Introduction

On February 1, 1942, revolutionary leader Hồ Chí Minh published a short article entitled “Our History Must be Studied” (Nên học sử ta). The article appeared in a newspaper that Hồ Chí Minh had established the previous year called Việt Nam độc lập, or Independent Vietnam. This newspaper was published in the northern province of Cao Bằng, where Hồ Chí Minh resided for a time in 1941 and 1942 after crossing the border from southern China to organize a united front against French rule and Japanese occupation known as the Việt Minh. Published three times a month with a run of 400 copies, Independent Vietnam’s reach was probably quite limited. However, the interpretation of the past that Hồ Chí Minh presented in this brief essay would be repeated countless times in the thirty years of revolution and war from 1945 to 1975, and it serves today as a key element in Vietnamese nationalism and identity.Footnote ¹

The gist of Hồ Chí Minh’s view of Vietnamese history was summarized in the following two sentences that appeared at the end of the article: “Whenever our people unite as one, our country is independent and free. By contrast, whenever our people do not unite, we are invaded by foreign countries.”Footnote ² The same issue of Independent Vietnam contained a list of “Ten Musts” (10 Điều nên) that was also penned by Hồ Chí Minh. These were ten acts that Hồ Chí Minh declared members of the Việt Minh must carry out: they must maintain the secrecy of the Việt Minh, they must be completely loyal to the Việt Minh, they must disseminate the aims of the Việt Minh, they must do their utmost to find new members for the Việt Minh, they must do their utmost to work for the Việt Minh, they must pay their dues on time, they must help each other, they must strive to study, they must read the books and newspaper of the Việt Minh, and they must support the newspaper of the Việt Minh.Footnote ³

Although Hồ Chí Minh argued in 1942 that the key lesson to learn from the Vietnamese past was that Vietnamese needed to unite to maintain the country’s independence, we can see today that what Hồ Chí Minh was attempting to unite in Independent Vietnam in 1942 was history and revolutionary politics. While one could argue that historical writings in Vietnam had always been political, earlier works had supported other types of politics, such as dynastic politics, and later, colonial politics. As such, to tell the story of the production of historical knowledge about Vietnam, as I will do in this essay, is to tell the story of the political history of Vietnam, and how the two processes have closely mirrored each other.

That said, the aim of this essay is not simply to point out how writings about Vietnamese history have been influenced by politics. Instead, its goal is to provide an historical background that will enable readers to better understand the articles in this Cambridge History of the Vietnam War. There are many ideas about Vietnamese history in the chapters following this one that are new. They are new not only because scholars have conducted new research and made new findings but also because there has been a movement away from certain “truths” that previously dominated writings on the history of Vietnam. In this essay, we will examine where those “truths” came from, and how they came to be adopted by scholars writing in English.

From Traditional to Modern Histories

The first histories produced by Vietnamese were dynastic histories. The two most important of these written prior to 1900 were the fifteenth-century Complete Book of the Historical Records of Dai Viet (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư; hereafter Complete Book) and the nineteenth-century Imperially Commissioned Itemized Summaries of the Comprehensive Mirror of Viet History (Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục; hereafter Comprehensive Mirror). These works were composed in classical Chinese, a language that only a small percentage of the population could understand. Each provided historical examples of good and bad governance, in the hopes that current dynastic officials would learn from the past.

Until the nineteenth century, Vietnamese history was thus a topic that was largely restricted to the world of court officials and the tiny literate elite aspiring to enter government service. While some Western missionaries and travelers learned what they could from local interlocutors, gaining access to actual historical texts proved to be difficult. That situation changed, however, with the French conquest of Vietnam. The extension of French control over Vietnam was a decades-long process but it began with treaties in the 1860s in which the ruling Nguyễn Dynasty granted the French direct control over the southern third of Vietnam, or what they called Cochinchine (Cochinchina). During this period, a French missionary by the name of Théophile Marie Legrand de la Liraye wrote the first history of Vietnam in French. While this work was based on Vietnamese sources, it nonetheless began a process of the “Westernization” of Vietnamese history in that Legrand de la Liraye employed European concepts to explain the past.

Whereas the Complete Book and Comprehensive Mirror documented a political genealogy from one ruling house to another, the purpose of Legrand de la Liraye’s work was to educate readers about the history of a people, or what he called the “Annamite nation.”Footnote ⁴ To do this, Legrand de la Liraye attempted to determine what race the Annamites belonged to so that his European readers could understand who these people were in relation to other racial groups in the region. These two concepts of nation and race were Western concepts, and they had never been previously applied to the history of Vietnam.

Another important idea that Legrand de la Liraye introduced to the writing of Vietnamese history was the concept of “independence.” There was a period in the early fifteenth century when the Chinese Ming Dynasty controlled the areas of what is now northern and north-central Vietnam. That brief period was brought to an end by a man named Lê Lợi, the founder of the Lê Dynasty. The Complete Book simply stated that Lê Lợi had “wiped out the Ming bandits” (tước bình Minh tặc 削平明賊).Footnote ⁵ By contrast, Legrand de la Liraye depicted that same historical event as a “war of independence” (guerre de l’indépendance). This was another new concept. Hence, when Hồ Chí Minh declared in 1942 that Vietnamese history was a timeless story of the Vietnamese people (dân tộc) uniting (đoàn kết) to maintain the independence (độc lập) and freedom (tự do) of the country, his interpretation of the past was filled with words and concepts that his ancestors would not have understood. That Hồ Chí Minh understood these words and concepts was because they all became part of the Vietnamese worldview during the years of French colonial rule.

Such ideas were adopted first in Cochinchina. There, the French established a new educational system, and in 1875, Trương Vĩnh Ký, a Vietnamese Catholic polymath, produced a history of Vietnam in French for the Vietnamese students there.Footnote ⁶ By 1906, a Vietnamese translation of a similar French-language history of Vietnam was published in Cochinchina, called a Brief History of the Country of Dai Nam (Đại Nam quốc lược sử).Footnote ⁷ In that same year, educational reforms were implemented in the center and north of Vietnam that sought to modernize the curriculum for the traditional civil-service examinations. In the late nineteenth century, the central and northern regions of Vietnam had both become protectorates of France.Footnote ⁸ Known as Annam and Tonkin, respectively, these regions were still governed by Nguyễn Dynasty officials, albeit under the guidance of French advisors. Proficient in classical Chinese, some of those officials learned a great deal about the West at that time through the writings of Chinese reformist intellectuals, and they transformed the educational curriculum in accordance with these new ideas.

A clear example of this is a work that was produced in 1906 and employed in the reformed curriculum in Annam and Tonkin by a scholar named Hoàng Đạo Thành entitled the Complete Compilation of the New Convention of Việt History (Việt sử tân ước toàn biên).Footnote ⁹ Hoàng Đạo Thành’s text was the first history created by a Vietnamese that was structured around the concept of the nation. It explicitly aimed to inculcate readers with a sense of pride in the nation. Whereas the Complete Book and the Comprehensive Mirror were designed to teach government officials about morally upright rule and the need to be loyal (trung) to the monarch, Hoàng Đạo Thành’s history was designed to teach students to be patriotic (ái quốc). This term for “patriotism” literally means “cherish the country.” It was a Western concept introduced to Vietnamese scholars through the writings of Chinese reformers, and it was a term that Hồ Chí Minh took as part of his revolutionary name, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, not long after Hoàng Đạo Thành produced his new account of the Vietnamese past.

Although Hoàng Đạo Thành’s history was a pioneering work, it was written at a time when classical Chinese started to lose its position of prominence in Vietnam. In 1909, colonial officials Charles Maybon and Henri Russier produced another new history of Vietnam in French for the revised civil-service exam curriculum. Entitled Ideas about the History of Annam (Notions d’histoire d’Annam), this work deliberately sought to present history following “European methods” of explaining the past and its importance rather than following what they criticized as the “Chinese model” of chronicling events.Footnote ¹⁰ They also sought to instill in their Vietnamese readers a sense of gratitude toward the French, rather than pride in the nation. While they acknowledged that there had been a “tendency towards unity” in the past, they nonetheless argued that true unity and independence only arrived in the nineteenth century as the French assisted Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty, in establishing his rule over the entirety of Vietnam, and as the French forced the Qing Dynasty to terminate Vietnam’s status as a tributary state.Footnote ¹¹

Such a view of the past was rife with contradictions, but this view was the norm from the 1910s through the 1930s. Although the civil-service exams were abolished in 1919, a system of Franco-Annamite schools with instruction in Vietnamese and French was established at that time, and an updated version of Maybon and Russier’s history continued to be employed in the curriculum for these schools. Also popular was a conservative rendering of the past by Vietnamese scholar Trần Trọng Kim, An Outline of the History of Vietnam (Việt Nam sử lược).Footnote ¹²

One could argue that by the 1930s there was a certain degree of stasis in the knowledge about the Vietnamese past. That intellectual stasis was a mirror image of the stability that had been established in colonial Vietnam and was supported by the individuals, both Vietnamese and French, who maintained the colonial order. However, in the 1940s, that colonial order was challenged, and as that happened, Vietnamese historical knowledge came to life.

Historical Writings of the 1940s

In the summer of 1940, France was occupied by Nazi Germany and a collaborationist government known as Vichy France was established. The Japanese took advantage of this political transition to move troops into French Indochina to block war supplies from reaching Republican China through the Hanoi–Kunming railway, as well as to prepare for their eventual occupation of the rest of Southeast Asia. Even as Vichy officials allowed what essentially became a Japanese military occupation, they attempted to challenge Japanese wartime propaganda that called for Asians to unite in opposition to the West. Vichy French colonial officials did this by promoting Vietnamese nationalism.Footnote ¹³

Certain Vietnamese intellectuals embraced this opportunity to express ideas that had previously been prohibited. With regard to historical scholarship, a journal called Trí Tân (New Knowledge) was established in 1941, and in the more than 200 issues that were published over the following four years, writers made initial steps toward moving historical knowledge out of the patterns into which it had fallen in the previous decades. In the very first issue, for instance, Ứng Hòe Nguyễn Vӑn Tố, a researcher at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), a research institute established by the French in the early twentieth century, wrote an essay that encouraged people to not use the term “Annam” to refer to the country. He produced historical evidence to argue that this was a term that the Chinese had created for Vietnam when it was under their control and that it had submissive connotations. Instead of using the term “Annam,” Nguyễn Vӑn Tố argued that historically the term that made the most sense to use was “Đại Nam,” meaning the “Great South,” a name that Nguyễn Dynasty emperor Minh Mạng had officially introduced in 1838.Footnote ¹⁴

That Nguyễn Vӑn Tố did not suggest using the term “Vietnam” demonstrates how inchoate certain ideas about the nation and its past still were at that time. It is in this context that Hồ Chí Minh penned his article “Our History Must be Studied” the following year. He also wrote and published a poem at that time called “The History of Our Country” (Lịch sử nước ta) that summarized key events over the previous two millennia.Footnote ¹⁵ As in his article, Hồ Chí Minh emphasized the importance of unity and concluded the poem with an appeal for people to unify under the Việt Minh. In other words, Hồ Chí Minh attempted to identify a key element of the past – unity – and to declare that the Việt Minh had the mandate to realize that goal (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Hồ Chí Minh at his writing desk, probably in Tonkin c. 1950. A picture of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin hangs on the wall behind him.

Source: Pictures from History/ Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

This new interpretation of the past was one that many other Vietnamese shared. However, not all of them agreed with Hồ Chí Minh about the need to unify under the aegis of the Việt Minh. In March 1945, the Japanese took full control of French Indochina by imprisoning Vichy officials and ordering Nguyễn Dynasty Emperor Bảo Đại to declare Vietnam’s independence. A government was quickly formed with historian Trần Trọng Kim serving as prime minister. While Trần Trọng Kim’s own history of Vietnam was conservative in its approach, a certain Nguyễn Duy Phương quickly produced a new history of Vietnam to mark the establishment of this new government and the country’s nominal independence. Entitled The History of the Independence of Vietnam, Nguyễn Duy Phương sought to place the Trần Trọng Kim administration at the end of a long line of historical struggles for independence.Footnote ¹⁶ That said, at only twenty-six pages, and undoubtedly written in a hurry, Nguyễn Duy Phương’s history offered cursory and uneven coverage of the past. It began with a discussion of the Trưng Sisters’ struggle against Han Dynasty rule in the first century CE and then discussed other instances of resistance during the millennium of Chinese rule. This was followed by a detailed discussion of Lê Lời’s struggle against the Ming in the early fifteenth century. The text concluded with some brief comments about the colonial period.

Trần Trọng Kim’s government did not last long, but the model for writing about the Vietnamese past that first emerged in the 1940s with the brief writings of Hồ Chí Minh and Nguyễn Duy Phương did. In August 1945 Japan surrendered and the Việt Minh declared Vietnam to be independent under its authority. This of course was challenged by the French and the French Indochina War began late the following year. While some intellectuals joined the Việt Minh, others remained in French-controlled territory. One such person, Phạm Vӑn Sơn, took this time to write a more comprehensive history of Vietnam than either Hồ Chí Minh or Nguyễn Duy Phương had been able to produce. Entitled A History of Vietnamese Struggles, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s work likewise focused on the topic of struggles for independence and resistance to foreign attacks. It began with a discussion of the Trưng Sisters, whom Phạm Vӑn Sơn referred to as “the two Joan of Arcs of Vietnam.” He devoted chapters to wars with the Chinese and the Cham and detailed the various “independence movements” (vận động độc lập) that arose between 1861 and 1945. The various revolutionary parties that sought to bring about independence in the first half of the twentieth century were also discussed, as was the August Revolution of 1945. Uncertain which direction Vietnam would take in the future, Phạm Vӑn Sơn provided chapters in his book on Emperor Bảo Đại, who had just agreed to work with the French to establish the State of Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh, who was fighting the French.Footnote ¹⁷

Historical Scholarship in South Vietnam

Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s A History of Vietnamese Struggles was first published in Hanoi in 1949. When the French Indochina War ended in 1954, Phạm Vӑn Sơn followed hundreds of thousands of other people in migrating to the South. His text was subsequently republished numerous times in Saigon. Meanwhile, Phạm Vӑn Sơn continued to write new works, including a multivolume survey of Vietnamese history entitled A New Compilation of Việt History that began to appear in 1956.Footnote ¹⁸ As such, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s scholarship can be seen as representing a continuation in South Vietnam of an approach to writing about the past that had ties to earlier periods, as it perpetuated certain ideas that had been produced by historians during the colonial era, under the Trần Trọng Kim administration and the State of Vietnam. In this way, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s writings were not unlike the government of South Vietnam, which built on the expertise of men who had served in earlier regimes.

At the same time, however, historians in South Vietnam, like their government counterparts, also contributed to the process of decolonization. While they built on, and cited, the work of colonial-era scholars, South Vietnamese historians also sought to produce new historical scholarship that could help create a national spirit (tinh thần dân tộc) for their young nation. The University of Hue, established in 1957, set this process in motion. It employed an historian from Taiwan who had spent time at the EFEO in the 1940s, Chen Jinghe, to lead a group of scholars to start cataloging and translating Nguyễn Dynasty documents. It also produced a journal called University (Đại học) that published articles on topics ranging from French philosophy to Vietnamese linguistics and history. One of the early issues included an article by a young historian who had recently returned from graduate school in Belgium, Trương Bửu Lâm, that called for a new national history curriculum.Footnote ¹⁹

The University of Huế was supported not only by the South Vietnamese government but also by foreign organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, The Asia Foundation, the Committee of the American Sponsors of the University of Huế, and the American Friends of Vietnam. It was part of a Cold War effort to build a democratic and prosperous South Vietnam. That effort started to falter, however, as the university became embroiled in the tumultuous events of 1963 that led to the assassination of President Ngô Đình Diệm in November of that year. The university’s Catholic rector, Cao Vӑn Luận, was dismissed by President Diệm for supporting the Buddhists, and although he was briefly reinstated after Diệm’s assassination, the times had changed. University ceased publication and the Nguyễn Dynasty historical sources project was discontinued.

This was not, however, the end for historical scholarship in South Vietnam. On the contrary, professors and students at Saigon Normal University collaborated to start publishing a journal in 1965 called History and Geography (Lịch Sử và Địa lý). This journal was published continuously until 1975 and it featured the work of historians who had come of age during the colonial era, such as Phạm Vӑn Sơn, Hoàng Xuân Hãn, Hồ Hữu Tường, and Phan Khoang, as well as a new generation of South Vietnamese historians, such as Tạ Chí Đài Trường and Nguyễn Thế Anh. In an effort to create a sense of a national spirit, albeit one with a southern emphasis, these historians published articles on famous figures in Vietnamese history, such as Trương Công Định, a Nguyễn Dynasty official who led a resistance war against the French in Cochinchina in the 1860s, Phan Thanh Giản, a Nguyễn Dynasty official who committed suicide in 1867 for failing to prevent the French from gaining control of Cochinchina, and Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the Tây Sơn Rebellion.Footnote ²⁰

Historical Scholarship in North Vietnam

Like their counterparts in South Vietnam, Historians in North Vietnam were eager to produce historical writings to educate the population under their control. However, whereas South Vietnamese historians built on the work of colonial-era scholars, the historians in North Vietnam sought to make a deliberate break with the world of colonial scholarship. They criticized the “colonial mindset” of EFEO scholars and strove to produce scholarship that was free of colonial influence. Ironically, North Vietnamese historians attempted to do this by closely following another foreign model of knowledge production, Marxist historiography, which they learned from Chinese and Soviet writings.

This process formally began in 1953, when the French Indochina War was still underway, with the establishment of the Institute of History. Scholars affiliated with this institute set about discussing various issues that their Chinese and Soviet counterparts were debating, such as how to periodize Vietnamese history following Marxist stages of development, and how to determine when the Vietnamese nation was first formed, using Stalin’s definition of a nation. The various viewpoints that scholars proposed were published in a journal called Literature, History and Geography (Vӑn sử địa).Footnote ²¹

Some historians also worked on producing surveys of Vietnamese history. The first to do so was a man who wrote under the name of Minh Tranh (Khuất Duy Tiễn). In 1936 Minh Tranh became a communist, and during the French Indochina War he served as a propagandist, journalist, and editor for the Việt Minh. He was also a committee member of the Central Department of Literary, Historical and Geographical Research (Uỷ viên Ban Nghiên cứu Vӑn Sử Địa Trung ương). In 1954 Minh Tranh published a book entitled a Draft Brief History of Vietnam (Sơ thảo lược sử Việt Nam) that was meant to serve as a history textbook for schools in North Vietnam. This work closely followed Marxist theory. It divided Vietnamese history into periods of primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, etc., and highlighted peasant rebellions as examples of the struggle of the working class against the oppression of the feudal elite.

Two years later, in 1956, historian Đào Duy Anh published another survey entitled the History of Vietnam (Lịch sử Việt Nam). Đào Duy Anh saw value in the Marxist approach to history; however, he felt that Marxist theory had to be adapted to the Vietnamese context rather than rigidly imposed, and this survey was essentially devoid of Marxist theory. Further, in an interview published that same year in the journal Humanities (Nhân Vӑn), Đào Duy Anh criticized the restrictions being placed on scholars at that time.

This journal was one of two journals (the other being Giai Phẩm, or Masterpieces) that critiqued government restrictions on artistic and intellectual life following the French Indochina War. The North Vietnamese government cracked down on this critique, an event that is known as the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm Affair. In 1958 Đào Duy Anh’s scholarship was denounced, and Minh Tranh’s Draft Brief History of Vietnam was upheld as an ideal model for the writing of Vietnamese history. However, that honor did not last long – Minh Tranh was demoted in 1963 for his “revisionist” view against expanding the war in the South.Footnote ²²

Both these men were in their fifties when they were demoted, and a new generation of historians in their twenties emerged to take their place. In the early 1960s, for instance, archaeologist Hà Vӑn Tấn and historian Trần Quốc Vượng published a volume on early history called the History of the System of Primitive Communism in Vietnam (Lịch sử chế độ cộng sản nguyên thủy ở Việt-Nam) and contributed a volume on early history to a three-volume history entitled the History of the Vietnamese Feudal System (Lịch sử ch́e độ phong kiến Việt Nam).Footnote ²³ The second volume in this series, on premodern history, was authored by historian Phan Huy Lê. Meanwhile, the final volume, on modern history, was written by Phan Huy Lê, Chu Thiên, Vương Hoàng Tuyên, and Đinh Xuân Lâm.Footnote ²⁴ Four of these men – Hà Vӑn Tấn, Trần Quốc Vượng, Phan Huy Lê, and Đinh Xuân Lâm – would continue to produce historical writings for decades to come and came to be known as the “Four Pillars of the Field of History” (Tứ trụ sử học).

Although the titles of these works indicate an effort to follow the ideas of Marxist historiography, with the expansion of the war in 1963 historians in North Vietnam abandoned the strict adherence to Marxist theory that Minh Tranh had promoted in the 1950s in favor of a more nationalistic approach to the past. North Vietnamese historians ceased writing about class divisions and conflicts and focused instead on unity. Further, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Cultural Revolution, and Nixon’s visit to China were all events that gradually introduced an anti-China element in historical writings. This topic was broached in subtle terms in the mid-1960s as historians began to write about a history of “resistance to foreign invasion” to mobilize the population, but it eventually reached extreme levels during and after the 1979 border war with China.

An additional important development in this period was an intense focus on ancient history. A series of conferences were held in Hanoi in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which scholars from various fields sought to prove that the earliest rulers in the Red River Delta, the mythical Hùng kings, had truly existed. Here the work of North Vietnamese archaeologists was particularly important as they tried to find material evidence for the existence of these rulers that could make up for the absence of solid textual information. In the end, archaeologists did find many artifacts, but nothing that could unquestionably prove the existence of the Hùng kings. As such, while scholars initially sought to verify that these kings had existed, they ended up declaring that “the period of” the Hùng kings had existed. Nonetheless, that was sufficient to serve the nationalist need of the moment to rally people behind the war effort by pointing to the supposed antiquity of the Vietnamese nation with its heartland in the Red River Plain.

In the 1970s, these developments culminated in what we can consider the orthodox history of Vietnam as it is known in Vietnam today. This view of the past argues that there was a unified and culturally and linguistically distinct group of people who lived in the Red River Delta long before the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties extended their control into the region at the end of the first millennium BCE. This group of people endured a thousand years of Chinese domination, but emerged again as an independent nation, and that nation has been fighting off successive efforts by foreigners to encroach on their land ever since. Finally, in the twentieth century, this Vietnamese orthodox history argues, the task of resisting foreign invasion was led by the Communist Party.

This is the interpretation of the past that Hồ Chí Minh argued in 1942 the Vietnamese needed to know. By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the inhabitants of half of what is now Vietnam had been taught this version of history for a good twenty years. In the years that followed, the other half of Vietnam was introduced to this interpretation of the past. To launch this effort, in 1976, the Institute of History in Hanoi published a book entitled The Country of Vietnam is One, the People of Vietnam are One (Nước Việt Nam là một, dân tộc Việt Nam là một). In it, the anonymous collective authors argued for the historical unity of Vietnam, and highlighted the Communist Party’s role in unifying the country.Footnote ²⁵

Anglophone Histories of Vietnam

As the above discussion should make clear, the version of Vietnamese history that gained prominence in Vietnam after 1975 has its own long, complex history. By contrast, writings about the Vietnamese past in English have a shorter history. However, in the years following the end of the Vietnam War, these writings likewise culminated in a kind of “official” version of the Vietnamese past, one that mirrored the official version in Vietnam in significant ways.

When the US government first intervened in Vietnamese affairs in the 1950s, there was very little information available in English about Vietnamese history. Over the subsequent two decades, various writers and scholars tried to fill this gap. Lacking knowledge of the Vietnamese language, the earliest English-language writers relied heavily on the work of a very limited number of scholars writing in French, such as Lê Thành Khôi, an expatriate Vietnamese in Paris, and Paul Mus, a French scholar and colonial official.

The first survey of Vietnamese history in English was Joseph Buttinger’s The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam.Footnote ²⁶ Buttinger was an Austrian-born socialist politician who fled his home country in 1938, first for France and then the United States. During World War II, Buttinger started working for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organization that aided refugees. In 1954 the IRC sent Buttinger to South Vietnam to assist the government in settling the hundreds of thousands of refugees who moved south of the 17th parallel under the Geneva Accords. This was Buttinger’s first exposure to Vietnam, and he was so impressed by the country and its people that he spent the next four years reading everything he could find in Western languages on Vietnam and writing a survey on Vietnamese history.

In researching and writing this book, Buttinger was particularly influenced by a survey of Vietnamese history published in 1955, Lê Thành Khôi’s Vietnam: History and Civilization, the Environment and History.Footnote ²⁷ Lê Thành Khôi was born and raised in Hanoi but then went to study in Europe where he received a Ph.D. in economics in Paris in 1949 and then went on to study international law at the Hague. Vietnam: History and Civilization was his first work of history. Influenced to some extent by Marxist theory, Lê Thành Khôi argued that French colonization had led to the emergence of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, but a sense of romanticism for the past led him to play down the existence of any class antagonisms in the precolonial period. He was similarly positive about a future under a “Marxist democracy” in “the new Vietnam,” the topic of his brief concluding chapter.

Buttinger did not reproduce Lê Thành Khôi’s views, but he did rely heavily on Vietnam: History and Civilization to create a basic narrative of the Vietnamese past. Buttinger’s work also mirrored that of Lê Thành Khôi in that it focused primarily on premodern history, and in fact, only provided a chronology of events for the twentieth century. In a footnote, Buttinger blamed French scholars for an imbalance in historical information about Vietnam, as he argued that the French, “in accordance with French colonial policy,” had “consistently ignored the reality of Vietnamese nationalism” and the many developments that led to its rise. “In short,” he noted, “they ignored the development of the forces that they had to fight after 1945.”Footnote ²⁸

When war did break out after 1945, there was one French scholar who did seek to understand the forces that the French faced in Vietnam: Paul Mus. Born in France but raised in Hanoi, Mus became an expert on early India and Southeast Asia and was employed by the EFEO. He then fought in various capacities in World War II, served as a political advisor for the high commissioner for Indochina in the immediate postwar years, and finally returned to academia, teaching both in France and at Yale University. Warfare and the August Revolution of 1945 had a transformative effect on Mus’s ideas.Footnote ²⁹ Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mus took Vietnamese nationalist aspirations seriously and even came to empathize with the Vietnamese.Footnote ³⁰ At the same time, however, his positive views of the Vietnamese and their anticolonial struggle were still framed in Orientalist terms that explained to his Occidental readers how these, albeit dynamic, Oriental people thought.Footnote ³¹

As the Vietnam War got underway, Mus’s description of the Vietnamese struck a chord with his students in the United States, particularly Frances FitzGerald who visited Vietnam in 1966 as a journalist and went on to publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Vietnam War and its historical background, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.Footnote ³² This book begins with a chapter entitled “States of Mind,” and following Mus, to whom the book is dedicated, Fitzgerald describes the Vietnamese world as one that functions based on a different logic. With numerous references to texts and ideas in the Sinitic cultural tradition, from the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, Fitzgerald describes a world of thought and action that is completely alien to the American experience.

Ultimately what FitzGerald and many others who followed argued is that Vietnam was a country that Americans simply did not understand, and that once they did understand Vietnam better they would see that it was a foe the United States could not take lightly. This latter point was highlighted in an extremely influential work by George Kahin and John Lewis entitled The United States in Vietnam. Although the authors did not know Vietnamese, their depiction of Vietnamese history was strikingly similar to the interpretation that Hồ Chí Minh in 1942 argued that his compatriots must adopt. Like Hồ Chí Minh, Kahin and Lewis viewed Vietnamese history as a long story of efforts to resist foreign intrusions and to maintain the independence of the country, arguing that “for many centuries a basic and constant theme of [Vietnamese] nationalism was freedom from China’s domination,” and that with the end of colonial rule, “this theme reasserted itself with traditional vigor.”Footnote ³³ One difference with the past, according to Kahin and Lewis, was that now nationalism had “fused” with communism.Footnote ³⁴ Their message was thus that the Americans were facing a foe that for millennia had fought off previous attempts by foreigners to control their land.

This vision of the Vietnamese past became extremely popular among members of the antiwar movement, and over time, it made its way into countless publications, two of the most influential being Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, a History and Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990.Footnote ³⁵ Such works were often produced by authors who did not know Vietnamese. Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1980s there were scholars proficient in the language who produced more grounded studies of the Vietnamese past. Nonetheless, many of these studies focused on gaining a better understanding of the communist side, and in so doing perpetuated Hồ Chí Minh’s interpretation of the past that placed the communists at the center of Vietnamese history.

Since the 1990s, there has been a new wave of Anglophone scholarship on Vietnamese history. Produced by scholars who write in English but who read Vietnamese and who have conducted extensive archival research, this body of scholarship has moved away from the essentialized renderings of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese history that were produced in and outside of Vietnam in the twentieth century. This work has eschewed the depiction of the Vietnamese past as a perpetual struggle against foreign domination; it has also challenged the habit of depicting the communists as the primary drivers and central actors in twentieth-century Vietnamese history. In these accounts, modern Vietnamese history appears as a much more complex tale of multiple efforts to build Vietnam based on competing visions of the future. This scholarship, in turn, has opened up new perspectives on the history of the Indochina Wars – including the “Vietnam War” that began in the late 1950s and continued until 1975. In the chapters that follow, readers will find many instances of these new perspectives and the historical insights that can be gleaned from them. These new perspectives and insights are undoubtedly very different from what Hồ Chí Minh had in mind when he declared in 1942 that “our history must be studied.” But they are no less a part of the still-unfolding tradition of seeking to understand Vietnam through its vibrant and fascinating history.