Kathlene Baldanza's Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia is a history of Sino-Vietnamese relations during the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). It is also the most sophisticated historical study of Sino-Vietnamese relations to date. Rather than presenting the interactions of these two countries as a dichotomous engagement between “the Chinese” and “the Vietnamese”, as many earlier works have done, Baldanza presents a history of the interactions between two polities that were in turn divided. More specifically, Baldanza demonstrates that in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries there were major policy disputes at the Ming court and political conflicts within Dai Viet, as Vietnam was known at that time, and that relations between these two countries took place within, and can only be fully understood in reference to, these divisive contexts.
Baldanza also argues that any effort to understand Sino-Vietnamese relations during this period requires that we also take into account two additional, but related, factors. First, the fact that the two countries shared a common elite culture ensured that the elites of these two lands could communicate with each other and find ways to negotiate and compromise, and they did. At the same time, however, Baldanza argues that “the two countries had conflicting understandings” of their shared elite culture and that this led to “differences in self-representation” (p. 5) which in turn had political consequences. In particular, Baldanza argues that in certain cases Vietnamese elites represented themselves as fellow heirs of the East Asian classical tradition in an effort to influence certain negotiations but that such efforts had the opposite effect as the Vietnamese “were actually decentering the Chinese world by positing a cultural hub beyond the borders of the Chinese state” and that “Chinese observers were made profoundly uncomfortable by the intimation of a center of classical culture outside of the Central Country” (p. 6) and thus did not agree to Vietnamese demands.
To demonstrate these points, Baldanza begins by exploring the close relations between the two lands. She does this by examining the writings of two Vietnamese exiles at the Ming capital: one (Le Tac) capitulated to the Ming in the fourteenth century; and the other (Ho Nguyen Trung) was captured in the early fourteenth century. In writing about Dai Viet for Chinese readers, both of these authors produced works that relied on cultural and historical information shared by their Chinese counterparts. This at times had the potential to blur the distinctions between the two countries, and Ming officials likewise struggled to define the status of Dai Viet.
We see this clearly in debates at the Ming court in the early fifteenth century when political instability in Dai Viet led the Ming Dynasty to send troops to the Red River delta. The decision to invade Vietnam at that time was made by the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, and it contravened an earlier order by the first Ming emperor that Vietnam should be left alone, as he had wished to honour it for being the first tributary state to send an embassy to the Ming. Ming emperors were thus not consistent in their policy towards Vietnam. Their court officials also offered contending perspectives. In this case, some officials cited the type of shared history and culture that Vietnamese exile Le Tac had documented as justification for invading and re-incorporating Dai Viet into the empire. Others, however, argued that the Vietnamese were alien barbarians who could never assimilate and should therefore be left on their own. These two views persisted throughout the Ming period and Baldanza's discussion of these debates is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations.
The Ming were supported by some Vietnamese during their two-decade occupation, but they were ultimately driven out by others who in 1428 established a new dynasty, the Le Dynasty. Control of that dynasty was then usurped a century later by an official named Mac Dang Dung who established a rival dynasty, the Mac. Conflict and rivalry between the Le and the Mac persisted throughout the rest of the Ming Dynasty period, an issue that almost brought the two countries to war and resulted in Vietnam being demoted from a kingdom to a pacification commission, a lower-level administrative unit. Baldanza covers all of this history in detail and from different perspectives and in the process we learn a great deal about how politically divided Vietnam was, as well as how Ming officials continued to engage in policy debates, not only at the court but also between the court and provincial officials (Lin Xiyuan and Jiang Yigui).
Finally, Baldanza also examines in detail an effort in the late sixteenth century by Vietnamese envoy Phung Khac Khoan to get the Ming Wanli emperor to restore the title of “kingdom” to Dai Viet. Phung Khac Khoan presented the emperor with poems that he had written that were filled with classical allusions in what Baldanza argues was a political effort to sway the emperor's decision. However, Baldanza contends that this “self-representation” had the opposite effect because to the Ming these “political and cultural similarities were seen as threatening” (195), and the request for the title change was not granted.
Ming China and Vietnam is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations, as well as anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the complex functioning of the Chinese tributary system. That said, I think the issue of how Vietnamese “self-representations” were understood by officials at the Ming court is a topic that can be investigated further as it is not one that we have direct textual evidence to support. Instead, we have to rely on supposition, and there are always ways to sharpen our historical suppositions. For anyone who wishes to take on this task, however, Baldanza's ably and carefully researched monograph is definitely the best place to start.
