List of Maps and Tables
Acknowledgements
Note on Transcription and Referencing Systems
Table of Chinese Dynasties
Introduction
Chapter One: Digging up Drums
Chapter Two: The Two Rivers and the Lands Between—a Geographical
Outline
Chapter Three: Why are the Li and Lao?—The shifting meanings of
Ethnonyms
Chapter Four: ‘Masters of their Small Domains’—Local and Imported
Traditions of Leadership
Chapter Five: ‘To Overawe the Li and Lao’—Attempts at Military
Conquest
Chapter Six: Gold, Silver, Snakes and Slaves: Highland-Lowland
Trade Relations
Chapter Seven: ‘Last of the Bronze Drum Chiefs’—The Rise and Fall
of the Great Families
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Catherine Churchman is a lecturer in the Asian Studies Programme in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University, Wellington.
Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account
of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent
Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the
uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in
recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's
plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges
the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the
region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese
empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless
‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and
justifiably makes the region the center of its own history.
Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without
their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and
material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and
exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary
confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly
rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually
Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and
recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who
conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in
their constant political and military dealings with and alongside
the Chinese empires in the north.
Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.
*CHOICE*
[An] extraordinary piece of work. . . . The People Between the
Rivers is a recommended read not only for specialists on the
history of this particular region, but also for any historian
looking for outstanding examples of how to apply a strict
methodology to elaborate plausible hypotheses, in contexts where
data is scarce. In spite of the inevitable limitations caused by
this problem, Churchman is able to, quoting a Vietnamese historian,
put ‘'flesh” on the mute archaeological “bones”’ (p. 36),
demonstrating along the way that it is possible to say much more
about the Li and Lao than what is contained in histories determined
by nation-building interests. Her work is bound to become a
reference for future studies on the region of the Two Rivers; and
hopefully it will also spark similar interest within the
present-day nation states whose lands the Li and Lao inhabited more
than a thousand years ago.
*New Books Asia*
A masterpiece of synthesis and insight that provides a lucid
overarching framework for several centuries of regional history as
well as nuanced discussions of countless ground-level issues, from
problematizing the concepts of ‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to
mapping out trade patterns between the Red River Plain and southern
China.
*Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog*
This is a consummate treatise on the history of the peoples who
lived in the region between the Red River and Pearl River during
the period from roughly the third through the eighth century.
Utilizing materials from a wide variety of disciplines—archaeology,
metallurgy, coinage, linguistics, botany, zoology, medicine, and so
forth—Catherine Churchman skillfully navigates between the
conflicting claims of modern nationalists to show that the
indigenes of that time and place viewed themselves as neither
Vietnamese nor Chinese. In light of the heavy investment of modern
scholarship in projecting contemporary political boundaries and
ideologies backward to earlier times, this is a major, salutary
achievement.
*Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania*
A masterful synthesis of information from multiple disciplines that
provides a lucid overarching framework for several centuries of
regional history and engages in nuanced discussions of countless
ground-level issues, from problematizing the concepts of
‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to mapping out trade patterns
between the Red River Plain and southern China. It is indeed an
invaluable scholarly contribution.
*Liam Kelley, University of Hawaii*
This book admirably collates the existing documentation on and puts
in context an obscure period in the history of south China. By
setting Chinese records in the background of south-eastern Asian
society and the distribution of bronze drums, it successfully
argues that from the first century CE to the seventh century CE,
chieftainship evolved from overseeing small local communities to
exerting control over regional alliances under the recognition of
the Chinese imperial government. In so doing, it reasserts the
importance of an understanding of indigenous society, not only in
China but in all of history.
*David Faure, The Chinese University of Hong Kong*
Catherine Churchman has given us a marvelous reinterpretation of
the bronze drums and their political significance as she shows us
the complexities of southern Chinese frontier history during the
first millennium CE. Using both original Chinese texts and
archaeological sources, her work opens up for us the true nature of
the mountain region lying between China and Southeast Asia and of
the interactions between indigenous and Han peoples. It is
important for understanding this region’s history within a broader
context over the past two millennia.
*John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan*
A remarkable and path-breaking contribution to both East and
Southeast Asian historical studies. Eschewing the restraints of
nation-state histories, the author weaves a political and social
account of the lands and peoples located between what are today the
Red River and Pearl River systems. Employing the bronze drum as a
cultural and social marker, Churchman exercises an extensive range
of disciplines extending from linguistics to archaeology, and
critical textual studies to political history to describe this
region over much of the first millennium of the Common Era.
Thereby, societies and polities which other traditions and
histories depict as peripheries are assigned an unprecedented and
illuminating centrality.
*Geoffrey Wade, Australian National University*
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