When the Vietnamese first declared independence from Tang China, you'd expect that nearly a thousand years of Chinese overlordship, you'd expect a newly independent Vietnam to be indistinguishable from any other Chinese province. https://twitter.com/Visvavasu/status/1273238035035873280

And it is true that Chinese schools, law, clothing, marriage rites & agriculture was introduced during this period, while the breadbasket of the Red River plain was dominated by mixed ancestry landowning families absorbed into the Imperial hierarchy.

But there were plenty of Austroasiatic Tai & Viet groups in the hills outside of Chinese influence, which lowered further from social & physical distance from the families above, + Cham and Indian Ocean contacts which offered alternative cultural options to the lowland Viets

This, plus the fact that some laws may have only applied to Chinese immigrants and even the heavily sinicised aristocratic families still retained the Vietnamese language for casual use + Buddhist traditions, gave the Vietnamese a unique PoV of their role in Chinese civilisation

Vietnamese independence from China occurs in 3 stages which shaped the future polity's structure.

First, the sinicised aristocratic families mentioned above declared independence, defeated a Chinese attempt at reconquest, and kept some Tang era administration.

Second, rural elites from both in and out those families challenged their sinic inclinations and aimed to restore indigenous traditions while also defeating another Chinese army, but didn't know how to run a proper administration

Third, powerful Buddhist monks reconciled both factions while transferring secular power to the Ly Family, which was close to the monkhood. After, they worked to present themselves as sufficiently civilised on Chinese terms to prove they do not need their overlordship anymore

Chinese Imperial titles, coins & ceremonies were adopted and there was an attempt to preserve Tang-era administration, while the Ly family created an Ancestral Temple, Chinese genealogy, and allowed rulers sole authority on heir selection to differentiate from other families

Men literate in Chinese were selected for diplo, ceremonial and clerical work via Chinese-esque examinations for 3 years

Compared to Pagan & Angkor, which appeared to build their empires from scratch, Dai Viet inherited centuries of Chinese admin & high culture, making their empire, in the eyes of the elites, uninspiring. The 1st Ly ruler wanted to restore the golden age of Shang & Chou Era China

Vietnamese historians frequently condemned Ly and Tran dynasty Dai Viet as immoral (While Theravada historians, while idealising Indian myths like the famous Ashoka the Great, would never denigrate their own country or portray it as lesser)

So far, do you feel like Dai Viet's adherence to Chinese norms is a bit of a LARP? Bc, in a sense, it kind of was. Past the facade of Sinic civility lay a state that resembled the alien empires of Pagan and Angkor more than the Tang Protectorate of An Nam which preceded it

While Song China bureaucratised its aristocracy into irrelevance, the Ly Dynasty ruled as basically first among equals and only directly controlled a small domain, which provided all its taxes and manpower, while often illiterate familial bonds tied the rest of Dai Viet to them

Insert my tweet about them sacred animal blood here find it yourself

The exams themselves were near worthless, with the candidates being Buddhist monks who were also given useless posts since important ones went to royalty, and only again only for 3 years lol so much for Confucian bureaucracy

While officially the heir was set, in reality, resembling Pagan and Angkorian traditions, Ly King's used polygamous marriages to secure familial ties and failed to rank their wives -allowing rivalries around mothers to form- or favour firstborns only, very un-Confucian!

So while in theory Ly rulers copied the Tang legal code wholesale, because SEAsians do not like to oppress women, laws on marriage and inheritance that would've allowed for sinic administration had to be ignored, while keeping those about court etiquette and loyalty to the ruler

Insert tweet about barefoot king fishing with bamboo pole tattooing that thing in his soldiers heads it's a bit old go look for it yourself

The Ly Dynasty's religion was not Confucianism. It was a heavily Animist mess, with a Hindu-Buddhist royal cult (Mahayana and not Theravada, a Chinese legacy) around Indra similar to ones in Pagan and Angkor, while one Ly king identified with the Buddha like one Angkor king did

The Ly kings also tied royal power to their ability to personally placate local spirits (nature gods, dead heroes, etc) to an extent that would make Confucius vomit (animal blood?) to form a kingdomwide pantheon to protect the throne and Buddhism, similar to Pagan, Sukhothai, etc

In Song China even local elites could read, but in Dai Viet even high officials were illiterate, implying that like in most other SEAsian polities at the time literacy was confined to religious specialists

In short, as China marginalised Buddhism and aristocracy in the face of a new Confucian scholar official class, Mahayana Buddhism dominated the aristocratic families of Dai Viet even as it kept a facade of Confucianism to pretend to keep up with the centre of civilisation

Why the fuck did I do this fuck me how long have I been staring at this tweet UI and this is just the Ly Dynasty