The Dong Son Bronze Drums

Ask any Vietnamese which artefact best stands for the age when the country was founded and you will almost certainly hear two words: bronze drum. It is on the banknotes, on emblems, on festival stages.

Yet go into the research literature and something strange appears. Almost everything "everybody knows" about the bronze drum is being argued over by somebody: what bird is on the drum face, whether the circle at the centre of the face is a sun or a star, what the drum was used for, and who cast one first.

That disagreement is not a small one. It is large enough that one historian devoted an entire study to rereading the bronze drum debate between Vietnam and China — not to rule on who is right, but to see by what route politics worked its way into archaeology.¹

This episode tells what is certain, and tells at greater length what is not.

The classification of bronze drums that both Vietnam and China still use today came from an outsider.

Modern study of the bronze drum began only in the late 19th century, after Westerners reached the region, and the most widely accepted division is the one published in 1902 by Franz Heger, the Austrian archaeologist. He had 22 actual drums in hand plus the records and photographs of 143 others — 165 in all — and divided them into four types on the basis of shape, distribution, decoration and even alloy composition.¹

Type I is the one he took to be the oldest. It is this type that Vietnamese archaeology later gave another name: the Dong Son drum.¹

The other three types are simpler or later; Type II in particular turns up often in Muong areas and is therefore also called the Muong drum, while in the early 20th century many people called Type IV outright the "Chinese drum", because it resembled the bronzes from over there.²

That naming — calling Type I the "Dong Son drum" after a village in Thanh Hoa — sounds ordinary enough, but it is a move with weight behind it. On the other side of the border, drum types are likewise named after places in China: Wanjiaba, Shizhaishan, Beiliu, Lingshan.¹ A name does not only name. It plants a flag.

Read widely and you will meet three different figures that look as though they are fighting each other. By the 1980s Vietnam had found about 360 bronze drums of all types, of which roughly 140 were Dong Son drums; after the excavations of the 1990s, the figure for Dong Son drums was put at between 150 and 190.¹ An article from 2023, meanwhile, speaks of about 600 bronze drums of all types.²

Those three figures count three different sets at three different moments. Say clearly which type is being counted and for which year and the contradiction disappears; quote a bare number and it comes out wrong.

It is also worth remembering that the bronze drum belongs to no single country. Its distribution runs from the Yangtze basin down to Indonesia; the two densest concentrations are northern Vietnam and southwest China, where the Chinese side alone has collected some 1,460 of them.¹

On the face of a Dong Son drum there is a band of flying birds, long-billed, long-legged, following one another in a ring. That image is printed on textbook covers, on logos, on propaganda posters.

What bird is it?

The historian Dao Duy Anh held that it was the Lac bird, the legendary bird bound up with the name of the Lac Viet people — a reading so familiar that many take it for a scientific name. But another Vietnamese scholar, Dao Tu Khai, objected at once: it is a heron, because the Lac bird of legend is an altogether different bird.¹

Most of the Chinese side also accept the heron, but read it in the opposite direction: they hold that the heron motif spread from north to south by way of the state of Chu, citing bronzes from Chu tombs in Henan and Hubei that also carry heron figures. Some other Chinese scholars say it is a crane, or a hornbill.¹

One and the same bird image, at least four names for it and two opposed explanations of where it came from.

The second animal goes the same way: the four-legged figures modelled in relief on the rim of many drum faces are usually called toads in Vietnamese writing — which calls up the saying that the toad is the uncle of the Lord of Heaven — while international writing usually calls them frogs, linked to a rain deity.¹ Then the rayed circle at the very centre of the drum face: some call it a star, others the sun; the Vietnamese side reads it as a trace of sun worship among the ancient Viet, and the Chinese side replies that sun worship was practised by a great many ancient peoples and belongs to nobody in particular.¹

Keep this in mind on meeting any article that states firmly that the decoration on a bronze drum "represents" something. The decoration does not speak by itself. It is the person reading it who speaks.

The question that looks easiest turns out to be the one with the liveliest debate behind it, and few outside the research world know about it.

It starts from a scene engraved on the face of the Ngoc Lu drum: a group of people gathered around objects shaped like drums. The archaeologist Pham Huy Thong read it as a scene of drumming, and wrote that whatever else the Dong Son drum may have been used for, it "was a drum to begin with — a musical instrument, a percussion instrument". The researcher Ta Duc went further: this was drumming in the manner of husking rice, with a long pestle driven straight down from above, and he cited the Muong language in support.³

That reading has become a stage number: a troupe standing and pounding bronze drums at the Hung Kings temple festival.

Then a whole series of people objected, and their reasons were not alike.

The Han Nom scholar Nguyen Ta Nhi went through every Han Nom text on the musical instruments of the Vietnamese of old and reported that not one of them classes the bronze drum as a musical instrument. From the musical side, the composer Don Truyen and Dr Nguyen Van Vinh argued that the bronze drum does not belong to the "drum family", since the word drum goes with a resonant sound that the bronze drum does not have. The composer Duong Dinh Minh Son pointed out something very concrete: the bronze-drum pounding number at the Hung Kings temple dates only from 1979, a modern staging with no basis in the historical record. The composer Cao Khac Thuy said the technique is really the Muong rice-husking rhythm carried over and applied to the bronze drum.³

The author of that article, Professor Phan Dang Nhat, adds two arguments of his own. The first is linguistic: Muong calls every kind of drum "kloong", but the bronze drum alone it calls "khau" — a completely different word; in the Mo epic "De dat de nuoc", the word "khau" appears 14 times out of 18, while "trong dong" appears only 4, which shows that "trong dong" is the later name, translated from the Chinese "dong co".³

The second is the decoration itself. The Ngoc Lu drum carries a real rice-husking scene: the mortar set on the ground, two people standing, both hands on a long pestle thrust straight down. But the scene people call "drumming" is different: most of the figures in it are sitting, their arms reaching forward. His argument is this: if the ancients had meant to engrave a scene of pounding drums, they would have engraved the very husking posture they had just engraved elsewhere.³

Who is right is unsettled. But this is a live Vietnamese scholarly argument, with specific names and specific reasons — far more worth knowing than a tidy assertion that the Dong Son people beat their drums this way or that.

The previous episode mentioned the hypothesis that Dong Son originated in the Dian culture over in Yunnan, and how radiocarbon dating refuted it. Here we take up the part less often told: the circumstances in which that argument took place.

One historian, rereading the whole Vietnamese-Chinese argument of the 1970s and 1980s, made an observation uncomfortable for both sides: not one Vietnamese scholar publicly doubted the Vietnamese origin of the bronze drum, and not one Chinese scholar publicly doubted its Chinese origin — whereas among Western and Japanese researchers there was no such unanimity along national lines.¹

He also points to a chronology worth pondering: bronze drum research boomed in both countries from the mid-1970s, exactly as relations between them began to sour, then cooled in the late 1980s and early 1990s, exactly as the two were seeking normalisation.¹ During the argument, both sides invoked radiocarbon dates when the dates supported them, and were ready to doubt the method itself when they did not.¹ When a measuring instrument is trusted or suspected according to its results, what decides the conclusion is no longer the instrument.

Two details make the picture less flat. Even Chinese scholarship was not a single bloc: Guangxi scholars took Guangxi to be the origin, Yunnan scholars took Yunnan to be the origin, and only in 1982 did the Yunnan side prevail, with the minority view left out of the conference proceedings. And the one point the two sides agreed on was rejecting every theory that the bronze drum came from outside the southern China – northern Vietnam region.¹ When it suits them the two sides fight each other; when a third party appears, they stand on the same side.

The archaeologist Charles Higham, standing outside the dispute, proposes a different view: the bronze drums were made by professional craftsmen belonging to a cluster of increasingly complex polities, spread across what is now the Vietnam-China border. To look for the origin of that whole development in any one region is, he argues, beside the point.¹ A border drawn at the end of the 19th century has no reason to cut neatly through a metal-exchange region of two thousand years earlier.

What is certain is short: the Dong Son people cast bronze drums themselves — the mould fragments found at Luy Lau settled that in the previous episode; the drum was a precious object bound up with power and ritual; and it travelled a long way from where it was made, reaching Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.² What is uncertain is more than people suppose: what bird the bird is, whether the animal on the rim is a toad or a frog, whether the drum was struck with a pounding motion or not, and who cast the first one.

Admitting those uncertainties does not make the drum any lighter. It still sits there, a dead weight, its surface dense with decoration, cast in an alloy with lead added so the metal would fill the mould — the trace of a metallurgical craft built up over many generations. An object like that needs no tidier story to be worth more.

The next episode leaves archaeology to return to legend, with the three-year-old boy who suddenly shoots up: Thanh Giong and the Yin Invaders.