Reconceptualizing Southern Vietnamese History from the 15th to the 18th Centuries: Competition along the Coasts from Guangdong to Cambodia.

This study is a preliminary step toward a more systematic analysis of the standard dynastic histories and other sources, with a focus on the region called Cochinchina and its connections with nearby territories. I note that Champa remained a viable political entity after 1471 and the Mạc Dynasty controlled extensive parts of the southern territories, even after their defeat in Đông Kinh c. 1596. Thus, control of the south by Nguyễn rulers was a gradual and complex affair, not to be reduced to family rivalries and not decisively inaugurated in 1558. Political and economic concern with the coast was no more important than control over production centers in the highland interior. These findings help refute the “Southern Push” model of Vietnamese expansion, indicating that it was not a thousand-year long process, did not involve the steady displacement of indigenous peoples, and did not focus exclusively on agrarian resources. There was not a purely north-south trajectory for political integration, and control of east-west rivers connecting the coast and the middle Mekong was no less important than control of the coast itself. Although historians have long focused on key dates and events in the dynastic chronicles, many of these are less obvious watersheds than they recognize.Ph.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89821/1/brianz_1.pd

Monsoon extremes and society over the past millennium on mainland Southeast Asia

The early 21st century has seen vigorous scientific interest in the Asian monsoon and significant development of paleo-proxies of monsoon strength. These include the Monsoon Asian Drought Atlas – a 700-year, gridded reconstruction of hydroclimate derived from 327 tree ring records – and several long speleothem records from China and India. Similar progress has been made on the study of monsoon climate dynamics through re-analysis data products and General Circulation Model diagnostics. The story has emerged of a variable monsoon over the latter Holocene, with extended droughts and anomalously wet episodes that occasionally and profoundly influenced the course of human history. We focus on Southeast Asia where an anomalous period of unstable climate coincided with the demise of the capital of the Khmer Empire at Angkor between the 14th and the 16th centuries, and we suggest that protracted periods of drought and deluge rain events, the latter of which damaged Angkor's extensive water management systems, may have been a significant factor in the subsequent transfer of the political capital away from Angkor. The late 16th and early 17th century experienced climate instability and the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China under a period of drought, while Tonkin experienced floods and droughts throughout the 17th century. The 18th century was a period of great turmoil across Southeast Asia, when all of the region's polities saw great unrest and rapid realignment during one of the most extended periods of drought of the past millennium. New paleo-proxy records and the incorporation of historical documentation will improve future analyses of the interaction between climate extremes, social behavior and the collapse or disruption of regional societies, a subject of increasing concern given the uncertainties surrounding projections for future climate

Discrete seasonal hydroclimate reconstructions over northern Vietnam for the past three and a half centuries

We present a 350-year hydroclimatic year (HY) index for northern Vietnam derived from three discrete seasonal reconstructions from tree rings: an index of autumn rainfall from the earlywood widths of Chinese Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga sinensis), the first such record from this species, and two nearby published Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions from cypress (Fokienia hodginsii) tree rings for spring and summer, respectively. Autumn rainfall over the study region constitutes only around 9% of the annual total, but its variability is strongly linked to the strength of the atmospheric gradient over Asia during the transition from the boreal summer to winter monsoons. Deficit or surplus of autumn rainfall enhances or mitigates, respectively, the impact of the annual winter dry season on trees growing on porous karst hillsides. The most protracted HY drought (dry across all seasons) occurred at the turn of the twentieth century at a time of relative quiet, but a mid-to-late eighteenth century multi-year HY drought coincided with a period of great societal turmoil across mainland Southeast Asia and the Tay Son Rebellion in northern Vietnam. A mid-nineteenth century uprising accompanied by a smallpox epidemic, crop failure and famine, occurred during the worst autumn drought of the past two and a half centuries but only moderate drought in spring and summer. The “Great Vietnamese Famine” of the mid-twentieth century was dry only in autumn, with a wet spring and an average summer

Cambodia's development strategy

Master of ArtsCenter for Southeast Asian StudiesUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149067/1/013854979.pd