Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina and Samuel Baron on Tonkin (review)

Historians of Vietnam are indebted to Olga Dror and Keith Taylor for making far more widely available these two fascinating accounts of the contending seventeenth-century states that existed in the northern and central regions of modern Vietnam. The texts are among the earliest direct observations of this time and place written in any European language, and doubly important because only a few indigenous primary sources survive from Tonkin from this era, and none at all from Cochinchina. While the first part of Borri’s text, as translated into the wonderfully robust and idiosyncratic English of 1633, was reprinted in 1970,¹ my own failure to track down a copy of Baron’s account before now indicates the scarcity of copies of his description of Tonkin, the land of his birth and upbringing as the son of a Dutch East India Company employee. By using the complete 1704 English retranslation of Borri’s account, the editors have also for the first time made easily accessible in English its precious second part, in which the Jesuit missionary described local religious practices and the introduction of Christianity, something anti-Catholic animus in seventeenth-century England had excised from the 1633 edition. Until now this rich vein of historical material has only been available in a modern European language in Bonifacy’s 1931 French translation.² While historians may benefit most from this new publication, the editors’ numerous scholarly annotations, which elucidate almost all the obscurities in the two texts, ensure these accounts can now be far more profitably perused by people interested in early modern Southeast Asian societies and cultures in general.

The two editors share the task, with each taking primary responsibility for introducing and annotating one text each: Dror deals with Cochinchina and Taylor with Tonkin. As a result, the book falls into two chronologically-organized parts, beginning with Christoforo Borri in late 1610s and early 1620s Cochinchina before moving to Samuel Baron’s text, which is based on his early experience and knowledge of growing up in the Tonkin of the 1640s and 1650s combined with his later observations made in the late 1670s and early 1680s, as an associate of the ill-fated English East India Company factory there. Introductory essays on the lives of the two authors precede their accounts. Taylor makes as many serviceable bricks as possible from the few surviving wisps of information about Baron’s life; but Dror’s ability to chase down leads in several European languages, placed in the service of an indefatigable curiosity about the life and times of this early Jesuit observer of Cochinchina — and about the subsequent history of his record of observations — results in a bravura display of historical detective work. Her finely nuanced and well documented portrait of Borri reveals him in an unexpected light, primarily as a frustrated scientific enquirer driven to the East less by missionary zeal than by his own scientific aspirations and personal flaws. This is a far cry from the more usual, carefully cultivated heroic missionary persona of later Jesuit (and other) seventeenth-century missionary publications dealing with the Vietnamese missions, sketch portraits designed as they so often were to edify European Catholic sensibilities and shore up support there for far-off evangelists. No doubt more interesting than this for most students of Vietnam is Dror’s later discussion of the contemporary fate of Borri’s text in the hands of its 1997 Vietnamese translator (pp. 67–73). Her careful textual comparisons reveal how this precious primary source has been bowdlerized, censored, and even rewritten in its Vietnamese version. In this revisionist project, the observations of the long-dead Jesuit have been made to conform to the demands of contemporary Vietnamese political correctness and acceptable historical perspectives.

Notwithstanding the usefulness of having these two early sources readily available, and the scholarly worth of the editors’ contributions to the...