The emperor was anxious lest the rebels stall the army to wait for miasmic pestilence; he ordered [Zhang] Fu to wait until next spring to annihilate the rebels.Footnote 1
帝慮賊緩師以待瘴癘，敕輔等必以明年春滅賊
—The Yongle emperor's fears about his campaign in Đại Việt, Ming Shi
No insects, plants, or trees were able to survive.
昆蟲沖草木，咸不得以遂其生Footnote 2
—Description of Ming occupation in Lam Sơn thực lục
The plants and trees tremble at the approach of war,
The mountains, the rivers: all have entered the domain.Footnote 3
草木驚風鶴
山川入版圖
—Poem attributed to Lê Lợi, founder of the Lê dynasty
In 1406, the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty sent Trần Thiêm Bình, a self-proclaimed descendant of the former Trần dynasty (1225–1400), and an escort of troops into the neighbouring state of Đại Việt (present-day northern Vietnam) in order to install him on the throne. The group was ambushed by soldiers of the reigning Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) once they crossed the border into Lạng Sơn and Trần Thiêm Bình was killed.Footnote 4 The Yongle emperor dispatched a larger army in response, and soon the Ming overthrew the Hồ dynasty and claimed the territory as a province, naming it Jiaozhi (Vietnamese: Giao Chỉ). The Ming colonisation of Vietnam was characterised by the dispatch of Chinese military and civil officials to administer the territory, the extraction of taxes and resources, recruitment of locals into the colonial government and military, and the creation of institutes like schools to facilitate assimilation to Han culture.Footnote 5 After twenty years, the Ming retreated amid increasing pressure from the Lam Sơn resistance movement led by Lê Lợi, a man from the upland ‘Dong World’, who then founded the Lê dynasty (1428–1789). These events were profoundly important in Asian history. Indeed, James Anderson and John K. Whitmore see Yuan-Ming era military campaigns in Đại Việt (covering the period of 1258 to 1427) as a major turning point that resulted in the current division of the border-crossing Dong World between the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.Footnote 6
‘The Dong World’ derives its name from the Tai word for mountain valley settlements, ‘dong’.Footnote 7 The uplands south of the Yangzi River Valley and along the northern segment of mainland Southeast Asia belong to this world. Inhabitants of Dong communities engaged in wet rice agriculture and were led by Dong chiefs. Readers may be more familiar with ‘Zomia’, James C. Scott's elaboration of a highland zone that resisted the control of lowland states through such tools as deliberate illiteracy, a more egalitarian social structure, and mobility based on shifting cultivation. Anderson and Whitmore's concept of the Dong World is more grounded in the terrain and sociopolitical realities of the Sino-Vietnamese uplands, in which, unlike Scott's Zomia, literacy was present, wet-rice cultivation mitigated against mobility, and engagement and interdependence with lowland states was the norm. They show that lowland states were at times threatened or even dominated by their Dong neighbours. ‘The Dong World’ concept allows a rethinking of the highland–lowland binary in Southeast Asian historiography, emphasising interdependence and showing that the balance of power only shifted definitively to lowland states since the fifteenth century. Maybe, as Scott writes in his summary of scholarship on lowland–upland divides in history, ‘civilizations can't climb hills’,Footnote 8 but as we see with Lê Lợi's Lam Sơn uprising, power can descend hills.Footnote 9
In this article, I argue that previous research on the Ming–Đại Việt conflict has not paid sufficient attention to either the role of the climate and disease or to the rhetorical invocation of nature. Fifteenth-century sources frequently invoked natural enemies and natural allies: miasmic disease, natural resources, and local spirits or superfauna.Footnote 10 Recognising environmental factors as central to the Ming military campaign and occupation, and to Vietnamese resistance and subsequent state-building, helps us better understand the linkages of nature and empire in Sino–Vietnamese relations.
Recent scholarship on environmental history has deepened our understanding of this period of Vietnamese history. On a longer timescale, deforestation and frequent fires caused by warfare have shaped the ecology of the Red River and its environs in the Late Holocene.Footnote 11 Li Tana has written several articles that deal with the Medieval Warm Period and its consequences. She suggests that warmer and wetter weather between 900 and 1300 led to population growth, accompanied by deforestation and environmental degradation. This in turn pushed the population from the eastern to the western Red River Delta over time.Footnote 12 Hieu Phung's research analyses long-term trends such as climate change, water management, rice agriculture, while using fifteenth-century historical sources to focus on specific case studies. She demonstrates the connection between weather and climatic events and political legitimacy, and the Lê government's concern with agriculture and dyke-building.Footnote 13 In a later period, Kathryn Dyt has shown the continuing importance of controlling weather to political regimes in her study of the wind and rain rituals sponsored by the Nguyễn court in the nineteenth century.Footnote 14
Inspired by these historians, I wish to give a new reading of a familiar story by highlighting the role and rhetorical uses of the natural environment of Vietnam and its uplands. Rather than examining a changing climate or charting the incidence of drought and flood, I focus on how historical actors conceptualised their own relationship with nature—specifically, how the natural world could produce benefit or harm.
In this article, I focus on three ways in which environmental factors shaped the Ming invasion and occupation of Đại Việt and Vietnamese resistance. First, miasma, an environmental disease prevalent in the upland Dong World, complicated military campaigns by making troop movement more dangerous. Second, valuable natural resources found within Đại Việt and its Dong World borderlands made colonisation an appealing endeavour. Finally, in the rhetoric of the Lê dynasty, Vietnam's nature spirits rose up to support their defender, Lê Lợi, whose dynasty went on to conquer the land, resources, and people of neighbouring territories. Restoring the centrality of environment to the story of Ming China and Đại Việt's early-fifteenth-century conflict clarifies the motivations of the Ming in committing to a distant war and unruly colony. It shows that miasmic disease was a problem for both countries as they sought to expand their control into the Sino-Vietnamese uplands. It contributes to the growing awareness of the Dong World's interactions with lowland states and their importance for Vietnamese history. Although economically integrated with the lowland, the Dong World was not as affected by deforestation and flooding, and inhabitants had a closer relationship with ‘wilderness’. And it demonstrates that the Lê rulers’ invocation of the spirits of nature and assertion of the distinctiveness of the southern environment contributed to the development of a sense of Vietnamese identity.
Miasmic disease and the Ming occupation of Đại Việt
In 1406, the Yongle emperor of the Ming dispatched troops under the command of General Zhang Fu to remove Hồ Quý Ly, the ruler of Đại Việt (known in Chinese sources as Lê Quý Ly 黎季犛) in retaliation for the killing of Trần Thiêm Bình. General Zhang Fu intended to garrison his troops in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands for the winter; he needed time to build warships and gather provisions. But the Yongle emperor grew impatient. According to The History of the Ming (Ming shi), ‘The emperor was anxious lest the rebels stall the army to wait for miasmic pestilence; he ordered [Zhang] Fu to wait until next spring to annihilate the rebels.’Footnote 15 General Zhang Fu complied, and the campaign met with success, leading to incorporation of the Red River Delta and its environs as a Ming province.
Why was the Ming army so successful so quickly, especially given that they were routed when delivering Trần Thiêm Bình to Vietnam not long before? A likely possibility is that they had a serious advantage in weapons technology, especially small guns. The pioneering work of Sun Laichen and Tonio Andrade point in this direction, though their work is careful not to make definitive claims of cause and effect in the Ming–Đại Việt war. Andrade busts the conventional scholarly view that gunpowder was invented in China but not used for weapons there. His research shows the development of a staggering range of gruesome, deadly gunpowder weapons and firearm drilling not just in China, but across East Asia and Vietnam. He demonstrates that in the Ming period small guns were developed and used for antipersonnel purposes, while earlier gunpowder missiles and bombs continued to be used. By the time of the Yongle invasion of Vietnam in the early 1400s, somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of Ming soldiers were gun specialists, well trained to use firearms on the battlefield.Footnote 16 Put in a larger frame, Sun and Andrade's work show that the much-studied military revolution of Renaissance Europe should be understood instead ‘as a global process that started in China’.Footnote 17 The Ming–Đại Việt war is a case study of innovation and the spread of new technologies in times of conflict.
Sun Laichen and Kenneth Swope's work on the Ming occupation emphasises the importance of military technology transfer. They argue that the Ming started with a marked advantage in terms of military technology, but over time the Vietnamese resisters were able to adopt superior gunpowder weapons in their struggle against the Ming.Footnote 18 Their work shows the extent to which Europe-focused historians have underestimated the military technology of early modern Asia, and also suggests that Đại Việt used the military advances made during the Ming occupation to conquer neighbouring territories. Sun argues that Vietnamese use of gunpowder weapons permanently shifted the balance of power between Đại Việt and its southern neighbour Champa in the late fifteenth century.Footnote 19 The idea of technology transfer and military innovation is supported by the 1431 Lam Sơn thực lục (Veritable records of Lam Sơn), written in the voice of the Vietnamese military hero Lê Lợi: ‘Through my indignation with the powerful enemy's oppression, I was absorbed in books of military strategy, I used up all of my family's resources generously entertaining my guests. I recruited those who had surrendered to the enemy, and secretly nurtured those with good ideas.’Footnote 20
The best and most thorough study of the Ming invasion and occupation remains Whitmore's classic book, Vietnam, Hồ Quý Ly, and the Ming. Whitmore briefly mentions the Yongle emperor's concerns about the effect of heat and malaria (a retroactive diagnosis of miasmic disease), and that he was aware the toll these took on earlier Mongol campaigns. In response, Whitmore tells us, Yongle ordered his generals to go slowly, but they did not obey.Footnote 21 Although most studies, including those cited above, note that miasmic pestilence played a role in the Ming campaigns, they do not grant it the same central importance that rulers, generals, officials, and soldiers of the time did. In fact, historical records show us that, during the initial campaign, the Yongle emperor was deeply engaged with troop movements, sending frequent orders to his generals micromanaging their plans. The issue he was most concerned about was timing troop movements to the winter in order to avoid miasma-induced casualties in the spring and summer.
‘Miasma’ (瘴; Chinese: zhang; Vietnamese: chướng) is an environmental disease; it indicates both a climatic condition of vapours or mist and the illnesses these conditions caused. It frequently appears as part of a compound word: for example, miasmic pestilence 瘴癘 as above, or miasmic qi 瘴氣 (miasmic matter or climate). A major shift in the conceptualisation of zhang occurred between the Tang-Song period and the Ming-Qing period. Miasma often appears in Tang poetry to evoke the alien and exotic landscape of the South and the homesickness of the author. This poetic concept is explored in Schafer's classic study of Tang-era images of the South, The vermilion bird. Footnote 22 By the Ming period, though miasma was still part of the Chinese literary imagination, it was more often used to describe a specific environmental and health problem. No mere poetic trope, miasma was increasingly understood as a real environmental condition and disease agent given serious attention by medical specialists of the day.Footnote 23 In what Marta E. Hanson refers to as the Chinese geographic imagination, miasma was almost always associated with the South. The northern illness nüe 瘧 caused similar symptoms, but nüe and zhang were different, because of their different locations. A modern dictionary will gloss both words as malaria, but their semantic range was broader in the pre-modern period. Although miasmic illness was often characterised by the intermittent fevers, chills, and flu-like symptoms familiar to malaria-sufferers, it included other features that do not fit as easily with malaria, starting with its aetiology. Miasmic illness came not from mosquitos but from exposure to miasma. In the words of the Song scholar Fan Chengda, miasma ‘is caused by mountain mists and watery poisons, together with foul exhalations from wild grasses and steamy swelter from lush vegetation’.Footnote 24 Some added the exhalations of reptiles and snakes, linking the lush vegetation, fauna, and mountains to disease.Footnote 25 Indeed, historian Bin Yang argues that miasmic disease receded in the face of Han settlement, as new arrivals in the South cleared land for agriculture. Unlike malaria, miasma is seasonal. There are different kinds of miasma, often divided by season and again by type (hot, cold, mute), each with their own corresponding treatment.
Although some recent studies have retroactively diagnosed zhang as malaria,Footnote 26 this anachronistic application of modern biomedical categories elides the cultural context of miasmic diseases in the Ming era, or what Bruno Latour terms the ‘spatiotemporal envelope of phenomenon’.Footnote 27 In pre-modern usage, the word zhang describes what causes the disease (pathogenic mist) and the disease itself (a febrile illness). In China, miasma was most concentrated in the southern provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan, though references to it can be found throughout the empire. Likewise, in Vietnamese sources it appears nearly everywhere, but was described more commonly as a feature of highland areas flanking the Red River Delta.
The Ming strategy was to avoid miasma as much as possible, by moving troops in the winter, early spring, and fall when miasma was less prevalent and by encamping in healthful areas. In a missive dated 1 December 1406, the Yongle emperor urged his generals bivouacked near the border to strike quickly, in order to ‘take advantage of the winter months when the miasmic pestilence dissipates, to exterminate the fierce enemy’.Footnote 28 Less than two months later, he wrote again, urging, ‘The strategy of the Lê rebels is precisely to wait for a long time in order for miasmic pestilence to arise. To destroy them, speed is best. It is not advisable to delay this matter.’ A month later, in the beginning of February 1407, upon hearing news of the success of the campaign within Đại Việt, the Yongle emperor wrote again, ‘Pull back the troops early, or I fear miasmic pestilence and flooding will be inconvenient.’ But before that could happen, the miasmic season arrived, and the Yongle emperor advised them to retreat if possible, but to stay in place in lowland Đại Việt if there was no miasma there at present. He advised the troops to encamp in a high and sunny place.Footnote 29
Several Ming forts had been built in areas prone to miasmic qi. To deal with this problem, the regular northern troops were scattered in non-miasmic areas, and the forts were guarded by local troops hailing from Dong communities who were thought to be seasoned against miasmic diseases.Footnote 30 In the meantime, a messenger had been sent to the capital to inform the emperor that 10 to 30 per cent of the troops were ill with miasmic disease. The emperor castigated his generals for not heeding his order to strike quickly and retreat before the onset of the miasmic season and instructed them to make use of Miao troops to guard miasmic areas. ‘Miao’ is a generalised term for various non-Han groups of China's southern periphery, now classified as one of China's officially recognised ‘ethnic minorities’.Footnote 31 Miao people were presumed to be less susceptible to the climate and to miasmic disease and were important participants in the Ming campaign in Đại Việt, illustrating the interdependence and alliances forged between the Dong World and lowland states.
The Yongle emperor expressed frustration that even though his generals were out in the field they could not report clearly on the incidence of miasma, a problem which kept him up at night.Footnote 32 In late June of 1407, the Yongle emperor listed the miasmic places preventing retreat: Pingxiang 憑祥, Qiuwen 邱溫, Jiling 雞翎, Polei 坡壘 and Longzhou 龍州. These locations were in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands, and some were strategic passes, forming a barrier blocking retreat from east to west. A missive dated 4 July notes that messengers from the capital were falling ill and even becoming comatose on the road while passing through these miasmic places. The emperor ordered that messengers should only be sent for the most critical matters, and that anything that could be delayed should be delayed until the fall or sent over the less miasmic route through Guangdong province.Footnote 33
The Vietnamese were well aware that miasma helped shelter them from attack. The dynastic chronicle of Đại Việt, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, records many instances of miasma impeding the attacks of northern dynasties. Specifically, it mentions miasma in relation to a Han attack in 138 CE,Footnote 34 and a Liang campaign in 541 CE. When a Liang emperor insisted on sending troops despite his advisers’ warning about miasma, 60 to 70 per cent of them died.Footnote 35 In 1006, in response to a proposal to attack Đại Việt, emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty said, ‘Jiaozhou [northern Vietnam] has miasmic diseases; if we raise an army to attack them many would be harmed or killed’, and therefore the existing border should be guarded but not expanded.Footnote 36 These stories were no doubt familiar to the Yongle emperor, who was defying historical warnings by expanding his state into the Red River Delta, as well as the express wishes of his father, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty.Footnote 37 What makes these details about the threat of miasmic illness worth reporting is that it was entered into the Vietnamese annals, demonstrating that the deadly effect of miasma was shared lore.
In the same way, miasma created a natural barrier between Đại Việt and its southern neighbours. In the twelfth century, the kingdom of Chenla (located in modern-day Cambodia) raided Nghệ An province on the north-central coast of modern-day Vietnam. Nghệ An is covered in forests and mountains, dotted with small valleys nestled between peaks. The Chenla troops attacked in the late summer of 1150, but were stopped short ‘when they reached the misty mountains and encountered the heat and humidity. Many died of miasma.’Footnote 38
Despite the challenges posed by miasma, the initial Ming campaign against the Hồ dynasty in 1407 was quick and successful. Holding on to the new province proved more difficult. Each time General Zhang Fu returned home to Nanjing after stability was reached in Jiaozhi, he was sent back again, for a total of four times over a decade.Footnote 39 Miasma complicated the campaign and subsequent occupation, but it did not prevent it. The end of Ming rule was brought about by local resistance movements, waning Ming interest after the death of the Yongle emperor, and the continuing expense of the occupation.Footnote 40 The Lam Sơn uprising (1418–27) decisively defeated the Ming, who withdrew in 1427.
Economic and environmental exploitation
Why did the Ming invade and annex Đại Việt? Historians have forwarded a variety of reasons. According to official Ming sources, the Ming were trying to restore the former ruling family, the Trần, and remove Hồ Quý Ly, whom they perceived as a usurper. Matters only came to a head when a Ming delegation accompanying the supposed Trần heir Trần Thiêm Bình across the border was ambushed and the heir killed.Footnote 41 This is often dismissed by historians as a pretext used by the Ming in order to continue their southern territorial expansion.Footnote 42 James Anderson suggests that the Yongle emperor was tempted to turn Đại Việt into a province due to the relative ease of the initial military campaign and a desire to surpass the legacy of both his father and the preceding Yuan dynasty.Footnote 43 Put in a broader context, the campaign can be seen as an extension of the 1383 Ming conquest of Yunnan,Footnote 44 itself a response to earlier Yuan expansion in the southwest, as well as to the culmination of a decades-long disagreement over control of border territories.
The most important reasons were perhaps economic. Wade suggests that restoring the Trần was only a pretext, and that the Yongle emperor's actual goal was to increase Ming power in Đại Việt and in the South more generally. Why? Wade points out that the Ming established three Maritime Trade Supervisorates 市舶提舉司 (shibo tiju si) in northern Vietnam in 1407–08, ‘the same number as existed in the rest of China’, indicating the importance of trade and economic exploitation.Footnote 45 He suggests that part of the reason for Ming economic exploitation in Southeast Asia was ‘to ensure that enough of the accumulation of the area was drawn off so as to inhibit the rise of too powerful a local regime, but not so great an amount as to induce rebellion among the people of that polity’.Footnote 46
Although resistance to Ming rule was persistent and took various forms, a segment of Vietnamese society, particularly the educated and wealthy elite and ethnic Chinese communities around present-day Hanoi and supporters of the fallen Trần dynasty, accepted and even supported Ming rule. Stabilising Ming rule could help Sino-Vietnamese elites preserve their property and way of life. Others were recruited into the colonial army, a deliberate policy of the Ming to lessen their own military burden, but one that may have contributed to their later defeat.Footnote 47 The Hồ dynasty had moved the capital from the Red River Delta to Thanh Hóa (in the upland Dong World), revealing the ‘littoral–montane’ divide within Vietnamese society that the Ming were able to exploit.Footnote 48 Recent scholarship emphasises that the Ming were intervening in this interregional conflict within Đại Viêt. The Hồ and later the Lê had their origins in Thanh Nghệ ̣and Thanh Hóa, south of the Red River, while the Trần and those who supported the Ming had their roots in the traditional elite class of the Red River Delta and the overlapping Sino-Vietnamese community of the coast. Anderson points out that the Ming backed the weaker side in this interregional rivalry, dooming its attempt to control a region that it did not fully understand.Footnote 49 Lê Lợi himself acquiesced to Ming rule for a time before re-entering the fray and launching the Lam Sơn uprising.
Fortunes could be made in Jiaozhi, but while individual officials lined their pockets, maintaining the colony proved expensive for the Ming government. Southern products found their way to northern markets, many gathered from upland areas, including ‘gold, silver, iron, ivory, plumage from tropical birds, aromatic wood for incense, pearls, lacquer ware, tea, fans, fish, and salt’ as well as rice; however, ‘there was a net loss for the state treasury’.Footnote 50 The Ming levied taxes on grain and imposed monopolies on ‘gold, silver, salt, iron and fish’.Footnote 51 While the Ming government instituted tax holidays for war-impacted areas, as well as a military farm system 屯田 (tuntian) to help make soldiers less reliant on tax revenue, resentment remained. In the meantime, Ming exactions took a toll on the local population. Rapacious Ming officials are singled out again and again for their cruel appropriations from local people. Eunuch commissioners like Ma Qi who procured precious goods for the emperor were beyond the control of the civil government. They took advantage of this immunity to amass personal fortunes. Chinese texts like the gazetteer Annan zhi yuan (安南志原) mention the crimes of Ma Qi so much that one cannot help but suspect that he was chosen as a scapegoat to take the blame for the Ming occupiers’ failure to retain Đại Việt.Footnote 52 However, this evidence is borne out by Vietnamese sources, which also identify Ma Qi, among others, as an especially greedy and unreasonable representative of the Ming government. Opportunistic Ming officials created pockets of dissatisfaction in the population and stirred resistance.Footnote 53 For Lê Lợi, it was personal. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư records that Lê Lợi sent an inquiry to Beijing about his lost daughter, who had been taken by Ma Qi to serve as a maidservant in the palace when she was only nine sui (eight years old).Footnote 54
Much has been made of Lê Lợi's partnership with the scholar Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442). Nguyễn Trãi ‘was a man of the Kinh [Vietnamese] people while Le Loi and large numbers of his followers came from the Trai peoples of the southern provinces’. The Trai hinterland that was home to the Lê clan was culturally and linguistically distinct from, for example, Miao areas, but both are part of the Dong World. John Whitmore, following the language of the Lam Sơn thực luc (‘Veritable Records of Lam Sơn’), describes Lê Lợi as a ‘Dong chief’ (洞主) while Nguyễn Trãi was from a lowland scholar elite family, passed the civil service examination under the Hồ dynasty, and refused to serve the Ming. Although ‘the team of brain and brawn’ image of the two may be exaggerated, they do represent a bridging of the montane–littoral binary in the creation of something new. In Whitmore's view, once Nguyễn Trãi joined Lê Lợi, his local movement went national.Footnote 55 They drew on Ming exploitation to rally the divided population of Đại Việt to their side. Nguyễn Trãi compiled the Lam Sơn thực lục in 1431, making it one of the first tasks of the new state after the explusion of the Ming army. The account covered the years 1418 to 1428 when Lê Lợi led the rebellion against Ming rule from Lam Sơn, the ‘Blue Mountains’, in Thanh Hóa province. It informs readers of the hardships he endured to gain control of the country. The book contains only three chapters and was composed in literary Sinitic.Footnote 56
Lê Lợi's account of his reasons for leading the Lam Sơn rebellion suggests that he tried first to lessen the harm of Ming government officials through bribery, but they were so greedy that nothing could satisfy them. He was only roused to action, he tells us, when he saw how exploitative and cruel Ming rule continued to be.
They dug our graves, took our people captive, massacred the good and loyal, and injured and killed orphans and widows. The country ran with blood, the people had no way to survive. The laws were cruel and excessive; there was nothing they would not do. They banned salt to make it hard for people to eat and levied heavy taxes to exhaust the people's wealth. They made people dive into the ocean to look for pearls, drill into the mountains to find gold, ivory, rhino horn, kingfisher feathers, and aromatic wood. Whatever we produced they exhausted themselves searching for, extravagantly gratifying their insatiable desires.
To add insult to injury, the Ming blamed the Vietnamese for their difficulties, ‘saying that our people are capricious and hard to rule’.Footnote 57
Later in the text, Nguyễn Trãi, writing in the voice of Lê Lợi, issued a powerful ‘Great Pronouncement upon the Pacification of the Wu’ (Bình Ngô đại cáo 平吳大誥).Footnote 58 This Pronouncement, which is contained within the Lam Sơn thực lục but also appears in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, has received more scholarly attention than the Lam Sơn thực lục as a whole. However, scholars have mainly focused on the opening lines and not the full text which vividly describes the environmental consequences of war and resource extraction under Ming colonial rule.
Under tyrannical Ming rule, the Bình Ngô đại cáo states, the Ming forced the Vietnamese people to engage in dangerous work:
When they [the Vietnamese] drilled for gold they contracted wind-borne miasma, but they had to chop down the mountains and pan for gold. When they harvested pearls they struck flood dragons, but they had to sound the rivers and dive in the seas. [The Ming] disturbed the people by making them arrange pitfalls for black deer, and treated animals like playthings by weaving nets to catch kingfishers. No insects, plants, or trees were able to survive. Widowers and widows had no help and no safe haven. [The Ming] extracted the people's blood in order to moisten their violent and cunning mouths and teeth and used soil and trees to build their grand offices. Because of the heaviness of compulsory service, the village looms were all empty. Even damming the East Sea would not wash away the defilement. Using up every stick of bamboo in the southern mountains would not yield enough paper to record the evil [they committed]. The gods and humans are indignant; Heaven and earth cannot tolerate it.Footnote 59
Nguyễn Trãi made a passionate condemnation of economic and environmental exploitation in the service of empire a centrepiece of legitimating the Lê dynasty's hold on power. In his words, the Ming overlords dispatched Vietnamese workers to harvest gold, pearls, black deer, kingfishers, insects, plants, and timber. These luxury goods often served as valuable medicines.Footnote 60 Ming colonial administrators eagerly dispatched their Vietnamese subjects to procure such rare and efficacious drugs. New taxes on wealth and labour made survival more difficult for those with less support, like ‘widows and widowers’, and looms stood empty as the young were called away to work on state projects.
The Annan zhiyuan confirms that the Ming administrators engaged in massive construction projects in Đông Đô (東都 present-day Hanoi). Rather than making do with existing structures, northern administrators oversaw the construction of grand timber-frame buildings that projected Ming imperial power and prestige. These projects would have been enormously expensive and labour-intensive. Huang Fu 黃福 (1362–1440), the highest-ranking civil administrator in Ming-held Jiaozhi, started constructing a new government office in Đông Đô on 3 September 1416 and did not complete the project until 4 April 1419. More rightly called a complex, it contained twenty different structures for a total of one hundred and thirty-eight bays (間). A bay is the space between four supporting columns. In standard Chinese construction, the central bay of the building facade was larger than the bays flanking it.Footnote 61 The new building had the same dimensions as the older one it replaced, and it was large. The main hall was five bays across, the front hall three, and the back hall five, flanked by massive halls along the east and west sides measuring thirty bays each, and connected by long, covered corridors. There were large towers on both the east and west sides. In addition to these main structures, there were buildings for archives, a library, for sorting official documents, and for the office of criminal affairs. These were not the only grand structures built by the Ming. Construction of an ever-full granary 永盈庫 (yongying ku) north of the Drum Tower in Đông Đô began on 17 June 1407. Elsewhere in the city, there were three warehouses comprising approximately forty-two bays and several other small structures. Just outside the city they built another large complex for the salt tax in 1414, totalling thirty-four bays.Footnote 62 These buildings would have required massive quantities of large timbers, which would have had to have been procured from the uplands and not the already deforested vicinity of Đông Đô and then shipped to the capital. These monumental timber structures are of a piece with the Yongle emperor's mobilisation of resources and labour for his architectural projects, as described by the art historian Aurelia Campbell. Monumental palaces and temples in Beijing and the far corners of the Ming empire projected the wealth and might of the Ming empire, while putting stress on natural and human resources.Footnote 63 In addition, the Lam Sơn thực lục laments that the Ming moved the capital from Tây Đô to Đông Đô, presumably in part due to the costs of rebuilding grand government offices, specifically citing the construction of city walls demanded by the Ming. These too were massive structures, generally made of tamped earth and faced with brick, to be used for military defence.Footnote 64
The passage tells us too that lowland Vietnamese ‘contracted wind-borne miasma’ in the uplands, just like their Chinese counterparts. Both groups were susceptible to highland diseases. Ming generals often lamented that Vietnamese troops relied on miasmic illnesses to decimate their armies, drawing them into the country but avoiding engagement while disease worked its deadly course.Footnote 65 This was likely a conscious strategy of the Vietnamese, but also a way to avoid miasmic diseases themselves. Like their northern opponents, lowland Vietnamese were susceptible to the miasmic diseases of the uplands. This reality is not noted in the Chinese sources, which often lump lowland Vietnam and the Dong World together and fail to recognise divisions within Vietnamese society.
Nguyễn Trãi paints a stark scene of environmental devastation and economic exploitation. Nguyễn Trãi and Lê Lợi based the legitimacy of the Lê dynasty on the overthrow of the Ming; stirring up anti-Ming feelings and persuading those Vietnamese who had supported the Ming that their rule was harmful and exploitative was an important rhetorical move.
Environmental rhetoric and Vietnamese identity
Upon defeating the Ming invaders, Lê Lợi strove to persuade holdouts to recognise his new regime by condemning Ming colonial exploitation. He and Nguyễn Trãi worked toward this goal by crafting texts and imperial decrees that cast his rule as inevitable, Heaven-ordained, and preferable to Ming rule.Footnote 66
The preface of the Lam Sơn thực lục immediately alerts the reader to the nature of the text: a hagiographic treatment of Lê Lợi and justification of his new government. The text makes remarkable use of natural allies and avatars that serve as auspicious portents or supernatural helpers, perhaps reflecting the lore of the Dong World. Before Lê Lợi was born, it tells us, a black tiger often appeared in his home village ‘that was familiar with humans and did not harm them’. After Lê Lợi's birth, which was accompanied by many auspicious portents, the tiger was no longer seen. Lê Lợi possessed physical characteristics that linked him to the tiger. From birth,
His imperial countenance consisted of an unusual demeanor, resolute eyes, a large mouth, and a prominent nose. His left shoulder had seven black spots. He moved like a dragon and paced like a tiger, and his whole body was covered with hair. His voice was resonant like a bell. He sat like a crouching tiger. Everyone knew that he was precious.Footnote 67
Here Lê Lợi is associated from birth with a totemic southern animal, biding his time until the moment came to strike.
In the Lam Sơn thực lục, nature is not only exploited by the invading Ming colonists, it conspires to help the local defender, Lê Lợi. The Lam Sơn thực lục contains many stories of divine intervention through the means of superfauna, establishing that Lê rule was supported by Heaven and by the local spirits that protected the land.Footnote 68 While on the run from the Ming troops, Lê Lợi turned his face to the sky and implored, ‘the Ming enemy are closing in on us, please protect the people!’ A tree reached out and helped him climb up to hide in its branches. A fox, a dog, and even stones tumbled down to block his pursuers. This timely intervention from the natural world gave him the strength to continue despite hardship and lack of food for the troops.Footnote 69
It is worth recounting in detail the story of Lê Lợi's magical Ming-defeating sword. The story of the return of the sword is much more well-known than the story of receiving it. According to legend, a turtle swam up to Lê Lợi's boat in a lake in Hanoi after the expulsion of the Ming, taking the sword in its mouth to return to Lạc Long Quân, the Dragon King. The lake is known to this day as Hồ Hoàn Kiếm 還劍湖 ‘Returned Sword Lake’, or colloquially as ‘Sword Lake’ (Hồ Gươm), an important tourist destination and local landmark. However, the legend of the sword's return is relatively recent, and it has been suggested that it arose from the sword-like shape of the lake before it was partially filled in by the French in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in the earliest versions of the legend of the return, the turtle was a foe who snatched the sword from Lê Lợi. The sword had the characters ‘Thuận Thiên 順天’ (Heaven-ordained) carved into it,Footnote 70 which would become the reign name Lê Lợi used as emperor. In popular culture, the story of how Lê Lợi received the sword is commonly conflated with the later story of returning it, and it is often assumed that he initially received it from the Hồ Hoàn Kiếm turtle. In fact, the earliest extant written account of the sword, the Lam Sơn thực lục, is quite different. Rather than Hanoi, the sword was found in Mục Sơn, in Thanh Hóa, Lê Lợi's home district in the Dong World. It was found not by Lê Lợi, but by his close friend and early follower, Lê Thận. And though the sword in the story did not have a name, the hilt did: ‘Thanh Thúy’ 青翠 (verdant). According to the text, ‘One night Lê Thận saw a light bright as a fire or a candle at the bottom of the Lam River. He saw it night after night. Lê Thận cast his net and got a piece of iron that was longer than one chi, shaped like an old blade, and he put it in a secret place.’ Later, Lê Lợi went to Lê Thận's house and saw a ray of light. Lê Thận's wife explained that it came from the iron rod her husband had fished up from the river and allowed Lê Lợi to take it with him to use as a plough. Lê Lợi saw that it had writing on it and shone without being polished, and realised it was a heavenly object. That night, his garden was visited by a spirit who left behind footsteps and mysterious seal-script writing on leaves. Lê Lợi's wife also found Lê Lợi's name written in seal script on the leaves when she was working in the garden and knew the object was a ‘treasure of the country’ 國寶. Later, Lê Lợi found a hilt at the base of a banyan tree with the characters Thanh Thúy 青翠 inscribed on it. It fitted the blade perfectly. The passage concludes: ‘At that time, the Hồ usurped the throne of the Trần dynasty. The emperor read books of history and military strategy, preserving himself and biding his time.’Footnote 71 Although the main elements of the story are familiar (a magical, Heaven-sent sword), a few elements are worth remarking upon. The discovery of the sword was made not just by Lê Lợi himself, but also by Lê Thận and their wives. It took time and explicit clues for them to understand its significance. Even then, Lê Lợi was waiting in the wings for the right moment to come forward.
There's something new in Lam Sơn thực lục, as is most apparent in the Bình Ngô Đại Cáo. Stephen O'Harrow made the argument that the Pronouncement is notably different from earlier Vietnamese writing in that it reflects ‘the development of a Vietnamese national identity’.Footnote 72 While disputing some of O'Harrow's claims, Liam Kelley concurs that the Pronouncement put forth a new ‘claim of the South's rightful existence as a separate kingdom’.Footnote 73 There is clearly some consensus that Nguyễn Trãi articulated and promoted a new sense of Vietnamese identity; I argue that this identity was rooted in a distinct local environment, characterised by the southern rivers, mountains, auspicious animals, and local spirits invoked in his writing, especially that of the Dong World. According to the writings produced under Lê sponsorship, this natural environment was the wellspring of Lê Lợi's power and legitimacy.Footnote 74 This is made literal in the case of the sword fished up from the river.
At the end of the Bình Ngô đại cáo, Nguyễn Trãi employed nature metaphors that indirectly suggest Lê Lợi's own troops’ footprints on the land: ‘Our elephants drank the rivers dry, whetting our swords ground mountains down. The first drumbeat ripped whales open and broke crocodiles apart. The second drumbeat scattered birds and frightened deer.’Footnote 75 Blood stained the rivers and the stench of dead bodies filled the air. Peace would be a time of renewal: ‘Our state altars (社稷) have settled down, our mountains and rivers have changed.’Footnote 76 Nguyễn Trãi uses ‘state altars’ to mean ‘country’ or ‘land’, but the invocation of the state altars to the earth and grain is significant. He is signalling not only that the country can heal in peacetime, but also that Lê Lợi has a religious role in achieving this end. Emperors traditionally made annual sacrifices at the state altars. Indeed, one of Lê Lợi's first acts as emperor was to send representatives to thank the local spirits.Footnote 77 This was a political act to demonstrate that he had the support of the local spirits, but perhaps also to atone for the damage done to the land during the fighting.
Miasmatic disease and Vietnamese expansion
Despite the appeal to local spirits and attempt to heal the scars of war, the Lê state soon began its own campaigns of expansion. Đại Việt under the Lê engaged in a process of imperial conquest that, like that of the Ming, involved dominating the landscape and exploiting natural resources. When Lê Lợi suppressed pro-Ming rebels in the uplands, he had his poems inscribed on boulders to admonish local residents, a practice of claiming newly conquered land also employed by the Ming.Footnote 78 One line claimed ownership of the local environment:
At the same time, divisions within Đại Việt under the Lê persisted. As symbolised by the relationship between Lê Lợi and Nguyễn Trãi, the early Lê blended Dong and Sino-Vietnamese rulership: the Lê ruler was simultaneously a Sino-Vietnamese style emperor and a Dong lord [洞主].Footnote 80 Perhaps inevitably, a struggle played out in the Lê court between Dong military leaders who rose to power with Lê Lợi and the traditional Confucian elite of the Red River Delta. Nguyễn Trãi was killed in 1442 by Dong leaders who had had enough of him. Dong influence persisted as the Lê royal clan eventually sought refuge in Dong World following the rise of the Mạc clan from the lowlands in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 81
Territorial conquests continued during the reigns of Lê Lợi's heirs. From the late-fifteenth century on, with its annexation of Cham territories to the south, Đại Việt became an empire in its own right. From a small state centred in the Red River Delta, it would gradually reach into the uplands and all the way south to the Mekong Delta. The Tây Nam biên tái lục 西南邊塞錄 (Records of the Southwest Border), which deals with Vietnamese relations with the Cham and Lao from 1418–1527, describes near constant skirmishes with neighbouring polities. In one case, the text claims that a community of ‘barbarians’ was reduced from 90,000 households to a mere 2,000 individuals by 1479, a chilling testament to the Lê dynasty's violent expansion.Footnote 82
During this long process of expansion, the Vietnamese sought to exploit the same highland resources, battle the same highland diseases, and manage the same resistant peoples as their erstwhile Chinese foes. While pathogenic miasma and the hard-to-traverse Dong World had once sheltered Vietnam from attacks from the North, Dong communities increasingly became a problem for the Vietnamese state. Like its Chinese counterpart, the Vietnamese state struggled to staff positions in the uplands, experimenting with various incentives and punishments. Officials pleaded illness to evade the posting or travelled only partway and sent others to complete their tasks.Footnote 83 Yet the state persisted. Securing the borders and stabilising the region was deemed too important to neglect. But perhaps more important than the political or military reason was the economic one: the lure of the riches of the marginal uplands and the opportunity to expand tax rolls.
The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư makes it clear that miasmic areas concentrated in the Dong World served as a buffer zone that helped protect Đại Việt from invasion. But miasma not only protected the Vietnamese heartland, it also limited their own military campaigns. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư records miasma impeding both Vietnamese military campaigns and attempts to send officials to remote areas to expand central rule. The most stable and expansive period of the early Lê dynasty occurred in the reign of Lê Thánh Tông (1460–97). One of the challenges he faced was staffing the most distant parts of the state. In 1467, the state struggled to defend the An Bang fortress 安邦 (present day Quảng Ninh in the northeast) due to the presence of miasmatic disease.Footnote 84 In the spring of 1469 there was an imperial decree that officials serving in distant miasmic posts should be nurtured in the proper way. If the tax collectors succeeded in quickly collecting taxes without harassing the people for a full six years, they would be transferred to a better location. If they pleaded illness and tried to evade the posting, or if the tax revenue was extremely wanting, then they would be sent to an even more distant location, and would have to wait a full six years before they were permitted to move again.Footnote 85 Despite this incentive, in 1474, the emperor brought in several officials to question them about their practice of rotating personnel in and out of areas with miasmic disease, a strategy officials must have devised in order to minimise their time in the uplands.Footnote 86 By 1480, a solution was reached. Lê Thánh Tông ‘ordered that officials serving in miasmic regions who satisfy two or more tests and who are competent with no marks against them, the Ministry of Personnel after verifying that this is true should transfer them to a good place’.Footnote 87
In 1486, the emperor again had to make concessions for officials serving in miasmic locations. He spelt out exactly where these places were: An Bang, Hưng Hoá 興化 (in the northwest), Lạng Sơn 諒山, Thái Nguyên 太原, and Quảng Nam 廣南.Footnote 88 With the exception of Quảng Nam, all of these places lined the northern border with China. Quảng Nam marked a southern border. Lê Thánh Tông's successor continued these policies, and in 1498 ordered that those officials who committed serious crimes should be posted to distant places with miasmic fevers.Footnote 89
Ultimately, the central governments of both China and Vietnam dealt with staffing problems in the miasmic uplands by creating native offices, or thổ ty (Chinese: tusi 土司), which empowered local leaders to govern largely independently, under the nominal umbrella of the imperial state in both imperial domains. It was an expedient, meant to be replaced by regular administrative control as soon as was possible. In China, the gaitu guiliu 改土歸流 policy (Vietnamese: cải thổ quy lưu) sought to convert these native offices to regular administrative units governed by a centrally appointed official. The process proved slow in both countries.
Conclusion
When researching the Ming colonisation of Đại Việt, scholars have focused on motivation, military technology, and institution building, but the sources also speak eloquently of environment. For the Ming, miasma was a fearsome adversary. Looking at Đại Việt from the North, it is tempting to conclude that miasma and a tropical climate blunted the force of external attacks. This story would fit well into the nationalist narrative of Vietnamese resistance to Chinese aggression and of Vietnamese difference. The reality is more complicated. The miasmic uplands protected Đại Việt from attack, but also limited Vietnamese state expansion. Paying attention to the Dong World complicates the familiar narrative of a bilateral struggle between a monolithic China and Vietnam. Inhabitants of the Dong World allied with, resisted, or in the case of Lê Lợi, even conquered lowland states. They leveraged their position astride trade routes and access to forest products for their own gain when they could. Despite the dangers, the desire to exploit the unique products of the region drew Ming armies. The ensuing environmental exploitation in turn became the leading charge against the Ming, and the flora, fauna, and landscape of ‘the Southern country’ came to play a central role in Vietnamese self-articulation. As seen in the Lam Sơn thực lục, the ecology and flora and fauna of Đại Việt helped form nascent Vietnamese self-articulation as a country separate from China, one that blended the natural landscape and superfauna of the Dong World with Sino-Vietnamese literature. Nguyễn Trãi used images drawn from nature to express condemnation of the Ming empire's exploitation of Vietnam's natural and human resources, describing how the Ming occupation changed the landscape. Despite this political rhetoric of a dynasty allied with local spirits of nature, the Vietnamese state that emerged from the ashes of Ming colonisation in turn sought to conquer and exploit the land and its human and natural resources.
