The Traditional Boats of Vietnam, an Overview

Abstract

This paper addresses the material boat culture of Vietnam both in its current context and more specifically through an assessment of how the boats of Vietnam have been studied in the past. It presents a comprehensive summary of past publications describing the construction, use and variety of boats in the region, from the earliest volumes to modern research projects, including the work of the US military. It highlights the rich diversity of construction approaches and boat-types that are still built and used, and demonstrates the need for further field research to record the fast-disappearing traditional boats of Vietnam.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Boats of Central Vietnam

“…This in turn can help to address continuity and change. This is mostly feasible from the early 1800s up to the present, since there is a consistent record of studies on traditional boats and nautical technology of Vietnam since that time to the present day (Pham et al 2010). Archival references can also complete the chronology (see below).…”

“…Every harbour had its own characteristic fleet and specific boat types. The past diversity of Vietnam's nautical traditions is well attested in nineteenth and twenieth centuries traditional boat studies (for an overview of the literature, see Pham et al 2010), in the European archives formed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and it somehow just survives in the present day. Through the analysis of these written records and of ethnographic research conducted by the author between 2009 and 2014, over 60 types of boat were catalogued and identified.…”

“…Maritime material culture is a subject seldom addressed in Vietnamese studies, despite the growing literature on maritime trade. Important studies from the 1940s, the American Blue Books (Dalby et al 1962, Westerman et al 1967, and a few subsequent articles have described boats and their nautical technology (Pham et al 2010), but these belong to the field of nautical studies alone or to "traditional boat studies" (Ransley 2011: 881). These studies do not address the boat in its entirety.…”