Center 華 and Periphery 夷 in Eighteenth-Century Annamese Neo-Confucian Discourse

I. Introduction

Huang Chun-chieh 黃俊傑 has described the eighteenth century as a transitional period of “radical changes” in Neo-Confucian traditions across China, Japan, and Korea, which marked the threshold of modernity and initiated an advent of intellectual developments and crises which would characterize nineteenth-century Confucian discourse across East Asia (Huang 2015, 131). In tandem with modulating hermeneutic orientations and philosophical commitments, Huang draws attention to increased divergence within Chinese, Japanese, and Joseon literati discourse regarding conceptions of zhongguo 中國, its constituents, and geographical location as a defining concern of East Asian Confucianisms on the cusp of modernity (Huang 2015, 140-47, 219-20).¹ Absent from Huang’s incisive study is an analysis of eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucianism and its comparatively dissimilar ideological orientations—specifically in relation to contemporaneous conceptions of zhongguo prevalent among Annamese literati.² Through analyses of discussions of zhongguo and the hua-yi 華夷 dichotomy across diverse genres of literati writing, I argue that, contrary to the shifting discourses on zhongguo in light of growing national subjectivity across eighteenth-century East Asian Confucianisms, contemporaneous Annamese Neo-Confucian conceptions of zhongguo followed an opposite trajectory which reaffirmed zhongguo as being constituted by what Huang has termed “geographic China, political China, and cultural China” (Huang 2015, 217).³ In arguing that the politico-cultural prestige of Annam and its normative constituencies were primarily derivative from sustained geographical and institutional connection with this transdynastic Chinese zhongguo, eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse diverged not only from contemporaneous trends in East Asian Confucianisms, but also marked a shift away from previous conceptions of center and periphery in the early Le. I will begin by analyzing fifteenth-century Vietic conceptions of statehood and politico-cultural centrality in early Le discourse, specifically as articulated in historiographical genres 史 and “imperially”-commissioned edicts. Shifting focus to the post-Restoration period, I will proceed to draw from a range of eighteenth-century essays 說, discourses 論, and proemial and colophonic writing 序跋, which marked an intentional shift in literati discourse away from the foundational assumptions of early Le rhetoric in favor of an historicized genealogy of Annamese politico-cultural institutions as deriving their legitimacy and prestige from a transdynastic Chinese zhongguo. I will conclude by briefly exploring disparate conceptions of center and periphery as articulated in commentarial, religious, and lyrical modalities of late eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse.

II. Multipolarity and Dyadic Co-equality in Early Le Statecraft

While the usage of zhongguo to describe a politico-cultural entity and geographical domain associated with Annam rather than the so-called “Northern state 北國,” i.e., China, was far from default in official histories commissioned by the Le court, neither was such usage entirely uncommon (Chen 1986, 255, 353, 426, 515, 540).⁴ It is impossible to understand conceptions of zhongguo among post-Restoration Annamese literati without revisiting the foundational texts of their intellectual lineage in the early Le moment of the fifteenth century. It is not entirely clear whether the ascendant Le court’s bold rhetoric of centrality was necessary for its ruling clan to legitimate its dynastic enterprise in relation to lowland networks of Ming partisans or facilitated by a localized ethos unbeholden to the normative intellectual and cultural climate of those very networks.⁵ More than any other contemporaneous text, the Grand Pronouncement on the Pacification of Wu 平吳大誥, penned by Nguyen Trai 阮廌 (1380-1442) in early 1428 on behalf of King Thai-to of Le, captured the heightened triumphalism of the early Le court in wake of the Ming withdrawal from Annam. Nguyen Trai opens the Grand Pronouncement:

Lo, our state of Great Viet is verily a realm of authoritative institutions and worthy purveyors of tradition!⁶ Since the geographical boundaries of their rightful domains are distinct, the customs of North and South are likewise dissimilar. From the foundation of our state by the Zhao, Dinh, Ly, and Tran, together with the Han, Tang, Song, and Yuan each wielded imperial rule over its respective quarter.⁷ (Chen 1986, 546)

The Grand Pronouncement envisioned a world-order wherein dynastic enterprises, irrespective of geographical accident, could claim legitimate politico-cultural parity through the employment of institutional apparatuses drawn from a common repertoire of classical statecraft. Even if the administrative technologies of this repertoire were associated with a normatively “Northern” antiquity, Nguyen Trai implies that the political legitimation and cultural prestige afforded by their adoption throughout the transdynastic continua of Vietic statecraft was not derivative from tributary vassalage to the “North.” Indeed, this dynamic of co-equal “Northern” and “Southern” binaries seems to preclude the existence of a singular politico-cultural center which alone commanded the right to confer legitimation to peripheral states through a tributary system. Any coherent conception of zhongguo in this world-order would necessarily be in the plural.⁸ Rather than deny the legitimacy of “Northern” dynastic enterprises, Nguyen Trai legitimates “Southern” dynasties by linking each one with a contemporaneous “Northern” counterpart. The early Le geopolitical imaginary thus articulated was a North-South dyad wherein each half wielded legitimate imperial authority within boundaries dictated by its respective geographical and cultural demarcations.⁹

The fundamentally multipolar imagination of the early Le court did not preclude assertions of centrality in its politico-cultural lexicon. Beyond lyrical and literary celebrations of Annam as zhongguo, the Le court institutionalized unambiguously imperial ritual into its newly-bureaucratized Neo-Confucian state, thus intimating cosmic parity between the Le “emperor” and his Ming counterpart.¹⁰ Building on ritual reforms initiated under the reign of King Thai-tong of Le 黎太宗 (1423-1442, r. 1433-1442), in 1461 King Thanh-tong of Le 黎聖宗 (1442-1497, r. 1460-1497) furthered Ming-modeled institutional reform by reestablishing the Suburban Sacrifice to Heaven-and-Earth 郊, an annual ritual of cosmic import over which only the Son-of-Heaven could preside (Whitmore 2019, 447). One revealing account of this momentous reform is a passage in the Complete Records detailing Thanh-tong’s caustic rebuke of court-historian Ngo Si-Lien 吳士連 for suggesting that the early Le adoption of the Suburban Sacrifice was “unworthy of continuation 不足述.” Although Ngo’s exact objections are not recorded, Thanh-tong berated Ngo for recommending discontinuation of the Suburban Sacrifice on account of the Le dynasty’s origins as an “ancient feudatory state 古諸藩” (Chen 1986, 644). The severity of Thanh-tong’s response—condemning Ngo as “truly a traitorous minister who sold his state 真賣國奸臣也”—suggests that such insinuations were not taken lightly.¹¹

Thanh-tong’s ritual invocation of his realm’s cosmic centrality was not merely rhetorical self-exaltation—for neighboring polities such as Muang Phuan, Lan Xang, and Champa, it spelled the beginning of cataclysmic military invasions, ultimately resulting in Annam’s uncontested regional domination by the close of the fifteenth century (Li 2010, 93).¹² Proclamations 詔 purportedly authored by Thanh-tong himself justified these punitive expeditions 征 not in the language of multipolarity characteristic of early Le political discourse in relation to Ming, but in the unambiguously hierarchical dichotomy of center versus periphery. The 1470 proclamation declaring war on Champa described the Chamic polity as a “yi zone 夷服” and its inhabitants as belligerent “yidi 夷狄” (Chen 1986, 681).¹³ In his 1479 proclamation justifying invasion of Muang Phuan, Thanh-tong described his court as exercising “unifying control over both hua and yi 統御華夷” (Chen 1986, 707). Only one month later, his proclamation against Lan Xang invoked the memory of his dynastic predecessors “overseeing zhongxia 蒞中夏” and “conciliating the outlander yi 撫外夷” in order to justify his impending “righteous chastisement 義征” of Lan Xang’s “rongdi 戎狄” in an attempt to restore the “yi customs 夷俗” of their “man quarter 蠻方” to human morality (Chen 1986, 708).¹⁴ It was on this particular campaign that Thanh-tong would bestow evocative titles such as “yi-punishing general 征夷將軍” on military officials leading the invasion (Chen 1986, 709). While many of these terms were used in a patently rhetorical tenor, the geographic precision of terms such as rongdi, when used to describe the “Western” constituencies of Lan Xang, suggests that Thanh-tong and his court employed a classically-inspired lexicon which sought out correlating specificities between the language of ancient Sinitic statecraft and the geopolitical subjectivities of fifteenth-century Southeast Asia. These fifteenth-century appropriations of models of statehood associated with high antiquity—notably the Five Zone 五服 theory—all led to the same tacit conclusion. If Champa could be described as belonging to the yi zone of Annam, it only followed that the Annamese court had assumed the mantle of politico-cultural center normatively claimed by “Northern” dynasties since antiquity (Yü 1986, 379).

Where did Ming fit into the world-order of this fifteenth-century Annamese zhongguo? Although the older model of dyadic co-equality between the Northern and Southern courts endured, early Le historiography and imperial proclamations were replete with anti-Ming pejoratives. This anti-Ming rhetoric seemed to originate in Nguyen Trai’s Grand Pronouncement with its references to the “crazed Ming 狂明” and sacrilegious description of Emperor Xuanzong of Ming 明宣宗 (1399-1435, r. 1425-1435) as a “crafty whelp 狡童” (Chen 1986, 546-47). The terms “Ming bandit 明賊” and “Ming brigand 明寇” were widely used in accounts of Le Loi’s military campaigns and subsequent reign (Chen 1986, 515-16, 527, 537, 556, 565). As late as 1497, Thanh-tong still referred to Ming and its Annamese partisans as “crazed Wu 狂吳” (Chen 1986, 708). Unlike contemporaneous descriptions of Annam’s Southeast Asian interlocutors coming from Thanh-tong’s court, these colorful appellations were more indicative of a rancorous triumphalism celebrating martial prowess than of a putative politico-cultural superiority. It was not lost on the Le “emperors” that their institutional legitimation as rulers of the Annamese polity was dependent on enfeoffment from the Ming court as princes 國王 within a Ming-centric world-order. The upsetting of this system of enfeoffment and tributary vassalage was an existential threat to the Le court and thusly treated—among Thanh-tong’s justifications for invading Champa was his claim that Chamic potentates had informed their Ming allies of the Le ruler’s “self-exaltation as the emperor of the Southern dynasty 自尊南國之帝皇,” thus provoking the suspicions of “Great Ming 大明” (Chen 1986, 680). While the early Le court’s claims to politico-cultural centrality were clearly disseminated beyond the confines of its Annamese constituencies, even for rulers as prone to magniloquent pomposity as Thanh-tong, this rhetoric was suppressed in relation to Ming. The geopolitical realities of late fifteenth-century mainland Southeast Asia confirmed the status of Annam as zhongguo in a regional context. Beyond this, the institutional dependence of the Le court on recognition from Ming necessitated the tacit perpetuation of a North-South binary, despite the increasing incongruity of this older model within a politico-cultural discourse of cosmic centrality.

III. Situating Zhongguo During Annam’s Long Eighteenth Century

Rhetoric of politico-cultural centrality was invoked in diverse contexts by rival Vietic principalities traversing the institutional disintegration and politico-cultural ambiguities which defined Annam’s long eighteenth century.¹⁵ The triumphal return of the Le court to Dong-Kinh 東京 in 1593 was described by King The-tong of Le 黎世宗 (1567-1599, r. 1573-1599) as a “recovery of the Central Plains 復中原” from its Mac usurpers (Chen 1986, 898). In wake of crippling military defeat and facing imminent death, Grand Mentor Mac Ngoc-Lien 莫玉璉 (1528-1594) emphatically warned the remnant Mac court against seeking military aid from their Ming allies, lest Ming be provided with pretext to invade “our zhongguo 我中國” (Chen 1986, 902). Following their return to Thang-Long, Le-Trinh rulers continued to self-referentially invoke zhongguo when describing their joint dynastic enterprise (1986, 999, 1000). Clearly, a classical lexicon of politico-cultural centrality was consistently employed across widely disparate geopolitical contexts throughout the entire Le epoch (1986, 515, 540, 573, 578, 762).

The seventeenth-century Ming-Qing transition unfolded during an era of politico-cultural instability and disunion among belligerent Vietic principalities with increasingly independent trajectories. Apart from a general indifference, it is difficult to discern any position which could constitute an overarching Vietic response to the plight of Ming or the ascendancy of Qing. Both the Le-Trinh and Mac courts seemed to have supported the Southern Ming cause, particularly in its early years (Baldanza 2016, 204). This “support,” however, was ambiguous and meager; in reality, Le-Trinh policies, whether by intervention or inaction, hindered Ming loyalist movements and were effectively pro-Qing (Struve 1984, 244). By the first decade of the Kangxi 康熙 era (1661-1722), both the Mac and Le-Trinh courts had transferred their institutional allegiance to Qing. Although the Le-Trinh court allowed Ming refugees into Annam, they were generally resettled outside of metropolitan centers and subject to strict regulation (Salmon 2014, 34-41). Absent from Annamese accounts of this post-Ming diaspora are any grand narratives of civilizational collapse, upheavals of the cosmic order, or vilification of Qing. Unlike their Joseon contemporaries, Annamese elite seemed largely unfazed by the “yi-ness” of the Qing dynastic enterprise (Niu 2012, 107-8). For Joseon elite, the rise of Qing triggered an epistemological crisis necessitating the fundamental reevaluation of hua-yi discourse in a post-Ming world-order (Haboush 2005, 115-17). Cultural loyalty to the fallen Ming was institutionalized by the Joseon court in state-sponsored rituals commemorating Ming emperors, soldiers, and martyrs. Having inherited the mantle of zhonghua from Ming, Joseon ruling elite and Neo-Confucian literati regarded their kingdom as a remnant bastion of huaxia culture in a world where the normative locus of zhongguo had been overtaken by yi (Bohnet 2020, 133-37). In turn, this shifting conception of center and periphery conditioned a nascent elite discourse of what Huang Chun-chieh has termed localized subjectivity, identifying Joseon, rather than Qing, as zhongguo (Huang 2015, 145-46).

Given that a similar localized turn can be discerned in early Le discourse and historiography, it would be reasonable to presume that eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse would develop along the trajectories shared with contemporaneous Japanese and Joseon elite discourses seeking to reposition zhongguo in wake of the Manchus. Not only is this turn unattested in eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucianism, the equivalent of an emergent localized subjectivity for eighteenth-century Annamese literati was often expressed through classicizing historiographical interventions at odds not only with prevailing trends in East Asian Confucianisms, but also with their early Le politico-cultural heritage. Eighteenth-century literati at the highest echelons of the Le-Trinh bureaucracy returned to Nguyen Trai’s Grand Pronouncement, interrogating what they argued to be flaws and exaggerations in the historical arguments expressed or tacitly assumed by its internal logic. Among the chief critics of Nguyen Trai was Bui Bich 裴璧 (1744-1818). In Miscellaneous Discussions Recorded in Sojourn 旅中雜說 (1789), Bui Bich criticized the Grand Pronouncement for its incongruency with the classical canon:

[Regarding] the appearances of our Vietic [state] in the Five Classics, in the “Canon of Yao,” third-brother Xi was commanded to reside in the southern outskirt called the “Brilliant Capital.” It was located in the southernmost extremity. In the “Tribute of Yu,” it likely belonged to the wild zone of Yangzhou. The scholar-elite of recent generations incessantly repeat the saying “together with the Han, Tang, Song, and Yuan each wielded imperial rule over its respective quarter” in their official writings. This [saying] ought to be regarded as merely equivalent to Zhao Tuo’s reply to Sir Lu. However, later generations perpetuated it, following it to the extent that it came to be regarded as normative. The Master regarded pretending to have ministers while having none to be deceiving Heaven.¹⁶ As for this type [of saying], is it not akin to deceit?¹⁷

Basing his critique on the Classic of Documents 書經, Bui identifies Vietic antiquity with the region described in the Classic of Documents as the wild zone 荒服 beyond the pale of zhongguo civilization. Hence, the Vietic state could not lay legitimate claim to the politico-cultural centrality which dynastic enterprises such as “the Han, Tang, Song, and Yuan” were imagined to have inherited through institutional and geographical continuity with the sage-kings of antiquity. Bui dismisses Nguyen Trai’s declaration of institutional parity between Annamese and Northern “emperors” as dissimulation on par with that of Zhao Tuo 趙佗 (240-137 BCE).¹⁸ Bui continues:

That being the case, what is a suitable solution? I answer: The fact that different geographic regions should be divided into “central” and “outer” regions is the naturally occurring condition of the cosmos. For one’s territory to not occupy zhongguo and yet have the ability to transform one’s state into huaxia—this is the accomplishment of the transformative influence of virtuous men and moral exemplars. In antiquity, Qin and Chu were yi in relation to the Three Dynasties. Despite this, the “Oath of Qin” and the “Sayings of Chu” were attached to the Classic of Documents and made manifest in the Great Learning, becoming a model for all generations. This is a clear proof of the ability to become xia. How could what qualifies one to become huaxia solely consist of geographic accident? Surely, it is only on account of the Way of Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu, the Duke of Zhou, and Master Kong existing therein [that it attains this status]. [If] one is able to use this Way to rule over one’s own person [and then] extend it to transform the entire state, literati will accumulate moral virtue and commoners will become accustomed to humaneness and deference. If one’s being xia consists of this, then one can be called xia. This is simply the fitting fulfillment of its principle. How much more so in the case of an enlightened and perspicacious region? If one’s being xia consists of this, this is simply the necessary unfolding of one’s fate. Failure to elucidate these principles but to be instead only concerned with baseless and empty assertions is the height of delusion.¹⁹

According to Bui, zhongguo and huaxia are two distinct categories, the former being grounded in what Huang Chun-chieh would term “geographic China,” the latter being the politico-cultural institutions normative, but not limited, to this geographical reality. Hence, Bui argues that although Qin and Chu were yi in relation to the dynastic enterprises of the ancient sage-kings, by adopting the way of the sage-kings, both Qin and Chu eventually attained the status of huaxia, thus becoming themselves models worthy of emulation. For polities external to zhongguo, transformation into huaxia can be achieved through the adoption of “this Way 斯道.”

Although this “ability to [become] xia 能夏” is not limited to the geographical boundaries of zhongguo, Bui nonetheless attempts to ground the Annamese state on a geographic periphery of zhongguo attested to in the classical canon. Hence, while Bui identifies Vietic antiquity with the southernmost “wild zone,” he simultaneously argues that Annam’s position as an “enlightened and perspicacious region 離明之壤,” at least partly facilitates transformation into huaxia status independent of politico-cultural institutions. The description of Annam’s geographical location as “enlightened and perspicacious 離明,” literally “sunlit,” is a reference to the “Clinging” 離 hexagram in the Classic of Changes 易經. In addition to association with the south, this hexagram also indicates clinging “to centrality and correctness” (Zhu 2019, 158). Although Bui identifies southern positionality as integral to Annam’s politico-cultural status as huaxia, this localized subjectivity differs from the North-South binary of the early Le in that it is ultimately derivative from a geographically static zhongguo (i.e., the “North”). The derivative nature of Annam’s politico-cultural excellence as related to its southern positionality was elucidated in greater detail by Bui’s contemporary and colleague, Pham-Nguyen Dzu 范阮攸 (1739-1786). In his “Colophon on Sir Am-Chuong’s Collected Poems 跋黯章公詩集後” (1782), Pham-Nguyen explained:

The south occupies the position of the terrestrial branch wu. It corresponds to the phase of fire. It [is represented by] the “Clinging” hexagram. “Clinging” refers to the sun at midday, the mutual encounter of the myriad creatures, the consummate flourishing of yang, the manifestation of patterned brilliance. Because yang originates in the north, it proceeds thenceforth to the east, finally reaching the southeast. Hence, from the beginning of the cosmos, pattern was located at the intersection of north and east. Yao and Shun established their capital in Puban, but Shun was born in Zhufeng. Chengzhou was established within the Passes. [By the time] their civilizational apparatuses and institutions had been established for over a thousand years, our state was merely a fetid marsh of dragons and serpents. Later, the [yang]qi gradually shifted southward. When the Song moved south of the Yangzi, the talented men, governance, and literary institutions of the Central Plains were entirely relocated [to the south]. Hence, the great scholar Master Zhu [Xi] arose in [Fu]jian. From then on, the societal climate and conditions of our Annam became expanded day by day. Its institutions and learned men increased in brilliance day by day. The unfolding phenomenon of its flourishing ascendancy is now at its fullness of expression.²⁰

Pham-Nguyen historicizes the “Southern” politico-cultural flourishing of Annam by contextualizing it within a cosmological narrative explaining the rise and spread of human civilization as a whole. Although Annam remains linked to a geographically-fixed southern positionality, no longer does this assume a suprahistorical cosmic parity with the “North.” Pham-Nguyen provides a metaphysical explanation for why the ancient sage-kings first arose in the “northeast” before the eventual southward permeation of their civilization. Although Annam was integrated into this process in a much later epoch, fundamentally, Pham-Nguyen understood the politico-cultural flourishing of Annamese institutions and society as triggered by the same circumstances which explained why the eminent Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) was born in the far south rather than the Jurchen-ruled north. Although this theory of civilizational transfer was contextualized within a metaphysical framework related to the movement of qi, it was concretized in human history by the southward migration of the politico-cultural apparatus of the ancient sage-kings.²¹ The early Le discourse of a primordial “North-South” binary is entirely absent from Pham-Nguyen’s vision of history; not only did Pham-Nguyen understand Southern antiquity as being entirely beyond the pale of human civilization, he further asserted that inasmuch as the South did eventually attain a degree of civilizational excellence, it did so only as a late inheritor of originally Northern politico-cultural institutions. Ultimately, the rise of Southern civilization could be explained as merely the latest phase in an on-going metaphysical process operating independent of human experience and subjectivity.

Pham-Nguyen understood the physical relocation of scholars and textual technologies to a broadly construed “South”—inclusive of both Southern Song and Annam—as initiating a civilizational flourishing thenceforth perpetuated internally within newly centralized “Southern” institutions. This historiographical narrative was not limited to Pham-Nguyen. Writing approximately one decade after Pham-Nguyen, Nguyen Quynh 阮儝 articulated a strikingly similar understanding of Annamese antiquity and its post-classical attainment of civilization in his “Preface to Collected Poems on the Flowery Trail 華程詩集序”:

Our state [occupied] the southern outskirts in antiquity. As for the rise of sages and worthies, the crafting of [proper] robes, headwear, ritual, and music, the glorious manifestation of [civilizing] institutions and ritual order, and the recording of the classics and textual traditions—all this [occurred] north of Jing[zhou] and Yang[zhou]. During the Song, the Yellow River’s course changed southward.²² Human excellence was entirely produced in the South. Hence, the great scholar Master Zhu [Xi] arose in [Fu]jian. It was at this point that we had a claim to being a domain of authoritative institutions and worthy men.²³

For both Pham-Nguyen and Nguyen, there is no question that the politico-cultural institutions of latter-day Annam originated in a Northern antiquity entirely external to Southern ancientry. Both traced the origins of Annamese civilization—as they understood it—to a twelfth-century moment of transregional cultural flourishing which occasioned the ascendency of Neo-Confucianism in the Southern Song just as much as it inaugurated the incorporation of Annam into this same civilization. According to Pham-Nguyen, Annam had not even reached the pinnacle of this process until his own generation.

Although Vietic antiquity is understood by Bui Bich, Pham-Nguyen Dzu, and Nguyen Quynh to have been geographically and culturally removed from the civilizational enterprise of the ancient sage-kings, there are nevertheless hints of a teleological impulse in their historiographical interventions. While the politico-cultural institutions definitive of huaxia civilization arose external to Vietic antiquity, it was, according to this mode of eighteenth-century discourse, inevitable that they would be transferred southwards at a later date. For this generation of Le-Trinh literati, the ostensibly huaxia nature of eighteenth-century Annam seemingly created an historiographical conundrum—the early Le narrative of Nguyen Trai was historically untenable; still, a convincing institutional genealogy of Annamese civilization demanded explanation for how an unquestionably peripheral polity such as Annam had inherited the civilizational apparatus of zhongguo and become a legitimate purveyor of huaxia culture in its own sphere of geopolitical influence. Common to the solutions analyzed above is a geographical argument emphasizing the proximity of Annam to various southward expansions of huaxia culture and institutions. Although this is suggestive of a certain localized subjectivity, this subjectivity was neither analogous to the politico-cultural parity asserted between “North” and “South” in early Le discourse nor to contemporaneous discourses of localized exceptionalism which arose in eighteenth-century Japan and Joseon in response to dynastic transition in China. Rather, these eighteenth-century Annamese literati understood the flourishing of Annamese institutions as ultimately derivative from Chinese antecedents which had never forfeited politico-cultural legitimacy or centrality. Hence, Annam only partook in a transregional Southern subjectivity which included large swaths of southern China. The problem of Annam’s peripheral positionality was resolved by arguing that, contrary to the Grand Pronouncement, there was in fact no meaningful geographical or cultural border distinguishing “North” and “South”—Annam was huaxia because it was both geographically and institutionally incorporated within the Chinese zhongguo. Hence, in his “Discourse on Dynastic Succession 國統論,” Bui Dzuong-Lich 裴楊瓑 (1757-1828) asserted that recognition and participation within the “ranks and association 列會” of the rulers of the Central Region was necessary for any given dynastic enterprise to possess political legitimacy.²⁴ This institutional communion 預 with the Central Land was, in fact, what constituted the Annamese state and elevated it above neighboring polities. Bui elaborates:

From the beginning of the cosmos, all states in the four quarters have had their respective rulers. Those in the north were predominantly fearsome and ruthless. Those in the west were predominantly freakish daemons. Only our Viet and Joseon are declared to share the same cultural institutions and traditions. However, Jo[seon] is located beyond the seas. Its cultural institutions were obtained only when Jizi came there from the Central Region, bringing with him the learning of the world-ordering principles bestowed to Yu—only then did the culture of ritual and propriety have means to gradually permeate. Our Viet is located exactly in the region of patterned brilliance. Its territory is joined with the Central Land. . . . Why should it be necessary to simulate descent from Shen Nong and only then be considered of importance!²⁵

Bui does not identify Annam as zhongguo. Properly speaking, Annam lies outside the Central Region. At most, according to Bui, Annam can be said to enjoy connection with the Central Land—it cannot claim to constitute the same. This stark difference with early Le conceptions of Vietic centrality is elaborated in Bui’s “Discourse on Field Allocation Astrology 天野論”:

Beyond the Five Zones, the four quarters are all with their respective rulers. Although compared to the Central Region they differ in terms of their diminutive size and deviation from centrality, in regards to the prosperity or decline, order or chaos of their respective states, [each ruler] surely has the means to dictate these for himself.²⁶

For Bui, not only was Vietic antiquity located beyond the pale of civilization, even contemporary Annam remained external to this world-order. Hence, Bui’s emphasis on institutional recognition within the politico-cultural order of the Central Land as the sole source of legitimate prestige which, alongside geographical proximity, united Annam and the Central Land in a dynamic of singular intimacy. Bui went as far as to condemn Ngo Si-Lien as a man of “crude and shallow learning 學識淺陋” for suggesting that Annam’s historical prestige should be attributed to the biological descent of its ancientry from Shen Nong, a mythical sovereign of high antiquity.²⁷ For Bui and his contemporaries, such fantastical conjecture—alongside claims to politico-cultural excellence independent of China—was simply unnecessary. Eighteenth-century Annam was huaxia precisely because of its institutional inseparability from the Chinese zhongguo, not in opposition to it or as a distinct counterpart.

IV. Commentarial Continua, “Classical Primordialism,” and “Contextual Turn”

Many of the objections which eighteenth-century Le-Trinh literati raised, whether explicitly or implicitly, against early Le discourses of center and periphery were drawn from the pre-imperial classical canon, particularly the Classic of Documents and the Classic of Changes. While an intentional philological turn is absent in their methodology, the general orientation of these exegetical maneuvers does suggest a concern of Le-Trinh literati to ground their historiographical narrative of Annamese civilization within a soundly classical framework. Referring primarily to eighteenth-century Annamese literati, Alexander Woodside has argued that, compared to scholastic discourses on “abstract metaphysical principles” characteristic of post-Song Neo-Confucianism, Annamese Confucianism was ideologically inclined to a non-metaphysical “classical primordialism” emphasizing pre-imperial Zhou and Warring States texts and conceptual categories related to “scholarly service” to the state (Woodside 2002, 118-21). Although Le-Trinh literati discourse drew heavily from the pre-imperial canon, it is debatable to what extent this represented an ideological aversion to the metaphysical lexicon of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism. For example, Pham-Nguyen Dzu’s Humble Comments on Analects 論語愚按, a prominent and widely-disseminated eighteenth-century Annamese Analects commentary, was thoroughly Neo-Confucian in orientation and drew directly from Zhu Xi’s metaphysical and pedagogical theories (Nguyen 2017, 186-88). For Pham-Nguyen, the Neo-Confucian concept of li 理—often translated as principle, pattern, or coherence—was even invoked in discussion of the hua-yi dichotomy. Commenting on Analects 13.19, Pham-Nguyen explained:

Reverence, single-mindedness, and devotion are all a single li. . . . A scholar can use it to rule his person. A lord can use it to rule the realm. “Even if sojourning amidst yidi it cannot be abandoned”²⁸ and “It can be practiced even among manmo tribes”²⁹—one refers to the effort exerted, the other to the results obtained. However, the intention is the same. As for the nature of li, it fills the entire cosmos and originally has no demarcations of yi or xia, near or far. If one conforms to li, there is nowhere one cannot go. If one goes against li, there is nowhere one can go.³⁰

Basing his argument on an understanding of the cosmos as fundamentally constituted by a single li, Pham-Nguyen argues that divergence between yi and xia is not determined by an essential difference, but by conformity—or lack thereof—to li. Elsewhere in his commentary, however, Pham-Nguyen seems to suggest that the politico-cultural demarcation between center and periphery is a fixed institutional reality maintained by strict adherence to a hierarchical binary of respective social roles for hua and yi:

When defined social roles are stable this is “possessing [kingly rule].”³¹ When they are confused this is “to be without.” . . . Alas! That the yidi are without [a ruler] is unworthy of mention. When zhuxia is without [a ruler], this is equivalent to removing what zhuxia rightfully possesses and forfeiting it to the yidi. . . . If only [defined social roles] complied with what Master Shao described as “yidi doing what is proper to yidi; zhongguo doing what is proper to zhongguo,”³² how could [rulership] be lost?³³

Evidently, Le-Trinh literati such as Pham-Nguyen did in fact draw from the Neo-Confucian tradition in their commentarial treatments of canonical texts such as Analects. Indeed, the exegetical apparatus of commentaries such as Humble Comments on Analects suggests that, more often than not, it is safe to assume both broad familiarity and tacit agreement with Neo-Confucian thinkers and texts among eighteenth-century Annamese literati, whether or not this directly translated into discursive engagement with the same. This is not to deny the prevalence of what Woodside has identified as “textual essentialism” among Annamese elite inclined to affirm a certain “presentness” of classical texts (Woodside 2002, 124). It is, however, to question to what extent this “presentness” of classical texts and concepts in Le-Trinh literati discourse suggested their immediate applicability in an eighteenth-century context. This is particularly relevant to what Huang Chun-chieh has described as the “contextual turn” of eighteenth-century Confucian discourse in Tokugawa Japan, especially in regard to its innovative exegesis of loci classici related to issues of zhongguo and periphery in the ancient canon (Huang 2015, 45-48). Although the 1734 Le-Trinh ban on importing Confucian texts from Qing could have provided an intellectually fecund atmosphere for an increasingly localized internal discourse of center and periphery among eighteenth-century literati, there is no evidence suggesting a subsequent burgeoning of localized subjectivity in court-approved Neo-Confucian discourse (Smith 1973, 19).

Despite an upsurge of commentarial activity among eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucian literati, it is difficult to discern any sense that scholar-officials such as Pham-Nguyen Dzu conceived of their exegetical endeavors as constituting a unitive contemporaneity of localized discourse. Hence, although Pham-Nguyen described his commentarial musings on Analects as a “record of self-study 自學之書,” lacking entirely in his commentary are any explicit references to his contemporaries or to the politico-cultural realities of eighteenth-century Annam which might have conditioned the underlying ideological orientation of his exegesis. Prior to completing Humble Comments on Analects, Pham-Nguyen composed Collection of Things Obtained During Southern Travels 南行記得集, a commemorative anthology celebrating the 1774 Le-Trinh takeover of Thuan-Hoa in which he condemned the Nguyen court as having forced formerly Le-Trinh subjects to “transform into yi 變入夷.” Among the Nguyen polity’s allegedly “man customs 蠻風” was its “demotion of [Confucian] learning 黜學” in favor of Buddhistic intellectuality and institutions. Although this politico-cultural rhetoric is drawn from classical discourse on center and periphery, the lack of a corresponding specificity in Pham-Nguyen’s classical exegesis—especially in passages amenable to such digressions—increases the difficulty of separating the triumphalist rhetoric of a self-aggrandizing politico-cultural narrative from a “classical primordialism” which positively registered eighteenth-century phenomena as latter-day instantiations of Zhou and Warring States archetypes.

Lack of contemporaneous specificity and localized subjectivity in eighteenth-century Annamese exegetical works is also characteristic of Modest Insights on the Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋管見 (1786), an extensive commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋 compiled by Ngo Thi-Nham 吳時任 (1746-1803) shortly before entering into service of the Tay-Son court. Ngo’s proemial framework for approaching the Spring and Autumn Annals does indeed assume a certain accessibility based on personal moral praxis rather than mastery of the recondite subtleties of commentarial accretions (Woodside 2002, 122-23). However, Ngo seems to be at least partly influenced by Neo-Confucian discourse on the hua-yi dichotomy in relation to exegesis of the Spring and Autumn Annals. Beginning with Han Yu 韓愈 (768-824), the Spring and Autumn Annals had become a primary locus classicus for developing discourses of ethnicized centrality and barbarophobic conceptions of the periphery as a perennial existential threat to the integrity of zhongguo. This exegetical emphasis on the hua-yi dichotomy reached its apotheosis in Hu Anguo 胡安國 (1074-1138) who based his revanchist, anti-Jurchen commitments on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Yang 2019, 24-37, 131-33). Hence, although Ngo argues that Confucius compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals out of fear 懼, the fear implied is primarily directed at the cosmic upheaval initiated by yidi disruption of the zhongguo world-order:

[That one should become] at ease with yidi ruling over zhongguo, no longer comprehending the proper relation between the heavens above and the earth below; that yang should mutate into yin, that the supple should take advantage of the firm—this was what Master Kong feared. This was why he composed the Spring and Autumn Annals.³⁴

Throughout his commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, Ngo draws from post-classical dynastic history to illustrate the ever-looming threat of moral corruption and politico-cultural compromise in any dealings involving yi. Whether the ultimate consequence was the “abandonment of moral bonds 棄綱常” or the “extinction of ritual proprietary 絕禮義,” Ngo implied that dynastic history was filled with examples proving that it was only in a prelapsarian classical antiquity that the Sage could transform yidi without being compromised by their corrupting influence:

The Master desired to dwell among the nine yi.³⁵ Why should there be strict [separation between huaxia and yi]? This is because only the sage is able to use the ways of [hua]xia to transform the yi. In every other case, there has never been one where [huaxia] was not transformed into yi. . . . Emperor Wen [of Han] declined the qianli stallion. Emperor Guangwu shut the passes and rejected the offerings [of yi]. They deeply grasped the meaning of keeping distance from yi as imparted in the Spring and Autumn Annals. Emperor Yang of Sui visited the tent of Yami [Khagan] and partook in drunken singing and toasts of longevity. No distinction was made between hua and yi. Whereupon the Japanese state sent a letter from “The Son-of-Heaven of the Land of the Rising Sun” addressed to “the Son-of-Heaven of the Land of the Setting Sun.” Taizong of Tang declared himself the “Celestial Khagan” and his progeny regarded this as normal. Afterwards, Nanzhao sent a letter addressed to “Grandfather Khagan, Emperor of the Great Tang.” In these cases, it would have been better to have never held relations with the yidi!³⁶

Elsewhere in his commentary, Ngo cites Song and Yuan history for similarly cautionary illustrations. Like his contemporaries Pham-Nguyen Dzu, Bui Bich, and Bui Dzuong-Lich, Ngo generally avoids dehistoricized speculation, preferring to contextualize his treatment of the hua-yi dichotomy in concrete post-classical instantiations drawn from a wide repertoire of dynastic history and politico-cultural experience. Both Ngo’s commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals and Pham-Nguyen’s commentary on the Analects share a willingness to draw widely from Sinitic institutional and intellectual history while simultaneously avoiding anything suggestive of an equivalent Annamese subjectivity, be it politico-cultural or intellectual in nature. Like Pham-Nguyen’s exegesis of zhuxia and yi in the Analects, Ngo’s hermeneutical approach to the Spring and Autumn Annals treats zhongguo and yidi as essentialized abstractions without an explicitly correspondent politico-cultural referent in his contemporaneous context. In an administrative report pre-dating his commentarial composition, Ngo recommended a policy of “using yi to assail yi 以夷攻夷” to neutralize a contumacious community of “cunning barbarians 狡胡” in Thai-Nguyen 太原 garrison (Ngo 2003a, 609). Although the Hakka settlers in question were semi-itinerant miners from southern China, there is little evidence to suggest that all Qing institutions and peoples were broadly regarded as yi regardless of context. Certainly, there is nothing in Ngo’s commentary to imply an understanding of Annam as an eighteenth-century zhongguo threatened by yidi neighbors. If anything, the Tay-Son court to which Ngo eagerly switched his allegiance was more friendly towards Qing than even its Le-Trinh predecessors.³⁷

It is worth considering classical exegesis as but one specific modality of eighteenth-century Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse, and not necessarily a primary site of discursive experimentation at that. The “closed” nature of Pham-Nguyen Dzu’s commentary on Analects and Ngo Thi-Nham’s commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals was removed not only from the subjectivities of their authors’ politico-cultural context, but also from relevant ideological orientations present in each author’s wider corpus of works. The tenor of this commentarial mode is neither entirely primordial nor fully contextual. At least in part, it seems that the composition of these commentaries involved an exegetical performativity which allowed their authors to affirm themselves as what Woodside has termed “autonomous moral selves” or “true Confucian literati” 真儒 operating within a closed system which assumed the perennial “presentness” of the past (Woodside 2002, 132-33). The apparent continuity of these eighteenth-century Annamese commentaries with the Song-Ming Neo-Confucian traditions as a whole is dangerously deceptive if used as an authoritative measure of Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse, especially regarding conceptions of center and periphery current among Annamese literati in an age of dynastic transition. Regardless of the rhetorical vehemence displayed in his treatment of zhongguo and yi in the Spring and Autumn Annals, Ngo Thi-Nham elsewhere actively promoted historiographical and anthropological models of understanding humanity and human civilization which either circumvented the hua-yi dichotomy or directly dismissed it as irrelevant and flagrantly misunderstood. Although written in a Buddho-Daoist tenor, the Primal Sounds of the Teachings of the Bamboo Grove 竹林宗旨元聲 (1796) is a late synthesis of Ngo’s mature thought and retains the metaphysical lexicon and politico-cultural framework which characterized his more normative Neo-Confucian commitments. Deconstructing the exceptionalism of the ancient sage-kings whose modes of governance formed the basis of all discourses on center and periphery, Ngo argued that diverse forms of human and institutional flourishing were equally ordained and safeguarded by Heaven 天:

Is there anywhere that sages and worthies are not generated? The flowering of brightness and brilliance—this is what Heaven treasures. The flowering of obscurity and remoteness—this is what Heaven keeps stored away. The sage-kings Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu, the Duke of Zhou, and Master Kong were generated with the flowering of brightness and brilliance. The buddhas and bodhisattvas arose in the far west. The progenitors of the Liao, Jin, and Yuan arose in the far east and the far north. These too were all rulers who inherited the mantle of rightful rulership from Heaven. They were generated from the flowering of obscurity and remoteness.³⁸

According to Ngo’s mature thought, the civilizational excellence of the ancient sage-kings associated with zhongguo was neither exceptional nor could it boast a cosmic centrality which elevated their politico-cultural institutions above those of other lands. The historiographical problematics which plagued Pham-Nguyen Dzu, Bui Bich, and Bui Dzuong-Lich in their reconceptualizations of Annam’s politico-cultural heritage are entirely irrelevant to this discourse of cosmic equity and the relative parity of human institutions. This radical re-envisioning of center and periphery was not limited to religious discourse. Indeed, Ngo’s poetic output dating to soon after the completion of his commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, indicates a strong contextual turn towards localized subjectivity had already led Ngo to entirely disavow himself of attachment to the hua-yi dichotomy. Pondering the diversity of language, customs, and clothing exhibited throughout the Vietic polities of his day in a series of ten poems collectively titled Pensive Meditations 有所思, Ngo wrote:

Having exhaustively observed the people’s customs, thoughts weigh heavy on my mind.
What propels these transformations of language and appearance, nature and customs?
South of the river, clothing resembles that of Manchuria;
North of the citadel-walls, robes are like those of the Huihe.
For the most part, preferences and style follow the circumstances of the times;
There is no essential discrimination between the technologies and outward appearance of hua and yi.
The flowering of patterned brilliance is without profound obstruction;
All with blood and qi are generated from the same womb, extended from the same li.³⁹
(Ngo 2003b, 382-383)

Without invoking explicitly Buddhistic religious sensibilities, Ngo already argues for the interrelatedness of all creation using a profoundly Neo-Confucian metaphysical framework. While Bui Bich and Bui Dzuong-Lich agonized to defend Annam’s politico-cultural institutions through associations with the Central Region, Ngo keenly observed that the institutional realities of their eighteenth-century context made any such associations tenuous at best. The politico-cultural technologies and institutional realities of the Vietic realm—whether ruled by the Le-Trinh, the Nguyen, or the Tay-Son—had no real correspondence to any Northern counterparts except, ironically, those which were themselves considered peripheral deviations from an imagined center. This, however, was entirely unproblematic as such discrepancies were merely superficial and unreflective of the deeper reality that all humanity—whether labeled hua or yi—partook of a common li. Despite a façade of static orthodoxy, even primordialism, confirmed in part by commentarial posturing, by the close of the eighteenth century, some modes of Annamese Neo-Confucian discourse—particularly the religious and the lyrical—had already moved beyond the established parameters of center and periphery.

V. Coda

The existence of a longue durée Annamese discourse positing politico-cultural equality between Annam and China in pre-modern Annamese intellectual history has been grossly exaggerated (Yu 2006, 67-68). Arguments made to defend this trope are usually over optimistic in regarding the Complete Records as a reliable repository of transdynastic experience rather than as an historiographical project undertaken to achieve ideological interventions specific to an early Le politico-cultural discourse of dyadic co-equality between “Northern” and “Southern” dynastic enterprises. There is indeed something unprecedented—even radically so—about the Vietic exceptionalism articulated in early Le discourse. The Grand Pronouncement of 1428 did in fact articulate a genealogy of politico-cultural origins and prestige for so-called “Great Viet 大越” independent of China—whether this, as some have argued, contributed to the articulation of a “separate national identity for Vietnam” requires further investigation; it is, however, undeniable that the Grand Pronouncement represented a watershed in Vietic conceptions of statehood and the possibilities of a non-Sinocentric world-order (O’Harrow 1979, 159, 174). Due largely to the nature of the archive, it is difficult to determine whether the ideological orientation of this early Le moment was normative before the Le or if it in fact represented a brief and shocking aberration from more representative Vietic conceptions of center and periphery which eighteenth-century Le-Trinh literati subsequently attempted to recover. Le Loi’s fifteenth-century military campaigns have been aptly described as a highlander conquest of the overwhelmingly pro-Ming Red River plain (Taylor 1998, 955-57). It is difficult to recover what exactly constituted a normative discourse of politico-cultural legitimacy and prestige among socially displaced Annamese literati in wake of this reversal of center and periphery. In the wider context of a long institutional history of what Keith W. Taylor has described as Annamese “mimicry” of Sinitic political practice and “mixtures of subservience and non-compliance” towards Sinitic dynastic enterprises, the classicist concerns of eighteenth-century literati such as Pham-Nguyen Dzu, Bui Bich, and Bui Dzuong-Lich appear much less anomalous than the confident triumphalism of Le Loi and Nguyen Trai (Taylor 2003, 621-23).

The center-periphery relationship between pre-modern Sinitic and Vietic dynastic enterprises is often treated in an essentialized manner which assumes enduring nation-state identities across nearly a millennium of dynastic transition involving fundamental re-conceptualizations of the state’s spatial organization and disparate imaginations of the normative identities of its constituencies (Nguyen 2019, 62-70). Certainly, the dynamics of the tributary system cannot be oversimplified; it is undeniable that some Annamese ruling elite and literati, particularly during the early Le, understood this dynamic according to an internal logic of dyadic equilibrium between Northern and Southern courts (Anderson 2013, 275-76). For most Le literati, this dyadic parity was not conceived of as predicated on a civilizational distinction between North and South, but as the partaking of both in a shared fountainhead of classical politico-cultural institutions and reflected in a common lexicon of statecraft and standards of human flourishing (Kelley 2005, 28-36). Perhaps it is for this reason that inquiries into various “localist turns” in pre-modern Vietnamese intellectual history have focused on the development of Vietic subjectivity in various genres of historiographical writing from the early Le (Kelley 2012, 119-21).

Still, the levels of discomfort and resistance which some eighteenth-century Annamese literati directed at Nguyen Trai’s Grand Pronouncement and Ngo Si-Lien’s historical revisionism makes it dubious whether the attention drawn to the radical nature of these texts in twentieth-century scholarship should be attributed entirely to an anachronistically projected nascent Vietnamese nationalism (Kelley 2005, 19-20). Regardless, a broad survey of late eighteenth-century Annamese literati writing is highly suggestive of an intentional turn away from the ideological commitments of the early Le among Annamese scholar-officials in service of the Le-Trinh and later Tay-Son courts. Strikingly coherent leitmotifs recur across diverse modalities of Le-Trinh historical, literary, exegetical, religious, and lyrical composition in relation to classicized conceptions of Vietic antiquity, integration into the politico-cultural institutions of the Central Region as a source of legitimation for Vietic dynastic enterprises, and this same institutional (and geographical) integration into the Chinese zhongguo as constituting a certain politico-cultural prestige for Annam indicative of the superiority of its flourishing institutions over other polities and dynastic enterprises—even those which, like Joseon, participated in the same tributary system. To search for evidence of Vietic exceptionalism anywhere outside this intimate integration into zhongguo was, in the words of Bui Bich, “the height of delusion 惑之甚矣.”

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dam Quang-Hung 譚光興 (1933-2017). I owe my initial and sustained interest in conceptual issues related to zhongguo to Thomas C. Bartlett—this paper is but an outgrowth of our coffee conversations in the “sunlit regions” of Sacramento and San Jose. I sincerely thank Philip J. Ivanhoe, Kaishuo Chen, Albert E. Errickson, Grace Teo, and the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive editorial suggestions. All errors are my own.

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