Philippe Papin writes: “The stele contains more than the archive. . . . No Vietnamese historical document goes so far and so deep into the society of the past. . . . In Vietnam there exists no source more specific, more technical, more arduous than what village epigraphy allows to be known” (9–10). He notes that village inscriptions, the least known of Vietnamese historical sources, are “anchored in thousands of real-life stories” (13). Papin's book demonstrates the truth of these observations.
Papin is the world's foremost expert on Vietnamese epigraphy; he has published on many other topics as well, including an excellent history of the city of Hanoi. Having studied the over twenty thousand rubbings of steles made during the French colonial era, held in the Hán-Nôm Institute in Hanoi, and having conducted fieldwork at stele sites, Papin addresses a practice in seventeenth-century northern rural Vietnam: villagers donating land and...
