An Examination Of The Names Of Places Along The Beijing Route During The Vietnam’s Nguyen Dynasty

Vietnam’s Nguyen Dynasty had a long national movement and had diplomatic relations with the Qing dynasty China for more than 80 years(1802-1885).Therefore,the Nguyen Dynasty was also the dynasty that sent the most missions to China in Vietnam’s history.Vietnamese envoys left a very rich historical materials of Beijing route documents,which included a large number of Chinese place names.During the Ruan dynasty,most of the missions reached Beijing through Guangxi,Hunan,Hubei,Henan and Zhili,but through the textual research of the place names,we also found that some missions did not follow the main route such as Qing Dynasty due to special circumstances.For example,in 1802,Zheng MAODE’s mission bypassed Leizhou Peninsula and landed from Humen pass in Guangdong,then turned to Guangxi,joined li guangding and other people in Guilin,and then went North with them.Because of the long history of Chinese place names,their number and complexity,there were many problems with the Vietnamese ambassadors recording their recollections of Chinese places,such as the misremembering of place names.In1802,Le Quang Dinh and his party travelled north by water from Xinningzhou,Guangxi,to Hengzhou,where they passed through Yongchun County,one hundred and twenty miles west of Hengzhou.However,in his poetry collection,Lai Guangding recorded the place as ’Yongchun City’.When Vietnam envoys pass through a certain place,they often make a concise description and investigation of the origin,meaning,historical evolution and characteristics of a certain place in the form of small notes in the poetry collection,such as the records of Vietnamese envoys in the poetry collection on the semi-liberated areas of Guangxi.The China Place names recorded by the Vietnam emissary during the Qing dynasty provide a "foreign eye" for us to understand the urban landscape and social customs of the Qing dynasty in China,and this part of the content in turn provides historical and geographical materials from foreign countries for the study of traditional local Chronicles.The Vietnamese ambassadors,in their recitation of Chinese places,valued the culture behind the geographical names,and the groups of names they wrote about either intersected or overlapped with traditional Chinese names of common origin,demonstrating their uniqueness and inheritance.