October 1887: French Indochina and Vietnam's Amazing Literacy Rates

Look at these crazy stats! These are for youngsters;
they taper off a few percentage
points as age increases.

In October of 1887, France formally founded French Indochina, and with it solidified a path which would result in modern Vietnamese rates that are through the roof.

(beat)

Wait, really?

Yes! But let's give credit where it's due: this story spans much more, from French Jesuit missionaries to a 8,000 word trilingual dictionary to a very recent (historically speaking) adoption of the entire written Vietnamese language.

Today's script is called Quoc Ngu, or "National Language," and is the national script of Vietnam. It's most interesting characteristic, beyond the tones inherited from it's Chinese history, are that it is in Roman characters and is pronounced phonetically! This makes it different in appearance from most other SE Asian languages, which generally looks like beautiful scribbling.

However, below the makeover it got in the 17th and 19th centuries, the grammar remains very similar to others in the regional language family (and the grammar is so easy it's almost comical, which probably also helps literacy).

In addition, literacy rates in Modern Vietnam are high. Like, really high. Per UNICEF's most recent data (2013), total adult literacy rate, 2008-2012, lies at a cool 93.4%. For youth it climbs even higher - 96.7% of Vietnamese females 18-25 are literate, and the males figure rests at 97.5%. These are STUNNING figures, and, if accurate (I'm not sure if that data was collected in-house by UNICEF or outsourced), are a serious achievement. We'll learn more about how these great literacy rates run up against the State Party and their media restrictions much later in this series, so keep these in the back of your mind.

To put this in perspective, America has an ongoing literacy crisis (as does much of the world, developed or no). 14% of American adults can't read. A ridiculous 19% of high school graduates cannot read. What. the. f*ck. (Yes, the problem is definitely unions, and not the fact that poverty shrinks your brain from birth. *eyeroll*) These numbers are from a US Department of Education paper published in 2013. If that doesn't break your brain, I don't know what will.

Ok, but backing away from the politics and back to the French (if I had a nickel)...

192 A.D.: The Chams in the Land Before Vietnam

In my last post we heard a bedtime story about the origins of the Vietnamese people (TL;DR: Viets are spawn of a fairy and a dragon, who then got an amicable divorce and each took half the kids back to their parents' homes). This occurred in one of the earliest Vietnamese kingdoms, Dai Viet, which covered the area of current North Vietnam/South China.

Fast forward about 1,500 years and we encounter the Sa Huynh peoples, the forebears of the more culturally developed Chams. Scholars believe they were Malayo-Polynesian-speaking seafarers from Borneo, and this tendency to dominate the seas never completely left them as they founded what would become one of the regions' powerhouse governments, complete with major religions and early ideas of statecraft imported from the Indians. It was initially centered on the modern central Vietnam coast around Da Nang, although the sea unquestionably was their true dominion.

The Sa Huynh thrived and expanded from roughly 1,000 B.C. to the 2nd Century A.D., which is when we find the Cham peoples' distinctive culture flowering. Cham artifacts and ruins have been found on most of the western islands of the South China Sea (at that time known as the Cham Sea, because they know who's in charge), including the Sprately and Paracel islands, which we'll learn a bit more about much, much later in this series.

This is a very unique Champa sculpture that represents the nine gods (navagraha) associating planets to other deities, and was once worshipped. It's linked strongly to the Indian traditions of cosmology, and very common in India. Similar remnants have been found among the ancient Cambodian Khmer art. Taken at the HCMC History Museum of Vietnam.

Hinduism was imported early on in the kingdom's history from Indian merchants, and was followed later by Islam. Adherents of both religions also revered Cham kings and deities, as well as their ancestors, much like virtually all current-day Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese) do.