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Name of Vietnamese monarchy (1054 - 1400; 1428 - 1804)
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Đại Việt (大越, IPA: [ɗâjˀ vìət]; literally Great Việt) was the official name of multiple Vietnamese monarchies in eastern Mainland Southeast Asia from the 10th century AD to the early 19th century, centered around the region of present-day Hanoi. The initial name, Đại Cồ Việt, was adopted in 968 by Emperor Đinh Bộ Lĩnh, following his successful campaigns that ended the Anarchy of the 12 Warlords and lasted until the beginning of the reign of Lý Thánh Tông (r. 1054–1072), the third emperor of the Lý dynasty. Đại Việt lasted until the reign of Gia Long (r. 1802–1820), the first emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, when the name was changed to Việt Nam in 1804. Under rule of bilateral diplomacy with Imperial China, it was known as the Principality of Giao Chỉ (975–1164) and later the Kingdom of Annam (1164–1804) when Emperor Xiaozong of Song recognized Đại Việt's independence and upgraded its status from principality to kingdom.
Đại Việt's history was divided into the rule of eight dynasties: Đinh (968–980), Early Lê (980–1009), Lý (1009–1226), Trần (1226–1400), Hồ (1400–1407), and Later Lê (1428–1789); the Mạc dynasty (1527–1677); and the short-lived Tây Sơn dynasty (1778–1802). It was briefly interrupted by the Hồ dynasty (1400–1407), which changed the country's name to Đại Ngu, and the Fourth Era of Northern Domination (1407–1427), when the region was administered as Jiaozhi by the Ming dynasty. Đại Việt's history can also be divided into two periods: the unified state, which lasted from the 960s to 1533, and the fragmented state, from 1533 to 1802, when there were more than one dynasty and several noble clans simultaneously ruling from their own domains. From the 13th to the 18th century, Đại Việt's borders expanded to encompass territory that resembled modern-day Vietnam, which lies along the South China Sea from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf of Thailand.
Early Đại Việt emerged in the 960s as a hereditary monarchy, with Mahayana Buddhism as its state religion, and lasted for six centuries. From the 16th century onwards, it gradually weakened and decentralized into multiple sub-kingdoms and domains, ruled by either the Lê, Mạc, Trịnh, or Nguyễn families simultaneously. It was briefly unified by the Tây Sơn brothers in 1786, who divided it among themselves in 1787. The Lê-Mạc war was followed by the Trịnh-Nguyễn War and the Tây Sơn wars, which ended with a final Nguyễn clan victory and the destruction of the Tây Sơn dynasty. Đại Việt was reunified, ending 262 years of fragmentation with the founding of the Nguyễn dynasty in 1802. From 968 to 1804, Đại Việt flourished and acquired significant power in the region. The state slowly annexed Champa and Cambodia's territories, expanding Vietnamese territories to the south and west. The state of Đại Việt was the primary precursor to the country of Vietnam and the basis for its national historic and cultural identity.
The term Việt (Yue) (Chinese: 越; pinyin: Yuè; Cantonese Yale: Yuht; Wade–Giles: Yüeh4; Vietnamese: Việt) in Early Middle Chinese was first written using the logograph "戉" for an axe (a homophone) in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 BC), and later as "越". At the time, it may have referred to a people or chieftain to the northwest of the Shang, such as the Yuefang. According to Ye Wenxian (1990) and Wan (2013), the ethnonym of the Yuefang in northwestern China is not associated with that of the Baiyue in southeastern China. In the early 8th century BC, a tribe on the middle Yangtze was called the "Yangyue", a term later used for people further south. Between the 7th and 4th centuries BC, Yue/Việt referred to the state of Yue in the lower Yangtze basin and its people.
From the 3rd century BC on, the term was used for the non-Han Chinese populations of south and southwest China and northern Vietnam, with particular ethnic groups called Minyue, Ouyue, Luoyue (Vietnamese: Lạc Việt), etc., collectively referred to as the Baiyue (Chinese: 百越; pinyin: Bǎiyuè; Cantonese Yale: Baak Yuet; Vietnamese: Bách Việt; lit. 'Hundred Yue/Việt'). The term Baiyue (or Bách Việt) first appeared in the book Lüshi Chunqiu, compiled around 239 BC. At first, Yue referred to all peoples of the south that practiced un-Chinese slash-and-burn cultivation and lived in stilt houses, but this definition does not suggest that all Yue were the same and spoke the same language. They were loosely connected or independent tribal societies belonging to a diverse ethnolinguistic complex. As Chinese imperial power expanded southward, Chinese sources generalized the tribes of northern Vietnam at the time as Yue, or the Luoyue and the Ouyue (Lạc Việt and Au Viet). Over time, the term Yue morphed into a geopolitical designation rather than a term for a group of people, and it became more of a historical and political term than one tied to connotations of barbarism. During the period of Chinese rule, many states and rebellions in the former region of Yue (southern China and northern Vietnam) used the name Yue as an old geopolitical name rather than as an ethnonym.
When the word Yue (Middle Chinese: ɦʉɐt̚) was borrowed into the Vietnamese language during the late Tang dynasty (618–907) by the Austroasiatic Viet-Muong-speaking peoples, who were the ancestors of the modern-day Vietnamese Kinh, the exonym was gradually localized and became an endonym of the Vietnamese. That endonym might have manifested in different forms depending on how neighboring peoples interacted with and referred to the Vietnamese back then. For instance, until the modern day, the Cham have been calling the Vietnamese Yuen (Yvan), from the reign of Harivarman IV (1074–1080) to the present. It is evident that Vietnamese elites tried to tie their ethnic identity to the ancient Yue through constructed traditions during the late medieval period. However, all endonyms and exonyms referring to the Vietnamese, such as Viet, Kinh, or Kra-Dai Keeu, are related to political structures or have common origins in ancient Chinese geographical imagination. Most of the time, the Austroasiatic-speaking ancestors of the modern Kinh under one single ruler might have assumed for themselves a similar or identical designation, inherent in the modern Vietnamese first-person pronoun ta ("us, we, I"), to differentiate themselves from other groups. In the older colloquial usage, ta corresponded to "ours" as opposed to "theirs", and during colonial times, they were nước ta ("our country") and tiếng ta ("our language"), in contrast to nước tây ("western countries") and tiếng tây ("western languages").
Đại Cồ Việt was the name chosen by Đinh Bộ Lĩnh for his realm when he declared himself emperor in 966. It is probably derived from the vernacular Cự Việt ("Great Việt") or Kẻ Việt ("Việt Region"), with the Sino-Vietnamese Đại ("great") added as a prefix. The name appeared in the 15th-century text Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư but not the earlier 13th- or 14th-century text Đại Việt sử lược. According to Momoki Shiro, Đại Cồ Việt may have been the result of a mistake in the records or invented while compiling old records.
When Lý Nhật Tôn ascended to the throne in 1054, he dropped the vernacular nôm term Cồ from Đại Cồ Việt and shortened it to Đại Việt. The term Đại Việt Quốc ("the Great Viet State") has been found on brick inscriptions from Hoa Lư, the first capital of the polity, dating to the 10th century AD. The name Đại Việt is the more literary version of the name and had been in use since before its formalization in 1054.
For a thousand years, the area of what is now Northern Vietnam was ruled by a succession of Chinese dynasties as Nanyue, Giao Chỉ (交趾, Jiaozhi), Giao Châu (交州, Jiaozhou), Annan, and Jinghai Circuit.
Ancient northern Vietnam and particularly the Red River Delta were inhabited by various ethnolinguistic groups that constituted modern-day Hmong–Mien, Tibeto–Burman, Kra–Dai, and Austroasiatic-speaking peoples. Early societies had emerged and existed there for a while before the Han conquest in 111 BC, such as the Phùng Nguyên and Dong Son cultures. Both practiced metallurgy and sophisticated bronze-casting techniques. They were together called the Yue and barbarians by the Chinese and collectively understood as non-Chinese. Ancient Chinese texts do not give any distinction to each tribe and do not precisely indicate which languages or tribes they interacted with in northern Vietnam. All peoples living under the administration of the empire were usually referred to as either "people" (ren 人) or "subjects" (min 民). There was absolutely no classification or distinction for "Vietnamese", and it is difficult to identify people accurately as such or to infer modern ethnicity from the ancient. It is highly likely that these intermingled multilinguistic communities might have evolved into the present day without modern ethnic consciousness—until ethnic classification efforts carried out by the colonial government and successive governments of the Republic of Vietnam, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and Socialist Republic of Vietnam—while retaining their intangible ethnic identity. There was no persistent "ethnic Vietnamese" identity during this period.
Official Vietnamese history textbooks usually assume that the people of northern Vietnam during Chinese rule were Việt/Yue. The Yue were broad groups of non-Chinese peoples of the south, which included many different ethnolinguistic groups who shared certain customs. After the disappearance of the Baiyue and the Lac Viet from Chinese records around the first century AD, new indigenous tribal groups might have emerged in the region under the name Li-Lao. The Li-Lao people were also known for their drum casting tradition. The culture produced Heger Type II drums, while the previous Dong Son culture of the Lac Viet produced Heger Type I drums.
The Li-Lao culture flourished from approximately 200 to 750 AD in present-day southern China and northern Vietnam. These Li tribes were recorded in Chinese sources as Lǐ (俚; "bandits") inhabiting the coastal areas between the Pearl River and Red River. Li political structures were distributed in numerous autonomous settlements/chiefdoms (dong 洞) located in riverine valleys. The Book of Sui notes that Li noblemen who possess a bronze drum in each dong were called dulao (都老), which Churchman argues bears some resemblance and cultural connection to the previous local ruling class of the Red River Delta. The Li tribes were described as ferocious raiding bandits who refused to accept imperial authority, leading to Jiaozhou, the heartland of the Red River Delta, being deemed by the Chinese to be an isolated borderland with difficult and limited administration. Because the Li-Lao people managed to keep themselves away from the Chinese sphere of cultural influence, the landscape of northern Vietnam during Han–Tang period experienced a degree of equilibrium between Sinification and localization. From the sixth to the seventh century, Chinese dynasties attempted to militarily subdue the Li dong, gradually causing the Li-Lao culture to decline.
In terms of complex culture and linguistics, the important effects of ten centuries of Chinese rule over northern Vietnam are arguably still observable. Some native languages of the regions for a long time had employed a Sinitic script and Sinitic-derived writing systems to represent their languages, such as Vietnamese, Tày, and Nùng.
James Chamberlain believes that the traditional Vietic realm was north central Vietnam and northern Laos, not the Red River Delta. Based on his interpretation of Keith Weller Taylor's examination of Chinese texts (Jiu Tangshu, Xin Tangshu, Suishu, Taiping Huanyu Ji, Tongdian), Chamberlain suggests that Việt-Mường peoples began emigrating from central Vietnam (Jiuzhen, Rinan) to the Red River Delta in the seventh century, during the Tang dynasty, possibly due to pressure from the Khmers in the south or the Chinese in the north. Chamberlain speculates that during the rebellion led by Mai Thúc Loan, the son of a salt-producing family in Hoan province (today Hà Tĩnh Province, North-Central Vietnam), which lasted from 722 to 723, a large number of Sinicized lowland Vietic people or the Kinh moved north. The Jiu Tangshu records that Mai Thúc Loan, also known as Mai Huyền Thành, styled himself as "the Black Emperor" (possibly after his swarthy complexion), and that he had 400,000 followers from 23 provinces across Annam and other kingdoms, including Champa and Chenla.
However, archaeogenetics demonstrate that before the Đông Sơn period, the Red River Delta's inhabitants were predominantly Austroasiatic: genetic data from Phùng Nguyên culture's Mán Bạc burial site (dated 1800 BC) have close proximity to modern Austroasiatic speakers; meanwhile, "mixed genetics" from Đông Sơn culture's Núi Nấp site show affinity to "Dai from China, Tai-Kadai speakers from Thailand, and Austroasiatic speakers from Vietnam, including the Kinh"; therefore, "[t]he likely spread of Vietic was southward from the RRD, not northward. Accounting for southern diversity will require alternative explanations." Churchman states that "the absence of records of large-scale population shifts indicates that there was a fairly stable group of people in Jiaozhi throughout the Han–Tang period who spoke Austroasiatic languages ancestral to modern Vietnamese". On a Buddhist inscription dated to the 8th century from Thanh Mai village, Hanoi, 100 out of 136 women mentioned in the epigraphy could be identified as ethnic Vietnamese females. Linguist John Phan proposes that a local dialect of Middle Chinese, called Annamese Middle Chinese, developed and was spoken in the Red River Delta by descendants of Chinese immigrants, and later was absorbed into the co-existing Việt-Mường languages by the ninth century. Phan identifies three layers of Chinese loanwords into Vietnamese: the earliest layer dates to the Han dynasty (ca. 1st century CE) and Jin dynasty (ca. 4th century CE); the late layer dates to the post-Tang period; and the recent layer dates to the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Đại Việt”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.