Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia [book review]

As explored in several recent studies, the regions of modern-day China and Vietnam have been engaged in a long and complicated relationship. In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia, Kathlene Baldanza skillfully discusses how internal Vietnamese political changes accompanied the thirteenth- through sixteenth-century transformations in Sino-Vietnamese relations, illustrated in this study with literary examples by the relationship’s chroniclers. Baldanza has written what she describes as an overview of late imperial “Sino-Vietnamese history” in which she captures the dynamic nature of this interregional engagement from the era of Mongol invasion to the cessation of conflict in the Trinh-Nguyen rivalry (10). The author’s focus on intellectual portraits of Vietnamese and Chinese scholars closely associated with changes along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier provides a novel, well-researched approach to an important topic