Welcome back everyone to another CHP episode, number 197 this time, part one in a multi-part series in which I'm going to attempt to offer you another patented CHP overview of this long and well often adversarial

relationship but as history goes it's a good one in this effort of mine to encapsulate the milestones and then some of the history of China-Vietnam relations,

I'd also like to seize on the opportunity while I have it to also give you a brief and hopefully not too complicated general survey of Vietnamese history.

It took me something like 27 episodes to do that cursory

overview of Chinese imperial history, shiataching, and I'm sure it would take about the

same amount of time to cover Vietnam stem to stern.

So I hope any Vietnamese listening or anyone already expert on this subject please cut me

a little slack.

I'm guessing most of you haven't delved too deep in the Vietnam history.

After digesting this little de Guustacion, I'm going to put together for you, if you'd like, you can do your own personal

deep dive.

My fellow Americanes, well, sometimes our understanding of Vietnamese history tends to start only at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

So at least, let me disabuse anyone here of that notion, it actually goes back quite a lot further than that. And being the China History

podcast, I wanted to present Vietnamese history through the lens of China relations.

As tempting as it is, I don't want to turn this into a series where I try and

scrunch 3,000 years of Vietnam history into a four or five-part series.

Hope you don't mind that I've left out great swaths of

Vietnam history. There certainly are a lot of books written on the subject. My two main sources and I heartily

recommend them both as superb all-in-one general histories of Vietnam, in English

anyway.

Cornell University Professor of Vietnamese Studies, Keith Taylor, a history of the Vietnamese,

Cambridge University Press, that one came out in 2013.

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