Vietnam, the mysterious Southeast Asian country, has a history of Chinese characters dating back more than 1,800 years. As a central tool for political, academic and cultural exchange, it has deeply penetrated all areas of Vietnamese society and has had a profound impact on it.
However, in the late 19th century, French colonists invaded Vietnam and forcibly promoted the Latin alphabet in an attempt to cut Vietnam off from the world of Chinese characters. This battle, dubbed the "Cultural Offensive", plunged the Vietnamese people into a painful choice.
An elderly Vietnamese man recalled that when he was a child, his grandfather always held a thick book filled with characters he couldn't read, which was a classic of Vietnamese history written in Chinese characters.
Every time I read it, the old man has to sigh: Today's children can't understand these anymore......Indeed, in 1945, Vietnam officially announced the abolition of Chinese character education, and Chinese characters withdrew from the stage of Vietnamese history.
Thousands of years of history became taboo overnight, and the cultural memory of generations was eclipsed. This was a major turning point in Vietnam's modern history, and it also forced future generations to face a series of questions: What is the tragic price of the abolition?
What kind of changes has the disappearance of Chinese characters brought to Vietnamese society?
In 111 BC, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty destroyed the Kingdom of Nanyue and incorporated northern Vietnam into the territory of the Han Dynasty. For more than 1,000 years, Vietnam became a vassal state under Chinese rule.
During this long history, Chinese culture has profoundly influenced all aspects of Vietnamese society with the introduction of Chinese characters. Chinese characters became the official writing system used by the Vietnamese royal family and scholars.
Through the study of the Chinese language, Vietnamese scholars cultivated virtue and learned the way of governing the country. In their eyes, Chinese characters are a symbol of loftiness and a passport to becoming an elite member of society.
Over the centuries, Vietnamese society has developed a knowledge and value system centered on Chinese characters.
However, the ambitions of the colonizers became apparent in 1858. The French colonial army invaded Vietnam and began to encroach on this ancient eastern country.
Not only did they destroy wealth and depopulate the population, but they also tried to cut Vietnam off from the world of Chinese characters through script reform. The colonizers threatened the people with fines, curses, etc., and forced them to use the Latin alphabet.
At the same time as Latinization, Sinology academies were forced to close, traditional imperial examinations were disqualified, and the legitimacy of professions such as Chinese medicine and Chinese education was questioned.
The aim of this series of initiatives was to sever Vietnam's ties with the world of Chinese characters and make it completely subjugated intellectually and spiritually to Western colonial rule.
Despite the high-handed measures adopted by the French colonialists, the Vietnamese people still strongly resisted the reform of the written language.
For them, abandoning Chinese characters is tantamount to cutting off the historical context of national culture. However, at the same time as this resistance, Vietnam's cultural chauvinist elite became the driving force behind the reform of the written language.
These Vietnamese** tried to convince the people that learning the Latin alphabet was a surefire way to modern civilization.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the old system collapsed, the process of writing reform was accelerated by the foreign slave forces. Overnight, the millennium foundation shifted, and in 1945, Vietnam** announced the abolition of Chinese characters and their education, which completely stopped the use of Chinese characters in Vietnam.
The traditional Chinese imperial examination was also abolished after 1951, and batches of ancient books containing the blood of Sinology were abandoned.
In just a few years, Vietnamese society was cut off from its ancient civilization.
This change has had a profound impact on the cultural identity of the Vietnamese people. The colonizers' written strategy was cunning and cruel, making this nation face painful choices again and again in the process of modernization.
The wheel of history has never stopped, and Vietnamese society has also experienced the pain of "vaporizing gold and running water lead" in the changes of modern times.
The withdrawal of Chinese characters has broken the threads that have existed for thousands of years, hurting the cultural foundation of this nation.