Land & Water: A History of Fifteenth-Century Vietnam From an Environmental Perspective

Debates and concerns about contemporary environmental problems have challenged historians to examine the human past from a perspective that explores the role of the natural environment in the historical development of individual societies. This dissertation examines how premodern Vietnamese rulers, officials, and scholars perceived "the environment" in the fifteenth century and how they documented the human-environment interaction. The fifteenth century, especially the long reign of King Thanh Tong of the Le dynasty (1460-97), was one of the most prosperous eras in Vietnam's pre-twentieth-century history, and the aim of this study is to shed new light on this historical period. Rather than focusing on court politics, intellectual developments, or warfare, this dissertation uses the Vietnamese primary sources in classical Chinese as a basis for understanding how the environment was conceptualized. A recurring theme in these sources concerns the attitudes towards land and water, which were fundamental in facilitating humannature interactions in fifteenth-century Vietnam. The evidence shows that when the Le rulers established their dynasty in northern Vietnam, they focused on understanding how the landscape should be conceptually "mapped" and on recording the natural resources that different regions within this land could provide. Their emphasis on land resources reveals a deeper environmental goal: how to transform the land into an environment that would be eminently suited to wet rice farming. This goal is also illustrated in the Vietnamese state's efforts to build dikes and to develop strategies to cope with water-related natural disasters such as droughts and floods. Overall, the environmental analysis in this dissertation posits that "geographical considerations" can have some application in certain contexts, like fifteenth-century Vietnam. However, it was through a long historical development that the Vietnamese people came to self-identify as inhabitants of a society where rice-growing lay at the cultural core. In this history, both the particular environmental conditions of northern Vietnam and the historical conjunctures of the fifteenth century lent impetus to a Vietnamese self-perception of themselves as quintessential wet rice producers.