Vietnam is among the most attractive tourist destinations in the world and Vietnamese studies are an essential field of scholarship. Bangkok-based River Books and its publisher Narisa Chakrabongse have produced a highly valuable, well-illustrated colour guidebook about the ancient civilisations of Vietnam written by a renowned French historian and epigrapher, Anne-Valérie Schweyer from the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS). The volume is enriched by Paisarn Piemettawat's beautiful colour illustrations.
As a guidebook, this monograph has its own beauty: limited texts with many brilliant images of Vietnamese art on every page; detailed sections which can be read separately, and simplified spelling of Vietnamese, Sanskrit and Cham names and terms. Readers who wish to broaden their knowledge of Vietnamese history and art will find this here.
Ancient Vietnam consists of four independent parts. The first deals with history; the second describes the religion, art and architecture of Champa — a common name of ancient kingdoms which flourished in Central Vietnam from the fifth to the fifteenth century CE. The third part describes religion, architecture and monuments of the ‘Viet Land’, i.e. the Red River Valley or Northern Vietnam. The fourth and final part gives a brief account of five principal museums in Vietnam.
For the convenience of readers the monograph contains a glossary of Sanskrit names and terms, a brief bibliography, an index and a reference list of Vietnamese, Sanskrit, and Cham spellings. It also includes many maps and plans of archaeological sites throughout, including maps of Vietnam (p. 9), of ‘major trade routes between India and Southeast Asia between the 10th–15th centuries’ (p. 10), of Champa (p. 58), of ‘the main Viet sites around Hanoi’ (p. 252), of Hanoi (p. 263), and many others.
Meanwhile, Schweyer offers a fresh look at Vietnam's history. While traditional scholarship has concentrated on the history of the Vietnamese as in The birth of Vietnam by Keith W. Taylor (University of California Press, 1983), or on the history of Champa as in George Maspero's Le royaume de Champa (Les Éditions G. Van Oest, 1928), Schweyer incorporates Champa and its culture within the ancient history of Vietnam: a historical sketch begins with Champa and then gives parallel developments in Champa and in the Viet Land. Ancient Vietnam covers a long timespan from the first millennium BCE to the end of the fifteenth century CE when the Champa kingdom of Vijaya was conquered by the Ðai Việt emperor Lê Thánh Tông in 1471.
Schweyer synthesises contemporary historical research on Champa and describes its polities as trade-oriented and the Viet Land as agricultural. She believes Champa never was ‘a centralised territory under the rule of a king’ (p. 9). The Chams, an Austronesian group, adopted Indic, not Sinicised, cultural traits, including Sanskrit, because China ‘had imperialistic desires incompatible with the independent spirit of the Chams’ and ‘the Chams saw in India, social and political structures to which they could relate; they were, thus, seduced by a script which could also be used to record their own language, something that was not possible using Chinese ideograms’ (p. 13).
I wonder why and how the Chams could adopt an Indic writing due to their ‘independent spirit’; this vague concept can hardly be verified by the available sources. How can this factor explain the adoption of Hinduism or Buddhism? I suppose the spread of a religious system, like Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, or Islam has required propagation of its main ideas by its exponents; therefore, the adoption of Indic religious systems in Champa and the Viet Land was possible due to the activities of many Buddhists or Hindus who propagated these systems; they could have been from India proper.
Part 2, ‘Champa’, contains an outline of the various Cham religions, namely local cults, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and a history of Cham architecture and sculpture. Descriptions of various Cham sites in Central Vietnam follow, from south to north, including the world-reknown temple complexes of Mỹ Sơn and Ðồng Dủỏng in Quảng Nam province as well as other Cham monuments, such as the Phủ Ðiền or Mỹ Khánh tower in Thừa Thiên–Huế province.
Part 3, ‘The Viet Land’, traces the main features of Vietnamese religious history that embrace the dispersal of Mahayana Buddhism, the emergence of Vietnamese Buddhist schools, the appearance of Confucianism and Taoism as well as few elements of Hinduism, and the flourishing of spirit cults. Vietnamese architecture is described by its main building types, the temple or Ðền, the communal house or Ðing, and the pagoda or Chùa among them, and by the dynasties Lý (1009–1225), Trần (1225–1400), and Later Lê (1428–1788). A description of the Viet land sites starts with Hanoi and follows by province.
The final part of the monograph offers a guide to the Museum of History in Ho Chi Minh, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi, the Bình Ðịnh Museum of Qui Nhỏn, the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang, and the Museum of History and the Revolution in Hue. Schweyer's guide to contemporary exhibitions and the most interesting, original displays of Cham and Vietnamese art will help travellers to better understand the context of what they are looking at. Perhaps it would have been helpful for readers to provide a list or index of illustrations as sometimes a description concerns an object published on another page, for example the Mỹ Sơn inscription C.87 dated 687 CE can be found on pp. 50 and 183 but is only mentioned on p. 393.
Several historical theses seem doubtful. The Champa king Prakāśadharma-Vikrāntavarman who reigned in the seventh century is called a ‘Vaishnavite, or follower of the god Vishnu’ (p. 19), but all but one of his inscriptions concern other gods — Siva, Kubera (god of wealth), ‘the Lord of Earth’ (dharaṇibhujaḥ), and the author of the Ramayana, Vālmīki. Despite Schweyer's statement on p. 43, there were two kings named Vikrāntavarman — Prakāśadharma who left the Mỹ Sơn inscription from 658 CE and Vikrāntavarman II who left another Mỹ Sơn inscription dated from 741 CE.
Despite a careful survey of Champa's cultural history, the reader finds a few discrepancies. A reign of king Bhadravarman who left the most ancient inscriptions in the Thu Bồn river valley is dated as being from either the fifth (pp. 177–9) or sixth centuries CE (pp. 18, 68). The E1 temple of Mỹ Sơn is dated either the mid-seventh (p. 68) or eighth centuries CE (p. 69). The main tower of Phú Hài in Bình Thuận province is dated from either the seventh to the eighth century (p. 78) or the end of the eighth century (p. 69). Certainly, the relatively loose chronology of Cham art offers such dating but I would have liked to see a more balanced conception, especially in its chronology and periodisation given on p. 68 where each of the four periods are distinguished by totally varied criteria, such as a name of a site, the political dominance of a certain kingdom, a socio-political process, or a vague concept of the ‘golden age’.
A few captions are misleading. The inscription on p. 412 is not ‘the 5th century Van Co inscription, from Khanh Hoa province’, but the Mỹ Sơn record C.72 issued by the king Bhadravarman. The Buddha as a Child emerging from a lotus is dated from either the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries (p. 35) or from the fourteenth century (p. 411).
Despite all such flaws, this guidebook will be useful for anyone interested in Vietnamese history and art as it gives a succinct and at the same time sufficiently detailed account of possibly all the major historical sights in this ancient country.
