Monologue, Dialogue, and Tran Vietnam
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MONOLOGUE, DIALOGUE, AND TRAN VIETNAM By O. W. Wolters [A manuscript comprised of materials completed by O. W. Wolters before his death.] DEDICATION: to Euteen CONTENTS Chapter one: Introduction - By way of studying Tran history (1226-1400) 3 Chapter two: Prologue - Northern and Southern accounts of Vietnam (1293-1418) 12 A far-off corner over the horizon Among the mountains and rivers Chapter three: Conversations in the early fourteenth century 75 By the shore of West Lake (1314) Outside the Office of the Keeper of the Imperial Chariots near the Gate of Everlasting Glory (1317) Chapter four: Conversations in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries 143 A remote stockade in the Black River region (1470) Lying low on a farm in Hai-duong (1400) Northern captivity (1412) Chapter five: New voices in the fifteenth century 229 Chapter six: Conversations in the early sixteenth century 251 Altercation in a temple (1509) Tragedy in Hai-duong (1516) Chapter seven: Authorial critique 286 1 Published Essays on Tran Vietnam by O. W. Wolters, arranged in order of publication: “Le Van Huu’s Treatment of Ly Than Ton’s Reign (1127-1137),” in C. D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters (eds.), Southeast Asian History and Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 203- 226. “Historians and Emperors in Vietnam and China: Comments arising out of Le Van Huu’s History, Presented to the Tran court in 1272,” in Anthony Reid & David Marr (eds.), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Heineman Educational Books [Asia] Ltd., 1979 [Asian Studies Association of Australia]), pp. 69-89. “Assertions of Cultural Well-Being in Fourteenth-Century Vietnam,” first published in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies X, 2 (September 1979):435-450, and XI, 1 (March 1980):74-90. [Reprinted in Two Essays on Dai-Viet in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Lac-Viet Series No. 9, 1988), pp. 3-53.] “Pham Su Manh’s Poems Written while patrolling the Vietnamese Northern Border in the Middle of the Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies XIII, 1 (March 1982):107-119. “Celebrating the Educated Official: A Reading of Some of Nguyen Phi Khanh’s Poems,” The Vietnam Forum 2 (Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Summer-Fall 1983):79-101. “Narrating the Fall of the Ly and the Rise of the Tran Dynasties,” Asian Studies Association of Australia Review 10, 2 (November 1986):24-32. “A Stranger in His Own Land: Nguyen Trai’s Sino-Vietnamese Poems Written During the Ming Occupation,” The Vietnam Forum 8 (Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Summer-Fall 1986):60- 89. “Possibilities for a Reading of the 1293-1357 Period in the Vietnamese Annals,” in David G. Marr & A. C. Milner, Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 369-410. “Minh-Ton’s poetry of Sight, Light, and Country,” in O. W. Wolters, Two Essays on Dai-Viet in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Lac-Viet Series No. 9, 1988), pp. 54-165. “On Telling a Story of Vietnam in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 1 (March 1995):63-74. “What Else May Ngo Si Lien Mean? A Matter of Distinctions in the Fifteenth Century,” in Anthony Reid (ed.), Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, in honour of Jennifer Cushman (Sydney: Allen & Unwin for the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1995), pp. 94-114. “Chu Van An: An Exemplary Retirement,” The Vietnam Review 1 (Autumn-Winter 1996):62-96. 2 Chapter One Introduction - By Way of Studying Tran History (1226-1400) A number of years ago and after I became interested in Vietnamese history, I began to suppose that surviving Vietnamese poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries might furnish historians with valuable information and should not be neglected.1 As a neophyte, I asked myself what kind of information would become available. I had never been trained to read poetry in any language, let alone in the Chinese literary language which Vietnamese poets had appropriated for their own purposes many centuries earlier. I soon had to disabuse myself of the fallacy that these poems would be packed with the factual information that always delights historians. And so I went back to school, as it were, and studied Sino-Vietnamese literature under the patient guidance of my late friend Harold Shadick, and, at the same time, I began to consider what was being written in the field of literary criticism. Predictably, I was introduced to the notion of a "text" and its meaning. My understanding of a "text" is simply that it can be expected, though not invariably, to embody, among other features, sets of recognizable literary conventions, to exhibit systematic linguistic usage, and to present itself in a coherently structured manner. These attributes could then endow it with readability and meaning. When I read a text, my first obligation would be to discover what it had to say about itself in the sense of how it "worked." This would involve studying its literary devices and the themes it voiced. And so I tried to train myself to develop an approach to texts which paid attention to such formal devices as signifying systems, structures, and figures of speech; these would be parts of a text by which its whole could be better understood. 3 Patterned literary features belong to a text's "textual" properties and invite recognition to enable it to be attributed with meaning over and above its apparent items of information.2 Vietnamese poetry, endlessly read and reread, now interested me and sometimes, I believed, told me things I would otherwise never have known. No instance of what could happen gave me more satisfaction than when Nguyen Trai's poems, written during the Ming occupation of Vietnam (1407-1427), disclosed that he associated those dismal years less with grief than with silence and the sensation of being nowhere. He was an unusually eloquent exile in his own country before he became a hero of the anti-Ming resistance and an honored figure in Vietnamese memory until today.3 This kind of enquiry excited me and promised a congenial mode of historical study. One had to bite the bullet and read and reread a poem until something unexpected might disclose itself. But I then went on to wonder about the possibility of bringing a textual approach to bear on other genres. I turned my attention to about sixty years (1293-1357) as they are recorded in the annals of the Tran dynasty (1226-1400), the name of the ruling family in Vietnam during most of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here I seemed to stumble on an important development acknowledged by Phan Phu Tien, the dynasty's official annalist in the middle of the fifteenth century.4 I read Tien's text as having been written to present the period as a time when good government was practiced, though he never says so explicitly. His judgment was recoverable after a systematic analysis of the structure of a number of passages that he contrived to insert in his text between bare entries of events derived from available records. By means of this narrational device, which I defined as "contrived narrative" in the form of pauses composed by Tien to express his opinions, he could draw his readers' 4 attention to significant episodes and behavior that illustrated what he considered should be the relationship between perspicacious rulers and talented subordinates. Yet, attracted as I had become to textual study, I did not abandon a long-standing ambition to attempt a narrative account of the Tran period. A major virtue of narrative history, distinguishing it from topic-oriented history, is that the historian has continually to ask himself questions about how and why things could actually happen in a particular and perhaps changing cultural context. The choice of a specific topic for study may, on the other hand, tend to reflect no more than one historian's sense of what is significant and therefore worthy to be insinuated into the study of the past.5 Furthermore, a narrative historian can enjoy space to linger over problems arising from his study, and he is also challenged to experiment with effective narrational devices to do justice to his subject and, maybe, render it less familiar but more interesting.6 Yet I was bound, sooner or later, to wonder what would happen if I tried to combine a narrational approach with the requirements of textual criticism and had continually to slow down my narrational pace in order to put questions to my texts' formal features as well as their content. "The mind is refrigerated by interruption," remarks Dr. Johnson, and so, too, would be my narrative. I stated my problem in an essay I once wrote in honor of Professor John Legge. Narrational flow could become more difficult to maintain when the historian, whose first obligation was with linguistic usage, was diverted by his obligation to describe and analyse a text's properties and halted to ask himself questions about its form as well as its content before being prepared to use it for the purpose of narrative history. His first and essential question would be 'how' was the text 5 written, in the sense of using various writing devices. Only then could he consider 'what' was being formulated and 'why’.7 And so my goal eventually became the crafting of a narrative history of the 174 years of the Tran dynasty (1226-1400) without neglecting my recently acquired enthusiasm for "texts." This volume reflects how I have attempted to resolve this problem.