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Dai Viet

Dai Viet, "Great Viet", was the name of the Vietnamese state from the eleventh century until the early nineteenth, used under the Ly, Tran and Le dynasties, which expanded south at the expense of Champa and the Khmer.

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Independence from China

The Red River delta had been ruled as a Chinese province for about a thousand years when, in 938, Ngo Quyen defeated a southern Chinese fleet on the Bach Dang river and founded an independent state. Under the Ly dynasty, which made Thang Long, the later Hanoi, its capital in 1010, the state took the name Dai Viet in 1054. The Ly and their successors, the Tran, adopted Chinese forms of government, writing and examination, while patronising Buddhism. The Tran repelled three Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, the last in 1288, again on the Bach Dang.

The Ly kings were devout Buddhists and built many temples, among them the One Pillar Pagoda in Thang Long, founded in 1049, while in 1070 they founded the Temple of Literature in honour of Confucius, which later housed the national academy. The balance between Buddhist piety and Confucian statecraft shifted towards the latter over the following centuries.

The Le dynasty

In 1407 the Ming dynasty of China invaded and annexed Dai Viet. After a ten-year war, Le Loi drove out the Ming and founded the Later Le dynasty in 1428. His victory and the proclamation of it by his adviser Nguyen Trai became founding texts of Vietnamese independence.

Le Thanh Tong (r. 1460–1497) reorganised the state on Confucian lines and issued a legal code, the Hong Duc code, notable among other things for the property rights it gave women. In 1471 he attacked Champa, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom to the south whose culture belonged to the Indianised world of Southeast Asia, captured its capital Vijaya, and annexed its northern territory. Champa survived only as a smaller state in the far south.

Division and expansion

In 1527 the Mac family usurped the throne. The Le were restored later in the century, but real power passed to two great families: the Trinh lords in the north, ruling in the Le emperor's name at Thang Long, and the Nguyen lords in the south, based near Hue. They fought a long war from 1627 to 1672 that ended in stalemate. Blocked to the north, the Nguyen expanded south, absorbing what remained of Champa and settling the Mekong delta, then Khmer territory, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The end

The Tay Son rebellion, which broke out in 1771, swept away both the Nguyen and the Trinh, and the Le dynasty ended in 1789, the year the Tay Son leader Nguyen Hue defeated a Qing army near Thang Long. A surviving Nguyen prince, Nguyen Anh, reconquered the country with French help and founded the Nguyen dynasty in 1802, ruling a united Vietnam from Hue. The name Dai Viet gave way to Viet Nam in 1804.

Further reading

  • Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
  • Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
  • Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004

See also

  • Khmer Empire — The Khmer Empire was a Southeast Asian state centered on Angkor in present-day Cambodia that flourished from 802 to 1431 CE, building its political and religious order on Indian Hindu and, later, Buddhist models.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.