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Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship. By LIAM C. KELLEY. Asian Interactions and Comparisons. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. xiii, 267 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
This book analyzes poetry written by late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Vietnamese envoys during their journeys to China. Differing from the existing translations from Chinese into Vietnamese, Liam C. Kelley's work has taken the critical step of explaining the authors' literal words in the context of East Asian poetic, intellectual, and cultural traditions. Kelley avoids using the modern concepts of Vietnam and China, as he believes such nationalist and rigid compartmentalizatron was foreign to the premodern world of East Asia, of which Vietnam was a part. For Kelley as well as the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Vietnamese literati in his book, China was less a place and an overwhelming political power than it was a civilization shared by scholars in the areas far beyond the borders of the Central Kingdom. In such a context, border crossings meant little; moreover, in the minds of the southern (Viet) envoys, Kelley argues, the journey to the north (China) was an integral component in the way their world was structured. They were like stars revolving around the fixed North Star (pp. 94-96).
Kelley thus confronts a major narrative in the field of Vietnamese history since the 1960s, the "particular...