Continuance and innovation: A study of Chinese character variants in late modern Vietnam’s village customs texts

Abstract

This article explores the reception and creation of Chinese character variants in Vietnam within a small scale of eight hand-written village customs texts in Bắc Ninh province dating from 1889 to 1915. The article focuses on the four following main issues: (a) the continuance and innovation rate of variants in Vietnam; (b) the method of innovation of variant characters; (c) the behavior of the writers regarding variant characters; (d) supplementing 71 unrecorded variants to dictionaries of variant characters and previous studies.