Silk for Silver: Dutch-Vietnamese Relations, Tonkin 1637-1700

330 Pages·2007·4.928 MB·English

by  Hoang Anh Tuan

Silk for Silver
TANAP Monographs
on the History of
Asian-European Interaction
Edited by
Leonard Blussé and Cynthia Viallé
VOLUME 5
Silk for Silver
Dutch-Vietnamese Relations, 1637-1700
By
Hoang Anh Tuan
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
The TANAP programme is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO).
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISSN 1871-6938
ISBN 978 90 04 15601 2
© Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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printed in the netherlands
This book is dedicated to my mentors: Professor Femme Gaastra
Professor Leonard Blussé
Professor Nguyễn Quang Ngọc

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
Probably nowhere in the world have such profound changes in his-
toriography been occurring as in the nation states of Monsoon Asia
that gained independence after the conclusion of the Pacific War in
1945. These traditionally outward-looking countries on the rims of
the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Seas have been interacting with
each other through maritime transport and trade for more than two
millennia, but the exigencies of modern nation-building have tended
to produce state-centred historical narratives that emphasize a distinc-
tive heritage and foster cultural pride and identity on the basis of such
heroic themes as anti-colonial resistance. No one will deny the need for
and utility of such ‘nation-building’ agendas, but an inward-directed
national historiography does not necessarily prepare one’s citizens for
our present age of regional co-operation and globalization.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coastal societies of
Monsoon Asia witnessed the entry of European traders, the emergence
of global maritime trading networks, and the laying of the foundations
of colonial empires that reached their apogees in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The difficulties of studying this pre-colonial and
early colonial past should not be underestimated. Local sources are
often rare because of wars and the frequent changes of both indig-
enous and colonial regimes. The hot and humid tropical climate is
also unkind to the preservation of manuscripts. The mass of west-
ern-language data preserved in the archives of the former East India
Companies and those of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Asia
often have an undeniably Europe-centred character and bias. Thus we
face not only a highly imbalanced supply of source material, but also
the very complex problem of how to decode the hidden agendas that
often colour these primary materials.
Over the past fifty years there has been a pronounced effort in aca-
demic circles in North America, Australia and the former European
colonial nations to ‘decolonize’ historical writing on Asian-European
interaction, albeit for reasons totally different from those in their Asian
counterparts. Increasingly doubt has been cast on such longstanding
paradigms as the superiority of the dynamic West over static Asian
societies. Historians of international trade such as the late Holden
viii series editor’s foreword
Furber, whose description of this period as ‘The Age of Partnership’
inspired the name of the TANAP programme, have taken an interest
in the various ways and means by which Asian-European interaction
began in various kinds of competition, collaboration, diplomacy, and
military confrontation. This approach has forced historians to return
to the archival sources and the places where these events unfolded
with the result that new frontiers of research have opened up in which
close partnerships between Asian and European historians, with their
specific cultural tool kits and linguistic backgrounds, are now starting
to bear fruit.
In anticipation of the four hundredth anniversary of the establish-
ment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, members of the
History Department of Leiden University proposed the establishment
of an international research programme aimed at training a new gen-
eration of Asian historians of Asian-European interaction in the early
modern period. It was taken for granted that any such drive towards
international educational co-operation should be carried out in care-
fully planned collaboration with the National Archives in The Hague,
the Arsip Nasional of the Republic of Indonesia in Jakarta and the
archives of Cape Town (South Africa), Colombo (Sri Lanka) and
Chennai (India), which together hold several kilometres of archival
records from the former Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. The
TANAP—Towards a New Age of Partnership—educational and archi-
val preservation programme was started in 2000 thanks to generous
grants from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research (NWO), the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of
Tropical Research (WOTRO), the Netherlands UNESCO Commission,
and Leiden University. Twelve universities in Asia sent some thirty
young lecturers to Leiden during 2001-2003. Under the auspices of the
Research Institute for Asian-African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS),
these historians participated in an advanced master’s programme that
included intensive courses on historiography, palaeography and the
old Dutch written language.
With additional funding from several Asian foundations, in 2002
seventeen of the TANAP graduates from Sri Lanka, India, Singapore,
Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa and
the Netherlands began working towards a PhD degree at Leiden. Three
others went on to pursue their doctorates at universities elsewhere in
series editor’s foreword ix
the world. The TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-Euro-
pean Interaction, which includes two studies on early modern South
African society, are the offspring of their doctoral theses defended at
Leiden.
Leonard Blussé
Leiden University