Organizer: Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University

Type/Location: In Person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

Join us for a talk by Dr. Hieu Phung, Assistant Professor of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian History at the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick University, who will discuss state-building in the Red River region.

The Red River is not the most impressive in Southeast Asia, but it has a richly recorded hydrosocial profile. Its lower basin has been occupied not only by a large population but also by the centuries-old political center of the Vietnamese since the eleventh century. Like Angkor in the Lower Mekong and Pagan in the Middle Ayeyarwady, early Vietnamese states established their political centers in the Red River’s mid-river region. By the fifteenth century, however, as the loci of power in other river basins moved towards the coast, the new leaders of Dai Viet, the Le dynasty, sustained the mid-river center and used it to extend their influence over the uplands, the coast, and nearby smaller river basins. This talk explores the relationship between large rivers and state-building by analyzing the evolution of the Red River dike system. As all rivers in monsoonal Asia are seasonal, building a state dependent on river resources requires effective policies concerning weather and climate dynamics. The Le sponsorship of river embankments continued a flood control strategy that had emerged several centuries earlier at the peak of the Medieval Climate Anomaly. This commitment also embraced a new perception of dike building. It matched the state’s expansionist policy on reclamation and rice production as the climate became drier during the transition to the Little Ice Age. The Red River dikes have been maintained for centuries but their impacts on the environmental, social, and cultural systems have constantly shifted.

About the Speaker:

Hieu Phung (Assistant Professor, Rutgers-New Brunswick) is an environmental historian who investigates the impacts of local culture and statecraft on the preindustrial environment, especially on water and climate. Her research delves into the history of Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly (c. 800/950–1250/1300) to the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850). Her study of environmental history also involves the analysis of space, maps, and texts to uncover the construction of premodern geographic knowledge. She has written about the rivers and climate history of premodern Vietnam and Southeast Asia and is currently working on her book, Heavenly Drought: Natural Anomalies and State-Building in Dai Viet, Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries.

Registration link:

To attend the event in person, please register here.