Ming China and Vietnam
Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia

Studies of Sino-Viet relations have traditionally focused on Chinese aggression and Vietnamese resistance, or have assumed out-of-date ideas about Sinicization and the tributary system. They have limited themselves to national historical traditions, doing little to reach beyond the border. Ming China and Vietnam, by contrast, relies on sources and viewpoints from both sides of the border, for a truly transnational history of Sino-Viet relations. Kathlene Baldanza offers a detailed examination of geopolitical and cultural relations between Ming China (1368–1644) and Dai Viet, the state that would go on to become Vietnam. She highlights the internal debates and external alliances that characterized their diplomatic and military relations in the pre-modern period, showing especially that Vietnamese patronage of East Asian classical culture posed an ideological threat to Chinese states. Baldanza presents an analysis of seven linked biographies of Chinese and Vietnamese border-crossers whose lives illustrate the entangled histories of those countries.

Reviews & endorsements

'Kathlene Baldanza uses Vietnamese and Chinese materials from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries to fundamentally change our understanding of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship. She shows that Chinese administrators understood how Vietnamese leaders contributed to the management of border security, and that Vietnamese leaders used relations with China to maximise both border security and leverage against domestic rivals. This book will reorient all future scholarship on the topic.' Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University, New York

Customer reviews

Product details

• Date Published: June 2017
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781107576285
• length: 249 pages

• dimensions: 230 x 153 x 14 mm
• weight: 0.37kg
• contains: 7 b/w illus. 4 maps
• availability: Available