Oh no! I did it again. While reading a work on Vietnamese history, I asked myself, “How does this author know that?” And once again that question set me off on a long journey.
The work I was reading was an essay on “L’Expédition de Ma Yuan” by Henri Maspero (in “Études d’histoire d’Annam,” Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 18 [1918]: 1-36). This essay is an historical account of Han Dynasty general Ma Yuan’s (Mã Viện, 馬援) campaign against the Trưng Sisters Rebellion in 40-43 AD.
Before talking about Ma Yuan’s campaign, Maspero spends some time explaining the historical context. Ma Yuan served what is known as the Later (or Eastern) Han Dynasty (25-220 AD). This was a successor to the Former (or Western) Han Dynasty (206 BC-9 AD). In between these two dynasties was the short-lived Xin Dynasty (9-25 AD) that was established, through the usurpation of power, by a Han Dynasty official by the name of Wang Mang.
During the period of Wang Mang’s rule, it appears that no new officials were dispatched to the Red River delta (referred to at that time as Jiaozhi/Giao Chỉ), and that the Han Dynasty officials who were already stationed there continued with their work. The main official at that time was a man by the name of Xi Guang (Tích Quang 錫光).
When the Wang Mang period came to an end, the restored Later Han Dynasty allowed Xi Guang to continue to serve in Jiaozhi, and appointed an official by the name of Ren Yan (Nhâm Diên, 任延) to rule over an area further to the south, in what is now central Vietnam, which was then referred to as Jiuzhen/Cửu Chân.
Both of these men sought to carry out some policies that were aimed at transforming the lives of (at least some of) the indigenous people, such following Han-style marriage norms, and in the case of Ren Yan, getting people to cultivate the land.
This is the first time that such efforts are mentioned in the historical record. The historical chronicles for this period are of course imperfect, so we cannot definitively conclude that this was in fact the first time that Han Dynasty officials had ever tried to make such changes, but this is how modern historians have often interpreted that information: they have seen it as the first major indication of “Sinicization.”
Further, Maspero offers an explanation for why this effort to “Sinicize” the indigenous people took place at that time. He attributes it to the arrival in the region of Han Dynasty officials and literati, or scholars
Prior to this time period, Chinese historical records indicate that prisoners had been exiled to the Red River delta. However, Maspero writes that in the early years of the first century AD a number of families of Han officials and scholars (nombre de familles de fonctionnaires des Han et de lettrés) came to the region to escape the instability that Wang Mang’s usurpation had initiated, and that these people encouraged and aided Xi Guang in his effort to introduce Chinese civilization (encourager et aider le préfet dans ses efforts pour introduire la civilisation chinoise).
As always, when I read a passage like that, I ask myself, “How did Henri Maspero know that?”
And what I saw was when I asked myself this question is that Maspero did not cite any source from that time period that documents the migration of people into Jiaozhi at that time. . .
What he did do, however, was to mention two people who later lived in the region and who, according to later historical accounts, each had an ancestor who fled to Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period. In mentioning these two people, Maspero sought to demonstrate his point that families had migrated to the region and left descendants.
Maspero first cites a fourteenth-century Vietnamese text (the An Nam chí lược) that mentions a certain Hu Guang/Hồ Cương. This person appears to have served as an official in the Red River delta region in perhaps the second century AD as he was reportedly the fourth-generation descendant of a man who had fled to Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period.
As for that man, the text states that during the Wang Mang period this man left his job as an official (not sure where) and hid in a meat market in Jiaozhi. . . Then when the Wang Mang period came to an end, this man returned to his village (again, not clear where).
Hmmm, a man hiding in a meat market doesn’t sound like someone would be all that concerned with helping to introduce Chinese civilization. . . It also looks like this man did not actually settle in Jiaozhi. That said, perhaps it was the case that he was based just to the north in the area of what is today Guangxi or Guangdong, and that later his descendant, Hu Guang, took up a position in Jiaozhi.
The other person that Maspero mentions is Lý Bôn/Bí (李賁), a man who established his own kingdom in the Red River delta region in the early years of the sixth century AD. Maspero indicates that a fifteenth-century Vietnamese history records that this man was descended from refugees of the Wang Mang era.
In fact, that text, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thứ, states that Lý Bôn/Bí was descended from someone who came to the Red River delta region at “the end of the Western Han” period because he was “suffering from military campaigns” (其先北人，西漢末苦於征伐，避居南土).
“The end of the Western Han” may or may not mean the Wang Mang period, but let’s put that distinction aside. While Maspero stated that a number of families of officials and literati took refuge in Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period, in fact the only evidence he provided is that one person from outside, Lý Bôn’s/Bí’s ancestor, took up residence in Jiaozhi at that time.
Therefore, I found the answer to my question. Maspero didn’t know that there were Han families that took up residence in Jiaozhi in the early years of the first century. He simply made a conjecture based on very little evidence.
Meanwhile, in the years since Maspero published this essay there have been several historians who have looked at what Maspero wrote and who appear to have not asked themselves, “How did Henri Maspero know that?”
In 1979, Stephen O’Harrow published an article called “From Co-loa to the Trung Sisters’ Revolt: Viet-Nam as the Chinese Found It.” This work covers some of the same issues that Maspero’s earlier article did, and in discussing the Wang Mang period, O’Harrow states:
“We know of the arrival of many well-to-do Chinese, of scholars and the like not in sympathy with Wang Mang. What we do not know is the extent to which poorer Chinese also made the journey south. But apparently those who came for the most part stayed, because later men of note in Vietnamese history have claimed descent from these early refugees.”
O’Harrow does not indicate how “we know” this information, but it is clear that he was repeating what Maspero had stated earlier, which means that actually we don’t know that “many well-to-do Chinese” took refuge in Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period. We only know that one person reportedly did this.
In 1980, Jennifer Holmgren published Chinese colonisation of Northern Vietnam. Without citing Maspero (or any work that supports the idea that there were many Han Chinese who migrated into Jiaozhi in the early first century AD), Holmgren follows Maspero’s ideas in claiming that there was a change in attitude in the way that Han administrators ruled in Jiaozhi at this time, and that this change can be attributed to the arrival of Han Chinese literati. To quote, she states that,
“The change in attitude. . . was the result of a sudden increase in the number and type of Chinese immigrant arriving in the south after the end of Former Han. . . Moreover, the new immigrants affected the social composition of the resident Chinese population, which had previously been composed of poor peasant refugees and convicts, with a small proportion of political exiles and literati. The increasing numbers of literati families arriving in the south after the end of Former Han led to a change in the laissez-faire attitude formerly taken towards the aboriginal groups in the region.” (2)
In the middle of this paragraph, Holmgren cites two sources to support her statement about the change in composition of the resident Chinese population. One is the fifteenth-century Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư. I checked the page she cites, in the edition she cites, but that page contains a comment by the fifteenth-century compiler of that text (Ngô Sĩ Liên) about events in the late sixth century. In other words, there is nothing there about the resident Chinese community in Jiaozhi in the first century AD.
Holmgren also cites four pages from a doctoral dissertation, Richard Rafe Champion de Crespigny’s “The Development of the Chinese Empire in the South: A Discussion of the Origins of the State of Wu of the Three Kingdoms.” Those pages do talk about the Wang Mang period, and mention that many Han Chinese did migrate southward to escape from unrest.
However, de Crespigny does not say anything about migrants making it all of the way to Jiaozhi. Instead, he uses population/taxation statistics from the Eastern Han period to show that the population in areas to the south of the Yangzi river increased during this period.
Nonetheless, Holmgren imagines that there must have been very many Han immigrants in Jiaozhi. What is more, she sees Ren Yan’s effort to teach people further south in Jiuzhen how to cultivate the land as a response to the need to feed this growing population.
To quote, she states that “When the [History of the Later Han] speaks of the introduction of advanced methods of agriculture during [Ren Yan’s] time, it means that desperate efforts were made to accommodate and provide for the influx of new settlers and refugees fleeing the north at the end of the Former Han.” (6)
Again, there is no evidence in the sources that there was ever such an influx of new settlers into Jiaozhi or Jiuzhen during this time period, and Holmgren does not cite any sources that document her claims.
In 1983, Keith Taylor likewise wrote about this episode in his The Birth of Vietnam. Taylor stated that Han officials in Jiaozhi began “to pursue a more aggressive policy toward the indigenous way of life” in the early years of the first century AD, and that “This policy gained momentum in the following years with the arrival of a large number of Han refugees in the south.”
It is unclear what Taylor means by “the south” here. Was it Jiaozhi? The southern half of the Han empire?
For instance, he states that the governor of Jiaozhi “closed his borders against the anarchic situation in the north” (and cites a 14th century Vietnamese text for that information, but it is in earlier Chinese sources as well), but then he says that “Large numbers of Han ruling-class people found refuge in the south; these newcomers strengthened the position of local Han officials and encouraged a less tolerant attitude toward the local society.”
Taylor does not provide a citation for this last point, but it is clearly following Maspero’s claim. Further, whereas Maspero imagined a number of Han families arriving, Taylor now has “large numbers of Han ruling-class people” appearing in Jiaozhi. To be fair, this is a more modest claim than Holmgren’s but it still is an amplification of what Maspero originally wrote.
Finally, as an example of this “less tolerant attitude,” Taylor goes on to discuss the actions of Ren Yan, an official whom he describes as “The most famous Han official in Vietnam during the Wang Mang era.” In fact, however, Ren Yan was appointed by Han Emperor Guangwu after the Wang Mang era, when the Western Han was restored to power in 25 AD.
In his 2013 A History of the Vietnamese, a work that does not have any footnotes at all, Taylor again repeats Maspero’s idea that newly-arrived Han Dynasty officials and scholars assisted Han officials in Jiaozhi in Sinicizing the local population by stating that “This wave of refugees from the north strengthened Han officials in their dealings with local peoples during this short but tumultuous era and accelerated the ascendancy of imperial administration over the Lac aristocracy.”
In his 2017 survey, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, Ben Kiernan repeats Maspero’s original claim, but does so by closely following Holmgren. He states that,
“Large numbers of northern refugees, many of them educated people, fled to south China and further, into the Red River plain. . . All this led to problems with native Lạc Việt, who for the first time were seeing large-scale settlement and more direct Chinese involvement in their affairs. Some could have been moved from their land to make way for the newcomers. Indeed, the grand administrators’ agricultural improvement policies may have been spurred by the need to feed these new arrivals. . .”
Kiernan follows these comments with a footnote that is deceiving. He claims that his ideas come from the History of the Later Han as it is quoted in works by Holmgren and O’Harrow, but that is not actually true.
As the image above from page 6 of Holmgren’s book indicates, when Kiernan states that “the grand administrators’ agricultural improvement policies may have been spurred by the need to feed these new arrivals” he is not relaying information in the History of the Later Han, but instead, is repeating Holmgren’s interpretation of what the information in the History of the Later Han might mean if it is viewed through the lens of Maspero’s claim, and exaggerated further.
Meanwhile, the passage that O’Harrow cites from the History of the Later Han in his work has nothing to do with anything Kiernan says in this passage.
What does all of this show us?
First of all, it is fascinating to see the way in which an undocumented claim can persist in historical scholarship.
Maspero did not have evidence for his claim that there were a number of families of Han officials and scholars who migrated into Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period. The only “evidence” he had was 1) a claim from much later that Lý Bôn’s/Bí’s ancestor arrived at that time (with no evidence that he was either an official or a scholar), and 2) a record from much later claiming that a Han official hid in a meat market somewhere in Jiaozhi during that time and then left at the end of the Wang Mang era.
That’s it! That’s all the evidence that Maspero provided for “a number of families of Han officials and scholars” arriving in Jiaozhi during the Wang Mang period and “encouraging and aiding the introduction of Chinese civilization.” All we have evidence for is that one man came and stayed, and we know nothing about him, or his educational level, or what he ever did.
Having said this, I recognize that when there is not much information, historians have to be creative and put forth plausible interpretations. One could argue, for instance, that this is precisely what someone like Holmgren did. However, in this case the limited information that she built her interpretation on was not historical information, but another interpretation, and one that was based on a couple of flimsy fragments of tangential historical information.
In other words, Maspero came up with an interpretation, and others have been building on his interpretation, but the very interpretation that Maspero came up with is untenable given the absence of evidence to support it.
Beyond that, however, it is interesting that these historians clearly follow Maspero’s idea, but that they do not cite Maspero for that idea (and in Kiernan’s case, that he does not cite Holmgren for her interpretation).
Finally, there is also something very interesting here about the willingness of historians to accept (the popular colonial-era idea of) migration as a key means for change in history. That is a topic that we will look at more closely in subsequent posts.
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