Suchergebnisse

Although climate science suggests that the Yuan era in China witnessed a number of natural disasters, historians have yet to consider such data in their accounts of the Yuan dynasty's rapid fall. The dominant view largely blames their quick demise on extravagant grants to the Mongolian aristocracy and army and excessive expendi-tures on war, but even a perfunctory analysis of the data reveals these behaviors had effectively disappeared decades before the dynasty collapsed. This study highlights two neglected climate-related factors that played a much greater role in the dynasty's demise than has been previously established.First, the sheer size of the Yuan Empire, which included the territories of modern central and southern China, along with the Mongolian steppe to its north and other territories to the northwest and northeast, made it vulnerable to many different sorts of climatic disasters. When a series of such catastrophes struck, the emperor Kublai extended the ancient Chinese Confucian policy of huang zheng (disaster relief) to all parts of the empire. The situation became so dire, however, that this official relief across such a vast area consumed as much as one-third of government revenue in bad years. Although well-intended, the policy ultimately undermined both the wider economy and the government finances.Second, serious flood damage to the Yangtze delta occurred at a critical moment when this rich granary was badly needed to support other stricken areas. Four-fifths of the Yuan population lived south of the Yangtze, and the area's production of grain, cotton, silk, and salt were all crucial for government revenue and general wealth accumulation. Typhoons and floods here ultimately cost the court far more than its support for hard-pressed Mongolian refugees. These disasters drained increasingly scarce resources from other areas while negatively impacting the dynasty's capacity to support the empire as a whole. In the end, it was the pressure of a major disaster here that sparked the revolt that ...

This article seeks to tell the story of a river and a canal in pre-fifteenth-century Thanh Hóa. Although apparently dissimilar, the fate of both waterways reflected a similar process, as both lived or died from the consequences of dynastic attempts to promote integration by bridging the territory of northern Vietnam with that of Champa. Integration was a central goal for the Việt authorities and water was one of their most important means. The story of water in the Thanh Hóa area illustrates the ongoing historical tension between integration and disintegration in Vietnamese history.

This article focuses on the eastern region of the Red River Delta, Vietnam, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. This area was an important centre of economic and population growth in Đại Việt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and nurtured Đại Việt's sophisticated and renowned ceramics industry, hosted leading schools of Vietnamese Buddhism and bred a rising class of scholars and bureaucrats. The region's rapid rise as an economic and political centre was, however, also the key to its undoing. The sudden spike in population density, and the intensive logging carried out for ceramic production, and temple and ship building, overtaxed the area's natural resources. The burden on the local ecology was exacerbated by the Trần dynasty's dyke building project, which shifted the river's course. The ensuing environmental deterioration might have been one major reason for the Vietnamese forsaking the large-scale ceramic production in Chu Đậu, deserting their main port, Vân Đồn, and for the Chinese abandoning a historical maritime invasion route.

This article attempts to piece together the available data on Sino-Vietnamese trade of northern Vietnam in the early nineteenth century with a focus on its upland region. This essay shares the views expressed in the works by Oscar Salemink, Philip Talor, Sarah Turner and other scholars on northern uplands, and in particular their rejection of the "urban-rural," "advanced-backward," "civilized-barbarian," lowland-highland dichotomies. But building upon these works, this essay also tries to determine what proportion of overland and maritime trade made up the Nguyễn revenue, and to understand the interactions among various peoples living between the mountains and the sea. The data seems to suggest that, contrary to the view that this upland region was remote and consequently isolated, the upland region (outer provinces) near the Sino-Vietnamese border represented an important and even crucial portion of the overall revenue of Nguyễn Vietnam in the early nineteenth century.

This article challenges the perceived image of 'traditional' Vietnam by viewing the polity's early history from the sea. A trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tonkin area, stretching to Hainan Island and northern Champa by sea, and overland to Yunnan and Laos. Commerce and interactions of peoples in this area played a crucial part in state formation for Vietnam.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nguyen kingdom was known as Dang Trong to Vietnamese, and Cochinchina by the Westerners. In just 200 years it won control over three-fifths of the territory in modern Vietnam. The experiences of this expanding southern frontier area seem to suggest an image of Vietnam that is very different from the north, opening a door to an alternative world in which diversity was tolerated, and indeed exploited, for Vietnam's own development.