Vietnam under Chinese rule

Vietnam under Chinese rule or Bắc thuộc (北屬 lit. "belonging to the north") (111 BCE–939 CE, 1407–1428 CE) refers to four historical periods during which several portions of modern-day northern and central Vietnam were governed by successive Chinese dynasties. Vietnamese historiography traditionally dates the beginning of this period to 111 BCE, when the Han dynasty annexed Nanyue (Vietnamese: Nam Việt). Chinese control continued in various forms until 939 CE, when the Ngô dynasty was established, marking the end of what is usually referred to as the main phase of Chinese rule. A later period of occupation by the Ming dynasty from 1407 to 1428 is often treated as a distinct episode. Notably, parts of Vietnam were under Chinese rule for longer than several territories that now form the modern provinces of China, underlining the longevity and depth of Chinese influence in the region over many centuries.

The historiography of this period has become a subject of scholarly debate, particularly concerning how national and cultural identities have been retroactively applied. Historians such as Catherine Churchman, Jaymin Kim, and Keith W. Taylor argue that many narratives about Bắc thuộc are shaped by modern constructs, often influenced by nationalist or anti-colonial sentiment. These scholars emphasise that the idea of an unbroken narrative of resistance or subjugation simplifies a more complex historical relationship, which included periods of accommodation, syncretism and local autonomy. Recent research critiques the use of this history as a tool for contemporary nationalist and irredentist projects in Vietnam, China and elsewhere.

Geographical extent and impact

The four periods of Chinese rule did not correspond to the modern borders of Vietnam, but were mainly limited to the area around the Red River Delta and adjacent areas. During the first three periods of Chinese rule, the pre-Sinitic indigenous culture was centered in the northern part of modern Vietnam, in the alluvial deltas of the Hong, Cả and Mã Rivers. Ten centuries of Chinese rule left a substantial genetic footprint, with settlement by large numbers of ethnic Han, while opening up Vietnam for trade and cultural exchange.

Elements of Chinese culture such as language, religion, art, and way of life constituted an important component of traditional Vietnamese culture until modernity. This cultural affiliation with China remained true even when Vietnam was militarily defending itself against attempted invasions, such as against the Yuan dynasty. Chinese characters remained the official script of Vietnam until French colonization in the 20th century, despite the rise in vernacular chữ Nôm literature in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Ming.

Historiography

French historiography

The historiography of Vietnam under Chinese rule has had substantial influence from French colonial scholarship and Vietnamese postcolonial national history writing. During the 19th century, the French promoted the view that Vietnam had little of its own culture and borrowed it almost entirely from China. French scholars and officials did this to justify European colonial rule in Vietnam. By portraying the Vietnamese as merely borrowers of civilization, the French situated themselves in a historical paradigm of bringing civilization to a backwards region of the world. French scholar Léonard Aurousseau argued that not only did Vietnam borrow culturally and politically from China, the population of Vietnam was also directly the result of migration from the state of Yue in China. This line of thought was followed by Joseph Buttinger, who authored the first English language history book on Vietnamese history. He believed that to fight off the Chinese, the Vietnamese had to become like the Chinese.

Adrien Launay, historian of the Missions-Étrangères, characterized the Vietnamese as copiers of Chinese civilization who made no discernible improvements in either the arts or the sciences. Other scholars such as Eliacin Lurô and Paul Ory espoused the same view that Vietnamese society was a poor man's version of China. This narrative was modified to an extent by individuals such as Camille Briffaut, who proposed that the Vietnamese successfully adapted Chinese institutions to expand their territory south and west. On 20 January 1900, the École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) was created as the academic arm of the French colonial state, and its Orientalists later challenged this framework because they considered the association with China to be detrimental to French colonial interests. Louis Finôt, first director of the EFEO, offered an alternative policy that engaged in "discovering the origins, explaining the anomalies, and justifying the diversity" of the Indochina colonies. Eventually the EFEO developed a model of Southeast Asia characterized by the influence of Hinduism, however Vietnam did not fit this model neatly and had a more ambivalent relationship to it.

Vietnamese national historiography

Origin

Few historiographies have borne such a strong national imprint as that of Việt Nam in the twentieth century. Engaged through much of that century in a fierce battle for national identity and survival, Vietnamese historians and their international sympathizers focused intently on the grand narrative of national struggle against China, France, and America. Only recently has a new generation of historians been able to explore the political and cultural complexities of relations between the myriad peoples who have inhabited the Indo-Chinese peninsula without having to consider the effect of their words on national struggle.

— Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid

The national school of Vietnamese history portrays the period in "a militant, nationalistic, and very contemporary vision through which emerged a hypothetical substratum of an original Vietnam that was miraculously preserved throughout a millennium of the Chinese presence." The national Vietnamese narrative depicts the Chinese as a corrupt and profit-driven people and merely the first of the foreign colonizing empires that were eventually driven from Vietnam. According to Catherine Churchman, this is not an entirely new historical tradition, but a rewriting or updating of it, and has roots in Dai Viet, which portrayed itself as the Southern Empire equal to the Northern Empire (China). Dai Viet literati of the Trần and Lê dynasties sought an ancient origin for their autonomy prior to Chinese rule and traced their genealogy to Triệu Đà or the semi-legendary Hồng Bàng dynasty. They recorded that the Northern Empire suffered defeat for not respecting these views. However, scholars such as Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen argue that "the trope of a small country consistently repelling the China’s cultural force is a recent, postcolonial, mid-20th-century construction".

During the anti-colonial struggle against France and the United States, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam started to reconstruct history as part of its nation-building process, which included the creation of a homogeneous national identity and a national consciousness that covered both North and South Vietnam. Although part of the anti-colonial movement involved rejecting French rule, Vietnamese nationalists and postcolonial scholars were informed by both colonial views that they were a lesser version of China as well as unique from China. As a result, efforts to decolonize the past were at least partially in response to the fear of being seen as a derivative of China, but also drew on colonial scholarship (EFEO) that sought to separate Vietnam from Chinese influence.

Patricia M. Pelley calls what followed the union of two endeavors - the search for a national origin and the theme of the "fighting spirit of the Vietnamese" - the "cult of antiquity". The cult of antiquity provided a "conceptual, visual, and ritual center for national identity" that served to deconstruct the trappings of colonial scholarship. Scholars like Trần Trọng Kim and Phạm Văn Sơn traced the Vietnamese past to increasingly ancient origins from the Âu Lạc in the 3rd century BC to Lạc Long Quân in the 3rd millennium BC and finally Thần Nông, the Vietnamese version of the Chinese mythological ruler Shennong. By 1975, the cult of antiquity had become fully established and ancient semi-mythological figures such as the Hùng kings were firmly entrenched in the daily life of the Vietnamese as their national origin.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnamese scholars decided to "desinicize the [Vietnamese] past" by emphasizing Vietnam's status as a long-standing, independent, and unique civilization. Activities associated with the se déchinoiser ("de-chinese") effort included claiming archaeological artifacts as distinctive Vietnamese technological innovations and reframing history as a national-territorial narrative of "Kinh" (ethnic Vietnamese) people perpetually resisting against foreign invasion. The trope of the "ancient Chinese invasion" was applied to propaganda campaigns against American influence in the South starting in 1956. Due to the works of postcolonial academic scholars and the needs of anti-colonial resistance groups, a historical narrative of "ancient, continuous, ethnically-grounded and even 'traditional' conflict with China" was created. The North Vietnamese scholar and first president of the Institute of History Trần Huy Liệu made a direct connection between the period of Chinese rule and French rule, characterizing both as examples of the indomitable spirit of resistance intrinsic to Vietnamese history.

Western dissemination

Works by Japanese scholars in the 1970s as well as in the English language in the 1980s have taken on elements of the national school. Katakura Minoru's Chūgoku shihaika no betonamu emphasizes the innate characteristics of the Vietnamese people. Keith Taylor's The Birth of Vietnam (1983) asserts a strong continuity from the semi-legendary kingdoms of the Red River Plain to the founding of Dai Viet, which was the result of a thousand-year struggle against the Chinese that culminated in the restoration of Vietnamese sovereignty. The model of Vietnamese resistance against Chinese occupiers was used to explain to the U.S. public the steadfast Vietnamese resistance against French and U.S. military operations. Jennifer Holmgren's The Chinese Colonisation of Northern Vietnam uses Sinicization and Vietnamization as terms to refer to political and cultural change in different directions. Works following the national school of Vietnamese history retroactively assign Vietnamese group consciousness to past periods (Han-Tang era) based on evidence in later eras. The national school of Vietnamese history has remained practically unchanged since the 1980s and has become the national orthodoxy.

According to Catherine Churchman, recent Western scholarship has started to move on from depicting "primordialist historical narratives of a Việt people originating in prehistory and surviving (though somewhat modified) as a distinct population throughout the millennium of Chinese domination". Even in Vietnam, new historians seem to be moving in the same trajectory. However works as recent as Ben Kiernan's Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (2017) have reiterated the same tropes while introducing new ones. Churchman criticized Kiernan for trying to rework outdated scholarship and in the process produced a narrative with so many errors that it would constitute a major project to list them all. Of particular note is Kiernan's inability to read Classical Chinese or Vietnamese sources, restricting him to secondary sources in English and French.

Criticisms

The historical paradigms introduced by the nationalist school of Vietnamese historiography have been criticized by several scholars including Catherine Churchman, Keith W. Taylor, Haydon Cherry, Patricia M. Pelley, Jaymin Kim, and Martin Großheim. Catherine Churchman categorizes the argument for an intrinsic, intractable, and distinctly Southeast Asian Vietnamese identity in the Red River Plain throughout history into three categories: context, cultural continuity, and resistance. Context refers to the downplaying of similarities between Vietnam and China while emphasizing Vietnam's Southeast Asian identity in the postcolonial period. The purpose of this was to establish Vietnam as a focal point of Southeast Asia rather than as an insignificant periphery of East Asia. Cultural continuity refers to an intrinsic Vietnamese "cultural core" that has always existed in the Red River Plain since time immemorial. Resistance refers to the national struggle of the Vietnamese people against foreign aggressors. Proponents of this historical narrative, such as Nguyen Khac Vien, characterize the history of Vietnam under Chinese rule as a "steadfast popular resistance marked by armed insurrections against foreign domination", while opponents such as Churchman note the lack of evidence, anachronisms, linguistic problems, adherence to Chinese political and cultural norms, and similarities as well as differences with other peoples under Chinese rule.

Keith W. Taylor was a proponent of the nationalist school of Vietnamese history when his work The Birth of Vietnam was published in 1983. In The Birth of Vietnam, Taylor espoused the same fundamental tenets as Vietnamese national history where an unbroken line of descent stretching back to the legendary Hùng king culminated in the restoration of Vietnamese sovereignty after a thousand year resistance against the Chinese. Taylor later retracted from this position and criticized the "rigid overarching narrative of the Vietnamese people or the Vietnamese nation". He also challenged the view that Vietnam developed a tradition of resistance against foreign aggressors due to regular invasions by China.

Patricia M. Pelley remarks that postcolonial scholars undoubtedly favored disengaging from Chinese culture and establishing new cultural norms. However in many cases, this essentially meant severing their own link to the past on a societal and individual level due to how intertwined the notions of culture and education were with Chinese civilization in premodern Vietnam. Pelley compared Chinese culture in Vietnam to Greek and Roman culture in Renaissance Europe, surmising that the "death" of Latin made acknowledging their Latinate past easier than Vietnam with Chinese culture. The effort to reach into the ancient past to provide a source for national identity, which Pelley calls the "cult of antiquity", introduced new problems that future historians will have to solve.

Ethnic unity

The Vietnamese national narrative has introduced anachronisms in order to prove a unified Vietnamese national consciousness. The word Viet/Yue is often used to refer to an ethnic group when it had various meanings throughout history. There was no terminology to describe a Chinese-Vietnamese dichotomy during the Han-Tang period nor was there a term to describe a cohesive group inhabiting the area between the Pearl River and the Red River. During the Tang period, the indigenous people of Annan or Jinghai Circuit were referred to as the Wild Man (Wild Barbarians), the Li, or the Annamese (Annan people). In addition, the national history tends to have a narrow view limited to modern national boundaries, leading to conclusions of exceptionalism. Although it is true that the political situation in the Red River Plain was less stable than in Guangzhou to the north, such circumstances were not restricted to the area. The Vietnamese national narrative retroactively assigns any local rebellions, the rise of local dynasties, and their local autonomy with the motive of seeking national independence.

After the second century BC, local administration became more hereditary with greater decentralization of state governance. Churchman criticized Holmgren and Taylor's characterization of this phenomenon as a form of "semi-independent Vietnamised bureaucracy" when applied to territory covering Vietnam. The same trend was occurring throughout the entirety of the Han dynasty during this period. Moreover, families that Holmgren and Taylor selected as examples of Vietnamization held positions not just in areas that later became Vietnam, but also areas that are part of modern China. Like Shi Xie before them, such families (Tao, Du, Teng) that administered parts of modern Vietnam were also involved in the politics of Guangzhou and other places outside the Red River Plains. In the late fifth century, the politics of the Red River Plain did diverge from Guangzhou and the area experienced greater autonomy under the control of powerful local families. However none of them with the exception of Lý Bôn seem to have been interested in becoming the ruler of an independent state. While Lý Bôn declared himself the Emperor of Yue in 544, his initial grievances seem to have arisen from the Liang dynasty's administrative system, in which he found no avenue for advancement. In Chinese historical texts such as the Book of Qi and Book of Chen, Lý Bôn is neither considered a foreigner or a barbarian but simply another rebel leader spawning from the regional governing elite. The 15th century Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư describes Lý Bôn as the Vietnamized descendant of Chinese refugees fleeing turmoil in the north caused by Wang Mang's usurpation of power. Later moves toward autonomy in the 10th century were also not unique, and were fairly tame compared to the activities of people who cushioned them from more direct contact with Southern dynasties empires.

Resistance against China

According to Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen, "there is little proof of a consistent or extreme Vietnamese hatred for Chinese culture" throughout history and recent scholarship on elite Vietnamese perspectives indicates there was no practical or popular resistance against China. The concept of a long held animosity towards Chinese culture dating back to ancient times was an artificial construction by the Communist Party of Vietnam created through selective pruning of historical accounts to fit their new historical narrative. Recent scholarship on this time period shows that there was no homogeneously defiant Vietnamese mindset towards China's cultural influences. The Vietnamese elites were generally favorable towards Chinese culture and political norms. Liam Kelley conducted a study of poems composed by Vietnamese envoys to China and did not find any hostility held against China. While these diplomatic missions are portrayed in nationalist historiography as cynical efforts to appease China (tributary missions), the study's subjects seem to have been genuinely proud of being part of Sinic civilization. On the whole, Vietnamese elites prior to French colonization considered knowledge of specific Chinese texts to be the equivalent of historical literacy. As late as the 20th century, important Vietnamese literature such as Ho Chi Minh's poem Vọng Nguyệt, which recites the entire history of Vietnam, was written in Classical Chinese. According to language researcher Nguyen Thuy Dan, the majority of the Vietnamese elite up to the 19th century seem to have never written in anything other than Classical Chinese and even criticized attempts to nativise the Chinese script to represent the Vietnamese language. Language has been used as evidence for a distinct Vietnamese identity in the Han-Tang period. However, some research points to the formation of a Vietnamese language only afterward as the result of a creolization and language shift involving Middle Chinese.

Similarly, Tuong Vu calls the nationalist framework for historical China-Vietnam relations "seriously misleading" and criticizes it as simplistic, reducing complex relations to a one dimensional narrative of domination and resistance that exaggerates the importance of Vietnam to China as well as overlooking Vietnam's own expansionist initiatives. Despite serious shortcomings to the nationalist narrative, it has become extremely prevalent as a result of popularization due to the wars against France and the U.S. as well as Vietnam's location at the periphery of China lending it an air of reality. Vu notes that recent scholarship has challenged the standard narrative but is "still preoccupied with dyadic Sino-Vietnamese interactions in which China and Vietnam are taken out of their broader geopolitical contexts and juxtaposed as opposites". Vu argues that rather than China being the primary opponent of Vietnam throughout history, it was other groups on the southern frontier such as Lâm Ấp or Champa that endangered Vietnam's existence even during the era of Chinese rule.

According to Vu, China's political center was too far from its southern frontier to be as concerned with Vietnam as the north. When the Qin dynasty first reached the Red River Delta, they ruled the area indirectly. They were followed by Zhao Tuo who founded the kingdom of Nanyue. By the time the Han dynasty established control in 111 BC, most of the ancestors of the Vietnamese people still lived in the upland areas northwest of the Red River. The government was based around modern Hanoi where over time, the Han intermarried with the locals, creating a Han-Viet group that spoke Annamese Middle Chinese along with a language called Proto-Viet-Muong that was prevalent among the lowland population. The significance of this is that the people of the Red River area did not have a single identity or language and often imperial rule meant protection from other groups. Sometimes rebellions such as the uprising of Mai Thúc Loan or Nanzhao's invasion resulted in heavy plundering and destruction for the natives despite their alliance. Many of the rebellions and de facto independent states like the ones created by Zhao Tuo, Lữ Hưng, Lương Thạc, Lý Bí, and Ngô Quyền were led by people of Han or Han-Viet descent with connections to the imperial government. It is impossible to know what their motivations were other than that opportunism was certainly a factor. Vu suggests that these Han-Viet elite families rose up to defend themselves in times of imperial decline rather than seek independence, and in the case of Ngô Quyền, his opponent was not the "Chinese" as a whole but another regional warlord state led by Liu Yan. Following Ngô Quyền, every Vietnamese dynasty spent more time in conflict with people to their south and west than with China.

Jaymin Kim criticized the framing of the Qing-Viet conflict in 1788–1789 as yet another attempt by "China" to annex an independent "Vietnam", which emphasizes the heroic Vietnamese resistance against China and obscures the agency of the Qing-allied Lê dynasty. According to Vietnamese sources, the governor-general Sun Shiyi advocated to the Qianlong Emperor for a military expedition to reclaim the former Chinese territory of Annan (Vietnam during the Tang dynasty). However, Kim notes that no Chinese source contains a statement by Sun explicitly advocating for annexation and it is unlikely that the authors of the Vietnamese sources had access to Sun's communications with the Qing emperor, which were secret memorials intended only for the emperor. In addition, the Lê loyalists actively lobbied the Qing court to launch a campaign against the Tây Sơn rebels. Six Lê officials provided the Qing court with tailored and selective information that exaggerated the amount of popular support for the Lê royal family while the last Lê emperor, Lê Chiêu Thống, directly asked the Qing for intervention. The resulting Qing campaign consisted of mostly Qing soldiers, but the Lê loyalists, while small in number also played an important role. Nguyễn Đình Mai, one of the six officials who accompanied the Lê royal family into Qing territory, led the vanguard at the head of a contingent of Lê loyalists. When news of the Qing-Lê alliance reached Vietnam, it received significant support, especially in the north. A number of Vietnamese leaders joined the Qing-Lê alliance, resulting in early successes for the allied army. After the alliance was defeated, the Lê loyalists continued to lobby for further intervention in the Qing dynasty. These Lê refugees and war proponents became a problem for the Qing after it recognized the Tây Sơn dynasty as the rightful successors to the Lê, and the refugees were integrated into the army, forcibly settled in Qing territory, or returned to Vietnam.

Canonization

The postcolonial Vietnamese canonized the mythological prehistory of Vietnam - the Hùng king, Hồng Bàng dynasty, and kingdom of Văn Lang - as historical truth. Trần Huy Liệu made a direct link between the Hùng kings and the formation of the Vietnamese nation, dating the start of Vietnamese resistance to the beginning of their history. The CPV upgraded the status of the Hùng kings from mythical ancestors to the founding fathers of Vietnam. There had already been a long line of support for the Hùng kings as the origin of the Vietnamese nation, but during the reform period, Party leaders started personally attending the Hùng kings' festival and made further use of it as a source of Vietnamese national unity in a time of instability. Vietnamese historian Vũ Đức Liêm calls this "religious nationalism" and characterizes the act as a form of legitimacy building by the CPV.

Several scholars who have scrutinized the origin of the Hùng kings doubt their historicity. The earliest Vietnamese text to mention the Hùng kings, the Đại Việt sử lược, dates to the 13th century, almost two thousand years after the period which they purport to describe. The earlier Chinese text, the 4th century Almanacs of the Outer Territories of the Jiao province, contains similar descriptions of rulers but calls them Lạc instead of Hùng. According to Henri Maspéro, Nguyễn Văn Tố, and Luo Xianglin, the recorded Hùng (雄) may have been a scribal era that mixed it up with Lạc (雒). Cherry notes that even considering the 4th century Chinese text, it was still created 800 years after the period it discusses, and doubts that either Chinese or Vietnamese texts were able to reliably transmit information over such a large span of time. At best they are a window into what Chinese and Vietnamese of their respective eras made of this prehistoric period of Vietnamese history rather than true primary sources. The only true sources for the relevant period are archaeological artifacts that contain information on the level of technology available to the early inhabitants of northern Vietnam, but contain no information about either the Hùng king or the kingdom of Văn Lang.

Previously orthodox views in Vietnamese history were changed to fit a modern nationalist ideology. The rulers of Nam Việt (Nanyue), referred to as the Triệu dynasty (Zhao dynasty), were reclassified as foreigners in modern Vietnamese historiography. While traditional Vietnamese historiography considered the Triệu dynasty to be an orthodox regime, modern Vietnamese scholars generally regard it as a foreign dynasty that ruled Vietnam. The oldest text compiled by a Vietnamese court, the 13th century Đại Việt sử ký, considered Nanyue to be the official starting point of their history. According to the Đại Việt sử ký, Zhao Tuo established the foundation of Đại Việt. However, later historians in the 18th century started questioning this view. Ngô Thì Sĩ argued that Zhao Tuo was a foreign invader and Nanyue a foreign dynasty that should not be included in Vietnamese history. This view became the mainstream among Vietnamese historians in North Vietnam and later became the state orthodoxy after reunification. Nanyue was removed from the national history while Zhao Tuo was recast as a foreign invader.

Linguistic influence

The periods of Chinese rule over Vietnam also saw the linguistic transformations of several lects in Northern Vietnam, including Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Muong and many other languages. These languages are often referred to as a regional sprachbund known as Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area. Vietnamese and Muong, under heavy linguistic influence from Chinese and Tai-Kadai languages, have completed tonogenesis, monosyllabicization, and grammaticalization of Chinese loan words to become classifiers and aspect markers; while at another extreme, the Southern Vietic languages have robustly polysyllabic morphemes and derivational or inflectional morphology much like conservative Austroasiatic languages.

Periods of Chinese rule

The four periods of Chinese rule in Vietnam:

Period of Chinese rule	Chinese dynasty	Year	Description
First Era of Northern Domination 北屬𠞺次一 Bắc thuộc lần thứ nhất	Western Han dynasty Xin dynasty Eastern Han dynasty	111 BC–AD 40	The first period of Bắc thuộc is traditionally considered to have started following the Western Han's victory in the Han–Nanyue War. It ended with the brief revolt of the Trưng sisters.
Second Era of Northern Domination 北屬𠞺次𠄩 Bắc thuộc lần thứ hai	Eastern Han dynasty Eastern Wu dynasty Western Jin dynasty Eastern Jin dynasty Liu Song dynasty Southern Qi dynasty Liang dynasty	AD 43–544	Chinese rule was restored after the Trung sisters' rebellion. The second period of Chinese rule was ended by the revolt of Lý Bôn, who took advantage of the internal disorder of the waning Liang dynasty. Lý Bôn subsequently founded the Early Lý dynasty, with the official dynastic name "Vạn Xuân" (萬春).
Third Era of Northern Domination 北屬𠞺次𠀧 Bắc thuộc lần thứ ba	Sui dynasty Tang dynasty Wu Zhou dynasty Southern Han dynasty (sometimes counted)	AD 602–905 or AD 602–939	The Sui dynasty reincorporated Vietnam into China following the Sui–Early Lý War. This period saw the entrenchment of mandarin administration in Vietnam. The third period of Chinese rule concluded following the collapse of the Tang dynasty and the subsequent defeat of the Southern Han armada by Ngô Quyền at the Battle of Bạch Đằng. Ngô Quyền later proclaimed the Ngô dynasty.
Fourth Era of Northern Domination 北屬𠞺次四 Bắc thuộc lần thứ tư	Ming dynasty	AD 1407–1428	Vietnam was brought under the control of China following the Ming dynasty's defeat of the short-lived Hồ dynasty. The fourth period of Chinese rule ended when the Lam Sơn uprising led by Lê Lợi emerged successful. Lê Lợi then reestablished the Đại Việt kingdom (大越) under the new Lê dynasty.

Census data

Year	Chinese dynasty	Period	Households	Population
2	Han dynasty	First Era of Northern Domination	143,643	981,755
140	Han dynasty	Second Era of Northern Domination	64,776	310,570
	Jin dynasty	Second Era of Northern Domination	25,600	-
	Liu Song dynasty	Second Era of Northern Domination	10,453	-
609	Sui dynasty	Third Era of Northern Domination	56,566	-
ca. 700	Wu Zhou dynasty	Third Era of Northern Domination (Protectorate General to Pacify the South)	38,626	148,431
740	Tang dynasty	Third Era of Northern Domination (Protectorate General to Pacify the South)	75,839	299,377
807	Tang dynasty	Third Era of Northern Domination (Protectorate General to Pacify the South)	40,486	-
1408	Ming dynasty	Fourth Era of Northern Domination	-	5,200,000
1417	Ming dynasty	Fourth Era of Northern Domination	450,288	1,900,000

See also

• China–Vietnam relations
• Chinese expansionism
• Sinicization

Sources

• Cherry, Hayden (2009), "Digging Up the Past: Prehistory and the Weight of the Present in Vietnam", Journal of Vietnamese Studies
• Kim, Jaymin (2023), "The Rise and Fall of a Qing-Lê Alliance, 1788–1804: A Case Study on the Praxis of Sino-Vietnamese Relations", Journal of Vietnamese Studies
• Pelley, Patricia M. (2002), Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past, Duke University Press
• Vu, Tuong (2016), State formation on China’s southern frontier: Vietnam as a shadow empire and hegemon, HumaNetten Nr 37Hösten
• Lockard, Craig A. (2010). Societies, Networks, and Transitions: A Global History To 1500. Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-1-439-08535-6.
• Walker, Hugh Dyson (2012). East Asia: A New History. AuthorHouse. ISBN 978-1-477-26516-1.
• Suryadinata, Leo (1997). Ethnic Chinese As Southeast Asians. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
• Eliot, Joshua (1995). Thailand, Indochina and Burma Handbook. Trade & Travel Publications.
• Hoang, Anh Tuấn (2007). Silk for Silver: Dutch-Vietnamese relations, 1637-1700. Brill. ISBN 978-9-04-742169-6.
• Schafer, Edward Hetzel (1967), The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South, Los Angeles: University of California Press
• Trần, Khánh (1993). The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. ISBN 9789813016668.
• Ms, Cc (2007). The World and Its Peoples: Eastern and Southern Asia - Volume 6. Marshall Cavendish.
• Ooi, Keat Gin, ed. (2004). Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-576-07771-9.
• Li, Tana (2018). Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-501-73257-7.
• Taylor, Keith Weller (1983), The Birth of the Vietnam, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-07417-0
• Reid, Anthony; Tran, Nhung Tuyet (2006). Viet Nam: Borderless Histories. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-1-316-44504-4.

External links

• Vietnam under Chinese rule on Encyclopædia Britannica