WAS 1550-1680 A GOLDEN ERA?
Contrary to the long-held view that the sixteenth century was a regressive and desolate era in Vietnamese history, which saw the country ruled by a usurping Mạc family, who constantly fought against the Lê-Trịnh, recent scholarship suggests a quite different picture of Vietnamese society in this period. According to Trần Quốc Vượng, it was during this period that the suffocating atmosphere of Confucian domination under Lê Thánh Tông was significantly alleviated. It was also the Mạc, according to Đinh Khắc Thuận, after coming to power in 1527, who reformed the country's rapidly declining economy. Agriculture was extensively developed, and an irrigation system was built around the Mạc capital region in Hải Dương. At least 15 new bridges were built, according to the existing stele inscriptionsl while revived handicrafts production stimulated the need for more markets, and overseas trade flourished.
This renewed vigour was also manifested in the constructions of this period. A survey of the 2000 steles of the period shows that, in terms of building or renovating temples, communal halls, markets, bridges and ferries, the construction projects under the half century of Mạc rule in the sixteenth century were more numerous than the projects from c.1680 to c.1840 combined (see Figure 1 below).
The civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have stimulated the two Đại Việt societies. When the war with the Mạc ended in 1593, the Lê-Trịnh continued to carry out the Mạc's open-door policies, encouraging handicrafts production and foreign trade, which offered the quickest source of income to repair the damaged agricultural infrastructure in the post-war era. The early seventeenth century thus saw Tongking picking up the momentum and development of the Mạc of the sixteenth century.
But Tongking also benefitted greatly from the broader background of the booming late Ming economy, one of the greatest economic expansions in Chinese history. By the sixteenth century, China was intimately a part of the growing global economy. The Chinese traded actively in the South China Sea commercial trading networks with silk and porcelain in exchange for silver. These two exports were precisely the same staples of Tongking. It seemed therefore, while Tongking shared the boom years of the Southeast Asian economies between 1570 and 1630, as noted by Reid, it shared the same export markets and products with China. Different from other Southeast Asian countries during the Age of of Commerce, whose export items were spices, pepper, and luxury trade items such as aromatics and gold, Tongking's main export items were silk and porcelain. Tongking's strength, in other words, rested on manufacturing, which was the most important silver earner and one of the main engines of the seventeenth century Tongking economy.
The demand for silk from Tongking first by the Japanese and then by the Dutch must have stimulated the expansion of silk production. By the late 1640s the size of raw silk production was considerable. In 1648, for example, although the Chinese offered a high price and brought 6,000 piculs of Tongking raw silk to Nagasaki, the VOC was still able to buy 522 piculs of raw silk, and a good amount of pelings, velvet and other silk products to Japan, worth over 300,000 guilders. Again in 1650, while junks from China brought a total of 930 piculs of raw silk to Nagasaki, Chinese junks from northern Vietnam carried 820 piculs of Tongking raw silk, plus large amount of silk piece goods. This indicates that Tongking raw silk was competitive in Japan markets and thus was an attractive alternative to Chinese silk, both in terms of quantity and price.
The capacity of silk production of Tongking average 130-150 tons of raw silk and around 10,000 piece-goods a year. It would have required no less than 20,000 households or 100,000 labourers to produce the amounts. But since 90 percent of silk production was women's work and silk was a sideline production, the households involved with silk production would have been three for four times the 20,000 figure. In reponse to the demand for silk, and the silver flowing in, the number of Vietnamese peasants involved in silk production in the seventeeth century would have been considerable. Raw silk production is a labour-intensive business. A study of the silk-producing areas of China indicates that if a the cycle of rice-planting on an acre of land requires 76 days, tending an acre of mulberry trees needs 196 days. Silkworm tending is equally labour-intesive and labour is usually 30-50 per cent of the total production cost. If were are not clear whether silkworm tending, cocooning, and spinning were done by the same family, we do know that dying operations were performed by specialized villages, and silk piece-good producers definitely bought raw silk rather than producing their own. So there were layers in the silk production, circulation and export sectors, each relying on the other, and all demanding some coordination. These in turn relied on agricultural productivity, transport and commerce, as these provided the necessary materials, food, transport and commercial links.
Under such circumstance cutting taxes to encourage domestric trade was the government's advantage, as teh enourmous silver revenue derived from foreign trade had made the income from the domestic trade sector less important anyway. It was no coincidence therefore that the Trịnh abolished the tax collecting passes in the country in the 1658, and in 1660 further forbade officers from charging high fees on ferries and markets. In the same year the government ordered the whole country to build highways (đường thiên lí, "roads of thousand lí"), in order to "facilitate travel".
The half-century war with Cochinchina seems to have stimulated silk production and given it more focus, as this was the most important means for obtaining hard cash to finance the more advanced weapons from the West. Silk manufacturing in Tongking thus developed a higher level and numerous silk-producing centres flourished in and around Thăng Long. New villages emerged and the seventeenth century thus was an important period in this history of settlement of the Red River Delta. Archaeological findings in a ten-year Japanese project on the history of village formation in teh Nam Định area reveals that a new landscape was made during the seventeenth century, possibly by both land expansion of the older villages and establishment of new settlments.
New cash crops were introduced and became rapidly popular. Tobacco was brought into Tongking in the early 1660s from Laos and soon became an essential part of the ordinary people's life. "Offices common people and women all compete to get addicted to it, so much so that there is a saying that, 'one can do without eating for three days but cannot do without smoking for one hour'". The method of brewing rice wine came from Guangdong but was originally from Siam, according to Lê Quý Đôn. This involved "adding aromatics to the wine which was called a-la-ke (arrack)." Corn was also brought in during the seventeenth century. Although its Vietnamese name is Lúa Ngô (the crop of Ngô, i.e. the Chinese), the method of planting using a knife to dig a hole and plant the seed suggested that it might have been introduced into Tongking from the mountain peoples. The Sơn Tây region even came to rely on corn as its staple food. Both corn and sorghum became important crops in the bordering provinces with China. The seventeenth century was in naways a "'golden era' and gave birth to an unprecedented commercial system", as described by Hoang Anh Tuan. The next sections examine this golden era.
