From Moral Exemplar to National Hero: The transformations of Trần Hưng Đao and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism (part 2/2)

 From Moral Exemplar to National Hero: 

The transformations of Trần Hưng Đao 

and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism (part 2/2)

LIAM C. KELLEY

 Department of History, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, United States of America Email: liam@hawaii.edu

Confucian moralizer

While some literati, therefore, participated in and recorded information about Trần Hưng Đao’s cult in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the 1890s Trần Hưng Đao began to express himself directly. He did this through spirit writing (giáng bút). Spirit writing is a phenomenon where a spirit possesses a person who then writes out a message from the spirit in a bed or tray of sand by holding a special writing implement and letting the spirit indicate what to write. Someone standing by the tray of sand then reads out the characters as they are written, and a third person records the message on paper. This is a practice that literati traditionally looked down upon, as such direct contact with spirits was considered a form of heterodoxy. However, in the late nineteenth century in Vietnam, parts of China, and Japanese-controlled Taiwan, this practice enjoyed an intense period of activity. While this outburst of spirit writing may have occurred as a kind of reaction to the troubles of the times, and particularly to the onset of colonial rule, as a genre of writing it was intimately related to a kind of text known as morality books (thiện thư).

    Morality books were texts which had been revealed in China by spirits such as Wenchang Dijun and Guangsheng Dijun. Such texts first appeared during the period of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and, like Neo Confucianism, can in some ways be seen as a Confucian response to Buddhist ideas. They encouraged people to live in accordance with Confucian moral standards, but they used the logic of karmic retribution to encourage people to do so, arguing that if you did good things, good things would happen to you, and if you did bad things, bad things would happen to you. This karmic logic, however, was justified through reference to passages in the Confucian classics, such as a line in the Classic of Documents (Shangshu) which states that "On those who do good are sent down a hundred blessings, and on those who do evil are sent down a hundred calamities". That said, as texts that were said to have originally been revealed, they were also considered somewhat heterodox by the elite. Nonetheless, they were tolerated as effective tools for encouraging common people to follow Confucian mores. At the same time, some members of the elite would also chant these texts on a daily basis in an effort to create merit for themselves, so that their wives could produce sons, or so that their sons could pass the civil service examination. What literati were not supposed to do, however, was to contact the spirits directly themselves, but this is precisely what started to happen at the end of the nineteenth century in Vietnam.     At some point in the late nineteenth century, the Vietnamese went from reading these texts to creating their own, and Trần Hưng Đao was directly responsible for the production of what was perhaps the first such text in Vietnam, one which appears to have been created at some point in the 1890s. This text, revealed in classical Chinese, was called the Orthodox Scripture of the Great King Who Manifests the Divine (Hiển Thánh Đai Vương chính kinh), and will hereafter be referred to as the ‘Orthodox Scripture’. Trần Hưng Đao revealed some prefatory remarks in this text in which he stated that as he looked down on the world from above, he started to worry about the condition of his ‘disciples’ (đệ tử). He found that they ‘acted with sincerity, but their hearts were not introspective, so when they sought a response [from the spirits], that response did not last’. Trần Hưng Đao then took pity on his disciples and commissioned his deputy, Pham Ngu Lão, to take a spirit carriage to visit Hà Lac Shrine [in Kiếp Bac], descend into the brush, and transmit the Orthodox Scripture. The actual text of the Orthodox Scripture is then recorded as follows: 

    People live between Heaven and earth and must engage in the enterprise of the sages. What is this enterprise? It is nothing more than loyalty and filial piety. Loyalty and filial piety are essential for the five relationships. Neither can be lacking. You must consider how you can be filial as sons, how you can be loyal as officials, how you can be harmonious as brothers, how you can be respectful as wives, and how you can be trustworthy as friends. Above, one respects the Heavenly spirits and serves one’s ancestors. Below, one holds in the measure the dark souls and engages in hidden virtue. In conducting oneself such, will one not fully carry out the Way? Otherwise one will fall prey to the laws of the King of Hell, and upon one’s death, receive the censure of Heaven. One will be eternally divorced from the proper human Way [nhân đao]. To not follow the proper human Way, how sad that is! 

    Those of you who are my disciples, make haste and return to carrying out good deeds. In order to eradicate the various forms of evil, first uphold the five relationships, then carry out hidden virtue. Absolutely abstain from wine, licentiousness, wealth, and arrogance. Completely reject arrogance, parsimoniousness, and graft. Carry out my benevolence and justness. Do not assist others in their idle talk. Maintain my loyalty and filial piety. Do not get involved in base complaints. Organize one’s home with pure simplicity. Grant one’s descendants trust and tolerance. Scholars, farmers, workers, and merchants should follow their allotted occupations. They should not degenerate into opulence, but always return to what is generous and moral. [In so doing] the spirits will naturally respect the king of the underworld; disasters will depart and good fortune will arrive. There will be no need to make blasphemous entreaties of my spirit, for auspiciousness will collect and blessings arrive en masse. Is that not joyful? You must strive to carry this out. If you violate my teachings, then you must not chant my scripture. Respectfully [presented].

In his scripture, we see Trần Hưng Đao as literati saw him, and promoted the ideas that they valued. In particular, his claim that the "enterprise of the sages" (thánh nghiệp) is "nothing more than loyalty and filial piety" makes him the perfect spokesperson for this enterprise as those are the two values that literati associated with him. At the same time, Trần Hưng Đao brings in many more values that were part of the Confucian repertoire at both the elite and popular levels. Filial piety, loyalty, respect, harmony, and trust are all values that were discussed in elite texts but are likely known by common people as well. ‘Hidden virtue’ (âm chất), meanwhile, was a concept that the morality book tradition was based on, and which the elite encouraged commoners to follow. The idea of hidden virtue was that those who carry out virtuous acts with no calculation of the positive consequences of such acts will definitely reap a positive response. For many men at the time, there was no more positive response that one could reap than having a son, and this was one blessing that the Orthodox Scripture could help obtain. The Orthodox Scripture is included in a larger text entitled the Complete Compilation of the Documentary Traces of the Trần Family. This compilation also contains testimonials of men who succeeded in obtaining sons after seeking Trần Hưng Đao’s aid. These stories follow a similar pattern in that the men were married to women who did not bear sons. The men then traveled to Trần Hưng Đao’s shrine where they petitioned him for help and obtained a copy of his Orthodox Scripture. Then, after a long period—in some cases years—of regularly reciting the scripture, their wives finally gave birth to sons. These ideas that we find in the Orthodox Scripture were very common throughout the late imperial period in East Asia. In the first dozen years of the twentieth century, Trần Hưng Đao revealed many more messages along these lines. He was by no means the only spirit to reveal messages at that time, but he gradually became the most important ‘Southern’ spirit, and in many ways served as a deputy in ‘the South’ for the ‘Northern’ spirits who had originally created morality books in ‘the North’, such as Wenchang Dijun and Guansheng Dijun. Hence, Trần Hưng Đa. o’s role in revealing messages through spirit writing to some extent mirrored his position in institutions like the Martial Temple, where he was an important Southern representative of a world that was centered in the North. Trần Hưng Đa.o’s spirit made this point explicit when, in 1900, it explained that in the past, after a kingdom had first emerged in the region, ‘its social mores were depraved and its customs decrepit. I greatly lamented this fact. Ah, but with the training of King S˜ı/Shi and the transformative teachings of Wengong, the Southern Kingdom ceased to be confined in the south.’ ‘King S˜ı/Shi’ was S˜ı Nhiếp/Shi Xie, a Chinese administrator who served in the region in the third century CE, and whom centuries later Vietnamese literati honored as the figure who had introduced writing and Confucian teachings to their land. ‘Wengong’, meanwhile, was the Song Dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi. What Trần Hưng Đa.o expressed here was an idea that was common among literati prior to the twentieth century, that their land had only taken its mature form with the spread of elite cultural practices from the North. As a potent deity who revealed moral messages through writing, Trần Hưng Đa.o’s spirit contributed further to this process in the early twentieth century. However, just as this was happening, the Southern Kingdom began to transform in dramatic ways, such that soon this world that Trần Hưng Đao’s spirit was endeavoring to support would come to an end.

National hero 

       Right as Trần Hưng Đao’s spirit was revealing moral messages in the early twentieth century, the first generation of scholars to be influenced by Western ideas began to transform Trần Hưng Đao into a national hero. What these reformers became aware of is that the worldview that was exemplified by such politically charged structures as the Temple of Sovereigns from Successive Generations and the Martial Temple, was very different from the world view of the Westerners who were extending their dominance over the region. Westerners saw the world as divided between nations, each of which had its own history and culture. As reformist intellectuals came to realize this, they sought to change the way in which people in their land thought. In doing this, they created a shared discourse that is easily recognizable in their writings and which through their use of neologisms is very distinct from earlier writings. In particular, these reformist intellectuals started to make use of such new terms as ‘nation’ (quốc gia), ‘fatherland’ (tổ quốc), and ‘compatriots’ (đồng bào), words that had been coined by Japanese reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century to translate Western terms that did not exist in Japanese (or Chinese or Vietnamese) at that time. First, reformers contrasted the way in which people in Western countries educated their populace with the way in which people were educated in their own land. In particular, they noted that Western nations—‘nation’ (quốc gia) being a new concept at this time for Vietnamese, although the term that was used to express it had long existed—taught students about their own nation, whereas students in what they termed ‘our nation’ or ‘our kingdom’, studied the ‘Northern Kingdom’ or ‘China’. This marked a major intellectual transformation. For instance, what had long simply been ‘history’ now became ‘Chinese history’. The National History Textbook for Reformed Elementary Studies, a textbook created by reformers in the early twentieth century, makes these points clear in its introduction, where it states that Studies in the Occident [Thái Tây] place first importance on national history. All of the male and female students in each school are first taught their own nation’s history . . . Studies in our nation just stick stubbornly to the rotten and base Chinese [Chi Nà] writings. As for this nation’s [writings], they know nothing, as if they were in a fog. Second, reformist intellectuals placed the blame for this lack of concern for the nation on the fact that education in the past had focused on preparing students to take the civil service exam. For instance, a text published by the Đông Kinh Nghıa Thuc, a reformist school in Hanoi that ran from 1907 to 1908, stated that the students who studied for the civil service exam “buried their heads in Northern histories, and the famous people and great events of our fatherland were indifferently put to the side”. Or, as scholar-official Hoàng Cao Khải stated in 1914 in his Summary of Việt History, because students had studied ‘Northern histories’ to prepare for the exams, ‘none of the educated people in the kingdom knew about the race [chủng tộc] of our land’. 

    Third, reformist intellectuals then provided specific examples of the effect of this focus on studying for the exams. They did this by contrasting the knowledge that people had of Chinese historical individuals with the lack of knowledge that people had of Vietnamese historical figures. As the above text, published by the Đông Kinh Ngh˜ıa Thuc, stated, ‘If you ask someone about Han Gao[zu] or Zhuge [Liang], even a three-foot-tall youngster can respond with ease’. However, “If you ask about the achievements of Lê [Thái] Tổ or Trần [Hưng Đao], teachers and scholars can search but still not find sufficient information” Hoàng Cao Khải similarly lamented that people in the past who studied for the exams ‘knew about Han [Gao]zu and Tang [Taizong], but did not know that Đinh Tiên Hoàng and Lê Thái Tổ had served as sovereigns. They knew about Kongming [Zhuge Liang] and Di Renjie, but did not know that Tô Hiến Thành and Trần [Hưng Đao] had served as officials”. This unfortunate state of affairs, reformers argued, needed to change. Getting people to learn the history of their nation was the key way to do this. They, therefore, produced textbooks on the history of the nation with the declared aim of ‘imprinting’ the word ‘nation’ in people’s brains so that they would realize that they were citizens of a nation and thereby identify with the nation. As one such text stated in 1906, ‘When people reach the age of seven and enter primary schools, they should be made to learn the nation’s literature, and to intone the nation’s history. The same should be true for women, for this is how we can get the word, “nation,” imprinted in each person’s brain.’ The ideas that Vietnamese reformers were promoting were very similar to those of Westernizing Chinese intellectuals like Liang Qichao, and of the Japanese reformers from whom he learned. Further, from memoirs and historical accounts it is clear that intellectuals at this time read some of the ‘New Writings’ (Tân Thư), which were written at the turn of the twentieth century by Chinese reformers. However, it is relatively rare that specific texts are mentioned. Nonetheless, from the similarities between the writings of Chinese intellectuals like Liang Qichao and reformist Vietnamese intellectuals, such as the authors of the texts cited above, we can see that the ideas of Chinese reformers were either adopted in Vietnam or that the historical trajectories of these two societies were so similar that intellectuals in the two places responded to the changing times in very similar ways. Given, however, that we can often find similar ideas expressed by Chinese intellectuals earlier than their Vietnamese counterparts, it would appear that there was a flow of information from north to south during this period. For instance, in 1902, a few years before Vietnamese reformers called for a national history in the texts above, Liang Qichao had argued in an essay entitled ‘New Historiography’ that China likewise did not have a national history. He noted that although the Chinese had recorded historical information for centuries, this information had focused on imperial courts, rather than on the nation, and that, therefore, the Chinese did not think in nationalist terms. However, without a history of the nation, he argued, there would be no way for the people of the nation to unite. Liang Qichao, therefore, wanted historians to write a new type of history, which would take the nation as its main focus so that China could unite and be strong. However, as Xiaobing Tang has pointed out, when Liang Qichao provided examples of the form in which a new history could be written, he did so by narrating heroic biographies, thereby creating an ambiguity as to the importance of the individual hero versus society. At the time, discussion of heroes was widespread among Chinese intellectuals as there was a worry among Chinese reformers at the turn of the twentieth century that China was passive and did not have dynamic heroes like Western countries did. Many biographies of influential Westerners were produced that discussed their vitality and achievements. In 1902, for instance, Liang Qichao wrote biographies of Louis Kossuth (1802–1894), Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), Count Camillo di Cavour (1810–1861), and Madame Roland (1754–1793).57 He wrote about such people as positive examples for the Chinese to follow, but he was ambiguous about their ultimate role. For instance, on the question of whether heroes create the age or the age creates heroes, Liang argued in an 1899 work that the two phenomena were interconnected and played off each other.58 The ambiguities that are present in the writings of intellectuals like Liang Qichao are a reflection of the difficulties he faced in creating a new form of history (a national history) with new protagonists (national heroes) for a new audience (a national citizenry). Vietnamese reformers faced the same difficulties, and we can see this in their attempts to refashion Trần Hưng Đao from a loyal and filial general into a hero (anh hùng). To do this, reformers had to first introduce this idea of a hero and convince readers that such people had existed in the past. As they did this, they mixed together with old and new ideas. We can see this in two texts published by the Đông Kinh Nghia Thuc. One, entitled Biographies of the Southern Kingdom’s Great People (Nam Quốc vı nhân truyện), states in its preface in very traditional terms that, ‘When the potent and exquisite khí [Chinese, qi] of the mountains and rivers gathers for long, it eventually leaks forth, and thereupon magnificent and special people emerge.’ Then, reflecting some of the ideas that had been circulating in Chinese reformist writings, it states that in the past such ‘heroes and worthies have emerged and made the age’. Meanwhile, another text published by the Đông Kinh Ngh˜ıa Thu. c, The Southern Kingdom’s Great Matters (Nam quốc giai sự), notes in its preface that the neglect of national history had ‘led heroes to become buried’. Nonetheless, using three neologisms, it argues that for centuries there had been great people in the land who had ‘taken self-determination (tự chủ) as their creed (chữ ngh˜ıa), and patriotism (ái quốc) as their spirit’. Patriotism and self-determination were concepts that applied to the new age of nations that Vietnamese reformers wanted their land to enter. Loyalty and filial piety belonged to the age they wished to leave. As such, neither of these virtues was mentioned in the short biography of Trần Hưng Đao which appeared in the Biographies of the Southern Kingdom’s Great People. Instead, the text simply states that he was stately in appearance and surpassed others in intelligence and that he read widely and was well versed in both civil and military affairs. It then says that when the Yuan came to raid, Emperor Trần Thánh Tông stated to Trần Hưng Đa. o at some point during the Thiệu Bảo era (1279–1285 ce), ‘With the bandits’ strength like this, I can surrender.’ Trần Hưng Đa. o then replied, ‘First cut off my head, and then surrender.’ The emperor thereupon put Trần Hưng Đa. o in charge of the army and he defeated the Yuan at Va.n Kiếp. Then, in the second year of the Trùng Hưng era (1286 ce) the Yuan again came to invade, and the emperor summoned Trần Hưng Đa.o to ask about the strategy. This time Trần Hưng Đao said, "This year the bandits are not a worry". Information about conversations between Trần Hưng Đao and Emperor Trần Thánh Tông does exist in The Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đai Việt; however, prior to the twentieth-century literati had not cited this information in praising Trần Hưng Đao. This was a new development. It was also a selective reading of the sources. First, the conversation that this text states occurred during the Thiệu Bảo era is actually undated. It appears in The Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đai Việt in an entry for the year 1300. That was the year Trần Hưng Đao passed away, and after reporting his death, the text provides various pieces of information about his life, including this updated exchange with Trần Thánh Tông. Earlier in the text, however, there is a detailed record of a conversation between these two men. In particular, in 1286 Trần Thánh Tông asked Trần Hưng Đao what he thought of the enemy’s strength. At that time, Trần Hưng Đao responded that Our kingdom has been at peace for a long time. The people do not know about military matters. Previously when the Yuan came and raided, there were those who surrendered or fled. By relying on the potent awe of the imperial ancestors, Your Highness’s divine [perspicacity] and martial [awe] wiped clean the dust of the nomadic barbarians. If they come again, our troops are trained at fighting, while their army fears a distant campaign. They are also dejected by the defeats of Heng and Guan. They do not have the heart to fight. As I see it, they are sure to be defeated. Far more complex than the undated ‘first cut off my head’ statement, in this conversation Trần Hưng Đao predicted success based in part on the lack of morale among the enemy troops and noted that his own kingdom’s people were apt to surrender and flee. These were ideas that clearly were not appropriate for a national hero to express. It is understandable, then, why the information in the Biographies of the Southern Kingdom’s Great People took the form it did. At the same time, however, the same dilemma that Liang Qichao struggled with appeared here, too. Trần Hưng Đa. o was a national hero, but where was the nation? The National History Textbook for Reformed Elementary Studies (Cải lương mông hoc quốc sử giáo khoa thư), a text was published in the early twentieth century for the purpose of creating a national history, found a way to address this dilemma. Employing several neologisms, this work notes that the kingdom used to be an absolute monarchy (quân chủ chuyên chế) and that the people’s rights (dân quyền) were restricted. As a result, they could not participate in making decisions about matters concerning the kingdom or the army. However, during the period of the Trần Dynasty, the feeling of a ‘sovereign-citizen republic’ (quân dân cộng hòa) existed. When the Yuan attacked, the emperor called together elders from the people and consulted them about strategy; it was because of this that the people became determined to put up a strong resistance. The author then goes on to say that it is foolish to attribute the victory over the Mongols’ 50,000 troops to the achievements of someone like Trần Hưng Đao because he relied on the aspirations of the people. The mention here of consulting with elders refers to an episode recorded in The Complete Book of the Historical Records of Đai Việt for the year 1284. Aware that the Mongols were coming to attack, the emperor emeritus summoned elders from around the realm, dined them, and asked them about strategy. They all reportedly responded in unison, "Fight!’" Ngô Sı Liên made the following comments about this event: A raid by the Northern Barbarians is a great hardship for the kingdom. If the two emperors meet to plan, and the officials hold discussions, how can they not come up with a strategy for defense? What need is there to dine elders and ask them about strategy? It was probably that [Trần] Thánh Tông wanted to examine the sincerity of the lower people’s (ha dân) support and to get them to feel moved and riled up upon hearing the official pronouncement. The import of the ancients’ “taking care of the elderly and seeking [their] words” is present here. Ngô Sı Liên clearly did not think much of this episode. Nonetheless, he found justification for it in the ancient ritual text the Record of Rites (Liji), where a certain ritual is mentioned which is called either ‘taking care of the elderly and seeking [they are] words’ (yanglao qiyan) or simply the ‘taking care of the elderly ritual’ (Panglao li). This was a ritual in which the king would throw a feast for elders. The words that were sought do not appear to have been words of advice, but merely of approval. For a scholar-official like Ngô Sı Liên, this was appropriate as he likely saw no need for a monarch to seek advice from anyone other than his officials. To justify this episode during the Trần period, he, therefore, explained it as an instance in which the ruler simply sought pro forma words of approval rather than actual advice, as was the case with this ancient ritual. While Ngô S˜ı Liên, therefore, looked to antiquity to dismiss the importance of this historical event, the author of the National History Textbook for Reformed Elementary Studies reinterpreted it in order to give people in the present hope for the future. If the land had once been a "sovereign-citizen republic", then succeeding in the modern world by becoming a republic in the future was not inconceivable, and Trần Hưng Đao was enlisted to promote this and related causes. In 1914, for instance, Lê V˘an Phúc, Phan Kế Bính, and Pham V˘an Thu. produced a historical novel about Trần Hưng Đa. o with such purposes in mind. Their introduction contains the same lament that you find repeated in the writings of reformers in the early twentieth century, namely that although Vietnam had a long history, because of the educational system, people only knew about Chinese history. People thus did not know who the heroes (anh hùng) who fought against China (Tàu) were, or who had performed meritorious service for the citizens (quốc dân). It was now necessary, these authors argued, to forge a national soul (quốc hồn). To do this one needed to create a mechanism (máy móc) that would develop the people’s intellects and imprint the word ‘nation’ in their brains. This "mechanism" could take various forms. Creating national histories was one; another was to create stories for common people to listen to or to watch as plays. It was this second form that these three authors sought to create with this publication. This idea of a national soul was adapted from German and French Romantic nationalist ideas and was part of the new nationalist discourse in East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. Lê Van Phúc, Phan Kế Bính, and Pham Van Thu. saw a national soul for Vietnam in Trần Hưng Đao and his relationship with the people. Echoing the argument of the National History Textbook for Reformed Elementary Studies, they stated that while Trần Hưng Đao was a hero, his accomplishments were made possible only because he was one with the people. Just as a fish needs water, so did Trần Hưng Đao need the people’s support in order to succeed in defeating the Mongols. Lê Van Phúc, Phan Kế Bính, and Pham Van Thu. then developed this argument further by stating that during the period of the Trần Dynasty, people followed Buddhism and were thus more altruistic, daring, and patient. They were willing to “sacrifice themselves to save the world” (xả thân cứư thế). Further, the monarch and his officials interacted as equals, and much authority was given to local officials. This all made the soul of the nation strong. Unfortunately, the authors argued, history did not talk about these issues and this soul. Therefore, later generations of citizens only knew about Tran Hung Dao through his role in fighting ghosts and other ‘superstitious’ practices. 

Hero and deity 

    The early twentieth century was thus a seminal moment in the creation of Trần Hưng Đa.o as a national hero, for it was at that time that the concepts of both the nation and its heroes were first conceived. Trần Hưng Đa.o was imagined in new ways to fit these new concepts. In the process, values that had previously been associated with him were downplayed or even discarded. His loyalty to the monarch and his filial piety, for instance, were no longer of prime importance. It was also necessary to take him out of the worldview that saw ‘the South’ as a lesser component in a larger world and to place him at the forefront of an individual nation. There was thus no longer a need to liken him to Guo Ziyi or to envision him as furthering the efforts of Northern deities to spread Confucian values. His role now was to serve as the hero of the nation. That said, it still took a long time for Trần Hưng Dậo to fully become the hero of the nation that he is widely recognized as today. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the transformations in Trần Hưng Dao’s status as a hero that took place in the twentieth century, but clearly, such changes did take place, and it evidently took a long time for his image as a hero of the nation to become fully established. During the height of the colonial period in the 1920s and 1930s, it would appear that Trần Hưng Đao was only discussed to a limited degree. For instance, he was part of a history contest that the Saigon newspaper Morning Bell (Thần Chuong) held in 1929 to determine who the greatest person in Vietnamese history was, but he was presented as one among numerous alternatives for that title. During the 1940s, with the promotion of Vietnamese nationalism by the Vichy government in an effort to counter Japanese pan-Asian, there was likely an increase in the mention of his name, particularly given that Governor-General Jean Decoux visited his temple in Kiếp Ba. c. Although the reformers in the early twentieth century had been the first people in Vietnam to start thinking of heroes, in 1943 Hoa Bằng criticized them for only talking about Charlemagne and Alexander the Great. He contrasted their supposed lack of discussion of Vietnamese heroes to his own time, but in reality, such statements probably indicate that the creation and promotion of heroes had stalled in the intervening years, and were only then being discussed more freely. Finally, when Trần Trong Kim ruled over an ‘independent’ Vietnamese nation in the spring and summer of 1945, he had Paul Bert Street in Hue renamed Trần Hưng Dao Street, a sign that Trần Hưng Đa. o was finally taking a place of prominence. However, the division of Vietnam in the 1950s undoubtedly led to different interpretations of Trần Hưng Dậo’s heroic role. Benoît de Tréglodé has written a wonderful volume on the use of heroes by the Communists in the North, but there is much more that can be said about the specific topic of Trần Hưng Đao as a hero, and how he was represented in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. An article published in 1956 in the North with the awkward title of ‘Oppose the worship of individuals, but it is necessary to recognize the role of individuals in history, for instance, was written shortly after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, and its author engaged in a complex line of argumentation to defend the reverence of Trần Hưng Đa o as a national hero in light of Krushchev’s statements. Intellectuals in the South, meanwhile, did not have to respond to the same ideological changes as their counterparts in the North. How they represented Trần Hưng Đa. o and what role he played in the South are issues that deserve attention. Another topic that deserves attention is when and how the term ‘hero of the nation’ (anh hùng dân tộc) came to be used. The term for ‘nation’ (dân tộc) which is used today in an expression like ‘hero of the nation’ is not the same as the term which was used at the turn of the twentieth century (quốc gia). Dân tộc has connotations of both a political nation-state as well as an ethnic nationality, whereas quốc gia has the political sense but less of the connotation of a nationality. How these terms were used over the course of the twentieth century and how ideas about Trần Hưng Đao changed with the changing usage of these terms are topics that remain unexamined. Also, while Pha.m Qu`ynh Phương has done a wonderful job of examining the recent resurgence of interest in Trần Hưng Dậo’s cult, his status as a potent deity was discussed by intellectuals during the twentieth century, and these views also deserve further attention. In 1942, for instance, an intellectual by the name of Nguyễn Duy Tinh visited Trần Hưng Dậo’s shrine in Kiếp Bac and was shocked to find throngs of people there engaging in ‘superstitious’ practices and thinking nothing of Trần Hưng Dao’s status as a hero. One wonders how Trần Hưng Đao’s continued status as a deity was treated throughout the twentieth century and ultimately silenced for several decades until the 1990s. Finally, today Trần Hưng Đa.o has a prominent position in the Cult of the Mothers (Đao Mẫu), a cult dedicated to certain female deities. This cult has been written about extensively by Ngô Đức Thinh, and a study of its main deity has recently been published by Olga Dror. Neither of these scholars, however, have documented Trần Hưng Đao’s association with this cult prior to the twentieth century, nor have either of them consulted spirit writing texts produced in the early twentieth century. At that time, these female deities also revealed messages through spirit writing, but their texts did not mention Trần Hưng Đao, and in the texts that he revealed through spirit writing, Trần Hưng Đao did not mention the Cult of the Mothers. The fact that these deities were both revealing messages at that time, however, suggests that it may have been through the spirit writing phenomenon in the early twentieth century that someone brought these deities together. Nonetheless, this is a topic that requires further research. So, while today Trần Hưng Đao is a hero and a deity, his history is much more complex. In examining what literati thought and wrote about him in the past, and in tracing how those ideas were abandoned when reformist intellectuals in the early twentieth century sought to create national heroes, we can gain a sense of how modern nationalist ideas emerged in Vietnam. While those ideas were undoubtedly contested and modified over the course of the twentieth century, the direction that this nationalist discourse would take was set in the early years of the twentieth century. Those were seminal years in the transformation of the Vietnamese worldview, and this study of Trần Hưng Đao’s passage through that period hopefully makes that point clear.