The Position of Vietnam in the Eastern Sea Trading System in the Ancient and Medieval Times

Abstract

In contrast to a considerable number of researches focusing on such topics of Vietnamese history as agriculture, peasant, resistance wars and so on, maritime history is a neglected field in Vietnam until the dawn of the twenty-first century. The death of source materials relating to this theme was often blamed for the sporadicalness of the maritime history research. Another reason was perhaps the traditionally negative view of a large part of the Vietnamese people, even until today, on trade, maritime trade in particular, which was believed to have been influenced strongly since the Nguyen Dynasty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Utilizing recent researches by foreign scholars on this topic, this article seeks to view Vietnamese history, maritime history in particular, from a different angle: regional maritime history, especially by recapitulating the existence and transition of the major trading networks in the Eastern Sea from around the Christian era to the end of the sixteenth century. In order to sketch a bird's-eye view on the position of Vietnam in the Eastern Sea trading system, this paper examines three major periods of regional maritime trade with which Vietnam had close connections: before the tenth century, from the tenth to the mid-fifteenth century, and from the mid-fifteenth to the late sixteenth century.