Việt Nam literally places the Viet people in the south
Vietnam, a Socialist Republic of about 331,000 square kilometres and over 102 million people, is the world’s sixteenth-most populous country and one of two communist states in Southeast Asia. Paleolithic settlement preceded Red River Delta states in the first millennium BCE; Han rule lasted from 111 BCE until a local dynasty emerged in 939.
The twentieth century brought French reconquest after the Second World War, French defeat in 1954, Cold War partition and later wars with Cambodia and China. A planned economy and a Western embargo left deep damage until reforms from 1986, similar to China’s, steered the country toward a socialist-oriented market economy.
Read in Vietnamese word order, Việt Nam means the Viet of the south; in classical Chinese order it can also mean south of the Viet. The Viet element, Yue in Chinese, was first written with a character for an axe in Shang oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions around 1200 BC, naming a people north-west of the Shang. It later labelled the Yangyue of the middle Yangtze in the eighth century BC, the State of Yue on the lower Yangtze between the seventh and fourth centuries BC, and from the third century BC the non-Chinese peoples of southern China and northern Vietnam, such as the Lạc Việt.
A reversed form, Nam Việt or Nanyue, is documented in the second century BC. Việt Nam itself first appears in the sixteenth-century prophetic poem Sấm Trạng Trình and on a dozen steles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including one from 1558 at Hải Phòng’s Bao Lam Pagoda.
When Nguyễn Phúc Ánh founded the Nguyễn dynasty in 1802 as Emperor Gia Long, he asked the Qing Jiaqing Emperor to recognise him as king of Nam Việt. Jiaqing refused, because that name recalled Zhao Tuo’s ancient Nanyue, which had included Guangdong and Guangxi, and granted Việt Nam instead.
Source: Vietnam
