How ‘Chinese’ is Vietnam? In addressing this long held question, Dr. Whitmore will examine different episodes of movement by Chinese into the territory of present-day Vietnam. Starting two millennia ago, there occurred several periods of this migration. First, through the first millennium CE to 1100, a mixed group (officials, merchants, monks, et al.) came south into the central Red River plain. Then, from 1100 into the modern era, there was the flow of private Chinese trade and settlement into coastal regions. We see two such groups, interrupted by the Ming ban on such movement: the Ngo (Wu) and the Minh Huong (Ming Xiang). Finally, the modern era of colony and independence saw continued entry under first French, then Vietnamese auspices, reaching a crisis point in the late 1970s. Did these epochs turn Vietnam into a ‘little China’?

Biography

John K. Whitmore, a student of O.W. Wolters and a historian of pre-modern Southeast and East Asia and Vietnam, holds his PhD in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University. He has taught at Yale University and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia, and California, Los Angeles, and is currently a research associate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies here at the University of Michigan. Recently, he has been a co-editor of Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (Columbia University Press) and China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest, Reforging the Fiery Frontier Over Two Millennia (Brill, 2015) as well as the author of a variety of articles on Dai Viet (northern Vietnam), Champa (central Vietnam), and the mountain world of southern China/northern Southeast Asia.