Why Did China Rule Vietnam for 1,000 Years but Leave Almost No Chinese Behind?（原声文稿）

Transcript of 中国为什么统治越南一千年，却没留下中国人？ （中文完整文稿）。

For more than a thousand years, Northern Vietnam was ruled from China.

Chinese governors, Chinese soldiers, Chinese law, Chinese writing on every official paper for a millennium.

Today, Vietnam has about a hundred million people and they speak Vietnamese, a language that is not even in the same family as Chinese. Chinese.

The people officially counted as ethnic Chinese, fewer than one in a hundred, and most of their ancestors arrived long after that thousand years was over.

Now look just up the coast.

This is Guangdong. China conquered it in the same war, in the same year, as northern Vietnam.

Today it has around 127 million people, and it is about as Chinese as anywhere on earth. earth, so why there and not here?

I always assumed the Vietnamese simply fought the Chinese off and threw them out. That is the story on the statues.

But when I started reading, I found almost the opposite.

The Chinese settlers never left. Their language did.

Our story begins with a kingdom that no longer exists. It was called Nhan Hue, which means the Southern Hue.

A general from northern China named Zhao Tuo set it up around 200 BC with his capital at Panyu.

Today that city is called Guangzhou.

His kingdom stretched from there all the way down into the Red River Plain in what is now northern Vietnam.

Then in 111 BC the armies of the Han dynasty marched south and destroyed it.

Everything Nanuei had ruled now belonged to China.

So picture these two places at that moment.

Guangdong and the Red River. Same empire, same laws, same conquest.

One of them turned Chinese.

One did not. And the first clue is a very old piece of paperwork.

In the year 2 AD the Han government counted its people household by household right across the empire.

Here is Nanhai, the area around Guangzhou, 19 ,600 households.

Here is Jiaojie, on the Red River, 92 ,000.

Nearly five times as many, Guangdong, in those days, was a thinly settled frontier.

The Red River was one of the most crowded places in the south.

Because these people grew wet rice, they had been farming this plain for centuries, and they had walled towns, crossbows and huge bronze drums before any Han soldier arrived.

So the Han did what empires do with a crowded province.

They kept the old local lords in place, put Chinese officials over them, and guarded the rivers and the trade.

A few officials on top of a very large number of people who had no reason to change how they talked.

For about 150 years, that worked.

Then in the year 40 AD, a Chinese governor killed the husband of a noble woman called Trung Trac.

She and her sister Trung He rose up.

The revolt ran down the coast and up into China itself, and at its height they held some 65 towns.

Then the Han sent their best general Ma Yuan.

By 43 AD the sisters were dead and the revolt was over.

And after that something changed.

Look at what archaeologists find on the Red River from the following years.

More than 120 Han style brick tombs.

Chinese people were coming here to live and to die.

This is exactly when the oldest Chinese loanwords start turning up in Vietnamese. The settlers had arrived.

So why did they not turn the place Chinese? Well, meet a man called Xi Xie.

Around the year 200 he ran this province almost like his own kingdom.

His family came from Shandong in the far north of China.

But they had left it six generations earlier. He was born here.

In Vietnam there are temples where people still honour him as a king. That was the pattern. Settlers came and they married into local families. Their children grew up with two languages.

Over the centuries the Red River grew a local dialect of Chinese Chinese, spoken by the people with power. Scholars call it Annamese Middle Chinese.

And next to it was the language of the villages, an ancestor of Vietnamese which they call Proto -Vietnam.

The important thing is this.

These people were not really Chinese anymore and not quite anything else. They were from here.

In 544 a man called Le Bon rose up and declared himself emperor of an independent state.

Vietnam remembers him as a national hero.

His ancestors had come down from China about 500 years before.

Meanwhile, the other half of our puzzle was catching up, and here the paperwork tells the story again.

By the 700s, under the Tang dynasty, the numbers had flipped.

An An, the Red River region, had under 40 ,000 households on the books. Guangdong had 71 ,000. Why?

Because the Empire had moved its attention, Northerners had been pouring south for centuries, escaping invasions, and more and more of them stopped well before the Red River.

In the early 700s, the Tang widened a road through the Da Yu Mountains straight into Guangzhou, and ships found a direct route from there to Southeast Asia.

Guangzhou became the Great Port of the South.

The Red River, which used to be the gateway, was now the far end of nowhere.

A posting there was close to a punishment.

One official, ordered to go, kept refusing. The Emperor had him executed.

So Guangdong was flooded with Chinese speakers until the old local languages drowned. The Red River got far fewer and they got absorbed.

Then the Tang collapsed.

In the chaos a new southern Chinese state tried to take the Red River back.

In late 938 its fleet sailed in from the Gulf of Tonkin.

A general called Noh Quen had driven huge iron tip steaks into the bed of the Bah Dang River and let the high tide cover them.

Small boats lured the warships upriver, then the tide went out, the fleet was caught on the stakes and half the army died, including the prince in command.

In the spring of 939, no quen made himself king.

After 1048 years, China's rule was over.

Here is the part I did not expect.

All those rulers, the men who beat China, very likely spoke Chinese themselves.

In 987 an envoy from China came to visit.

He recited an old Tang poem and a local monk interrupted him and sang the last two lines back.

They could understand each other, so a language expert called John Fan argues this.

For But now no empire was backing it up.

No Chinese governors, no new settlers and everybody around them speaking the village language.

So slowly those families switched.

They gave up their Chinese for the language of the villages and they carried all their fancy words across with them.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is what happened to the Normans in England.

French -speaking rulers ended up speaking English, a language now stuffed with French.

We can even see what the village language looked like.

The people who stayed up in these hills, the moon, were cut off from all that.

Their language is the closest living relative of Vietnamese.

The word for water in Vietnamese is nuoc. In moon, it is duck. In Khmer, in Cambodia, it is took. that is the family Vietnamese really belongs to.

Now you would think an independent Vietnam would drop Chinese as fast as it could. It did the opposite.

In 1070 in Hanoi the emperor built a temple of literature dedicated to Confucius.

Soon there were exams on the Chinese classics in Chinese for anyone who wanted a government job.

Vietnam's most famous patriotic poem says the South has its own emperor and heaven has decreed it. It is written in Chinese.

Then in 1406 China came back.

The Ming dynasty sent 215 ,000 soldiers and it stayed for 20 years. The emperor's orders survive.

All Every stone inscription smashed so that not one character was left.

In 1428, Le Loi drove the Ming out.

His victory proclamation, the Great Declaration of Vietnam's Freedom, is one of the finest things in Vietnamese literature. It too is written in Chinese. And this is the key.

Chinese was now like Latin in medieval Europe. Europe. You wrote it. You took exams in it.

Nobody spoke it at home." Vietnamese had a way of being written.

People built new characters out of Chinese ones. They called it Chu Nong.

The national epic, The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Xu, is 3 ,254 verses of it, but you had to know Chinese to read it, and most people could not read at all.

The thing that finally ended it came from the other side of the world.

In 1651 a French Jesuit called Alexandra de Rhodes printed a dictionary in Rome.

It wrote Vietnamese in Latin letters building on the work of Portuguese missionaries before him.

For 200 years hardly anyone but Catholics used it. Then came the French.

In 1910 Then they imposed the new alphabet, partly because it cut people off from China and from their own old scholars.

On the 4th of January 1919, in the old capital of Hui, the very last Chinese exam was held. It had run for almost 900 years.

And when Ho Chi Minh declared independence in 1945, his government set out to teach the whole country to read those Latin letters. The result is strange.

Today, most Vietnamese cannot read the characters on the walls of their own temples, except that the Chinese never really left. It is hiding inside almost every sentence.

Every day words are mostly the old ones. Eat is an.

Mother is meh. House is nha.

But somewhere, from a third to more than half of Vietnamese vocabulary comes from Chinese and much more of it in formal writing.

Take the word for university. In China it is Da Shui.

In Korea it is Daehok. In Japan it is Di Ga Ku.

And in Vietnam it is Daihok.

All the same word, all written the same way once.

Nation is Quoc Xà. and the settlers themselves, they are still here too.

Millions of Vietnamese people may well have Chinese ancestors they will never know about.

Even the country's name comes from this.

In 1804 the Emperor of Vietnam asked China to recognise his country as Nam Viet, Nhanue, the old kingdom we started with. China said no.

That kingdom had once ruled Guangdong and it sounded like a claim, so the two characters were flipped around. Vietnam.

So here is the answer. There were too many people on the Red River for the settlers to swamp.

Then China's attention moved to Guangdong, and the settlers' own descendants, once the empire was gone, switched to the language of their neighbors.

And my favorite detail is this.

When Ho Chi Minh stood up in Hanoi and declared Vietnam free, the Vietnamese Chinese word he used for independence was doclap. It comes from Chinese.