How to Do Things with Words in Colonial Vietnam

In 1932, Đào Duy Anh published the first Sino-Vietnamese dictionary in French Indochina, perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of the colonial period.  Drawing on the methods of J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, this paper charts the intellectual history of that dictionary.  The paper traces how Đào Duy Anh taught himself to read Chinese from the magazine Nam Phong, while teaching in provincial Annam; it describes his involvement in the radical and clandestine New Vietnam Revolutionary Party; it details how he acquired radical French, German, and Japanese texts in Saigon, sometimes legally, sometimes through the black market book trade; it reveals how Đào Duy Anh introduced new political, economic, and scientific, words and concepts from those works into the Vietnamese language through the Quan Hải Tùng Thư pamphlet series; and finally, it shows how many of those new words – such as “historical materialism,” “dialectic,” “proletarian,” and “class warfare” made their way into his Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary.  The paper argues that Đào Duy Anh popularized a new Marxist vocabulary which the educated Vietnamese public increasingly used to critique French colonial rule.  Vietnamese intellectual history is necessarily transnational intellectual history.