Loyalty and Innovation: Understanding the Shared Community of Inquiry of 19th-Century Vietnam and China

It is well-known that the educated elite of China, Vietnam, and other neighboring polities participated in a shared community of inquiry, but how did it work in practice? This talk examines Phạm Thận Duật’s 1856 Hưng Hóa Gazetteer in order to discover the process by which knowledge was contested and produced within this broader culture of knowledge. Writing within the gazetteer genre, Phạm Thận Duật shows himself to be deeply engaged with, or even loyal to, foundational classical Chinese texts. At the same time, he cites recent Vietnamese works, and the Qing-era kaozheng movement of evidentiary scholarship. That he took himself to be participating in a literary culture that transcended Vietnam is clear from an analysis of his textual citations, as is his confidence in rejecting, reconfiguring, or adding to a trans-regional culture of knowledge. Phạm Thận Duật, and others like him, were autonomous contributors to a community of inquiry that transgressed political boundaries. For Vietnamese scholars, this community was rooted in classical texts but centered in Vietnam.