The Origins of Ancient Vietnam

"In my book , I have a chapter on the ancient city of Co Loa, which is in northern Vietnam. It’s not the kind of place that normally appears in an ancient history book . This is the most academic of the books I picked, and one of the reasons for that is because there is no other book that covers it. Much of the research on Co Loa is in Vietnamese or other languages. Nam C. Kim is just a fantastic archeologist who is based in the U.S. but works regularly at the site, which is just outside of modern-day Hanoi. In many ways, Co Loa is like King Arthur’s Camelot; there is a lot of folklore about it. Nam Kim doesn’t dismiss all that. He’s very much trying to lay the groundwork: ‘Okay, what can we prove about this place? What’s going on here?’ And one of the things he did prove is that this is an older city than people had thought. That’s what a lot of research that has been coming out is showing. This is just a fantastic book to really understand the state of ancient Vietnam. It’s not under the shadow of ancient China, which is Vietnam’s version of what so many of the other cultures in the Mediterranean have to deal with in terms of Rome and Greece (Co Loa is on the edge of the Han empire). The book still looks at the links between Chinese and Vietnamese culture in this period but sets aside the idea that China gave Vietnam culture and civilization. What the research from Co Loa shows is that the hallmarks of what we think of as civilization had already started to occur, not only in Vietnam but in Southeast Asia. Co Loa was the biggest example of this. We also have evidence from just south of Co Loa down to the very south of Vietnam of Roman artifacts, so of Roman trade in the region. This brings into question what we mean when we talk about the ancient world. The Romans didn’t really know about Vietnam, but they did have contact with it. It’s not between the imperial court or between leaders—it’s between tradesmen. We even have Chinese evidence that suggests that Roman traders may have landed in Vietnam and made it to the Han imperial court in the second century AD. We’re very quick to ignore much of the world, but if we can include these seemingly out-of-the-way places in our usual stories, it really opens up the idea of just how big and interconnected the ancient world was. Nan C. Kim’s work on this is just brilliant. It’s an absolutely fantastic book. Yes, you can visit it and walk around the sites. There are later temples dedicated to people like the Trung sisters, who were the two female warrior leaders that stood up to the Han empire—Vietnam’s answer to Boudicca , although one would argue more successful than Boudicca, even though they also failed."