Taylor - A History of the Vietnamese

The history of Vietnam prior to the nineteenth century is rarely examined in any detail. In this groundbreaking work, K. W. Taylor takes up this challenge, addressing a wide array of topics from the earliest times to the present day including language, literature, religion, and warfare and themes including Sino-Vietnamese relations, the interactions of the peoples of different regions within the country, and the various forms of government adopted by the Vietnamese throughout their history. A History of the Vietnamese is based on primary source materials, combining a comprehensive narrative with an analysis which endeavors to see the Vietnamese past through the eyes of those who lived it. Taylor questions long-standing stereotypes and clichs about Vietnam, drawing attention to sharp discontinuities in the Vietnamese past. Fluently written and accessible to all readers, this highly original contribution to the study of Southeast Asia is a landmark text for all students and scholars of Vietnam.

K. W. TAYLOR is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. His career began in the US army, where he was deployed in the USVietnam War. He has now been researching Vietnam for nearly forty years, and his work has made a fundamental contribution to the development of the field.

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I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to four people who have provided inspiration for this book. The late Paul G. Fried (19192006), whom I encountered at Hope College nearly half a century ago, gave me confidence in the importance of studying the past and in the possibility of becoming a historian; without his encouragement, I doubt if I would have subdued the disquiets of wartime experience to commence a life of scholarship. John K. Whitmore, who initiated me into the study of Vietnamese history at the University of Michigan, demonstrated a commitment to academic study, an intellectual integrity, and an abiding curiosity about the past that have given me a deep appreciation for the craft of the historian. The late Oliver W. Wolters (19152000) taught me how to critique my ideas about historical study; his questing mind was a constant prompt to reread and to rethink texts with an awareness of the options exercised by those who wrote them. The late Alton L. (Pete) Becker (19322011), both during my training at the University of Michigan and during a summer seminary in 1992, taught me a love of words, of how language shapes and is shaped by thought, and of the pleasure of translation; his influence has gone deep into how I understand culture as a process of telling stories and of translating them. Olga Dror, my wife, has been my intellectual companion and most valued discussant for ideas about the Vietnamese past.