The Dong Son Culture

Archaeology came upon this culture entirely by chance. In the summer of 1924, after heavy rain, a farmer fishing on the bank of the Ma River in Thanh Hoa saw bronze objects showing through the earth.¹

From that spot opened nearly a hundred years of excavation, and the name Dong Son became the name of a whole age.

The first excavations, from 1924 to 1932, were carried out by a customs officer who also collected antiquities. A researcher at the French School of the Far East then published the finds, calling them "the bronze age in Tonkin and northern Annam". By 1934 an Austrian archaeologist proposed calling it outright the Dong Son culture, and that name has stayed ever since.¹

But ask when the culture began and three Western scholars of the early twentieth century give three different answers. One said around the eighth to seventh centuries BC. Another brought it down to the fourth to third. A third discussed instead when it ended, around the Han period.¹

One thing was common to the view of that era: while granting that the culture was indigenous, Western scholars still tended to look for the origins of Dong Son outside it — in the steppes to the north, in the state of Chu, or in the Dian region of Yunnan.¹²

After 1954 excavation passed into Vietnamese hands, and the focus changed: instead of asking where Dong Son came from, researchers asked what came before Dong Son.

The result is the sequence told in the previous episode: Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau, Go Mun, then Dong Son.¹

But one detail is seldom mentioned and deserves to be. That sequence is not a single line. The Ma River basin has a line of its own: Con Chan Tien, Bai Man, Quy Chu, then Dong Son. The Lam River basin has another: Den Doi, Ru Cat, Ru Tran, Lang Vac.¹ Which is to say that several different local lines all arrived at Dong Son, rather than one centre spreading outward.

From this, Vietnamese archaeology concluded that Dong Son formed in place. The author of the ninety-year survey himself states the second half of it plainly: in the course of its development, Dong Son selectively took up elements of neighbouring cultures, chiefly the Dian and the Han.¹ Indigenous, but not closed off.

More than 400 Dong Son sites are known today, and even that count is incomplete. Their distribution nearly coincides with northern Vietnam as it is now: north to the Vietnam-China border, west to the Vietnam-Laos border, south to Quang Binh.¹

In time, most researchers inside and outside Vietnam place Dong Son from about the seventh century BC to the first or second century AD — roughly 900 years.¹

Those 900 years divide into two clear phases. The early phase has no iron and shows no influence of Han culture. The late phase has iron, and the marks of Han influence appear on both the pottery and the bronzes.¹

This is where Dong Son genuinely differs from the layers before it.

Since Phung Nguyen times people knew how to alloy copper with tin. By Dong Dau and Go Mun, casters were adding arsenic and antimony to make arrowheads sharper. At Dong Son they added lead to the alloy — and it is lead that makes large objects possible: drums, situlae, bells.¹ Metal alloyed with lead runs further in the mould, which is what allows complicated moulds to be filled.

The Dong Son people used at least eleven different alloys, choosing one or another according to the object they meant to make.¹ That is the sign of a craft built up over generations, not of groping about.

Moulds of sandstone and fired clay have been found at Lang Ca, Lang Vac and Lang Ngam — moulds for daggers, spearheads and ornaments.¹

Moulds for drums are rarer still. The ninety-year survey published in 2014 reports that by then only one fragment had been found, at Luy Lau in Bac Ninh, and belonging to a later phase.¹ One fragment of a mould sounds like little, but it settles a question that was once disputed: the bronze drums were cast by people here, not bought in from elsewhere.

That figure is now out of date. At the end of 2024 the Vietnamese press reported that an excavation at the same Luy Lau site had recovered more than 2,300 fragments of drum moulds, among them an outer mould for a drum face carrying its full pattern.³ The degree of certainty needs stating: this is a news report, not a peer-reviewed archaeological one, and it gives no date for the fragments. So all that can be said for now is that where there was one fragment there are now a great many, and what period they belong to must wait on the excavators.

Traces of rice appear earlier than Dong Son: charred rice grains have been found at Dong Dau, that is, in the preceding phase. By Dong Son they are far denser — the fired-clay moulds at Lang Ca have rice husks mixed into the clay, a lump of earth at Dong Tien still carries the impressions of husks, and inside a bronze situla at Lang Vac both husks and whole grains of rice were found.¹

As for livestock: buffalo and cattle for draught, dogs, and elephants — elephants used both in war and for transport, and engraved on the handle of a dagger found at Lang Vac. Pigs, chickens and goats were most likely kept as well, but on a small scale.¹

There is another kind of evidence often cited alongside: old Chinese texts describe the Lac fields that followed the rise and fall of the tide, and two rice harvests a year in Giao Chi and Cuu Chan.¹ But the two must be kept apart: that is what books record, not what was dug out of the ground. It is good when the two kinds of evidence support each other, but they must not be mixed into one.

Archaeology shows a few things fairly clearly. Grave goods differ from burial to burial — some graves hold much, some little, which is to say there were rich and poor. Bronze weapons increase, making up about half of the bronze artefacts in burials.⁴ The ramparts of Co Loa were raised. At Cau Vuc near Co Loa a cache of tens of thousands of bronze arrowheads was found.¹

Tens of thousands of arrowheads of one pattern are not something a village makes for itself. They call for a centralised place of production, someone to organise it, and a power large enough to mobilise.

From these signs the author of the survey concludes: the state of Van Lang, and then Au Lac, came into being on the foundation of the Dong Son culture.¹

This is a place to read slowly. That conclusion holds two claims laid over each other, and they are not of the same kind.

The first — that Dong Son society was stratified, had centres of power, and could organise production at scale — is something archaeology points to directly: burials, ramparts, arsenals.

The second — that this state was named Van Lang and headed by the Hung Kings — does not come from the ground but from texts and legends written down hundreds to thousands of years afterwards. No Dong Son artefact carries writing that gives the name of a country or of a king.

Both claims may well be true. But they carry different degrees of certainty, and anyone telling history ought to say where that difference lies rather than folding them into one tidy sentence.

This culture did not live alone.

To the south, Dong Son influence on the Sa Huynh culture is clearer than the other way round — Dong Son bronze drums have been found within Sa Huynh territory.¹

To the north, the exchange of bronzes between Yunnan and northern Vietnam began early and was strongest in the period of the Dian culture.¹ This is exactly where the hypothesis once stood that Dong Son originated in Dian — a hypothesis later refuted by radiocarbon dates, the more widely accepted reading being that the two developed in parallel and traded back and forth.²

Further west and south, Dong Son bronze drums have been found in Laos, Cambodia, northeastern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia.¹ A culture that could cast something people thousands of kilometres away wanted to own.

And once bronze drums come up, they deserve the full account. The next episode is given over entirely to a single object: The Dong Son Bronze Drums.