This article was downloaded by: [University of Southern Queensland] On: 11 October 2014, At: 01:01 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Asian Studies Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casr20 The Tongking Gulf through History Geoffrey C Gunn a a Nagasaki University Published online: 05 Mar 2013 To cite this article: Geoffrey C Gunn (2013) The Tongking Gulf through History, Asian Studies Review, 37:1, 122-123, DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2013.767176 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2013.767176 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or 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http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions 122 Book Reviews as an important new voice in our efforts to understand this “oldest of professions” in a complicated part of the world ERIC TAGLIACOZZO Cornell University Ó 2013 Eric Tagliacozzo http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2013.767174 Downloaded by [University of Southern Queensland] at 01:01 11 October 2014 SOUTHEAST AND EAST ASIA NOLA COOKE, LI TANA and JAMES A ANDERSON (eds) The Tongking Gulf through History Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 205 pp Notes, glossary US$59.95, hardcover Although not listed in any gazetteer of the world, the authors of the work under review have nevertheless decided on “Tongking Gulf” as a fitting metaphor to evoke, after Braudel, a “mini-Mediterranean”, circumscribed by the northern Vietnam rimland, in turn linked by maritime and sea corridors with contiguous regions of China Sweeping across almost two millennia of cross-cultural and civilisational exchanges, this is an ambitious undertaking The fruits of an academic conference appropriately hosted in Nanning in China, the work also calls upon some erudite understandings, especially in ranging from the Neolithic to the tenth century (Part I), and thereafter to the nineteenth century (Part II) Allowing the gaps in this two millennia-long exegesis – linguistic evolution comes to mind – it is salutary that, by way of introduction to this collection, Li Tana masterfully sets the individual contributions against the broader sweep of Vietnamese and Chinese history In a separate chapter (Chapter 2) she expands upon this precocious evidence by delineating the contours of a Jiaozhi region, more or less a territorial correlate to the maritime Gulf Importantly for the Han court, Jiaozhi gave access to the maritime trade linking up with the sea-silk roads It was a rice granary and was also contiguous with (Dong Son) bronze drum culture, a veritable Sino-Vietnamese “crossbreed” But much was fluid here in the constitution and reconstitution of states, as with Ec Oe, Champa and Zhenla and with Jiaozhi fading by the tenth century as Arab-Persian maritime trade bypassed the area completely The exchange dynamic is also well captured in Michael Churchman (Chapter 4), who writes on the “barbarian” Li-Lao peoples inhabiting the lands between the Red River and the Pearl River, the major regional centre of bronze drum production Commanding all the strategic connecting routes up until the tenth century, the Li-Lao narrative also challenges dominant nationalist interpretations of the past in both Vietnam and China Outside of most archaeological evidence, as Judith Cameron reveals (Chapter 1), textile production serves as an index of material culture and early trade activity Such is confirmed in discoveries of spindle whorls and weaving devices in Red River plains sites developed from types associated with Neolithic sites in the Yangzi Valley, otherwise confirming the southward movement of peoples outside boundaries In a cognate study, Brigitte Borell (Chapter 3) focuses on glass vessels recovered from Han tombs and with the evidence firmly indicating local as opposed to Mediterranean provenance, Downloaded by [University of Southern Queensland] at 01:01 11 October 2014 Book Reviews 123 although there is also ample evidence of long-distant trade in prestige goods including glass along this vast route As James Anderson flags in Chapter 5, the conjunction of the Dai Co Viet state and the early Song dynasty in China not only signalled the arrival of a new bounded political entity in northern Vietnam but, outside a strictly tributary protocol, also saw a surge in “subaltern” trade on the part of “liminal communities”, maritime especially, which knitted the region Moving on to the 1450–1550 period, as John Whitmore discusses in Chapter 6, the Van Don island network emerged as a major location for Dai Viet trade for the next three centuries, especially in Vietnamese ceramics Shipwreck evidence along with chronicle and western sources are all brought into play, laying the blame for the collapse of the trading system upon the disastrous rule of Le Huy Muc De, albeit a system reinvented in the sixteenth century with Hoi An at the centre The trade dimension is complemented by Ioka Naoko (Chapter 7), tapping a trove of multilingual sources to explicate the silk side of the historic Japan “silk-for-silver” trade with Vietnam Moving the chronology along, in Chapter 8, Niu Junkai and Li Qingxin write of the seventeenth-century juncture when the Le-Trinh and remnant Mac courts faced off and even tolerated a range of Southern Ming or anti-Qing “political pirates” who roamed the gulf making it a veritable outlaw haven In a concluding chapter, drawing from Vietnamese and Chinese archives, Vu Duong Luan and Nola Cooke focus on coastal and maritime exchanges in the era prior to French colonialism, a backwater alongside major international trade but nevertheless replete with localised, including illicit, trade in especially rice across the porous Sino-Vietnamese border We suspect that other “mini-Mediterraneans” can be intellectually carved out of the seas and straits of the greater East–Southeast Asia maritime region just as we surmise that research on the “Tongking Gulf” is virtually open ended (Hainan Island could still offer itself as a candidate) Still, as a trailblazing contribution to regional studies, all scholars entering this field will appreciate the major didactic lessons from this work, namely the merit of longue durée approaches to regional questions, and the limits of strictly national narratives GEOFFREY C GUNN Nagasaki University Ó 2013 Geoffrey C Gunn http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2013.767176 ... that other “mini-Mediterraneans” can be intellectually carved out of the seas and straits of the greater East–Southeast Asia maritime region just as we surmise that research on the Tongking Gulf ... delineating the contours of a Jiaozhi region, more or less a territorial correlate to the maritime Gulf Importantly for the Han court, Jiaozhi gave access to the maritime trade linking up with the. .. of the world, the authors of the work under review have nevertheless decided on Tongking Gulf as a fitting metaphor to evoke, after Braudel, a “mini-Mediterranean”, circumscribed by the northern