What relationship developed between the new realm of Đại Việt (northern Vietnam) and the growing southeast coast of China in the early second millennium C.E.? Fan Chengda's report of the 1170s on the Vietnamese spoke of a strong interaction between the two regions, of Min Chinese moving into Đại Việt. This note looks at commercial and educational developments on the southeast coast of China and relates these develop-ments to the emerging Trần dynasty and the increased significance of literati in Đại Việt.

1. Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, Volume 4, 2010
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Brush and Ship: The Southern Chinese Diaspora and
Literati in Ð i Vi t during the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Centuries
John K. Whitmore©2010°°°°
Abstract:
What relationship developed between the new realm of Ð i Vi t (northern Vietnam) and
the growing southeast coast of China in the early second millennium C.E.? Fan Chengda's
report of the 1170s on the Vietnamese spoke of a strong interaction between the two
regions, of Min Chinese moving into Ð i Vi t. This note looks at commercial and
educational developments on the southeast coast of China and relates these develop-
ments to the emerging Tr n dynasty and the increased significance of literati in Ð i Vi t.
Keywords:
Vietnamese literati; early Ð i Vi t; Tr n dynasty; lower Red River Delta; southeast coast of
China; Fan Chengda; Asian maritime commerce
In the 1170s, two officials in Guangxi Province of the Song empire, just north of Ð i Vi t
(now northern Vietnam), wrote reports on the Vietnamese realm and its people. In what
appears to us as an exaggeration, the first of these officials, Fan Chengda, claimed:
[The locals] cannot produce paper and brushes, getting them from [our] territory.
Their people have little comprehension of [our] writings. People from Min close to
the sea come by ship [and] are certainly most well received. Consequently, [their
king] commands his officials to consult [the Min people] so as to decide matters.
Generally, [our] civilization (wen) influences [their] perversity [and] chaos. Many
travelers from [Min] go [there]. Tradition has it that their royal ancestor (Lý) Công
U n was also originally a Min man.
Moreover, the indigenes of their country form much less than half [of the
population]. [There are] people of [our] territory [who] travel to the south [and]
entice people, male and female, to become menials. [They] grab them and take
them into the mountain grottoes of [this] territory, binding and selling them for two
liang of gold. [From this] territory’s grottoes, [they] move and sell them into Jiaozhi
[the Chinese name for Ð i Vi t], receiving three liang of gold (for each one).
Yearly, there are not less than 100,000 [such people]…
There are also accomplished scholars, Buddhist monks, Daoist practitioners,
and clever artisans, [all] becoming absconders [who] have lost the [imperial]
mandate. Those who flee are very many.…
[The Vietnamese thus] grab and plunder the sold men and women as well as
the scholars [who] cross the frontier and enter [their land].…
Specifically, in Fan’s mind, Ð i Vi t was dependent on the north for ideas and
manpower, including scholars, as well as for literati materials like writing brushes and
paper. Indeed, Fan saw Min (Fujian) on the southeast coast of China as the source of
intellectual power for the Vietnamese realm. Ð i Vi t, he also declared, was the meeting
point of south Chinese merchants and traders from points south and west. Chinese
° John K. Whitmore is an historian of early Vietnam. His email address is: johnkw@umich.edu.

2. Brush and Ship
39
manpower and civilization flowed along this maritime route into Ð i Vi t.
1
The second
official, Zhou Qufei, shortly afterward wrote his Ling Wai Dai Ta and reinforced Fan’s
points, but without his sensationalism.
2
What can we make of these comments? Let us turn
to contemporary events on the southeast coast of China to attempt an explanation.
After the defeat of the Northern Song regime in 1126 and the move of the capital to
Hangzhou in the Yangtze Delta, there was an increase in both maritime trade and local
scholars. From the eleventh century into the twelfth, the growing wealth of this southern
society and the increasing emphasis on education led to ever larger numbers of males
receiving instruction and striving for government service. The expansion of scholarly
numbers, and competition among them, grew as the Song Empire was confined to the
south. By the mid-twelfth century, there was a strong recognition that the surplus of
scholars had become a problem. What was to be done for (and with) all these young
educated men? Scholars like Lu You and Yuan Cai noted what paths such literati might
take—into religious life, into clerkships, into commerce, etc. In sum, many educated men,
lacking a secure path to state service, found themselves spun off into seeking other
opportunities to support themselves and their families. Certainly, there would have been
roving scholars looking for the chance to teach or somehow to benefit from and to apply
their learning. And in the thriving commercialism of the south, what better opportunity for
the literate than in internal and external, short- and long-distance trade?
3
Thus, at the very time when Fan and Zhou were describing the Chinese–
Vietnamese connections, Lu and Yuan were discussing (pejoratively, perhaps) alternative
occupations for the surplus educated. This situation may be seen especially in the Min
region, now Fujian, and particularly in the port of Quanzhou. The quantity of degree
candidates and the overall number of educated men in this region were, in Peter Bol’s
word, “amazing,” many thousands in all. John Chafee describes the significant scholarly
development in the Quanzhou region and throughout Min during these centuries. One of
the new opportunities to be had there was to teach in a school for foreigners, instructing
them in Chinese texts. Quanzhou lay at the eastern end of the international trade route
stretching westward to the Mediterranean during a time of major maritime commerce.
This meant both that many foreigners came into Quanzhou and that ships, especially
Chinese vessels, moved south down the southeast coast into Southeast Asia. This
maritime movement offered further opportunities for educated men, in a very fluid
situation and overpopulated region, to service the merchants or to move elsewhere along
the coast.
4
Quanzhou also stood at the northern tip of a more regional trade system, that of the
Jiaozhi Ocean. This system formed in the twelfth century as a result of the Song surge of
international maritime trade and linked Quanzhou to Yaizhou on the coast of Hainan
Island, Qinzhou on the Guangxi coast, Vân ð n in the islands off the northeast coast of the
Red River Delta, and Th N i (modern Quy Nhơn) in central Champa (now south-central
1. J. K. Whitmore, “’Elephants Can Actually Swim!’: Contemporary Chinese Views of Late Ly Dai Viet,” in
Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries , ed. D. G. Marr and A. C. Milner (Singapore: Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, 1986), p. 121; Li Tana, “A View From the Sea: Perspectives on the Northern and Central
Vietnamese Coast,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (hereafter JSEAS) 37, 1 (2006): 86–88, 91–92; Fan’s
report, Gui Hai Yu Heng Zhi, is included in Ma Duanlin’s Wen Xian Tong Kao (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 2593–595
(quotation, p. 2594).
2. Whitmore, “’Elephants Can Actually Swim!’”, p. 123; Li, “A View From the Sea”: 85–89, 92–93, 100; Zhou
Qufei, Ling Wai Dai Ta (Shanghai, 1935–37), pp. 15–18.
3. P. K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), pp. 30–31, 34-
36, 38–39, 41, 221–22, 229, 237; V. Hansen, The Open Empire. A History of China to 1600 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2000), pp. 293–97.
4. J. Chaffee, “At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade: The Chinese Port City of Quanzhou (Zaitun),
Eleventh–Fifteenth Centuries,” in Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c.1400-
1800, ed. K. R. Hall (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 99–122; Bol, Neo-Confucianism, p. 39.

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40
Vietnam). Angkor’s reach eastward in this century strengthened the Vijaya region of
Champa and helped shape the new system. Both local and international goods flowed
around this system as Muslim traders connected it with East Java and points further west.
Behind these ports, population, industry, and wealth grew as trade linked the agricultural
lowlands, the highlands, and the coast, and as manufacturing developed for both internal
and external markets. This trade route also provided a path for the movement of population
down the southeast coast of China into underpopulated areas like the lower Red River
Delta.
5
In Ð i Vi t, the development of this coastal hinterland behind the port of Vân ð n,
and of the Jiaozhi Ocean system, involved not only commerce and industry, but also
fishing and agriculture. The growth of population came out of the latter two as much as the
former two, especially as more sophisticated methods tamed the wetlands and the
swamps. It would appear that population movement from Min helped to form both the
political base of the new Chinese-descended Tr n (Ch. Chen) dynasty (1225–1400) of Ð i
Vi t and a “northern” society in this region (confusing the Vietnamese generals in the
Mongol wars of the 1280s). Accompanying this Min population movement undoubtedly
were some of the roving surplus scholars of the Fujian region, drawn to the settlements
abroad. There such scholars would have taught and inspired not only other Chinese, but
also bright local lads. The coastal Tr n royal family, originally of a fishing background,
came to have the most literate group of princes in Vietnamese history, well known for their
poetry. For me, it seems to have been no coincidence that this Tr n dynasty set up more
formal Confucian examinations in the thirteenth century and that the great majority of the
successful Vietnamese scholars came from the coastal provinces of H i Dương, Sơn
Nam, and Thanh Hóa. It would appear that this coastal zone saw the development of
population and literati out of Min along the thriving trade route of these centuries.
6
While we have no direct evidence from this era that Min scholars did migrate into
coastal Ð i Vi t, teach immigrant Chinese (and local) students like the Tr n, and thereby
create this literati coastal culture, we do have one major example from the fourteenth
century. The classic “First Teacher” of Ð i Vi t was the scholar Chu Văn An (1292–1370).
He was credited with establishing his own school south of the capital of Thăng Long
(modern Hanoi) and teaching a number of famous Vietnamese students there. His father
was from China and a man of a certain education, perhaps specializing in geomancy,
medicine, and commerce.
7
Against this background, I would interpret the twelfth century observations of Fan
and Zhou as true, if seen through the prism of Min migration into the lower Red River
Delta. Their coastal perception is reflected in their view of the territories of Ð i Vi t. They
knew the more peripheral areas, but were weaker on the inland ones. It was the coastal
region of the lower Red River Delta that held the most Chinese population. This population
carried with it a strong interest in the education and scholarship of their homeland, hence
5. Li, “A View from the Sea:” 84–86, 90–99; J. K. Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast: Trade, State, and Culture in
Early Dai Viet,” JSEAS 37, 1 (2006): 108–12; Chaffee, “At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade,” pp. 106,
111; M. Vickery, “Cambodia and Its Neighbours in the Fifteenth Century,” in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth
Century: The China Factor, ed. G. Wade and Sun Laichen (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press,
2010), pp. 276–79; Fan, Gui Hai Yu Heng Zhi, p. 2594.
6. Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast”: 112–19; Li, “A View From the Sea”: 100–02; Huynh Sanh Thong, The
Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 3–5, 56–57, 154–55, 238,
269–74, 370–71; Ð i Vi t L ch Tri u Ðăng Khoa L c (Ð i Vi t examination records across the dynasties), trans.
T Thúc Kh i (Saigon: B Qu c Gia Giáo D c, 1963), pp. 12–24; Nola Cooke, “Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese
Confucianism in Historical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations,” JSEAS 25, 2 (1994): 275–76.
7. Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast”: 120; O. W. Wolters, “Chu Van An: An Exemplary Retirement,” The Vietnam
Review 1 (1996): 62, 88–90; Tr n Qu c Vương, “Chu Văn An và làng Thanh Li t [Chu Văn An and Thanh Li t
village],” in his Văn Hóa Vi t Nam, Tìm Tòi và Suy Ng m [Vietnamese culture, research and reflections) (Hanoi:
NXB Văn Hóa Dân T c, 2000), pp. 723, 726–27.

4. Brush and Ship
41
the import of writing brushes and paper. Fan and Zhou saw Min as connected to this
territory and indeed as furnishing its brains. The rise of the Tr n family from Min to the
throne of Ð i Vi t in the half century after they wrote confirms this view.
8
In general, then, this coastal territory of Ð i Vi t might be interpreted as an extension
of southern Chinese coastal history which overlapped with the movement of Ð i Vi t from
the upper Red River Delta down to the lower. One aspect of southern Chinese history
important here was the reclamation of wetlands for rice agriculture. In both south China
and the lower delta of Ð i Vi t, draining and poldering
9
led to the intensification of
agriculture and, together with the growing commerce, to a greater concentration of
population and wealth.
10
Given this connection, it is no surprise that survivors from the
Mongol defeat of the Song found refuge in Ð i Vi t as they followed the earlier population
movement. There the Tr n court warmly received the refugees and exchanged poems with
them, as local and immigrant literati interacted.
11
One result of the overlap of these two
historical forces was the possibility of loyalty going in either of two directions, up the coast
to the capital of the Chinese empire or upriver to Thăng Long, the capital of Ð i Vi t. The
tension between these two choices exploded with the Mongol invasions of the 1280s. The
Tran prince Ích T c, founder of the first major Vietnamese school of Chinese classics on
his estate in the lower Red River Delta, joined the Yuan forces and, on their defeat, went
with them to China. So too did the coastal scholar Lê T c.
12
Thus might the movement of
ships and brushes go in either direction at this time.
This strong movement from the recently populated southeast coast of China,
specifically Min, represents a new stage in the interaction of Northerners and Southerners
(Chinese and Vietnamese) that had gone on for almost a millennium and a half by the time
Fan and Zhou wrote their reports. As Michael Churchman and John D. Phan show in this
issue of Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, through the first millennium C.E. there was a
strong integration of northern and southern societies and cultures in the middle of the Red
River Delta around what is now Hanoi. In this new stage of northern and southern
relations, the strong demographic and port growth along China’s southeast coast at the
end of the millennium meant two things: first, that the new Song dynasty had no need to,
and so did not, force the reintegration of Annan back into the empire; and second, that
there would be a continued contact between the more recently settled southeast coast and
the older populated region of the Red River Delta. In turn, this stage would be followed by
the next, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when more Chinese from the
southeast coast would participate both as inhabitants and sojourners in H i An and in the
wider Nguy n domain on the central coast of Vietnam. Just as in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, intellectuals in this later movement would eventually have an impact on
Vietnamese society.
The consequence of this situation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was what
Fan described, a shared community of peasants and scholars spread along the coasts of
the two regions. While Ð i Vi t and the Song formed two different regimes (as the Tr n
dynasty stressed in its historiography
13
), there was a communality between these two
sectors of their respective realms, a shared regional history that needs to be examined
more closely.
8. Whitmore, “’Elephants Can Actually Swim!’”, pp. 123, 129.
9. A polder is a low-lying tract of land surrounded by dikes that control the access of water.
10. Bol, Neo-Confucianism, pp. 17–19; Hansen, Open Empire, p. 264; Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast”: 118.
11. Chan Hok-Lam, “Chinese Refugees in Annam and Champa at the End of the Sung Dynasty,” JSEAS 7, 2
(1966): 1–10; Li, “A View from the Sea”: 90–91.
12. Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast”:119; Chan, “Chinese Refugees”: 5–7.
13. John K. Whitmore, “Keeping the Emperor Out: Trieu Da and Ming Taizu in the Vietnamese Chronicle,” in Long
Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History, ed. S. Schneewind
(Minneapolis, MN: Society of Ming Studies, 2008), pp. 345–53.