The Traditional Village: For and Against
Over the centuries, the Việt (ethnic Vietnamese or Kinh) nation took shape through the spread of villages, which were the political-socio-economic groupings that united the Việt people in continuous struggle with nature and against foreign invaders. Another term for a Vietnamese “village” is “commune,” which is not a communist term but, instead, comes from the French word, “commune,” for the lowest-level governmental administrative unit.
The Vietnamese village with its staunch sense of community binds residents together within the three-step structure of family, village, and state. Villages allowed the Việt to survive on wet-rice cultivation by building and maintaining large communal irrigation and drainage systems. On a wider scale, Việt Nam’s thick network of villages supported the Việt resistance to invasions by powerful foes, such as the Mongol armies in the 1200s.
In many countries, military defense has relied on urban citadels. The fall of a fortress was a military disaster. However, in Việt Nam, each village was a bastion. The Ba Ðình Resistance Against France in 1886 is a perfect example. “Ba đình” (meaning “three communal houses”) refers to the three villages in Thanh Hóa Province that joined together, connecting themselves with deep, defensive trenches. They held at bay thirty-four hundred French colonial troops supported by four gunboats during the thirty-five-day siege conducted by Captain (later, Marshal) Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre (1852–1931).
Other factors in addition to self-defense and community irrigation systems strengthen the communal character of Vietnamese villages. Traditionally, villages were autonomous units within the state. The central authority, which was represented by district mandarins, assessed each commune for head taxes, land taxes, and unpaid labor. However, village councils of male elders assisted by elected agents met those obligations. A popular saying summarizes the village’s unusual stature: “Royal decrees yield to village customs.”
The village population had several groupings, including the hamlet, giáp, family clan, and guild. The giáp, a vestige of the primitive agricultural commune, was an egalitarian and democratic male association, which grouped the men into classes by age regardless of their titles, functions, or fortunes. A man’s passage from a lower to a higher class in the giáp gave him greater prestige. In certain cases, elders would bring sensitive matters before the giáp for a preliminary consensus to avoid a stormy discussion in the broader village.
The periodic distribution of communal village fields among registered male villagers every three, four, or six years was another democratic village institution and a vestige of the primitive agricultural community. Vietnamese practiced this recurring privatization of public land from the 1100s to the early 1800s and, in some areas, even into the 1900s. Communal fields still existed in some villages on the eve of the Land Reform Campaign conducted in the 1950s. The traditional communal lands brought the state more revenue than private lands because of higher tax rates; those taxes also supplied funds to pay village administrators and assist widows, the elderly, orphans, and others without adequate support.
The traditional village was also the repository of our nation’s spiritual and artistic traditions. Many mandarins and scholars retired to their home villages after public service; their literary creations were both learned and popular. Today, village temples remain the sites for spring and autumn ritual celebrations, which draw communities together through popular merriment. These temples display some of the best examples of ancient Việt architecture. They also house a majority of the remaining Việt sculptures because Vietnamese hid their national art (which was in fact popular art) in the countryside during the long periods of Chinese and French domination.
Despite its positive aspects, the traditional Vietnamese village is far from a Rousseau-esque model. During the early 1900s, “village” was synonymous with oppression and extortion, intellectual backwardness, and moral stagnation. The democracy apparent in the examples above became a delusion. Communal lands were reduced and no longer played a significant role. Elders imposed their tyranny. The communal hierarchy buttressed by Confucianism divided villagers into socio-economic classes: scholars, soldiers, artisans, traders, and peasants. The lowest class—the peasants—bore the burden of taxes and forced hard labor.
In fairness to the French, it should be said that the colonial administration attempted several reforms, but those were formalities. During French colonialism, the traditional village was still pre-capitalist, essentially agricultural, and self-sufficient. One result was a severely limited national economy with little foreign trade. Despite Việt Nam’s long coastline, the Việt were not seafarers like the Malays. The absence of Vietnamese foreign trade hampered the country’s economic advancement.
Before the August 1945 Revolution, young Western-trained Vietnamese intellectuals converted some patriotic Confucian scholars to the Western idea of progress. These patriots criticized the archaic character and structure of the traditional Việt village. During the Resistance War Against France (1945–1954), the vast majority of residents in French-occupied villages functioned undercover on the patriots’ side by secretly supplying food and intelligence. Many Vietnamese left French-occupied villages to help transport rice by shoulder poles and pack bicycles hundreds of kilometers to the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ. This Herculean effort made possible the Vietnamese defeat of the French army in 1954. Võ Nguyên Giáp, the victorious Vietnamese general, noted that when the French tallied the balance of armed forces before the battle, they neglected to appraise accurately the role of Vietnamese peasant porters.
Later, Ngô Đình Diệm, whom the Americans had brought in from the United States in 1954 to be premier of South Việt Nam, tried in vain to dismantle traditional Vietnamese villages. His troops drove southern Vietnamese peasants from their homes into policed, barbed-wire-encircled camps called strategic hamlets. During the American War, US aircraft tried without success to destroy the traditional Việt socio-economic-cultural village bonds by bombing two-thirds of the rural communities across the country, in both North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam.
The August 1945 Revolution, the Land Reform Campaign of the 1950s, the creation of agricultural co-operatives in the 1960s, and the two resistance wars for national liberation and re-unification (1945–1975) subjected traditional villages to profound upheavals. Now, it is up to us to keep the positive values within this heritage.
A Village Landscape
I shall never forget this reading lesson, which I learned by heart (but of course in Vietnamese!) at primary school, when I was eight:
My Village
My village is near the province. All around my village is a bamboo hedge so thick that those outside cannot see our houses. At the head and foot of my village is a brick gate. Most houses are thatch. Each household has a courtyard, a garden, and usually a pond. A bamboo hedge surrounds each house, while the garden has vegetables, sweet potatoes, and fruit trees. Only one main road runs through the village, but we have many meandering lanes. Recently, the small lanes were laid with bricks, making those paths much cleaner. Before, whenever it rained, the lanes were slushy with mud and unpleasant for walking.
The village bamboo hedge, in some cases reinforced by an earthen embankment and a moat, turned the traditional rural community into an islet in a sea of green rice fields. The hedge not only protected villagers against bandits and typhoons but also supplied materials to repair or build temples, bridges, markets, and other public works. A village usually had four gates (north, south, east, and west) but sometimes fewer. Guards closed these gates at nightfall. Banyan or ceiba (kapok) trees in front of the main gate cast refreshing shade for farmers returning from the fields or travelers drinking a cup of tea at a stall nestled among the trees. A few villages in Việt Nam’s northern delta, the cradle of our nation, kept these traditional traits when facing Western influence and urbanization.
Topography determines four villages types in northern Việt Nam:
• villages behind a river dike, which also serves as a road, since the dike is higher than the flooded rice fields
•