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Kathryn Dyt, "The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
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A
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B
New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
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C
Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Patrick Jory, I teach Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland in Australia and I'm co host of this channel. Now when we think about the way that pre modern Southeast Asian rulers govern their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the people. But as Katherine Dyche shows in her new book, the Nature of the Weather World in 19th century Vietnam, Royal governance in Vietnam depended on a highly detailed knowledge of the weather and the natural environment. Kings took a deep personal interest in the weather, even writing poetry in an attempt to influence it. The Vietnamese royal bureaucracy had a bureau for the Observation of the sky. Yes, that's the official name. To advise the king on portentous signs and omens which might help him interpret the will of heaven. This pre modern understanding of the natural world was influenced both by classical Chinese learning as well as by an empirical understanding of Vietnam's distinct climate and landscape. This highly original book connects Vietnam's pre colonial political history with an understanding of the natural environment as seen through the eyes of Vietnamese king and royal officials. Today, I'm so glad to be talking to the book's author, Katherine Dyett. Catherine is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at SOAS University of London. Catherine, thanks so much for coming on our podcast. I've got so much I want to ask you.
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B
Thanks so much for having me, Patrick. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thanks also for your kind words about the book.
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C
Now, your book is about Vietnamese history. Can you tell us how and why you became interested in Vietnamese history?
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B
Yeah, sure. So I first really got interested in Vietnam through my undergraduate studies at Monash University in Melbourne. I was studying Japanese language at the time and also taking a lot of history courses. And, you know, through that I started to develop a real curiosity about Southeast Asia, you know, especially Vietnam. And like a lot of people, I think my initial entry point for Vietnamese history was studying the Vietnam War. But the more I read, the more I found myself wanting to move beyond familiar war focused narratives to understand more of the deeper historical forces that had shaped the country over time. I think of part of what drew me in as well was this, the sense that this was a field where there was still so much to be explored, you know, especially anything outside the war period. Vietnamese history felt in some ways understudied, at least in the Australian academic context I was in at the time. And that made it all the more compelling. And maybe there was a sense, a kind of challenge there too, which I was up for. Also, while I was completing my undergraduate studies, I traveled to Vietnam as part of a longer backpacking trip through Southeast Asia. And I think I was really struck by Vietnam's energy, by its geographical diversity from north to south. And I came away from that trip wanting to understand it more deeply, you know, not just as a tourist, but as a historian. And after finishing my honours degree in history, I did a research based MA at M as well, during which time I went to Hanoi to study Vietnamese. I'd originally planned to stay in Hanoi for just a few months, but I found the language so challenging that I ended up staying for about 16 months and taking daily private lessons. So my MA research focused on Buddhist nuns in Northern Vietnam. And as my Vietnamese improved, I was able to carry out oral history interviews with around 30 nuns in and around Hanoi.
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C
This book has such an unusual and original theme. When I saw the title, the Nature of Kingship, I thought, oh, it's another study of Southeast Asian kingship. But as soon as I started Reading the preface, I realized that the title is actually a play on words. The book is about how Vietnamese rulers in the 19th century thought about and tried to manage the natural environment of Vietnam. So how and why did you become interested in this theme? And why did you want to write a book about it?
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B
Thank you. So after I finished my MA, I began my PhD at the Australian National University. And I'd actually initially intended to continue in the direction of Buddhist history in the 19th century. So I returned to Hanoi for fieldwork. And while I was working on the 19th century Vietnamese archives, I started noticing something really kind of unexpected. I'd been looking for references to Buddhism, but what kept jumping out at me were these constant mentions of the weather. Sometimes they were just really small entries, but other time they were really detailed entries recording things like rainfall, drought, you know, even exact measurements of river levels. And what really intrigued me was how systematic it all was. You know, there's this whole bureaucratic infrastructure around weather monitoring, which in involved all levels of society, you know, from provincial officials right up into the king. There's one record where Ming Mang, the emperor, kind of from 1820 to 1841, he wakes up in the middle of the night, you know, to check his rain gauge. And all across the kingdom, officials were required to keep weather diaries and send in regular reports to the court. And that's when I started thinking, you know, why was the court so invested in this kind of environmental surveillance? This line of questioning ends up shifting the whole direction of my research. So one of the core arguments I make in the book is that governance in 19th century Vietnam was in many ways, what I call kind of an ecological project. And the first part of the title of this book, as you brought out, the Nature of Kingship, speaks to this idea that kingship and the structures of rule weren't abstract or detached from the natural world. They were actually deeply entangled with environmental rhythms, elemental forces, and the daily negotiation of climate and geography. And this is quite a departure from how Nguyen rule has traditionally been understood. Most historical accounts focus on colonial conquest, since the Nguyen dynasty was the last to govern an independent Vietnam before the French arrived. So within this framework, Nguyen rulers are often portrayed as corrupt, ineffective, out of touch with people and the natural world, and they're overly committed to a conservative Confucian worldview, which made them vulnerable to French domination. And when the environment does appear in the historiography of the Nian Court, it's usually framed in really ideological terms, particularly through the concept of the mandate of heaven. So this idea that extreme weather, floods, floods, drought, storms signal divine displeasure. So if the emperor is ruling poorly, heaven withdraws its favor and nature lashes out. In that reading, environmental events become a kind of moral scorecard. Is the ruler still worthy of heaven's blessing or not? Now, that framework was absolutely important at the time. It was part of how legitimacy was understood. But in the book, I try to take it a step further. I argue that we shouldn't just treat the natural world as a symbol of imperial virtue or failure. Instead, we need to see it as something that actively shaped how kingship worked in practice. So rulers had to confront the real material challenges of living and governing in an extraordinarily diverse landscape. Things like travel, the movement of goods, and the transmission of urgent messages were all shaped by environmental conditions. So having reliable information about the weather and the terrain was critical for the court. They couldn't control the environment, but they could observe, document, and try to make sense of it. And in the book, I show how this knowledge about the environment fed into things like court structures and decision making.
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C
Now, working in Southeast Asian history, we always have this challenge with source material, and the farther back you go, the harder it is to find it. And I would have thought that finding source materials for this kind of history would have been a particular challenge. But it seems that the Vietnamese court in the 19th century cared so much about the weather and events in the natural world that they apparently left a lot of records. And you found what seems to be a very large amount of documentation which has helped you reconstruct the way that the Vietnamese royal government managed the natural environment or tried to manage it. Where and how did you find these sources?
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B
So, yeah, the book draws on quite a wide range of sources, everything from court records, weather reports, temple inscriptions, French missionary letters, and even imperial poetry. As you mentioned, a lot of the material comes from the Nguyen imperial histories, which are the veritable records, or Dinam tukluk, which were sources which were compiled after an emperor's death and which document the key events of his reign. It's an incredibly rich source, but it's also been kind of quite under explored, exploited and underused, I think, because it's quite challenging to work with. So I mostly used the Vietnamese translations of the veritable records, but I also cross check passages with the original classical Chinese versions to check my understanding. But even when working with the Vietnamese versions, the language is really quite archaic and dense. It definitely took me quite a while to find my way in and get a feel for their rhythm. But one thing I really loved about working with these sources is how much emotion and texture and humor they contain. You'd expect official documents to be quite dry, but instead you find these really vivid accounts of court life. They're actually deeply human. So I tried to bring that out in the book to show how these official sources could actually be, you know, very intimate.
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C
Early in the book, you introduced an important concept which is in the title of the book as well, the Weather World. Can you tell us what you mean by the weather world?
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B
Sure. So in my book, I take a phenomenological approach to kingship. So I try to understand Nguyen rulers as beings in the world, as deeply embedded in their environment, as shaped by it, and as constantly responding to it. So this is. I'm just going to give a bit of context, but this is quite a departure from how the Nguyen court is usually studied. So a lot of previous scholarship has looked at kingship through the lens of inherited cultural models. You know, there's a long running debate about whether Vietnamese rule was more Chinese or more Southeast Asian, and that's still very much an ongoing conversation about Vietnam. You know, Vietnam often doesn't fit neatly into regional categories, and academic departments often struggle with where to place it. But I argue that if we focus only on those cultural scripts, we risk missing something really essential, the lived, everyday experience of ruling in a place like 19th century Vietnam. Cultural models alone don't fully account for the environmental and sensory context in which rule was performed. So instead of placing kingship purely within these cultural frameworks, I try to locate it within the weather world. And this is a concept I've borrowed from the anthropologist Tim Ingold. So Ingold has this really evocative phrase. He talks about our lives unfolding in the swirling midst of the weather world. And Ingold's really building on Heidegger's idea of dwelling, which is this notion that the environment isn't just something external to us, it's not just this passive backdrop we move across like a stage set. Instead, it's completely entangled with how we live, how we think, and how we experience the world. So Ingold really pushes back as well, against the traditional way of separating out land and weather, as if land is solid and fixed, while weather is just fleeting or ephemeral. He says, no, that's a false binary. In reality, the land and the elements are constantly interacting. So the earth is shaped by wind, rain, heat and frost, and in turn, the atmosphere is affected by what's happening, happening on the ground. So from this perspective, the weatherworld isn't just about meteorological conditions, it encompasses the entire landscape as it's shaped and transformed by wind, water, and temperature. So I found Tim Ingold's framework of the weatherworld as this immersive, entangled space where land and atmosphere are all in constant interplay, really helpful. And when thinking about the 19th century Vietnamese context, because there was a really strong idea in this period that land was strongly shaped by elemental forces. So in the book, I take Ingold's idea of the weather world, and I kind of rework it through a Vietnamese cosmology. And one of the most important concepts connected to the weather world that I discuss in the book is key. Now, qi is often translated as vital energy or cosmic breath. And it's absolutely foundational to how People in 19th century Vietnam understood the world. It gave form to everything. So everything from wind and mist to the denser stuff like rocks, rivers, trees, people, everything was infused with this dynamic, flowing energy. Key even extended into the cosmos. Stars and planets were made of solidified kiwi, you know, so the whole universe, from the earth under your feet to the sky above, was part of the same energetic continuum. And this means that nature wasn't seen as something which was passive and inert. You know, it was vital and it was powerful. And these energies mattered for politics, they mattered for rule, took it all really seriously. They believed that the natural world had real material effects on human life, on character, and on society as a whole. There was this idea that veins which pulse underground could tug on people, you know, mold their dispositions, their morality, even their political loyalties. So the court studied then combinations of wind and land or water and land, and how they gave rise to particular types of human beings. And there was a real fear that toxic brews of wind and water with land could breed disorder and rebellion, exert a corrupting influence, not because of bad governance, necessarily, but because the place itself exerted a corrupting influence that lay beyond human control. And this raised a bigger question for me. You know, in a world where nature itself is active, even agentive, what does it mean to rule? What does it mean to be a king?
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C
You explain that Vietnamese ideas about the natural environment, at least official ideas, were heavily influenced by traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Taoism. Concepts such as feng shui and others were used to understand the Vietnamese natural environment. But. But at the same time, you write that Vietnamese emperors and their officials were also a bit skeptical of whether Chinese texts were applicable to Vietnam, due to its different weather patterns and its different environment. Can explain how Vietnamese rulers sort of squared the two or squared the influence of the Chinese conception of these things with the reality in Vietnam.
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B
Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question. So, yeah, absolutely. Chinese knowledge about the weather, about the stars, about the cosmos, was really important for the main court. So they used a lot of the court observatory, the Bureau for the Observation of the sky, the longer title drew on these Chinese texts. And they were kind of foundational core reading for this group of people in order to interpret the sky and the cosmos. But in the book, I make the point that they didn't rely only on those texts because often they were incompatible with the Vietnamese climatic context. So it was really important that even in deciphering portents, which was really important activity carried out by the Bureau for the Observation of the sky, they had to rely on a more embodied and local understanding of what was happening in the climate in that particular locality rather than just rely on these texts. You know, there's quite a few exchanges I discuss in the book where the king gets really annoyed at his astronomers when they're just blindly following what the text says rather than reading the environment locally and in its own terms. So these two things coexisted.
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C
I think you write also that the Vietnamese accessed even Western ideas about astronomy and meteorology from Chinese texts that have been written by the Jesuits. And I think also later on, sort of more scientific works of Protestant missionaries recorded by the Chinese. So they're getting a lot of knowledge about the weather and the natural environment, I guess, from different sources.
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B
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's really interesting that a lot of the books which were actually on the core reading list for the observatory were actually translations of Western texts which were written by. By. By Jesuit missionaries in China. So it's a really kind of interesting way that this knowledge is kind of filtering into. Into Vietnam. And they were drawing on this wide body of kind of Western and Chinese knowledge about the environment and combining those two things with their own embodied local understandings of. Of how the environment worked.
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C
Okay, so what natural events were Vietnamese emperors most interested in?
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B
I think there's quite a wide spectrum. I mean, obviously things that had severe impacts on populations like drought and the other extreme flood, were really important to the emperor. But I would say that they were also interested in more understanding climatic rhythms and trying to map kind of seasonal calendars so that people in the kingdom, peasants would have an understanding of how the weather works so that they could be successful in agriculture. So it. It wasn't necessarily just paying attention to the really big events. It was actually more subtle Climatic rhythms and weather patterns on a day to day basis as well.
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C
I was really interested in this. It's kind of like a pre modern version of the Bureau of Meteorology. It's called, I think you call it the Bureau for the Observation of the sky. And it employs, as I understand, astronomers, meteorologists, scribes, even students are there and their job is to report to the emperor about the weather and I think also astronaut astrological events. And you also write that a lot of these men who managed the observatory were in charge of writing the dynasty's history, is that right?
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B
Yeah, I mean, in the fourth chapter of the book, I kind of explore that in more detail. But what I found really fascinating was that the men who were appointed to the kind of highest position within the Bureau for the Observation of the sky were also the chief editors of the historical chronicles.
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C
Very convenient, isn't it?
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B
Very convenient. And what I found in my research was that the men who were kind of appointed in these, you know, as chief officers of the Bureau for the Observation of the sky also held positions as managers or chief editors of the History Bureau. So there was a lot of overlap between those two departments, obviously. And they were also the kind of inner circle of the Nguyen Court. So they were the emperor's most trusted advisors and, you know, the men who held the most power at court. And I'd make the point in the book that this. So what was kind of really important for the Yang Court was the way that knowledge and environmental expertise gave you status and power at the Nguyen Court. And you know, in number, in chapter four of the book, I look at how environmental expertise was performed at court and then recorded in the veritable records. And so these two things were going on where at the court, the chief officer of the Bureau of the Observation of the sky is having a conversation with the emperor about, you know, an environmental port or an environmental event. And then later these are being stored and then used for dynastic histories. But the men who were actually engaged in this conversation with the emperor, the ones who are overseeing the documents which are being created for, for posterity. And one thing I noticed in the royal records, the veritable records, that the conversations between the king and his royal astronomers often followed a really similar pattern. So a strange event occurs, say a thunderclap at the wrong time of year, or Venus appeared during daylight. An official comes forward and he offers an interpretation. And then the king kind of tears it apart. And often he's quite brutal. He says things like, use your brains, don't just follow what the book says, you know, you kind of idiot. And I, I kind of, I, I got kind of thinking, you know, why? Because this, of this overlap between, you know, officials in the history office and the observatory, you know, why are these men preserving stories or records that seem to undermine their own authority? Right, because they're being kind of mocked and ridiculed. And I argue in the book that these weren't casual inclusions. They're actually carefully crafted. They help to kind of reinforce the king's intellectual, and he's in the hierarchy of expertise in the court. So officials, you know, would accept their criticism not as a failure, but also as a kind of mark of inclusion, you know, of being close enough to the center of power to be corrected. And by having these debates recorded, it became part of the court's claim to legitimacy. You know, not just having environmental knowledge, but also being seen to know.
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C
When you read the history of the 19th century and the Nguyen emperors, especially Ming Meng, they always talk about the so called civilizing mission, although it's obviously something different to the later colonial administrations. But what I didn't know was that the emperors understood that the level of civilization of a local population seemed to depend on the natural environment. In order to civilize that barbarian population, they had to improve that environment. Could you explain a little bit more about how the Vietnamese court understood the relationship between, you know, the natural environment in a locality and its kind of civilizational level?
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating because I think we tend to think about, you know, the way that the Nguyen court tried to control populations or try to influence them was to enact policies which would, you know, change behavior. But what I became interested in was the, you know, what I kind of discovered through working in the ARCOLL archives is actually the focus was much more on changing things from the ground up. So I mentioned earlier that the court studied these conjunctures of wind and water, you know, feng tui, sorry, fong TOU or twee to, which means wind and land or water and land, and that these places would give rise to particular types of human beings. You know, that there was something about the way that the wind interact with the land of that place, and the atmosphere it created would actually kind of produce particular types of populations. And that this was very much out of the court's hands, out of the court's control. So the only way you could actually civilize these people was to actually physically go in and change that land composition. So there's records of the king actually ordering that, for example, Trees be raised down, or if there was kind of mounds that were in the shape of something like a sword or what they perceived to be a sword or something looking, you know, menacing, like a gun or spear, then they would actually go. Go and kind of dig it up, you know, so there was a real emphasis on if we really want populations and to be under the control of the courts and not be rebellious, we need to do something about the land composition itself.
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C
When Vietnam faced adverse weather events such as droughts, the Vietnamese emperor would call for a rich ritual to be performed across the kingdom, to, quote, call the wind in the rain. Could you tell us something about this ritual?
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B
Yeah, sure. So the cold owl ceremony, literally calling for wind and rain, was performed all across the Vietnamese kingdom, and it was a remedy for drought, but it could also be a remedy for a lot of other things, plague or. Or even too much rain. You could perform another ritual called khotan, which was very similar. And, yeah, so in the book, I really explore this ritual and how the court managed it by distributing funds to various localities to perform the ritual, about how the people who were chosen to go forward and perform this ritual. There was lots of rules and regulations about, you know, how long the ritual should be performed for, for three days. What happened if you don't get a successful result? You got to wait 10 days and you got to do it again, and you can do up to three rounds. And then, you know, and then if that doesn't work, then the court would bring in the big guns. They would get somebody from the center, potentially, to go and perform the ritual for this other locality that hasn't. Hasn't managed to produce the desired result. So it was really fascinating to me that this was just such a widespread ritual that, you know, the court had so many rules and regulations. They invested a lot of money in it and involved also a lot of people. People. And a point I'd make in the book as well, that it wasn't just about performing the ritual, but there had to be a sincere emotional component to the performance of the ritual in order for it to be efficacious. So, yeah, it wouldn't work unless the participant was kind of emotionally sincere. You couldn't fake it.
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C
One of my favorite parts of the book, and it occurs in various places, is when you're writing about how the Vietnamese emperors composed poetry, actually a lot of poetry. And the main theme for many of these poems was the weather. Can you tell us about these weather poems?
- [29:23]
B
So, yeah, it's fascinating, but Nguyen kings were actually incredibly Prolific poets. So Ming Meng, Tiu Chi and Tu Duc each wrote over 3,000 poems in their lifetimes. But this poetry is often dismissed for being formulaic or lacking literary flair, we might say. But what's really surprising to me was how much of it is about the weather, about the environment. So in chapter six, I take a look at this body of poetry and, you know, argue that it played a really crucial role in the way the kings kind of related to their world. It helped kings to process the weather. So some of the poems that the kings wrote act a bit like meteorological diaries. A weather report would come in from different places. You know, the king would reflect on it, and then he'd write. Write a poem about it. And poetry also gave kings a way to grapple with the unpredictability of nature. They couldn't always protect their people from disasters, but they could show that they felt people's pains. And these poems were widely circulated. So the king's emotion became a shared experience across the kingdom.
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C
Yeah. In quite a few of the poems that you mentioned, the book, the emperors express themselves in really emotional way, and they say they sort of cry of the suffering of the people due to some weather event. I was wondering whether it was real emotion or whether expressing emotion was part of the genre of the poetry. Genre?
- [30:57]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I mean, I think the fact that it's. Well, I mean, and I guess we'll never know, but I think the thing is that it's so consistently referenced that we could at least say that it was a really important. Considered to be a very important attribute of kingship. And this is important because when we think about Nyan kings, they're not usually imagined as emotional figures. So the assumption tends to be that Confucian ideals demanded restraint, that rulers had to suppress their feeling, you know, stay composed, govern with this stoic rationality. But, you know, when you start digging into the court records, a really different images emerges. Like you said, we see Nguyen Kings crying, sweating, losing sleep, overwhelmed with worry, weighed down by grief. You know, really vivid visceral reactions. And they weren't seen as signs of weakness. They're actually part of what made a good king. Emotion was seen as central to how kingship functioned. Yeah. And I make the point in the book that this makes sense if you place emotions within the context of the weatherworld, a context where nature itself could feel and respond emotionally to human actions. So in this framework, the feelings of the king, the members of the court, it had consequences. People believed that sincere Emotional displays could move heaven. You know, I just talked about the Kaldel ritual. You know, this is another point. So during times of drought or natural crisis, it wasn't uncommon for people to perform really dramatic acts of crying, screaming. French missionaries have kind of documented this. You know, people would kind of go out and mimic animals eating grass to show nature how desperate they were and ask for compassion. So it seems to me to be part of this wider environment where actually emotion was part of how society and how nature functioned.
- [33:01]
C
Yeah, sometimes you're looking at it from a modern perspective where, you know, weather events we still get, of course have droughts and floods, which are, you know, serious events for people affected, but generally speaking they don't affect the general economy all that much. But in an agricultural society, a drought could be catastrophic or floods by the same token. So you can understand why the weather was of such importance to the rulers and obviously to everyone, and how important it was to try and influence it to produce the right conditions.
- [33:34]
B
Yeah, absolutely. But I would also say that there was kind of a point I tried to bring out in the book as well is that there was kind of a limit to how much obviously they could influence the weather, even though they try to a bit it with through ritual measures etc. But most of what Kingship was about was gaining as much knowledge and understanding about the weather as possible so that you could live with nature and subsist with it. But it was a powerful force which couldn't be completely controlled.
- [34:04]
C
Well, you finished this book in 1883, just before the French completed their colonization of Vietnam. And it seems that the older understanding of the weather and the natural environment gives way to a new, more modern scientific understanding. And this process, as I understand it, continues under the modern socialist government. So I was wondering whether anything remains of the old understandings of the weather and the causes of weather events.
- [34:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, I didn't. You know, my book does end, you know, at the very end of that point. And I haven't gone very deep, deeply into what lay beyond that, but definitely there was. The French obviously colonized Vietnam and started teaching modern science, scientific methods schools and started kind of ridiculing what they saw as outdated, superstitious modes of interacting with nature, you know, belief in dragons, etc. But actually when I was living in Vietnam and doing my field work, I traveled. I was mainly based in Hanoi, but I traveled to Ningayan Province in Central Vietnam. Vietnam. And I was actually following up on a text that I discovered in the, the Sino Vietnamese Institute in Hanoi. Which is this series of questions and answers about the environment. It was a survey that was carried out in, I don't know, 1911 or something. And it's a really fascinating source. And I don't know who person the French person who kind of, because it was a French official who went in and did this study. But I don't know who it. I haven't been able to find out. But I went back to ne try and find out about this document and also to see whether some of those, you know, really fascinating stories about the environment still had any resonance in the Ngan province where I went to visit. And what really struck me, I mean, a lot of people didn't remember these specific stories that I was reading from the documents, but they had a lot of other stories about trees that, you know, would kind of provide bounty food, etc for hungry villagers, lakes which would give rise to a dinner tray or jewels kind of buried beneath that. There was really a sense that, you know, nature was very much still perceived to be alive, agentive, that people had to respect it and work with it rather than just kind of dominate and subdue it.
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C
Fascinating. Before we conclude, could I ask you if you're working on a new project and whether you could possibly tell us a little bit about it?
- [36:45]
B
Yeah. So my current project that I'm doing at Soaz actually builds on some of the themes I explored in the Nature of Kingship, but it actually shifts the focus underground. Like literally. I'm looking at how people in Vietnam, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries, understood the subterranean world. So things like caves, mines, mineral veins and other underground spaces. So it's a project that really brings together environmental history, geology and local cosmologies. So I'm interested in how the Vietnamese and later French colonial authorities interpreted what lay below the surface of the earth. You know, what did they think was down there and how did those ideas shape state power, spiritual beliefs and ideas about wealth and danger? And I'm also looking at the rise of geology as a science in Vincent Vietnam and how early French geologists tried to map and to classify the landscape, sometimes in conversation with and sometimes in conflict with local knowledge systems.
- [37:54]
C
Fascinating. I can't wait till it comes out.
- [37:58]
B
Maybe we'll have another session.
- [37:59]
C
Patrick, that would be wonderful. In the meantime, Catherine Dyke, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss your your new book, the Nature of the weather world in 19th century Vietnam. It's hot off the press, published this year 2025 by University of Hawaii Press.
- [38:19]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Patrick.
- [38:22]
C
And you've been listening to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Thanks everyone, as always for listening. You can download or stream these interviews and thousands more free of charge via the New Books Network website or iTunes. Dunes.