As I stated in the previous post, in 1744 Nguyễn Phúc Khoát, the “Nguyễn lord” of Đàng Trong (the southern half of the Lê Dynasty empire) elevated his status from that of a commandery duke (quận công 郡公) to that of a “prince” (vương 王), which was the same rank that his counterpart in the north, the “Trịnh lord,” held.
One important difference, however, was that the Trịnh lord was granted the title of “prince” by the Lê emperor, whom he served, whereas Nguyễn Phúc Khoát granted himself the title, without the approval or knowledge of the Lê emperor.
Therefore, this act of declaring himself to be a prince was a definite breach of authority. However, it needs to be understood in its context, and that is something that I argue historians so far have not done.
Instead, as I also noted in the previous post, this event has been placed in a narrative that imagines the Nguyễn as willfully seeking to differentiate themselves from the Confucian society of the north by creating a less-Confucian society in the south.
More specifically, historians have argued that Nguyễn Phúc Khoát declared himself to be a “king” and that this event more or less marked an official break with the world of the Lê Dynasty.
The information about this 1744 event can be found in an official Nguyễn Dynasty chronicle known as the Đại Nam thực lục [Veritable Records of Đại Việt; hereafter, “ĐNTL”]. What historians have written to date about this event is based on “some” of the information in the ĐNTL about this event, not “all” of the information.
To understand why this is the case requires some explanation about the nature of premodern Vietnamese historical sources and about how modern historians read and make use of those sources.
The ĐNTL, like many other pre-20th-century Vietnamese historical sources, was written in Hán (i.e., classical Chinese), and has been translated into modern Vietnamese.
The original Hán version of the ĐNTL is difficult to read. It is the product of a different society from ours today; a society where the elite became literate by learning the Confucian classics in Hán.
When we want to understand what people from that time and place wrote, we have to work hard. First, there is no punctuation in the ĐNTL, so the reader has to figure out where sentences and terms begin and end, etc.
Second, the ĐNTL has varying levels of difficulty.
On the one hand, there are passages that are relatively easy to understand for someone who has some facility in classical Chinese, and that at most only require one to look up some terms to be certain that one understands the text correctly (“Level One” in the image below).
Then there are passages that require even someone with facility in classical Chinese to look up terms in order to understand the text (“Level Two” below). For such terms, a Chinese-English dictionary is not adequate, as such dictionaries are too limited in their coverage and do not include vocabulary from classical texts. Fortunately, there are now good Chinese-Chinese dictionaries online that do explain such terms.
Finally, there are passages that are extremely difficult to understand as they contain many specialized terms from ancient texts like the Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經) and the Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經). To understand such passages require a reader to not only look up terms in a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, but to then look at the texts where those terms were originally used to gain a clear sense of how they were used and in what context, or to see how those terms were defined by later commentators (“Level Three” below).
Additionally, passages of that level of difficulty usually require a reader to do some research as well. So, for instance, if the ĐNTL that makes reference to terms or information a text like the ancient Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經), then a reader will have to do some research to understand how the Classic of Changes was used and read, and how a reader should understand the information that is in that (arcane) text.
So there are levels of difficulty that one encounters in attempting to read the ĐNTL in its original form – Hán. What happens when someone translates a text like the ĐNTL into modern Vietnamese? How do translators deal with those levels of difficulty?
Level One is not a problem. Text that is not difficult to understand in Hán can easily be translated into Vietnamese, and basic information can be explained in footnotes if needed.
Vietnamese translations can also handle much of the difficulty that one encounters at Level Two, however sometimes the footnotes do not provide enough information for a reader to truly understand a certain reference, and sometimes rather than translating a difficult-to-translate term, translators will simply transliterate it into Hán-Việt (that is, to just use the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Hán characters), making it difficult for a reader to know what the term really means.
Finally, at Level Three Vietnamese translations become a big problem. It is clear to me that in general the people who have translated Hán texts into modern Vietnamese have tried to make their translations as readable for a common reader as possible. That approach is not sufficient when it comes to translating text that is at the difficulty level of Level Three.
In particular, by translating into modern Vietnamese very specialized terms in the Hán original text that come from ancient works like the Classic of Poetry and the Classic of Documents, readers cannot see the ways in which scholars in the past used ideas from those texts to express themselves. As such, a lot gets “lost in translation” at that level.
Therefore, regardless of whether one is reading the Hán original of a premodern text like the ĐNTL or a Vietnamese translation, there are “levels of difficulty” to each of these texts.
In the Hán original, difficulty comes from the presence of arcane terms and references that are hard to understand. Meanwhile the inadequate way in which those terms and references are translated into Vietnamese then creates difficulties for the reader of the translated version of the text because the translation doesn’t accurately show the ideas that are in the original text.
So how do historians deal with these issues? In general, historians do not tell their readers what they are able to understand from a text like the ĐNTL or its translation. However, if one can read all three levels of these texts, it becomes easy to see that most historians do not (or cannot) read the information that we find at Level Three.
Instead, they build their ideas from Level One and some of Level Two.
This is a point which I think most readers don’t realize. When we read a work by an historian that is based on “the sources,” we assume that the historian can read “the sources.” In the case of scholarship on pre-20th-century Vietnamese history, however, that is not the case.
Instead, historians read “some” of what is written in works like the ĐNTL (and often only “some” of the information in the translated version of that text) and then base their ideas on that limited reading. The narrative about Nguyễn Đàng Trong and the way that Nguyễn Phúc Khoát’s adoption of the title of “prince” has been explained have both been based on precisely such limited readings/understandings of the ĐNTL.
By contrast, in the following post we will look at Nguyễn Phúc Khoát’s adoption of the title of “prince” by looking at all three levels of difficulty in the original Hán version of the ĐNTL.
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