Sino-Vietnamese Culture

Evan-Moor Publishing

About 4 pages (1,114 words)

Vietnam Summary

Sino-Vietnamese Culture

The term "Sino-Vietnamese culture" designates the part of Vietnamese culture that has been very heavily influenced by China and that uses classical Chinese as its medium of expression. Because Vietnam was part of the Chinese empire from the second century BCE until the tenth century CE, China was able to mold Vietnam in its own cultural image. China introduced methods of cultivating the land, Chinese rituals of life, the Chinese writing system, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Chinese administrative structures, and so on. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese people continued to speak their own language and retained their sense of national identity. Vietnam rejected Chinese political domination in the tenth century, but Chinese culture continued to exert a powerful influence on Vietnamese institutions as well as on the literature of the scholarofficial elite class.

The structures and organization of the Vietnamese government were almost identical to their Chinese models. The monarchical system in Vietnam supported a ruler, called, like the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven. Like his Chinese counterpart, he had absolute power and the title of emperor; he was also endowed with a reign name and posthumous glorification. The central government of Vietnam was composed of six ministries. The civil service, or mandarinate, had nine ranks, each divided into two steps, so that it ran from the low 9B to the high 1A. The local administration governed provinces, prefectures, and districts. At the lowest level of government were the villages, also called communes, which had their own hierarchy of notables, selected by the villagers themselves from among the inhabitants of their own locality. These notables were not considered members of the mandarinate; as in China, to become a civil servant one had to pass rigorous examinations that tested appplicants' ability to write official documents, compose poetry in prose and verse, comment on Confucian texts, and analyze critically certain contemporary events. The language of the examinations was classical Chinese. Successful candidates were appointed right away to official positions according to the degrees they had earned. Usually the lowest degree holders would be appointed to ranks 7A–6B and the highest ones to 3A or 3B. The last of these examinations were held in Hue in 1917.

Vietnamese law also followed the example of China. While the code published under the Late Le dynasty (1428–1788) showed some original features appropriate to Vietnamese situations, the Gia Long Code of the Nguyen dynasty (1802–1955) was a close copy of Qing-dynasty legal codes. Even under French colonial rule, the Vietnamese court used the Gia Long Code.

How much of that Confucian influence permeated to the lower levels of Vietnamese society remains a topic of debate to this day. Some scholars maintain that Confucianism stayed within the elite scholarofficial class, and that the Vietnamese common people retained their indigenous traditions. This is a difficult position to defend, given that one can find popular songs such as the following, which makes light of Confucian virtues:

You want to go but I do not let you go
On your blouse I write three letters
Loyalty is for our fathers and Filial Piety for our mothers,
As for us, let us have Love.

In Sino-Vietnamese culture one can list countless Vietnamese works of literature that follow all the techniques and stylistic canons of Chinese literature, down to the plots of novels and the inspirational interior or exterior landscapes of poetry. Ironically, the vast body of Sino-Vietnamese literature includes a large number of anti-Chinese texts, composed to raise the morale of Vietnamese troops in their resistance against Chinese invasion or to celebrate victories over Chinese armies. Classical Chinese was still used in the pamphlets, poems, and letters of anti-French nationalists such as Phan Boi Chau (1867–1940) and Phan Chau Trinh (1872–1926) up to the 1920s.

A writing system that used Chinese characters to transcribe the sounds of Vietnamese words, called nom, may have been invented by the eleventh century, but Vietnamese who saw themselves as serious writers never gave it much consideration. Nom literature cannot, by any measure, rival Sino-Vietnamese literature as far as works of nonfiction are concerned. As for creative writing, an official 1989 almanac list of the one hundred best books in the entire history of Vietnamese literature included twenty-one written in nom, twenty in Sino-Vietnamese, two in French, and fifty-seven in quoc ngu, the transliteration system that uses the Roman alphabet. The adoption of quoc ngu by the French colonial government, who proclaimed it the official writing system of Vietnam, marked the weaning of Vietnam from Chinese influence.

China was also the route by which Buddhism entered Vietnam. Although Theravada Buddhism could have come to Vietnam from the South, it happened that communication was easier from north to south and thus it was Mahayana Buddhism that came to Vietnam, through China. Buddhism was so eagerly accepted that Buddhist monks became the highest administrators in the first independent governments of Vietnam. The founder of the Ly dynasty was a Buddhist monk of sorts. The Tran dynasty (1225–1400) was also deeply devoted to Buddhism, although the progress of Confucianism pushed Buddhism out of the governing circles and into the hearts of the common people. Practically all Buddhist publications were written in classical Chinese; even certain prayers, which originally were composed in Sanskrit, had their sounds transcribed in Chinese. Vietnamese Buddhism has never actually been cut off from Buddhism in China. Up to the nineteenth century, relations between the two churches could not have been closer: Vietnam purchased incense, books, and other Buddhist necessities regularly from China. Exchanges of monks occurred on a regular basis.

Taoism in Vietnam has never been strongly tied to Taoism in China. It is the least institutionalized religion in Vietnam, with no real worries concerning orthodoxy and no books, sets of prayers, or texts of incantations that need to be exactly reproduced from an original version. In effect, Taoist superstitious beliefs and practices found in Vietnam a favorable enough environment for the faithful to nurture and develop their own conviction without any external props.

In the arts, government, law, religion, indeed, in every aspect of life, Chinese culture has left an enduring imprint on Vietnamese culture. It is a relationship Westerners can understand if they consider the relationship between the cultures of the peoples of Western Europe and ancient Greco-Roman culture.