Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) has recently published an article on “Sinology in Vietnam” in the Journal of Chinese History.

Sinology is the study of “China,” and although the Vietnamese educated elite read and wrote classical Chinese for centuries, this paper argues that it is only in the twentieth century that a body of knowledge emerged in Vietnam that we can refer to as “Sinology,” as it was only at that time that nationalist concepts took hold and the educated elite came to see the world in terms of separate nations with their own distinct cultures.

This paper documents the emergence of Sinology in Vietnam in the early twentieth century and then traces its development, demonstrating how revolution and political movements affected the production of this form of knowledge. In many ways, the history Sinology in modern Vietnam therefore mirrors and reflects the various political transformations that took place at that time.