海からの眺望--地域世界からみたベトナム北部海岸 (特集 アジア東方海域の近世)

Abstract

For too long Vietnam has been regarded as a land based polity amongst the mainland Southeast Asian countries, and as a series of autonomous villages located on the plain, with only simple exchanges in village markets and having little to do with either the mountains or the sea. This agrarian society provided the perfect environment for Confucianism, which melted into its soil and formed an integral part of Vietnam's social fabric. This article challenges the perceived image of "traditional" Vietnam by viewing Vietnamese history from the sea, suggesting that a trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tongking area from the 12th to the 15th centuries and arguing that commerce and the mixing of peoples of this trading zone formed a crucial part of the foundation of the early Vietnamese states. This sea view allows the author to revisit the historical connections between Dai Viet, Champa, and Hainan Island. Scholars have presented Dai Viet as an entity under Chinese influence, Champa as one sharing Indian culture, and Hainan as a remote backwater in the middle of nowhere. Although located next to each other physically, the three have been seen as isolated localities that shared little, whether culturally or economically. Recent scholarship of the last few decades and the historical evidence this article tries to draw together, suggest a much more integrated region than previously perceived. Such a sea view also reveals a different map of ethnicity around the Gulf of Tongking area, in which the non-Viet, the Chams and the Chinese, all played an important part in making its history and added vitality to this region. These traces were eradicated both by tide and time, and by the prejudices of later Confucian historians, whose skepticism towards trade coloured Vietnamese historiography. Muslim connections would have suffered the most from this cleansing, in the construction of a national story. This Muslim connection was however the lifeline of porcelain production, Dai Viet's leading export industry of the 14th and 15th centuries. Le Thanh Tong's 1471 attack on Champa destroyed the key link between Dai Viet and the Archipelagic and Middle Eastern Muslim markets, which Cham merchants used to serve, and thus directly caused the decline of Dai Viet's ceramic production and its main port, Van Don. Another episode this article examines briefly is the 17th century triangular trade between Nagasaki, Ningpo and Pho Hien, highlighted by the book trade. It argues that Confucian learning, which formed the ideological foundation of Vietnamese statecraft and political culture, was in fact heavily subsidised by commerce in other merchandise.