The Northern Mountains lean against the Laotian and Chinese borders and surround the Red River delta. This strategic underpopulated area, which was difficult to access for a long time, is characterized by wide ethnic diversity and was for a long time overlooked by national economic development. It is now undergoing unprecedented economic growth and raising growing interest. The systematic utilisation of its hydroelectric potential is visible everywhere, as can be seen by the many reddish scars that spoil the landscape. In order to reduce its dependence on Chinese importations, over the past 10 years Viet Nam has set about building hundreds of small and large dams to attain energy autonomy at a time when its needs are growing by 20% per year. At the same time, a fast growing tourist industry shows another Viet Nam, with indented peaks criss-crossed with terraced rice fields, which are a pleasant alternative to the flatness of the delta area rice fields. The economic integration of the mountainous areas and the arrival of migrants from the overpopulated plains is a prelude to the slow assimilation of the native populations.
North Vietnam (© released in thepublic domainby its author)
There is, however, widespread ignorance about the history and culture of these faraway provinces. The ancient dynasties considered the border districts as a large area covered with forests and mountain peaks, where only the populations with strange customs could drink the poisoned water. These provinces did appear on maps, but they were not directly administered, as their economic interest appeared to be so minimal. Nourished by a long imperial tradition, the documentation of past events was confined to the capital's scribes, who considered these distant regions as an appendix to the national political history led mainly by the Kinh (or Viet) majority established in the plain.
It was not before the 19th century that the first detailed descriptions of these regions appeared. Vietnamese mandarins, then French officers wrote regional monographs describing the habits and customs of peoples who constituted a complex linguistic archipelago. The ethnic groups are spread over a vast territory in a perfect ethnic stratigraphy, by which the latest arrivals settled on empty lands on the high slopes. Some have been established for a very long time (Lo Lo, Tay, Tai, Glay, Khmu), while others are the result of more recent migratory waves (Yao, Hmong). Many of these groups did not have a writing system, and the vernacular documentation pf the others, the Tai and the Yao in particular, is limited and poorly identified.
At first, researchers looking for primary sources, manuscripts and inscriptions or even physical traces that the past leaves may feel at a loss, as they cannot count on monuments, places of worship or ancient buildings, of which there are very few. Going through archives, provincial libraries and excavations, they thus organize a highly diversified corpus. As the written record of ancient periods is rare, any alternative source is welcome.
The enigmatic petroglyphs of Sapa in LÃ o-Cai province, which have been known since 1925, are original models of stone cartography. As they had no writing, the engravers nevertheless left us a subtle description of their world. The network of terraced rice fields engraved in the rock, the interlacing of the hydraulic network and the representation of villages allow their morphology to be studied and provide information on the evolution of human implantation in the high valleys. The petroglyphs have now been catalogued and can thus be interpreted to give a new perspective on the way of life of the peoples that succeeded each other on the same territory.
In the surrounding valleys, the ancient manuscripts kept in the Yao households seem to have no heirs, because although there are many Yao speakers, the ancient writing was abandoned in favour of the assimilating Vietnamese school . These texts, written in Chinese characters but read in the Yao language, are diverse – the Taoist canon, works on traditional medicine, epic poems, songs etc. - and risked being sold to tourists. A provincial inventory identified 14 000 texts, and 1000 were digitalized. At the same time, schools to teach characters were established for literate people in villages, to familiarize the young generation with these texts and to strengthen community awareness. The huge work of gathering these sources and protecting this heritage protection is only beginning, but it is encouraging. For these two projects, a partnership between EFEO and the Là o-Cai local authorities was combined with donors in order to complete the collection and cataloguing of the manuscripts within a few years.
An engraved rock in Sapa(© 1925 / V. Goloubew)
Formerly scattered withtributary principalitiesunder the rule of hereditary chiefs, the region became a military territory after the French conquest. The local leaders compromised with the few French government officers who controlled the province at the time. They set about restraining the rights given by customary law to the large clans. At the beginning of the Indochina War when the Vietminh began to entrench themselves in the interior, the region again fell into the hands of the Lai-Châu Dèo clan, then, in 1948, the region was established as a Tai confederation, dependent on the Vietnamese crown and thus a French ally.
Tai village on the Nam Nariver
(© 2005 / Philippe Le Failler)
It was in Dien-Biên-Phu valley that the French set up their entrenched camp in December 1953 and where French colonial history in Indochina ended. Their defeat accelerated the end of the war and locally led to the decline of a clan but also to the predominance of the ethnic group. The region became an autonomous zone in 1955, and after 1975 became of the common administration. Its autonomy was thus finished. Nowadays, the old village of Lai-Châu lies underwater in the Son-La dam. Diên-Biên-Phu, the eponymous administrative centre of the province, is a flourishing Vietnamese town set in Tai territory, as seen in its brick buildings that have replaced the traditional houses on stilts. This example is a perfect illustration of the process by which regional particularities are reduced.
Apart from political and military history, the archives also give insight into the everyday life of the populations, to distinguish them from each other and to determine the state of interethnic relations, which are sometimes contentious. One discovers a high region, situated weeks away by pirogue, the sites of penal colonies, with endemic malaria, iodine deficiency and illiteracy. Its fragile economy relies in the long term on the salt trade, transit of Chinese tea and the opium traffic. Historians are now mapping market networks and quantifying the exchange channels. This will make it possible to to determine the nature and the extent of cross-border ties in a geographical area that was profoundly disrupted by the creation of stretched frontiers more than a century ago, which is very recent.
Philippe Le Failler
Historian
Associate professor
École française d'Extrême-Orient
Tug of war in Diên-Biên-Phu,
annual ceremony in Hoà ng Công Chất,
(© 2005 / Philippe Le Failler)