| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Liam C. Kelley. Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship. (Asian Interactions and Comparison.) Honolulu: University of HawaiÎi Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 267.
Liam C. Kelley has written an extraordinary book based on some truly impressive research the author conducted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the Han Nom Institute in Hanoi. It offers fascinating glimpses of the political and literary worlds of Vietnamese scholars who traveled to China as envoys representing Vietnam's vassal kings. Kelley's work is remarkable for its erudition and for what it reveals about tributary ties between China and Vietnam from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It is remarkable, also, for what it conceals (until p. 179) about Sino-Vietnamese relations. Even though this book is problematic, it is absolutely original and deserves to be widely read.	1
In the first chapter, "The Bronze Pillars," Kelley argues that, from the perspective of Vietnamese literati, the bronze pillars commemorating Ma Yuan's suppression of a Vietnamese rebellion marked a border between two unequal domains of "manifest civility" (p. 9). Asserting that generations of scholars have misconstrued the Sino-Vietnamese relationship, Kelley first skewers Henri Maspero and then spars with Keith Taylor, John Whitmore, Oliver Wolters, Li Tana, and Nola Cooke, who, he believes, have downplayed and even denied the extent to which Vietnamese scholars willingly accepted Vietnam's subordinate status vis-à-vis China. Rejecting their interpretation, Kelley counters that envoy poems, documents dealing directly with the Sino-Vietnamese relationship, "depict a wholehearted affirmation of the world order that the tributary relationship was based on and of Vietnam's secondary position" (p. 23).	. . .

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