Churchman provides a careful, compelling, and much-needed account of an oft-neglected region in both Chinese history and recent Vietnamese nationalist history. Churchman criticizes in passing the uneven and negligible treatment of the bronze drum culture in recent Vietnamese historical writing, which undervalues the drum's plain designs for promoting national pride. She mainly challenges the prevailing Sinocentric view in Chinese historiography that the region was politically peripheral and insignificant to the Chinese empires, and that their peoples were uncivilized and nameless ‘southwestern barbarians.’ Instead, Churchman skillfully and justifiably makes the region the center of its own history. Recognizing the difficulty in writing a history for peoples without their own written records, Churchman turns to archaeology and material culture for corroborating evidence, and she detects and exposes political biases and linguistic as well as literary confusions in the Chinese sources. As a result, she convincingly rejects the portrayal of a homogeneous, passive, and eventually Sinicized people subject to the imperial Chinese states and recovers the agency of these bronze drum casting people, who conducted active, strategic, and at times powerful negotiations in their constant political and military dealings with and alongside the Chinese empires in the north.

Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Choice Reviews

[An] extraordinary piece of work. . . . The People Between the Rivers is a recommended read not only for specialists on the history of this particular region, but also for any historian looking for outstanding examples of how to apply a strict methodology to elaborate plausible hypotheses, in contexts where data is scarce. In spite of the inevitable limitations caused by this problem, Churchman is able to, quoting a Vietnamese historian, put ‘'flesh” on the mute archaeological “bones”’ (p. 36), demonstrating along the way that it is possible to say much more about the Li and Lao than what is contained in histories determined by nation-building interests. Her work is bound to become a reference for future studies on the region of the Two Rivers; and hopefully it will also spark similar interest within the present-day nation states whose lands the Li and Lao inhabited more than a thousand years ago.

New Books Asia

A masterpiece of synthesis and insight that provides a lucid overarching framework for several centuries of regional history as well as nuanced discussions of countless ground-level issues, from problematizing the concepts of ‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to mapping out trade patterns between the Red River Plain and southern China.

Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog

The People Between the Rivers is a masterful historical account of an important region, its peoples and chieftains, and the various Chinese administrative empires with which they constantly interacted. It provides a focused, interdisciplinary analysis of cultural interactions involving a neglected group of peoples over a large expanse of time. . . . Churchman also brings broad insights and critical approaches from linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to bear on the study; the result is nothing short of spectacular. This study provides a crucial missing link in the chain of our understanding of premodern China–Southeast Asia relations.

Asian Perspectives

This is a consummate treatise on the history of the peoples who lived in the region between the Red River and Pearl River during the period from roughly the third through the eighth century. Utilizing materials from a wide variety of disciplines—archaeology, metallurgy, coinage, linguistics, botany, zoology, medicine, and so forth—Catherine Churchman skillfully navigates between the conflicting claims of modern nationalists to show that the indigenes of that time and place viewed themselves as neither Vietnamese nor Chinese. In light of the heavy investment of modern scholarship in projecting contemporary political boundaries and ideologies backward to earlier times, this is a major, salutary achievement.

Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania

A masterful synthesis of information from multiple disciplines that provides a lucid overarching framework for several centuries of regional history and engages in nuanced discussions of countless ground-level issues, from problematizing the concepts of ‘Sinicization’ and ‘ethnicity’ to mapping out trade patterns between the Red River Plain and southern China. It is indeed an invaluable scholarly contribution.

Liam Kelley, University of Hawaii