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From: Davis,Bradley C.(History) <davisbrad@easternct.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2022 5:48 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Tich Dien ceremony
Dr. Hayton, Dr. Kelley, Professor List,
Book 81 of the Khâm Định Đại Nam Hội Điển Sự Lệ has details about the tịch điển in case anyone wants to check a nineteenth century source. Unsurprisingly, at least according to this source, the most detailed discussions date from the Minh Mạng reign, when many aspects of productive and ceremonial life became standardized in the imperial imagination. It might figure heavily in the Minh Mạng Chính Yếu as well, especially since that text hits some hagiographic heights.
As for its continuation to the present (or re-emergence?), anthropologists working in rural areas might have some work on this, perhaps in Japanese or French if not English. My own incidental and limited knowledge about agrarian traditions in VN leads me to think that formal political changes (1945, ‘end of the monarchy’) or instructions from the authorities might not always reverberate in the countryside as they do/did in the capital. The official on the plow might be there at the behest of the crowd around him. As was the case with many things during the Nguyễn (or the Lễ even), this practice might have been adopted as much to accommodate farmers as to bolster imperial decorum. Digging through the sources will probably give us a better sense.
Brad
Bradley Camp Davis
Associate Professor
Department of History
Coordinator of Asian Studies Minor
Eastern Connecticut State University
9 Eastern Hall
Office Hours Spring 2022
Monday 10-11, 3-4; Wednesday 10-11; Friday 10-11, 3-4
Series Co-Editor, HdO Section 3 - Southeast Asia, Brill
https://brill.com/view/serial/HO3
From: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2022 5:01 PM
To: billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Tich Dien ceremony
Dear Bill,
That's solved, but when it stopped is still a mystery to me. I looked around a little bit and found the article below from 1940. It's an investigation of the tịch điền ritual. Most of the article is a detailed description of how the Nguyễn perform (or performed?) it. The person who wrote it seems to have had direct knowledge because 1) it contains details that go beyond what one can usually find in Nguyễn records and 2) such records were not publicly available yet. But was the person talking about something that was still happening? It's not clear to me from the way the article is written, it just says "Please now allow me to briefly examine the tịch điền ritual of the Nguyễn so that everyone can be clear about it."
By that time period, the Nam giao ritual was showing up in French travel brochures of Indochine ("Visit Indochine and experience a true Oriental ceremony" etc.), but my sense is that most Nguyễn Dynasty rituals remained "imperial" and thus out of sight of the public. Was that the case with this one? I can't see why it would have been stopped. Meanwhile, I could imagine that French officials might not have wanted to walk around in the mud of a rice field and may have passed on it.
Maybe you can start a Twitter storm so that we can learn the answer to this mystery too. :)
Regards,
Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam
From: Hue-Tam Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2022 11:26 AM
To: billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Tich Dien ceremony
Interesting timing. Why was the ceremony revived in 2009 after 100 years? What was the relationship with the financial crisis?
Why an agricultural ceremony when agricultural land is shrinking under the impact of rural urbanization and industrialization? hmm...
Hue Tam Ho Tai
Harvard University emerita
On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 5:44 PM billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
Problem solved! It was 2009…
Nice little Twitter thread here on the invention of tradition:
https://twitter.com/dietpx/status/1491802311517081609
All the best
Bill
On 10 Feb 2022, at 19:15, Vernon, Alex <Vernon@hendrix.edu> wrote:
I just checked, and today is not April 1st….
Alex
Alex Vernon
(he/him/his)
M.E. and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English
Hendrix College
From: Vsg <vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Pierre Asselin
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2022 10:54 AM
To: billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Tich Dien ceremony
Dear Bill:
According to some highly classified documents I saw but probably was not supposed to see in Vietnamese Archives #3, Party leaders decided to sanction a revival of the tradition after watching Apocalypse Now. According to the same top secret documents, they thought it would scare the Chinese and bring victory in the 1979 Border War. Le Duan thereafter shaved his head and asked the rest of the Politburo to call him Anh Kurtz, his former aide told me during a recent visit to Hanoi
Pierre
Pierre Asselin
Professor of History - Dwight E. Stanford Chair in US Foreign Relations
San Diego State University
History Department
5500 Campanile Dr.
San Diego, CA 92182-6050
On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 1:02 AM billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
Dear all,
Recent coverage of the annual Tich Dien ploughing/plowing ceremony (see the photo below with the buffalo painted like a tiger) has prompted a few questions…
Does anyone know about the recent history of the ceremony? Presumably it was abolished with the monarchy in 1945. When was it revived? Was it performed during the war years? When did state and party leaders begin to take part?
All the best
Bill Hayton
Independent researcher
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