1 Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 and Yang Jialuo 楊家駱, eds, Ming shi 明史 [History of the Ming] (Taipei: Dingwen Shuju, 1980), (P.8315) 2020/9/25, Scripta Sinica: http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanjieb?fcbedgmjW.

2 Nguyễn Diên Niên and Lê Văn Uông, eds, Lam Sơn thực lục [Veritable records of Lam Sơn] (Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bàn Khoa học xã hội, 2006), p. 25b (hereafter LSTL).

3 Phạm Thận Duật, Hưng Hoá địa chí 興化地志 [Hưng Hoá gazetteer] (Viện Hán Nôm, A.620), p. 22a.

4 Chinese and Vietnamese sources are not in accord, and therefore scholars still debate whether Trần Thiêm Bình was an actual Trần royal family member or merely an opportunistic servant of the former dynasty. There are various interpretations over whether restoring the Trần dynasty was the true goal of the Ming or merely a convenient pretext for annexing Đại Việt. For a fairly representative Vietnamese view, see Phạm Văn Kính, ‘Nhà Minh xâm lược nước ta lần thứ nhất và sự thất bại của nó’ [The first Ming invasion of our country and their defeat], Tạp chí nghiên cứu lịch sử [Historical Research Review] 210 (1983): 61–8.

5 For a discussion of Ming colonialism in Vietnam and ‘proto-colonialism’ in Southeast Asia in this period, see Geoffrey Wade, ‘Domination in four keys: Ming China and its southern neighbors, 1400–1450’, in Ming China: Courts and contacts, 1400–1450, ed. Craig Clunas, Jessica Harrison-Hall and Luk Yu-ping (London: British Museum, 2016).

6 Anderson, James A. and Whitmore, John K., ‘The Dong World: A proposal for analyzing the highlands between the Yangzi valley and the Southeast Asian lowlands’, Asian Highlands Perspectives 44 (2017): 8–71Google Scholar. For an argument for the historical connectedness of upland and lowland spaces and people in more recent Vietnamese history, see Salemink, Oscar, ‘A view from the mountains: A critical history of lowlander–highlander relations in Vietnam’, in Upland transformations in Vietnam, ed. Sikor, Thomas, Tuyến, Nghiêm Phương, Sowerwine, Jennifer and Romm, Jeff (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), pp. 27–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For a helpful discussion of the meaning and origin of the term dong, see Chengda, Fan, Treatises of the Supervisor of the Cinnamon Sea, trans. Hargett, James M. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010): li–liiGoogle Scholar.

8 Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 20–21Google ScholarPubMed.

9 Anderson and Whitmore, ‘The Dong World’. Zomia has inspired much debate and critique. See, for example, the special issue of Journal of Global History, particularly Jean Michaud's Introduction, which points out that Zomia did in fact contain polities; Michaud, J., ‘Editorial: Zomia and beyond’, Journal of Global History 5, 2 (2010): 187–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Here I follow the terminology of Elvin, Mark, Retreat of the elephants: An environmental history of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 195Google Scholar.

11 Mathers, Steve and Zalasiewicz, Jan, ‘Holocene sedimentary architecture of the Red River Delta, Vietnam’, Journal of Coastal Research 15, 2 (1999): 314–25Google Scholar; Li, Zhen, Saito, Yoshiki, Dang, Phong X., Matsumoto, Eiji, Vu, Quang Lan and Barker, Graeme, ‘Warfare rather than agriculture as a critical influence on fires in the Late Holocene, inferred from northern Vietnam’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, 28 (2009): 11490–95CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. My thanks to Bradley Camp Davis for these references.

12 Tana, Li, ‘Swamps, lakes, rivers, and elephants: A preliminary attempt towards an environmental history of the Red River delta, c.600–1400’, Water History 7 (2015): 199–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tana, Li, ‘Towards an environmental history of the eastern Red River Delta, Vietnam, c.900–1400’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 45, 3 (2014): 315–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Hieu Phung, ‘Land & water: A history of fifteenth century Vietnam from an environmental perspective’ (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 2017).

14 Dyt, Kathryn, ‘“Calling for wind and rain” rituals: Environment, emotion, and governance in Nguyễn Vietnam, 1802–1883’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10, 2 (2015): 1–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ming shi, p. 8315.

16 Andrade, Tonio, The gunpowder age: China, military innovation, and the rise of the West in world history (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 55–6Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 119.

18 Kenneth M. Swope, ‘Gunsmoke: The Ming invasion of Đại Việt and the role of firearms in forging the southern frontier’, in China's encounter on the south and southwest: Forging the fiery frontier over two millennia, ed. James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore (Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 156–68; Sun Laichen, ‘Military technology transfers from Ming China and the emergence of northern mainland Southeast Asia (c.1390–1527)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, 3 (2003): 495–7.

19 Sun, ‘Military technology transfers’, p. 509. Indeed, LSTL mentions that massive amounts of weapons and horses were captured from the Ming army after several battles, see pp. 13b–14b; 20b, 23b, 24a. Likewise, it describes a 1418 ambush during which Lê Lợi's forces flanked Ming troops and shot at them from both sides with 弩藥. The Vietnamese translators interpret the weapons used as poisoned arrows, but 藥 could also refer to gunpowder, which seems to be a more likely translation. LSTL, p. 12b.

20 LSTL, p. 7a.

21 John K. Whitmore, Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371–1421) (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), pp. 91–2. For an excellent recent synopsis, see James Anderson, ‘The Ming invasion of Vietnam, 1407–1427’, in Haggard and Kang, ed., East Asia in the world, pp. 97–107.

22 Edward H. Schafer, The vermilion bird: T'ang images of the South (Warren, CT: Floating World, 2008 [1967]).

23 For studies of zhang in the Song and Ming periods, respectively, see Yun-ju Chen, ‘Accounts of treating zhang (‘miasma’) disorders in Song dynasty Lingnan: Remarks on changing literary forms of writing experience’, in Chinese Studies 漢學研究 34, 3 (2016): 205–54; Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of epidemics in Chinese medicine: Disease and the geographical imagination in late imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2011), esp. pp. 69–90.

24 Fan Chengda, trans. Hargett, Treatises of the Supervisor, pp. 133–4.

25 Qu Dajun (1630–96) identifies both mist and insects as the origin of miasmic illness, for example.

26 See for example, David Bello, Across forest, steppe, and mountain: Environment, identity, and empire in Qing China's borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 169–218; Anthony Reid and Jiang Na, ‘The battle of the microbes: Smallpox, malaria, and cholera in Southeast Asia’, ARI Working Paper no. 62 (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2006), pp. 1–19.

27 For a clear and concise overview of this issue as it relates to miasma, see Hanson, Speaking of epidemics, pp. 7–8. For a theoretical essay on walking the line between realism and relativism in the history of science, see Bruno Latour, ‘On the partial existence of existing and non-existing objects’, in Biographies of scientific objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 247–69.

28 Li Wenfeng 李文鳳 and Yue Jiao Shu 越嶠書 [Book of the jagged peaks of Viet] (Tainan: Zhuang Yan, 1996), p. 700.

29 Ibid., pp. 701–3.

30 Ibid., p. 706.

31 For a historical overview of the classification of ‘Miao’, see Norma Diamond, ‘Defining the Miao: Ming, Qing, and contemporary views’, in Cultural encounters on China's ethnic frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 92–116. In Southeast Asia, ‘Hmong’ is used instead of Miao to classify some speakers of Miao-Yao languages. The term ‘Miao’ was rather broadly applied in late imperial texts and should not be seen as an unproblematic description of the Hmong.

32 Li, Yue Jiao shu, p. 707.

33 Ibid., p. 709.

34 Chen Chingho A. 陳慶浩, ed., Daietsu shiki zensho/ Đại Việt sư ký toàn thư 大越史記全書 [Complete historical records of Đại Việt] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo Fuzoku Toyogaku Bunken Senta, 1984), p. 128. Hereafter DVSKTT.

35 DVSKTT, p. 148.

36 Ibid., pp. 199–200. Also found in Kao Hsiong-tcheng 高熊徵, Ngan-nan tche yuan 安南志原 [Treatise on Annan], ed. E. Gaspardone and Léonard Aurousseau (Hanoi: Imprimerie d'Extrême-Orient, 1932, pp. 165–6 (hereafter ANZY). For an earlier period, see Catherine Churchman's suggestion that the Li-Lao people inhabiting the borderlands served as a buffer zone between China and Vietnam. Churchman, ‘“The people in between”: The Li and Lao from the Han to the Sui’, in The Tongking Gulf through history, ed. Nola Cooke, Tana Li and James A. Anderson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 67–84.

37 See Cheng Wing-sheong 鄭永常, Zhengzhan yu qishou: Ming dai Zhong-Yue guanxi yanjiu 征戰與棄守：明代中越關係研究 [Attack and abandon: Research on Sino–Viet relations in the Ming] (Tainan: Guoli Chenggong Daxue Chubanzu, 1998); Kathlene Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating borders in early modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 49–60.

38 DVSKTT, p. 291.

39 Wang Gungwu, ‘Chang Fu’, in Dictionary of Ming biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 67.

40 Keith Taylor, A history of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 180–83.

41 See further Whitmore, Vietnam, Hồ Quý Ly, and the Ming.

42 For a recent and forceful representative of this view, see Wade, ‘Domination in four keys’, pp. 17–20.

43 Anderson, ‘The Ming invasion of Vietnam, 1407–1427’, pp. 97–8.

44 For a brief overview of the Ming conquest of Yunnan, see Yang Bin, Between winds and cloud: The making of Yunnan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

45 Geoff Wade, ‘Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th century: A reappraisal’, ARI Working Paper no. 28 (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2004), pp. 7–8. See also Wade ‘Domination in four keys’, p. 18.

46 Wade, ‘Ming China and Southeast Asia’, p. 28.

47 Wade calls the dependence on Vietnamese soldiers an inefficiency and a ‘flaw’ in ‘Domination in four keys’, p. 19.

48 On the montane–littoral divide, see John K. Whitmore, ‘Ngo (Chinese) communities and montane–littoral conflict in Dai Viet, ca. 1400–1600’, Asia Major 27, 2 (2014): 53–85.

49 Anderson, ‘Ming invasion of Vietnam’, p. 97.

50 Taylor, A history of the Vietnamese, pp. 178–80. On Vietnamese products in demand, see Whitmore, Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming, p. 126.

51 Wade, ‘Domination in four keys’, p. 18.

52 ANZY, pp. 13, 16.

53 Wang Gungwu, ‘Huang Fu’, in Dictionary of Ming biography, p. 654; Wade, ‘Ming China and Southeast Asia’, p. 28.

54 DVSKTT, p. 556.

55 Taylor, A history of the Vietnamese, pp. 185–6. Taylor writes here that there is no evidence to judge that Ming rule was any more rapacious than indigenous rule; John K. Whitmore, ‘Talk on the Dong World’, paper presented at the John Whitmore Conference, Yale Southeast Asian Studies Council, 16 Oct. 2020.

56 For more on the book's origin, see Usta Serna Ungar, ‘Vietnamese leadership and order: Đại Việt under the Lê dynasty, 1428–1459’ (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1983), p. 161. There is scholarly debate about the authorship and dating of the LSTL. For a textual history of LSTL, see Lê Vân Hảo, ‘Nguyễn Trãi với Lam Sơn thục lục’ [Nguyen Trai and Lam Son thuc luc] Tạp chí nghiên cứu lịch sử 192 (1980): 53–9. While Lê Vân Hảo accepts Nguyễn Trãi as the main author writing on behalf of Lê Lợi, Nguyễn Công Lý views Nguyễn Trãi as one of several authors, including Nguyễn Nhữ Soạn and Ngô Sĩ Liên. Nguyễn Công Lý, ‘Danh Nhân Nguyễn Trãi: Sự Hội Tụ Những Tinh Hoa của văn hóa Thăng Long thời Lý-Trần’ [The famed Nguyen Trai: The quintessence of Thang Long culture in the Ly-Tran period], Tạp chí Hán Nôm 1, 104 (2011): 16.

57 Lam Sơn thực lục, pp. 7a–7b.

58 Historians generally translate Wu as ‘Chinese’ or conflate it with ‘Ming’, though Whitmore suggests that it refers to diasporic Chinese in the eastern Red River Delta and Liam Kelley too sees it as more narrow, as something like ‘false Ming’. Whitmore, ‘Ngo (Chinese) communities’; Liam Kelley, ‘The BNĐC series: A conclusion of sorts’, 14 Aug. 2016, https://leminhkhai.blog/12-the-bndc-series-a-conclusion-of-sorts/ (accessed 14 Oct. 2020).

59 LSTL, pp. 25b–26a; DVSKTT, p. 547. The version in DVSKTT is the same but for five characters. An English translation of the Bình Ngô đại cáo can be found in Truong Buu Lam, Patterns of Vietnamese response to foreign intervention: 1858–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1967), pp. 56–62.

60 The distant location and difficulty of obtaining these drugs contributed to their perceived value and potency, according to medical experts like Li Shizhen. Carla Suzan Nappi, The monkey and the inkpot: Natural history and its transformations in early modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 114. For example, the Bencao gangmu, citing an earlier bencao, records that the black deer is the culmination of a long process of transformation: ‘A deer turns gray after [it has lived for] a thousand years. In another five hundred years it turns white, and in another five hundred it turns black. A black deer's bones are also black. If you dry its meat and eat it, it will extend your life.’ It also notes that the deer is plentiful in the southern mountains. Li Shizhen, Li Shizhen quan ji (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004), p. 3447.

61 Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese architecture: A history (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 153.

62 Annan zhiyuan, pp. 125–6.

63 Aurelia Campbell, What the emperor built: Architecture and empire in the Early Ming (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020); Ian M. Miller, Fir and empire: The transformation of forests in early modern China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), pp. 140–59.

64 LSTL, p. 7b. On the construction and importance of walls in the Ming, see Andrade, Gunpowder age, pp. 96–102.

65 Ming Shi, juan 321. For a study of this process in the Atlantic world, see John McNeill, Mosquito empires: Ecology and war in the greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

66 On Nguyễn Trãi's ghostwriting for Lê Lợi, see Stephen O'Harrow, ‘Nguyen Trai's “Binh Ngo dai cao” of 1428: The development of a Vietnamese national identity’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 10, 1 (1979): 159–74, esp. pp. 164–7. He describes Nguyễn Trãi as a ‘propagandist’ whose writing conferred ‘Confucian respectability’ on the upstart ruler.

67 LSTL, p. 7a; Ungar, ‘Vietnamese leadership’, p. 53.

68 The connection between heavenly portents and political legitimacy in Chinese and Vietnamese statecraft is well established. For a case study involving Lê Lợi and Nguyễn Trãi and the interpretation of a drought, see Phung, ‘Land & water’, pp. 177–86.

69 LSTL, p. 11b.

70 Lê Thời Tân, Nguyễn Văn Phương and Dương Văn Duyên, ‘Truyền thuyết Hồ Hoàn Kiếm một cách đọc liên văn bản’ [The legend of ‘Returned Sword Lake’: An intertextual reading], Trường Đại học sư phạm TP Hồ Chí Minh Tạp chí khoa học [Ho Chi Minh City University of Education Journal of Science] 16, 2 (2019): 83–91.

71 LSTL, pp. 9a–b; Ungar, ‘Vietnamese leadership’, pp. 52–3.

72 O'Harrow, ‘The development of a Vietnamese national identity’.

73 Kelley, ‘The BNĐC series’.

74 Ungar, ‘Vietnamese leadership’, p. 97.

75 LSTL, p. 27a.

76 Ibid., p. 27b.

77 LSTL, p. 28a.

78 See Wade, ‘Domination in four keys’, pp. 22–3, for examples of Ming stelae in Southeast Asia and a comparison with Portuguese practice.

79 Phạm Thận Duật, Hưng Hoá ký lược, p. 22a.

80 This term is applied to Lê Lợi throughout LSTL. See for example, p. 8a.

81 Whitmore, ‘Talk on the Dong World’.

82 Tây Nam biên tái lục 西南邊塞錄 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, microfilm no. 28870, 1966), p. 32b.

83 For a study of how the disease environment of southwest China necessitated tusi rule, see Bello, Across forest, steppe, and mountain, pp. 169–218; Emmanuel Poisson, ‘Unhealthy air of the mountains: Kinh and ethnic minority rule on the Sino-Vietnamese frontier from the fifteenth to the twentieth century’, in On the borders of state power: Frontiers in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region, ed. Martin Gainsborough (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 12–24.

84 DVSKTT, p. 677.

85 Ibid., p. 673.

86 Ibid., p. 698.

87 Ibid., p. 711.

88 Ibid., p. 727.

89 Ibid., p. 757.