Kim Định and History that “Is”

The topic of the importance (or non-importance) of South Vietnamese philosopher Lương Kim Định has come up again and this has forced me to think more about this issue.

I have described Kim Định’s scholarship as “bold,” and have tried to define what I mean by that as follows:

“Bold” scholarship is scholarship that presents a new way of looking at something, and which cannot be immediately rejected. “Bad” scholarship is scholarship that can be immediately rejected because it puts forth ideas that scholars already know are not valid. Finally, “bold” scholarship can become “bad” scholarship if scholars can produce evidence to reject it, but that process of producing evidence to reject bold scholarship leads to more sophisticated ideas.

I have also argued that Kim Định’ scholarship should have become “bad” scholarship by now, but people have not rejected it in a convincing way, and as a result, historical scholarship in Vietnam has not been able to benefit from that process of producing evidence to reject bold scholarship.

Finally I’ve also said that this has not happened because people lack the breadth of knowledge that Kim Định had.

Let’s look at some examples of the kind of knowledge that it would take to reject Kim Định’s ideas. To do that we need to remind ourselves of what Kim Định’s basic argument was.

Kim Định argued that in distant antiquity the ancestors of the Việt migrated into the area of China and that later the people whom we refer to as the “Chinese” migrated there as well. The Chinese were pastoralists and violent, and they pushed the Việt southward, and assimilated them as well, until eventually the only remaining Việt group out of what had originally been many related peoples (the “Hundred Việt/Yue”) were those in the Red River delta, that is, the ancestors of the Vietnamese in Vietnam today.

The other point that Kim Định made is that the Việt created many of the ideas that we find in texts like the Yijing (Classic of Changes), but that the Chinese later appropriated these ideas and claimed “authorship” over them. However, he argues that there is a lot of evidence of the ideas in the Yijing in Vietnamese culture, and that this can be seen through the importance of numerology, where numbers like 3 and 4 have deep and significant importance in Vietnamese culture.

Indeed, these concepts, Kim Định argues, form a kind of structure to Vietnamese society, similar to the ideas of structuralism that Claude Leví-Strauss was developing in the field of anthropology around the same time that Kim Định was producing his ideas.

We can call Kim Định’s version of history an “IS” (LÀ) version of history. It is a form of history where history is seen to be true. It’s based on the idea that we can confidently say that something “is” (là) history.

Kim Định tells us, for instance, who the Việt “are” (người Việt “là”) what their history “is” (lịch sử của người Việt “là”) and what the Yijing “is” (Kinh Dịch “là”).

This remains the dominant form of history in Vietnam today, and this is another reason why his ideas have not been rejected, because they are flawed at a conceptual level, and in order to demonstrate those flaws, scholars have to go deeper than simply talking about what history “is.” They need to demonstrate how history is constructed.

This has been an essential part of the historical profession in “the West” ever since the emergence of postmodernism in the 1960s when historians increasingly came to view history as something that is constructed or created rather than simply “is.”

So instead of asking “What is the history of something?” historians in “the West” often ask questions like the following: Where does this information about the past come from? Why does this person think this way? What evidence does s/he base her/his ideas on? How is this person interpreting that evidence, and why is s/he interpreting it in that way? What can this tell us about the past, and what does it tell us about the time when this historian wrote this information?

Let’s now look at Kim Định’s ideas. He presents his ideas as if they “were” (là) historical truth, but where do his ideas come from?

If we look at the historical information that was recorded in Asia prior to the 20th century, we will not find evidence of an ancient Chinese migration into China or of the Chinese pushing a group of people’s known as “the Việt” southward.

So where did Kim Định get those ideas? From Western scholars like Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes and Leonard Aurousseau who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “assumed” that there must have been migrations in antiquity in Asia, and who looked for “evidence” to support these “assumptions” in ancient texts.

Did their “findings” stand the test of time? No, because later generations of scholars asked questions like: Why did this person make this argument? What evidence did he base his ideas on? Is that evidence valid?

How about this idea that there was a large group of related peoples called the “Hundred Việt/Yue” who were all eventually assimilated into the Chinese except for one group? Again, that is something that you will not find discussed in Asia until Western scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries started to look for things like “races” and to try to determine which “races” were able to survive the Social Darwinian struggle between societies.

Here again the ideas that were produced at that time have all been overturned. Now we have studies that argue that ancient Chinese writers constructed an imagined “Other” – the Việt/Yue, and that this image was later appropriated by people like the ancestors of the Vietnamese to label themselves.

Finally there is the topic of the numerology of the Yijing. Much of what Kim Định thought about the Yijing likewise came from his reading of what Western scholars (Joseph Needham, Marcel Granet, Richard Wilhelm, etc.) had said about that text, and it would therefore be important to examine closely what their ideas were and how those ideas may have influenced Kim Định’s thinking.

At the same time, some of Kim Định’s understanding of the Yijing came from what he knew about the long history of employing the numerology of the Yijing in various ways in daily life in Vietnam.

This use of numerology in the Yijing has a history. It is not something that simply “is.” Instead, it is a tradition of ideas that were created/constructed at specific historical times for specific historical reasons.

One of the most important times was during the Song Dynasty period, when Neo-Confucian scholar Shao Yong came up with ideas about how numbers in the Yijing could be used to explain various phenomena in the world. If someone were to examine the history of numerological ideas in East Asia, my suspicion would be that s/he would find that Kim Định wrote about the Neo-Confucian (i.e., Shao Yong’s) version of Yijing numerology and projected that historically-constructed interpretation back into antiquity as an unchanging “truth.” The Yijing “is” (Kinh Dịch “là”). . .

My point here is that Kim Định’s ideas were based on a lot of concepts that he presented as “truth,” but which Western scholars have argued are “constructs,” and often very modern constructs.

Those arguments that Western scholars make, however, have largely been made in the decades since Kim Định published his writings.

Here then is my main point: Given how connected Kim Định was to the Western world of scholarship, and given how so many of the ideas that Kim Định’s work is based on have been discredited in the West in the years since he wrote his books, my argument is that if Vietnamese scholars had continued to be as connected to that scholarly world as Kim Định was and had sought to reject the ideas that Kim Định’s scholarship is based upon by asking the kinds of questions that scholars in “the West” started to ask from the 1960s onward, then the world of historical scholarship in Vietnam today would be much more sophisticated than it is (just as the world of historical scholarship in “the West” is much more sophisticated than it was in the 1960s), and Kim Định would be seen as a catalyst for that positive development.

Why do I say this about Kim Định and not about other scholars? Because, again, I find Kim Định’s scholarship to be “bold,” as it presents a new way of looking at something, and it cannot be immediately rejected.

One main reason why it cannot be immediately rejected is because it is based on a wide range of ideas (i.e., breadth of knowledge). Given that virtually every one of those ideas is flawed in one way or another, it takes a lot of work to challenge Kim Định’s argument as a whole as there are so many issues to address.

Nonetheless, the effort to point out the weakness in the many ideas that Kim Định put forth leads one to think about and find answers to a wide-range of fundamental questions about the past and how we understand it such as the following:

Can we find ethnic groups in antiquity? When was the Vietnamese nation formed? What is the history of Yijing numerology? How did the views of Westerners transform how Vietnamese thought in the 20th century? How does structural anthropology work? Do we have enough information to re-create the structure of an ancient society? Do our current ideas and biases distort what it is that we imagine in the structure of a past society? How do we know any of this? etc., etc.

These questions are all about how history is constructed, and they can lead us to an understanding of how Kim Định constructed history. That process, in turn, can lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the past.

That process, however, still hasn’t taken place in Vietnam.

Instead, history in Vietnam, as it was in Kim Định’s day, still “is.”

Lý Đông A, Lương Kim Định, Trần Ngọc Thêm and Terrien de Lacouperie’s Ancient Chinese Migration

As I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, there is an idea that is of central importance to Vietnamese ultra-nationalists, and that is that in antiquity the Chinese migrated into the area of what is today China from the northwest, and that when they did so, they found people already living there.

These people, according to Vietnamese ultra-nationalist writers like Lý Đông A (1940s), Lương Kim Định (1950s-1990s) and Trần Ngọc Thêm (1990s-present) were the ancestors of the Việt, and they were more civilized than the Chinese, as they were the ones who created the ideas that we find in works like the Yijing.

I’ve long wondered where that idea came from, and now I realize that the main source is clearly the late-nineteenth-century writings of an Orientalist by the name of Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie.

Terrien de Lacouperie was born in France in 1845, but his family was originally from England, and he published in both French and English.

He began his career as a merchant in Hong Kong where he also studied Chinese, but in 1879 he settled in London and became a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Terrien de Lacouperie’s main interest was the early history of China, and what he perceived as its connections to the Chaldean-Akkadian cultural world of ancient Mesopotamia.

In works like Early History of the Chinese Civilization (1880), The Languages of China Before the Chinese (1887), Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilisation from 2,300 BC to 200 AD, or Chapters on the Elements Derived from the Old Civilisations of West Asia in the Formation of the Ancient Chinese Culture (1894), developed the idea that the Chinese descended from some tribes that migrated from the Middle East to China.

However, unlike Vietnamese ultra-nationalists who argue that these migrants were less sophisticated than the peoples who were already inhabiting the area of China, Terrien de Lacouperie felt that the Chinese migrants brought with them writing and ideas that they had already developed, and that this could be demonstrated by what he saw as similarities between Akkadian and Chinese writing, and similarities between the numerology in the Yijing with similar concepts in Chaldean-Akkandian culture.

So while there are differences in content between what Terrien de Lacouperie and Vietnamese ultra-nationalists have argued, the Vietnamese ultra-nationalist belief in an ancient Chinese migration is one which Terrien de Lacouperie established the framework for.

It is also a concept that did not enjoy much support at the time he published his ideas, and which soon fell completely out of favor.

However, these unorthodox and unprofessional ideas have lived on in Vietnamese ultra-nationalism, and I’m sure that Terrien de Lacouperie would be very pleased to know that at least some people in the world still believe him.

Lý Đông A, Kim Định and a Mid-20th–Century Unorthodox Version of Early Việt History

I’ve written quite a lot on this blog about the South Vietnamese philosopher, Lương Kim Định, and his ideas about history.

What was Kim Định’s view of the past? In a nutshell his view was that originally the area of what is today China was inhabited by people who engaged in agriculture (người nông nghiệp) and who were the ancestors of the Việt. Kim Định refers to them as the “Viêm race” (Viêm tộc). According to Kim Định, the ancestors of the people whom we now refer to as the Han Chinese, but whom he referred to in this early period as the “Hoa race” (Hoa tộc), then migrated into the region.

The people of the Hoa race, again according to Kim Định, were pastoralists (người du mục). These people ultimately started to conquer the Viêm race, but in the process, they adopted many of the Viêm race’s cultural practices as well. This included concepts that we find in the Yijing.

These concepts, according to Kim Định, eventually came to be part of the “Confucian” world of the Han Chinese. As a result, people today see a text like the Yijing as “Chinese,” but according to Kim Định that text represents ideas that were created in the pre-Chinese world of the Việt.

Kim Định therefore coined a term, “Việt Nho,” which we can loosely translate as something like “Việt Confucianism” to refer to this pre-Sinicized body of ideas.

How did Kim Định come up with such a view of the past? There are several people who have suggested to me that Kim Định might have gotten these ideas from an earlier, and somewhat mysterious, figure who wrote under the name of Lý Đông A.

Lý Đông A’s real name was Nguyễn Hữu Thanh. He was born in 1920, and apparently spent some time as a teenager helping take care of Phan Bôi Châu while he was under house arrest in Hue. During WW II he became a revolutionary and wrote various tracts to encourage people to resist the French (and the Chinese and the Thai and anyone else who might stand in the way of the Vietnamese). However, Lý Đông A’s anti-colonial efforts competed with those of the Việt Minh, and he was assassinated in 1947.

Many of Lý Đông A’s writings were later republished in South Vietnam, so we have a sense of what it is that he thought, and from those writings we can see that the outline of Kim Định’s ideas about history were already expressed in the 1940s by Lý Đông A.

In particular, Lý Đông A argued that all of humanity originally migrated outward from the Pamir Mountains around 5,000 BC and that the Việt (or Viêm) made it to the area of what is now Mount Taishan in Shandong Province where they created texts that are related to the tradition of the Yijing, such as the Hetu/Hà Đồ (the Yellow River Chart) and the Luoshu/Lạc Thư (the Luo River Square). However, the Việt were then pushed southward by the Chinese, until they finally established a base in the Red River Delta.

This view of the past is very similar to Kim Định’s, minus the detail of a difference between agriculturalists (the Việt) and pastoralists (the Chinese). However, Kim Định never cited Lý Đông A or any other Vietnamese when he presented this information.

He did, on the other hand, cite the works of some modern Chinese scholars for factual information and Western Sinologists such as Herrlee Creel, Wolfram Eberhard and Harold Wiens for their comments about how the world of the ancient Chinese had been much smaller, and that ancient China had been much less ethnically homogenous, than scholars had been previously believed.

But none of those scholars said anything about ancient migrations of agriculturalists and pastoralists, or of any pre-Chinese people creating concepts that we can find expressed in the Yijing.

So did Kim Định “steal” these ideas from Lý Đông A?

I think the answer to this question can be found in the way that Lý Đông A presented information about the past. He did not write a narrative in which he explained his ideas. Instead, he presented his ideas in lists of points, or in questions.

What is more, it is clear that he was able to present his ideas so briefly in this outline form because his readers must have already known what he was talking about.

Take, as an example the following two questions that Lý Đông A asked his readers in an essay that he wrote in 1943.

1. “Was our race locally born or did it descend from the Pamir Mountains?”
2. “How many years before the Han and the Yi [‘barbarians’] did [our race] descend into East Asia, and what was the history of that like?”

The second question only makes sense if one knows how readers will answer the first question, and readers will only be able to answer the first question in the way that Lý Đông A expects them to if they are familiar with the topic.

There are many more examples like this in Lý Đông A’s writings that we could point to.

So what does this mean? It suggests to me that in his writings Lý Đông A expressed ideas about the past that while not “official,” were nonetheless probably well-known at a popular level.

This “unorthodox” version of the past contained ideas about race and ancient migrations into Asia from places to the west, and these were all ideas that French authors discussed in numerous writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It would therefore make sense that some of those ideas would have made it into circulation at the popular level among Vietnamese, and that these ideas would be transformed to some extent.

This would also explain why Kim Định wrote about the past in the way he did. That view of the past was probably not limited to Kim Định and Lý Đông A.

Instead, my guess would be that it was something that was commonly known, but as an “unorthodox” view of the past, it did not make it into most books and textbooks.

If this view had been unique to Kim Định and Lý Đông A, then I don’t think they would have written the way they did. Lý Đông A would have had to explain more, and Kim Định’s views would have been too absurd for anyone to accept.

But if these ideas about the past were already in popular circulation, then the writings of both of these men would have made sense to many people.

The Great Agricultural (Nông Nghiệp) – Pastoral (Du Mục) Divide, or how Kim Định and Trần Ngọc Thêm Distorted Will Durant’s Ideas

One of the core tenets of Vietnamese ultranationalism is the idea that there is a fundamental division between Han Chinese and Vietnamese.

In particular, the argument of Vietnamese ultranationalism is that the Han Chinese were originally pastoral (du mục 遊牧) while Vietnamese from the earliest times have been agricultural (nông nghiệp 農業).

As any archaeologist knows, Han Chinese have been practicing agriculture for thousands of years, but the argument of Vietnamese ultranationalism is that before they started to engage in agriculture, the Han Chinese had originally been pastoralists, and that even though they eventually turned to practicing agriculture, many of their pastoral traits – such as a penchant for violence and for oppressing agriculturalists – nonetheless persisted.

In other words, to simplify the argument, the basic point here is “Han Chinese = bad, Vietnamese = good.”

While it is completely understandable that an ultranationalist argument would propose such a clear dichotomy of good vs. bad, it is more difficult to understand how anyone could get the idea that the Han Chinese were originally pastoralists and that pastoralists are somehow more violent and oppressive than agriculturalists.

In what follows, I will try to give a sense of how these ideas developed.

One of the first people to write in detail about this was South Vietnamese philosopher Kim Đình, and in putting forth his ideas, Kim Định cited the work of the American writer, Will Durant.

Will Durant was what we could call an “independent scholar.” Although he was trained in philosophy rather than history, over the course of several decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s, he published, in collaboration with his wife, an 11-volume series on “The Story of Civilization.”

While these books were never regarded highly by professional historians, they did popularize information about world history among the general public, albeit world history as seen from the perspective of the Durants.

 

In his 1973 work, Việt Nho Structure (Cơ cấu Việt Nho), Kim Định cited a French translation of the first volume of Durant’s series to support his explanation of the difference between pastoral and agricultural societies.

The term for “pastoral” in Vietnamese is “du mục,” where literally “du” mean “to move about” and “mục” means “to herd” or “to shepherd.”

This is significant for Kim Định as he sees the “moving about” of pastoralists as being tied to the world of hunting where people had to move about to find their food, whereas the “herding” was closer to the world of agriculture, as it required that one domesticate animals in order to be able to herd them.

The reason why this was significant for Kim Định was because he felt that this term symbolized the place of pastoralism in human history, namely that it was the last stage of hunting and gathering, and as such, it still carried with it many of the elements of the hunting lifestyle, such as bloodletting, violence and oppression.

These elements, Kim Định argued, persisted in such societies long after they turned to agriculture.

In other words, Kim Định’s logic was that 1) hunters are the most violent and 2) pastoralists maintain many elements of the hunting lifestyle, so therefore 3) when pastoralists become agriculturalists they remain violent and cruel.

Again, in making these points Kim Định cited Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization,” but this is not at all what Durant argues in that book. [Kim Đình cites pages 36, 41 and 76 of the French-language addition. Pages 36 and 76 correspond to pages 7 and 52 of the English-language edition. However, I cannot find anything in the English-language version that corresponds to what Kim Đình says is mentioned on page 41 of the French-language edition.]

Instead, this is what Durant wrote:

“Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of civilized society. Once the center of life, they are still its hidden foundations; behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual and art, stand the stout killers of Packingtown [i.e., a working class area of Chicago].

“We do our hunting by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields; but our memories of the chase linger in our joyful pursuit of anything weak or fugitive, and in the games of our children even in the word game. In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the façade; in the rear are the shambles.” (7)

In other words, Durant argued that the violence of hunters continued not only in the lives of pastoralists, but in the lives of EVERYONE, even “into the highest forms of civilized society.”

What is more, he did not portray the agricultural life as a clear improvement over earlier times, as he felt that agriculture brought many new problems to humankind. He argues, for instance, that “Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery.” (19)

Finally, he did not argue that pastoralists were more violent than agriculturalists. Instead, the distinction that he made was between “primitive” and “civilized” man. The adoption of agriculture did not make someone immediately “civilized.” Instead, this is a process that took many centuries as it required the development of cultural practices that would control the violent nature of all “primitive” peoples, be they hunters, pastoralists, or agriculturalists.

As such, while Kim Định cited Will Durant’s work, Durant’s work does not support Kim Dình’s ideas AT ALL.

This distortion of Durant’s book was later continued by Trần Ngọc Thêm, the author of Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam) a popularly used textbook on Vietnamese society that is deeply indebted to Kim Đình’s ideas.

In that work Trần Ngọc Thêm cites Durant in arguing that the Han Chinese were originally pastoralists. He states that “The ancestors of the Han have pastoral origins that emerged from Central Asia. According to Western sources, or [sources] from the West, this matter is very obvious.” (62) He then cites a Vietnamese translation of the section on China in Durant’s first volume to support this point.

Let me cite that section at length because 1) it does not support what Trần Ngọc Thêm wrote, but 2) one needs to read the full passage to understand what Durant was saying. [It is on page 641-42 of the English-language version.]

“No one knows whence the Chinese came, or what was their race, or how old their civilization is. The remains of the ‘Peking Man’ suggest the great antiquity of the human ape in China; and the researches of Andrews have led him to conclude that Mongolia was thickly populated, as far back as 20,000 B.C., by a race whose tools corresponded to the ‘Azilian’ development of mesolithic Europe, and whose descendants spread into Siberia and China as southern Mongolia dried up and became the Gobi Desert. The discoveries of Andrews and others in Henan and south Manchuria indicate a Neolithic culture one or two thousand years later than similar stages in the prehistory of Egypt and Sumeria. Some of the stone tools found in these Neolothic deposits resemble exactly, in shape and perforations, the iron knives now used in northern China to reap the sorghum crop; and this circumstance, small though it is, reveals the probability that Chinese culture has an impressive continuity of seven thousand years.

“We must not, through the blur of distance, exaggerate the homogeneity of this culture, or of the Chinese people. Some elements of their early art and industry appear to have come from Mesopotamia and Turkestan; for example, the neolithic pottery of Honan is almost identical with that of Anau and Susa. The present ‘Mongolian’ type is a highly complex mixture in which the primitive stock has been crossed and recrossed by a hundred invading or immigrating stocks from Mongolia, southern Russia (the Scythians?), and central Asia. China, like India, is to be compared with Europe as a whole rather than with any one nation of Europe; it is not the united home of one people, but a medley of human varieties different in origin, distinct in language, diverse in character and art, and often hostile to one another in customs, morals and government.”

In contrast to what Trần Ngọc Thêm wrote, Durant did not say here that the Han “have pastoral origins that emerged from Central Asia.” Instead, he cites the 1926 work of Roy Andrews, the leader of a “Central Asiatic expedition” on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, to argue the opposite, namely that Chinese had been living in the region for as long as anyone could tell, and that no one knew where they might have originally come from, or what their original society might have been like.

He did argue that like people in other parts of the world, such as Europe and India, the Chinese probably consisted of a “primitive stock” which had then intermixed with “invading or immigrating stocks,” but he did not say that any of these people were pastoralists, or that the Han Chinese were originally pastoralists.

Indeed, he didn’t say anything about pastoralism.

Will Durant was not an expert on Chinese history. As a student he studied Western philosophy, and from that background he went on to write a history of world civilization.

Kim Định and Trần Ngọc Thêm both cited his work to support their argument about a supposed cultural divide between pastoralists and agriculturalists in antiquity. In doing so, however, they completely distorted what Will Durant wrote.

The ideas of Kim Định and Trần Ngọc Thêm about a supposed cultural divide between pastoralists and agriculturalists are thus based on a “double failure.”

They both failed to build their ideas on the work of experts, and they both failed to even understand the ideas of the non-expert they did consult.

This idea that there is a cultural divide between pastoralists and agriculturalists therefore has no basis in reality. It is the product of ultranationalist imagination.

It is interesting, however, that this ultranationalist imagination has felt the need to cite Western scholars.

Those Western societies, after all, were also originally pastoral. . . weren’t they?

Remixing the Past: The Peopling of Asia (According to Kim Định)

In is 1970 work, Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, Lương Kim Định presented an outline of his understanding of the early history of East Asia.

The main point that Kim Định wished to make about early history was that the “Viêm race” (Viêm tộc/Yanzu 炎族) had already inhabited the area of China before the Han race arrived on the scene.

This was important for Kim Định, because he believed that the Vietnamese were part of the Viêm race, and that therefore, they had just as legitimate of a claim to be the “owners” of various aspects of “Chinese” culture as the Han Chinese did (or in Kim Định’s eyes, even more legitimate of a claim).

While there are plenty of problems with Kim Định’s view of history, it is good material for “remixing the past.”

The Far East at the Crossroads, According to Kim Định

At the end of his book, Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, Kim Định has a few short chapters that discuss certain political and social issues of his day that can help us understand what he was trying to accomplish through his writings in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In his writings, Kim Định argued that in antiquity there was a large group of people in the Far East (Viễn Đông), a term that he often used, that he called the “Viêm race.” The term “Viêm” comes from the name Viêm Đế/Yandi (“the Fiery Emperor”) which was another name for the mythical ancient figure, Thần Nông/Shennong (“the Divine Agriculturalist), a person who is associated with the development of agriculture.

Kim Định argued that the members of the Viêm race were agriculturalists and that they created a philosophy that he called “Việt Nho,” or what I will translate as “Authentic Việt Confucianism.” The basis of this philosophy were concepts like âm dương/yinyang and the five phases (ngũ hành/wuxing), concepts which Kim Định argued that Han Chinese, members of what he claimed was a pastoral group that migrated into China after the Viêm race was already prospering there as agriculturalists, later appropriated and made part of what Kim Định referred to as “Hán Nho” (Han Confucianism).

For the many centuries that followed, Han Confucianism was central to the cultures of Vietnam and China. However, in the twentieth century scholars of “new learning” (tân học), by which Kim Định meant “iconoclasts” who had learned new ways of thinking from the West, sought to discard Han Confucianism as an outdated and oppressive ideology.

Kim Định was more of a “traditionalist,” however he did not want to preserve the Han Confucianism that the iconoclasts rejected. Instead, he wanted to “preserve” the “Authentic Việt Confucianism,” which essentially was a philosophy that he was creating through his writings. What is more, the ideas that he expressed in his writings were clearly influenced by a broad range of Western thinkers at that time, from Sinologist Marcel Granet to structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

As such, Kim Định was perhaps what we could label an “eclectic traditionalist.”

So what was it about the times he lived in that led Kim Định to come up with and write about these ideas?

It is clear that Kim Định was not happy with the state of society in the Far East in the middle of the twentieth century. The rise to political power of Communist parties was one development that he did not like. However, he was even more unhappy with what he saw as the failure of Nationalist parties to offer a strong alternative to Communism, and here he felt that their greatest failing was that they did not offer a philosophical alternative that could provide a spiritual basis for society.

At the same time, Kim Định did not really think that Communism offered a meaningful philosophy either. Its success in the Far East, he argued, was not due to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, but instead to certain deviations from the tenets of Marxism-Leninism that first Chinese and then later Vietnamese Communists had taken.

Those deviations brought those two groups closer to Kim Định’s idea of Authentic Việt Confucianism.

Citing Lucien Bianco’s 1966 study, Les Origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949, Kim Định argued that what had led to the success of the Communists in China was the fact that Mao Zedong had gone against some of the theories of Marxism-Leninism and had followed a path that fit better with China. In particular, he emphasized patriotism, the army and the peasantry.

Given the deep resentment in China at the actions of Westerners and the Japanese in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kim Định says that the Communists were able to appeal to a deep sense of patriotism and to unify people in resisting foreign aggression. In the process, the Communists also trained a strong and disciplined army.

Meanwhile, rapid population growth, a lack of land, exploitation by landlords, the loss of small industry to Western competition, and spiritual decline brought on by the abandonment of traditional education all created hardship for the peasantry. Reforms were therefore needed, but according to Kim Định, the reforms that the Nationalist government implemented were superficial. The Communists, on the other hand, actually distributed land to poor peasants, and because of this they were supported.

This was significant, Kim Đinh, argues because theorists such as Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Stalin had all held peasants in contempt. Mao, however, saw “the existing potential of the people of the Viêm race and attained great success” (Chính vì Mao đã nhìn ra cái khả năng cố hữu của dân gian của Viêm tộc đó nên đã thành công một cách lớn lao. . .). Westerners, Kim Định notes, saw Mao’s reliance on the peasantry as “the Sinicization of Communism.”

The reality, Kim Đinh contends, was that the power of the Chinese peasants had been relied on by rulers many times before, and that there was therefore nothing new about Mao’s policy. The implication here was that anyone who relied on the power of the Viêm race could succeed, as long as their actions intersected with Authentic Việt Confucianism, the basic belief system of the Viêm race.

Thus, Kim Định felt that in seeking to help the peasants, the policies of the Chinese Communists had intersected with some of the basic beliefs of the Việm race, a people whose descendents still resided throughout China. Nonetheless, Kim Định felt that there was still a major flaw in Chinese Communists rule in that the Chinese Communists did not establish a new spiritual foundation (cơ sở tinh thần) in the form of a philosophy that could motivate the intellectual class.

The Nationalists, Kim Định felt, had also failed at this. He argued that there had been potential in Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People to build a spiritual foundation, but it needed to be developed into a philosophy. In the years after Sun’s death in 1925, however, the Nationalists promoted outdated Han Confucian ethics together with foreign concepts such as militarism, Puritanism and asceticism.

This resulted in Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life movement which promoted hygiene as much as proper behavior, all in the name of “Confucianism.” With such developments, Kim Định argues, Confucianism had become devoid of meaning and had no relevance for the people.

On the other hand, while Mao outwardly rejected Confucianism, in reality, Kim Định argues, his actions revealed characteristics that had long been part of Confucianism (since the time when Authentic Việt Confucianism first formed): getting close to the peasants, dividing property equally, establishing a strong army to resist invasion.

As for the Vietnamese Communists, Kim Định attributed their success to the same basic factors, such as their ability to mobilize people’s sense of patriotism.

At the same time, Kim Đinh was particularly critical of what he terms the “Nationalists” in Vietnam, meaning the South Vietnamese government.

The ultimate problem, according to Kim Định, was that the educated elite were doing nothing to create a spiritual foundation for the nation. Instead they argued over politics and society, but Kim Định states that this of course fails because there is no philosophical grounding to their actions.

He writes that other than a few translations of Bergson, Plato, Kant and Descartes, there was nothing for people to learn from, and at the same time, Confucianism had been discarded. As for the Nationalists, that is, the ruling elite, Kim Định expresses frustration and distain. He says that they are like the Romans having a great time while Mount Etna erupts. He characterizes them as a bunch of rich people who have good will for the fatherland but think in Western terms.

At a time when the world was at war on an ideological level, it was obvious, Kim Định states, that the Nationalists would lose to the Communists. To Kim Định however this was not because one ideology had defeated another, but because the Nationalists simply did not have an ideology, and that the Communists had made use of patriotism to motivate people. What is more, Kim Định argued, while the Communists are Marxists, in their writings they value the people of their nation more than the Nationalists do.

What was one to do in such a situation? Kim Định wanted intellectuals to act as idealistically as Confucian scholars supposedly did in the past.

To demonstrate how Confucian scholars supposedly acted, Kim Định cites the work of American Sinologist Herrlee Creel, who presented a very positive image of those men. Creel stated that the scholars of China “successfully governed one of the largest empires on the globe through a longer period than any other has persisted without fundamental change.”

“Time after time representatives of other systems have taken the reins in China, only to fail,” Creel wrote. Men like the founder of the Han dynasty, uneducated rustics who looked down on the Confucian scholars as impractical bookworms, have come to the throne.”

The rise to power of Confucian scholars in China marked a “revolution in governmental policy,” according to Creel, “but it came silently and without bloodshed. The manner of its coming is most interesting. The scholars who triumphed appeared to have everything against them, while the powerful rulers and military who opposed them seemed to hold all the trump cards.”

In citing information like this from Creel, was Kim Định attempting to document an historical fact, or to paint a glorified image of himself? It’s not easy to tell. There do not seem to have been many intellectuals who were ready to follow his ideal model.

From what Kim Định says, the intellectuals of his day appear to have been mainly interested in Wesern ideas, but Kim Định was also critical of the West. He felt that Western philosophers from Neitzsche to Hiedegger to Foucault had been gradually destroying Western philosophy by pushing spiritual and humanist concerns to the side.

As such, in Kim Định’s eyes, everyone was failing. The people of the Far East were thus at a crossroads (“Trước Ngã Ba Đường, “Before the Crossroads” is the name of his final chapter on this topic). They had to decide on a direction to take in order to be able to move forward.

Ultimately, however, the path that they needed to chose was clear to Kim Định. He felt that they needed to “rediscover” and promote Authentic Việt Confucianism, as that would provide them with the spiritual foundation that would enable them to prosper.

Why did it have to be Authentic Việt Confucianism (Việt Nho) rather than “regular/normal” Confucianism? Because it looks like this was part of an effort on the part of Kim Định to “de-Sinify” Confucianism so that Vietnamese could accept it as an essential part of their culture (in the nationalistic world of a mid-twentieth-century society going through a process of decolonization), as well as to distance it from the Confucianism of conservative elders in Vietnamese society, which clearly did not appeal to the young, more Westernized, generation.

In any case, what should be clear, is that Kim Định was a complex person. He is easy to dismiss if one just looks at his main conclusions, but if one traces what led him to come to those conclusions by looking at the intellectual issues mentioned in the post below and the political issues discussed here, then it is clear that he had a lot on his mind.

The Western Intellectual Debates Behind Kim Định’s Ideas

In reading the writings of South Vietnamese philosopher Kim Định, one point that I have found fascinating is seeing the degree to which Kim Định’s ideas were shaped by his awareness of some of the main intellectual debates in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At the broadest level was a debate about “primitive” peoples and cultures. This is a debate that emerged with the development of cultural anthropology as a field of study in the nineteenth century.

English anthropologist Edward B. Tyler, the “founder” of cultural anthropology, argued in works such as Primitive Culture (1871) that cultures evolve from a primitive state to a more complex state.

Tyler, therefore felt that people were basically all the same. The differences that exist were simply the result of different levels of societal evolution.

In the early twentieth century, French scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl put forth a contending argument. In his Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), later translated into English as How Natives Think (1926), Lévy-Bruhl argued that it was not the case that people were all the same, but that there were essential differences between Westerns and “primitive” peoples.

“Primitive” people were “mystical.” They did not differentiate between reality and the supernatural. They did not understand the concept of causation, etc. Westerners, in contrast, were “logical.”

Then in the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss made a further contribution to this debate by arguing in works like La Pensée sauvage (1962), published later in English as The Savage Mind (1966) that if we examine the structure of meaning behind the thoughts of peoples from around the world, we can find that people are basically the same in the way they think.

Lévi-Strauss acknowledged that there were different types of thought, what he called mythical thought and scientific thought, but he argued that they were equally logical and that one (mythical thought) did not proceed the other (scientific thought). They were simply two equally valid ways of perceiving and thinking about reality.

This debate in the fields of anthropology and sociology about how primitives/natives/savages think intersected with scholarship in the field of Sinology.

Lévy-Bruhl supposedly first became interested in the topic of different human “mentalities” after his friend, Sinologist Édouard Chavannes, provided him with a copy of some translations of ancient Chinese writings. Lévy-Bruhl apparently found these writings incomprehensible and this supposedly led him to start examining how different peoples think.

Edouard Chavannes, meanwhile, is a French scholar who first came up with a theory in 1901 that the Việt in Vietnam were people who had migrated southwards from China, a theory that Leonard Aurousseau made more well known in 1923, and a theory that plays a part in Kim Định’s writings.

In any case, the Sinologist who was the most important for Kim Định was Marcel Granet. Granet was actually both a Sinologist and a sociologist, and his scholarship contributed to both of these fields.

In his La pensée Chinoise (Chinese Thought, 1934) one can clearly see the influence of Lévy-Bruhl. To Granet, the way Chinese thought was definitely different from the way that Westerners thought.

To demonstrate this point, Granet tried to explain in detail the concepts that informed the way that Chinese think, and here he discussed many issues that Kim Định later focused on, such as the concept of yin and yang (âm đương) and the five phases (ngũ hành).

Just as Claude Lévi-Strauss came to argue in the field of anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s that Westerners and non-Westerners are not all that different, so did a similar discussion emerge at that time in the field of Sinology.

One person who was deeply involved in that discussion was British Sinologist Joseph Needham. Needham began in the 1950s to research and publish a series of books (actually massive volumes) called Science and Civilization in China.

In these books, Needham and his many collaborators over the years, sought to examine Chinese knowledge from a comparative perspective in order to understand Chinese “science.” Granet’s writings were initially important for Needham, but over time he moved beyond Granet’s characterizations and came to find more similarities between Chinese and Western thought.

Needham, therefore, sought to offer his readers a more positive view of Chinese civilization than they had been aware of.

Another Sinologist who did the same was Herrlee Creel. A professor at the University of Chicago, Creel published works on China during this same time period that provided a very positive view of that land.

In the early twentieth century, Western scholars believed that the earliest periods of Chinese history, such as the time of the Shang Dynasty, were myth, but Creel introduced readers to the archaeological discovery of oracle bones at Anyang to argue for the historical validity of that period.

He also wrote a very sympathetic biography of Confucius in which he argued that Confucius was a democratic reformer. . .

Then there was Wolfram Eberhard. Eberhard was a German Sinologist who shattered the myth that China has historically been a homogenous society by demonstrating how multi-ethic China has always been (thus opening the door for Kim Định to argue that the Việt are more important historically than the Hoa, or Chinese).

Kim Định cites all of these scholars in his writings. And while he does not necessarily follow their exact ideas (Eberhard, for instance, does not argue that the Việt were in China before the Hoa, as Kim Định does), I would still argue that it is impossible to understand Kim Định’s ideas if one does not understand the ideas of the scholars whose work he read and thought about.

Kim Định read the works of Marcel Granet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joseph Needham and Wolfram Eberhard, but in order to understand what these scholars wrote about, one also needs to understand about what scholars like Edward Tyler and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote about.

This can lead us to understand “the spirit” behind what all of these scholars were doing, and to think about “the spirit” behind what Kim Định sought to do.

Archaeology, the Mã Lai Origins of the Việt, Orientalism, Complicity in Colonial Scholarship, Confucianism as the Foundation of Việt Culture. . . All in Two Pages of a Kim Định Book

One of the things that makes reading the works of South Vietnamese philosopher Kim Định so interesting is that they are filled with ideas. Kim Định of course had his own ideas, but in order to understand those ideas, one also needs to know a lot about other people’s ideas and actions as well.

To get a sense of this, let’s take a look at what he wrote in two pages of his book Việt Lý Tố Nguyên. The first topic he touches on is archaeology.

The field of archaeology began in Vietnam with the work of amateur French archaeologists. While they deserve a great deal of credit for pioneering a new field, their techniques were by today’s standards at times quite rudimentary.

To put it bluntly, in the first half of the twentieth century scholars like Madeleine Colani and Henri Mansuy dug up bones from the ground, measured them, and then declared them to belong to a certain “race,” such as the “Indonesien” or “Mongoloid” race.

Such pronouncements contributed to a discussion that French historians and anthropologists had already been engaged in based on textual and ethnographic information. There were theories that the Vietnamese (Mongoloids) had migrated into the region from places to the north, and there were theories that the Vietnamese were the mixture of a group (Mongoloids) that migrated into the region from the north and then intermarried with an indigenous people (Indonesien).

Then there were people like Bình Nguyên Lộc in South Vietnam who argued that the Việt were “Mã Lai” who had migrated into the region in antiquity from the Himalayas. By “Mã Lai” he meant roughly the same thing as what French scholars referred to as “Indonesien” – that is, more or less the same as what we would today call “Austronesians,” a group of linguistically and culturally related peoples who live across a vast area of the globe from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to Taiwan and the islands of the Pacific.

Kim Định did not think highly of these archaeological findings and the conclusions that people like Bình Nguyên Lộc drew from them. In fact, he accused such scholars of being complicit in the colonial project.

As he explained in Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, French scholars like Henri Maspero had been influenced by a sense of cultural superiority and the colonial desire to dominate, and that when they wrote about Asia they thus depicted it in negative terms so that the colonized people would more willingly accept the domination of the colonizers (out of a sense of inferiority).

This is an argument that Edward Said would famously make about the complicity of academic (and other) writings and colonialism a few years later in his book, Orientalism.

According to Kim Đinh, the Vietnamese scholars who argued for the “Mã Lai” roots of the Vietnamese were complicit in the same act that scholars like Maspero had engaged in, as they depicted Vietnamese origins in negative and inferior terms.

“Mã Lai” culture, Kim Định argued, had contributed nothing to Vietnamese culture, and had particularly done nothing to contribute to the spirit of the Vietnamese (tâm hồn người Việt).

Kim Định actually uses the term “Mã Lai Á,” which refers to the country of Malaya/Malaysia, but it is clear that he was referring to “Mã Lai” in the sense of “Indonesien,” or as is more common now, “Austronesian.”

He argued further that if the roots of the Vietnamese were “Mã Lai,” then what were the centuries of writing in Vietnam a product of? They made no sense from the perspective of “Mã Lai” culture. Therefore, if one were to argue that the roots of Vietnamese culture were “Mã Lai,” then this would mean that the written heritage of Vietnam was “mere literature” (văn chương thuần túy) with no significant connection to the people.

It would also mean that the roots of Vietnamese civilization were unimpressive, and this is where Kim Định felt that scholars who argued for the “Mã Lai” origins of the Vietnamese were complicit in colonialism, for just as the colonizers had tried to argue that the Vietnamese were inferior and therefore in need of colonial rule, so were the people who argued that the origins of the Vietnamese were inferior, because from Kim Định’s perspective there was nothing sophisticated about “Mã Lai” culture.

To Kim Định, however, Vietnamese origins were definitely impressive, as he felt that they were reflected in such works as the five “Confucian” classics (Ngũ Kinh), which, he argued, represented the original culture of the Việt, the earliest civilized people in Asia.

The ideas that Kim Định expressed here were fascinating. Several years before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism popularized the concept that scholarly writings about “the Orient” contributed to the creation of a discourse about that part of the world which lent justification to its conquest and colonization by “the West,” we see that Kim Định was already well aware of this concept.

Then alongside this clarity of vision, we can also see how a strong sense of nationalism and some ethnocentrism worked to distort his view of the past.

Nonetheless, he certainly provided his readers with a lot to think about.

Kim Định’s Diachronic Synchronic Approach to Studying the Past

As I stated in an earlier post, structural anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss sought to employ a “synchronic” (hàng dọc) approach to the study of human societies. The synchronic approach required that one study a society at a given point of time (such as the present), rather than trying to understand a society’s evolution or development over time (that is, “diachronically” – ngang dọc).

The reason why this appealed to anthropologists was because some of the societies that they studied (such as “primitive” societies) did not possess detailed information about their pasts, except for some brief information in oral stories and myths. It was therefore very difficult, if not impossible, to determine how such societies had developed over time.

The synchronic approach of structural anthropology attempted to make up for this inability by trying to find a way to gain a deep understanding of a society without knowing its history. By attempting to discover an unconscious structure of meanings for the ideas and actions of people in the present, structural anthropologists sought to find a way to gain a more thorough understanding of the lives of people for whom information was limited.

At the same time that there was limited information about the histories of the “primitive” peoples that some anthropologists studied in the twentieth century, scholars like Kim Định realized that there was likewise limited information about the early inhabitants of places like the Red River delta. Other than some comments in what he labeled “myths” (thần thoại), there was not much else to build an understanding of early societies on.

This is why the structural anthropological approach appealed to Kim Định, because whereas other scholars had determined that it was very difficult to link the information from myths to what was known from recorded history, Kim Định felt that one could examine the information from myths synchronically and still learn a great deal.

The only problem is that this is not what he actually did. Instead, his synchronic examinations were always created from a diachronic perspective. In particular, Kim Định had a very clear idea of what had happened in the past, and when he sought to explain the structure of meanings behind myths, rather than create a synchronic model of those meanings that fit together as a system of ideas (as Lévi-Strauss sought to do), Kim Định simply interpreted parts of myths according to his diachronic view of history.

We can see this in his examination of some basic information from The Tale of the Hồng Bàng Clan, mentioned in a blog post below, where he sees Đế Minh’s journey to the south, as indicating a move toward light, and away from an invading army (I don’t think this story is actually a “myth,” but that’s a topic for another post. . .).

Where does he get any idea about an invading army? Can that be determined by creating a model of the unconscious structure of meaning that this story is built upon? If so, how? Kim Định never explains.

However, it is clear from reading his work that ultimately he comes up with ideas like this because they reflect his view of the history of the region, and his view was unique.

In particular, Kim Định felt that originally the area of what is today China was inhabited by people who engaged in agriculture (nông nghiệp) and whom he refers to as the “Viêm race” (Viêm tộc). According to Kim Định, the people whom we now refer to as the Han Chinese, but whom Kim Định refers to in this early period as the “Hoa race” (Hoa tộc), then migrated into the region.

The people of the Hoa race, again according to Kim Định, were pastoralists (du mục). These people ultimately started to conquer the Viêm race, but in the process, they adopted many of the Viêm race’s cultural practices as well.

When one understands this diachronic view of history, then it becomes easy to see how in his “synchronic” examination of a “myth,” Kim Định would see signs of a move away from an invading army. The “invading army” is the pastoralist Hoa race coming to conquer the lands of the agriculturalist Viêm race.

There is nothing in the “myth” itself that can clearly lead to this conclusion, but if one views the myth through the diachronic view of the past that Kim Định created, then it is possible to come to such a conclusion.

This, however, leads to two fundamental problems. The first is that there is no evidence that the Hoa/Han migrated into the area of what is today China, and there is no evidence of pastoralists conquering agriculturalists.

The second is that by engaging in a synchronic examination of a “myth” by viewing the information in the “myth” through a diachronic lens, Kim Định undermined what he claimed to be doing. You cannot produce a synchronic understanding of a “myth” by looking at it diachronically. There is no such thing as a “diachronic synchronic approach,” but that is precisely what Kim Định’s interpretations represent.

As such, there were some fundamental contradictions in Kim Định’s approach to studying the past, and these contradictions ultimately undermined his scholarship. Nonetheless, those contradictions are there amidst a great deal of creativity, intelligence and even brilliance, and that is what still makes his work fascinating to read.

Kim Định, Zhuangzi and Lévi-Strauss

In his 1973 work, Việt Nho Structure (Cơ Cấu Việt Nho), Kim Định introducted the theory of structuralism to his readers. Relying heavily on information in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology, Kim Định noted to his readers the importance for structuralism of the findings that Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure had produced in the early twentieth century.

In arguing that language consisted of linguistic “signs” that were comprised of a sound-image (the signifier) and a concept, or concepts, associated with it (the signified), and that the meanings of signifiers were established through their relations with other signifiers in the language, de Saussure argued that language must be studied as it exists at one point in time (synchronically) so as to understand how the entire system of relational linguistic signs functions, rather than to examine how individual signs had changed over time (diachronically) as linguists had done before his day.

Having thus introduced this concept of a synchronic approach to the study of language, Kim Định then goes on to explain how this approach can be applied to the study of history.

Kim Định introduces his readers to the distinction between synchronic history (sử hàng dọc) and diachronic history (sử ngang dọc), or what he also referred to as historicism (duy sử). This latter approach focuses on documenting observable changes over time, or what was termed in French historical scholarship in the twentieth century as “events” (événements). Synchronic history, Kim Đinh explains, is different as “it operates with the subconscious, does not need to manifest itself in an individual and therefore cannot be recorded in time or space, but it can still be called history because it is true although not real (vraie mais irréelle).” The way Kim Định writes this in Vietnamese is “thật tuy không thực (vraie mais irréelle).”

This idea of something that can be “true although not real” is one that Kim Định sees paralleled in the Zhuangzi where there is a line describing the universe that says, “That which exists but which has no location, is the universe” (有實而無乎處者, 宇也). Relating this concept to history, Kim Định states that “that which exists” is an effect (tác động) or principle (nguyên lý) that can guide, or an ideal (lý tưởng) that can assist, people, but the fact that it “has no location” means that it does not need to crystallize or take form in a particular individual. It is thus an archetype (sơ nguyên tượng) or a model (điển loại) that exists in a kind of paradise (thiên thai) that people desire to see become manifest.

To provide an example for these abstract concepts, Kim Định turns to the story in the Lĩnh Nam chích quái and the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư of Đế Minh, the third-generation descendent of Thần Long who went southward to the area of the Five Passes (Ngũ Linh) and married a woman by the name of Vụ Tiên.

Prior to the twentieth century, scholars in Vietnam suspected the veracity of that story, but they nonetheless valued it as a sign of a line of legitimate political descent (chính thống) which linked subsequent Vietnamese dynasties to an ancient source of political authority. By the early twentieth century, this story was interpreted by first French and then Vietnamese scholars to indicate actual migrations that could help explain who (in racial terms) the Vietnamese were.

In Việt Nho Structure, Kim Định offers a new interpretation of this story, one inspired by, but not strictly following, the ideas of structuralism. According to Kim Định, there is no reason to think that the people mentioned in this story ever existed. Instead, what this story reveals to him are the principles and archetypes that one finds in the structure of society.

First, Kim Định sees in this story a principle of moving towards light (“minh” in the name Đế Minh, means “brightness” or “light”), a reference to the south. Second, he argues that it reveals an effect of retreating before an invading army. And third, the reference to the Five Passes is an indication to Kim Định of the presence of a culture that follows the concept of the Five Phases (Ngũ Hành) in the Yijing.

How on earth did Kim Đinh come up with these ideas? In part it was by employing some of the concepts of structuralism. In particular, a structuralist reading of a story looks for concepts, particularly ones that are in binary opposition to each other, to try to find a general pattern for the information presented.

What are the binary oppositions in this story? Well, the opposite of light is darkness. Light is usually associated with things that are good, and darkness with things that are bad. The opposite of moving toward the south is moving toward the north.

How, however, do we get the Five Passes somehow indicating a culture based on the Five Phases? That is where Kim Định ran into trouble. . .

One of the main critiques of structuralism is that it grants too much power to the “structuralist” (i.e., the person producing the scholarship) to determine meaning. This definitely happened in the case of Kim Định. First of all, Kim Định did not approach the study of the past from a neutral standpoint. He had a clear agenda. He wanted to create a kind of moral/spiritual foundation for the Vietnamese people, and he wanted that foundation to be their own, not something that was “imported” from China or the West.

So the way that he did this was by declaring that “before China was China” there was already a culture there, and that that culture was “Việt.” To prove this, however, he needed evidence, and for the earliest periods of history in the region (i.e., the time of the mythical rulers such as Thần Nông/Shennong and the Yellow Emperor) there is very little information. Structuralism, however, provided Kim Định with “evidence” because it enabled him to interpret the limited information at his disposal in novel ways. And that is precisely what he did.

Was he correct in what he concluded? No. His conclusions are deeply flawed. However, if we view his work from the perspective of the time when he produced it, it is nonetheless extremely impressive. That he was able to master the abstruse concepts that people like Claude Lévi-Strauss were talking about, connect those concepts to passages from ancient Chinese texts, and come up with a novel explanation/interpretation of early Vietnamese history based (at least to some extent) on all of these ideas is extremely impressive.

Put differently, trying to understand what Kim Định sought to accomplish, and figuring out how and why he failed is simply fascinating.