Our mountains and rivers have changed: Nature and empire in the Ming colonisation of Đại Việt, 1407–28

Abstract

Scholars have yet to fully recognise the central role environment played in inspiring, and stymying, the Ming dynasty invasion and colonisation of Đại Việt (1407–27) and subsequent Vietnamese resistance movement. During the initial campaign, the Yongle emperor and his generals identified miasma, the illness-inducing hot and misty climate of the Sino-Vietnamese uplands (‘the Dong World’), as their primary obstacle and obsessed over strategies to avoid it. For Lê Lợi, the Vietnamese dynastic founder who expelled the Ming troops from Đại Việt, resistance to Ming environmental exploitation of Vietnamese resources was a rallying cry. The ecology and flora and fauna of Đại Việt helped inform an articulation of Vietnamese difference and independence. Despite the anticolonial rhetoric of the early Lê, the dynasty was soon engaging in a project of imperial expansion not dissimilar from that of the Ming. The Vietnamese state that emerged following Ming colonisation was in turn limited by the miasmic uplands.