Historians such as Keith W. Taylor, Catherine Churchman, and Jaymin Kim assert that these periods and stereotypes enveloped the narrative as modern constructs, however, and critique them as tools for various nationalist and irredentist causes in China, Vietnam, and other countries.
During the first three periods of Chinese rule, the pre-Sinitic indigenous culture was centered in the northern part of modern Vietnam, in the alluvial deltas of the Hong, Cả and Mã Rivers.
[5][6] Ten centuries of Chinese rule left a substantial genetic footprint, with settlement by large numbers of ethnic Han,[7][8] while opening up Vietnam for trade and cultural exchange.
Chinese characters remained the official script of Vietnam until French colonization in the 20th century, despite the rise in vernacular chữ Nôm literature in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Ming.
[11] Another narrative, the national school of Vietnamese history, portrays the period in "a militant, nationalistic, and very contemporary vision through which emerged a hypothetical substratum of an original Vietnam that was miraculously preserved throughout a millennium of the Chinese presence.
"[11] The national Vietnamese narrative depicts the Chinese as a corrupt and profit-driven people and merely the first of the foreign colonizing empires that were eventually driven from Vietnam.
However, scholars such as Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen argue that "the trope of a small country consistently repelling the China’s cultural force is a recent, postcolonial, mid-20th-century construction".
Keith Taylor's The Birth of Vietnam (1983) asserts a strong continuity from the semi-legendary kingdoms of the Red River Plain to the founding of Dai Viet, which was the result of a thousand-year struggle against the Chinese that culminated in the restoration of Vietnamese sovereignty.
[14] The argument for an intrinsic, intractable, and distinctly Southeast Asian Vietnamese identity in the Red River Plain throughout history has been categorized by Catherine Churchman as context, cultural continuity, and resistance.
[20] These early moves toward autonomy in the 10th century were fairly tame compared to the activities of people who cushioned them from more direct contact with Southern dynasties empires.
The oldest text compiled by a Vietnamese court, the 13th century Đại Việt sử ký, considered Nanyue to be the official starting point of their history.