I’ve seen it written countless times before that after the Han Dynasty extended its empire into into the area of what is now Vietnam, that “the Chinese” tried to Sinicize (Hán hóa) or assimilate (đồng hóa) “the Vietnamese.” One of the ways that people say this happened was through education. Let’s think about that. The […]

The Han Chinese who lived in the area of what is today Vietnam during the time of the Han Dynasty were afraid of something. This is obvious from the houses that they built. I thought of this recently when I read an article by Wei Weiyan, the author that I mentioned in the previous post […]

I’ve been reading a recent (2017) PhD dissertation from China that is on Han tombs in Vietnam. The dissertation is entitled “Archaeological Research on Han Tombs in Vietnam” (越南境内漢墓的考古研究) and the author’s name is Wei Weiyan (韦伟燕/韋偉燕). There were French scholars who “discovered” and wrote about some of these tombs over a century ago. During […]

In the first century AD there were a couple of Han Dynasty officials who reportedly tried to change certain cultural practices of some people in the area of what is today Vietnam. One of these men was named Xi Guang (Tích Quang), and the other, Ren Yan (Nhâm Diên). Xi Guang governed over the Red […]

In the early twentieth century, French scholar Henri Maspero came up with an undocumented theory about Han migration into the Red River delta in the first century AD (view the previous post for details). Seeing accounts in historical records indicating that in the early first century AD there were two Han Dynasty administrators in the […]

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 […]