Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

But things began to fall apart for the Nguyễn regime as French imperialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century began to encroach on the Vietnamese state, especially following the Sino-French War of 1884–1885, which was partially fought on Vietnamese soil. The writings in both Vietnamese and literary Sinitic of the great nineteenth-century scholar Nguyễn Khuyến 阮勝 (a.k.a. Nguyễn Thắng) (1835–1909), including some of his Yijing-based poetry,⁶⁹ reveal a deep sense of despair in the face of French colonial rule.

For many Vietnamese intellectuals, the challenge of Western imperialism provoked reform efforts—a process that was occurring simultaneously in China, Japan, and Korea, for similar reasons.⁷⁰ And, as in these other parts of the Sinosphere, the Yijing emerged as a potentially useful instrument for promoting change. Phan Bội Châu 潘佩珠 (1867–1940), for example, a novelist and a champion of the “new learning” (Tân hội 新學) movement in Vietnam, stressed the importance of applying Chinese classical wisdom to promote modern reforms in his Dịch học chú giải 易學注解 (An annotated explanation of the Changes).

Another such person was Lê Văn Ngữ 黎文敔 (b. 1859), a scholar who had failed the civil service examinations and who traveled to Europe for three months in 1900 and came back radicalized.⁷¹ Lê considered himself to be a “wild scholar”—a maverick who dared to criticize Zhu Xi and other exponents of “orthodox studies” in Vietnam—but he was also critical of Han and Tang scholarship on the Changes and had no use for post-Song scholarship on the classic at all. In this sense, he was very much like Korea’s Chŏng Yagyong (Tasan), who became highly critical of almost all major Chinese commentaries on the Yijing, and who was especially critical of Zheng Xuan and Wang Bi—two Chinese intellectuals who had virtually nothing in common except the hostility of Lê and Tasan.

In the preface to one of Lê’s most famous writings, the Chu dịch cứu nguyên 周易究原 (An investigation into the origins of the Changes) (1916), he tells us: “Born thousands of years [after the sages] and having witnessed the decline of Changes scholarship and the rise of heretical