[NFP] Vietnam Discussion Thread

That makes more sense. Reading the pins as district placement was frustrating me greatly. The IZ could make sense if they built a Harbor, but otherwise...

 

I mean, she literally says it at 0:40 in the first look video. Look at the mouse pointer .

 

I have a bad attention span.

 

Is it possible that she might be the first leader in the game to prefer founding Confucianism? Either that or they could just go with Buddhism, though I don't know how prevalent it was when she lived, or she doesn't have a preference.

 

Vietnam is largely Buddhist nation-even when she lived. So I am 99% certain she will be a Buddhist -like Japan, Korea and Khmer.
Confusionism never was big in Vietnam.

 

Vietnam was/is very big in Buddhism (before French) and Catholicism (after French). Confucianism, in both Vietnam and China, not to say Korea and Japan, etc., was/is no more than a civil religion. Portraying Confucianism as an organized religion in every generation of Civ series is already a mistake/cliché by itself.

 

Some of the religious picks in this game are a bit weird. Dido, as a semitic polytheist, choosing Judaism makes very little sense. The evidence for Cyrus being a zoroastrian is a bit dubious, although this one is more excusable. They should have them have no specific preference as they do with other leaders whose religious is not present, such as the Greeks (minus Basil) and Rome. Kristina should pick Catholicism, not Protestantism.

As is, nobody chooses Confucianism, Shinto, or Sikhism; arguably nobody present should choose Judaism or Zoroastrianism either. That'd be an interesting criteria for some new civs... representing all the religions present. It may be a bit difficult for Confucianism, since it's a bit more of a philosophy than a religion and thus would probably be superceded by the Taoism many emperors had (could argue something similar for Buddhism, too, but Firaxis made Hojo buddhist instead of Shinto, although given that he was a big proponent of Buddhism, that's fair!). We could have something like biblical David or Solomon for Judaism (to hopefully minimize modern controversy), Darius for Zoroastrianism (although honestly Cyrus is fine to have it), Oda Nobunaga for Shinto (also somewhat arguable)... I don't really know enough about Sikhism to suggest a leader for them.

In addition to all this, though, I really wish they had "classical paganism" (i.e. greco roman) as a religious choice, since it'd cover Rome, Macedon, and Greece well. Yeah, I know it's more complex than that, but it's better than not representing one of the most influential religions of all time. And they could at least have a generic "animism/shamanism" for the Native Americans (although maybe having just one blob religion is worse than none at all?)

 

It's hard to say what Civ5/Civ6 religion is intended to represent since Confucianism is not the only religion on the list that isn't particularly centralized (Taoism, Shinto, Judaism, Tengriism in Civ5--even Zoroastrianism after the fall of the Sassanids). Meanwhile, Christianity is split into sects while Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. are not. That's one reason I use Tomatekh's Historical Religions mod. You want to turn Inuit shamanism into an organized church? Go for it.

 

She predates the introduction of Buddhism, actually. At least to the common folk. The closest religion for her would probably have been Taoism, basically any form of the east asian shamanist tradition.
As far as Vietnam and Confucianism is concerned, I disagree. They did not go as hard on Confucianism as Joseon (no one went as hard on Confucianism as Joseon), but Le Loi's dynasty imported Neo-Confucianism wholesale and not only did the philosophy prosper, you have several emperors who just might have wished the country leaned closer to the Joseon "ideal". Look up Minh Mang, as an example.

 

This is one area where Tomatekh's mod actually doesn't improve things. He makes Cyrus favor Zurvanism when if anything he should be a Mazdaist.

Hezekiah might be less controversial since he's attested in Assyrian records. Plus David and Solomon are prophets in both Judaism and Islam, which makes their depiction very controversial.

Darius isn't any better. You have to wait for the Arsacids for rock solid evidence of Zoroastrianism. Of course, I'd love having a Sassanian alternate leader...

Maharaja Ranjit Singh. I wouldn't call him a top priority, though.

 

In terms of Taoism/Daoism I would like to add an interesting fact here: There was some sort of semi-shamanism religion existed before Daoism (Daoism only created in 3rd Century CE as an organized religion) in early China, called "popular/common religion of early China" academically - and Daoism was actually developed to reject and against this shamanist popular religion.

For instance, the popular religion emphases blood sacrifice of animals (even humans); while Daoism is firmly against blood sacrifice and heavily into vegetarian practices. The popular religion was centered around worshipping local deities; and Daoism, despite having many local deities in its pantheon like Shintoism, also having an abstract highest deity similar to Buddhism (Buddha) and Christianity (JHWH), named Daode Tianzun/Taishang Laojun. Moreover, every Daoist sect operates around certain manuscripts (Daoist scriptures), the Daoist priests are highly literate; while the initial popular religion was very much less so.

As a result, Qin Shi Hang founding Daoism is also very ahistorical - he was very likely a belier of the initial popular religion of early China - but since this "popular religion" is still a highly academic concept, even not a lot of Chinese people know about it, I can accept such a mistake in a game for popular audience.

 

I agree with Dido founding Judaism is weird. They probably did that because Phoenicians were Semitic speaking people like the Hebrews and was the closest thing they could get.

Considering Zoroastrianism was the primary religion of Classical Persia I'm fine with it for Cyrus.

I also don't mind Protestantism either for Kristina considering she only renounced it and became Catholic after she abdicated. Plus seeing Sweden as a Catholic nation most of the time in the game would be weird.
Not to mention it feels like half of the civs in the game prefer Catholicism so even if Sweden or Norway should be, I don't mind that they aren't.

Maybe it would be best if they just don't give her a preference then instead of giving her a Chinese "religion" considering the main ideas around her in history was fighting against Chinese rule.

 

It's a question open for interpretation. The Achaemenids can certainly be interpreted as Zoroastrian, but without definitive evidence I wouldn't try making that claim in an academic setting without some proof. But Civ is not an academic setting.

Actually Sweden was initially staunchly Catholic. Poland's reversal from a hybrid Catholic-Reformed state to staunchly Catholic was the result of staunchly Catholic Swedish monarchs inheriting the Polish crown. Sweden obviously eventually became the most staunchly Lutheran state in Europe. But yes, it's fair for Kristina to favor Protestantism because she was Protestant as queen. It's bizarre, however, for Harald to favor Protestantism rather than Catholicism when he lived nearly five centuries before the Reformation.

 

Maybe he should favor Eastern Orthodoxy instead after all of his time spent in the Byzantine Empire and Kievan Rus.

 

My understanding is that despite his time as a Varangian Guard and his time in Kievan Rus' he promoted Catholicism in Norway. It's also my understanding that he himself was not a shining example of a convert.

 

It's not like the religion was really a point of the contention with the supposed Chinese rule (going by reports of the Ming administrators in the field, belief in non-Buddhist dieties was fully lost in Vietnam, so "teaching the locals how to venerate the spirits of the land" was one of those agendas that was deemed important enough to be sent back to the emperor... and well, native vietnamese religion is still a thing in Vietnam today so the locals clearly didn't get rid of that like they have with the Ming supporters).
But if we accept her as a semi-mythical figure as seen through the eyes of someone from the imperial period, then yes, she is very much a Buddhist figure. Fun fact: Yesterday, I went looking for the book of Vietnamese mythology (越甸幽靈集, 1329 CE) to find the origin of the whale quote (as cited by the book cited by Wikipedia), but could only find later Vietnamese translations. If you had any luck getting that in its original form, you could probably glean at what blessing her worship entailed. I know the Trưng sisters became (basically equivalent to Christian) saints of rain in the later Buddhist tradition.

 

The reason why I assumed Confucianism first is because it seems like those ideas were adopted and intertwined into the Vietnamese folk religion. Plus the ideas of Confucianism would have been known by Vietnam by the time period in which she lived through interaction with China.
I wasn't quite sure if Buddhism spread to Vietnam that early.

 

any chance we might get a full theme on Monday?

 

Aside from Vietnamese's very own resistances against assimilation efforts, it couldn't be said that China tried their best to spread Confucianism and Taoism in Vietnam when they ruled over ancient Vietnam either.

On the contrary, they enacted policies which prohibited Vietnamese from accessing formal education; moreover Vietnamese weren’t allowed to take part in things such as the Imperial Examination. Nor were the average people rich enough to afford education at the first place.

So Vietnamese in that period actually weren’t big on Confucianism and Taoism, simply because they had little idea about those stuffs.

Throughout history, China didn't even try to spread Confucianism to other countries, which is the opposite of how you buy Confucianist Missionaries/Apostles to spread Confucianism to other cities when playing the game.

No, China tried to withhold their knowledge and philosophies from the "barbarians" (which was basically any country which was not China). Vietnamese even had to resort to espionage to steal stuffs which China didn't want to share, such as the most accurate version of Chinese calendar (lunar calendar), or maize seeds (I'm not sure if it means Vietnam merely stole a variety of Chinese maize, or it actually means that before that point, Vietnam couldn't cultivate maize at all)... from China, and the people who completed those espionage missions have been venerated as heroes by Vietnamese.

 

These statements highly contradict the written evidence, though:
Chinese records actually lament the small number of imperial officials from Jiaozhi, which is opposite of what you'd expect if they made it a policy to bar Jiaozhians from the examinations.
I think I've even read as someone of specifically Vietnamese ancestry making it, but you can always point to Kang Senghui, a Sogdian (barbarian) born in Jiaozhi who received his education there.
We even have a Japanese scholar Abe no Nakamaro, who couldn't manage to get back to Japan, passed the Imperial Examination and became a mandarin in Jiaozhi (then already part of Annam province).
And the Japanese missions to the Sui and Tang courts are a well known case of Chinese showering the new arrivals with knowledge. Including Taoism, Chinese medicine, Confucianism,...
Chinese in the imperial period do not have any concept of "a Vietnamese" in Jiaozhi. They, much like Romans, only have civilised and uncivilised people. Uncivilised people pay half the tax (and when you try to change that, rebellions happen) and that's where it ends for them AFAIK.

And of course, I'd love to hear more about the maize story. Sounds like a piece of neat trivia, even if I'm a bit vexxed as to why would Vietnamese go for maize from China when they are situated in the area where China got its maize from in the first place (European traders, overland from India).