One day in 1776, a famous Vietnamese scholar-official named Le Quy Don approached a Chinese merchant named Chen, who sailed between Vietnam and China. Le asked him: “What is the lay of the sea routes?” Chen responded: “The sea routes are like the rim of a pan. Hainan Island. . . is exactly in the pan's center.” Junks could sail the pan's north or south edge. They could also sail across the pan, if the touchy winds allowed. Inside this imagined pan lay the Sino-Vietnamese “water world” that Dian Murray introduced to English-language scholarship many years ago in Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987, p. 17) but that few since have endeavored to describe. Here, fisherfolk, sea traders and pirates shifted through a littoral maze of countless islands, impenetrable mountains, unpredictable winds, and endless waterways, eluding the efforts of outsiders to subjugate and discipline them until the technology of states finally caught up with them in the twentieth century. Here, too, empire builders created China's first emporium on the sea. This was, and is, the world of the Tongking Gulf, the subject of a new collection of essays selected from a 2008 international workshop that asked: Does the gulf constitute a region? Is the gulf “a mini Mediterranean Sea?”
The answer is “yes,” as you may have guessed, and the book offers evidence rather than a debate. To that end, a line-up of capable scholars from across disciplines endeavors “to reveal a complex pattern of interrelationships going back more than two millennia. . . which can fruitfully be compared to the Mediterranean as analyzed by [Fernand] Braudel” (p. 3). Viewed as a whole, the Tongking Gulf appears as a social “ensemble” orchestrated according to its own long-term rhythms, and shaped by patterns of integrity that the “vertical perspective” of Vietnam versus China obscures (p. 2). Indeed, the volume's regional perspective illustrates just how conditionally and recently the distinction between China and Vietnam developed, and how fragile, fleeting and fruitless attempts to bend the region to outside wills have been.
Li Tana's essay contextualizes the book's articles in a “geopolitical overview” of “changing fortunes” over the longue durée. During this long history, outside engagement and interventions often shaped the region's vicissitudes. Engagement came early, as Judith Cameron's study of textile archaeology attests. This reinforces Wang Gungwu's earlier assertion that interregional exchange preceded Chinese conquest. Qin Shihuangdi's short-lived triumph gave way to the Kingdom of Nam Viet (C: Nanyue), a rare moment when both regional and political unity cohered. A century later, Han conquerors created Jiaozhi (V: Giao Chỉ) from Nam Viet's western half and placed its center in the Red River Delta where a deep interior river trade intersected with a growing stream of coastal traffic that spanned Asia. Only this “complex network of interregional exchange” (p. 59) can explain the characteristics of Han period glassware in Guangxi, Bridget Borell writes. Still, resistance to outsiders mattered as much as interaction with them in determining the shape of the region over time, as Michael Churchman's essay on the Li and Lao makes clear. Indeed, endemic competition among strongmen—against outsiders and with each other—characterized the Tongking Gulf, in ways that resemble other “narrow seas” within the larger South China Sea (to use Braudel's parlance).
This pattern of competition endured after Jiaozhou lost its preeminence in trade to Guangzhou, and detached from the Chinese empire to become the kingdom of Đại Việt in the tenth century, as James Anderson illustrates. Changes in sea routes had shifted international traffic to the southern rim of Merchant Chen's “pan.” Political competition apparently shifted, too, from the northern to the western side of the rim, where Đại Việt battled for centuries a series of Cham polities for supremacy over the seacoast. Within this flux, John Whitmore perceives the rise and fall of new ports like Vân Đồn. Macro-regional trends exerted greater influence by the seventeenth century, as seen in Ioka Naoko's study of the Red River Delta's brief moment of commercial resurgence in the late 1600s, thanks to the efforts of Chinese and European merchants. By then, however, the gravity of ocean trade had already begun its inexorable migration south to the Mekong. Still, Niu Junkai and Li Qingxin show how the gulf continued to affect the world beyond it by tracing the movements of “political pirates” (p. 133) between Guangxi's Longmen, the Mekong Delta, and the Gulf of Siam. The tendency to mix trade, raid, and politics repeated itself a century later when pirates, merchants and seafarers from the region joined the ranks of Vietnam's Tay Son rebels. Western interventions eventually curtailed the subaltern flux of raid and trade, as Vũ Đường Luân and Nola Cooke's essay shows.
The editors successfully assemble the book's articles into a mosaic that conveys a Mediterranean “feel.” The individual authors, in contrast, generally focus on their particular time, place, and subject of specialization. As a result, readers will have to draw most of the regional connections themselves. Li Tana's essay stands out as an excellent exception. Still, engagement with Braudel and his vast legacy remains wanting. To merely highlight temporal continuity and spatial integrity oversimplifies the grand Annaliste, and risks leaving readers with the impression that the Mediterranean model offers little more than a metaphor, as some have claimed. Would Braudel have fancied the gulf as another Mediterranean, or as a “narrow sea” within the South China Sea, a body of water he did label as Mediterranean-like (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1 [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], p. 108)? In the end, however, these excellent articles launch a new “narrow sea” of inquiry that newer scholars are likely to follow.
