MANTENIMIENTO Y CRECIMIENTO DEL DATAMART

Northern Vietnam in the form of the Chinese province of Jiao-zhi had long been the interface between China and Southeast Asia. The centre of Chinese power was at Long-bien. From there Chinese

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Malay trading vessel, bas-relief, Borobodur, Java, ninth century.

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officials, with the variable support of a Sino–Vietnamese landed elite, administered a territory stretching south to the shifting frontier with Champa, a distance over which Chinese cultural influence and admin-istrative control gradually diminished. A Sino–Vietnamese elite might hold power, but the peasants they ruled were Vietnamese, and the province developed a tradition of strong local rule. In the words of Keith Taylor:

Giao [Jiao-zhi] possessed a political momentum of its own, independent of the empire. In fact, it was when the empire was in the deepest trouble that the south pros-pered most. Whenever the imperial court was strong enough to dominate the region . . . rebellion and political instability ensued. When the court was weak, local forces arose, and stability followed.⁷

These ‘local forces’ would eventually become sufficiently strong to gain Vietnam its independence. In the meantime, however, Jiao-zhi, despite its predominantly non-Chinese population, remained within the empire. The cultural frontier was fixed along with the political frontier between the Vietnamese and the Cham; or in Chinese termi-nology, between inner and outer barbarians. While the Vietnamese were forced to live under imperial domination and were expected to adopt Chinese culture, the Cham sent tribute missions as an in-dependent polity and were under no such pressure.

For a brief period in the 540s, the rebellion of Ly Bi established Vietnamese independence. Ly was of Chinese descent, but his princi-pal support came from native Vietnamese. The rebellion was suppressed by imperial forces, but for the rest of the sixth century, until China was reunified in 589, Jiao-zhi retained a high degree of autonomy under the rule of powerful Sino–Vietnamese families owing only nominal allegiance to their Chinese overlords. Buddhism became well established, and the economy flourished as Long-bien

temporarily eclipsed Canton as the principal terminus for the Nanyang trade.

The collapse of the Tang provided an opportunity for the independent-minded Sino–Vietnamese elite in Jiao-zhi to break free of imperial control. During the years of political and military turmoil that marked the early tenth century, Jiao-zhi became, to all intents and purposes, an autonomous province. Finally in 966, six years after the founding of the Song dynasty, Dinh Bo Linh proclaimed his inde-pendence. Exhausted after years of warfare, and aware that Bo Linh commanded a powerful army, the Song court accepted the de facto independence of Vietnam. Bo Linh was astute enough to follow diplo-matic protocol by requesting conferral of Chinese titles. His son, in whose name official communications with the Song court were con-ducted, was confirmed as ‘Peaceful Sea Military Governor’ with the additional title of ‘An-nam [Peaceful South] Protector General’. Bo Linh himself was granted the curious title ‘King of Jiao-zhi Prefecture’.

These claims and titles tell us much about relations between China and Vietnam, and the worldview both shared. By proclaiming himself emperor, Bo Linh was asserting independence from China, but not thereby equality with the Son of Heaven. He was well aware both that this would be quite unacceptable to the Chinese, and that Vietnam could not escape being part of the Chinese world order. This was made evident in the edict conferring his title, where Bo Linh’s relationship to the Song emperor was described as that of an obedient son to a benevolent father.⁸By describing Bo Linh as King of Jiao-zhi Prefecture, the Song court was on the one hand accepting his status as on a par with other rulers of independent kingdoms, while on the other hand reminding him that his territory remained, in some sense, part of the empire. In other words, it left open the pos-sibility (or threat) of returning Jiao-zhi to imperial administration.

The titles conferred on Bo Linh’s son defined the role a Vietnamese ruler was expected to perform within the Chinese world order. He was to accept Chinese suzerainty and keep the peace on the empire’s

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frontiers. (Subsequently the title conferred on the Vietnamese ruler was King of An-nam, though for his own people he was always emperor of Dai Viet.)

To reiterate: for the Chinese the ruler of Vietnam was a king, like any other ruler of kingdoms that presented tribute to the Son of Heaven. For the Vietnamese, in their dealings with China, this was accepted. The emperor of Vietnam designated himself ‘king’ in his official correspondence with the Chinese court. But because the Viet-namese shared the Chinese worldview, the ruler of Vietnam laid claim to the same cosmic relationship with Heaven and Earth as did the Son of Heaven, and the same relationship of hierarchical superiority to sur-rounding, less cultured peoples. In his official dealings with the Khmer and Cham and Lao, therefore, the Vietnamese ruler designated himself as emperor.⁹Only by such a device could Vietnam establish an accept-able bilateral relations regime with China, while at the same time expressing its own international relations culture in its dealings with its Southeast Asian neighbours.

The attitudes towards its neighbours that Vietnam adopted as part of its culture of international relations carried with them implica-tions for the extension of Vietnamese power that, not surprisingly, were remarkably similar to Chinese views. Strategically, moreover, Vietnamese expansion to the south (the Truong Son mountains effec-tively hemmed in the Vietnamese to the west) was undertaken—as was China’s southwards expansion—with an eye always on its vulner-able northern frontier. What the steppe peoples were to China in security terms, China was to Vietnam.

Throughout the Song period, Chinese attention was focused on its northern frontier where the steppe peoples posed a constant threat. This preoccupation, and the Song policy of avoiding unneces-sary armed conflict, enabled the Vietnamese to consolidate their independence. They did so by following a dual strategy in their rela-tions with China, combining military strength with status recognition of Chinese superiority. It was a pattern consistently applied over the

centuries that not only kept China at bay for most of the time, but also allowed the Vietnamese to engage their traditional enemies, the Cham, and to pursue their long ‘march to the south’ (nam tien) that over the next seven centuries would leave them in control of all coastal Vietnam, to the Mekong delta and beyond.