Craft production played an important role in the overall structure of economic life in the Gulf of Tongking region during both the prehistoric and protohistoric periods. This is evidenced by the large number of bronze drums found at archaeological sites in Vietnam, Yunnan, and Guangxi, discussed in the chapters by Li Tana and Michael Churchman. These drums indicate not only that metal production was a major preoccupation during the first millennium B.C.E., but that crafts contributed to the wealth of emerging elites in the region. There is also unequivocal archaeological evidence that many Bronze Age sites in Southeast Asia were...

This chapter introduces early Jiaozhi, a territorial unit covering the present-day Red River plains, coastal Guangxi, and western Guangdong, and discusses its importance in the exchange system of the Gulf of Tongking and South China Sea nearly two millennia ago. Contrary to conventional scholarship, which has stressed political forces pushing from north to south that resulted in Chinese colonization of the Red River plain, this chapter examines early Jiaozhi in its own context, as a territorial expanse occupying the same horizontal line. It argues that, by eliminating the once powerful Nanyue (southern Yue) kingdom in 111 B.C.E., the Han dynasty...

Archaeological investigations in Han dynasty tombs in Guangxi, China, have uncovered a small number of unusual glass vessels. The chronology of the tombs suggests that their initial production started around the middle or late Western Han period (206 B.C.E.–8 C.E.) and continued well into the Eastern Han period (25–220 C.E.). Although first thought to be imports, later chemical analyses of some of this glassware have disproved a Mediterranean or Western Asiatic origin. This chapter argues that these Han period glass vessels were in fact a local product, manufactured in the Tongking Gulf region of modern northern Vietnam and...

The lands that lie north of the Tongking Gulf, between the Pearl and Red Rivers, have been long divided up for historical analysis into areas that correspond to the modern national boundaries of China or Vietnam. As this region is now a borderland, intersected by a national boundary, its story has been overlooked as marginal in comparison with the great traditions of nation-centered history; so too the writing of its history, even for periods when no boundary is evident. To divide this area into two discrete subsets of Chinese and Vietnamese history in a pre-tenth-century context, when it formed part...

The tenth century was a period of significant new beginnings in the Tongking Gulf region. Political upheaval and the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907) farther north enabled the Jiaozhi elite under Ðinh Bộ Lĩnh (923–79) to strike out on their own account and establish an independent kingdom, Ðại Cố Việt (968–1054). A few years prior to the appearance of the new Vietnamese kingdom, a new dynasty was also emerging in China, the Song (960–1279). The distant roots of the modern Vietnamese and Chinese political configurations that now control the gulf region thus go back to...

Vân Ðồn, a network of island harbors stretching northeast of the Red River Delta into the Gulf of Tongking, was the major location of international trade for the kingdom of Ðại Việt for about three and a half centuries. It first appeared in the chronicle of Ðại Việt (Ðại Việt sử ký) in 1149, and the last explicit reference to it was in 1467,¹ although other evidence suggests it was still in operation for almost half a century after that. There is no precise indication of when or how the port ceased to function. Sometime after references to Vân Ðốn...

Tongkingese raw silk was one of the most coveted mercantile commodities in the South China Sea region in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Chinese private traders were engaged in exporting Tongkingese raw silk to its primary market in Japan. While several studies have focused on the Dutch role in this branch of trade,¹ little attention has been given to the Chinese merchants who preceded and competed with them,² except for Zheng Chenggong (1624–62) on Taiwan. It is generally believed that Zheng naval forces controlled the sea lanes linking East and Southeast Asian waters and...

Like all pirates throughout the centuries, the seventeenth-century pirates of the Gulf of Tongking cruised the seas and harassed passing ships and junks. But unlike those in the rest of the South China (or Eastern) Sea, most of the pirates active in the Tongking Gulf came from either Southern Ming or Mạc armed forces, and were involved in the politics of the time. Since most of them had mandarin titles and political ambitions, we have called them here “political pirates.” Chinese and Vietnamese regimes benefited from their activities, but none could control them completely. This was a most interesting period...

In 2006, a leading Vietnamese economist observed in a Chinese newspaper that “Sino-Vietnamese trade is more frequent than domestic trade between northern and southern Vietnam.”¹ As several chapters in this book have shown, this pattern of interregional economic interaction in the Tongking Gulf is a centuries-old phenomenon. This impulse to exchange and the economic complementarity on which it rested have helped interknit different parts of the gulf shores and hinterlands over centuries, and these innumerable transactions between local peoples have always resurfaced in the wider Tongking Gulf region whenever circumstances allowed, with or without official sanction. This chapter brings our...