(; ; lit. "southward advance" or "march to the south") is a historiographical concept that describes the historic southward expansion of the territory of Vietnamese dynasties' dominions and ethnic Kinh people (Đại Việt) from the 11th to the 19th centuries. The concept of has differing interpretations, with some equating it to Vietnamese colonization of the south and to a series of wars and conflicts between several Vietnamese dynasties and Champa Kingdoms, which resulted in the annexation and Vietnamization of the former Cham states, as well as indigenous territories such as those inhabited by the Khmer Krom. The nam tiến became one of the dominant themes of the narrative that Vietnamese nationalists created in the 20th century, alongside an emphasis on non-Chinese origin and Vietnamese homogeneity. Within Vietnamese nationalism and Greater Vietnam ideology, it served as a romanticized conceptualization of the Vietnamese identity, especially in South Vietnam and modern Vietnam.
The Vietnamese domain gradually expanded from its original heartland in the Red River Delta into southern territories, which were controlled by the Champa kingdoms. In a span of some 700 years, the Vietnamese domain tripled the area of its territory and more or less acquired the elongated shape of modern-day Vietnam.Nguyen The Anh, "Le Nam tien dans les textes Vietnamiens", in P. B. Lafont, Les frontieres du Vietnam, Harmattan edition, Paris 1989 Beginning in the 20th century, modern Vietnamese historiography, under the auspices of nationalism and racialism, coined the term for what they believed to be a gradual, inevitable southern expansion of Vietnamese domains. According to the 20th-century Vietnamese scholars who constructed the as a continuous historical phenomenon, the 11th to the 14th centuries saw battle gains and losses as frontier territory changed hands between the Viet and the Chams during the early Cham–Viet wars. In the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, following the Fourth Chinese domination of Vietnam (1407–1427), the Vietnamese defeated the less centralized state of Champa and seized its capital in the 1471 Cham–Vietnamese War. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Vietnamese settlers penetrated the Mekong Delta. The Nguyễn lords of Huế wrested the southernmost territory from Cambodia by diplomacy and by force, which completed the "March to the South".
History
11th to 14th centuries (Lý and Trần dynasties) Records suggest that there was an attack on the Champa kingdom and its capital, Vijaya, from Vietnam in 1069 (under the reign of Lý Thánh Tông) to punish Champa for armed raids in Vietnam. Cham King Rudravarman III was defeated and captured. He offered Champa's three northern provinces to Vietnam (now Quảng Bình and northern part of Quảng Trị Provinces).Maspero, G., 2002, The Champa Kingdom, Bangkok: White Lotus Co., Ltd.,
In 1377, the Cham capital was unsuccessfully besieged by a Trần Vietnamese army during the Battle of Vijaya.
15th to 19th centuries (Later Lê dynasty to the Nguyễn lords)
The native inhabitants of the Central Highlands are the Degar (Montagnard) people but otherwise are mostly Katuic, Bahnaric, and Chamic-speaking peoples. The Vietnamese from the Dai Viet conquered and annexed the area during their southward expansion.
Major Champa–Vietnam Wars were fought again in the 15th century during the Lê dynasty, which eventually led to the defeat of Vijaya and to the demise of Champa in 1471. The citadel of Vijaya was besieged for one month in 1403 until the Vietnamese troops had to withdraw because of a shortage of food. The final attack came in early 1471, after almost 70 years without a major military confrontation between Champa and Vietnam. It is interpreted to have been a reaction to Champa asking Chinese Ming dynasty for reinforcements to attack Vietnam.
Cham provinces were seized by the Vietnamese Nguyễn lords. Provinces and districts that had been originally controlled by Cambodia were taken by Vo Vuong.
Cambodia was constantly invaded by the Nguyễn lords. Around a thousand Vietnamese settlers were slaughtered in 1667 in Cambodia by a combined Chinese-Cambodian force. Vietnamese settlers started to inhabit the Mekong Delta, which was previously inhabited by the Khmer. That caused the Vietnamese to be subjected to Cambodian retaliation. The Cambodians told Catholic European envoys that the Vietnamese persecution of Catholics justified retaliatory attacks to be launched against the Vietnamese colonists.
19th century (Nguyễn dynasty)
Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang enacted the final conquest of the Champa Kingdom by a series of Cham–Vietnamese Wars. In 1832, the Emperor annexed Champa while the Vietnamese coercively fed lizard and pig meat to Cham Muslims and cow meat to Cham Hindus, against their will, to punish them and to assimilate them to Vietnamese culture. The Cham Muslim leader Katip Suma, who was educated in Kelantan, came back to Champa and led the dissatisfied Champa Muslims to declare a jihad revolt against Vietnamese rulers, but he was promptly defeated.(Extracted from Truong Van Mon, "The Raja Praong Ritual: a Memory of the sea in Cham- Malay Relations”, in Memory And Knowledge Of The Sea In South Asia, Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Malaya, Monograph Series 3, pp, 97–111. International Seminar on Maritime Culture and Geopolitics & Workshop on Bajau Laut Music and Dance”, Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya, 23-24/2008)
Minh Mang sinicized ethnic minorities such as Cambodians, claimed the legacy of Confucianism and China's Han dynasty for Vietnam, and used the term Han people 漢人 (Hán nhân) to refer to the Vietnamese. Minh Mang declared, "We must hope that their barbarian habits will be subconsciously dissipated, and that they will daily become more infected by Han [Sino-Vietnamese] customs." The policies were directed at the Khmer and the hill tribes. The Nguyen lord Nguyen Phuc Chu had referred to Vietnamese as "Han people" in 1712 to differentiate them from Chams. The Nguyễn lords established đồn điền, state-owned agribusiness, after 1790. Emperor Gia Long (Nguyễn Phúc Ánh), in differentiating between Khmer and Vietnamese, said, " [ 漢|夷|有限 ]" meaning "the Vietnamese and the barbarians must have clear borders." His successor, Minh Mang, implemented an acculturation integration policy directed at minority non-Vietnamese peoples. Phrases like Thanh nhân (清人, Qing people) or Đường nhân (唐人, Tang people) were used to refer to ethnic Chinese by the Vietnamese, who called themselves as Hán dân (漢民) and Hán nhân (漢人) in Vietnam in the 1800s, under the Nguyễn dynasty.
Historicity Analysis and periodization Michael Vickery articulates that was not steady, and its stages show that there was no continuing policy of southward expansion. Each territorial push was a move or reaction against a particular historical event. A famous historian of pre-colonial Vietnam, Keith W. Taylor, totally opposes and rejects the idea of , as he provides alternate explanations. Momorki Shirō, a historian from Osaka University, has criticized the as a "Kinh-centric historical view." Rather than an authentic continuous historical phenomenon, it is a colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiographic construction.
Scholarly consensus does agree that Vietnamese southward expansions that have been conceptualized into the modern-day did not start until at least the early 15th century AD. Numerous wars were fought between Champa and Đại Việt before the 1400s, but they happened indecisively, and there were territorial exchanges on both sides. Some scholars put the starting date of to 1471, precisely when the word itself began to be used. Therefore, the starting date of the 11th century should be rejected.
Nam tiến in South Vietnam At the onset of the 20th century, nationalism swept across the globe. In Asia, nationalists and advocates of the nation-state must have been joyful in crafting homogenous nationalities like "Chinese," "Cambodian," "Vietnamese," etc., which in common assumptions are as almost synonymous with the predominant ethnic group. The emerged at that time. In the postcolonial Republic of Vietnam, Vietnamese (Kinh) intellectuals began the selective remembering of history to construct sources of national pride for the newly formed Vietnamese nation. They probably found or inherited the idea from Hung Giang's article La Formation du pays d’Annam, published in July 1928. In that first nationalist narrative praising the , Lord Nguyễn Hoàng allegedly "urged his people to keep moving southward," coined as .
Early French scholarships in the late 19th century shaped Indianized kingdoms like Angkor and Champa, which had been declined mainly from Vietnamese expansionism, and mimicked them as the main villains who emerged at the end of the tale. Thereby, the French hypedly acted as "rescuers" of "lost civilizations" and prevent their heritage from being completely "swallowed up" by the Vietnamese by colonization and assimilation. After 1954, scholars in North and South Vietnam held varying reactions to French Cham studies. One side from Hanoi promoted the "multi-ethnic history" and "solidarity between peoples against invaders and feudal rulers" to fit its Marxist historiography and so little attention was paid to Champa itself. The other side celebrated the ethnohistory, virtually at odds with the Hanoi historiography. Frankly, Vietnamese nationalist writers in post-colonial Vietnam who were mesmerized by the French interpretation of the Vietnamese conquest of Champa, began using it as evidence for "ancient Vietnamese greatness."
The most famous apostle of the in South Vietnam in Saigon, Việt sử: Xứ Đàng Trong 1558–1777: Cuộc Nam tiến của dân tộc Việt Nam, an essay of Vietnamese ‘Southward March’, by the historian Phan Khoang (1906–1971), synthesizing a 'very real' concept of at its title, also the most detailed book about the . In the book, the author offers a quite strong Vietnamese-centric biased view and stereotyping negative sentiments toward the "conquered people." The book's main discourse is about the presumed "march" (piecing unrelated and distant events together) of the Vietnamese along the coast from the Red River Delta, traditionally said to be begun in the 11th century, until they reached the end tail of the Mekong Delta in 18th century. The essay concerning Champa begins by treating it as a single unified kingdom, like framework of early French scholars, and tracing the kingdom's genesis to the Indianized Linyi (Lâm Ấp). Little attention was paid to the civilizational aspects of the Cham, Khmer, and indigenous groups. They were considered by earlier colonial-era works indiscriminately as the same "Indianized origins." Those colonial scholars had introduced blatant Eurocentric-framed concepts like 'Sinic or Indic civilization spheres,' denying and downplaying the achievements of indigenous non-nation peoples of Southeast Asia. They are still widely in practice today.
During early colonial Indochina, French ethnographers used the Vietnamese collective pejorative for indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands, Mois, a word carrying extremely negative connotations and embraced both European and Viet colonialism in the Highlands.