Phụ lục (Sách nầy chỉ là bản văn khai triển bài tường trình-sau đây ở Hội Nghị Quốc tế về lịch sử Á châu ở-Hương cảng, 1964.)

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ASIAN

HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

AUGUST 30 - SEPTEMBER 5, 1964

CHINESE ORIGIN OF THE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE

REV. NGUYỄN-PHƯƠNG

(University of Huế, Việt-Nam)

The origin of the Vietnamese people is a challenging subject to the student of history. Difficulties arise not only from the scarcity of historical data, but also from emotional interpretations of earlier Vietnamese historians who thought it their obligation to exalt the beginning of their fatherland. Through centuries, their teachings had gained importance, had taken shape in popular traditions, and finally were regarded as truths.

When France came over to Việt-Nam to impose her unhappy domination, some of her scholars had a quick look at the subject. Their researches, at times plausible, did not lead to any valuable conclusion. They pointed out a number of errors committed by Vietnamese historians, but, being entangled in the web of earlier thoughts, they still considered the emotional framework of the traditionalists as unshakable.

But, if one has enough patience to go attentively over the records concerning the long period when China began to populate the territory which later bacame Vietnamese, one can get sufficient light to recognize that the mainstream of the Vietnamese people came from China and that it was the Chinese blood in them that gave them their vigorous vitality in the march southward to their present boundaries.

The traditionalistic school of the Vietnamese history is represented by every official historian of the successive dynasties, but mainly by two known annalists named Lê Văn Hưu and Ngô Sĩ Liên. Lê Văn Hưu lived under the dynasty of the Trần (1225-1400) and wrote his Đại Việt Sử Ký in the second half of the 13th century. This work is now lost, but what its author had said can still be seen in the writings of Ngô Sĩ Liên who had named his books Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư. Undertaking his narrative two centuries later, Ngô Sĩ Liên intended to give a complete history of Đại Việt. To this end, he did not only start from where his predecessor had stopped, i.e. from the events that happened from the first ruler of the Trần dynasty until the middle of the fifteenth century, but also brought back the beginning of the Vietnamese history for a period of more than two thousand years. If Lê Văn Hưu had been contented himself with taking the first dynasty of Nan-Yue, the dynasty of the Tchao (207 B.C.-111 B.C.), as the first dynasty of Đại Việt, Ngô Sĩ Liên, on the other hand, proudly claimed that the person who founded his country had been Kinh Dương Vương, a king would have begun his reign on 2869 B.C., who, in reality however, turned out to be but a creation of a certain novelist under the T'ang dynasty.

Generally speaking, the Vietnamese historians of the traditionalistic school got confused about persons and places found in the works of Chinese history. They could not distinguish between the different groups of people designated by the Chinese under the general word "yue", and thought naively that any yue group could have been of the same origin as that of Đại Việt. They got also confused about the historical value of earlier writings, assuming that whatsoever had been written was historical record. In this poor state of appreciation, they took the princes Hiong of the old kingdom of Tch'ou as their kings Hùng or considered Tchao T'o as the first legitimate Vietnamese ruler.

It is surprising, however, to remark that, while they took Chinese elements to build their nationalistic history, they, nonetheless, consistently affirmed the special character of the Vietnamese people. According to them, the Vietnamese were no Chinese; they had an origin of their own, and from the very beginning, had fought against the Chinese to keep their independence. These historians repeated that the name of the old Vietnamese kingdom was Văn Lang, but did not know for sure where that kingdom was situated.

Some of these nationalistic biaises were denounced by a French historian, Henri Maspéro. In two articles published in the Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient (Nos XVI and XVIII), Maspéro proved that the king Hùng in the Vietnamese history did not exist and Văn Lang was but an error. He insisted that the first rulers of Việt Nam were Lạc Vương, meaning that the tribe Lạc Việt was the ancestors of the Vietnamese people.

A few years later, archeological and paleontological discoveries brought into light remains of an indonesian life and civilisation in Northern Việt Nam. Evidence showed that before the coming of the Chinese which happened at the end of the second century B.C., the Indonesians were already there with their new-stone-age instruments. This is mostly the result of the careful researches of Henri Mansuy and Madeleine Colani. Historians therefore took advantage of these findings and concluded that, because the Indonesians were the Lạc Việt, they were consequently the Vietnamese's ancestors.

Meanwhile, in 1923, Léonard Aurousseau, then Director of the French Archeological School in Indochina, proposed his opinion on the origin of the Vietnamese people, that had prevailed for some decades. Referring to different texts taken from Chinese history books, he intended to establish that the Vietnamese, originally, were descent of the inhabitants of a little kingdom situated on the Tcho River in the Fou-Kien region named Yue. He reasoned: the Yue kingdom was crushed by the Tch'ou in 333 B.C.; its inhabitants had to take refuge and, therefore, scattered here and there in Southern China; that was the origin of the Hundred Yue, among them was the Lo Yue.

Aurousseau's theory, with its too easy logic, could not stand too long. Soon historians began to question its foundation and then abandoned it for good. In fact, it rested on shaky assumptions, that is, on the similarity of the word "yue, Việt" (Việt Quốc, Lạc Việt, Việt Nam) and on the migration of the inhabitants of the Yue kingdom on the Tcho River, southward to North Việt Nam. First, it is not sure that the word "yue" had the global meaning of a tribe, but it was rather used by Chinese writers to designate all the tribes who lived in Southern China beyond the Yang-Tse River. Secondly, if the inhabitants of the Yue kingdom had been decimated by disaster in the war with the Tch'ou, how could they multiply themselves so quickly, or spread over so large an area and travel so far?

As early as 1937, another French writer, Claude Madrolle, had tried to underline the weaknesses of Aurousseau's theory. He condemned it as unscientific and unsound. To give his own interpretation a more solid ground, he relied on measure and quantity. His belief was that people of the same size belong to the same origin. He found that the sizes of the inhabitants of Tonkin, cradle of the Vietnamese population, could be classified into two general kinds: those of 1m62 and those of 1m58. He found also that people of smaller size made up the majority of the population and people of taller size belonged only to some villages on the coast. Madrolle's conclusion: The Vietnamese people had two origins, one aboriginal, and one coming from abroad; people of smaller size were aboriginal and those of taller size came from China because in the region of Fou-Kien, there were also people of that size i.e., cf 1m62.

Madrolle's view is just a droll one. Man's size changed from generation to generation, and depended less on heredity than on food and physical exercises. Furthermore, it is really adventurous to base on sizes, measured in 1937, to argue about the sizes effects of people of more than two thousand years ago.

In sum, the theories mentioned above did not deal properly with the origin of the Vietnamese people. They are not entirely unbeneficial, but their historical conclusions are only mixed truths. It is right to think that the Vietnamese people came from China, but it isn't right anymore to affirm with Aurousseau that they came from the little Yue kingdom on the Tcho River. And, if it is true to say that there was a combination of origins in the Vietnamese, it is utterly wrong to assert with Madrolle that people of taller size are from Chinese ethnological stock, and those of smaller size are aboriginal.

Perhaps, the fact of history happened in a more realistic way.

On one side, it is now an archeological and paleontological evidence that before the coming of the Chinese in Northern Việt Nam, people of Indonesian race lived there. They were there from the newstone age down to the bronze age, and now, they are still living in different montainous parts of Việt Nam. History also identified these Indonesians with the Lạc Việt, because it said that the Lạc Việt tribe had as a specialty the kettledrums in bronze, and archeology discovered that these kettledrums are Indonesian works.

On the other side, it is an everyday ascertainment that the Vietnamese are not Indonesians, i.e., they are different from the mountainous population called Moi. Not only they have no Indonesian appearance, but also they have no Indonesian culture, no Indonesian tradition, or religion. Everything about them, on the contrary, invites us to link them with the Chinese: Language, tradition, religion, appearance. Archeology proved it, and everyday observation is proving it. This fact, therefore, compels us to conclude that even the Lạc Việt are not Vietnamese ancestors. But, is it to say that, in the Vietnamese, there is no Indonesian trace at all? No, there is. This trace, however, is now becoming so faint that it is almost entirely immersed in the Chinese characteristics.

How to interpret all that?

All that points out that the Vietnamese origin was Chinese. The faint Indonesian trace found in them resulted from the first relations between the Chinese newcomers and the aboriginal Indonesians, in the early days of the Chinese settlement. But soon, with military and political organisation, Chinese colonies spread over the tillable land of the commanderies of Giao Chỉ, Cửu Chân and Nhật Nam. The Chinese population, only a minority in the beginning, became a majority after centuries of colonisation, and finally the inhabitants of the countryside of the whole territory were Chinese, the autochthonous Indonesians occupying the mountainside as ever before and becoming more and more comparatively negligible.

This dominance of the Chinese is seen clearly in the sixth century when Lý Bí, a descendent of the Chinese settlers in Giao Chỉ, revolted against Chinese authorities in view of obtaining local independence, but the process of the Chinese takeover is discernable right up in the first century A.D., in the revolt of the Sisters Trưng. Then, the Chinese settlers were already numerous enough in the commandery of Giao Chỉ to form an army of 12.000 soldiers to help the Chinese General Ma Yuan to defeat the Lạc Việt leaders. By 140, the Chinese not only populated the commandery of Giao Chỉ, but also went down to colonize the farthest part of the Empire, the commandery of Nhật Nam. When war broke out there between the Chinese forces and the indigenous, the authorities of the Celestial Throne had to set up plans to evacuate their countrymen to Giao Chỉ where they could be safer.

Thus, in the tenth century, when the Đại Việt, later Việt Nam, was born, it was but the spectacle of the Chinese settlers in this territory who broke political ties with their mother country and united themselves to form a new nation. Politically independent from China, they continued however to carry in them Chinese blood, to use Chinese characters, to follow Chinese traditions, and to march southward as vigorously as ever before until the South Sea stopped them at Cà Mau. Cut off and settled in new environments, they might differentiate, little by little, from the Chinese cultural and social mainstream, and develop national special characteristics of their own, but when they look back to find out what was their origin, they have to confess that theirs was Chinese.

Sau hết, một điều nên nhớ nữa, làsở dĩ nước Việt Nam đâm rể sâu và phát triển mạnh trong ý thức độc lập của mình, đó là còn bởi sự người Việt Nam, mặc dầu bắt gốc từ Trung Quốc, đã không còn thuần túy Trung Quốc.

Chúng tôi đã trình bày dài dòng và nêu lên mạnh mẽ sự họ là những kẻ đã từ Trung Quốc di cư sang cổ Việt trong thời Bắc thuộc. Nhưng cũng không được bỏ qua sự kiện nầy là họ, khi di cư sang, đã ở với dân Lạc Việt, và nhiều thứ dân man khác, rồi với dân Lâm Ấp.

Những dân đó không thể làm cho họ cải biến, bất cứ về phương diện nào, nhưng lại có thể làm cho họ phong phú thêm, phong phú về mọi phương diện, chẳng hạn về nhân chủng, về phong tục, về ngôn ngữ.

Với nguồn gốc đó, với sinh lực đó, và với sự phong phú đó, người Việt Nam là người Việt Nam, và càng ngày càng Việt Nam...

Nhà in SAO MAI

75. Nguyễn Huệ - HUẾ