Traditional Vietnam's Incorporation of External Cultural and Technical Contributions : Ambivalence and Ambiguity

Abstract

Focusing on the Vietnamese attitude towards cross-cultural borrowings and cultural adaptation, this paper argues that, in spite of the age-old Sino-Vietnamese cultural alignment, the Vietnamese governing class had always been favourable to multi-centred technological transfer, contending at the same time that their own court culture would be less innovative than the Chinese Confucian tradition. In particular, the adoption of Western military technology, military strategy, and shipbuilding techniques from the very beginning of European expansion in the region belies the longstanding claims that the Vietnamese bureaucracy was blinded by Confucian dogmas to the real potential of Western technology in state-building and national defence. In fact, expressing strong interests in and understandings of Western material life in the early nineteenth century even as the Western threat was looming, the Vietnamese leadership was far from being introverted and anti-modernist, contrarily to the common belief.