Vietnam is geographically very close to the Leizhou Peninsula and to Hainan Island, and the human connections between these sites go back thousands of years. But what is the history and nature of these connections?

We note that the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan Island do not share land borders with Vietnam, as Guangxi and Yunnan provinces do, for example, and that they do not share Vietnam's strong economical development, so we may ask whether these entities were loosely or closely connected with the Red River Delta. We know rather little about the matter largely because trade in this region was primarily carried out by peddlers rather than by big merchants, and it therefore was rarely recorded. As a result, among all the Chinese peripheries, the connections between Vietnam and the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan have been the least known.

Archaeological findings, however, suggest long and deep connections between the various coasts of this region. For example, among all the coasts of Guangdong, bronze drums are found most numerously in the Leizhou Peninsula. Together with the bronze drums found in Guangxi and on Hainan Island, this makes the Leizhou Peninsula stand out for its evident connections with Vietnam, and it highlights the unity of the Gulf of Tongking as one region from the time of antiquity. Local gazetteers of Hainan and Leizhou also record official connections between these coasts. A search of the biographies of scholars recorded in these local gazetteers indicates a striking phenomenon: the scholars of Leizhou and Hainan provided the majority of lower officers during the twenty years of Ming occupation of Vietnam (AD 1407–28).

This fact might be the tip of an iceberg. What connected the different peoples on these disconnected coasts still largely remains a mystery. This paper attempts to offer insights into these connections. It starts by examining epidemic data of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this region, then moves on to look at the trade within, and the local worship shared throughout, the region. These data seem to suggest a rather surprising frequency and intensity of contacts among the peoples in this region. As such, this paper tries to shed some new light onto this shadowy corner of the South China Sea.

The Chinese province of Yunnan was officially brought under the administrative control of Imperial China during the Yuan Dynasty through the Mongol army's southwest campaigns. However, the central government's exertion of control in this remote periphery was not as strong as that in the northern or eastern parts of Imperial China. In many aspects, Yunnan maintained its frontier identity at a crossroads between East, South, and Southeast Asia. The traditional caravan trade that linked China and India can be traced at least to the Han Dynasty, and it remained a vital channel of interaction and exchange for the region throughout history, despite occasional interruptions such as the Sino-Burmese War (1762–69). Even with an increasing Han population and an intensified process of Sinification from the Ming Dynasty onwards, many areas were governed by native officials, who often held multiple, but nominal, loyalties to remote power centres in China, Siam and Burma well into the nineteenth century, a feature which has been identified more with Southeast Asian polities than with their counterpart based in Beijing.

However, in the late eighteenth century, this balance was abruptly interrupted by the arrival of the European colonial powers. The expanding northeastern frontier of the colonial state of British India (or of its predecessor until 1857, the East India Company) was directly confronted by Imperial China's southwest periphery. Unlike contemporary confrontations along the southern and eastern coasts of China, Yunnan experienced neither wars nor concessions of its territories. Nevertheless, the colonial presence challenged the free-flowing tradition of the frontier, and to some extent, defined Imperial China's southwest border immediately prior to the fall of the Qing Dynasty.

The current study looks at one group from this frontier region, the Han Yunnanese, who traditionally sojourned between western Yunnan and Upper Burma. In response to the approaching colonial presence — and from 1886 onwards, with the newly established colonial rule in Burma — this group underwent a communal transformation with reinforced or newly created identities, which reflected the demarcation of political borders and the delineation of ethnic boundaries in one of the remotest peripheries of Imperial China and in its southern neighbour, Burma.

Over the course of a thousand years roughly equivalent to the first millennium AD, the Sinitic culture of the Yellow River basin came into contact with the south, the culturally and ethnically divergent lands of the Yangzi River basin and beyond. By the Song Dynasty, which straddles the end of the first and the early second millennia, much of the south had become a full partner in the definition of a new emerging culture. Although this new culture drew heavily on the Sinitic heritage of the Central Lands, it was not simply an extension of the Sinitic world. On the contrary, the new culture that emerged through the course of this millennium, the culture we today call “Chinese”, was a hybrid entity, drawing as much on the non-Sinitic models of the south as on the Sinitic heritage of the north.

In this chapter, I intend to show how cultures merged in southern Fujian province to create a hybrid culture. Although there are many avenues through which I could make this case — family structures, economic activities, and cropping come readily to mind — in this chapter, I will focus on religious expression. Across much of China cults devoted to local deities have long been among the most important expressions of culture and local identity. However, whereas deities whose roots lay in the northern culture such as the Queen Mother of the West, Guan Yu, or Zhenwu Xuandi were often identified conceptually either in connection with direction or specific function, those of the south were more often identified as protector deities of designated locales. Although some deities with origins in the south gained broad followings, most cults remained strictly local, sometimes never spreading beyond a single shrine. In the following discussion, I will examine a range of cults that took shape in southern Fujian during the period between the later Tang and Song dynasties in southern Fujian province in an attempt to address two parallel questions: What makes a Chinese god? or What makes a god Chinese?

Cults of the Sinitic Immigration

As the Sinitic immigrants entered the alien lands of southern Fujian through the middle of the first millennium, they encountered the indigenous people. This encounter sometimes led to conflict, and other times unfolded more smoothly. Both outcomes, however, found expression in local cults that survive to the present.

Introduction

Past researchers have traditionally viewed ancient Southeast Asia as having been influenced by a virtually unidirectional flow of culture and civilization. Prior to the mid-1960s, many researchers explained the development of large-scale, complex societies (e.g., kingdoms and states) in Southeast Asia by pointing to influence from the more “advanced” civilizations of ancient India and China, citing the transmission of advanced technology and political models by diffusion, migration, or simple military and cultural imposition. Traditional perspectives from the early twentieth century viewed Southeast Asian societies as derivatives of Indian and Chinese counterparts. Intensified archaeological research efforts in recent decades throughout much of the region, however, have increasingly shown these sorts of positions to be untenable, demonstrating a model of unidirectional influence to be overly simplistic. To be sure, communities all over Southeast Asia were in either direct or indirect contact with one another and counterparts in India and China. But the countries of “China”, “India”, and Vietnam of today did not exist at 2000 BP, and the wider region was home to a kaleidoscope of societies. Modes of interaction and resultant social changes were complex, multilateral, and multidirectional. Societies were engaged in significant forms of interaction that included extensive long-distance trade, the movement of peoples and ideas, and cycles of peaceful relations and warfare.

This situation of complex interactions is evident throughout much of Southeast Asia, and the area of modern-day northern Vietnam is no exception. In this paper, I examine the important cultural frontier that existed between emerging Sinitic and proto-Vietnamese civilizations during the closing centuries BC, focusing specifically on archaeological evidence from the Red River Delta. To reconstruct cultural developments for the area's pre-and proto-history, a combination of textual and archaeological sources are crucial for understanding amorphous cultural boundaries and changing patterns of sociopolitical and economic interactions. During the first centuries BC and AD, the Han Empire began annexing the Red River Delta, as related by historical accounts and other traditions. At the time, a number of important cultural changes were taking place in the adjacent areas of modernday southern China and northern Vietnam.

Little did Raffles, the future founder of British Singapore, understand that the role he would be playing in East and Southeast Asian courts was that of an inferior luminary paying tribute to imperial or royal “North Stars”.

Introduction

The economic interaction between Southeast Asia and China is well known and fairly well documented. The basic premise is that China's possession of technological knowledge and capabilities enabled it to produce manufactured products that were often not matched outside of its economy. At the same time, its geographical predisposition and its limited flora and fauna resources caused it to look abroad for primary resources for its material needs. One of the key sources of such materials was Southeast Asia. The region was a major supplier of raw materials and natural products to China from as early as the mid-first millennium, although this role took off strongly only from the late tenth century onwards. A wide range of high and low unit-value products, including select and bulk volume items, were imported by China during the eleventh through the second millennium AD.

In considering the issue of material cultural influences between China and the societies of Southeast Asia, the basic assumptions have hitherto been one of transfer from a more sophisticated culture to a less sophisticated other. The premise is based primarily on technological know-how, artisanal or aesthetic finesses, or iconographic complexities that embody specific representations. The notion that there may have been gaps in the recipient society that were thus filled in the process of transfer, including economic and sometimes social gaps, have been argued to be the structural context within which such material cultural influences have occurred across Asia. The developments in the ceramics traditions of such Southeast Asian societies as Vietnam and Thailand in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the development of the silk industry of Vietnam, are prime examples of such arguments.

However, if we were to reimagine the flows of material cultural influences, we might gain a different perspective on the flow of the transfer processes. Material cultural construction, for instance, does not begin only at the point of manufacturing, or the value-added stage in which human knowledge application is the key ingredient, but at the stage of raw material availability and acquisition. The raw materials determine the nature of the final product, with the influence, of course, of the means by which the materials are manipulated.

The main aim of this chapter is to analyse and assess China–Vietnam relations and the legacy of history. The study outlines the development of bilateral relations between China and Vietnam both historically and contemporarily with a focus on the latter period. Existing and potential issues of dispute are identified and assessed. The legacy of the long historical interaction is discussed in the context of the contemporary relationship.

The chapter is structured as follows: First, the China–Vietnam relationship is outlined both historically and contemporarily. Second, the existing and potential issues of dispute in the current relationship are identified and assessed. Third, the legacy of historical interaction is discussed. Fourth, the study is concluded by a summary of the development of the China–Vietnam relationship together with a broader discussion.

HISTORICAL RELATIONS

Two parallel processes marked the period of direct Chinese rule over Vietnam from 111 BC to AD 939. One was the colonization of Vietnam by Chinese migrants and the other was the Vietnamese drive to regain political independence from the Chinese Empire. Apart from a steady migration from China to Vietnam of people such as administrators, farmers and landlords, there were also persons seeking refuge from political upheavals in other parts of the Chinese Empire.

During the more than one thousand years of direct Chinese rule over Vietnam, a number of rebellions occurred. From the Trung rebellion, in the first century AD (40–43) — a genuinely Vietnamese one — to the Ly rebellion, in the sixth century, periods of dependence and semi-independence alternated, with the latter gradually becoming more predominant. The Chinese migration that aimed at colonizing Vietnam gradually led to the emergence of a new Sino–Vietnamese ruling class, a social and economic decolonization of Vietnam, and efforts to establish political independence from the Chinese Empire. This led to new rebellions, but they all failed due to the strength of the Chinese Empire. After the fall of the Tang dynasty, in AD 907, the prospects for Vietnamese independence increased and, in AD 939, Vietnam regained complete independence.

The five case studies in this book clearly prove the fact that overhangs or legacies are a very real phenomenon in East and Southeast Asian international relations. In this regard it is arguable that history and historical memories have enduring value in foreign policy formulation. And, interestingly enough, many of the case studies point to the fact that important developments deriving from the pre-independence or colonial periods had a formative effect on informing policy output in the post-independence period. It may therefore be hypothesized that historical experiences and grievances in particular have had a continuous impact on elite and mass perceptions. Aspects of such perceptions have been imprinted for posterity. Importantly, it is also abundantly clear that there are specific reference points that have led to the creation of the overhang or legacy, and such critical conjunctures invariably deal with some sense of insult or injustice felt by victimized states. Such states regarded themselves the victims of callous exploitation or conquest and occupation at some point in their history and that memory has been preserved over time. As a result of such preservation there appears to be an ongoing demand to seek some form of apology or conciliatory gesture from the aggressor state. This is certainly the case with regard to the perceptions of both the Koreans and Chinese in relation to the Japanese. In both cases one gets the sense that Japan has been unable or unwilling to placate this feeling, at least as observed by the authors.

The cases that involve Thailand are interesting since they are so dissimilar from the cases involving Japan. The Thai overhangs or legacies with Myanmar and Cambodia appear to suggest that the archetypical Thai national is portrayed in contradistinction to that of those from neighbouring countries. This appears to be the case especially if Thailand had a history of conflicts with the countries and had been dealt severe defeats in the past. There seems to be a need to correct past defeats that are then characterized as injustices that need to be retold differently in order to salvage national pride.