INTRODUCTION

The official annals of Vietnam’s Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945) record pirate attacks, rebellion, and famine for the year 1835, as well as this minor incident:

A merchant vessel from Fujian of the Qing headed to Taiwan on business drifted to Quảng Ngãi because of wind. Following the precedent for typhoons, the officials there gave them money and rice. Once [the officials] heard that the stipendiary student Cai Tingxiang was a passenger on the vessel, they were more solicitous and gave him an additional fifty strings of cash and twenty fang of rice while he waited for a convenient time to return to his country.¹

Assisting Chinese shipwreck victims in this way was routine practice for the Nguyễn government. But for Cai Tingxiang, better known as Cai Tinglan, this was a defining episode of his life.² In contrast to the brief Vietnamese record, Cai wrote a much more personal account of his adventures in Nguyễn Vietnam in which he detailed his near-death experience at sea, his conversations with Vietnamese officials, and his impressions of Vietnamese society. That account, Hainan zazhu (Miscellany of the South Seas), is translated into English for the first time here. First published in 1837, the book offers a glimpse of Vietnamese society through the eyes of a Chinese scholar.

In 1835, Cai Tinglan was blown off course in a typhoon while sailing between Jinmen Island and the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Strait. Cai, his brother, and their shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central Vietnam. After Nguyễn dynasty officials verified his self-proclaimed identity as a scholar by giving him a mock civil service examination, the Minh Mạng emperor of Vietnam permitted Cai to return to Fujian Province overland with an escort of Vietnamese soldiers. This official support allowed Cai to meet the governors-general of each province he passed through as he moved north along the imperial highway.

In the midst of his journey, which was marked by bouts of homesickness, Cai recognized the opportunity to make a name for himself at home by recording his unusual access to government officials of a foreign country. The resulting book is a rare and precious account of the social history of early nineteenth-century Vietnam. Cai Tinglan divides his tale into three chapters: a shipwreck tale, a travel diary, and an overview of Vietnamese history and culture. Cai gives vivid descriptions of clothing, food, religious practice, the day-to-day functioning of government, and other aspects of daily life. He describes the nineteenth-century view of the shallow reefs and atolls of the South China Sea (or East Sea as it is called in Vietnam) as a place to be avoided at all costs. His many encounters with Chinese overseas show the penetration of the Hokkien merchant community into Vietnamese society. His warm embrace by Nguyễn officials and his friendly “brush talks” with them demonstrate that the shared elite world of classical culture extended beyond borders.

Cai Tinglan published Miscellany of the South Seas to demonstrate his writing ability, Confucian forbearance, and knowledge of a foreign place in his quest to secure the holy grail of Qing literati—employment in government service. In the process, the accidental adventurer left for posterity a revealing glimpse of Vietnam in the 1830s. Once Cai’s brief turn as an explorer helped him become what he had long desired to be, a scholar-official in the employ of the Qing dynasty, his book faded into obscurity.

Biography of Cai Tinglan

Cai Tinglan (1801–1859) is a celebrity in his native Penghu, also known as the Pescadores Islands, for being the only person from the islands who ever achieved imperial China’s coveted palace graduate degree.³ In some ways, he was a typical literatus who moved up the social ladder through learning and officialdom during the last imperial Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911 CE). Yet his shipwreck and journey through Vietnam distinguished him from his peers. Because of his adventure and his success in officialdom, he became the most celebrated hero of nineteenth-century Penghu.

Cai’s family represented the typical trajectory from farmer to literati that often took generations. The grandfather of Cai’s grandfather was a fisherman who migrated from Jinmen (then called Wuzhouyu) to the Penghu Islands in the late seventeenth century. Penghu is an archipelago located in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, between the island of Taiwan and Fujian Province (map 1). Taiwan only entered the Qing imperium in 1683, after the Qing military finally succeeded in defeating the anti-Qing resistance of the Zheng family, based in Tainan. After debate over whether the island was worth retaining, the Qing annexed it (and the Penghu Islands) as a prefecture of Fujian Province. During this period, the Chinese settlement in Taiwan and its adjacent islands increased, partially as a result of avoiding the turmoil of the Qing conquest on the mainland. But more importantly, the Penghu Islands provided not only fishing grounds but also uncultivated land for the new settlers. Taking advantage of the land, the Cai family soon moved from fishermen to well-to-do farmers. A few generations later, the Cai family could afford the schooling of Cai Tinglan’s father, Cai Peihua, who became a private tutor in the Penghu area. Under Qing dynasty rule since 1727, Penghu gradually transformed from a windy, deserted island to a settled community.⁴

Cai Tinglan entered his race to officialdom like millions of other literati in late imperial China. Throughout imperial China (221 BCE–1911 CE), officialdom was the most respectable and stable career and would bring honor to an individual as well as his family. During the Qing dynasty, the only way to enter officialdom was to take the civil examinations that took place every three years. The candidates needed to pass the lowest level, the provincial examination (Ch. xiangshi; V. hương thi) to earn the provincial graduate designation (Ch. juren; V. cử nhân; literally, “recommended man”). This title qualified them for official rank and permitted them to move to the next level, the metropolitan examination (Ch. huishi; V. hội thi), and then the palace examination (Ch. dianshi; V. đình thi). The winners of the palace exams—the palace graduates (Ch. jinshi; V. tiến sĩ; literally, “advanced scholar”)—were the paramount of the literati and qualified for high-ranking positions in the Qing government. Special prestige especially went to the top three winners, namely the optimus (Ch. zhuangyuan; V. trạng nguyên), secundus (Ch. bangyan; V. bảng nhãn), and tertius (Ch. tanhua; V. thản hoa), a practice that was adopted in Vietnam only in 1843.⁵ But in general, success in the civil exams elevated one’s social status, allowing the fortunate few to rise from farming to the ruling elite over time.⁶

This was true for Vietnam as well. Vietnam held civil service examinations based on the Confucian classics as early as the eleventh century. During the Minh Mạng reign (1820–41), the titles and timing of the final three levels of the examinations, namely the provincial, metropolitan, and palace examinations, were brought in line with Qing dynasty practice. The bureaucratic systems of the two countries were not identical, however. As historian Alexander Woodside points out, there was a relatively higher percentage of the Vietnamese population who attained success in the examination system, and the differences between the levels of degree holders was not as stark as in China. Vietnamese licentiates were at times allowed to skip regional examinations and pass directly to the metropolitan examinations to help officials fill the Nguyễn dynasty’s staffing needs.⁷ Despite these and other differences, the respect afforded successful students in both China and Vietnam explains the courtesy and support Cai was shown by the Nguyễn government.

Cai Tinglan started his literati path at age five. While not from a wealthy family, he did have the advantage of being tutored by his father. This early access to learning set him ahead of his fellow villagers in marginal Penghu, a place with few educational institutions. By the age of thirteen, in 1813, he passed the prerequisite exam for the civil examinations and became a “child student” (tongsheng 童生). He then passed the prefectural licensing examination (tongshi 童試) and earned the licentiate (shengyuan 生員) title, a candidacy to take the triennial provincial exams.⁸ Commonly referred to as “cultivated talent” (秀才 Ch. xiucai; V. tú tài), this title already put Cai Tinglan into the social status of the literati, for not only could the title holders enter the competition for officialdom; they also received privileges such as exemption from corvée labor. The next year, he tested first among all the child students from Taiwan Prefecture (Fu 府) and started to receive a stipend from the government.⁹

As Cai and his contemporaries knew all too well, civil examinations were a narrow path. Through the more than two hundred fifty years of the Qing dynasty, only 26,888 people were granted the palace graduate title, while the population of the dynasty peaked at 450 million during Cai’s lifetime. Cai may have been a big fish in Taiwan, but he needed to go to Fujian Province, a much bigger pond, to take his provincial exams. The provincial exams in Fujian took only 50 to 140 winners every time, out of more than ten thousand examinees.¹⁰ The format of the exam, the “eight-legged” essays (bagu wen 八股文), was also subject to the graders’ own standards, which could be opaque to the examinees. Given the cut-throat competition, Cai repeatedly failed the provincial exams from his teenage years all the way to his mid-thirties.¹¹

On November 21, 1835, while on his way back from the provincial exam in Fuzhou to the Penghu Islands, Cai Tinglan’s ship encountered a typhoon.¹² His ship lost direction and drifted off the southeast coast of China and in the South China Sea for more than a week (map 2).¹³ Cai and the sailors eventually reached land at the coast of Quảng Nam Province in Vietnam. Once spotted by the shore patrols of the Nguyễn, Cai and his companions needed to convince the patrol that they were not smugglers or pirates and to secure their help to return home.

Nguyễn officials, unsurprisingly, were on high alert. There are many instances of Chinese piracy recorded in Veritable Records of the Great South (Đại Nam thực lục), the official annals of the Nguyễn. To give some examples just from central Vietnam close in time to Cai’s arrival, in 1834 two Qing pirate ships arrived in Quảng Nam, robbed merchants, and went ashore to burn down houses.¹⁴ In 1835, a Qing pirate ship was recorded in Thới Cần, Quảng Ngãi, not long before Cai’s arrival.¹⁵ In 1836, the year after Cai Tinglan’s arrival, another two Qing pirate ships were pursued and captured by the Nguyễn navy in Quảng Nam.¹⁶ That same year, Nguyễn officials seized sixty-five jin of raw opium and twenty-five liang of refined opium from a Qing pirate ship in Quảng Ngãi.¹⁷

In addition to the ever-present threat of piracy and drug smuggling, the Nguyễn records show that Chinese ships did regularly drift to Vietnam after encountering storms at sea. Looking just at cases during the Minh Mạng reign involving Chinese students, there were two entries recording shipwrecked students just before Cai Tinglan’s arrival. In 1822, a student from Fujian named Wang Kunyuan was blown to Vietnam while attempting to sail to Taiwan to take an examination. He was given clothing, money, and rice and allowed to return home by boat.¹⁸ In 1831, a student of the Imperial College named Chen Qi also drifted to Vietnam.¹⁹ This context helps us better understand Cai Tinglan’s reception. The Nguyễn officials were not ready to accept Cai’s explanation that he was a scholar aboard a peaceful merchant ship until the ship had been searched for contraband and Cai tested on his literary ability. Only then was Cai accepted and given extra support as a student.

After registering the ship and the personnel, Nguyễn officials made plans to return the crew to China. Cai realized that he was not completely helpless; while he could not speak Vietnamese, he could communicate with the local officials by writing in literary Chinese, a common method among the literati of East Asian countries in the late imperial period. According to Vietnamese law, Cai’s cultivated talent title distinguished him from the rest of the people on the ship. Given that Vietnam under the Nguyễn dynasty also administered civil service examinations, it recognized and respected Cai’s degree. He was further invited to meet with the provincial administration commissioner, Nguyễn Bạch, who bonded with Cai through their shared Confucian literati identity. In this foreign land, Cai found a familiar role to play.

Cai’s Qing literati identity opened the path back to China. Faced with the frequent piracy and smuggling, Nguyễn Bạch initially seemed to have had doubts about Cai’s self-proclaimed identity as a literatus. After the meeting, he sent a few civil-examination questions to Cai, asking him to finish by the next day. Cai passed the bar; after a few days, local provincial officials began to visit and socialize with this literatus from the Heavenly Court (Ch. Tianchao; V. Thiên Triều). According to Cai’s account, on December 24, 1835, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng issued an edict that recognized Cai’s literatus status and accommodated him and his companions with money and rice. The recognition from the emperor opened a path of official support for Cai.

With the support of the Nguyễn government assured, the next question was how to get back home. According to Vietnamese law, Vietnamese officials needed to escort Chinese literati by the sea route, and only merchants and commoners were allowed to take the land route. The law was meant to privilege the literati; the sea route was not only much faster but also avoided bandits, onerous paperwork, and other logistics required for land travel. However, Cai insisted on returning by land; otherwise, he would have had to wait until favorable currents the next spring. Also, after experiencing the trauma of being lost at sea, it is possible that he was not ready to again set foot onboard a ship (see Cai’s travel route on maps 3A and 3B). The Vietnamese officials were hesitant to grant permission, given that the overland route was both more dangerous and more expensive—and they would bear responsibility. But eventually, they received permission directly from the emperor.

The next obstacle was money. In addition to paperwork for local authorities, traveling required food and lodging. Since Cai’s intended route from Fuzhou to Penghu was short, he had neither sufficient money for a months-long trip nor goods to trade. Even if he had money, it would still be difficult to find lodging in small villages or deserted areas. In a land where he could not even speak the language, Cai found himself in a predicament.

But once again, a solution emerged. China and Vietnam had long had trading relations, and since the seventeenth century, Chinese merchants from Fujian and Guangdong Provinces had traveled and migrated to Vietnam in large numbers.²⁰ By 1835, they had formed communities recognized by the Vietnamese government, called “associations” (Ch., V. bang). After meeting with the Quảng Ngãi magistrate, Cai was introduced to the head of the Fujian Association, Teng Kim, who provided him a place to stay. Even though he was from Penghu, Cai was perceived as part of the wider Fujianese circle. He was glad to be seen this way; during his trip back to Fujian, he stayed with and was accompanied mostly by speakers of Hokkien, the language of southeastern Fujian. Among the Chinese immigrants who paid visits to Cai, Cai identified most with people from Fujian, who shared daily customs and native language. Cai found a community in a foreign land.

Logistical problems solved, Cai was on his way to China on January 9, 1836. By June 21 that year, he was back in his mother’s house in Penghu. During these five months, he became adept at traveling in Vietnam without knowing the language. Whenever he reached a new town, he went to the local magistrate’s office to present his documents and his status as a Chinese literatus. This combination guaranteed that he would be welcomed by the local officials. Cai consistently reported that he was invited to feast with the officials and exchange poetry. Subsequently, he had no problem with the paperwork required to pass provincial borders or, later, the Chinese border. When it came to daily accommodation, his Fujianese identity allowed him to seek and receive help from his fellow Fujianese. Meanwhile, he received food, medicine, and money from other Qing Chinese migrants because they were all “people of the Tang” (Ch. Tangren; V. Đường nhân).

Once he was back in Fujian, Cai decided to capitalize on his accident and turned to his mentor, Zhou Kai (1779–1837), for help. Zhou, the provincial magistrate in Fujian, provided critical support for his student. Previously, in 1832, when Zhou was the circuit intendant of Quanzhou, Cai had contacted him regarding the current famine in Penghu to request aid for the island. Zhou had been impressed not only by Cai’s proposal of distributing financial aid but also by his talent in composing poetry. Eventually, he decided to take Cai under his wing, even giving the latter a new style name, Xiangzu (Source of Fragrance). In the next few years, Cai confided his anxiety about passing the civil examinations to Zhou; in response, Zhou comforted him with poetry.

When Cai returned to China, he saw Zhou Kai first in Xiamen (Amoy) on June 5 of 1836, even before seeing his mother. He told Zhou about his adventure, and the latter thought he had been “reborn.” When Cai wrote Miscellany of the South Seas to recount his travels, Zhou contributed a preface in which he describes Cai’s triumph over the obstacles strewn in his way as a testament to his filial piety and composure. If Cai could survive the unprecedented heaven-sent difficulties of his sojourn in Vietnam, Zhou suggested, he could certainly handle anything that came his way at court. Zhou’s advocacy promoted Cai among the literati circles in Taiwan. One year later, Zhou became the circuit intendant of Taiwan and immediately appointed Cai as the main lecturer at the Chongwen Academy and two other academies. Although he still lacked an advanced degree at this time, Cai was well respected thanks to the endorsement and support of Zhou Kai.

Cai had his break in 1844. That year, he finally passed the provincial exam and earned a palace graduate degree. In the same year, he was appointed to be a magistrate in Jiangxi. Five years later, he was assigned to Xiajiang County in Jiangxi. During his tenure, he promoted education and reduced taxes for this impoverished county. Soon after, in 1852, he became the examiner of Jiangxi and the associate administrator in charge of water conservancy. In 1856, he was moved to nearby Fengcheng County and earned praise for his work on flood control. It was there that he passed away in 1859. Cai had fulfilled the dream of many to become a literatus-official.

Given that Miscellany of the South Seas fell into obscurity fairly quickly, we cannot say with any certainty whether it helped Cai Tinglan make connections or climb the career ladder. We can see from the forewords that his friends presented his handling of himself abroad and the knowledge he gained through his travels as an asset. Cai Tinglan himself may have seen his book as a professional calling card, demonstrating his calm under pressure and his literary ability. There is a venerable history of Chinese scholars writing about the exotic south to show off their literary prowess, unusual experiences, and masculinity. The authors Liu Zongyuan (773–819), Su Shi (1037–1101), Fan Chengda (1126–1193), Xu Xiake (1587–1641), and Kuang Lu (1604–1650) all fit this mold.²¹ While Cai Tinglan, like these authors, constructed a self through travel narrative, it is notable that he did not exoticize Vietnam to create a more colorful backdrop for his exploits.

Publication and Translation History of Miscellany of the South Seas

Cai Tinglan published his account of his journey very soon after his return to China. Both the first and second printing of the first edition came out in 1837.²² In the rush to publish, Cai left out his poems, writing, “The poetry will later appear in the last chapter.” In the second printing, this line was changed to “Yuyuan’s [Cai’s art name] personal blocks,” suggesting that Cai owned the blocks carved with the poems and was perhaps intending to save them or print them separately. These poems were apparently never published and have not been preserved, nor have they appeared in any Vietnamese collections. Given the importance of poetry in his communication with Vietnamese officials, it is unfortunate that they have not survived.

A second edition soon followed the first. It was printed in two runs, with some minor changes to the text. The surviving copies of the second printing are not complete. Of these four versions of the text, the National Library in Beijing has two original copies, and the National Library in Taipei has one.²³

A handwritten copy of the first edition preserved at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies (Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm) in Hà Nội (shelf number HVv.80) forms the base text for our translation. We have also consulted other editions of this text and note substantial differences in the footnotes. The differences between the first and second editions of Miscellany of the South Seas are minor but telling. Cai revised some sentences that described Vietnamese people reacting to his appearance with surprise, awe, or even mirth. In the revision, he modestly shifts the focus away from himself and also away from any perceived slight to Qing dignity. In the earlier edition, Cai explicitly explains that he was wearing formal clothes, and we know, too, that he would have been wearing the queue hairstyle of shaved forehead and long ponytail required by the Qing government of all men. While common people gawked and laughed at the sight of a queue-wearing foreigner in formal clothes, treating Cai as a figure of merriment, Vietnamese officials tempered their initial surprise at Cai’s appearance with polite welcome. The awkwardness and friction of these initial accounts are edited out of the second edition. These changes also present the Vietnamese common people in a less unflattering light.

After this initial publication flurry, interest in the book among Chinese readers appears to have faded. Having achieved his goal of attaining the palace graduate title and a position in officialdom, Cai Tinglan no longer needed to promote the book. Although Miscellany of the South Seas fell out of view in China, it was translated into Russian in 1877. In 1878, it was translated from Russian into French.²⁴ It is no surprise that it attracted the attention of a French-speaking audience, given that country’s ongoing piecemeal colonization of what became known as Indochina and concomitant interest in information about Vietnam.

Miscellany of the South Seas was not reprinted again until 1959. At that time, a Taiwanese version based on the incomplete and poorly printed copy of the second edition held by the National Library in Taipei was published.²⁵ In 2006, the Taiwanese scholar Chen Yiyuan compiled and introduced Cai Tinglan’s work under the title Cai Tinglan and His Miscellany of the South Seas (Cai Tinglan jiqi Hainan zazhu). A Vietnamese translation of Professor Chen’s book by Ngô Đức Thọ and Hoàng Văn Lâu appeared as Thái Đình Lan và tác phẩm Hải Nam Tạp Trứ in 2009. Gotō Hitoshi (後藤均) led a reading group that made a partial translation of Miscellany of the South Seas into Japanese in 1992.²⁶ A Korean translation is in the works, part of the trend of recent interest in the text across East Asia. In addition, the text is digitized and available online on the website of the Chinese Text Project.²⁷

Cai Tinglan has consistently received scholarly attention in Taiwan, as an illustrious representative of Taiwan and as the only person from Penghu to ever receive a palace graduate degree. His house in Penghu has been preserved as a museum (Cai Tinglan Jinshi Di 蔡廷蘭進士第).

Navigating the South China Sea in the Age of Sail

Cai Tinglan boarded a boat in Jinmen, an island off the coast of Fujian, bound for his home in the Penghu Islands. The Fujianese sailors were well aware of various hazards in the vicinity, but once they were blown off course, they could not judge where they were in relation to these obstacles. Although farther away, drifting to Luzon (Manila) in the Philippine Islands or to Siam (modern-day Thailand) was preferred, because it would be straightforward to sail back home to Fujian from those locations. The large Chinese merchant communities in either place could provide material support for the return of their compatriots. More concerning would be to crash on the rocky atolls that studded the shallow waters of the South China Sea. Their fears first turned to the notorious Nan’aoqi.

The 1730 text Record of Things Heard and Seen in the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo wenjian lu) by Chen Lunjiong gives the following account of the southeastern coast of Nan’ao Island, off the coast of Guangdong:

Nan’aoqi is located on the southeast coast of Nan’ao [island]. There are islets that are small and low-lying, with feet extending out from all sides made of vegetation-covered stones. Long sea plants extend from the seafloor. There are sandbars in the bay that suck in anything that drifts by; boats should not go there. Once you enter the current then you get sucked to that place and cannot get out. About seven watches away from Nan’ao by the sea route is what has been called since ancient times “entering the current” [luoji]. The north is bounded by sunken and raised sand for about 200 li, about three watches by the sea route.”²⁸

Their next concerns were the One Thousand Li Stone Embankment (Ch. Qianlishitang; V. Thiên Lý Thạch Đường) and the Ten Thousand Li Sandy Shoal (Ch. Wanlichangsha; V. Vạn Lý Trường Sa) Islands. In common use at that time, these terms generally described the treacherously shallow waters in the middle of the South China Sea. Alternatively, these two place-names are sometimes associated with the modern-day names Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands. Mariners would either hug the coast or travel on known routes with deeper water to avoid running aground far from inhabited land.

European and American mariners were no strangers to these dangerous waters. John White, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, wrote in his 1823 account of a voyage to Vietnam that they avoided “the group of islands and shoals called the Paracels”:

The Paracels, just mentioned, were formerly, and indeed till very recently, dreaded by navigators, being represented as one continuous chain of low islands, coral reefs, and sandbanks, extending from the latitude of 12° to that of 17° north, in a north-north-east and south-south-west direction, forming a fancied resemblance to a human foot (the toe of which was the southernmost extremity).… This archipelago, once so formidable from its great imaginary extent, is now ascertained to be a group of islands and reefs, of no great extent, with good and safe channels between most of them, and in many places good anchorage.²⁹

They relied on the charts made in 1818 by Ross and Maughan of the Bombay Marine of the “different passages leading to the Macau roads.”

What is clear throughout Cai Tinglan’s account is the close connection between Fujian and central Vietnam. The Tongking Gulf (or Tonkin Gulf) forms its own distinct and cohesive region spanning the political boundary of China and Vietnam, but the Leizhou peninsula, Hainan Island, and the peak-studded inlets of the gulf tend to serve as a barrier between areas of China to the north and areas of Vietnam to the south.³⁰ Historian Charles Wheeler labels this zone connected by water the Tongking Stream, which was plied by coastal ships traveling to the west of Hainan Island and was dotted by coves and islands that made it an ideal lair for pirates.³¹ This contrasts with the Fujian Stream, which connected Fujian and central Vietnam, bypassing the Tongking Gulf. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, there were strong ties between Fujian and central Vietnam. Despite the distance, these regions were connected by water. As a case in point, Cai Tinglan encountered three Vietnamese officials who had traveled to Xiamen, compared with two who had traveled to the capital, Beijing.

Cai mentions the “inner sea” and the “outer sea.” Historian Ronald Po defines the Qing understanding of these two zones: “The inner sea constituted the empire’s domestic seawater.… By contrast, the outer sea was a capricious domain that lay beyond the purview of administrative governance and economic extraction.”³² The line between these two sea spaces was situational. While Po’s definition is based on the Qing’s division of political space, Cai sees them through the eyes of a sailor; to him, these terms define spaces of relative safety and danger. Cai views the outer sea as the space just beyond the coast out of sight of the shore where navigation becomes more complicated and the danger of storms increases. Once his ship entered the Blackwater Ocean, it was off course. Fang Junshi in General Record of the Ocean (Haiyang jilüe) describes the Blackwater Ocean as off the coast of Guangdong and “beyond our [Qing] governance and control.”³³

Chinese Overseas in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Vietnam

Nguyễn Vietnam was newly consolidated, expansive, and plugged into interregional trade networks, and it claimed rulership over diverse populations. Cai Tinglan arrived in Vietnam during the fourth decade of the dynasty under its second ruler, Minh Mạng. The founding emperor of the Nguyễn, the Gia Long emperor, was descended from the Nguyễn ruling family that had once controlled the south (the Cochinchina of European records, known as Đàng Trong or the “inner region” in Vietnamese) before being driven away by the Tây Sơn (1778–1802). The Nguyễn dynasty claimed to be the legitimate successors of the previous Lê dynasty (1428–1789) of imperial Vietnam, but much was new in the nineteenth century. Perhaps most notably, the territory under Vietnamese imperial control was much larger than in any previous period, stretching from the Red River delta in the north to the Mekong delta in the far south. The Gia Long emperor built his capital in the center of the territory, in Huế, near his family’s former seat, moving Vietnamese political power away from its historical center in Hà Nội. The Nguyễn state sought to incorporate diverse groups of people into its state, from non-Vietnamese peoples in the highlands, Chams in central and southern Vietnam, and Chinese communities centered on far-flung entrepôts, especially in central and southern Vietnam. The country formerly known as Đại Việt also had a new name: Việt Nam (or Vietnam). This is the name used by Cai Tinglan through his text.

Much would have looked familiar to Cai. All government work was conducted in literary Chinese, moving away from the Vietnamese demotic script, chữ Nôm, that had been favored during the Tây Sơn period. The main divisions of government—six ministries run by bureaucrats chosen through a civil service examination and presided over by the emperor, as well as government sponsorship of Confucianism—was broadly the same as in Qing China.³⁴ Vietnamese dynasties had long held civil service examinations to recruit erudite men for government careers. The palace examination was halted during the reign of the Gia Long emperor, who wished to calm north-south tensions and knew the bulk of the degrees would go to northern scholars.³⁵ His successor, the Minh Mạng emperor, reinstated the national-level competition in 1822 and held them every three years. Cai Tinglan made a point of recording his meetings with several Vietnamese palace graduates.

Although Cai and his shipmates were disoriented and frightened while lost at sea, they were in fact following a well-traveled current that connected Fujian to Vietnam’s central coast. The Fujian Stream, frequented by oceangoing vessels that skirted the dangerous Paracel Islands, connected central Vietnam to Fujian and northward to Japanese and Korean ports. The currents that connected distant Fujian to central Vietnam had long carried people, commodities, capital, and ideas between the two places. Fujianese merchants had been active in Vietnam since at least the Song dynasty (960–1279). Even before the fall of the Ming, Chinese traders were drawn to the lucrative markets of what is now southern Vietnam, especially following the partial lifting of the sea ban in 1567.³⁶ Following the fall of the Ming dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century, Ming refugees flowed into Southeast Asia seeking to settle beyond Qing control, becoming the “Minh Hương,” the majority of whom had roots in Fujian Province. Minh Hương literally means “Ming incense,” indicating people who continued to offer sacrifices to the Ming dynasty—in other words, Ming loyalists. Despite the name, rather than as a political group looking for an opportunity to restore a fallen dynasty, the Minh Hương are better understood as emigrants who were both pushed out of China due to instability and policy changes under the Qing and drawn by the pull of opportunity in what is now Vietnam. They planned to make Vietnam a permanent home, not necessarily a base for military action against the Qing. The Minh Hương were given special privileges by the Nguyễn lords of Cochinchina, predecessors of the Nguyễn dynasty encountered by Cai. They were allowed to intermarry with Vietnamese, own land, conduct trade, and govern their own communities. They came to serve as “sea-trade brokers, royal bureaucrats, and cultural intermediaries.”³⁷ Just as merchants used their wealth and social status to enter the literati class through education and marriage ties, Chinese merchant emigrants in Vietnam used the same strategies to become a minority elite.³⁸

While fighting Ming loyalist forces in Taiwan between 1664 and 1683, the Qing forced an evacuation of the southeast coast and a ban on maritime activities, devastating the coastal economy. Recovery was slow throughout the eighteenth century, as bans on sojourning overseas enacted early in the century continued to stymie trading families and push some of their activities underground. The relaxing of Qing maritime trade bans in 1754 ushered in a “Chinese century” during which miners, traders, adventurers, and entrepreneurs of all kinds sought economic opportunities across Southeast Asia. The Nguyễn royal family of Vietnam made use of the Chinese community to expand their control of the hinterlands and increase their tax base.³⁹

In the mid-eighteenth century, Fujianese and Cantonese trade with Southeast Asia increased rapidly. This period was also the peak of migration of Chinese settlers into the region. These “Chinese” settlers were in no way monolithic; dialect and place of origin created very real divisions. Struggles between Chaozhou (or, as it is sometimes transliterated to reflect local pronunciation, Teochew) and Cantonese communities influenced political formations in the “water frontier” stretching from Saigon to Bangkok. Indeed, when Cai Tinglan mentions Chaozhou, although technically located in Guangdong Province, he treats it as a part of the larger Hokkien world. This is understandable, as the Chaozhou dialect (or Teochew/Hoklo) is a southern Min language closely related to Hokkien; Chaozhou and southern Fujian formed a connected culture, despite their locations in different provinces. Fujianese traders occupied a different plane, having arrived earlier, dominating the circle of wealthy merchants, intermarrying with elite Vietnamese families, and producing children who went on to occupy important posts in the Nguyễn government.⁴⁰ Chinese merchants had a high status and political role in Đàng Trong.⁴¹

Minh Hương and more recently arrived Qing Chinese were clearly separated from one another. Qing Chinese were also known colloquially as Tang people (V. Đường Nhân), referring to the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE); however, this designation is cultural, not temporal. Tang people meant people from China, often southern regions, but not Chinese communities established since the Tang. Somewhat counterintuitively, Tang people were more recent arrivals than Minh Hương. Cai Tinglan used neither “Minh Hương” nor references to the Qing dynasty, such as “Qing people” in his account. Instead, he used “Tang people” or the strikingly modern-sounding “Chinese people” (Ch. Zhongguoren). Cai explains that “in Annam, Chinese people are called Tang people” and also call themselves Tang people, suggesting that the terms Tang person and Chinese person were nearly interchangeable. Later in the text, he states that Chinese people are also called “people of the Heavenly Court” (Ch. Tianchaoren). Cai seems to use “Tang people” to refer to more established communities of Chinese, and “Chinese people” to refer to sojourners or temporary residents. We have translated the terms as Chinese and Tang people in order to make the differentiation in the original clear. When Cai writes about named individuals, he simply provides their province and county of origin.

Qing Chinese were at least initially identifiable by the Qing-mandated queue hairstyle—a shaved forehead and long ponytail (as Cai observes in his account). Sojourners rather than emigrants, many Qing people intended to make money abroad and eventually return to China. In practice, some Qing people could not afford to return, and others did not wish to. Still others may have stayed longer than they intended or found ways to move back and forth between the two countries. Qing people also established families in Vietnam. Sojourning could be a prelude to migration.⁴²

In 1814, the Gia Long emperor decreed that overseas Chinese could divide into native-place associations (bang) for self-government, with a group leader (bang trưởng) responsible for relaying government decrees, collecting taxes within the group, and generally managing the affairs of the group.⁴³ The seven associations recognized in 1814 were the Guangzhao (Guangzhou and Zhaoqing), Fujian, Chaozhou, Fuzhou, Kejia (Hakka), Hainan, and Qiongzhou associations.⁴⁴ This division was based not only on province but also on ethnicity and language, especially Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka.⁴⁵ Later in the dynasty, the Nguyễn designated more groups and attempted to absorb the powerful Minh Hương into the associations.⁴⁶ Chinese overseas communities, even before this decree, were organized around native-place associations.

What services did native-place associations provide? They were social clubs and hostels; they housed shrines to regional deities; they would ensure the burial or shipment of remains home when compatriots died abroad; and they helped new arrivals get oriented, join a network of compatriots, and establish a base from which to make connections beyond their association.⁴⁷ Cai Tinglan stayed at the Fujian native-place lodge in Hà Nội, which is still located on Lãn Ông Street in the Old Quarter and is currently used as a school.⁴⁸ The native-place associations were a resource for the Chinese, but they were also encouraged by the Vietnamese government as a way to keep track of this mobile population.

Under the reigns of Minh Mạng and Triệu Trị (r. 1841–47), these policies shifted toward actively encouraging assimilation in order to decrease the power of Minh Hương communities. In 1827, the characters used to represent Minh Hương were changed from “incense” to “village” (香 to 鄉, both pronounced xiang in Modern Standard Mandarin), diluting the political loyalism suggested by the name. The Minh Mạng emperor forbade Minh Hương from “returning” to China with their Vietnamese wives or children or from wearing Qing dress. At the same time, he preserved their existing legal rights and re-affirmed their responsibilities, including providing translation services and regulating prices and coinage in the markets.⁴⁹

By the time Cai arrived in the early nineteenth century, the overseas Chinese community was imbricated in Vietnam’s commercial, institutional, and social life. He frequently encountered the native-place associations and received help from them, especially the Fujian Association. Many of his elite interlocutors informed him that their ancestors had originated in Fujian. At the same time, newer Qing arrivals kept connections between China and Vietnam strong, even as some of the older traditions faded. For instance, some earlier community centers of Minh Hương likely lost relevance as they assimilated more deeply into Vietnamese society. Describing Hội An (Faifo), “where Chinese people were most numerous,” Cai writes:

There was an old transshipment depot which was really spacious. (Inside they offer sacrifice to every commissioner from the previous dynasty, but Chinese people do not maintain the sacrifice well. Now it has returned to local people’s protection. It is often blocked off, and people are not allowed to go in.)

Hội An, once the most important trade port on Vietnam’s central coast, was partially destroyed during the Tây Sơn uprising in the late eighteenth century. It continued to lose relevance as the Thu Bồn river silted up and other ports, especially Saigon, grew in importance.

Scholars of the overseas Chinese have long been making the case that the history of China cannot be fully understood without incorporating an understanding of the influence of expatriate Chinese communities. Most of these emigrants traveled to Southeast Asia. In general, they did not view their physical separation from China as a permanent severing of ties with the Chinese world. Rather, they were expanding that world. In fact, emigration can be seen as a form of overseas expansion.⁵⁰ Viewed in this light, nodes of central Vietnam appear as both Vietnamese sovereign territory and as a Fujianese hinterland. As historian Melissa Macauley observes in the context of the South China Sea, “‘periphery’ and ‘core’ or ‘metropole’ and ‘hinterland,’ or even ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized,’ were complicated and fungible.”⁵¹ On Chaozhou’s entanglement with Southeast Asian polities, she writes, “In this entangled relationship, there was neither metropole nor hinterland but an increasingly interrelated trans-local economy that was dominated by Chinese, often at the invitation of colonizer, monarchs, and sultans.”⁵²

Macauley’s work on maritime Chaozhou pushes back against the “ecological cul-de-sac” argument famously made by historian Kenneth Pomeranz to partially explain “the great divergence” between Chinese and British industrialization and modernization.⁵³ While British industrialization was fueled by access to the resources of overseas colonies, the theory goes, China was running short of resources with no access to overseas colonies. Macauley suggests instead that Chinese maritime settlements functioned like colonies; they allowed for resource extraction, investment opportunities, and jobs to absorb excess workers who in turn sent sizable remittances to their native places. Unlike European colonialism, Chinese settlements in Southeast Asia operated without military or political support from the Qing government. As such, they have been less visible to historians than traditional European colonies. Moreover, this form of colonialism was cheaper and more effective than the Euro-American version. Perhaps, as Macauley suggests, it is better described as a non-statist form of territoriality, whereby Chinese merchants had access to markets and natural resources and engaged in commerce in a way that maximized group benefits.⁵⁴

Much of Macauley’s work focuses on Siam and the Straits Settlements of British Malaya, where many Chaozhouese settled. As she demonstrates, the British created a colonial society in which Chinese traders reaped great profits, deepening British dependence on Chinese capital, labor, and trading networks. The political situation in Nguyễn dynasty Vietnam was different. The Nguyễn dynasty, too, profited from and made use of the Chinese population and their trade networks, while perhaps achieving more success at monitoring that community. Native-place associations not only facilitated networking opportunities for Chinese emigrants, they also helped the Nguyễn dynasty organize and keep tabs on Chinese emigrants in their territory. Chinese trading networks and tax farming contributed to the Nguyễn economy. Chinese trade to southern Vietnam was largely unidirectional. Vietnamese and Chinese merchants took up their roles in interlocking interregional trade networks by tacit agreement. Chinese merchants brought Chinese goods along the long-distance route into central Vietnamese ports and purchased Vietnamese goods to sell at home. Vietnamese traders engaged in riverine trade and short-distance coastal trade along the Gulf of Siam.⁵⁵ European and American representatives eager to establish trading depots in Vietnam were baffled by this situation. When Vietnamese rulers repeatedly rebuffed their requests, they mistakenly assumed that the Qing government controlled Vietnam and sought to preserve their trading dominance. In fact, the trading system worked well for the Nguyễn, and they had no wish to destabilize it by granting Europeans and Americans more access.

The Nguyễn government’s relatively strong control of its coast suggests that Vietnam, at least, was not a Chinese “colony” or territory in the way Macauley describes for other Southeast Asian locations. Southern Vietnam was an international crossroads of goods and people, where cultures and languages mixed in busy ports and markets. Traditionally understood as “merchants without empire,” new research is revisiting the role of the Qing empire in overseas Chinese communities.⁵⁶ It may be that the Qing government was more in contact with and invested in overseas Chinese communities than has been previously acknowledged; one example is Hà Tiên, a trading enclave on Vietnam’s southern coast, whose leaders are sometimes described as Ming loyalists.⁵⁷ This dynamic applies to China as well. The internal migration of Cantonese within China may have been just as important to the construction of empire as sedentary, registered people farming a single crop. Furthermore, the distinction between sojourners and settlers is fluid, as one can seamlessly shift to the other.⁵⁸ On the one hand, the mobility and transnational connections of Chinese merchants reveal a world of activity not under the full control of the Qing government. On the other hand, imported rice was critically important to Qing China, and the government at times accepted the economic dependence of coastal Guangdong and Fujian on Southeast Asia sojourning and trade. The Qing was a great naval power that proactively integrated its empire with the maritime world through “maritime militarization and seaborne shipping” in the long eighteenth century.⁵⁹ Central and southern Vietnam can be considered as interconnected with maritime Chaozhou, a region that stretched beyond Chaozhou north to Shanghai and south to along the Gulf of Siam.⁶⁰ The significance of Miscellany of the South Seas is that it shows us precisely how these linkages worked in practice.

Multilingualism and the Two Worlds of Miscellany of the South Seas

Despite being in a foreign land, Cai Tinglan was surprised to discover that he had not strayed beyond the extended water world of southeastern China. Although Cai initially felt lost and adrift while abroad, he discovered that he was passing through a well-established trade corridor that had long shuttled people and products between the southeastern coast of China and the central coast of Vietnam. Cai found that he could move easily in two linguistic registers: the elite register of literary Chinese unlocked through learned “brush talks” and the Hokkien-speaking register of diasporic Fujianese traders. Cai Tinglan was able to leverage his double identity as a Hokkien speaker and a scholar to move with ease through Nguyễn Vietnam. Cai Tinglan simultaneously traveled through a Hokkien-speaking Fujianese maritime world and a cosmopolitan ecumene that communicated in literary Chinese poetry filled with scholarly allusions. His trip profoundly reveals the multilingual nature of the social worlds of Nguyễn Vietnam and Qing China.

When Cai communicates with the sailors aboard his ship and the overseas Chinese community, he presents himself as a Fujianese native. Like his compatriots among the emigrant community, his local place affiliations were more primary than his identification with the Qing or China as a whole. The Vietnamese government relied on the large and well-connected community of Fujianese to serve as translators and hosts for Cai Tinglan and his brother. Moved by their shared homeplace, Fujianese people offered Cai and his brother monetary support at several points in their journey. As he moves north and passes out of the Fujianese Stream and into the Tongking Stream, Cai encounters fewer Fujianese and more compatriots from Guangdong.

When he engaged with Vietnamese officials, Cai presented himself as a scholar from the Heavenly Court, signaling to them that he was a member of their elite community and that he shared their cosmopolitan code. This transnational cultural world has been labeled in various ways. Historian of China and Vietnam Alexander Woodside dubbed it a “Confucian commonwealth” whose members recognized themselves as part of an intellectual community that extended beyond political boundaries with deep roots in past tradition.⁶¹ In literary studies, scholars have championed terms such as the “Sinophographic cosmopolis,” a reworking of Sheldon Pollock’s “Sanskrit Cosmopolis.”⁶² The linguistic “Sinosphere” or character-based “Sinographosphere” each aim to cover places that were influenced by literary Chinese, even if the inhabitants do not speak a Sinophone language.⁶³ James Millward, noting that the “Chinese cultural ecumene” bears striking similarities to the Greco-Roman linguistic and cultural tradition of Europe and the Mediterranean or to the Persian-language Islamic tradition of North Africa and Asia, dubs it a “Sinicate.”⁶⁴ Whatever the label, this cultural world cuts against narratives of a unitary China bound by its territorial borders. More than an academic theory, this cosmopolitan community structured interactions across an enormous geographic expanse in the early modern world. When Cai Tinglan was blown off course, we know he was still within this familiar territory when, arriving in an unknown port, a man in a boat, unable to communicate in a shared spoken language, traces the two characters 安南 (Annan or Annam) with his finger.

The two worlds—that of the Fujianese diaspora and the Confucian commonwealth—interpenetrated. One of Cai Tinglan’s most illustrious interlocutors, Phan Thanh Giản, was the grandson of a Minh Hương from southern Fujian. Other officials throughout the narrative mention their Chinese family origins. Although his Hokkien-speaking guides did not necessarily know literary Chinese or converse with Nguyễn officials, the Fujian community was called upon by the Nguyễn government at several points to provide services (food, lodging, and translation) to Cai and his brother.

The crew of Cai’s ship was initially held in suspicion by local officials. This only cleared once the ship was searched for contraband (drugs and weapons) and Cai demonstrated that he was truly a scholar by taking a written exam. Piracy was a problem for the Nguyễn government at this time and place. In addition to a steady stream of European and American ships demanding unrealistic trading privileges and Asian pirates engaging in smuggling, the Nguyễn government was still engaged in putting down the Saigon-based Lê Văn Khôi revolt (1833–35). The Nguyễn would remember that the Tây Sơn deployed Qing pirates to fight the Nguyễn royal family in their long quest to regain control of Vietnam, sometimes called the Thirty Years War. It was also a time when the Minh Mạng emperor was working to limit the role of Chinese traders within the country and close loopholes that allowed them to evade taxation or smuggle Vietnamese rice into China.⁶⁵ Chinese traders found ways to evade new restrictions, and it had happened that traders pretended they had been blown off course and then engaged in illicit trade while waiting to return to China.⁶⁶ Once their story of being blown off course by a typhoon was verified, the Nguyễn government granted permission for the sailors to wait in Vietnam until the monsoon season passed and then to return home by boat. Ultimately, Cai Tinglan’s double identity as a Hokkienese and a scholar secured him safe harbor and a warm welcome across Vietnam.

Due to their geographical and historical adjacency, people in Penghu, Jinmen, and Tong’an spoke a particular dialect of Hokkien, the Quanzhou dialect of the Quanzhang division.⁶⁷ Growing up in Penghu, Cai spoke this dialect. Meanwhile, a common tongue, or “official language” (guanhua), the predecessor to today’s Mandarin, was used in late imperial China, especially among the officials and the literati. As a government-sponsored student, he was probably able to speak in some version of this common tongue, besides being well versed in literary Chinese writing. During his trip in Vietnam, he received help from people who could speak “Chinese speech” (Huayu) as well as “Min tongue” (Minyin), showing the division between Mandarin and Hokkien.

Cai’s experiences tapped into a larger multilinguistic situation among the Chinese emigrants in Vietnam. Cai relied on communication in Hokkien, especially the Quanzhou dialect. Of the thirteen people who hosted him, twelve came from Hokkien-speaking regions. Among the twelve hosts, five were from the Quanzhou dialect region Tong’an or Jinjiang; three were from Longxi or Zhao’an, two regions where the Zhangzhou dialect of the Quanzhang division was spoken; two were from the Chaoshan division of the Hokkien-speaking region Chaozhou of Guangdong; and only one was from Taiping in Guangxi, a Cantonese speaking region.⁶⁸ Cai used Hokkien daily while in Vietnam. This was particularly the case when it involved intimate interactions, such as staying as a guest at someone’s house. In contrast, Mandarin did not have much space in this sector.

Nonetheless, the “official language,” or certain types of nineteenth-century Mandarin, could be used on other occasions. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, a Nanjing-based Mandarin dialect dominated as the Mandarin koine among the literati and the officials. Later in the century, the Beijing-based dialect of Mandarin started to gain more prestige. People in Qing China then, especially the literati, could communicate across linguistic groups with a Nanjing or Beijing dialect of Mandarin, or more practically, a hybrid of both.⁶⁹ For example, when the shipwreck brought him into Vietnamese territory, a “Chinese” (Huayu)-speaking person approached Cai and the sailors, asking about their identity. During Cai’s trip in Vietnam, Chinese migrants came to pay tribute especially because of his literatus status. The majority of the migrants came from Hokkien-speaking regions, while many also came from Cantonese speaking regions, especially Guangzhou. If Cai did not speak Cantonese, a form of Mandarin might have been used on those occasions.

Chinese settlers and sojourners were embedded in the local society, where Vietnamese was the koine language. As a traveler passing through, Cai did not learn the language himself, but he recorded Chinese migrants’ different degrees of Vietnamese skills. Sim Liang from Zhao’an of Fujian, for example, was an official interpreter (tongyan) who helped Cai communicate with the Vietnamese officials at the beginning of his trip. While Sim successfully helped Cai navigate routine inquiries, he could not interpret the words from the head officials of Quảng Ngãi during a meeting. Cai noted that “the interpreter only knew the common street language, and not much more.” Able to understand a more literary speech or not, Sim was kept outside the subsequent conversation.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, people like Trịnh Đức Hưng, Hồ Bảo Định, and Nguyễn Nhược Sơn came from Chinese migrant families and were well integrated into Vietnamese society and officialdom. While some of them could still speak the Quanzhou dialect of Hokkien, their mother tongue may have been Vietnamese.

Besides Vietnamese, literary Chinese was also used across different linguistic groups, but almost exclusively among the literati. Unlike the previously mentioned languages, it was purely a written form. Its spoken counterpart, Old Chinese, was spoken from around the sixth to the third century BCE, and the native speakers of it might have started to die out around the first century BCE.⁷¹ However, its written form remained as the main communication form, perpetuated by the literati taste and by the civil service examinations since the sixth century CE.⁷² By Cai’s time, literary Chinese, together with the literati culture, was well established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. As a result, the literati of these countries could communicate by writing in literary Chinese, or as they called it, “brush talk” (Ch. bitan; V. bút đàm).⁷³ In addition to words and meanings, verification of each other’s literati status was communicated in these conversations.⁷⁴

Cai’s trip testifies the use of literary Chinese in trans-linguistic communications. When he first arrived in Vietnam, the coast guard officials questioned him about the shipwreck through ink and brush. During his encounter with the head officials of Quảng Ngãi, the provincial administration commissioner Nguyễn Bạch and the surveillance commissioner Đặng Kim Giám, they also switched from Sim Liang’s interpretation to brush conversation. Afterward, both the Administration Commission Office and Surveillance Commission Office followed up by sending him civil examination questions, requiring him to write literary Chinese essays by the morning of the next day. While Cai formulated this inquiry as Nguyễn and Đặng’s appreciation of his literary talents, very likely it also served as a verification of Cai’s self-proclaimed status as a government-sponsored student. Only then was Cai invited back by the commissioners and introduced to their staff members. Being honored as Mr. Stipendiary Student (Ông Lúm Sinh), he socialized with them through brush talks. In Cai’s case, literary Chinese substituted for Vietnamese, ranging from bureaucratic to social communication.

In addition to literary Chinese, some Vietnamese wrote in the demotic script, chữ Nôm. Chữ Nôm, or as it is usually called, Nôm, formed characters in two ways. In the first, Chinese characters were used for their phonetic value, representing Vietnamese words that sounded similar. In the second, new characters were created that combined Chinese characters in novel ways, using one character for its phonetic value and another for its semantic value. This resulted in characters that adhered to the rules of Han character formation but were not in use in China.⁷⁵ During the Nguyễn dynasty, literary Chinese was favored for government documents, and Nôm was used mainly for poetry and literature, representing the sound of spoken Vietnamese. Cai Tinglan uses at least two Nôm words in his account, but likely merely copied them down without understanding the nature of the script. A reader of Chinese would not readily understand the principle of Nôm character formation.

Literary Chinese as the language of this Miscellany of the South Seas also conceals the multilingualism Cai encountered in Vietnam. For example, the place-names, personal names, and even proper names might have been uttered in Vietnamese, Hokkien, Mandarin, or Cantonese, but they were all conveyed in Chinese characters without phonetic specifications. Only occasionally would Cai record the differences between the Vietnamese and Chinese pronunciation of a place; but again, he used characters to signify these differences. And it is difficult to tell whether the characters were supposed to be read in Hokkien, some type of Mandarin, or some other language (table 1.1).

This poses a challenge to our translation: What romanization should we use to best convey these names? Our aim is to maintain both the multilingualism Cai encountered and the universalism of literary Chinese as the language of the travelogue. Since conventionally it is the mission of translations to go beyond the verbatim meaning of the target text, we used romanizations of different languages instead of just Modern Standard Mandarin pinyin to transliterate the characters of the proper names. For example, instead of rendering 沈亮 as Shen Liang, we rendered the name in Hokkien, as Sim Liang. We recorded Vietnamese place-names and personal names in the quốc ngữ script representing Vietnamese pronunciation, even though Cai was not a Vietnamese speaker. Writing in literary Chinese, Cai not only hoped his travelogue would be read by people in his circle in Qing China; he also recognized that the literati in Vietnam, and even in Korea and Japan, could read it.

Vietnamese Social History

Although the quotidian world of Vietnam was less important to Cai than recording the names and conversations he had with Fujian natives and Vietnamese officials, he provides an invaluable and rare glimpse of early Nguyễn social history. He can be a maddening guide; he recorded what he thought was significant but not necessarily what his modern readers would want to know. Women barely appear in this account. He recognized Chinese influence but was not always as observant of other strands of Vietnamese culture. He also makes mistakes. Some of the names he records as officials of a particular place do not match Vietnamese historic records.⁷⁶ Nonetheless, he still created a valuable, though incomplete, portrait of daily life in Nguyễn Vietnam. Researchers can consult his work to learn more about social customs, agriculture and economics, and the functioning of government.

Cai Tinglan’s account is unique as a lengthy eyewitness account of precolonial Vietnam written by a Qing subject. There are other accounts of Vietnam during this time period, notably European and American accounts. Alistair Lamb’s anthology of British accounts of Vietnam, The Mandarin Road to Old Hue, provides an instructive comparison.⁷⁷ All foreign boats arriving in Vietnam had to be inspected and pay customs duty (in Hội An, 12 percent of the value of goods) upon arrival and departure and port fees that varied by country of origin. In addition, a gift to the official in charge of foreign trade was customary.⁷⁸ Euro-Americans tended to find these fees too high, opaque, and unfair. Cai Tinglan arrived in Vietnam by accident and sought only permission to return to China overland rather than wait for improved sailing conditions; in contrast, British and American visitors sought to secure favorable trading relations. Their demands ranged from privileged trading rights to ownership of islands to use as trade depots. Blocked at every turn from winning these unreasonable concessions, British and American observers concluded that the Nguyễn government was despotic, corrupt, or controlled by China. They may have misunderstood the trading system that used Chinese junks for long-haul ocean routes while Vietnamese merchants dominated riverine and coastal trade in the lower Mekong and Gulf of Siam. Europeans and Americans obsessed over gift-giving etiquette, imagining that there was a complex and corrupt gift-giving ritual that would unlock the country, if only they could figure out what kind of bribe was required. Assuming that larger gifts or bribes could ease their way, they became angry when that strategy failed. What European and American visitors failed to see was that the Vietnamese government rebuffed their demands because it was not in their self-interest to give in. Much English-language scholarship, like that of Alistair Lamb, has adopted these assumptions and has viewed the Euro-American failure to achieve their aims in a sympathetic light. In their disappointment and their misunderstanding of Vietnamese culture, Euro-American described the Vietnamese officials they encountered in patronizing ways, as “greedy” or even as “human baboons.”⁷⁹

Compared to these clumsy and unsuccessful overtures, Cai Tinglan was like a fish in water. Of course, he had an advantage in that he was not officially representing the Qing government or trying to wrest concessions from the Nguyễn. Unlike American and English sailors, he describes several warm and meaningful exchanges with Vietnamese scholars. He rarely used patronizing language to describe Vietnam or Vietnamese people, in contrast to some of the prefaces and postscripts of his text by other Chinese scholars. Preface writers like Zhou Kai were not only dismissive of Vietnam but also characterized Cai’s hometown as “poor and lonely,” so perhaps Cai could sympathize with Vietnam’s perceived marginality. Cai seems at ease, too, with gift-giving. He accepted some gifts (medicine) and declined others (money), without the obsessive strategizing typical of Anglo-American gift-giving in Vietnam. All that was required of him in exchange was poetry and calligraphy, and he was mostly happy to oblige. While the English perceived gift-giving as a kind of code of bribery that they could not crack, Cai used gift exchange to form affective relationships and get things done. Gifts were valued for their meaning, because people liked them, or as a memento.

During the Minh Mạng reign, a governor-general (a political appointee drawn from the military) oversaw two provinces. A provincial governor oversaw each province. Three officials operated at the next level down: the provincial administration commission, the surveillance commissioner, and what Cai Tinglan calls the garrison commander.⁸⁰ Taken together, Cai tells us, these three positions constitute the Office of the Three Officials. According to his report, Cai Tinglan met mainly with provincial governors and provincial administration commissioners. These were men with similar educational backgrounds to his own.

For Cai, Vietnam was familiar enough that exotic elements could be noteworthy. For example, Vietnamese officials dressed in a similar fashion to their Chinese counterparts, making the uniquely Vietnamese elements—namely “black crinkly silk embroidered headbands, black robes with narrow sleeves, and red damask trousers with bare feet”—all the more strange and remarkable.⁸¹ Likewise, the social niceties and bureaucratic paperwork that were required for dealing with government were familiar to Cai, but he especially noted the ta, or platform daybed, and a copper tray for sharing gifts. He was at times exhausted by the attention he received as a foreign scholar, much in demand for calligraphy samples and poems.

He makes some note of military installations and architecture. Cai gives a very detailed description of the capital city, Huế, describing its battlements and cannons, designed with some European influence. Although he was at times bothered by the incessant rain that soaked his clothes and bedding, he notes that “the scenery is quite similar to Taiwan.” Bamboo, betel, and bananas were cultivated near villages, with rice fields nearby. Cai sees peacocks and pheasants, and he describes forests still teeming with apes. He noted that “tigers cause a lot of problems in the mountains” and gave a detailed description of how they were captured to aid in the training of war elephants.

Cai made some observations of religious life. While passing through the dangerous mountain roads to Hải Vân Pass, he noted twenty shrines to an efficacious deity called Bản Đầu Công, who protected them on the way. Later in the narrative, he noted that people worship Bản Đầu Công in their homes and that he is similar to the Tudi Gong, or Earth Lord, in Fujian. We can understand Bản Đầu Công as a generic local god.⁸² Although Cai does not necessarily connect Bản Đầu Công with overseas Chinese, this name is connected with a deity that is worshipped in other diasporic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. Historian Edgar Wickberg writes that “Pun Tao Kung” was an “exclusively Chinese deity … a kind of culture hero who was venerated by the Teochiu and Hakka Chinese of Thailand.” In the Philippines, the topic of Wickberg’s research, Pun Tao Kung is remembered as a crew member on the fifteenth-century Zheng He voyages who died and was buried there. In 1790, two Chinese merchants built his shrine. He was a patron of the Chinese community.⁸³ The deity’s name appears in a temple in the Cù Lao Chàm islands and as a street name in Georgetown, Penang, and other Chinese communities across Southeast Asia.

Cai Tinglan visited both the shrine of the Trưng sisters, who led a rebellion against Han dynasty rule in 40 CE, and the shrine of Ma Yuan, the Han general who successfully put down their rebellion. Cai was taken to the shrine of the Trưng sisters in a village outside Hà Nội, which still stands and is now well within city limits. The Ma Yuan temples are near the Sino-Vietnamese border, and indeed, he was taken to one on both sides of the border. We can see Cai passing through different geographies; the Trưng sisters were deified in their home district, while Ma Yuan, a figure who knit together Vietnam and China, was important in the border zone. Coix seeds, or Job’s tears, known for its ability to prevent miasmatic diseases and said to have been brought back to China from Vietnam by Ma Yuan, grew outside the Ma Yuan temple in Vietnam.

The dancing girls and entertainments Cai Tinglan enjoyed in the province of Lạng Sơn at Vietnam’s northern border have been cited as an example of the economic robustness and integration of the upland border zone. The influence of Chinese migrants into the area from the mid-eighteenth century led to the formation of trading posts that provided lodging, food, and entertainment. The outlying northern provinces of Vietnam may have been more economically integrated with southern China than with the Red River delta.⁸⁴ Cai Tinglan’s experience bears that out, although he traveled along the more sparsely populated tributary route and not on the commercial route nearer to mining sites to the west.⁸⁵

In his third chapter, “Vietnam Chronicle,” Cai Tinglan provides an overview of Vietnamese history. His understanding of early Vietnamese history is conventional and apparently drawn from Chinese texts, as he uses names for Vietnamese rulers prevalent in Chinese texts as opposed to in Vietnamese texts. His perspective on more recent history does not entirely conform to Vietnamese official history and probably reflects the understanding of his interlocutors, providing a valuable counterpoint.

A standard history would explain that Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, a scion of the Nguyễn royal family of southern Vietnam (Cochinchina), fled during the Tây Sơn uprising, gathered support abroad, and eventually prevailed against the Tây Sơn and established the Nguyễn dynasty in 1802, reigning as the Gia Long emperor. In Cai Tinglan’s telling, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh was a sworn brother of the Tây Sơn founders who ruled his own kingdom in the south and moved against the Tây Sơn because of his anger over internal politics. While this is not entirely accurate, it may reflect the weary perspective of local residents. Rather than the imperial trappings of the official record, these rulers come across as members of a militarized brotherhood. Nguyễn Phúc Ánh was the sole survivor of a Tây Sơn massacre of Nguyễn royal family members in 1777. Building his power base in Saigon, Nguyễn Ánh solicited all the support he could—from Siam, France, and overseas Chinese communities. From 1778, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh controlled three southern provinces; he mobilized troops, collected taxes, appointed officials, redistributed land, and contacted foreign powers to seek recognition as a ruler.⁸⁶ This situation persisted for a relatively brief period, until 1781. He was at war with the Tây Sơn, not allied with them, but it is not surprising that residents of Đàng Trong may have described this period of multiple power centers to Cai Tinglan in a way that did not distinguish between the Nguyễn and the Tây Sơn brothers.

Likewise, Cai foregrounded Nguyễn Phúc Ánh’s sponsorship of the Chinese pirate He Xianwen, adding a dimension to our understanding of the Tây Sơn-Nguyễn war. It is well known that the Tây Sơn employed Chinese pirates to aid their war effort. However, the case of He Xianwen has only recently been used to demonstrate that the Nguyễn, too, sponsored pirates. This is because the Vietnamese records memorialize them as heroes and admirals rather than as pirates.⁸⁷ Chinese emigrants (some of them pirates) contributed in various ways to both sides of the conflict.

Cai Tinglan repeats what he must have been told about Nguyễn Phúc Ánh’s conquest of the Tây Sơn, his control of Hà Nội, and his accession to the throne as the Gia Long emperor. The Gia Long emperor’s power base was Saigon, then known as Lũng Nại or Gia Định. Hà Nội, too, was historically known by several names, including Đông Kinh (Tonkin) and Thăng Long 昇龍 (Ascending Dragon). Cai writes of Gia Long:

He changed the name of Lũng Nại to Gia Định [Auspiciously Settled 嘉定] and the name of Đông Kinh to Thăng Long [Ascending Prosperity 升隆]. He changed the reign name to Gia Long [Auspicious Prosperity 嘉隆], because he started in Gia Định and succeeded in Thăng Long.

Gia Long did indeed change the character for Long in Thăng Long from 龍 (Dragon) to 隆 (Prosperity), but this was not until 1805.⁸⁸ It is a common assumption that the Gia Long emperor chose his reign name to symbolize the unification of the north and south of his newly created empire by incorporating the characters of Vietnam’s two major cities into his reign name. This assumption has been challenged based on the timing of the change of the long in Thăng Long several years after Gia Long adopted his reign name.⁸⁹ Even if the story is apocryphal, Cai Tinglan’s account suggests that it dates to as early as 1835. On the other hand, given the highly symbolic nature of reign names, there is reason to think that Gia Long purposefully used meaningful names to promote national unity—even if the alteration of the characters for Thăng Long came second.

Cai Tinglan’s Chinese perspective at times does not pair up with Vietnamese perspectives. For example, when Cai arrives in Lạng Sơn, the local magistrate informs him that Lạng Sơn and Cao Bằng are still recovering from the Nông Văn Vân rebellion (1833–35). Nông Văn Vân was an ethnically Tày native chieftain (thổ ty) and led local people and Chinese miners against the Nguyễn government. The fact that Chinese joined in the rebellion was not lost on Cai’s Vietnamese interlocutors, who told him so. Cai objected, writing:

Since this their king is more wary of Tang people, but they do not know that the chief instigators were all local people. There were only one or two foreigners among them who were cunning and took the opportunity to secretly attach themselves to them or were coerced into it against their will, but then as a result tens of thousands of migrants lost the favor and gained the enmity of the king, and even traders were subjected to higher taxes. Is it not unjust?⁹⁰

Although not all of his observations can be taken at face value, Cai provides a trove of information that can deepen our understanding of Vietnamese society in the early nineteenth century.