Ngang Pass and the Mount Hoanh massif, at the southern border of Thanh
Nghe., had been the meridional extremity of the Vietnamese realm for centuries. Just
beyond lay a narrow coastal plain, roughly thirty kilometers wide between the
mountains and the sea, stretching out for around 250 kilometers to Hai Van Pass.
This place, the modern provinces of Qu'ang Binh, Qu'ang Tri, and Thiua Thien, was
called Thuan Hoa by Vietnamese rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it
contained territories that had been intermittently claimed, conquered, and occupied
by Chinese and Vietnamese rulers for generations, but, until the fifteenth century, it
remained a zone contested by Cham and Viet kings. In the 1470s, King Le Thanh
Tong sent armies through Thuan Hoa and beyond, conquering and garrisoning the
coastal territories that extended for three hundred kilometers beyond H'ai Van Pass
as far as Ciu Mong Pass, territories which were at that time called Qu'ang Nam and
which are today the modern provinces of Qu'ang Nam, Qu'ang Ngai, and Binh Dinh.
This opened these lands to an unprecedented immigration of Vietnamese speakers.
For the purpose of this argument, I will talk about the formation of different ways of
acting Vietnamese, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in three places
newly inhabited by Vietnamese speakers beyond the Ngang Pass: Thuan Qu'ang, Binh
Dinh, and Nam Bo.
The first of these places I call Thuan Qu'ang, a common abbreviation of the
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century toponyms Thuan Hoa and Qu'ang Nam, but redefined
for my purposes to exclude the southernmost area, Binh Dinh, which assumed a
distinct momentum of its own in the eighteenth century (see map). Thuan Qu'ang
came to be focused on a political center at Hue and a commercial center at Hoi An
and Da Nang. The emergence of Thuan Qu'ang as a new power in the scheme of
Vietnamese politics, society, economy, and culture began with the arrival of
Nguyen Hoang and his entourage in 1558 (Cooke 1998 and Li 1998b). Nguyen
Hoang was from Thanh Nghe and was allied with the other Thanh Nghe clans against
the Mac of Dong Kinh. In the 1590s, Nguyen Hoang led military forces from
Thuan Quang to participate in the final campaigns that expelled the Mac from the
Dong Kinh lowlands. Trinh Tiung's efforts to subordinate Nguyen Hoang to his
authority failed, however, and in 1600 Nguyen Hoang returned to Thuan Quang and
consolidated his family's power there (Taylor 1993).
In the 1620s, tension between the sons of Trinh Tiung and Nguyen Hoang erupted
into warfare, and fighting continued for over fifty years. The vernacular terms that
were applied to the two sides reveal a sharp sense of spatial differentiation. The
northern realm, ruled by the Trinh clan, was called Dang Ngoai, meaning "outer
road" or "outer direction," and the southern realm, ruled by the Nguyen clan, was