英文摘要 |
Vietnam cuts a long slender figure in Indochina with its two tips being the most prosperous regions, and at the midway point is the most critical corridor for Vietnam's historical development southward. This area also happens to be the base of the Nuyen Hui clan, which has decorated ancestors with honors in the imperial examinations, and hence an ideal case study for understanding Vietnam's socio-cultural history. This paper discusses thirteen epigraphical sources related to the Nuyen Hui clan, introducing their state of preservation and publications, their distribution, subject matter, and contents, followed by an appraisal of their functions and research value. The examination of the thirteen epigraphical sources leads to the following observations and avenues for further discussions. First, the Nuyen Hui clan epigraphical corpus provides excellent examples of imperial examination laureates in the Nghe An region. There is two honorific stelai for laureates and five that concern the clan's local connections, which can be further explored and evaluated to study the clan's social power or the elite interactions in the Nghe An region. Second, the Nuyen Hui clan epigraphic corpus yields quite many examples in which ChữNôm or localized Vietnamese characters appear alongside Chinese characters. One example is the Nuyen laureate genealogy (19311), in which the Chinese character歲appears along with its ChữNôm equivalent. Such instances offer essential opportunities for palaeographical studies and customs of vocabulary usage that would contribute to historical research. Thirdly, allusions and verbatim quotes taken from Chinese literary sources can be illuminating in studies that trace Chinese influences in Vietnamese culture, but at the same time, such studies bring to light also the process of Vietnamese localization, for example, the replacing of the character銘with the character曲in the Hou-shen-bei Ji of 1756. Finally, also striking and deserving of further study is the Guan-shi-bei Ji (no. 19308), a record of a member of the clan holding market at a family school compound signals a striking deviation from the anti-profiteering doctrine staunchly upheld among the Chinese literati. |