Fire in the Lake Read online

  The independence of the villages gave strength to the nation, but it proved nonetheless an obstacle to the maintenance of a national government. For Le Loi’s poet to compare the early Vietnamese dynasties to the T’ang and Sung of China was, after all, to elevate his own country into a different dimension: the “empire” of the Ly and the Tran was no larger than a single Chinese province. The Vietnamese state remained stable for as long as it remained within the circle of the Red River Delta, but once it breached the Gates of Annam it began to suffer the consequences of its original political frailty. In the year 1400 the general Le Qui Ly, who had saved his country from the last of the Chinese invasions, turned his army north from the frontier and overthrew the Tran emperor, and laid claim to the Mandate of Heaven. But the great mandarins refused to support him, and the empire shattered along the same faults that had opened during the war for independence. Irreconcilable, the powerful families of Vietnam rose like thunderheads in an electrical storm — their division giving the Chinese a new opportunity to launch an invasion and occupy the country. Only after two decades of guerrilla warfare did the new military hero, Le Loi, succeed in uniting them under his command and driving the Chinese out of Vietnam.

  The rebellion of Le Qui Ly did not destroy the Confucian empire, but it did signal the difficulty that future emperors would have in maintaining central control. The Vietnamese empire rested upon smaller units than did the Chinese, and so the danger of its breaking apart was always greater. When the armies of the successful new Le dynasty undertook the conquest of Champa, it was the villages rather than the state that conducted the colonization of the land to the south. From the now crowded plains of the Red River Delta, colonies of the young and the landless set out to pioneer the new territories. These colonies would be supported by the parent-villages until they became self-sufficient; then they would flesh out and close in upon themselves.10 In this process of amoebic reproduction the mandarinate could only certify an accomplished fact by granting the new villages charters of their incorporation into the empire. The difficulty of controlling these colonies naturally increased as they migrated away from the circle of the northern delta and down the thin strip of coastal plain to the Mekong.

  Broken laterally by the foothills of the Annamites, the ribbon of cultivable land in what is today central Vietnam is only three hundred miles wide at its greatest extent and forty-five miles wide at its narrowest. As the imperial armies fought their way down through the kingdom of Champa, they left behind them a new line of settlement six hundred miles long. In their seasonal campaigns they could only temporarily secure the stretch of lowland. Isolated within the short valleys, the villages offered easy targets to bandits who made their bases in the jungled slopes of the foothills. Under local military pressure the thin web of loyalty that bound them to the empire would snap off. With time the blood lines that bound the villagers to their ancestors in the north would similarly break and be forgotten. As the frontiers of settlement drew further and further from the capital, the Le emperors began to lose control of their territory in a more and more permanent manner. The bandits secured agricultural bases and turned their guerrilla bands into full-fledged armies. The most successful among them established their own bureaucracies of mandarins and, securing the villages against their smaller rivals, entered into a competition with the Le monarchy. By the beginning of the seventeenth century two warlord families, the Trinh and the Nguyen, had succeeded in eliminating all other contenders and in partitioning the country between them. The Trinh took control of the Red River Delta; the Nguyen withdrew to the Annamese coast to rule that part of the country that continued to expand southward. Though both remained determined to reunify the empire — still under the nominal suzerainty of the Le dynasty — their all-out civil war settled slowly into a boundary dispute. At the end of the seventeenth century they broke off hostilities at a wall built by the Nguyen across the narrow Gates of Annam at the 18th parallel. Once the most powerful and strictly Confucian of all the dynasties, the Le lived out their days as sacred prisoners in the imperial citadel, their empire divided between the northern and the southern warlord-kings.

  Like the “temporary” demilitarized zone created by the Geneva powers in 1954, the “temporary” wall built by the Nguyen had more than a military significance. The March to the South had altered the substance as well as the dimensions of the Vietnamese empire. As a result of the original distance between village and court, the nation had expanded at the price of its Confucian organization.

  Generally speaking, Confucian society consisted of two separate groups, the small, literate elite and the mass of the peasantry. The link between the two was the village “notables,” who sent their sons to study the Confucian texts and to compete in the national examinations for a place in the bureaucracy. These “notables,” in turn, instructed the villagers in Confucian patterns of behavior. After centuries of Confucian government — Chinese as well as Vietnamese — the villages of the Red River Delta possessed strong traditions of family solidarity, Confucian literacy, and loyalty to the empire. But even in the north the villages acted as reservoirs for an older folk culture. Secreted within the oral tradition were all the legends of an ancient world where nature ran countercurrent to the tidy designs of the Confucian heaven. Within the bamboo hedges of the villages, tree spirits and stone spirits and anarchic female spirits competed with the genii of the empire for influence over the villagers. (Père Léopold Cadière, the distinguished French anthropologist, came upon the following situation in a village in central Vietnam in the nineteenth century. The guardian of a village dinh had been persuaded by the villagers that con tinh, a dangerous female spirit who walked without feet, had come to inhabit a large tree by the edge of the river. Since she, the restless soul of a virgin, was known to seduce men and pluck their souls out of their mouths, he became very much concerned for the peace of mind of his mandarin-genii. In order that she should not disturb the genii he began to make offerings of flowers and glutinous rice to her tree. His successor, however, suppressed the cult with the explanation that he had “seen the con tinh following around a lot of local demons of no account.” In other words, a clear victory for Confucianism and the cosmopolitan tendency in the village.11 ) The village scholars studied the Confucian texts until they believed they believed in self-control, filial piety, and the virtues of the mandarin administration, but they lived nonetheless within a local underground of belief and custom that all but contradicted the official discipline. From a political point of view this meant that they were continually divided between parochialism and nationalism, the virtues of self-reliance and those of obedience to the emperor.

  As the villages moved out from the Red River Delta, away from the base circle of the empire, the influence of Confucian culture diminished progressively within them. The mandarins of the Le and the Nguyen followed them south, but the warlords and bandits disrupted their royal administration and left the intellectual elites to sink back into the village traditions, into the small anarchy of the old culture. The withdrawal of the Confucian notables from the universalist tradition exposed the villages more and more to the particular influences of the places where they settled. The change became most apparent as they moved from the narrow coastal plain of central Vietnam into the Mekong Delta.

  Unlike northern and central Vietnam, the Mekong Delta lies full in the framework of Southeast Asia. With their conical mountains, their sudden outcropping of rock formed by glacier and volcano, the northern regions of Vietnam seem to belong to China. But the low alluvial plains of the south flow directly into the deltas of Cambodia and Thailand without a break in soil or climate. At the time of the Vietnamese conquest the Mekong Delta was a vast, flooded territory, uninhabited but for a scattering of Khmer villages. As the Vietnamese moved into it, they dispersed to settle in clusters on the high ground of the marshes or along the banks of the tributary rivers. Suddenly freed of the old land pressures, their pioneer villages lost their fortress aspect and al
ong with it the disciplined social organization that gave the northern villages their political strength. In the village below Saigon studied by the American anthropologist, Gerald Hickey, the village notables could trace their patrilineage back only to the fifth generation, the rest of the villagers only to the third.12 In Hickey’s term, the villages had gone through a “cultural washout” as they moved from north to south. By the time of the French arrival they had only the unity of a series.

  During the American war the villages no longer played the important role they once had, but by that time the difference in their organization had left its mark even on the character of their inhabitants. The Vietnamese need no anthropologist to tell them that there are differences between northerners and southerners. The differences are clichés, endless source of jokes and, occasionally, of hostility. One southern member of the Viet Minh who had regrouped to the north in 1954 under the terms of the Geneva Agreements gave examples of these clichés in describing the relations between the northerners and the southerners in his unit. The southerners, he said, “are used to being free and extravagant in their expenses. After working hours they get together to go eat or play guitars and sing.” The northerners, on the other hand, “are very economical in their expenses and not very generous in their relations with friends.” While the southerners like to fight among themselves and to argue about matters of policy, the northerners “obey their leaders, and in the meetings they are ready to respond to any motto or any way.… [They] try to keep their present positions and thirst for fame.” This difference in life-style, said the soldier, provoked continual arguments within the unit. “Those northern stinkers are miserly,” the southerners complained. “They consider money as a big wheel. They are cowards like land crabs.… [They are] servile flatterers, always nodding to show their submission and never conceiving any idea of fighting for their rights.” The northerners in anger blamed the southerners for never being satisfied with anything and for fighting among themselves all the time. “Those southern guys,” they said, “only know how to have fun. They do not have Revolutionary Ethics. Their fighting standpoint is weak.”13

  The soldier’s account is reminiscent of Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper: the grasshopper sings all summer long and mocks the drudgery of the ant, but when winter comes the grasshopper must beg the ant for food. As a southerner, the soldier weights his account in favor of the southerners; still, the picture he presents is telling. In general it is true that the northerners have more discipline than the southerners. Brought up in a country where the land is scarce for everyone, they tend to be hard workers, careful of waste and expense. Theirs is a tightly knit, patriarchal society, and they, more than the southerners, are aware of their obligations to others and responsive to authority. On the whole they are less spontaneous than the southerners, more given to formality; they see themselves always with respect to their place within society. In Freudian terms, they tend to be more repressed than the southerners; politically, they are more inclined to community action and to the whole notion of government as the fulfillment of a society.

  These characteristics — as described by the Vietnamese themselves — ought perhaps to have given pause to the Americans who wished to oppose south against north. While the contrast between the people of each region is too broad to show up at the level of the individual, it has continually manifested itself in the political history of the country. By backing a regime in the south, the United States was taking on what had historically been the weakest part of the country. The south represented anarchy in contrast to the order of the north.

  The disintegration of Confucian society in the south had immediate consequences for the government of the south in the nineteenth century, for the Confucian culture was the single foundation of the state. Inflexible Confucians, the Nguyen princes continued to rule in precisely the same manner as their predecessors, making no adjustment for the change in the society beneath them. At the end of the eighteenth century a massive peasant rebellion led by three brothers from the village of Tay Son (in what is now Binh Dinh province) swept across the central and southern provinces. After a short resistance the Nguyen family fled — their last surviving heir taking refuge with the enemy in Siam. Brilliant military commanders, the Tay Son brothers,14 in a series of lightning campaigns, marched up the length of the coastal plain, broke through the Gates of Annam, and conquered the Trinh dynasty in the north. In the view of many historians, their revolt initially had the aspect of a true social revolution that pitted the peasants and merchants against the mandarins and large landowners. But the brothers failed to consolidate their victories by making social reforms or creating a replacement for the Confucian system of government. Their supporters quickly became disillusioned and apathetic. When a few years later the surviving heir to the Nguyen began a new offensive in the south, the peasants, who had formerly sustained the Tay Son, withdrew from the struggle and allowed the new dynasty to fall before the old one.15

  All Vietnamese look to historical precedents for the events of their own day. Thus the southern gentry of the 1950’s and 1960’s looked with hope upon the restoration of the Nguyen monarchy as a precedent for their own struggle. In the late eighteenth century the southern Nguyen emperor Gia Long reaped the Tay Son’s military harvest and reconquered the country from south to north. The surviving Le monarch deposed, Gia Long in 1802 succeeded in unifying Vietnam from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Siam for the first time in history. Despite this achievement, the Nguyen restoration boded poorly rather than well for the twentieth-century southerners. In the first place Gia Long’s military victories rested less on brilliant generalship or popular enthusiasm than on artillery and advisers loaned to him by foreigners. In the second place, rather than correct the political mistakes of his predecessors, he and his successors exaggerated them by creating an administration that was not simply North Vietnamese in style, but Chinese. Abolishing the Le code that had accommodated the “habits and customs” of the Vietnamese, the Nguyen promulgated a new set of laws modeled on those of the Ming and the Ch’ing dynasties of China. On the stele before the Temple of Literature near their new capital of Hue, they had inscribed: “It belongs to the sovereign to decide matters of ritual” and “The religion of the Sage is immutable as Heaven.”16 The religion might be immutable, but the country itself had changed. In the south the villagers so recently settled into the broad rich plains of Southeast Asia possessed no firm commitment to the empire or to its rituals. In time, perhaps, the mandarins descending from the imperial court might have “pacified” the southerners and included them within the circle of empire. But the French did not allow them the necessary period of generations. Only forty years after the accession of Gia Long a small French naval force landed near Saigon. The French column marched straight through the oldest of the southern provinces and severed them from the empire.17

  For those southerners interested in historical analogies, the French conquest of Vietnam provided a whole series of parallels to the American intervention a century later. To begin with, the French involvement in Vietnam was a gradual process. The French made a series of decisions, none of which could be singled out as the sole cause of armed intervention. French missionaries and merchants came to Vietnam to pursue their respective vocations as early as the seventeenth century. The merchants failed to establish themselves — in part because of the poverty of Vietnamese trade beside that of the other Far Eastern countries, in part because of Vietnamese resistance. But the Catholic fathers persisted and founded a strong mission in Vietnam. For a long time the French government in Paris considered Vietnam not worth the effort of subduing — it offered few commercial advantages. But by the mid-nineteenth century the British, Spanish, and Portuguese had made extensive conquests in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the French naval commanders in the Far East began to see Vietnam as vital to their imperial mission in Asia.18 Like the American commanders of the twentieth century, they were concerned not so much with Vietna
m itself as with China, where France was already engaged in commercial competition with the other European powers. Their occupation of Saigon and the surrounding provinces, finally authorized by the French government, gave them a base on the Pacific and the opportunity to search for a southern river route to China. When they discovered to their great disappointment that the Mekong was unsuitable for navigation (and in any case did not originate in China), they turned their sights towards the Red River Delta. In 1873 a young adventurer called Francis Garnier, under the aegis of local officials, sailed up the river, declared it open to international trade, and bombarded Hanoi as well as all the Vietnamese towns and garrisons along the shores. The adventure was frowned upon by the authorities in Paris. It was not until ten years later that Paris authorized the conquest of the Red River Delta and the bombardment of Hue. The justification the French officials chose for this armed intervention was the missionary account — greatly exaggerated — of persecution of the Catholic missionaries by the Vietnamese emperor. Because the missionaries had for more than a century directed a steady stream of propaganda to Paris about their valiant, but sometimes thwarted, efforts to civilize the natives, this religious pretext was more or less accepted by those who performed the conquest. Like many Americans in the twentieth century, the French conquerors truly believed they were helping the Vietnamese by occupying their country.

  Had the French naval forces met a concerted national resistance from the Vietnamese — even such a campaign as Gia Long waged against the Tay Son — they might have finally failed to convince Paris of the desirability of a military conquest. But the country fragmented beneath them. At the same time that the French were moving across the Mekong Delta a rebellion, sponsored by French missionaries, broke out in the north, and the emperor chose to accede to the French demands for the cession of the southern provinces rather than divert the imperial armies from the revolt. As a result, the resistance to the French in the south came not from the court but from the local governors, who raised the villages to wage guerrilla warfare against the ensconced French troops. The southern mandarins were finally defeated. Fleeing north, they found the center of the empire in a state of chaos, riven by pirate bands, invading Chinese troops, and a new rebellion, this time led by the anti-Catholic mandarins against the supine court. When twenty years later the French decided to make their move against the north, the imperial armies gave little resistance to the French Expeditionary Corps. A year after the death of the Emperor Tu Duc the French installed their own protégé, Dong Khanh, in the court of Hue; the young sovereign, Ham Nghi, appointed by the Vietnamese regents, fled into the mountains with a few loyal mandarins to carry on a long but finally hopeless resistance in the jungles. By the time of Ham Nghi’s submission, the Mekong Delta under its new name of Cochin China had been a French colony for over twenty years.