A View from the Sea: Perspectives on the Northern and Central Vietnamese Coast

Abstract

This article challenges the perceived image of "traditional" Vietnam by viewing the policy's early history from the sea. A trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tonkin area, stretching to Hainan Islan and northern Champa by sea, and overland to Yunnan and Laos. Commerce and interactions of peoples in this area played a crucial part in state formation for Vietnam.

The discussion of the article raises more questions than it answers to an extent which could satisfy keen scholars. While our view from the sea casts serious doubt on the Sinic agrarian model of early Vietnamese political economy and ethnicity and moves Dai Viet closer to the rest of Southeast Asia, what we have seen are little more than broken dots on the coast, rather than a complete structure. We see the links that stretched from coast to coast in the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as between the Gulf and the Archipelago and beyond, yet we know precious little on the intermediate level-about how the ceramic production was organised, its relationship to the rise of a popular mass market and the fall of this once-active trading zone. Yet the view from the sea has been helpful in breaking down the boundaries. The establishment of modern borders and of nationalist scholarship focused on separate and well-defined sections of state histories (such as the Tang, Song and Ming periods) or of the individual entities of China, Vietnam, Champa, etc. has left us with a Jiaozhi Ocean that is, metaphorically speaking, full of solid icebergs. It has become hard to imagine that these apparently separate entities, before drifting apart, came from the same glacier or ice-shelf, and thus were interconnected at birth. A view from the sea, as sketched here, reveals how national stories can hide the regional dynamics on which later states were founded.