During the several hundred years of Chinese rule,
sinicization of the newly conquered Nanyue was brought about by a combination of Han imperial military power, regular settlement and an influx of Han Chinese refugees, officers and garrisons, merchants, scholars, bureaucrats, fugitives, and prisoners of war. At the same time, Chinese officials were interested in exploiting the region's natural resources and trade potential. In addition, Han Chinese officials forcibly expropriated fertile land conquered from Vietnamese nobles to be redistributed for newly settled Han Chinese immigrants. Han rule and government administration brought new influences to the indigenous Vietnamese and Vietnam as a Chinese province operated as a frontier outpost of the Han Empire. The Han dynasty wanted to extend their control over the fertile
Red River Delta, in part as the geographical terrain served as a convenient supply point and trading post for Han ships engaged in the growing maritime trade with various South and Southeast Asian Kingdoms and the Roman Empire. The Han dynasty relied heavily on trade with the Nanyue who produced unique items such as: bronze and pottery incense burners, ivory, and rhinoceros horns. The Han dynasty took advantage of the Yue people's goods and used them in their maritime trade network that extended from Lingnan through Yunnan to Burma and India. During the first century of Chinese rule, Vietnam was governed leniently and indirectly with no immediate change in indigenous policies. Initially, the indigenous Lac Viet people were governed at the local level but with indigenous Vietnamese local officials being replaced with newly settled Han Chinese officials. Han imperial bureaucrats generally pursued a policy of peaceful relations with the indigenous Yue population, focusing their administrative roles in the prefectural headquarters and garrisons, and maintaining secure river routes for trade. By the first century AD, however, the Han dynasty intensified its efforts to assimilate its new territories by raising taxes and instituting marriage and land inheritance reforms aimed at turning Vietnam into a patriarchal society more amenable to political authority. successfully conquered Nanyue and annexed it into the Han empire. The native Luo chief paid heavy tributes and imperial taxes to the Han mandarins to maintain the local administration and the military. The Chinese vigorously tried to assimilate the Vietnamese either through forced signification or through brute Chinese political domination. The Han government sought to assimilate the Vietnamese into the dynasty exhibited through a "
civilizing mission" in their maintenance of a unified cohesive empire. Some Vietnamese welcomed the chance to assimilate as they considered Chinese culture to be a more civilized, advanced, and superior culture. Though the Vietnamese incorporated advanced and technical elements they thought would be beneficial to themselves, the general unwillingness to be dominated by outsiders, the desire to maintain political autonomy, and the drive to regain Vietnamese independence signified Vietnamese resistance and hostility to Chinese aggression, political domination and imperialism on Vietnamese society. Han Chinese bureaucrats sought to impose Chinese high culture onto the indigenous Vietnamese including bureaucratic Legalist techniques and Confucian ethics, education, art, literature, and language. The conquered and subjugated Vietnamese had to adopt the Chinese writing system, Confucianism, and veneration of the Chinese emperor to the detriment of their native spoken language, culture, ethnicity, and national identity.
Historiography The characterization of this period of Vietnamese history by national historiography as a "militant, nationalistic, and very contemporary vision" has been described as the nationalist school of Vietnamese history. This portrayal has its roots in
Dai Viet but scholars such as Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen argue that "the trope of a small country consistently repelling the China's cultural force is a recent, postcolonial, mid-20th-century construction". Other works since have repeated the same elements of the national school by retroactively assigning Vietnamese group consciousness to past periods (
Han-
Tang era) based on evidence in later eras. The national school of Vietnamese history has remained practically unchanged since the 1980s and has become the national orthodoxy. The argument for an intrinsic, intractable, and distinctly Southeast Asian Vietnamese identity proposes that there was an intrinsic Vietnamese "cultural core" that has always existed in the
Red River Plain and that they resisted foreign aggressors in a national struggle. This characterizes Vietnamese history under Chinese rule as a "steadfast popular resistance marked by armed insurrections against foreign domination". However some scholars such as Churchman note that this lacked evidence. The Vietnamese national narrative has introduced anachronisms in order to prove a unified Vietnamese national consciousness. The word Viet/Yue is often used to refer to an ethnic group when it had various meanings throughout history. There was no terminology to describe a Chinese-Vietnamese dichotomy during the Han-Tang period nor was there a term to describe a cohesive group inhabiting the area between the
Pearl River and the Red River. The indigenous people of the area of modern Vietnam ruled by the Chinese did not have a specific name during this period and were referred to as the
Wild Man (Wild Barbarians), the
Li, or the Annamese (Annan people) by the time of the
Tang dynasty. The national history tends to have a narrow view limited to modern national boundaries, leading to conclusions of exceptionalism. Although it is true that the political situation in the Red River Plain was less stable than in Guangzhou to the north, such circumstances were not restricted to the area. The Vietnamese national narrative retroactively assigns any local rebellions, the rise of local dynasties, and their local autonomy with the motive of seeking national independence. These early moves toward autonomy in the 10th century were fairly tame compared to the activities of people who cushioned them from more direct contact with
Southern dynasties empires. ==Administration==