Vietnam

Although its importance was not always recognized, trade and commerce always formed an integral part of Vietnam's economic history, sometimes even a matter of central concern, right from the country's earliest history. From the Han to Tang dynasties (111 b.c.e.–939 c.e.), Jiaozhou (northern Vietnam) was China's major port, attracting a large share of the maritime commerce of the South China Sea. This continued after Viet independence from China in the tenth century.

TRADE OF THE PREMODERN PERIOD

Between the late eleventh and the fourteenth centuries the Tonkin Gulf was a bustling trading zone linking western Hainan, the Guangxi coast, and Champa. An aroma called eaglewood was one of the major commodities traded between Viet and Cham merchants in Dai Viet's main port of Van Don. Conveniently located between Hainan and Qinzhou, Van Don attracted Chinese, Cham, and Muslim merchants.

Ceramics became one of Dai Viet's main trading items by the fourteenth century. The Cham/Muslim market drove production, and the spectacular Chu Dau blue-and-white wares were exported as far away as Persia, Egypt, and Turkey. Glazed tiles were also made for the eastern Javanese Majapahit court. Glass beads found in Vietnamese wares recovered in shipwrecks further reveal Dai Viet's participation in the secondary trading systems of Southeast Asia.

Neighboring Champa was the lynchpin connecting Dai Viet ceramics with the markets of island Southeast Asia and beyond, so the 1471 attack on Champa by the Viet king Le Thanh Ton (1460–1497) effectively destroyed the most important stimulus for trade in the Tonkin Gulf as it severed the link between this region and the archipelago. Apart from the continuing Chinese trade, overseas commerce languished in northern Vietnam until the need for munitions during the seventeenth civil war encouraged another port, Pho Hien, where Europeans also traded. The Chinese ships visiting Pho Hien were predominantly from Ningbo, a major port of the Yangtze River delta, where the key centers of mass print production were located. Books, therefore, were an important commodity. Ironically, the commerce so despised by literati was actually essential to the material foundation of Vietnamese Confucian culture. Overland trade in salt, cattle, horses, and weapons occurred with southwestern China and mainland Southeast Asia, and was often central to Trinh (north) and Nguyen (south) economies.

The central focus of Viet overseas trade in the Age of Commence (1450–1680) was in present-day central and southern Vietnam, the area known as Cochinchina (Dang Trong). It built upon the centuries-old commercial tradition of Champa, a major player in Southeast Asian trade. The civil war between the northern and southern regimes (1627–1672) provided the latter with a lucky conjunction between internal political change and external economic development, driven by overseas trade. In the seventeenth century Cochinchina was Japan's principal trading partner and a crucial link connecting Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian trade.

Although Hoi An (Faifo) remained the main port, by the early eighteenth century Chinese-settled Bien Hoa and My Tho in the Mekong Delta also became prosperous junk ports. The eminent player, however, was Cancao (modern Hatien), a semi-independent kingdom under the Cantonese Mac family. It linked the Canton trade with Mekong Delta rice and the tin trade and cash crops of the Gulf of Siam and Malay Peninsula. This string of ports attracted 85 percent of the Canton junk trade from the late 1750s until the rise of Bangkok in the 1770s. In the early nineteenth century maritime trade by Vietnamese vessels with Southeast Asian ports, especially Singapore, also grew remarkably.

THE MODERN PERIOD

Rice was the heart of overseas trade, and the foundation of Saigon. The trade was predominantly Chinese, from financing of cultivation to exporting the product. For its first twenty years French Cochinchina (1862–1954) enjoyed prosperous free trade, with imports rising (from 5 to 27 million tons between 1867 and 1885) and rice exports growing tenfold (1860–1900). French irrigation works accelerated Mekong Delta rice cultivation, and the upgraded port of Saigon facilitated its export. From 1910, the northern port of Haiphong also expanded, as the Yunnan railway saw Chinese tin exported from there, along with Tonkinese coal.

Certain French policies badly affected Vietnamese trade with its local region. Colonial control destroyed the emerging Vietnamese shipping industry. The tariff of 1892 penalized Asian economic ties in favor of the French Empire. Tying the fluctuating silver piaster in 1930 to the gold-based French franc further isolated Vietnam from Asian trading partners. Rice exports also suffered badly from the 1928 tariffs and currency policy, which, by emphasizing French links, made Vietnamese rice too expensive for regional competition. The rice trade had no time to recover from World War II before the continuing first and second Indochina Wars (1946–1975) hit production, forcing both North and South Vietnam to import basic foodstuffs. In other respects, war stimulated trade: Vietnamese communists maintained the South China Sea trade to Hong Kong and Macao, where cinnamon and tin were traded for arms and medicines.

VIETNAM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Thanks largely to the Vietnamese government's "renovation" (doi moi) policy, Vietnam has become a major international exporter of rice and coffee. In 2004 Vietnam joined Thailand and India as the top three rice exporters in the global market. As the second-largest producer of robusta coffee, Vietnam was partly blamed for overproduction that led to the 2001 crash in world coffee prices. Vietnam also exports coal, textiles, footwear, seafood, and oil. Imports, however, are growing more rapidly than exports, contrary to Vietnam's traditional trade pattern: although exports doubled from U.S.$9.18 billion in 1997 to U.S.$19.9 billion in 2003, imports, led by cars, building materials, and fuel, jumped from U.S.$11.59 billion to U.S.$25 billion. With the United States–Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement ratified in 2001, Vietnam is expected to join the World Trade Organization in the near future. At the regional level, since joining the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1995, Vietnam's exports to ASEAN countries have grown by nearly 25 percent per annum. As a member of the ASEAN Free Trade Area, Vietnam is expected to reduce its tariffs to less than 5 percent by 2006.

SEE ALSO China; Coffee; Empire, French; Empire, Japanese; Empire, Ming; Empire, Qing; Ethnic Groups, Cantonese; Ethnic Groups, Fujianese; Imperialism; Rhodes, Alexandre De;Rice;Rubber;Socialism and Communism;South China Sea;Russia;Tribute System;United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Nola, and Li, Tana, eds. Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Goscha, Christopher. "The Maritime Nature of the Wars for Vietnam (1945–75)." Fourth Triennial Vietnam Symposium, Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University, April 11–13, 2002.

Ishii, Yoneo, ed. The Junk Trade from Southeast Asia: Translations from the Tosen Fusetsu-gaki, 1674–1723. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1998. Also Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998.

Li, Tana. The Nguyê~n Cochinchina. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1998.

Momoki, Shiro. "Dai Viet and the South China Sea Trade from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century. Crossroads 12, no. 1 (1998): 1–34.

Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vols. 1 and 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, 1993.

Reid, Anthony, ed. The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies. London and New York: Macmillan, 1997.

Thompson, Virginia. French Indo-China, London: Allen and Unwin, 1937.

Li Tana