To read Vietnam's own script, you first had to master Chinese
For centuries Vietnamese was written in chữ Nôm, a script that adapted Chinese characters and invented thousands more. The catch was that you needed to know written Chinese first, which fewer than five percent of people did. Yet almost every village had someone who could read Nôm poetry aloud to everyone else.
Chinese characters arrived with Han rule, which began when the Han took the kingdom of Nanyue in 111 BC. Even after independence, won at the Battle of Bạch Đằng in 938, the state adopted Literary Chinese for official use in 1010, and formal documents stayed in it until the early 20th century. To write their own spoken language, scholars borrowed the structural logic of Chinese characters, using some for their sound, some for their meaning, and building new compounds that combined the two.
Early traces are small. A posthumous title for the late 8th-century hero Phùng Hưng uses two characters that make no sense in Chinese and seem to spell a Vietnamese phrase phonetically. A stele originally carved in 1209 records 21 personal and village names in an early form of Nôm. In 1282 the justice minister Nguyễn Thuyên reportedly composed a verse incantation in Vietnamese and threw it into the Red River to drive off a crocodile, often called the first literary writing in the language.
The script's fortunes followed politics. The Hồ dynasty made Nôm official from 1400 to 1407, but the Ming occupation that followed destroyed printing blocks and texts, which is why nearly all surviving Nôm writing is later. Under the Lê dynasty it became a vehicle for social protest and was banned in 1663, 1718 and 1760. The Tây Sơn restored it for government and exams, and the Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng then prohibited it in government again.
Its literary peak came in the 19th century, when Hồ Xuân Hương wrote her poems and Nguyễn Du produced The Tale of Kiều. It also dominated Vietnamese Catholic writing until late in that century. But the script was complex and hard to learn, and from the 1920s the Latin-based alphabet, first recorded in the 17th century in the work of Portuguese Jesuits, took over. Today Nôm survives in liturgy and scholarship, centred on Hanoi's Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies.
Source: Chữ Nôm
