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I wrote this project in 2002, and am putting it up just to provide info about the 19th-century history of Siam, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Quite alot of my coverage on early SEA history is not comprehensive, or uses sources that have been challenged by later scholarship. So please forgive my lack of expertise and feel free to correct me.

The Failed Vietnamisation of Cambodia and Xieng Khouang, 1832-1941


CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Historical Context of Vietnamisation
- The Tai Migrations and the Decline of Angkor
- The Viet “Push to the South”
- The Division of Lan Xang
- The Restoration of Siam and Vietnam

3. The Vietnamese Annexations of Xieng Khouang (1828-1832) and Cambodia (1832-34)
- The Phuan Annexation
- The Cambodian Annexation

4. The Failure of Vietnamisation (1834-1841) and the Last Siamese-Vietnamese War (1841-1847)
- The Rationale for Vietnamisation
- The Rationale for Resistance
- The Return to “Independence”

5. Conclusion

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INTRODUCTION

In the first half of the 19th century, the two dominant powers of mainland Southeast Asia - Siam and Vietnam - competed aggressively for control over the weaker territories that lay between them: the kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos. The Cambodian king and Lao princes tried to preserve their independence by playing the two suzerains against each other, but usually failed with dire consequences for themselves and their people. The first victim of this struggle was the Lao kingdom of Vientiane , which was destroyed by Siamese armies in 1828. In the aftermath of this conflict, the neighbouring principality of Xieng Khouang (a vassal of Vientiane) was annexed by Vietnam. The Phuan of Xieng Khouang had long resented their overbearing overlords in both Vientiane and Siam, and so did not resist Vietnamese occupation at first. However, this reception did not last long, and rebellions quickly broke out when the Vietnamese tried to impose a programme of cultural assimilation upon the Phuan.

Meanwhile, Siam and Vietnam had been supporting rival claimants to the Cambodian throne since 1811. The Vietnamese won the first round of military intervention and made Cambodia their ‘protectorate’, but Siam invaded again in 1832. The Vietnamese army had prevailed by 1834, and this time they also annexed Cambodia as a province. The irony is that the Cambodian people usually adopted a passive or cooperative attitude towards Siamese intervention, but Vietnamese patronage was often fiercely resisted. This was particularly so after Vietnam began trying to remake the Cambodians in their image, as they had been doing in Xieng Khouang. By 1847 the Vietnamese were out of Cambodia, and by 1852 Xieng Khouang was returning to the Siamese fold. Before long, the French were making their presence felt in Indochina, and the question of ‘Vietnamisation’ was completely submerged among the more dramatic changes brought by the tide of Western colonial expansion. In other words, one ‘civilising mission’ was eclipsed by another, and this time the Vietnamese were on the receiving end as well. With hindsight, the whole turn of events seems as laughable as the Chinese fable of the snipe and the mussel locked in mortal combat when the fisherman chances upon the scene.

We should not forget, however, that the sufferings involved were very real for the Phuan and Cambodians of the time, as were the perceived stakes of their resistance. Two related questions remain: why did Vietnamisation fail in Cambodia despite the previous success of Vietnam’s southward expansion into Champa and the Mekong Delta? On the other hand, why despite Xieng Khouang’s desire to break free from Thai and Lao supremacy, did they not embrace Vietnamese cultural and political patronage? While past studies have tended to focus more on the political ambitions, personal rivalries and strategic aspects involved in the struggle, my project will try to analyse it in the context of a fundamental incompatibility between Hindu-Buddhist and Sino-Confucian cultural values and political traditions. By looking at events from the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Phuan points of view, I hope to reach a clearer understanding of why this 10-year attempt at Southeast Asian acculturation, the last prior to the ascendancy of Western influence, so abruptly failed.

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THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF VIETNAMISATION

The Tai Migrations and the Decline of Angkor

In order to understand how the kingdoms of Cambodia and the Lao came to be on the receiving end of Vietnam’s drive for imperial expansion, it would be necessary to start with a broad survey of the history of mainland Southeast Asia from the 13th century at least. The great and ancient Khmer kingdom of Angkor, which at its height in the late 12th century had included large parts of present-day Thailand and Laos, entered a period of rapid decline after the death of King Jayavarman VII in 1219. The costly, incessant wars between Angkor and neighbouring Champa finally came to an end a year later, when the Cambodians pulled out of Cham territory.

Meanwhile, the Tai peoples (including the present-day Thai, Lao, Phuan and Shan) had been gradually migrating from southern China into the uplands of Southeast Asia, and then down into the floodplains of the Chao Phraya and the valley of the middle Mekong. By the 11th century the Tai had established themselves peacefully on the peripheries of the overextended Khmer empire and the powerful Burmese kingdom of Pagan. In the Mongol invasions from the 1250s to 1280s, which destroyed Pagan and further weakened Angkor, many Tai chieftains allied themselves with the Mongols and took advantage of the political vacuum to found kingdoms of their own. The two earliest were Lan Na and Sukhotai, followed in the 1350s by Ayudhya and Lan Xang.

Ayudhya soon conquered Sukhotai, formed an alliance with Lan Xang and engaged in a long war with Lan Na. However, the Thai of Ayudhya also directed their ambitions towards the shrinking empire of Angkor. From 1352 to 1431, they thrice laid siege to Angkor, and the latter two times were successful. The Khmer then decided that the city was no longer defensible and abandoned it, moving south to a new capital in Phnom Penh. The end of Angkorean civilization also marked a shift in mainland Southeast Asian religious culture, from the syncretic Brahmanism (with some Mahayana Buddhist elements) of Indianised Angkor to the relatively orthodox Theravada Buddhism (with some Indian elements) that the Tai had adopted from Mon monks. This new culture was eventually borrowed by the Khmer to replace their now-decaying cult of the God-king (Devaraja), and became their dominant tradition up to the mid-19th century.

The Viet “Push to the South”

Concurrent with the rise of Ayudhya and its conflict with Angkor, the conflict between Dai Viet and the ancient Cham kingdom was also reaching its end at last. The Cham were an Indianised Austronesian people who had ruled present-day central Vietnam since the 3rd century. Intermittent wars with Champa had begun not long after the Viets won their independence from Tang China in 939, but neither side could gain the advantage for long. From 1361 to 1390, the Cham king Che Bong Nga nearly succeeded in conquering Dai Viet until he was killed in battle, but the real turning point came with the rise of the Le Dynasty in Dai Viet, which in the 1440s launched an aggressive policy of southward expansion. This was mainly to relieve population pressure in the Tonkin delta, then the highest in mainland Southeast Asia.

From 1441, Champa was wracked by civil wars, which provided an opportunity for Viet armies. The Cham capital was taken in 1446 and again in 1471; the second time, it was razed to the ground and its entire population killed or taken prisoner. From then on, the state of Champa was reduced to a Vietnamese ‘protectorate’ in the far south of its former territory, where the remaining Cham gradually converted to Islam spread from Malacca and Majapahit. In 1447, a Viet army occupied Xieng Khouang and established the province of Tran Ninh (‘guarding the peace’), before withdrawing to leave the area under their nominal suzerainty. But in 1479, the Viet went on to invade Lan Xang by way of Xieng Khouang, inflicting heavy losses on the Plain of Jars and at Luang Prabang before being driven out. Such was the extent of pillaging that the famine that resulted is said to have reduced the population of Xieng Khouang from 90,000 to 2,000.

From the early 1500s onwards, however, the Le dynasty itself was split by a power struggle between three families – the Mac, Trinh and Nguyen. The Mac first usurped the Le throne, but were defeated in 1592 by the Nguyen and the Trinh, who restored the Le emperor. These two families, related by marriage, then fell out with the Trinh becoming dominant in the capital and the Nguyen taking control of the southern provinces. Both sides continued to regard the Le emperors as the legitimate rulers, while accusing each other of rebellion. Open warfare broke out in the 1620s, until finally in 1673 the two families agreed to partition Dai Viet at the Linh River and a century of peace began.

Even as this war was in progress, however, the Nguyen were little by little extending their territory towards the south, through the former lands of Champa and into the Cambodian provinces in the Mekong delta. First the Nguyen removed the last of the Cham kings, and then extended their influence into Cambodia, which had long been a ‘protectorate’ of Ayudhya. In 1623, the Cambodian king, after marrying a Nguyen princess, authorised the setting-up of a Viet custom-house that eventually became the city of Saigon. The weak Cambodian kings were quickly forced into vassalage to the Nguyen, who intervened openly in Cambodian politics, regularly supporting candidates in succession disputes against those favoured by the Thai. Meanwhile, the Nguyen also gradually annexed the fertile, underpopulated lands of the Mekong delta, filling them with settlers fleeing from bad harvests and the civil war to the north. By the 1750s, Viet territorial absorption of the delta was complete, effectively cutting Cambodia off from maritime access to the outside world.

The Division of Lan Xang

Coinciding with the Viet “push to the south” was the apogee and downfall of another major player in the region, the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang. Since the 14th century, Lan Xang had been an equal of its ally Ayudhya in both political and cultural terms. In the 1540s the alliance began to break down as the two competed for control over the weakened kingdom of Lan Na in Chiang Mai. An attack by the newly ascendant Burmese kingdom in 1563 forced them to join forces in defence, but both were ultimately defeated and fell under Burmese suzerainty until the 1590s.

Thereafter, with the decline of Burmese power, Lan Xang entered a golden age under King Surinyavongsa (r. 1637-1694). A destructive series of succession disputes followed the king’s death, however, in which none of the principal contenders was able to mobilise the necessary resources to convincingly defeat his rivals. One of them, Surinyavongsa’s nephew Sai Ong Hue, had grown up in exile in Trinh-controlled northern Dai Viet. In return for a pledge to recognise Viet suzerainty and pay an annual tribute, he received an army from the Trinh. He then made an agreement with the king of Xieng Khouang to march through Phuan territory in a successful attack on the capital, Vientiane. But a grandson of Surinyavongsa soon took the northern city of Luang Prabang and himself marched on Vientiane.

At this point, the king of Ayudhya intervened and in 1707 led a large army to Vientiane. He shrewdly forced the division of his rival Lan Xang into two kingdoms: Vientiane and Luang Prabang. Then in 1713, another of Surinyavongsa’s grandsons founded his own kingdom of Champasak in the south. Thus within two decades, Lan Xang had been reduced to three weak, warring kingdoms, each vulnerable to interference by outside powers. From then onwards, the Lao lost their equal status with the Thai, who moved to assert suzerainty over them.

The Restoration of Siam and Vietnam

Ayudhya’s ambitions, however, were interrupted by a massive invasion of the entire Tai world by the resurgent Burmese. Chiang Mai fell in 1763, Luang Prabang in 1765 and Ayudhya in 1767; the Thai capital was totally destroyed and its population carried off to captivity in Burma. The kingdom of Ayudhya came to an end, but a general named Taksin soon rallied the Thai to wage a ten-year war that drove out the Burmese, who were at this time also distracted by a Chinese invasion. At the same time, he sent armies into Cambodia in 1772 to intervene in a succession dispute, burning down Phnom Penh in the process. This was followed by successful attacks on Champasak in 1778 and Vientiane in 1779, the latter assisted by Luang Prabang troops as well. By 1782, when Taksin was deposed and replaced by General Chakri, the Lao kingdoms were completely under Thai hegemony. Chakri changed his kingdom’s name to Siam and established a new capital at Bangkok, founding the dynasty that still reigns there today.

At this time, Dai Viet was also shaken to its roots by the Tay-son peasant rebellion which began in the south in 1774. The rebels exterminated the house of Nguyen, except for one survivor who fled to Siam. They then attacked the north in 1786, destroyed the Trinh, defeated an intervening Chinese army, and replaced the powerless Le emperor with one of their own leaders. In 1789, however, the last Nguyen prince recaptured southern Vietnam with the help of Siamese, Cambodian and French forces. Nguyen Anh defeated the Tay-son in 1802, reunified the country as the Gia-long emperor, and then asked China for permission to change its name to Nam Viet. The Qing emperor found this inappropriate, since a separatist state in south China in the early Han dynasty had used the same name; he thus reversed the order of the words to ‘Vietnam’.

The rise of these dynamic new dynasties in Siam and Vietnam, while the power of the Cambodian kings and Lao princes remained in decline, meant that by the 1810s Cambodia, Vientiane and Luang Prabang were all paying tribute to both states. A certain stability was maintained with the Lao states and Cambodia serving as a buffer between the two expanding powers, but the self-aggrandising inclinations within both the Siamese and Vietnamese cultures soon began to generate tensions, especially after the British victory over Burma in 1826 neutralised the threat to Siam from the west. When two Siamese client rulers – King Chan of Cambodia, and then King Anou of Vientiane – began trying to break out of the Thai orbit by ostensibly transferring their loyalty to Vietnam, an explosive situation arose which would lead to Vietnamese intervention on a higher scale than they had ever envisioned.

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The Vietnamese Annexations of Xieng Khouang (1828-1832) and Cambodia (1832-34)

The Phuan Annexation

The Phuan of Xieng Khouang were perhaps the most hapless victims of the crossfire between Siam and Vientiane in 1827-28. One of the major Lao muang – semi-autonomous political centres under a local ruler subordinate to the king of Lan Xang – and hence also known as Muang Phuan, Xieng Khouang was never able, unlike the other three (Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Champasak) to actually assert its autonomy following the break-up of Lan Xang. This was because its geographical location made it a strategic crossroads sought after by all the surrounding powers: Vietnam, Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and later Siam. Throughout its history, Xieng Khouang has been forced to pay tribute to one or more of these states at a time as a symbol of their control over the plateau that is called the Plain of Jars.

Xieng Khouang has been an inhabited area for thousands of years; to the northwest of the capital lie three major Bronze Age sites littered with hundreds of large stone jars. Control of the plateau would enable an occupying power to sit astride invasion routes to Luang Prabang and Vientiane, as well as trade routes in all directions. The Phuan are said to be descended from the second son of Khun Bulom, the legendary ancestor of the Tai, while the Lao of Lan Xang are descendants of the eldest son. Thus the Phuan have traditionally regarded themselves as not only distinct from the Lao, but also of nearly equal status. From time to time they attempted to assert their independence, as the Lao later did in relation to the Thai, by refusing to send the triennial tribute (four branches of flowers made of gold, with 1,400 swords and other weapons made of silver ) or to take part in the usual marriage alliances. These attempts were almost always put down by military force. Instances of this are recorded in 1532 and 1651, the former a campaign that took two years, and the latter one that laid waste to the Phuan region, carried off some 500 families for resettlement near Vientiane, and forced Xieng Khouang to renounce its nominal tributary relationship with Trinh Dai Viet .

After the 1707 division of Lan Xang, the Thai king set down that all the northern principalities, including Xieng Khouang, would owe allegiance to Luang Prabang. However, Sai Ong Hue refused to accept this, and when the Phuan would not pay tribute to Vientiane, he sent an army to re-impose vassal status on them. Meanwhile, ties with the Lao states had grown so tenuous during the Lan Xang civil wars that the Phuan had again accepted nominal status, dating from 1447, as a province of Dai Viet called Tran Ninh (‘guarding the peace’). For most of the 18th century, Xieng Khouang sent an annual payment of 30kg of silver to the Viet emperor and 6kg to the Vientiane king, plus additional ‘gifts’ of ivory, silk, rhinoceros horn and beeswax to both.

Along with these exactions came intervention in Phuan politics by both sides. In 1790, King Nanthasen of Vientiane heard that King Somphu of Xieng Khouang was about to renounce allegiance to him, and sent an army to arrest him and imprison him in Vientiane. Somphu’s brother appealed to the Tay-son emperor to intervene as a suzerain, and a combined Tay-son and Phuan army began marching on Vientiane. Nanthasen then backed down and released Somphu with an agreement that Xieng Khouang would pay equal tribute to Dai Viet and Vientiane . Somphu was succeeded by his brother Noi, and Nathasen by his brothers Inthavong and then Anou. In 1823, King Noi’s foster-brother secretly accused him to Vientiane of rebellion and tyranny. King Anou summoned Noi to Vientiane and imprisoned him for three years, during which he tried to install a commoner as the new king, thus effectively reducing Xieng Khouang to a Lao province. The Phuan elders resisted this and sought Vietnamese support for Noi, upon which Vientiane again relented and accepted a compromise by which their candidate’s son was named deputy governor of Xieng Khouang.

In 1827, the year after King Noi’s release, King Anou rebelled against Siam and launched an attack on Bangkok. From 1806 to 1821, he had made some efforts to strengthen tributary relations with Vietnam, but not too thoroughly for fear of escaping one form of hegemony only to be locked into another. In the face of vastly superior numbers and fire-power, Anou’s army was defeated and he fled with his family by boat down the Mekong, then overland to Vietnam. The Siamese general Chaophraya Bodin put Vientiane to the sack; huge numbers of Lao were executed, fled to the jungle, or were forcibly resettled near Bangkok, and the kingdom of Vientiane was utterly destroyed.

Le Van Duyet, the Vietnamese governor of Saigon, proposed to attack Siam from the rear, via Cambodia, while its armies were occupied in Vientiane. But the Minh-mang emperor, wishing to avoid another war with Siam, decided to send Anou back to negotiate a settlement. In 1828, Anou returned to Vientiane with a force of 1,000 men, including 100 Vietnamese. But fighting soon broke out between the Lao and the Siamese garrison, and within months Anou was again forced to flee, this time to Xieng Khouang. Anou expected that Xieng Khouang, a vassal to both Vientiane and Vietnam, would guarantee his safe passage to Hue. However, King Noi turned him over to the Siamese, who later tortured and executed him in Bangkok. There have been three reasons suggested for Noi’s betrayal, all of which may be partly true: that he wanted revenge for Anou’s treatment of him in 1823, that Siam had promised him independence for Xieng Khouang in exchange for it, and that Siam had threatened to attack and destroy Xieng Khouang if Noi did not comply. But underlying all these must be the deeply rooted resentment of Vientiane overlordship among the Phuan.

Minh-mang, however, was highly displeased by this betrayal of one vassal king by another. When King Noi also failed to pay his annual tribute, it seemed that he was trying to “move gracefully out of the Vietnamese orbit now that the immediate Thai danger had disappeared.” The emperor summoned Noi to Hue, and when Noi pleaded ill and sent his eldest son Po in his place, Vietnamese soldiers were sent to Xieng Khouang to arrest him and his family. In 1829 they were brought to Hue, and in 1831 King Noi was executed. His wives and five sons remained in exile in Vietnam, while San, the deputy governor of Xieng Khouang was made the temporary governor by the Vietnamese. In 1832, Vietnam formally annexed Xieng Khouang as the province of Tran Ninh, to be administered by a Vietnamese official.

The Cambodian Annexation

Cambodian politics, which lacked a formal system of primogeniture, had been marked since the 17th century by frequent wars of succession, and the military weakness of the contenders often led them to seek either Thai or Viet backing. From 1658 to 1772, Nguyen armies intervened in Cambodia 8 times, and sometimes clashed with Thai armies sent for the same purpose: the Thai won in 1714-16 and again in 1772. With the outbreak of the Tay-son rebellion in Dai Viet, the Thai were given a free hand. They placed a 7-year old, Prince Eng on the throne in 1779 under the regency of a pro-Thai official. In 1790, Eng was brought to Bangkok and formally anointed as King before being sent back to Cambodia four years later; he died at the beginning of 1797, leaving four sons. One of them, Chan, was crowned in 1806, but he soon grew tired of Siamese domination and tried to strengthen tributary connections with Vietnam while maintaining his subservience to Bangkok. In 1807, he requested Vietnamese investiture, and received a gilded seal and a promise of protection against Siam in return for sending tribute every four years. Upon Rama I’s death in 1809, he refused to attend the cremation in Bangkok and executed two pro-Thai officials who did.
In 1811, therefore, Siamese armies invaded Cambodia planning to replace Chan with his brother Duang. Chan fled to Saigon, and the Vietnamese escorted him back with a large army. Reluctant to force a confrontation, the Siamese withdrew (taking with them Chan’s three pro-Siamese brothers), expecting the Vietnamese to do the same. Instead, the Vietnamese turned Cambodia into a protectorate with the governor of Saigon, Le Van Duyet, as its viceroy. Twice a month, King Chan and his entourage had to put on Vietnamese court costumes, visit a Vietnamese temple and bow before a tablet bearing the Gia-long emperor’s name. The Vietnamese probably also nurtured Cambodian grievances against Siam: Rama I had rewarded Eng’s regent in 1794 by giving him Battambang and Mahanokor (which contained the ruins of Angkor) as his own private domain, and in 1816 the Cambodians launched a failed attack on these two areas which remained under Thai suzerainty.

This, however, was soon overshadowed by Vietnamese ill-treatment of the Cambodians recruited to excavate the Vinh Te Canal from 1817 to 1820. It precipitated an anti-Vietnamese rebellion in 1820, led by a former monk or “person of merit” who was said to give his followers invincibility. The rebellion had to be crushed by a Vietnamese army because the Cambodian troops either defected or refused to fight. Though the Vietnamese still preferred to maintain indirect rule and give the Cambodian court some autonomy, claiming that “the purpose of the institution of the protectorate is to strengthen the preservation [of Cambodia]” , resentment against the Vietnamese continued to grow over the next decade. Meanwhile, relations between Siam and Vietnam had broken down over Vietnamese support for the Vientiane rebellion and the murder, by a Thai commander, of a Vietnamese embassy sent to King Anou.. In 1832, Le Van Duyet died, and when the Minh-mang emperor tried to remove Le’s son and successor Van Khoi from power, he seized Saigon and rebelled. King Rama III of Siam saw his chance to “restore the kingdom of Cambodia and to punish the insolence of Vietnam.”

Siamese armies entered Cambodia, escorting Chan’s two surviving brothers, Im and Duang. Simultaneously, they opened a northern front at Tran Ninh (Xieng Khouang) in concert with Luang Prabang forces, and also struck across the Annamite Cordillera into the Cam Lo area of central Vietnam. The Cambodian campaign succeeded in the short run, with the Vietnamese abandoning Phnom Penh and taking Chan into exile in Vietnam. However, the Siamese troops were repulsed in Cam Lo, while the well-fortified Vietnamese garrison on the Plain of Jars easily held out against Siamese attacks.

In 1834, the population of Xieng Khouang unexpectedly rebelled and massacred the Vietnamese garrison – apparently their leaders had secretly agreed to co-operate with the Siamese. But by this time, the tide had turned against the Siamese in Cambodia. Le Van Khoi’s rebellion in Saigon was crushed by General Truong Minh Giang, and soon logistical difficulties, lack of popular support and a Vietnamese counter-attack led by Giang forced Chaophraya Bodin to withdraw from Phnom Penh. The Siamese carried off more than 4,000 local people, including Im and Duang, of which perhaps a thousand managed to escape into the woods. King Chan returned to his capital, but under more stringent Vietnamese control. The initial success of the Thai offensive had shown Minh-mang that he could not rely on the Khmer to protect his southern and western borders, and he now ordered Truong Minh Giang to consolidate Vietnamese control.

King Chan died of illness at the end of 1834 , posing additional problems for the Vietnamese as he had no sons and his eldest daughter was suspected of being pro-Thai. They therefore chose his second daughter, Princess Mei, to be named as queen. A Vietnamese official was sent from Saigon to officiate at her investiture, where Mei and her sisters faced north, towards the emperor’s letter authorising her to reign, while the Vietnamese officials faced south, representing the position of the emperor in Hue. Cambodia was then officially renamed as the province of Tran Tay (‘guarding the west’).

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The Failure of Vietnamisation (1834-1841) and the Last Siamese-Vietnamese War (1841-1847)


The Rationale for Vietnamisation

By 1834, within two years of annexation, Vietnamese policies in Xieng Khouang had clearly stirred up enough anger for the Phuan to rebel. The same was to follow after five years of Vietnamisation in Cambodia: while anti-Vietnamese sentiment had already existed before annexation, as seen in the 1820 nak sel rebellion, there had not yet been a country-wide revolt led by both the political and the religious elites. It is thus important to understand why, despite the deep hostility that programmes of cultural assimilation encountered, the Vietnamese persisted in believing that this was the only reasonable way to administer a newly conquered province.

The Vietnamese “civilising mission” was founded upon the Sino-Confucian culture, which they had inherited from a millennium of Chinese rule, with its ethnocentric worldview and ingrained sense of cultural superiority. Certainly Sinicised traditions had not remained unchanged throughout Viet history: until the 13th century, Mahayana Buddhism was the dominant religion just as it was in China, and elements of Indianised Cham and Khmer culture remained among the peasantry of the south. But the rise of Neo-Confucianism in China led Vietnamese emperors to actively emulate its orthodoxy and downplay any deviations from the cultural ideal, and none more so than the first three emperors of the Nguyen dynasty (Gia-long, Minh-mang and Thieu-tri), who saw Confucian traditions as the only thing that could hold together a country long divided by political and regional rivalries. This imitative impulse extended to the Chinese view of themselves as a universal empire surrounded by barbarian peoples, who could be civilised simply by contact with Chinese culture and political institutions. To the Vietnamese, they themselves were major beneficiaries of this civilising effect, and it was now their duty and privilege to spread it in Southeast Asia.

What was unique to Vietnam was not the tributary system, which all powerful Southeast Asian states including Siam maintained, but rather the cultural and political pretensions that supported it. Vietnamese records listed all the neighbouring states as tributaries, but few of them actually sent tribute to Hue regularly. The real pattern, deliberately misinterpreted to accord with court protocol, was “to send gift-laden envoys to Vietnam whenever they needed a Vietnamese military counterweight to one of the other Southeast Asian courts… more suggestive of continental European diplomacy in the age of ‘the balance of power’ than it was of the Chinese diplomatic system” .

Furthermore, the Siamese court rarely attempted to transform the institutions and customs of the peoples who paid it homage: according to Hindu-Buddhist philosophy, the inclusion of outlying populations under its mandala (circle of power) was proof enough of the ruler’s ability and karmic merit. There was no concept of centralised administration within a defined territory, especially since in underpopulated Southeast Asia, control of relatively mobile populations was more important than that of the land they lived on. To the Vietnamese, on the other hand, once a province was established, its population would have to be responsive to social directives and moral exhortations from the central government, and to be tied to the land through census registers.

Thus the Vietnamese in Cambodia came “face to face with the fact that Cambodians were unaccustomed to the Sino-Vietnamese bureaucratic heritage… the glories of an officialdom based on merit – or with systematic military corvee and land and population registers.” Principles of irrigation works and of rice and grain storage, which the Vietnamese had assumed to be given, were absent in these loosely-populated and fertile lands, such that Vietnamese occupying armies had to be provisioned from south Vietnam. In 1834, Truong Minh Giang complained to Hue that

Quote

we have decided that Cambodian officials only know how to bribe and be bribed. Offices are sold; nobody carries out orders; everyone works for his own account. When we tried to recruit soldiers, the king was perfectly willing, but the officials concealed great numbers of people. When we wanted to compile a list of meritorious officials, the king was unwilling, because he was jealous.

What Giang was observing were the characteristics of Cambodian political culture, and traditional Southeast Asian political culture in general - diffusion of power, patron-client ties, indirect rule through deputies and “a negotiability of position that effectively kept anyone from becoming powerful for very long” - jarring with the Sino-Vietnamese formula of direct, permeative bureaucratic management

Minh-mang’s policy of Vietnamising Cambodia and Xieng Khouang had several facets: he sought to mobilise and arm the people to resist the Thai, to colonise the area with Vietnamese, and to reform the habits of the people. He also tried to standardise patterns of taxation, measurement and food supply. Control, especially over the adult male population, was the essential ingredient of all these programs, but problems of recruitment arose when many of the traditional elite would not relinquish control over their followers. The Vietnamese soon found that Cham mercenaries were the only troops they could recruit in Cambodia.
Minh-mang decided it would be best to send “military convicts and ordinary prisoners [who], if kept in jail, would prove useless. Therefore, it would be better for them to be sent to Cambodia and live among the people there, who would benefit from their teaching” – the same way that the Viets had first come into contact with Chinese culture. The same policies of social engineering were followed in Xieng Khouang, leading the Thai to report:

Quote

Those Vietnamese are arriving fifty or sixty at a time, or a hundred or more at a time… sending men out to inspect and demand taxes from Phuan officials and from households in every village. Those Vietnamese have made the Phuan… dress and wear their hair in Vietnamese fashion, seeking thereby to garner the Phuan definitively into the Vietnamese fold.

Besides convicts, of course, large numbers of Vietnamese administrators were sent to Cambodia and Xieng Khouang. In particular, the traditional Cambodian administrative divisions of sruk were converted into 31 Chinese-style prefectures and districts, each with its own educational officer to teach the population Chinese characters and the Vietnamese language. Vietnamese farmers were also encouraged to move into both new provinces by promises of buffaloes and farm tools, but relatively few did so. To them, the far south and the hill country were still a half-wild frontier, full of malaria and barbarian peoples.


The Rationale for Resistance

In Cambodia and Xieng Khouang, the Vietnamese tried to impose new hairstyles and tastes in clothing, a new language, a new philosophy of political administration, and even new modes of agriculture (Vietnamese crops were imported and systematically planted). Besides the fact that they made these changes too quickly without considering the durability of tradition and the importance of cultural identity to their subject peoples, they were also surprised that Cambodians and Phuan continued to hold the prestige of their kings in high esteem. To the Vietnamese, King Chan had been timid and ineffectual, King Noi a duplicitous traitor, and Princess Mei was but a puppet and a cipher. Yet to Theravada Buddhist peoples, the administrative ability of rulers had little bearing on their political authority: the fact that they were royalty was proof enough of their superior merit. To the Cambodians, furthermore, only the presence of the king would ensure the success of their harvests, and only he could legitimise their political elite by handing out official titles, seals and insignia. Without him, the country would enjoy “neither rain nor seed”, and the officials would virtually be without names.

In the case of the Phuan, the only thing which had marked them through the centuries as a separate people from the Lao and the Thai was that they had their own king in Xieng Khouang, even if he was somebody’s vassal. The Lao states and Siam had ancient Buddha statues that served as palladiums for their realms: the Prabang, the Emerald Buddha and the Crystal Buddha, for example. The loss of these spiritual guardians to another state could have a profoundly demoralising effect, but the Phuan had no such symbol for their identity, which was centred on their king and their land. They gradually grew disillusioned when King San sent the customary gifts to the Vietnamese emperor, but Vietnam would only recognise him as an ordinary town governor. Hence the decision to rebel against the Vietnamese garrison in 1834, after which the Siamese army promised to resettle the Phuan on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where they would be protected from Vietnamese retaliation. In 1835, King San and 4,000 Phuan families burned their villages and crossed the Mekong with the Siamese, only to be told that they would be settled near Bangkok. A portion managed to break away and return home, but King San and about 80% of the Phuan continued on to Phanom Sarakhan, east of Bangkok, where San lived until his death.

Following this Siamese act of deception, the remaining Phuan had no choice but to cooperate with the Vietnamese occupiers, especially when external threats also arose. In 1836, the king of Luang Prabang, believing that Xieng Khouang still owed him the triennial tribute, joined the Siamese in a punitive expedition. The Phuan had to agree to pay an annual tribute of gold and silver trees to Luang Prabang, under the indirect suzerainty of Siam. Following this, while the program of Vietnamese colonisation and cultural assimilation carried on, Phuan governors were now given Vietnamese administrative appointments in their own territory, so as to counteract the constant Thai efforts to depopulate the Plain of Jars by drawing disenchanted inhabitants over to the opposite bank.

In Cambodia, however, even a temporary return to stability would prove impossible. Faced with the Vietnamese ‘civilising’ program, many Cambodians were beginning to believe there was much truth to Siam’s oft-stated aim of intervening in their country: to share the benefits of the Thai king’s fund of merit by protecting Cambodian Buddhism from the heretical Vietnamese. The Buddhist belief in the cakkavartin, the ruler predestined by his karma to be a universal monarch, was less absolute than the Vietnamese concept of the Mandate of Heaven which gave the emperor the prerogative to manage the lives of his ‘children’.

The Vietnamese did not realise that in Cambodia, ‘national identity’ was defined not by any struggle against foreign invaders, but by “the sum of social arrangements in effect inside Cambodia” ; “Cambodia’ was defined not so much by territorial boundaries as by sruks where Cambodian was spoken and whose leaders (chaovay sruk) had received their official titles from a Cambodian king. Vietnamese reforms put all these social arrangements in jeopardy, including such ‘barbarous’ customs as eating with the fingers, wearing turbans and loincloths, building houses on stilts and greeting from a kneeling position. Sporadic anti-Vietnamese uprisings were already breaking out every year since 1836, but it was a reform to replace the chaovay sruk with Vietnamese in 1840 that finally threatened the vital interests of the Cambodian official class (okya) enough to drive them to revolt.

Cambodia was not a bureaucratic society like Vietnam, and normally an okya would simply have to wait upon his patron, as there was little paperwork to do and many tasks, like requisitioning supplies for the palace and raising armies for defence, could be spread out among several okya. When the Vietnamese tried to use the okya as civil servants, however, they found them incapable of governing in a Vietnamese way – of administering regions, collecting taxes and making detailed reports. At first the Vietnamese found it necessary to work through the okya while things settled down in the country, but soon they began to place greater demands on the official class while planning to take over the administration of the sruk for themselves.

A series of Vietnamese actions seemed to the okya to be aimed at extinguishing not just the official class, but also kingship and Buddhism in Cambodia. In June 1840, an exasperated Minh-mang had Queen Mei and her sisters demoted to low ranks in the Vietnamese civil service as punishment for the slow pace of reform. Then the six highest-ranking okya were secretly placed under arrest and taken to Saigon, on charges of falsifying census records and hiding some 15,000 clients from militia duty and corvee; their followers soon assumed they were dead. That same month, a Vietnamese taxation system was introduced that made new demands on the duties of the okya, while some Cambodian seals of office were recalled and replaced by Vietnamese ones with no indication of rank.

The last straw came in August, when the Vietnamese arrested Mei and her sisters and exiled them to Vietnam with the Cambodian regalia. To many Cambodians, the disappearance (and feared murder) of their monarch, however little authority she really had, signified the disappearance of the state, and the absence of the regalia with which to enthrone a successor made things even worse. The disappearance of patrons at court, the reformed tax system, and the devaluation of seals of office all precipitated a wide-ranging okya-led rebellion in September, which had been planned since May but probably was provoked into an early launch. A famous comment by one of the rebels expresses succinctly the popular mood: “We are happy killing Vietnamese. We no longer fear them; in all our battles we are mindful of the three jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.”

The Return to “Independence”

The Minh-mang emperor was a weary man by the end of 1840, and his recorded words over the previous five years may serve as a reflection of the growing Vietnamese disappointment with their new provinces. At the start of the Vietnamising mission in Tran Tay, he had written: “The barbarians have become my children now, and you should help them, and teach them our customs.” Not long after, he wanted to know from Truong Minh Giang “if the barbarian people have learned Vietnamese ways, and if they are happy.” Later, doubts begin to appear: “the customs of the barbarians are so different from our own that even if we were to capture all their territory, it would not be certain we could change them.” By 1838, he was growing annoyed at their ingratitude: “Thanks to… my generosity, imperial troops were despatched to Cambodia, costing millions of coins, and brought you security by destroying the Thai… Anyone who can think for himself should be grateful to the court; why are there people who hate us and believe the rebels?” When the 1840 rebellion broke out, he could at last only conclude that: “The Cambodians are so stupid that we must frighten them. Ordinary moral suasion has no effect.”

Minh-mang’s policies failed because he was unable to understand the intransigence of barbarians who simply did not want to be ‘civilised’ by paternally administered social change. He was never to realise this fact before his death from an accident at the beginning of 1841. His successor, Thieu-tri, was less committed to the vision of Vietnamising Cambodia, and began to seek a political solution even as a large Siamese expeditionary force under Chaophraya Bodin entered Cambodia with the exiled prince Duang, who carried insignia of rank and royal accoutrements supplied to him by Rama III. The objective was to win over the okya by promising that Duang would rule over Cambodia, since several had written to Bodin asserting that Cambodians would be happy only if the political conditions preceding the arrival of the Vietnamese were re-established. Thai intervention gave new momentum to the rebellion, which had been collapsing from lack of supplies and equipment. By late 1841, Truong Minh Giang knew that the political balance in Cambodia had shifted irrevocably. He withdrew to Vietnam, taking the population of Phnom Penh - some 6,000 people – with him, after which he committed suicide by poison for his failure.

Meanwhile, in Xieng Khouang, the Phuan in Thai territory continued to draw others over to join them. The areas most remote from Vietnam had been virtually depopulated, despite Minh-mang’s strict orders to handle the barbarians severely and move them to a place where they could be separated from the Phuan on the other side. Those Phuan who remained still hoped to restore their royal family to power, but realised that the current emperor would never allow it. Soon after Minh-mang’s death, therefore, a delegation of senior Phuan leaders raised a large sum of money as ransom and travelled to Hue, where they begged for the release of King Noi’s family. The Vietnamese were dubious and asked why the Phuan would wish to rear “the cubs of a tiger.” They replied using a derogatory term, that they wanted “those people” as by tradition their presence was essential in the performance of the buffalo sacrifice to their Guardian Spirit. They also assured the Vietnamese that they had no intention of restoring “those people” to power. Thieu-tri, then pre-occupied with Cambodia, seems to have agreed in principle to let the royal descendants return to Xieng Khouang, but would not specify when this could take place.

By 1843, Cambodia was becoming a quagmire for Chaophraya Bodin: short of supplies, he had to abandon Phnom Penh in 1844, and the Vietnamese soon reinstalled Princess Mei as the “legitimate” queen there. Bodin was also losing patience with the Cambiodian okya: “all the Khmer leaders and nobles, all the district chiefs and all the common people are ignorant, stupid, foolish and gullible. They have no idea what is true and what is false.” That ignorance may have been the very result of centuries of political stagnation and diplomatic isolation forced upon Cambodia by the Thai and Viets themselves. Throughout 1845, the Vietnamese tried but failed to dislodge the Thai forces; the two sides opened negotiations for a cease-fire at the end of the year. Siam had the stronger candidate for the throne, but Vietnam still retained the regalia which he needed for legitimacy.

In a face-saving gesture, the Vietnamese demanded that a Cambodian tributary mission travel to Hue in 1846 and declare Cambodia’s formal subservience to Vietnam. The embassy returned in 1847, upon which the Vietnamese handed over the regalia and released those members of the royal family still in their custody. Soon afterward, they withdrew their forces from Cambodia. Over the next few months, in a series of ceremonial gestures, Duang restored the institution of kingship and kingly behaviour, including the restoration of Theravada Buddhism as the state religion – for example by levelling the Vietnamese fortifications at Phnom Penh and using the bricks to build or repair seven Buddhist monasteries.
In that same year, Thieu-tri died and was succeeded in Hue by the Tu-duc emperor. The new emperor decided that the ongoing depopulation and passive resistance in Xieng Khouang would die down if the Phuan were placed under the nominal rule of one of King Noi’s sons, and if the policy of cultural assimilation were ceased in favour of local custom. Thus the eldest son, Po, was made an Imperial Mandatory Prince in charge of the province of Tran Ninh. He and his brothers had grown up using the Vietnamese language daily, following Vietnamese customs, cultivating relations with Vietnamese officials and learning provincial administrative practices, giving the Vietnamese confidence that their influence would continue in Xieng Khouang. However, the fact remained that in 1847 Xieng Khouang, like Cambodia, was a ‘barbarian’ state that had gotten its own king back, and in his person lay at least the semblance of independence as well.

[Yun]

CONCLUSION

In April 1848, Duang was anointed king of Cambodia in the traditional fashion, by Thai and Cambodian brahmins. For the rest of his reign, his kingdom was at peace, and although Thai political advisors and some Thai troops remained, the king was relatively free to make political decisions. One of these was to seek relations with the French from 1853 onwards, in an attempt to gain more protection from the Vietnamese, but the Thai put their foot down and stopped the French diplomatic mission from arriving. When the French began their campaign of conquest at Saigon in 1858, Cambodians saw an opportunity to regain the territory lost to the Vietnamese over the last 200 years. Upon Duang’s death in 1860, his heir Norodom faced a series of rebellions and turned to the Thai, but soon grew frustrated by the conditions attached to their patronage. He reopened negotiations with the French, and signed a treaty of protection with them in 1863. Thus, in a manner very similar to that of his uncle King Chan, Norodom invited another ‘civilising mission’ into Cambodia, and this time even the Thai would be of no help against it.

By 1849, on the other hand, Prince Po of Xieng Khouang was making overtures to Bangkok through Luang Prabang, and proposing a renewal of the indirect suzerainty arrangements – but on condition that the population of the plateau be left undisturbed. In 1851, the Thai rejected these conditions and ordered their Lao governors to resume moving the Phuan populace down to the Mekong, and to seek ways to induce Po and his brothers to also migrate to Siamese territory. That year, emboldened by their new autonomy and possibly stirred up by Siamese agitators, the Phuan again rebelled against Vietnam. The Vietnamese, who had their hands tied with the French threat, decided to restore independence to the Phuan, and formally installed Po as king. At this point, the Siamese realised that the Phuan royalty had no intention of leaving Xieng Khouang, and accepted a resumption of joint suzerainty with Vietnam.

At this time, the Vietnamese were still maintaining a garrison in Xieng Khouang, but it was probably recalled during the first battles with France and never replaced. Xieng Khouang was now classified as an “indigenous prefecture”, where administration was exercised by the local elite and supervised by visiting Vietnamese officials. The Thai also maintained a policy of non-involvement, leaving tributary matters to Luang Prabang, but not always by choice. Up till his death in 1865, King Po consistently declined to go to Bangkok to make formal submission to King Rama IV (Mongkut), perhaps mindful of what had happened on some such occasions.

As long as the plateau remained untroubled, however, Siam could afford to ignore it. This situation was to change in the late 1860s, when marauding bands of displaced hill people from south China, known as the Ho, poured into the Lao areas. They devastated Xieng Khouang in 1876, defeating a Vietnamese army and killing King Po’s successor King Ung. Siam then decided on intervention, sending an army to Ung’s son Khanti. When Khanti could not defeat the Ho by 1886, the Siamese, worried that he might switch allegiance to the French, summoned him to Bangkok and put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. The betrayal of Xieng Khouang was complete when Siam put a civilian Lao governor in charge of it, but Siamese influence in the Lao states also came to an end with the fall of Luang Prabang to the Ho in 1887. Just as the French conquerors of Vietnam were using the former Vietnamese overlordship as an excuse to establish tighter control over Cambodia, so too did they now claim that Vietnamese suzerainty over Xieng Khouang and Luang Prabang entitled them to the Lao states. In 1899, the French established a protectorate over ‘Laos’, and the Phuan kingdom ceased to exist politically.

In looking at the reasons for the failure of Vietnam’s cultural assimilation in Cambodia and Xieng Khouang, such as the clash between Theravada Buddhist and Confucian political cultures, or between Indianised and Sinicised social customs, one must also consider factors of time and place. The Viet assimilation in Champa and the Mekong Delta took place over centuries, and even then remnants of local culture remained evident. Furthermore, the Cham avoided having to adopt Viet culture wholesale by creating a new identity through conversion to Islam. Likewise, the Hindu-Buddhist traditions of the Thai, Lao and Cambodians had been established over centuries of acculturation and adaptation. Within less than ten years, Vietnam tried to replicate that process, inviting hostility in direct proportion to its evangelical enthusiasm. Given more time, the Vietnamese might have been able to win over the Phuan and Khmer, but they happened to have an equally powerful neighbour that was both qualified and keen to act as a champion of indigenous traditions. The stalemate with Siam in the military sphere meant that Vietnam would have little chance of advancing in the cultural sphere.
Lastly, some thoughts about the present-day legacy of the Vietnamisation project: the enmity that it created between Vietnamese and Cambodians has lasted into the Cold War and beyond, with especially destructive consequences in the Pol Pot era. As for the Phuan, they are now mostly scattered throughout Thailand and Laos, a people and culture without a state. Even now, as the Lao bristle at the “big brother – little brother” relationship imposed on them by the Thai, they seldom think of the fate of their own little brothers, the exiles from Xieng Khouang.


Bibliography

1. Kennon Breazeale and Snit Smuckarn A Culture in Search of Survival: The Phuan of Thailand and Laos (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, c1988)
2. David P. Chandler A History of Cambodia, 3rd Ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000)
3. George Coedes, trans. H.M. Wright The Making of Southeast Asia (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966)
4. Charles F. Keyes The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia (New York: Macmillan , c1977)
5. Mayoury and Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn Paths to Conflagration: 50 years of Diplomacy and Warfare in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, 1778-1828 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1998)
6. Peter and Sanda Simms The Kingdoms of Laos: 600 years of History (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999)
7. Martin Stuart-Fox The Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang: Rise and Decline (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, c1998)
8. John K. Whitmore “The Thai-Vietnamese Struggle for Laos in the 19th century” in Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy (Ed.) Laos: War and Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, c.1970)
9. Alexander Woodside Vietnam and the Chinese Model: a comparative study of Nguyen and Ching civil government in the first half of the nineteenth century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)

[Nguyen-Trong Cam]

I found it in general a good account of what happened, and why it happened the way it did.

[esse]

First of all, the river that was the border between Trịnh and Nguyễn is "Gianh". Linh giang isn't a wellknown name, and I suspect, was created only recently.

Secondly, I question the rationality that the Later Le made war on Chams due purely to economic reasons. Vietnam at the time just went through an extremely destructive war to evict the Chinese, they barely had time to recover. Most importantly however, whoever came up with this theory overlooked the personality and ambition of the person behind these campaigns, Lê Thánh-tông, aka Hồng-đức; and the hitherto rather unease relationship between the Le ruling house and his "Northern gentries" (Sĩ phu Bắc-hà) subjects.

[AhMan]

"This imitative impulse extended to the Chinese view of themselves as a universal empire surrounded by barbarian peoples, who could be civilised simply by contact with Chinese culture and political institutions. To the Vietnamese, they themselves were major beneficiaries of this civilising effect, and it was now their duty and privilege to spread it in Southeast Asia"
This is exactly what I wanted to say but words failed me. Thank Yun.

[thankstoall]

AhMan, on Dec 30 2005, 12:43 PM, said:

"This imitative impulse extended to the Chinese view of themselves as a universal empire surrounded by barbarian peoples, who could be civilised simply by contact with Chinese culture and political institutions. To the Vietnamese, they themselves were major beneficiaries of this civilising effect, and it was now their duty and privilege to spread it in Southeast Asia"

This happened before the 20 century, when Vietnam was influenced by China's Confucian political ideology. When the Confucianism influence declined, this kind of thought had been no longer existed in meanstream of thoughts, though there is a few persons bear this illness in mind. Cambodian, Laos and other Southeast Asian nations are seen as brothers and sisters with Vietnamese, that why we are proud of Vietnamese languague as grouped in Mon-Khmer group. The invasion of Cham is historical mistake when Vietnam was strongly influenced by Confucianism, we can not change it, but we admit that is invasion and unfairness to the Cham people, need not to use the beautiful name of "civilizing". Cham now is a member of Vietnamese family and we are proud of Cham's cultural heritage. Cham gained independence before Vietnamese did, Cham were brave soldiers and skilled men. We should be proud of our mixed with Cham and Khmer Krom people.

Regards,

TTA

This post has been edited by thankstoall: 30 December 2005 - 05:29 PM

[qrasy]

1.Those kind of things existed not until the R.O.C. Are you saying modern Chinese are not proud of cultural diversity of its ethnicities? Or Chinese is still considering the neighbors "barbarians"?
2. Cihai makers are proud of claiming Thai and Lao to be brothers by using old classification of Tai-Kadai being inside Sino-Tibetan.
3. How many Vietnamese do you think are proud of being grouped inside Mon-Khmer?
4. From whom did Cham gained independence from?
5. Do you think mixture people (not person) have to become a pride for others?

Regards,
qrasy

This post has been edited by qrasy: 31 December 2005 - 07:39 AM

[thankstoall]

qrasy, on Dec 31 2005, 06:39 AM, said:

Regards,
qrasy

Let me take a New Year break guy.

See you next year

Regards,

TTA

[Nguyen-Trong Cam]

qrasy, on Dec 31 2005, 04:39 AM, said:

1.Those kind of things existed not until the R.O.C. Are you saying modern Chinese are not proud of cultural diversity of its ethnicities? Or Chinese is still considering the neighbors "barbarians"?
2. Cihai makers are proud of claiming Thai and Lao to be brothers by using old classification of Tai-Kadai being inside Sino-Tibetan.
3. How many Vietnamese do you think are proud of being grouped inside Mon-Khmer?
4. From whom did Cham gained independence from?
5. Do you think mixture people (not person) have to become a pride for others?

Regards,
qrasy

2. You must be referring to the fact that the term Khmer evokes the unpreferred image of more Australid facial features such as darker skin color, protruding mouth, bigger nose, etc. These features are present in most peoples of East Asia, however. From Sanxingdui site statues to Wei River Valley neolithic skulls. People who have less of these, if any, were from the West of China, such as Zhou, Qin. Even though they adopted the Central Plain culture, they were the ruling class, and their facial features became the preferred. We are seeing this desire to identify with the winner, though they may be the ones who conquered us, with Caucasian features. So the answer is yes, but is it any different elsewhere?
4. Champa started as Lin Yi, the southern part of Ri Nan (then expanded South), so it gained independence from the Han Dynasty.

[wuTao]

Nguyen-Trong Cam, on Dec 31 2005, 10:21 AM, said:

2. These features are present in most peoples of East Asia, however. From Sanxingdui site statues to Wei River Valley neolithic skulls. People who have less of these, if any, were from the West of China, such as Zhou, Qin. Even though they adopted the Central Plain culture, they were the ruling class, and their facial features became the preferred. We are seeing this desire to identify with the winner, though they may be the ones who conquered us, with Caucasian features.

Huh? Where did you get this from? The Sanxingdui site had nothing in common Yellow River sites... their culture, language and people were totally alien compared to the Yellow River civilizations. The Zhou were not Caucasians from "West of China"... they were originally from the Wei River Valley. The rulers of Qin were from a Central Plains aristocracy whose ancestors were enfeoffed as nobles by the Zhou in the Wei River Valley.

[Nguyen-Trong Cam]

wuTao, on Dec 31 2005, 06:01 PM, said:

Huh? Where did you get this from? The Sanxingdui site had nothing in common Yellow River sites... their culture, language and people were totally alien compared to the Yellow River civilizations. The Zhou were not Caucasians from "West of China"... they were originally from the Wei River Valley. The rulers of Qin were from a Central Plains aristocracy whose ancestors were enfeoffed as nobles by the Zhou in the Wei River Valley.

The skulls as old as the mesolithic ones in China were examined by Cheboksarov, a Russian paleoanthropologist. He thinks the Gansu skulls could be labeled Proto-Chinese. These are different from the ones found in the Weishu Valley. Some interpret this to be proof that Europoids have mixed with Mongoloids in Gansu, but he thinks they are no different from the Americanoids --a Mongoloid phenotype.The 6000 year old skulls in Shandong and Jiangsu, compared with the Weishu Valley ones, contain clear distinctions of the Southern Mongoloid phenotypes. He interprets this to be the result of migration along the coast from the South. These immigrants may be of the Austronesian speaking admixture.
The Anyang skulls stored in Taiwan are of 5 groups, having Northern Mongoloid, Southern Mongoloid, and Indonesian (Australoid-Mongoloid admixture) types. These are decapitated ones, indicating that they were defeated and captured enemies who served as sacrifying objects. The ones stored in Beijing are of the dominant people corresponding to the skulls found in the neolithic age, with the burial type of stretched remains facing up.
He thinks there were relatively homogeneous groups living 200-300 km from the capital of the Shang.
Another group during this time was found in Gansu having Americanoid features, but with brachycephalicized (short and flat) faces. These could be the ancestors of present Tibetans.
In the North, in the Hsi-T'uan-Shan, Southwest Kirin, the Northern Monoloids, are represented by the present Tungusics and Siberian tribes. In Kirin and Liaoning, as well as in neighboring Korea, the skulls dated from the end of the Second Millenia to the beginning of the First Millenia were of the inland Mongoloid type, and are probably of the ancestors of the Altaic speaking peoples, and of the ancient Siberians. Some are dolichocephalic (long and non-flat) like the Proto-Chinese, and some are brachycephalic.
Very little is known of South China, though it is known that Southern Mongoloids, predominant in most of China, here mixed with Australoids. The Tai-kadai, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian speaking peoples probably developed from this region.

The above is translated from a Vietnamese translation of chapter 8 of the English compilation work by Karl Jettmar titled The Orgins of Chinese Civilization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983.

http://www.chinahist...?showtopic=8634

In the Wei Valley River Valley, before the invasion of ethnics that functioned as the exporters of Southern Cultures, there existed no transition or continuity between the microlithic civilization and the Yang Shao Culture.
Analyses of anthopological, linguistic, and archeological data allow us to form a theory that speculates that the origin of neolithic Proto-Han must be found in the South. We can say that an early neolithic age ethnic in South China, earlier residing at a location bordering the center of the late Hoa Binh Culture, has migrated during the 5th Millenia BC along the Chia-Ling Chiang range in Sichuan and crossed the passes in the Ch'in Ling range to enter the Wei River Valley.
Nature helped them establish and develop quickly agriculture in flooded plains. At the end of the 5th Millenia and beginning of the 4th Millenia, a mid neolithic age ethnic left decorated pottery to be found in Ban Po, a local Yang Shao site. They have aveolar prognathism, with broad noses, indicating clearly a Southern origin.
In the 4th Millenia BC, part of the population moved East along the Yellow River, met in West of Henan people of the Ch'in Wang Chai Culture who migrated there earlier from the Han River Valley. The interaction betwen these two peoples, has created a basis for the founding of the Yin Culture. The language of Yin, based on writings at the end of the 2nd Millenia BC, was Proto-Hua, essentially Sino-Tibetan, though it showed a few traits very different from the linguistic groups within the language family.
The groups that went West in the 4th Millenia BC go through even more transformation. One of these groups arrived to the Upper Yellow River Valley in Gansu, now called Qiang or Jung, whereas another group became the pillar of the Zhou. At the end of the 2nd Millenia, the Zhou defeated the alliance of tribes founded by the Yin in the Central Plains.
This invasion sparked the establishment of many statelets, and with the friction with neighboring tribes speaking Burmo-Tibetan, Proto-Tungusic, Austronesian and Tai, Hua-Hsia appeared in the 6th and 4th Centuries BC in the Central Plains. This can be called Proto Han-Hua.
The above was translated from a Vietnamese translation back to English.

http://www.chinahist...?showtopic=8491

Are you sure they were from the Wei River Valley, for it is mentioned above that they went from the Wei river Valley to Upper Yellow River Valley, underwent some transformation, and were of the same stock as Qiang.