In Sources of Vietnamese Tradition, we finally have a collection of translated documents to facilitate the study of the Vietnamese past beyond the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. The volume, which is organized around political periods, is divided into three parts and seven chapters: “Pre-Modern Vietnam” (comprising “The Period of Northern Empire,” “The Lý, Trần, and Hồ Epochs,” and “The Lê and Mạc Epochs”), “Early Modern Vietnam” (comprising “The Trịnh-Nguyễn Period” and “The Early Nguyễn Dynasty”), and “Modern Vietnam” (comprising “The Colonial Era” and “The Independence Era”). Each chapter begins with an introduction to the period that is its focus, which also serves as a guide to the documents contained within. The documents are chosen to illuminate a broad range of issues, and they are categorized under rubrics, such as “the land,” “society and culture,” “philosophy and religion,” “governance,” and “economics.” The seven chapters thus narrate the Vietnamese past through translations of a variety of historical documents, and the editors of the volume made an excellent decision to begin this narrative from the time that Vietnam “entered the historical record” (p. 9). In so doing, they highlighted important sources of information about the Vietnamese past that include texts more commonly associated with the study of Chinese history, such as the Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (San guo zhi) and History of the Later Han (Hou Han shu).

The sheer scope of the project demands strict selection criteria, which the editors took pains to explain in their introduction to the volume. One editorial decision was to minimize the inclusion of literary texts, since there exist several English-language anthologies of Vietnamese literature. While this certainly is a prudent decision, anyone using the text in teaching should be careful to supplement it with literary sources, both for the value of the works in themselves and because political critique and social commentary were often communicated through literary texts. Translations by Huỳnh Sanh Thông are a good place to start, but it is crucial to note that there remains room for more translations, in particular of pre-nineteenth-century works of literature. Another important decision was to focus primarily on sources relating to the lowland Vietnamese (also referred to as Kinh or Việt) to the exclusion of other ethnic groups, which are included only insofar as they are referred to in the documents that were created by the Việt people. This gave the editors room to emphasize the range of issues and voices within the Việt ethnic group. It is, however, essential to bear in mind that the volume does not seek to represent the ethnic diversity of Vietnam.

Many of the documents included in this volume come from works that already exist in quốc ngữ translation. It is important to draw attention to the laudable fact that the selections in this volume are translated from the original language. Some translators specify the language or script in which the source was originally recorded, but these are in the minority and it would have been helpful if the authors had systematically indicated whether texts were originally in classical Chinese, chữ Nôm, quốc ngữ, or another language. This would help the reader to understand the different literary and cultural domains associated with the respective scripts and languages. Not all the translations are new, and the volume draws together some English-language translations of significant sources and passages that currently lie scattered in other published works. This is particularly the case for the first part of the book, which covers the premodern period of Vietnamese history. Besides the convenience of having those sources in one volume, the selections acquaint the reader with works of scholarship in Vietnamese historiography. It is, however, puzzling that tone and diacritic marks have been left out completely in this volume.

This is an excellent volume that fills a long-standing need for English-language translations of primary documents that cover the chronological breadth and diverse concerns of the Vietnamese past. Particularly noteworthy are the translations of material relating to early modern Vietnam, many of which are new translations that serve to introduce key sources of knowledge about the period. Additionally, the volume contains useful chronological tables to help students navigate past events. Fortuitously, the publication of this volume comes just before that of A History of the Vietnamese by Keith Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which provides a rich historical narrative through which to contextualize the documents in Sources of Vietnamese Tradition. Undoubtedly, Sources of Vietnamese Tradition will greatly assist in the teaching of Vietnamese history; it also has immense potential to inspire research topics and ideas.