An updated map of the Nguyễn Dynasty following contact with the French.
<span lang="en">Anonymous</span><span style="display:none">Unknown author</span>
<ul><li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.blog/vietnam-mapped/">VIETNAM MAPPED. - liamkelley. - April 13, 2012. - No Comments</a>. (<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/">Lê Minh Khải's SEAsian History Blog</a>).</li></ul><ul><li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/bqdd.gif">The story of how Vietnam came to be “mapped” has yet to be told, but there is plenty of material to determine how this happened. - What is clear is that ideas about mapping in Vietnam gradually started to conform to Western standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was just looking at a work called the Bản quốc dư đồ. This map is undated, and there is no information about who created it, but I would argue that it was probably created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.</a>. (<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/">Lê Minh Khải's SEAsian History Blog</a>).</li></ul><ul><li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/sea.gif">Prior to the 20th century, concepts of borders and the control of territory were more vague in Asia than they were in the West. It is only through contact with the West that this changed. The classic academic treatment of this topic is Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped, which demonstrates how Siamese elites only came to view their land as a clearly-defined territory and to map it (in the Western sense) after the Siamese were forced to defend their kingdom from the threat of Western conquest. - The Siamese learned to “map Siam” in a Western way in order to demonstrate where the territorial boundaries of the kingdom were (as these were issues which the Siamese had not bothered with before) so that the British and French could be kept at a distance.</a>. (<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/">Lê Minh Khải's SEAsian History Blog</a>).</li></ul><ul><li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/bqtd3.gif">Also, on this map Vietnam is referred to as “Vietnam, that is, An Nam.” That terminology strikes me as post-French contact. If it was a map which predated French contact then I think it should say Đại Nam or Thiên Nam. Also, it has Jianpusai (柬埔塞, how do we write this in quốc ngữ?) rather than Cao Miên (高棉) for Cambodia. That is also a more modern term. (Did Vietnamese ever use it much?). - The following image is also interesting. It is a map of the “entire kingdom.” It is not how Westerners arrange maps. In this map the north is to the right and the south is to the left. However, it is rare to find a map of the entire kingdom in pre-twentieth-century Vietnamese geographies. And I do not know of any traditional geography which places the kingdom in the larger region like the image above does.</a>. (<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/">Lê Minh Khải's SEAsian History Blog</a>).</li></ul>