Li Tana - A Maritime Vietnam

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Join us at Asia Bookroom on Saturday the 22nd of June at 3.00pm, when author Dr Li Tana will be in conversation with Professor Anthony Reid about her lifetime work:

A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century.

Despite its 3,000 kilometre coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea.

This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam's early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese sources, Li Tana reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam's past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.

Dr Li Tana obtained her BA from Peking University and PhD from ANU (1989-1992). The thesis led to her monograph The Nguyen Cochinchina, Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. She taught in Wollongong University and ANU. Her edited books include Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, and The Tongking Gulf through History. At this book launch she will discuss her lifetime work A Maritime Vietnam with her colleague, Anthony Reid.

Professor Anthony Reid, was progressively Fellow, Senior Fellow and Professor in Southeast Asian History of the ANU between 1970-99. Tony retired early to become first Director of Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA 1999-2002 and then founding Director of the Asia Research Institute at NUS in Singapore, 2002-7. His most recent work is A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (2015) and a novel Mataram (2018).