This page was created by Michitake Aso. 

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

The Red River Delta in Sinosphere Geographies

Before the central coast and the Mekong Delta were incorporated in Vietnamese national space, the Red River Delta was viewed as the southern frontier of Chinese civilization. This view was common among Chinese intellectuals, of course, but also oriented the views of Vietnamese intellectuals and elite. An example of this space is the following 1811 Qing era map called Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu, or Complete map of all under Heaven, eternally unified by the great Qing (Richard Smith, "Mapping China and the Question of a China-Centered Tributary System," The Asia-Pacific Journal, no. 11 (3): 3). It depicts "Annam," or the pacified South, in the lower center left, along with a description of its relationship to China. 


Later Sinosphere maps that focused on the Red River Delta continued to show its connections to southern China. The following maps show this connection. The first map is from 1870, a couple of decades before the Sino-French war of 1884 and 1885. In 1870, the Qing court still occupied a privileged position vis-a-vis the delta and the Nguyen Court. It shows a gridded space as Chinese mapmakers began to deal with European cartographic conventions. The second map is from sometime between 1885 and 1890. This map comes from after the Sino-French war. It shows a similar Sinosphere imaginary even after the Red River Delta had fallen under French control and been incorporated into the new political entity of Indochina. Both maps use the term "Yuë(h) Nam," or southern Yuëh, a neutral term, rather than the pejorative "An Nam."





French commercial and imperial concerns were interested in connections to Southern China as well, though for different reasons. Here is a map from 1894 showing Indochina's waterway connections to southern China.



A third depiction of the Red River Delta's connection with southern China comes from the Asia Pacific War. The following map comes from a 1940s Japanese publication aimed at school children showing French Indochina and China. This map emphasizes the waterways and railroad connections linking China to Hanoi and to points further south.












 

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