Vietnam

As it will be observed below in Museums, the most popular designs were geometric patterns composed of straight or shopped or parallel lines, with concentric circles, points, triangles, comb and saw teeth, fish bones...often already seen on earlier ceramics. The most beautiful and versatile were describing life of inhabitants, of which: houses on stilts, drummers and dancers, rice pounding scenes, rowing scenes, chiefly on big drums. It was mainly the case for Heger I types where pictures of diverse animals could be also engraved, including short or long beak flying birds, fishes swimming around boats, crocodiles or gayals, walking deer or hunting dogs. In relief at each quarter of the tympanum border frogs/toads or other animals were lately added.

Scholars emphasized a common trend for the great musical family of bronze drums and bells: in general early decorative patterns were densely expressed in realistic forms but, later, became more stylized, more abstract, less dense, during half a millennium from the end of BCE to the beginning of ce, before a kind of quality decline where the drums survived despite the Han’s invaders.

To produce bronze pre-Đông Sơn cultures used copper/tin alloy without lead much present in Đông Sơn culture for larger pieces despite a poor sonority, copper/lead/zinc or copper/ lead alloys not excluding arsenic or antimony. Lead comprised up to 30% in some items, lowering the smelting temperature to increase its flexible utilization, making it more suitable to produce recurrent items.

Đông Sơn metallurgists used at least three-piece moulds made from clay first. For Đông Sơn Heger I were used basically spacing pieces techniques, already described. They produced holes on the surface of the drum, to be repaired or not, the “spacers” being recovered or not, as visible even on the best drums (Ngọc Lũ, Hồng Hà, Moulié, Vienna, etc).

About the places of bronze casting in the early times, and about the origins of the ores utilized, the hypotheses are numerous. It has been proved that bronze castings were made locally between the Red and the Ma rivers, in Lang Ca or Lung Khe for example, explaining the quality and the homogeneity of the products. Ores existed not so far-away to supply ingots coming from the diverse surrounding mountainous areas, including for example present-day Vietnam (Trường Sơn cordillera), and Laos (Sepon province), and present-day Thailand (Phu Lon).

Both famous, the “Moulié” drum (Fig. 28 and cover) was discovered in Sông Đà (Vietnam) and the “Vienna” drum (Fig. 29) in Yunnan (China). Both pertained to the same Heger I family, probably produced in different workshops but with same techniques and may be by closed schools. Both were at large “Red/Mä River valley’s drums”, proving a high degree of exchanges along (future) Tonkin and Yunnan. Comparisons will be made between Moulié and, in brackets when different, Vienna (nowadays in Austria) to better clear their common characteristics; also a way to limit repetitions when examining in Vietnam’ museums similar classical items.

Moulié Drum (Sông Đà) was presented to E. Moulié (French Vice-Resident in Vietnam) by the widow of a Mường chieftain and sent to Paris where it is now visible in Guimet Museum. Typically “mushroom” type - D78/H 61 cm - Moulié’s tympanum is decorated with a central star of 14 rays (12 for Vienna - D64/H52 cm) with comparable “inter-radial” peacock feathers designs surrounded by geometric bands between which two large ranks (three for Vienna) with designed houses and feathered people and flying birds. Both Moulié and Vienna mantles had four double handles and display a life scene around the upper convex part and, in plaques (cartouches) in the middle, boats, warriors or dancers intermixed with circular geometric bands. More details are interesting about their main decorations, (counter-clockwise):

• Feathered humans (warriors; dancers; musicians) formed lines of three men on Moulié tympan (four on Vienna) and also on mantle’s panels (cartouches).
• Houses were built on poles or stones with large raised platforms on Moulié (smaller on Vienna), humans seen as “in transparence” inside the houses where they seemed to play gongs or drums or thrash rice in the company of perched birds (cocks versus peacocks)
• Boats with sea-prows are sketchily depicted with feathered crew consisting of rowers with one drummer and a man with a hatchet on Moulié (on Vienna: roamers, helmsman and a man sitting at the prow); birds enlivening the seascape in both cases.
• Flying big birds filled a large band as in nearly all Heger I. On Moulié there are 20 birds (16 on Vienna) of which 18 big white herons and 2 small birds may be because not enough space was left for the artist.
• Geometric designs which ornamented most of the circular bands were composed of circles, triangles, dots, along with meanders or spirals, on both Moulié and Vienna.

As it will be observed below in Museums, the most popular designs were geometric patterns composed of straight or shopped or parallel lines, with concentric circles, points, triangles, comb and saw teeth, fish bones...often already seen on earlier ceramics. The most beautiful and versatile were describing life of inhabitants, of which: houses on stilts, drummers and dancers, rice pounding scenes, rowing scenes, chiefly on big drums. It was mainly the case for Heger I types where pictures of diverse animals could be also engraved, including short or long beak flying birds, fishes swimming around boats, crocodiles or gayals, walking deer or hunting dogs. In relief at each quarter of the tympanum border frogs/toads or other animals were lately added.

Scholars emphasized a common trend for the great musical family of bronze drums and bells: in general early decorative patterns were densely expressed in realistic forms but, later, became more stylised, more abstract, less dense, during half a millennium from the end of BCE to the beginning of ce, before a kind of quality decline where the drums survived despite the Han’s invaders.

To produce bronze pre-Đông Sơn cultures used copper/tin alloy without lead much present in Đông Sơn culture for larger pieces despite a poor sonority, copper/lead/zinc or copper/ lead alloys not excluding arsenic or antimony. Lead comprised up to 30% in some items, lowering the smelting temperature to increase its flexible utilization, making it more suitable to produce recurrent items.

Đông Sơn metallurgists used at least three-piece moulds made from clay first. For Đông Sơn Heger I were used basically spacing pieces techniques, already described. They produced holes on the surface of the drum, to be repaired or not, the “spacers” being recovered or not, as visible even on the best drums (Ngọc Lũ, Hồng Hà, Moulié, Vienna, etc).

About the places of bronze casting in the early times, and about the origins of the ores utilized, the hypotheses are numerous. It has been proved that bronze castings were made locally between the Red and the Ma rivers, in Lang Ca or Lung Khe for example, explaining the quality and the homogeneity of the products. Ores existed not so far-away to supply ingots coming from the diverse surrounding mountainous areas, including for example present-day Vietnam (Truong Son cordillera), and Laos (Sepon province), and present-day Thailand (Phu Lon).

Both famous, the “Moulié” drum (Fig. 28 and cover) was discovered in Sông Đà (Vietnam) and the “Vienna” drum (Fig. 29) in Yunnan (China). Both pertained to the same Heger I family, probably produced in different workshops but with same techniques and may be by closed schools. Both were at large “Red/Mä River valley’s drums”, proving a high degree of exchanges along (future) Tonkin and Yunnan. Comparisons will be made between Moulié and, in brackets when different, Vienna (nowadays in Austria) to better clear their common characteristics; also a way to limit repetitions when examining in Vietnam’ museums similar classical items.

Moulié Drum (Sông Đà) was presented to E. Moulié (French Vice-Resident in Vietnam) by the widow of a Mường chieftain and sent to Paris where it is now visible in Guimet Museum. Typically “mushroom” type - D78/H 61 cm - Moulié’s tympanum is decorated with a central star of 14 rays (12 for Vienna - D64/H52 cm) with comparable “inter-radial” peacok feathers designs surrounded by geometric bands between which two large ranks (three for Vienna) with designed houses and feathered people and flying birds. Both Moulié and Vienna mantles had four double handles and display a life scene around the upper convex part and, in plaques (cartouches) in the middle, boats, warriors or dancers intermixed with circular geometric bands. More details are interesting about their main decorations, (counter-clockwise):

• Feathered humans (warriors; dancers; musicians) formed lines of three men on Moulié tympan (four on Vienna) and also on mantle’s panels (cartouches).
• Houses were built on poles or stones with large raised platforms on Moulié (smaller on Vienna), humans seen as “in transparence” inside the houses where they seemed to play gongs or drums or thrash rice in the company of perched birds (cocks versus peacocks)
• Boats with sea-prows are sketchily depicted with feathered crew consisting of rowers with one drummer and a man with a hatchet on Moulié (on Vienna: roamers, helmsman and a man sitting at the prow); birds enlivening the seascape in both cases.
• Flying big birds filled a large band as in nearly all Heger I. On Moulié there are 20 birds (16 on Vienna) of which 18 big white herons and 2 small birds may be because not enough space was left for the artist.
• Geometric designs which ornamented most of the circular bands were composed of circles, triangles, dots, along with meanders or spirals, on both Moulié and Vienna.

Very similar in fact, despite their distinct places of discovery, “Moulié” and “Vienna” main components, typical of Heger I, impress by their decorative profusion, their inventiveness, their complexity too, but first by their quality making these “chef d’oeuvres” at once globally magic and realistic with their detailed sceneries.

Heger II almost intact (D61/H40 cm/weight 32 kg) its tympan is ornamented with eight rays star, lozenges, flowers with 4 or 8 petals, and square decorative shapes; around which are four in-relief figurines of toads. On the body are lozenges, flowers with 4 or 8 petals and square decorative shapes as on tympanum. (Figs. 32 and 32bis)

In front of so many beautiful pieces displayed, and countless mini-ones for burials, the necessarily short selection imposed by editorial limits is also highly subjective.

Not excavated during archaeological researches but recovered by chance in 1893, this probably BCE drum is a reference studied by all (F.Heger included) and may be the “star” of the Hanoï Museum. Its size is standard for such classical big Heger I drum (D79 / H64 cm) and its state of conservation exceptionally good. (Fig. 35 to 35ter)

The tympan displays a star with fourteen rays and successive bands of naturalistic figured scenes: first are life scenes mixing humans (warriors, dancers), houses, and birds; then a rank with two groups of cervids walking in line, interspersed with two groups of eight and six flying birds; last on a peripheral band, eighteen flying birds (white herons?) interspersed with eighteen perching birds (cormorants?).

On the mantle: boats on the upper section; dancers on the middle section; the lower section remaining undecorated.

In total, a kind of “summing up” of the main patterns to be seen on Đông Sơn drums. elements of life in rice fields plus possible references to other worlds to be reached by air (birds) or boats (sea or river) or earth (cervids).

Recovered in 1937, also classical reference for Đông Sơn drums (D79 / H61 cm), its beautiful tympan had a central star with sixteen rays and successive bands of naturalistic scenes as on Ngọc Lũ drum, the last peripheral rank being of fourteen big flying birds. Two pairs of flat handles and many chaplets of spacers everywhere.

Note: None of these Heger I drums mentioned above bore frogs or toads in relief on their tympan, probably because they came before the other ones cited below.

Measuring 4,76 m in length, the wooden boat contained one hundred seven burial goods giving an interesting idea of the funeral rites involving drums. It held a Đông Sơn Heger I (tympanum diameter of 23 cm), a bronze situla (H 32 cm), few bronze bells, bronze ustensils (spoons or spittoons...) and weapons (axes, knives, spears...); along with non- metal materials like wooden lacquered objects. Without body remains but only a human figurine, the discoveries were burial goods for a rich person about 2200 years ago. The drum itself with feathered-men, as the situla and the bells decorated with comparable motifs, was the biggest and possibly the more costly artefact belonging to a family to honor and accompany the deceased (maybe buried again posteriorly).

(Fig.38)

Only six early bronze drums, of which two big, are exhibited and it is reported with insistence by guides that all were not “native” but came from the north (Đông Sơn or near) even if some were discovered locally during the last century. A Heger I masterpiece was collected in 1923 at Son Tay (Hanoï Province): around a fourteen rays central star its tympan without frogs is composed of geometric decorated circles with a large central band of eight stylized big stilt-birds, with boats on the upper mantle, dancers on the middle mantle and no decoration underneath. (D59/H40 cm, Figs. 40 and 40bis.)

After so many descriptions it appear, looking at Vietnamese drums with a magnifying glass and not only on documents, that the great majority of them were not “one-piece lost wax made” as at times described in the literature, some famous items included, but involved at least three molds in their casting process. (Fig. 42)

Such tests revealed that discontinuities or misalignments often abounded on the designs or vertical mold lines of the mantle, in addition or not with a visible heterogeneity of “spacers”, not forgetting the presence of multiple “undercuts” when tympan or decoration’s parts were added a posteriori (handles, in-relief animals)

A situation probably linked to the difficulties of a pure “one-piece process”, of which: scarcity of high competences; corresponding highest costs; big size castings not easily “manageable”; risks of waste-goods if the process failed... etc.

In Luy Lau ( Bac Ninh Province at 20 km from Hanoï ) for the first time in Vietnam was discovered in 1998 a fragment of a ceramic mold for casting a bronze drum (Fig. 43). In 2015 many other small pieces of early drum’ molds in terracotta were again discovered in Luy Lau, being under examination in the Hanoï National Museum of History laboratory.

Future North Vietnam was undoubtedly, quantitatively and qualitatively, a prominent area for bronze drums from the end of BCE to beginning ce, during half a millennium before the arrival of new rules and tastes from the northern colonial Han Chinese Empire.

Relaying our conclusions at the end of preceding China chapter, Red River Basin generally speaking can be considered like the “Cluster no.1” associating (future provinces) Tonkin and Yunnan in the bronze drums odyssey with strong influences in all indochina and southern Archipelagos-preceding a “Cluster no. 2” in Guangxi and nearby provinces.

Đông Sơn culture was a pinnacle indeed: not only were new sophisticated techniques mastered but the best artists created outstanding designs getting their inspiration from steppes’ fauna to tropics feathered people.

A lot of Chinese old records and modern discoveries were ignored when first EFEO studies, vigorously relayed by Vietnamese scholars after Independence, gave the bronze drum’s primacy and anteriority to Đông Sơn, as part of a kind of mythic Viet’s culture. It is time to acknowledge that the facts were not so monochromatic and that all inhabitants from north to south of Red River played a win-win role being part of clusters in which the Ma (Đông Sơn) valley had undoubtedly taken a key place. Obviously the present sino- Vietnamese boarder did not apply in ancient times.

More recently, due to wars or political turmoil, many ethnicities (Nationalities) came as refugees in Vietnam from neighboring nations, China, Myanmar, Laos. Bringing their own specific beliefs which often included devotion and practice of bronze drums it explains the presence of a great number of Karenni Heger III made in Myanmar/Laos, No doubt that these newcomers also played a role of “reminders” for the Viets not always familiar with their early drums’ achievements.

Historical strong bronze drums’ relations between Vietnam and other nations were only studied recently. After periods of ignorance or antagonisms, the coming times will permit a better knowledge of what was probably a “Golden Regional Drums Culture” for all southern Asia as anticipated in the precedent chapter. After so many divisions is given to the Peninsula a rare opportunity to deepen the corresponding ancient trails of common inspiration and devotion, if not political old links. Henceforth the new regional agreements (ASEAN or others) could facilitate more cultural researches.

Vietnam before Vietnam /Thap/ Lolo

From the Chinese records the term MAN for Southern Barbarians covered all the people living from “south of the clouds” (from Himalayan mountains) down to the “hotseas and hill-sides” of Indochinese peninsula (on modern maps the south-east of China and the northern portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar). They formed a mosaic of ethnical peoples (future Nationalities) not yet colonized, tumultuous but wealthy and inventive inside animist worlds no more tolerated by Chinese Empires. In 2016 ce Nationalities are always alive in Clusters 1 and 2, remaining the majority in Chinese Guangxi (versus the Han) or becoming a very specific minority like in Tonkin where the Viets, also barbarians long time ago, have taken power and multiplied.

In Vietnam, among 54 ethnic Nationalities officially recognized, the Lolo (3134 people in last 1989 General Census—versus 10 millions yi in China) are specially interesting for us as far as bronze drums always play a great role in their life and particularly during their funerals. Lolo (Yi or La La...) live in the extreme north-east of Tonkin, not far from the frontier with China from where they came, in concentrated villages composed of distinct homes encircled with a stone wall with a gate. Their language belongs to the Tibeto-Burmese group (Sino Tibetan family) and they work mostly on wet fields and terraces with a tight community structure worshipping their ancestors with a cemetery for all. Drums always played a big role, connected with the legend of Deluge when only two Lolos, the founders, were kept alive in two drums, a wonderful story too long to be related here. Drums are nowadays only used for funerals and create the rhythms for appropriate community dances. Two drums, a male and a female (Yin and Yang), are hung facing each other on as helf placed in front of the deceased’s feet: the drummer stands in between and uses drumsticks to beat on both drum’s heads: through the sounds, the deceased’s spirit is supposed to find its way back to the place of its ancestors. Otherwise the drums are buried under the ground, hidden in a clean protected secret place. (Alas, during a trip in Hà Giang Province, beginning 2015, no funeral occurred and photos were forbidden.)