curving coastline, broken every twenty miles or so by river mouths and port towns.
Central Viet Nam, once known as Champa, is a long, narrow coastal plain that Vietnamese often picture as a thin bamboo pole, at whose ends are suspended two bulky rice baskets, the northern and southern deltas of the Red River and the Mekong. In the past three millennia, these three lowland regions have nourished unique wet-rice civilizations, speaking primarily forms of the Vietnamese, Cham, and Cambodian languages, respectively. Overlooking the lowlands, and descending very close to the coast along the narrow central plain, forested ranges and hills (“the bones of the earth”) serve as the watersheds of the country’s many rivers, occupy three quarters of its territory, and are home to over fifty more ethnic minority groups speaking as many languages.
Thus the rich tapestry of Vietnamese history cannot be reduced to a national story, an unchanging ethnic identity, or an enduring ancient polity—any more than the country can be reduced to a singular twentieth-century war. What is known today as Vi?t Nam is a land shared and contested by many peoples and cultures for several thousand years.
Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present treats the country over the millennia primarily as a place, a series of homelands that have become a shared territory, a changing land and common home rather than a continuous culture or a developing polity.
The book focuses not on the origins of Vietnamese nationhood or the persistence of a political identity but on documenting and narrating the experiences of the variety of peoples who have inhabited the country’s different regions since earliest recorded times, as well as their interactions with their natural environments and with neighboring countries. The focus is on much more than the political history of a geographical area defined by the modern state’s contemporary boundaries. Rather, a history of the different regions within those boundaries helps to integrate the multiethnic nature of its people’s histories and their cultural relationships with the lands where they have lived.
The Asia Pacific Journal/Japan Focus for more