Mining and local power in the highland areas of Vietnam - A perspective of the Hoang chieftain clan in the eighteenth-century Tụ Long copper mine

Abstract

This article concentrates to explore the role of the mining industry in the process of power-making and administrative regimes in the mountainous regions of pre-modern Vietnam. While previous scholarship on local chieftaincy and the political system of the highland areas tended to address the power of local chieftaincy being established by the control of agriculture and cultivating land, this study however will provide a different source of local chieftaincy power. By analyzing the almost one-century history of the Hoang chieftain clan in managing the Tu Long mine, the article not only reveals the way local chieftains used mining as a tool in establishing their political hegemony in the Sino-Vietnamese borderland but also points out this economic sector was reasons of the contestation among parties concerning with mining benefits. These will explain the changes of power and the social impacts of mining before the colonization took place in this area.