History of Vietnam - Culture and background country
 The history of Vietnam
is one of the longest to be found in any country, with
archaeological excavations revealing a past that goes back almost as
far as earth’s recorded time. To study this extensive history in
detail would take you, the reader literally years, thus I have cut
it down, deleted some of the less important periods and have
concentrated on those I feel will be of more interest to the general
traveller considering visiting this fascinating and beautiful
country.
The country has seen both prosperous times as well
as years of slumber. Evolving over literally thousands of years
Vietnam and its progressive expansions have always been under
constant pressure from her powerful neighbour, China and throughout
the county’s history, China features very strongly.
 Vietnam has her own
legends concerning the origins of the race but according to the
history books the Vietnamese first appeared as one of many scattered
peoples living in what is now South China and Northern Vietnam just
before the beginning of the Christian era.
According to local tradition, the small Vietnamese
kingdom of Au Lac, located in the heart of the Red River valley, was
founded by a line of legendary kings who had ruled over the ancient
kingdom of Van Lang for thousands of years. Archaeological findings
indicate that the early peoples of the Red River delta area were
among the first East Asians to practice agriculture and by the first
century BC had achieved an advanced level of civilization.
The Chinese Influence In 221 BC the Ch'in dynasty in China
conquered the neighbouring states and became the first to rule over
a united China. The Ch'in Empire, however, did not survive the death
of its founder, Shih Huang Ti and this was soon felt by Vietnam.
The Chinese commander in the south built his own
kingdom, Nam Viet (South Viet; Chinese, Nan Y?eh); the young state
of Au Lac was included. In 111 BC, Chinese armies conquered Nam Viet
and included it in the growing Han Empire. This conquest had fateful
consequences for the future course of Vietnamese history.
Chinese rulers attempted to include Vietnam
politically and culturally into the Han Empire. Administrators were
brought in to replace the local rulers and political systems along
Chinese lines were imposed. Confucianism became the official
ideology. The Chinese language was introduced as the official
language and Chinese script as the writing. Chinese art,
architecture and music also influenced Vietnamese history.
Vietnamese resistance to rule by the Chinese was fierce but
ineffectual and the Vietnamese during these times had a fondness for
murdering anyone in power, including their families that weren’t
popular, a practice that continued up until the 1600’s.
The most famous early revolt took place in AD 39,
when two widows of local aristocrats, the Trung sisters, led an
uprising against foreign rule. The revolt was briefly successful and
the older sister, Trung Trac, established herself as ruler of an
independent state. Chinese armies returned to the attack, however,
and in AD 43 Vietnam was re-conquered.
Independence  The
Trung sisters' revolt was the first in a series of uprisings that
took place during the thousand years of Chinese rule in Vietnam. In
939, Vietnamese forces under Ngo Quyen took advantage of chaotic
conditions in China and set up an independent state. Ngo Quyen's
death a few years later prompted a period of civil strife, but in
the early 11th century the first of the great Vietnamese dynasties
was founded.
Under the astute leadership of several dynamic
rulers, the Ly dynasty ruled Vietnam for more than 200 years, from
1010 to 1225. The rise of this dynasty encouraged a feeling of
patriotism among the Vietnamese despite the retention of many of the
political and social laws that had been introduced during Chinese
rule.
Confucianism continued to provide the foundation for
the political institutions of the state. The Chinese civil service
examination system as the means of selecting government officials
was retained and eventually not just men of noble background, but
the general public could sit the test. The educational system
continued to follow the Chinese model and young Vietnamese were
schooled in the Confucian classics and grew up conversant with the
ideas that had shaped Chinese history.
Vietnamese society, however, filtered through and native forms of
expression continued to flourish. At the village level, social laws
and lifestyle reflected native Vietnamese traditions more than
Chinese.
 The Ly Dynasty
Primarily an agricultural state, most of the land was divided among
the nobility. Some landholding farmers also existed, however, and
powerful monarchs frequently attempted to protect this class by
limiting the power of feudal lords and dividing up their large
estates. The Vietnamese economy though was not based solely on
agriculture. Commerce and manufacturing thrived, local crafts
appeared in regional markets throughout the area and trade grew.
Change and Expansion The Ly dynasty and its
successor, the Tran from 1225-1400 helped Vietnam become a powerful  nation
in Southeast Asia. China though, still wanted to control the Red
River delta and when the Mongol dynasty came to power in the 13th
century, the armies of Kublai Khan attacked Vietnam in an effort to
re-instate it into the Chinese Empire. The Vietnamese resisted and
after several battles sent them back across the border.
While the Vietnamese continued to fight the forces
from the north an area of equal and growing concern lay to the
south. For centuries, the Vietnamese state had been restricted to
the area around the Red River valley. Tension between Vietnam and
the kingdom of Champa, the seafaring state along the central coast,
began shortly after the restoration of Vietnamese independence.
The Cham occupied the capital near Hanoi but were
gradually driven further south. Finally, in the 15th century,
Vietnamese forces captured the Cham capital south of present-day Da
Nang. The following generations continued their drive south wiping
out the remnants of the Cham Kingdom closed in on the Mekong delta.
Here it came up against, the Khmer Empire, the most
powerful state in the region. By the late 16th century, however, its
strength had dwindled and it offered little resistance to Vietnamese
encroachment. By the end of the 17th century, Vietnam had occupied
the lower Mekong delta and began to advance to the west, threatening
to transform the disintegrating Khmer state into a protectorate.
The Le Dynasty The Vietnamese advancement to
the south coincided with yet more trouble in the north. In 1407
Vietnam again suffered under the hands of the Chinese. For twenty
years, the Ming dynasty tried to get Vietnam back, but in 1428,
resistance forces under the  rebel
leader Le Loi won hands down and restored Vietnamese independence
once more.
Le Loi became the first emperor of the Le Dynasty
that maintained power for more than a hundred years. Then in the
16th century it began to decline again. Power then went to two rival
clans, the Trinh and the Nguyen. When the former became dominant,
the Nguyen were granted leadership in the south, subsequently
dividing Vietnam into two separate areas.
By the late 18th century, the Le dynasty was near
collapse. Nearly all the paddy fields were controlled by powerful
lords, this in turn made the peasants angry which then led them to
revolt and in 1789 Nguyen Hue, the ablest of the Tay Son brothers, a
powerful family at the time revolted, briefly restoring Vietnam to
united rule.
Like many of his Vietnamese predecessors Nguyen Hue
died shortly after ascending the throne; a few years later Nguyen
Anh, one of the heirs to the Nguyen house in the south, defeated the
Tay Son armies. He became Emperor Gia Long and established a new
dynasty in 1802.
The French  Pierre
Pigneau de Behaine, a French missionary, raised a mercenary force to
help Nguyen Anh seize the throne in the hope that the new emperor
would provide France with trading and missionary privileges. The
Nguyen dynasty, however, was suspicious of French influence.
Roman Catholic missionaries and their Vietnamese
converts were then persecuted, and a number executed during the
1830’s. Religious groups in France demanded action from the
government in Paris and eventually Emperor Napoleon III sent naval
expedition in 1858 which he hoped would force the Vietnamese and the
court to accept a French protectorate.
The first French attack at Da Nang Harbour failed to
achieve its objectives, but a second further south was more
successful and in 1862 the court at Hue agreed to cede several
provinces in the Mekong delta, later called Cochin China, to France.
In the 1880s the French returned to the offensive, launching an
attack on the north. After severe defeats, the Vietnamese accepted a
French protectorate over the remaining territory of Vietnam.
French colonial rule met with little resistance. The
national sense of identity, however, had not been destroyed and
anti-colonial sentiment soon emerged. Poor economic conditions
contributed to hostility towards these new rulers and despite the
French occupation having brought improvements in transportation,
communications, commerce and manufacturing, colonialism brought
little improvement in livelihood to the masses.
In the countryside, peasants struggled to survive,
paying exorbitant taxes as well as working hard in the fields.
Workers in factories, coal mines and on rubber plantations laboured
in abysmal conditions for low wages. By the 1920’s, nationalist
parties began to demand reform and independence. In 1930 the
revolutionary Ho Chi Minh formed an Indochinese Communist party.
World War  Until
World War II started in 1939, such groups laboured without success.
In 1940, however, Japan demanded and received the right to place
Vietnam under military occupation, restricting the local French
administration to figurehead authority.
The Communists seized the opportunity and organized
the Vietminh Front that prepared to launch an uprising at the war's
end. The Vietminh (League for the Independence of Vietnam)
emphasized moderate reform and national independence rather than
specifically Communist aims.
When the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in
August 1945, Vietminh forces arose throughout Vietnam and declared
the establishment of an independent republic in Hanoi. The French,
however, were unwilling to concede independence and in October drove
the Vietminh and other nationalist groups out of the south. For more
than a year the French and the Vietminh sought a negotiated
solution, but the talks, held in France, failed to resolve
differences and war broke out in December 1946.
The French leave
The conflict lasted for nearly eight years. The Vietminh retreated
building up their forces while the French formed a rival Vietnamese
government under Emperor Bao Dai, the last ruler of the Nguyen
dynasty. Unfortunately Vietminh forces lacked the strength to defeat
the French and were forced to restricted their activities to
guerrilla warfare.
In 1953 and 1954 the French fortified a base at Dien
Bien Phu. After months of siege the Vietminh overran the fortress in
a decisive battle. As a consequence, the French government could no
longer resist the pressure at home and in June 1954 agreed to end
the war. They divided the country at the 17th parallel, with the
Vietminh in the North and the French and their Vietnamese supporters
in the South. To avoid permanent partition, a political protocol was
drawn up, calling for national elections to reunify the country two
years after the signing of the treaty.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam Today, the socialist
republic of Vietnam is the unification of North and South  Vietnam.
Vietnam has established friendly diplomatic relations with many
countries in the world.
In 1990 the European Union established official
diplomatic relations with Vietnam. In 1992 Vietnam signed a 1976
ASEAN agreement on regional amity and cooperation, regarded as the
first step towards ASEAN membership, which occurred in 1996. Vietnam
established diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the
United States removed a trade embargo in 1994 and in 1995 Vietnam
and the United States agreed to exchange low-level diplomats. By
1997, the two countries had established full diplomatic relations.
Peace has settled for the first time in many years
and suddenly the country is reaping the rewards. Tourism is slow but
beginning to boom and the economy improves almost daily. It has
become the country of new discoveries and adventures with a
potential that is only now showing it’s shy and beautiful face to
the rest of the world.
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