1 Khánh, Huỳnh Kim, Vietnamese communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 82–3Google Scholar.

2 Works that have addressed this debate, either implicitly or explicitly include: Tân, Văn, Cách mạng Tây Sơn [The Tây Sơn revolution] (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Sử Địa, 1957)Google Scholar; Tân, Văn, Quốc Sử Quán Triều Nguyễn đối với khởi nhghĩa Tây Sơn’ [The Nguyen history board and the Tay Son righteous uprising], Nghiên cứu lịch sử 65 (Aug. 1964): 14–21Google Scholar; Liệu, Trần Huy, ‘Đánh gia cuộc cách mạng Tây-Sơn và vai trò lịch sử cuả Nguyễn Huệ’ [Evaluating the Tây Sơn revolution and the historical role of Nguyễn Huệ], Văn sử địa 14 (Feb. 1956): 30–44Google Scholar; Trường, Tạ Chí Đại, Lịch sử nội chiến ở Việt Nam từ 1771 đến 1802 [History of the civil war in Việt Nam from 1771 to 1802] (Sài Gòn: Văn Sử Học, 1973)Google Scholar.

3 Such episodes were often those centred on political transitions and concerned questions of legitimacy. These included the rise of the Ho clan, the Mac seizure of power, the eighteenth-century challenges to Trinh authority, and various nineteenth-century uprisings against the Nguyen court.

4 Tønnesson, Stein, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a world at war (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1991), pp. 2–5Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 3.

6 Ibid., p. 5.

7 There are of course efforts, such as Goldstone's, to identify multiple shared attributes that can be used to identify revolutions. While this is a useful exercise, my essay is less concerned with systematic and scholarly efforts to identify revolutions than it is with the deployment of the term in self-conscious fashion by participants in the events, and for particular purposes. Goldstone, Jack, ‘The comparative and historical study of revolutions’, Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982): 187–207Google Scholar.

8 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 171Google Scholar.

9 Peycam, Philippe M.F., The birth of Vietnamese political journalism: Saigon, 1916–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 19–21, 50–52Google Scholar.

10 Ký, Trương Vĩnh, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine, (Saigon: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1875), p. 82Google Scholar; my translation; emphasis added.

11 Other nineteenth-century Vietnamese dictionaries published in Cochinchina do not include any terms for revolution. The term does not appear in either the 1877 or the 1898 editions of the Dictionnaire Annamite–Français published in Saigon. Nor is it found in Huỳnh Tịnh Của's 1895 Đại Nam Quấc Âm Tự Vị. Furthermore, neither of these dictionaries even carries the older Chinese usage of ‘ge ming’ in reference to a changing of the fates of heaven, suggesting perhaps that the term was sufficiently obscure as to not be considered relevant for inclusion of a dictionary focused on more commonly used terms and compounds, or, equally likely, that it was not recognised as a compound.

12 Ký, Trương Vĩnh, Petite dictionnaire Français–Annamite (Sài Gòn: Imprimerie de la Mission, 1884), p. 1032Google Scholar.

13 One could certainly trace the use of the word ‘révolution’ among Francophone scholars and students over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century. Such an inquiry could examine French-language newspapers of the period, as well as the writings of such prominent figures as Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh and Nguyễn An Ninh, among others. I suspect that the word would have come into relatively frequent use in their respective political commentaries. For this article, however, I have opted not to follow this track, which would require an article in itself. One should at least bear in mind, however, that this sense of ‘revolution’ continued to coexist with more indigenised forms. Moreover, given their own exposure to and experience of the French language, even the most prominent Vietnamese revolutionaries, such as Hồ Chí Minh, would have continued to use the term ‘révolution’ as a part of their political discourse, which would have distinguished them from their Chinese and Russian revolutionary counterparts.

14 Woodside, Alexander, Community and revolution in Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 54–5Google Scholar, explores the development of xã hội in the Japanese context, and the implications of its importation to Việt Nam; interestingly Hồ Chí Minh also uses the term to illustrate the introduction of neologisms into the Vietnamese language, see Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập [Complete works of Ho Chi Minh] (Hà Nội: NXB Chính Trị Quốc Gia, 2000), vol. 2, p. 160.

15 It also has the unrelated meaning of animal hide or skin.

16 I say ‘kind of compound’ here for while the characters were used together, they were not being used as a noun compound — i.e. there was not really a sense of ‘revolution’ as a thing. Rather, the characters were used together as a phrase — the verb of change being enacted upon the object (fate or rule). Indeed, this juxtaposition of these characters seems to have been relatively rare. The individual characters, especially 命, were much more typically used independently of each other.

17 Mathews, R.H., Mathews’ Chinese–English dictionary, rev. American ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 497Google Scholar.

18 Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org/; last accessed 8 May 2014); trans. in Sailey, Jay, The master who embraces simplicity: A study of the philosopher Ko Hung, A.D. 283–343 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1978), p. 129Google Scholar.

19 Chinese phrase taken from the Chinese Text Project; trans. in Sailey, The master who embraces simplicity, p. 205. The first sentence might also be rendered: ‘Tang and Wu kept rightly that which they had acquired wrongly.’

20 The text is taken from the Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org/; last accessed 8 May 2014). The translation was generously provided by my colleague David Schaberg, who puzzled out that 天乙 was the given name of the founder of the Shang Dynasty.

21 Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/ (last accessed 8 May 2014). My translation.

22 Nhậm, Ngô Thì, Ngô Thì Nhậm toàn tập [The complete works of Ngo Thi Nham] (Hà Nội: NXB Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2004), vol. 2, p. 617Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 641.

24 This should not be confused with a periodical by the same name that Liang Qichao was also publishing during this period. See Lee, Theresa Man Ling, ‘Liang Qichao and the meaning of citizenship: Then and now’, History of political thought 28, 2 (2007): 310Google Scholar.

25 The entire text in Chinese can be found at: http://www.chinapage.com/big5/prose/xms.htm (last accessed 30 Sept. 2011).

26 Ibid.

27 Châu, Phan Bội, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập [The complete works of Phan Boi Chau] (Hà Nội: NXB Thuận Hóa, 2000), vol. 3, p. 149Google Scholar. Like all of Phan Bội Châu's writings, this one was produced in classical Chinese, and was then published and distributed back to Việt Nam. In this case, the original Chinese text has been lost, so this version is derived from a contemporary French translation. One presumes that the term ‘革命’ was in the original, though there is no way of being absolutely certain.

28 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 394.

29 Trinh, Phan Châu, ‘A new Vietnam following the Franco–Vietnamese alliance’, trans. in Phan Châu Trinh and his political writings, ed. Sinh, Vĩnh (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2009), pp. 72–4Google Scholar.

30 Vĩnh Sinh, Phan Châu Trinh, pp. 28–33; also Bradley, Mark, Imagining Vietnam and America: The making of postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 20–23Google Scholar.

31 Trinh, Phan Chu Texts, in Tổng tập văn học Việt Nam [General collection of Vietnamese literature] (Hà Nội: NXB Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2000), vol. 19, p. 184Google Scholar.

32 Quốc dân độc bản [Volume to be read by the nation's people] (1907), reprinted as Văn thơ Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục [Literature of the Tonkin Free School] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn Hóa, 1997), pp. 462–3Google Scholar.

33 Mai, Đặng Thai, Văn thơ cách mạng Việt Nam, đầu thế kỷ XX (1900–1925) [Vietnamese revolutionary poetry, beginning of the twentieth century] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn Học, 1974)Google Scholar.

34 There is a similar and striking absence of the term in Mark Bradley's discussion of the degree to which early twentieth-century Vietnamese were enamoured of the American Revolution and its implications. Bradley provides a detailed discussion of these scholars and their engagement with and writings on such external models, and yet the term ‘revolution’ itself does not appear. In short, these men were able to talk about the American Revolution without talking about a ‘revolution’. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America, pp. 20–23.

35 Tổng tập văn học Việt Nam (vol. 19), p. 616; also Đăng Thai Mai, Văn thơ cách mạng, p. 387.

36 Tổng tập văn học Việt Nam (vol. 19), p. 565.

37 Phan Bội Châu, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập, vol. 5, p. 207.

38 Marr, David, Vietnamese anticolonialism, 1885–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 259Google Scholar.

39 All page references are to Phan Bội Châu, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập, vol. 5.

40 Hải Triều, Muốn thì được: Ai-nhỉ-lan cạch-mạng lược-sử [If you wish it, you will receive it: A summary history of the Irish revolution] (Gia Định: 1922), p. 1; this reference to the ‘loss of the country’ [亡國] is a reference to the Mozi, in which the phrase notes that a ruler who loses the support of his scholars will lose his country.

41 Ibid., p. 3.

42 This is, of course, a considerable simplification of the Vietnamese Revolution's course. The first phase did also include social transformation, most notably the land reform campaign, which began in 1953, and the nature and extent of social and economic transformation after 1954 varied considerably between the DRV and the NFL-held territories south of the seventeenth parallel.

43 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, pp. 81–2.

44 Nguyễn Thượng Huyền (1868–1925) was a classically trained scholar who had passed the civil service examination and had later served in the Nguyễn court's administration. In 1907, however, he left his position to take part in the Đông Du movement, travelling to Japan. After a failed effort to recruit followers in Thailand for an attack on the French, he went to China, where he retired at a Buddhist monastery in Hangzhou.

45 While such writings often took the form of newspaper articles, some were published instead (or also) as pamphlets.

46 Nguyễn Thượng Huyền, La révolution, trans. of Cách mệnh (n.p., n.d.).

47 Ibid., pp. 1–2.

48 While it is true that the early Chinese texts included the term ‘ge minh’ to refer to the political transitions affected by these rulers, it is equally clear that this represented dynastic transitions, rather than transformations of the underlying political systems.

49 Nguyễn Thượng Huyền, La révolution, p. 3.

50 Marr, Vietnamese anticolonialism, p. 207.

51 Ibid., p. 207.

52 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, p. 82.

53 Quoted in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, p. 175.

54 Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, vol. 2, p. 160. My translation.

55 Ibid., pp. 160–61.

56 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, p. 83.

57 Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, vol. 2, p. 161.

58 Ibid., p. 261.

59 Ibid., p. 263. Intriguingly, Hồ follows this by a list of revolutionaries that begins not with Marx, but with Galileo, followed by Stevenson (inventor of the steam train), and Darwin, and it is only after these three that he brings up Marx.

60 A useful discussion of the text is found in Duiker, William, ‘What is to be done? Hồ Chí Minh's Đường kách mệnh’, in Essays into Vietnamese pasts, ed. Taylor, Keith W. and Whitmore, John K. (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1995), pp. 207–20Google Scholar.

61 Anh, Đào Duy, Hán Việt từ điển [Chinese–Vietnamese dictionary], reprint (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hóa-Thông Tin, 2009 [1931]), p. 55Google Scholar.