In the twentieth century, many outside Vietnam had never heard of the Gulf of Tongking until the USS Maddox incident in 1964 which ignited the United States' bombardment of North Vietnam and escalated American involvement in the Second Indochina War. Subsequently, little attention was paid to this ‘backwater’ or ‘isolated Gulf’, given the frigid China–Vietnam relationship following the 1979 border conflict. The perception of the Gulf as a ‘backwater’ was a product of the colonial era, following the French establishment of control over the area and successful forcing of the Qing government to allow them to ‘rent’ Guangzhou Bay in 1899. Up until then, the Gulf was well known as a centre for regional and international trade and cultural exchange. Historians of the late twentieth century began to reconsider this maritime area as a ‘mini Mediterranean Sea’ as had long been proposed by Braudelian scholars such as Denys Lombard. Applying this regional perspective, The Tongking Gulf through history highlights the lively history of the Gulf prior to the French colonial era.

This important book not only views the history of the Gulf from ‘a horizontal angle’, as the editors state, but it also combines a diachronic and synchronic approach in its two parts. Part I examines the Gulf's development until the tenth century, when the Vietnamese finally regained their millennia-old loss of independence. Prior to this political settlement, which theoretically set a border (though a highly ambiguous one) between China and Vietnam, numerous transformations had taken place in this dynamic water frontier region. And as Li Tana convincingly points out in her argument about the Han-era Jiaozhi region (encompassing northern Vietnam and southern China), such developments can only be perceived clearly if China-centred views are cast off, allowing us to see the other ‘principalities’ along the coastline that stretched between the southeastern China coast and central Vietnam (chap. 2). Sharing this view and analysing in detail the history of the ethnic Li-Lao ‘stateless societies’ in the north, Michael Churchman warns us that the history of the Gulf should not be, in any case, regarded as simply the history of the two contemporary nations sharing the water, but the history of a variety of groups and powers interacting with each other (chap. 4). This regional perspective helps us understand fully the other aspects of Tongking Gulf history, from its ancient industries such as textiles, glass, pearls, bronze casting, to its role as a rice-growing centre and even as the main gateway for China's maritime activities in the first millennium.

The history of the Gulf in the second millennium has been hardly explored despite the availability of better documentation. Trade, as revealed in the five chapters of Part II, continued to be pivotal to the region's economic development despite political changes. Court policies during the tenth and eleventh centuries, argues James A. Anderson, could not stop coastal people from ‘slipping through holes’ between the existing kingdoms to continue their age-old maritime trade (chap. 5). The maritime trading ban during the Ming and Qing eras, nonetheless, did influence the rise and fall of the ‘commodity-economy expansion’ and ‘export-oriented products’ such as ceramics and silks during Vietnam's Lê Dynasty. This, coupled with the transformation of regional and international maritime trade, was the major cause of the disappearance of Vân Đồn Port in the sixteenth century (John K. Whitmore, chap. 6) and the ultimately unsuccessful resurgence of Vietnamese silk in the seventeenth century (Iioka Naoko, chap. 7). The intricate history of the Gulf during the tumultuous seventeenth century, according to Niu Junkai and Li Qingxin, was flavoured with the presence and activities of a number of ‘political pirates’ who undoubtedly influenced the downturn of gulf trade and traffic (chap. 8). Although the situation may have eased in the following centuries, it could not help prevent the Tongking Gulf from becoming a backwater in the nineteenth century, despite the continued maritime trade in rice (Vu Duong Luan and Nola Cooke, chap. 9).

The Tongking Gulf through history is an important book. Its well-researched chapters and non-state-centric viewpoint will make it valuable well into the future and attractive to readers of Asian maritime history. It is hoped that this volume will inspire people to pay more attention to this region, especially to aspects not mentioned in this volume such as religion, acculturation, and so forth.