Between north and south

The country that appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century stretching from the southern border of China to the eastern border of Cambodia had never existed before. The name Vietnam can be found in some earlier Vietnamese texts, and the Qing court used this name when recognizing the new country as a vassal kingdom, but it was not commonly used until the twentieth century. The Qing continued to routinely refer to this place as An Nam, a name that dated from the Tang dynasty and that later became the French name for the central part of the country.

In 1802, Vietnamese envoys to the Qing court were instructed to propose Nam Viet as the name of their new country. The message sent with the envoys cited the ancient kingdom of Nam Viet founded by Zhao To in Guangdong and Guangxi at the beginning of the Han dynasty as an auspicious precedent because it had pacified and civilized all the southern territories. Furthermore, the message gave the name a new contemporary meaning as representing the unification of all the Vietnamese lands: “Now, the South (Nam) has been swept of rebels and the whole realm of Viet has been restored to normalcy.” The Qing court, however, objected to the name Nam Viet for the very same reason proposed in its favor by the Vietnamese. In imperial historiography, contrary to Vietnamese historical tradition, Zhao To’s kingdom was an inauspicious rather than an auspicious precedent because it had rebelled against the Han dynasty. Arguments about the name shuttled between Hue and Beijing for nearly a year before the Qing court finally turned the name to Viet Nam, thereby avoiding the unpropitious connotation of insubordination and separatism in the name Nam Viet. The name Vietnam eventually entered popular usage with the spread of alphabetic literacy and nationalist ideas in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.