How Chinese Classics Reached Vietnam

The sun had only just gone down when people began arriving in the brick-paved yard at the end of the hamlet.

The children came first. They dragged out sleeping mats, spread them on the ground, and fought over the spots right by the pillar. Whoever came late had to sit in the outer ring. Then an old woman from next door arrived, walking slowly with her cane, and at once someone stood up to give her the place where she could lean against the wall. A few men home from the rice fields, their feet still muddy, stopped at the water jar to rinse them, then sat right down on the step. Nobody had invited anybody. When the hour came, they simply gathered.

Inside the house, someone turned up the wick of an oil lamp and carried it out to the middle of the yard.

The best reader in the hamlet stepped out with a sheaf of thin paper in his hand. He sat down on a stool set just under the lamp, leafed through to the place he had marked the night before, and cleared his throat.

The whole yard went silent.

What he was about to read was not scripture, and it was not village paperwork. It was a story. A very long story, written across the border several hundred years earlier, about men who swore to be brothers and kept that oath all their lives. But the paper in his hands did not carry a single Chinese character. It was printed in the new script, one that a diligent child could learn in a few months.

It all began in Saigon, on August 1, 1901.

That day a newspaper put out its first issue. It was called Nông cổ mín đàm. On page four, among articles about farming and trade, the paper ran a piece of translated fiction. It was the opening of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese novel. For the first time, Vietnamese readers saw a long Chinese novel begin to be told in chữ quốc ngữ. Chữ quốc ngữ is the Latin-based alphabet now used to write Vietnamese.

Who sat down to translate those first lines is still not settled. The paper printed one name, but later researchers disagree. Some say the real translator was the editor in chief, Lương Khắc Ninh. Others say it was Nguyễn Chánh Sắt, working with Nguyễn An Khương. That pioneer hid himself so well that more than 100 years later, no one can yet give him his true name.

The paper ran one installment in each issue. When the installment ended, that was it until the next one. This trickle of a story suited Vietnamese readers remarkably well, because it turned reading into an appointment.

Then the printing houses joined in.

In 1907, in Saigon, the Three Kingdoms was printed as a proper book for the first time. Nguyễn Liên Phong translated it, and Đinh Thái Sơn published it. Two years later, in Hanoi, another version appeared. This one was by Phan Kế Bính, and Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh checked it word by word.

Phan Kế Bính came from the village of Thụy Khê. He was born in 1875 and studied Chinese characters from childhood. In 1906 he passed the classical examinations and earned the title of licentiate. Even so, he did not go on to become an official. He taught school, and then he sat down to translate books. The Chinese learning he had gathered since boyhood went into carrying a whole novel over into a script that even children could read. In the preface of the book printed in 1909, its makers all but cheered at how fine this script was, and how easy to learn.

That translation was later revised once more by Bùi Kỷ. It became the version that generation after generation of Vietnamese readers knew by heart.

After the Three Kingdoms came a whole stream of books. The Story of Yue Fei was printed in 1905. Water Margin and the Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms followed in 1906. Then came the Investiture of the Gods, and then the Shuo Tang. One translator alone, Trần Phong Sắc, rendered about 29 Chinese novels. In Saigon, a bookshop called Tín Đức thư xã printed the Three Kingdoms again and again. Before 1930 alone, it did so at least four times. At first the novel came in 31 thin volumes, so people could buy it bit by bit. Later the volumes were gathered into a single book of more than 1,000 pages. And sooner or later, that shelf would also hold Journey to the West, the book every child begged to hear. It is the tale of a stone monkey who goes with a monk to fetch the sacred scriptures.

But the loveliest part of this whole story lies somewhere else.

In those days, when a poor family sent a child to learn to read, they often had no hope of seeing that child become anyone grand. They only hoped the child could read, so that in the slack farming season someone at home could read Chinese tales aloud to the whole family. So whichever child learned fastest suddenly became the most important person of the evening. The child sat in the middle of the yard, under the lamp. The grandparents and parents sat in a ring around, listening to their own child read.

The part the whole yard waited for most, the one someone asked to hear again every time, was the opening. It was the first of 120 chapters.

Three men have only just met. They go out behind a house, where a peach orchard stands in full bloom. Among those blossoms, the three kneel and swear that from now on they will be brothers, as close as brothers by blood. They were not born on the same day, they say, but they vow to stand by one another to the end. That is all. There is nothing grand or loud about it. And yet hundreds of years later, in a brick-paved yard on this side of the border, far from that peach orchard, people who reached that moment still held their breath.

Heard night after night, the names in the book turned into the names of people everyone knew. Someone quick to anger was told he was as hot-headed as Trương Phi, the man called Zhang Fei in Chinese. Someone always suspicious was teased for being as distrustful as Tào Tháo, whom Chinese readers know as Cao Cao. The grandparents spoke of Quan Công and of Khổng Minh in the same familiar voice they used for a neighbor at the head of the lane. To them these were not characters in a foreign book.

Those names are still alive in Vietnamese homes today. They walked into the Vietnamese language slowly, on foot. They came through the hands of translators, through the printing houses, through the voice of a child who had only just learned to read. It was never one people teaching another. It was only neighbors telling stories to neighbors. Those who listened then told the stories again in their own language, and gave them their own voice.

Out in the yard, the reader stopped at the most exciting moment. He folded the papers, tucked in a leaf to mark his place, and said the familiar words: more tomorrow.

A storm of protest went up. It made no difference. The mats were rolled up and stood in a corner against the wall. The oil lamp was carried back inside, and the brick-paved yard slowly went dark. All that remained was the shuffle of slippers heading for the gate, the old woman and her cane disappearing behind the fence, and the children running off, arguing over who would get to be Trương Phi tomorrow night.