ReflectionsVietnam: putting the ‘china’ in Indochina

I spent last weekend at a beach resort in the central Vietnamese town of Lang Co, where I thoroughly enjoyed the beach, the food and the company of good friends. A highlight of the holiday was the day trip to the Imperial City at Hue, the for­mer capital of Vietnam’s Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945). It was at this palace complex, still undergoing restoration, where the last emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, abdicated on August 25, 1945.

Culturally, the Vietnamese are an anomaly in Southeast Asia, being the only Sinicised people in a region profoundly influenced by the Indian and, later, Islamic civilisations – it is, as it were, the “china” in “Indochina”. Northern Vietnam was, during several long periods in history, formally a part of the Chinese empire.

Despite their fierce resistance to their Chinese over­lords and eventual independence, the Vietnamese were much enamoured by the Chinese and adopted many aspects of the latter’s political system, culture and language. For example, Chinese loan words account for about a third of the Vietnamese lexicon and in formal writing, these loan words may form some 60 per cent of the text. The southward push of the Sinicised Vietnamese to present-day southern Vietnam, aggressively displacing the native Cham people and their Hindu and Islamic kingdoms over a few centuries, mirrored the Han Chinese colonisation of southern China.