Dai Viet

Politics and institutions

Đại Việt, the Great Viet, was adopted as the state name in 1054 by the Lý emperor Thánh Tông, and for the next seven and a half centuries it named the Vietnamese monarchy centred on Thăng Long, modern Hanoi. Power passed from the Lý to the Trần in 1225, to the Hồ in 1400, through two decades of Ming occupation, to the restored Lê from 1428, with a Mạc interlude after 1527 and a Trịnh–Nguyễn division of the royal house. The state was governed through a Confucian bureaucracy staffed by examination graduates, codified law under the Hồng Đức code of Lê Thánh Tông, and managed a tense relationship with the village autonomy of the Red River Delta. The Tây Sơn swept the Lê away in the 1780s, and in 1802–04 the Nguyễn founder Gia Long renamed the country Vietnam.

Economy and finance

The economy of Đại Việt was anchored in the wet rice of the Red River Delta, protected by one of the world's oldest systems of dikes and fed by communal village land. Registers of adult males underpinned taxation and corvée, while crafts — ceramics, silk, bronze casting — supplied both tribute missions and an export trade: Vietnamese blue-and-white wares reached Japan and Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century. Ports such as Vân Đồn and later Phố Hiến hosted Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian merchants, and the southern Nguyễn domain drew trade toward Hội An. Copper coinage circulated across the realm, and tribute missions to China doubled as licensed commerce. The delta's surpluses financed armies, canals and the examination schools that tied the countryside to the state.

Society and culture

Đại Việt culture joined the Confucian examination state to a Buddhist and Daoist countryside. The Temple of Literature was founded in 1070 and the first examination held in 1075, and education in Chinese characters became the road to office; beside it grew chữ Nôm, a demotic script in which a distinct Vietnamese literature flourished, from Nguyễn Trãi's verse to the poetry of Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm. Mahayana Buddhism remained close to court under the Lý and Trần, and women's property rights, strong by the standards of East Asia, were later restricted under Confucian codification. Village life ran on communal ritual and the guardian temple, so that the state's classical order always shared the field with local custom.

Military and frontiers

Đại Việt's army earned its reputation in defense. In 1075–77 Lý Thường Kiệt struck first against the Song and then held the border; in 1258, 1285 and 1287–88 the Trần repelled three Mongol invasions, destroying the Yuan fleet on the Bạch Đằng river in 1288. The Hồ could not repeat the feat: Ming armies occupied the country from 1407 until Lê Lợi's Lam Sơn uprising drove them out in 1427. The Later Lê took Vijaya, the Cham capital, in 1471, breaking the long rivalry with Champa. From 1627 to 1672 the Trịnh and Nguyễn lords fought seven wars with European firearms and cannon, and in the 1780s the Tây Sơn destroyed a Siamese invasion at Rạch Gầm–Xoài Mút in 1785 and repelled a Qing army in 1789.

Foreign relations

Đại Việt's diplomacy turned on China: it sent tribute and received investiture from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, keeping the formula of 'king abroad, emperor at home' that let its rulers crown themselves at Thăng Long. War and dynastic marriage alternated with Champa until its conquest, and the kingdom dealt with Lan Xang, Ayutthaya and the Tai principalities along its western marches. From the sixteenth century Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese traders called at its ports, and missionaries such as Alexandre de Rhodes transcribed Vietnamese into Latin script and left a church that survived persecution. In 1802 the new Nguyễn dynasty sought its own investiture from the Qing and renamed the country Vietnam in 1804.

Legacy and influence

Đại Việt is the spine of Vietnamese national memory: the name lasted from 1054 to 1804, and its examination tradition, run in Chinese characters, did not close until 1919. The southward expansion that began under the Lê turned a Red River kingdom into the long country of today, absorbing Champa and the Mekong Delta. Thăng Long, renamed Hanoi, remains the capital; the Hồng Đức code, the vernacular literature of chữ Nôm and the victories on the Bạch Đằng form the repertoire of a statehood that outlasted every dynasty. When Gia Long renamed the country Vietnam, he renamed a continuity, not a beginning.