Fishers, Monks and Cadres

Front matter

Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam

Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam

EDYTA ROSZKO

Contents

List of Illustrations ... viii Acknowledgements ... ix

Note on Transliteration and Translation ... xv Glossary ... xvii

Maps ... xix

Chapter 1

‘The Coastal Society: Historical and Vernacular Geographies a Huynh, a coastal region of central Vietnam, and the island of

Ly Son have long been socially and economically oriented around

the South China Sea. Both places are associated with a distinct Bronze Age culture of Austronesian seafarers referred to as the Sa Huynh culture, which flourished in central and southern Vietnam between 1000 BC and 200 AD.' The Sa Huynh archaeological sites, named after the village where the discovery took place and where I conducted my fieldwork, provided evidence of intercultural links to maritime Malay cultures and extensive trade networks across the South China Sea as early as 600 BC (Wheeler 2006; Vickery 2009), predating the Cham period by a millennium or more. For centuries, then, the sea was a space that integrated and facilitated the circulation of wealth, power, and knowledge, while the seacoast was a point of cross-cultural contact rather than a borderline (Wheeler 2006).

Charles Wheeler (2001: 6) notes that most of the seaports in the central and southern parts of Vietnam were established during the Nguyễn period (1802-1945) on the foundations of former Cham seaports that had had extensive trade relations with seafaring merchants of predominantly Chinese origin (see also Dong Khanh Dia Du Chi 2003 [1885]; Ngô Đức Tho and Nguyễn Văn Nguyên 2006).? Historically,

1. In 1909, the French scholar M. Vinet identified jar burials, pottery, and other objects with characteristic ornaments in the coastal village of Sa Huynh. The first discovery of artefacts in Sa Huynh was followed by excavations by Vietnamese archaeologists in other settings, including the most recent one on Ly Son Island.

2. In Quảng Ngãi Province alone there were six ports — Sa Huỳnh, Thới Can, Sa Kỳ, Ly Son, Dai Cổ Lũy, and Mỹ Y - that are of Cham origin.

the Cham port network included Sa Huỳnh and Lý Sơn and stretched as far as Hainan Island and Guangzhou, where Cham merchant communities existed for over a thousand years, interacting, and engaging in commerce with Chinese as well as Arab, Persian, Jewish, and Indian merchants. The coast served as a ‘nexus for sea, coastal, riverine, and land traffic that integrated Vietnamese regions and linked Vietnam with maritime Asia’ (Wheeler 2001: 6).

The Cham were known throughout Southeast Asia not only as skilful seafarers and successful merchants, but also as ‘pirates, due to their naval raids on coastal areas that employed ethnically diverse maritime peoples (Hall 2011: 80). Between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, the Cham established their rule over coastal plains and mountainous zones in what is now south-central Vietnam (Nam Trung Bộ), a region that stretches from Quang Nam to Binh Thuan provinces. Although the Cham sovereign polities never formed a unified kingdom (Vickery 2009: 45), the Cham and Cambodian inscriptions as well as Chinese sources from the seventh century refer to them as ‘Champa’ In the fifteenth century, Champa was invaded by Dai Việt — the name of the Việt polity at the time — which gradually took control of the entire Cham territory. It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, that Nguyén lords were able to establish their power in the south. The civil wars between the Nguyễn and the Trinh lords (1627-1672 and 1774-1775), which divided Vietnam into northern and southern realms, created conditions that allowed Viét migrants living in the south to form their own distinct way of life. Central Vietnam was part of the southern realm and provided an option for northern Vietnamese migrants who, driven by a shortage of land, famine, internal conflict, and struggles for power, were seeking a better life elsewhere.

Historian of Southeast Asia Li Tana (1998) points out that the Viét, who arrived in the seventeenth century, had to settle into a new and different environment and engage with Cham communities. Their gradual extension into new areas in the south allowed migrants to escape domination by the northern court of Trinh in the Red River Delta, and to adopt such local elements as Cham deities and spirit cults, which were free of Confucian restrictions (Li 1998: 101-116). Vietnamese migrants colonizing the old Cham territory worshipped tutelary spirits that they had never worshipped in their places of origin. The new experience of the sea, the encounter with the unfamiliar Cham civilization, and interethnic marriages produced patterns that were quite different from those that existed in northern Vietnam (Li 1998). Therefore, to gain an adequate appreciation of contemporary religious practices and the sites of spirit worship in Sa Huynh and Ly Son, one must take a closer look at the historical legacy of the Cham, at different ways of being Vietnamese, and at the complex history of this coastal society.

Cham and Viét legacies

In Sa Huynh and Ly Son there are numerous temples and shrines located where anthropomorphized deities and terrestrial and maritime spirits are venerated by the local community. Many of these temples bear traces of assimilation of Cham elements into Viét culture, while others show a strong Chinese influence. As we will see in Chapter 3, they cast an interesting light on the history of the two locations, but also reveal an interrelated series of binary oppositions involving mainland and island, inland and coast, and land and sea, and thus different relationships between people and space. While Sa Huynh villagers almost never expressed anxiety about the previous Cham inhabitants of the land, the Viét residents of Ly Son Island were acutely aware that they were only the latest residents in a long history of settlement. This was a source of anxiety, as was the fact that the archeological record indicates that the Cham civilization was present prior to the Viét arrival on Ly Son in the seventeenth century. Islanders assuaged such unsettled feelings by seeking to convey a sense of genealogical continuity with larger entities such as the mainland and the nation. During my conversations with islanders, many of them betrayed a sense of unease regarding the previous Cham presence. One of the Ly Son villagers told me:

In the past Binh Thuan was the place of origin for the Cham people, but from there they spread to central parts, entering Da Nang and Quang Nam. In Ly Son there were not so many of them, so [the land] out here was intact. There was no one to have an exchange with at all. For that reason in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Viét people occupied Champa and stayed there. Well, back then, people from all provinces were moving in and out ... to other provinces. There were also people here [on the island] and the Cham also came here, but then [Viét] occupied the islands. After that [Cham] did not come here anymore, they were not able to (laughing). ... The Việt caught crabs, fish, and snails, which they ate through the day to survive. When more Viét occupied the island and stayed here, civil harmony with Champa people began.

When [asked the villager what he meant by ‘civil harmony with Champa, he replied:

There were still a few Cham people here - they lived on this land. After those regarded as Cham died, they did not enter the island anymore; they were gone so the Viét people flocked together here.

The passage quoted above is not an isolated example of the sense of discomfort associated with the prior Cham presence on the island. It reveals an immediate defensive reaction of the islanders, who felt the need to convince me of the absence of Cham people at the time when their ancestors arrived on the island. Despite the historical evidence that Champa consisted of several states that occupied the south-central coast of Vietnam from the end ofthe first millennium BC (Southworth 2004; Vickery 2009; Hardy 2009), many islanders maintained that the Cham were originally concentrated only in the southern part of Vietnam, in present-day Binh Thuận Province. Many villagers claimed that those Cham who stayed on the island gradually vanished and, generally, the Viét people outnumbered them. In this way Ly Son people wanted to clear up any doubts about their identity and their rights to the land, and to forestall any accusations of violence during the process of settling on the island. Nevertheless, surnames such as Mai, Dinh, Tiéu, and so forth suggest that the Vietnamese migrants on Ly Son Island intermixed with the Cham natives (very few of whom still lived in the area). In the process, the descendants of these interethnic marriages masked their Cham origins by absorbing and retaining most of the beliefs of the agrarian villages from which their Viét forefathers had come.

While Viét people took possession of various islands in the South China Sea as Viét territory by means of a Viét-centric settlement history, they did not establish themselves on empty soil. Ly Son villagers had to assimilate and interact with the Cham who were already there, even though they might claim that those Cham who stayed gradually vanished and that the Viét people simply came to outnumber them. However, control over territory is not only about the occupation and use of the land, but also about cultural attempts to produce locality and create the type of localized sociality that Appadurai calls ‘neighbourhood’ (Appadurai 1996). Such production of locality might require newcomers to perform ritual procedures that would pacify local spirits of the defeated and dispossessed indigenous inhabitants and incorporate them into the pantheon of the newly dominant community (Kammerer and Tannenbaum 2003). For example, Viét villagers ritually inscribed themselves in Ly Son and Sa Huynh history by cultivating relations with the Cham spirits that are to this day worshipped in many temples on the island and mainland. The ritual relationship with these spirits was predicated on the existence of a more powerful spiritual domain and was maintained through the ritual of ‘buying or renting land’ (lẽ tá thô) (Li 1998: 131; Tạ Chi Đài Trường 2005: 264). Right into the twentieth century the inhabitants of both Ly Son and Sa Huynh would engage a local ‘sorcerer’ to perform a ‘ritualized bargain’ with a Cham ancestral couple, Chua Ngu Ma Nuong, and make lavish sacrifices in order to keep the land fertile (see Li 1998: 131; Tạ Chí Dai Trường 2005). One of the oldest inhabitants of Ly Son Island described the ceremony concerning land ownership:

In the past, the northern part of Ly Son belonged to the Chiém Thanh (Cham Kingdom). Our Kinh forefathers fought with the Chiém Thanh, who were defeated and had to leave their land. The land remained and it was sacred (linh thiêng); if our ancestors who wanted to inhabit it refused to worship them [the Cham deities], they would bring serious illnesses upon the village. That is why the forefathers installed an altar [on the old Cham territory] for a wife and a husband, Chúa Ngu Man Nuong. The couple managed the land and every five years the village organized the ‘request for land’ ritual, during which many oxen and buffaloes had to be offered to keep peace. The ceremony was great and lasted several days and nights. The phủ thuy (sorcerer) was invited too. He called the couple and asked them if they were satisfied with the offerings. If they said ‘yes’, the villagers could stop, but if the couple said ‘no, they had to continue to make sacrifices of animals. The land belonged to the couple, and without the offerings the village would be punished. If the husband required five pigs, they would give him exactly five pigs. If asked, they complied; the husband was easygoing, but it was very difficult to satisfy his wife!

By performing the large ceremony for such Cham spirits as the goddess Uma and Chúa Ngu Ma Nương, the newcomers not only established themselves as the rightful patrons of the new land, but also tacitly apologized for taking the land away from the Cham natives? As the new owners of the territory, they ritually paid tribute to the fact that other inhabitants once ruled over the land and its fertility. But this is just one dimension of the ritualized bargain and the newcomers’ way of inscribing themselves into the new territory. Another symbolic dimension appears when we look at the ritual of “buying or renting land’ as a reconciliation of binary Cham and Viét ethnicities. By adopting cosmologies and spirits and engaging ritually with land and sea, the Việt newcomers downplayed and even masked their foreignness. In that sense, the ritualized propitiation by the Viét became the symbolic surrender by the previous owners of the land and thus provided the newcomers with protection against sanctions from the Cham spirits (see Arno 1976).

The close interaction with the sea and the encounter with Cham prompted the Viét in Sa Huynh and Ly Son Island not only to adopt foreign spirits and beliefs into their own religious practices, but also to willingly experiment with the material culture of their predecessors. Viét migrants learned seafaring techniques from the Cham, and even the construction of their ships followed Cham principles (Li 1998: 112; Pham, Blue, and Palmer 2010; Pham 2013). Ly Son’s family annals (gia phá) indicate that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, many of the islanders, due to their excellent seafaring abilities, were recruited by the feudal state to collect precious sea products and goods from wrecked ships in the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos. The eighteenth-century Vietnamese historian Lé Quy Dén (1972 [1776]: 210) reported on Vietnamese from mainland villages near Sa Ky who were allowed to move to Ly Son and were granted a royal concession to explore the sea. Such practices were not unique to Vietnam, but also took place in other regions of Southeast Asia. In his interesting account of the eighteenthand the early nineteenth-century migration and trade practices of ‘sea people’ in south-west Kalimantan, Atsushi Ota (2010: 69) observes that during this period many migrants, referred to as ‘pirates’ by Europeans, set up their communities in the coastal areas and ‘were engaged in

3. Uma is the name for the great Hindu goddess Paravati, usually associated with mountains. Chua Ngu Ma Nuong is the Cham spirit of the ancestral couple.

various profitable activities such as trade, fishing, and cultivation, supplemented by occasional raids on traders, fishermen, and the villagers’ By calling these maritime migrant communities ‘sea people’, Ota (2010: 69) makes the interesting point that those communities were ‘within the political reach of states and settled under state rulers’ approval, but they were not completely politically integrated, maintaining privileges in certain activities, such as settlement in certain places and plundering’ This is analogous to Ly Sơns loose connection to the mainland’s political apparatus, which came to be formalized as the Paracel and Spratly navy, consisting of villagers recruited from Ly Son who operated in the vicinity of the Paracels and Spratlys, which until recently constituted the fishing grounds of Ly Son fishers (Lê Quý Đôn 1972 [1776]: 203, 210).

Local mobilities vis-à-vis highlands—lowlands—islands

Sa Huynh and Ly Son villagers proudly talked about their ancestors’ engagement with other societies and their extraordinary mobility over land and sea. Ly Son people in particular underlined their past explorations in an effort to contest and change their present status as a remote, ‘sea-locked’, and ‘outlandish’ fishing community. Indeed, mobility and commercial networks between Cham, Chinese and Viét across the Central Highlands and the South China Sea were of long standing.* Up until the nineteenth century, mountain and forest areas of Quang Ngai Province were famous for the production and trade of cassia and eaglewood (Hardy 2009). At that time, cinnamon trees were farmed by highlanders, and the bark was purchased by Vietnamese and Chinese traders for resale to merchants based in Hội An. The mountain areas were home to important markets for trade in highland products — especially cassia, buffaloes, and rice — that attracted people from lowland population centres such as Sa Huynh.

Out in the middle of the South China Sea, the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos sustained mobility and cultural and economic exchanges among smallisland communities around the South China Sea. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ly Son sailors capitalized on various cosmopolitan and commercial links in the South China Sea by gathering gold, silver, swords, ivory, porcelain, cloth, wax, and other goods from the wrecked ships in the Paracels and Spratlys

4. For the region of the Mekong Delta, see Taylor (2007).

and supplementing them with large quantities of mother of pearl, snails, tortoises, and sea cucumbers, all of which were handed over to the royal court in Hué. The sailors were allowed to keep a significant portion of the harvested marine produce for their own profit (Lê Quý Đôn 2006 [1776]: 155). The beautiful and well-preserved ancestor house built during the reign of Emperor Minh Mang (1820-1841) by the family of Mr Tứ (born in 1930)’ - the uncle of my host on Ly Sơn — bears testimony to the extraordinary profits coming from that trade and the extensive maritime networks that connected Ly Son villagers and Chinese merchants. During their voyages to the Paracels, the Paracel and Spratly sailors occasionally met Chinese fishermen on the high seas and exchanged information (see, for example, Lê Quy Đôn 1776: 82b-85a, in Nguyễn Q. Thắng 2008). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some Fujianese and Hainanese who ventured into the Nanyang region (present-day Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) to procure their catches of sea cucumber (hải sâm, béche-de-mer) would stop off in Ly Sơn to get fresh water and peanut oil for cooking. Mr Tư told me that the generations of his family built their wealth on the lucrative trade that involved the sea cucumber - a highly appreciated delicacy among Chinese. Unlike the Chinese, however, for a long time Ly Son villagers did not develop a taste for sea cucumbers, but they knew how to process the animal in order to sell the product in Hội An - a former Cham port that from the seventeenth century onwards attracted many Chinese as well as Japanese, Muslim, and European merchants.

Under French colonial rule, the Paracel and Spratly flotillas ceased to exist, but the seafaring and trading skills of the islanders enabled their voyages to the south, where they continued to explore new markets and expand their networks through translocal and transregional trade. Islanders traded with the mainland and sold whatever they caught and farmed, which included beans and peanuts, although they were most famous for their production of fish sauce, peanut oil, and fishing nets made of a special fibre from a tree (cây gay) that grows on Ly Son. At this time fish preservation in Sa Huynh was inextricably linked with the production of salt, which entailed directing sea water into the fields and allowing the sun to evaporate the water, leaving just the salt. The salt-making technique remains the same to this day in Sa Huynh. It was

5. All personal names are pseudonyms.

learned from Cham, who specialized in a mixed economy based on irrigated agriculture, salt production, and fishing. In the colonial period the French controlled salt production, and the finished product from Sa Huynh was sold to Tonkin in northern Vietnam and Cochinchina in southern Vietnam. Although the French salt monopoly aimed to control the highlands and ethnic groups for whom the salt was essential to their livelihood, an illicit and clandestine trade in salt and fish sauce with Hré and Cor ethnic groups living in the highlands flourished. Elderly fishers from Sa Huynh reported that in the past they used to travel into the mountains to Ba To, a trip that lasted about five days, to trade the salt, usually for rice.

While Sa Huynh fishers exploited overland connections to the mountain and forest regions, Ly Son people relied on their seafaring skills and maritime trade connections. One of my Ly Son informants said that in the 1930s his late father worked as a ‘trader assistant’ (Idi phụ) for one of the boat owners (chủ tuyển) on the island and used to travel south on the winter monsoon and return north with the summer monsoon. In November the northerly winds would begin blowing and over the next few months, Ly Son people would sail in their vessels (ghe buém) down to Saigon, where they would spend the lunar new year. Because rice could not be cultivated on the island due to the poor soil and the shortage of water, the trip to the south was undertaken in order to buy rice, which was an essential component of the diet of the people of Ly Son. The father of my informant did not take these trips alone; he would be accompanied by a group of other sailing boats. On the way down to the south he would usually buy sugar (đường phén) in Quảng Ngai and salt in Sa Huynh but his trade networks also allowed him to go to Quy Nhon, Nha Trang, and Ha Tién in search of bargains. Disembarking in Saigon or Ca Mau, he and the rest of his crew would hire themselves out as labour to the French or Chinese, which gave them additional income for the purchase of rice. At some point in March the wind would shift northwards, and the trip back could be commenced. In early summer with a full load of rice, he would sail along the coast and up to the north, passing different ports on the way. Sometimes he took on board Cham traders of medicinal plants (thuóc nam), which were highly sought after and needed by islanders. The Cham traders would board at the port of Binh Thuan and sail with him all the way to the island. The father of my informant would stop again in Sa Huỳnh to buy salt, which then would be sold back in Lý Sơn. However, reaching home did not mean that his voyage was completed. Taking advantage of the southerly wind he would resume his journey up north through the ports of Hội An and Huế, where he would typically buy blocks of ironwood (gỗ lim), used for building ancestral houses, as well as Chinese porcelain, which was in high demand on Ly Son Island.

While Sa Huynh and Ly Son villagers cognitively differentiated the mainland from the island and the highlands from the lowlands, their mobility stretched far beyond these binaries. These territorial categories were not self-contained; they were, rather, subverted by people’s movements, continuously transgressed and interlinked (see Salemink 201 8a). Brought into contact through trade and mobility, the qualitatively different worlds of highlands, lowlands, and islands became a translocal, even domestic, space that Sa Huynh and Ly Son villagers traversed as they temporarily settled in distant places. Their diasporic networks and engagements with distant markets and ports promised a good profit (see Ho 2006). Venturing out into the Central Highlands or navigating through the South China Sea was not just a matter of contacting new people but, as Eric Tagliacozzo (2009: 114) points out, more often a matter of renewing already existing ties and networks. These connections and relations were sufficiently intimate and prolonged to allow people to go back and forth between various modes of life as they navigated through different geographical spaces.

Post-revolutionary realities and economic liberalization

The outbreak of the First and the Second Indochina Wars brought new political and economic pressures to the people of Sa Huynh and Ly Son, who found themselves trapped between two forces - the National Liberation Front and the U.S. troops. In 1954, after the First Indochina War, the United States supported the establishment of an anti-communist government south of the demilitarized zone between Quang Tri and Quảng Binh provinces. Consequently, Sa Huynh and Ly Sơn - like the whole Quảng Ngai Province —- were assigned to the Republic of Vietnam, commonly known as South Vietnam, and disconnected from the liberation movement that they strongly supported. Due to a solid communist tradition (Fall, 2005 [1961]), much of the population continued to support the Hồ Chi Minh regime even when the first regular American troops entered Quang Ngai. While Sa Huynh served as a base for the U.S. Army, the strategic location of Ly Son Island was used both by the Naval Forces of the Republic of Vietnam to control passing ships and trawlers in the South China Sea and by the communist guerrillas to, for example, hide stolen weapons. Ly Son fishermen were occasionally used by the Vietnam Naval Forces as guides in military missions to the Paracels.

However, in contrast to Sa Huynh, Ly Sons geographical position enabled it to some extent to avoid the turmoil of war. In 1975, after the Second Indochina War had ended and the country was unified again, the revolutionary state tried to impose a socialist vision of society on the South and unsuccessfully attempted to pursue a policy of collectivization (see Taylor 2001; Kerkvliet 2005). As a provincial official in Quang Ngãi stated in an interview with me in 2007, relations between more and less prosperous peasants were never as harsh in the South as they were in northern villages. According to the official, many of the farmers in Central Vietnam were knowledgeable persons who treated their labourers well and provided help if necessary. While this commonly held view of the situation is most likely highly idealized, it nevertheless demonstrates my interlocutors’ desire to point out that the state’s policy ended in a complete fiasco. They claimed that when the poor farmers joined cooperatives, their situation often became worse than it had been when they worked for hire. In Sa Huynh and Ly Son, fishing cooperatives established in 1979 and 1980 only survived a few years, as they met with resentment from the people. In the 1980s the fishing cooperatives stopped operating, although they have never been officially dissolved.°

Calling this period the ‘catastrophe’ (ham họa), Sa Huynh and Ly Son villagers reported that when cooperatives were introduced, the village temples were stripped of their property and, in some cases, were severely damaged. Sacred statues were removed from temples and placed in the local offices of the People’s Committee, and the temples

6. There was also a fundamental disparity between fisheries in the northern and southern regions. By the 1980s, only 10-15 per cent of the boat owners in Central Vietnam had joined cooperatives, and most of them were in the provinces known today as Quang Binh, Quang Trị, Thừa Thiên, Ninh Thuận, and Bình Thuận (Nguyễn Duy Thiệu 2002).

were closed. In Lý Sơn, people who had ancestral wooden panels embellished with Chinese characters or lacquered boards at home were forced to bring them to the communal house, which had been turned into a warehouse. However, some of the local cadres were aware of the great religious value of these objects and allowed people to take them back home piece by piece.

Consequently, continuous bargaining, bricolage and navigation of state discipline were part of peoples daily survival repertoire. In the period of the subsidized collectivist economy (1977-1986), the mobility and trading networks of Sa Huynh’s and Ly Son’s residents were also severely restricted. Ly Son villagers reported that there were shortages of the most basic products, such as rice, sugar, and salt, which had to be brought from the mainland. To sail to Quang Ngai they needed to obtain special permission from the local authorities. Such permission specified clearly how many days they were allowed to stay away. On the day of the trip their names would be shouted out by the authorities, and only after presenting a valid document would they be allowed to embark on a small motorboat. The islanders recall that the boats were filled with more people than they could actually accommodate, and many of them had to stand or squat in uncomfortable position for eight or more hours before they reached Sa Ky. Villagers would still manage to smuggle out some of their local products, such as garlic and onions, to sell in Saigon on the black market in order to be able to buy rice. Hidden in baskets full of vegetables, the rice was then illicitly transported on the boat back to the island. Villagers recalled that they had so little rice that they had to cook it with sweet potatoes in order to fill their stomachs. For the people of Ly Son, the time had come to capitalize on their seafaring skills.

In 1982 Mr Nha (born in 1948) was the first fisherman on the island who, using a simple administration map stolen from the local People’s Committee Office, made the daring journey to the Paracels to fish there. Later that same year he guided another seven fishing boats. Navigation technologies or nautical charts were not available at that time because the local government feared that fishers might try to escape the country by sea. Initially, in the Paracels, the fishers caught mainly flying fish (cá chuén), which were suitable for preservation in salt. A year later, when ice-making technology became more accessible, they expanded their fishing territories, catches, and methods. Fresh fish from the Paracels and Spratlys was transported to Da Nang, from where they obtained the ice. Again, this changed along with the new market opportunities that appeared in the late 1980s. Most of the Ly Son fishers chose to sell their catches to local women traders in Đông Ba market in Huế and later in Sa Ky port — the closest mainland harbour to Ly Son. In 1989, Sa Ky port began to operate under the Border Guard Command (Công an Biên phong), which provided the logistical facilities for the development of the local fish market.

In Sa Huynh, fishing has been an intensive activity in the coastal waters for a long time. Fishers employed mainly traditional fishing techniques such as trawling, hooks and lines (lưới gid cao), lift nets (lưới rút vay), and seine nets (nghé câu) to catch fish far off shore. All these methods required hard manual labour. Fishing close to the shore and in the lagoon demanded profound practical knowledge. The most popular methods of using nets were lưới bén and chải lười for catching fish and shrimp. The fishers also relied on their ability to locate various species and to gather and drive them together into the net ( đuổi cá).