“Muang” (in Vietnamese spelling, “mường”), a Tai Dam word indexed by the imperial official Phạm Thận Duật in the 1850s using a logographic character to denote sound and meaning

During the early 1800s, the Nguyễn state of Đại Nam began an ambitious project to remake the Vietnamese imperial realm into a homogenous space, one wherein non-Vietnamese communities, such as speakers of Tai-Kadai, Mien-Hmong, and Bahnar languages, would fall under the supposedly harmonious rule of the Vietnamese bureaucracy. Part of a larger vision for environmental rule, this project spurred an “ethnographic turn” in imperial Vietnam, with officials producing detailed work in Classical Chinese and Hán Nôm about non-Vietnamese communities. Decades before French colonialism, imperial officials produced work that charted the differences among human communities in Vietnam.  However, a difference of another sort emerges when we consider perspectives from the uplands. Based on evidence from official documents, imperial records, and ethnography research, this presentation considers how the communities who were targeted by this imperial project spoke back to the empire itself. From passive non-cooperation to open revolt, as the state climbed hills, people at high altitudes kept the empire at arm’s length, continuing a sophisticated negotiation that echoes into the present.

Bradley Camp Davis is a professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University who specializes in nineteenth century Southeast Asia and Vietnam. He is the author of Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (Washington, 2017), a co-editor of The Cultivated Forest: People and Woodlands in Asian History (Washington, 2023), and a co-founder of the Yao Script Project. His current book manuscript examines the multispecies, environmental history of the last Vietnamese empire.

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies