Vietnam

• Other Names: 大越 (V: Đại Việt), 安南 (Annam)
• Japanese: ベトナム (betonamu), 越南 (etsunan, V: Việt Nam, C: Yuènán)

Vietnam, also known as Dai Viet and Annam at various times historically, is a Southeast Asian country which runs largely along the coast, facing the South China Sea to its east. It borders Laos and Cambodia to the west, and China's Yunnan and Guangxi provinces to the north.

Vietnam is the sole "Sinicized" Southeast Asian country with a strong connection to Chinese Buddhist and Confucian culture, in contrast to the more "Indic" or "Sanskritic" cultures of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The territory of Vietnam was controlled by China for nearly one thousand years in the first half of the Common Era, before gaining independence in 939, amidst the fall of the Tang Dynasty. Though controlled by various independent Vietnamese dynasties & polities for nearly its entire history after that, Vietnam remained a loyal tributary to the Chinese court, particularly during the Ming and Qing Dynasties; Vietnamese elites engaged in Chinese cultural practices such as literati painting and calligraphy, and all Vietnamese writing employed Chinese characters up until the early 20th century - Vietnamese is now written in a romanization form devised by the French.

History

The Ming-Ho War ended in 1406 with Ming victory,

Nguyễn & Trinh

In the 16th-18th centuries, Vietnam was divided, effectively, into three polities. Tonkin, in the north, was ruled by the Trinh family, and Quang Nam (also known by a number of other names) in the central region, was ruled by the Nguyễn, while the southern region was the independent and ethnically distinct polity of Champa. The Trinh and Nguyễn domains were ruled by "lords," however, both under the ostensible authority of the emperor-kings of the Lê Dynasty.

The first contact between Quang Nam and any Japanese was with the pirate Shirahama Kenki, who came raiding ships and shores in 1585. He was driven off by Nguyễn ships, but returned in 1599. The Nguyễn captured him, and wrote to Japan to ask what to do with him; Tokugawa Ieyasu's 1601 response to Lord Nguyễn Hoang, explaining the red seal ship system, is considered the beginning of formal relations between the two polities.

From about 1590 to 1640, the Quang Nam port town of Hoi An, the largest port in all of Vietnam, was home to a major Nihonmachi (Japantown), where a few tens of independent Japanese merchant families played a prominent role in the local trade. On average, more than ten Japanese ships visited the port every year during the period of the "red seal ships," that is, between roughly 1590 and 1635; this represented fully a quarter of all Japanese maritime economic activity, more than that of any other individual port.

Some of these merchants married into the Nguyễn family, and the Nguyễn lords exchanged formal diplomatic correspondence with the likes of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa shogunate, in XX and 1601 respectively. When war broke out between Tonkin and Quang Nam in 1627, the Nguyễn, along with members of the local Japanese community in Quang Nam, wrote to the Tokugawa shogunate, requesting that trade and formal relations with Tonkin be cut off. As a result, though Tonkin also saw some Japanese trade & settlement, it was to a considerably lesser degree. Fighting began in earnest between Tonkin and Quang Nam in 1633, and lasted until XX. Formal envoys from Quang Nam also traveled to Japan on a handful of occasions.

The Dutch East India Company first appeared in Hoi An in 1633; for the remainder of that decade, before Tokugawa kaikin (maritime restrictions) policies cut off Japanese overseas trade, the Japanese continued to dominate the port's local economy, leaving the Dutch with second-choice of the remaining goods (mainly textiles), and at higher prices due to the diminished supply after Japanese merchants bought their fill each season. From 1640 onwards, however, the Japanese trade shrank and eventually died, and the Japanese community in Hoi An, as elsewhere throughout Southeast Asia, assimilated into the local Vietnamese community and effectively disappeared.