the southerners improved upon their "insidedness" by building a network of walls
between the sea and the mountains in the basin of the Nhat Le River at DOng Ho'i,
a short distance south of the border between Dang Ngoai and Dang Trong at the
Gianh River. Behind the walls, soldier-farmers were thickly settled in self-sustaining
garrison-villages. During all the warfare of the seventeenth century, the northerners
never once broke through this place. They never got "in." Why not?
One explanation is that the southerners were defending their own territory while
the northerners were far from home in unfamiliar terrain. Furthermore, only a
relatively short time each year was available for battle due to the limitations of the
dry season when armies could move, of suitable winds to facilitate naval operations,
and of the extenuated northern supply lines. However, considering the scale of effort
expended by both sides in attacking and defending, these strategic considerations
were obviously not considered to be insurmountable. The magnitude and frequency
of northern campaigns is comprehensible only if one imagines that there were
reasonable expectations of success, and the huge investment made in southern defenses
is comprehensible only with the assumption that the threat was real.
A close examination of the terrain at Dong Ho'i and of human efforts to enhance
it with walls reveals a relatively small space between mountains and the sea through
which were only two practicable routes: a "mountain road" on the west that crossed
along the foothills and a "coastal road" on the east that crossed along the edge of the
dunes at the seashore. Between these two routes lay an expanse of river and swamp.
It is clear that the northerners did not have the capability to move beyond this place
with naval forces only; without land forces, their ships posed no serious threat south
of Dong Ho'i. Part of this may have been due to the superiority of southern naval
forces, which had learned from the Portuguese how to mount and use large cannon
on ships; but even aside from this, southern coastal defense was apparently beyond
the northern ability to overcome without the assistance of land-based forces. This
consideration made the terrain at Dong Ho'i the prime focus of battle, lying just south
of the border and at a place where the options for land transport were restricted to
two narrow lines of movement. The application of human intelligence to this terrain
produced a system of walls extending from the mountains at two different places and
included ramparts along the shore at the top of the dunes (Cadiere 1906, 138-40).
I have lingered at Dong Ho'i because it was here that three generations of rival
Vietnamese-speaking leaders repeatedly met in battle, where Dang Ngoai and Dang
Trong tested and defined their continued separation. Why were these surface
orientations and ambitions played out with arrow, cannon, sword, and war-elephant
rather than with more benign means of interaction such as negotiation and
accommodation? It is, in fact, not surprising that Dang Trong resisted the authority
of Dang Ngoai at DOng H6'i for so many generations and by so many battles when
we recall that peoples we call Cham had previously resisted northern authority at this
same place for hundreds of years. And it is not unreasonable that people we call
Vietnamese who came to dwell in this place should have adopted an attitude toward
the northern power in some ways analogous to that of prior inhabitants. The new
inhabitants worshiped the deities of the old inhabitants (Nguyen The Anh 1995, 42-
50). That they should also have inherited the enemies of their predecessors is not
astonishing. Rather than the southward expansion of the Vietnamese people, the
archive suggests the formation of new ways to act Vietnamese in terrain previously
inhabited by speakers of Cham and other languages (Taylor 1993, 64-65). Family
records in the vicinity of Da Nang reveal that some families who now identif