Looking East: Constructing an Image of Vietnam in Russian Travel Writings of the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the numerous travelogues written about Vietnam by foreign authors, Russian travel writings make up a modest amount, and may be less known to many readers. Although sporadic information about Vietnam had appeared in the Russian press since the mid-eighteenth century, only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when France promoted colonial expansion in Indochina, did the first Russians arrive in Vietnam. Their travel writings were afterwards published in Russia in some specialised publications, introducing this distant and unfamiliar Southeast Asian country to Russian readers. From the observative position that seemed to be between colonisers and colonised, as a third party, how did the Russian travellers depict and evaluate indigenous and colonial Vietnam? By employing the conceptions of Russian Orientalism and putting Russian travel writings about Vietnam in the context of the Russian vision of Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this essay aims to figure out the characteristics of Russian construction of the Oriental in the case of Vietnam.