Viet Nam: Borderless Histories

5. The Eighteenth-Century Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier

The Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier 147 5 The Eighteenth-Century Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier L I T A N A Water is the most important feature of the Mekong Delta. It is present in hundreds of place names in the delta itself as well as in the names of the kingdoms arising in the area. It was no accident that the area was called Water Chenla in eighth-century Chinese records, nor was it by chance that, a millennium later, the two rulers of seventeenthcentury Cambodia were called the Mountain King (based in Oudong) and the Water King (based in Sài Gòn).1 The pervasive nature of its water is so essential a part of the Mekong Delta landscape that the very boundary between land and water is often indistinct, as pointed out by Pierre Brocheux.2 Equally indistinct were the ethnic elements that interacted in this region, especially among the minor ports dotted along the coast of the Mekong Delta, the Gulf of Siam, and the northern Malay Peninsula. In this coastal region of mixed ethnicities and fluid settlements, waterborne commerce was an essential component of local life. It can even be argued that the whole coastal region from the Mekong Delta in modern ViӾt Nam to the sultanates and later British colonies of the 147 148 L I T A N A Malay Peninsula formed a single economic region, an extended water frontier knit together by the itineraries of Chinese and other merchants and small traders. This water frontier in turn formed a major component in the wider web of Chinese commercial networks throughout Asia. Colonial historians, whose main focus has been the colonial cities of Batavia, Manila, Melaka, Penang, and later Singapore, are understandably little interested in this murky area. Twentieth-century nationalist historians have shared this attitude of indifference. For a variety of reasons, they have had little interest in lines of inquiry that do not fit with the national myth and the focus on the current capital city and dominant ethnic configuration. Because their view of the past ends at their present territorial borders, the region this study surveys is fragmented and is never seen as a whole with a historical integrity of its own.3 The effects of this bias are particularly serious in regard to ViӾt Nam. The nationalist ideology in the last few decades has effectively fossilized the interpretation of Vietnamese histories and restricted research to the use of a few classical sources. As a result many historians focusing on ViӾt Nam find it hard to resist an essentialized version of “a unified ViӾt Nam, a village ViӾt Nam, a Confucian ViӾt Nam, and a revolutionary ViӾt Nam.”4 This encapsulation of Vietnamese history is particularly damaging to our understanding of the history of southern ViӾt Nam. A critical part of our knowledge about ViӾt Nam is missing, one bearing on the most complex and vigorous part of the nation. This essay places the Mekong Delta back in Southeast Asia’s water frontier where it belongs and traces the connections linking the eighteenth-century Mekong Delta to Cambodia, Siam, and the Malay Peninsula. A Period of Intensive Trade and Human Movement Canton was the only port in China open to foreign trade after 1757, but because of a lack of consistent trade records for Canton, the picture has never been clear. Some newly discovered European records on Canton trade, however, make it possible to reconstruct the previously obscure Canton trade of the 1760s.5 One of the most important findings drawn from this new information is that the focus of Canton junk trade of this period was the coastal area of the Mekong Delta, The Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier 149 Cancao, and Cambodia.6 Among the thirty-seven Canton junks sailing annually between Canton and Southeast Asia, 85 to 90 percent of them came to trade in this area, particularly to Bassac (today’s Sóc Trang in the Mekong Delta), Cancao, and Cochin China.7 This finding contradicts conventional scholarship, which saw Melaka, Batavia, and Ayutthaya as the centers of trade and that of the Mekong Delta as negligible. These new data also throw light on existing but fragmented sources such as the English records on the Canton-Southeast Asia trade, one of which recorded that...