THE SOUTHERN MANDARINS
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The Birth of the Vietnamese Alphabet. Jesuit
missionaries serving in Vietnam during the seventeenth
century devised a Roman script alphabet for writing Vietnamese.
The system, called "Quoc Ngu," replaced the Chinese
characters that had traditionally been used. Father Alexander
de Rhodes, a French Jesuit, played an important part in
spreading its use. His catechism, printed in Rome in 1651,
is among the earliest published works using Quoc Ngu. (Rare
Book and Special Collections Division)
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Vietnam has traditionally stood apart from the rest of Southeast
Asia, separated by its close historical and cultural ties to
China. Vietnamese often speak of their thousand years under Chinese
rule, emphasizing that they fought and won independence in 939
A.D. Although fiercely independent, Vietnam continued to follow
the Chinese model of society and government. Until it fell under
French colonial rule in the nineteenth century, Vietnam was ruled
by an emperor and administered by a Confucian bureaucracy chosen
through an examination system, while Chinese remained the official
language of the court and the educated elite. In the seventeenth
century, Alexandré de Rhodes, a French Jesuit missionary,
helped devise a romanized alphabet for written Vietnamese that
is still in use.
Vietnam has a strong tradition of written dynastic history,
and the Asian Division has a good selection of the major works.
Although many of the early Vietnamese books are reprints in modern
Vietnamese, the Asian Division does have a small collection of
important Vietnamese books in traditional format. In 1918 the
Director of l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient
in Hanoi gave the Library several valuable works published in
Chinese. Two of these books were printed for the Library from
the original wooden blocks at the imperial palace in Hue. One
of these, Khâm-Dinh Viêt-Su Thông-Giám
Cuong-Muc is a nineteenth-century history of Vietnam. The
other, Dai-Nam Nhat-Thong-Chí, is an early Vietnamese
gazetteer. Besides these two large works, the French gift included
two copies of the best-known work in Vietnamese literature, Kim-Vân-Kiêù, a
poem or rather a versified novel, written by Nguyen Du in 1813.
One copy is in Chinese characters used phonetically, a form of
writing called "Chu Nôm"; the other is in standard romanization, "Quoc
Ngu."
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Early Western Map of Tonkin (1651). One
of the earliest Western maps showing details of northern
and central Vietnam appeared in Father Alexander de Rhodes's Histoire
dv royavme de Tvnqvin, published in Rome in 1650.
This map is from the French edition, published a year later
in Lyon. Oriented with the north to the right, "Regnu Annam" shows
the extent of seventeenth-century Vietnam, then divided
between two rival dynasties, one in the north and the other
in central Vietnam. Remnants of the Cham kingdom, eventually
destroyed by the Vietnamese, still exist in the south.
To the west, are the highlands occupied by "Rumoi" (upland
minority groups, later called "montagnards" by the French).
The limited Western knowledge of the interior is illustrated
by the large region labeled "Solitudo." (Rare Book
and Special Collections Division)
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In 1920, the Library received another important Vietnamese history
printed on the palace library blocks in Hue, the Dai Viêt
Su Ky Toàn Tho (Complete Annals of the Great
Viet),
in twenty-four books bound in fourteen volumes. Incorporating
an early history of the Ly Dynasty (1009-1225) completed in 1272
by historian Lê Van Hu’u, the annals were revised
extensively by Ngô Si Liên in 1479 at the order of
the emperor. The annals were again edited and expanded by Lê Hi
in 1698. The Library's copy was printed from the original but
somewhat worn blocks on good Vietnamese paper. Incorporated in
this work immediately after the contents page is the treatise Viêt
Giám Thông Khão Tong Luân by Lê Tung.
It is a summary of Ngô S. Liên's original draft of
the annals. Rounding out the Library's collection of Vietnamese
is an 1884 Shanghai reprint of the An-Nam Chí Luoc, written
in China toward the end of the thirteenth century by the expatriate
Lê Tac. It is probably the oldest Vietnamese historical
work that has been preserved. In addition, the Library holds
a wide range of reprints of early works that have been translated
from Vietnam's old writing system, which used Chinese characters,
into modern Vietnamese.
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