The Birth of Vietnam

Keith Weller Taylor is a historian of Vietnam, and this University of California Press book is his standard scholarly history of early Vietnam, drawing on both Chinese and Vietnamese sources, including discussion of the Hong Bang dynasty legend. Its strength is that it is a peer informed academic monograph from a major university press by a leading specialist, treating early Vietnamese sources critically rather than repeating traditional dynastic legend as settled history. Its limit is its age and scope: it is a decades old foundational synthesis of early Vietnamese history specifically, so a claim about later Vietnamese history or about more recent archaeological findings needs a source with that different focus.