RESEARCH ARTICLE Sinology in Vietnam Liam C. Kelley Q1 * Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei *Corresponding author. Email: liam.kelley@ubd.edu.bn (Received 25 November 2021; revised 3 June 2022; accepted 20 June 2022) Abstract A form of Sinology emerged in Vietnam in the early twentieth century during the period of colonial rule as Western learning came to replace the traditional curriculum of the Confucian classics. At first, scholars sought to preserve traditional learning by translating Confucian and Buddhist texts into the Vietnamese vernacular. Then in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars produced works on Chinese history, philosophy, and literature that engaged with the works of modern scholars from China and the West. The development of this body of Sinological scholarship was then disrupted by periods of revolution and war. This article traces the development of Sinology in Vietnam through these periods up to the present. Keywords: Sinology; Vietnamese Sinology; Global Sinology; Vietnamese history Sinology in Vietnam is a difficult topic to address. On the one hand, one could argue that there is little or no Sinology in Vietnam in that there are very few Vietnamese scholars who produce knowledge about China for the sake of educating others about China. At the same time, one could also argue that Sinology is very deeply rooted in Vietnam, in that there are countless aspects of Vietnamese society, culture, and history that cannot be explained without knowledge of and reference to something Sinitic, and many scholars in Vietnam possess such knowledge. This odd position that Sinology occupies in Vietnam today, as a body of knowledge that both does and does not exist, is the result of a century of intellectual developments and transformations which I will trace and examine in this article. In the nineteenth century, Vietnamese society was firmly situated within the larger world of Sinitic learning. Literary Sinitic was the main language of written communi- cation, and education focused on the Confucian classics and other Sinitic texts. Then, in the early twentieth century, with Vietnam under French colonial rule, traditionally trained Vietnamese intellectuals turned to Chinese and Japanese reformers to learn about the West. In the process, they came to learn about nationalism, and they started to view the texts that they had long studied as no longer simply the Confucian classics, but as the “Chinese” Confucian classics. By the 1920s, as the study of Western knowl- edge came to be seen as more important than the study of traditional knowledge, or what now came to be referred to as “Han learning” (Hán học 漢學), and as the Vietnamese vernacular came to replace Literary Sinitic as the preferred language of © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press Journal of Chinese History (2022), 1–30 doi:10.1017/jch.2022.29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49