Two bibliographers count the ashes

Claim (verbatim)

Vietnam's own scholars kept the ledger of their literature's destruction. Lê Quý Đôn in the eighteenth century and Phan Huy Chú in the early nineteenth compiled bibliographies — the Nghệ văn chí and the Văn tịch chí — that list the works of the Lý and Trần dynasties title by title, marking loss after loss, and both point to the same caesura: the Ming occupation of 1407-1427, when imperial orders had Vietnamese writings confiscated, carted north, or destroyed. Around the event stands the recopying treadmill that made it unrecoverable. The pattern-facts are stark: Lê Văn Hưu's Đại Việt sử ký of 1272, the founding national chronicle, survives only as absorbed into Ngô Sĩ Liên's 1479 Toàn thư, whose own oldest surviving state is the 1697 Chính Hòa woodblock printing; the Thiền uyển tập anh of 1337 survives through a 1715 reprint; and Hoàng Đức Lương's 1497 preface to the Trích diễm thi tập already laments that the poetry of the previous dynasties had all but vanished — a loss testimonium from inside the fifteenth century. If the 1407 bottleneck plus the treadmill is the true shape, the pre-1400 stratum of the Hán-Nôm heritage must be both minuscule and entirely mediated by post-1428 compilation and seventeenth-century-plus carriers. Prediction: in the standard union catalogue of the Hán-Nôm heritage — Di sản Hán Nôm Việt Nam: Thư mục đề yếu, roughly five thousand titles — works composed before 1400 will number under two percent; not one pre-1400 work will survive in any physical witness, manuscript or print, made before 1600; and over half the Lý-Trần titles listed by Phan Huy Chú's Văn tịch chí will have no surviving witness in the catalogue at all (primary clause: the under-two-percent pre-1400 share; the verdict follows it). Kill: Trần Nghĩa and François Gros (eds.), Di sản Hán Nôm Việt Nam: Thư mục đề yếu (Hanoi, 1993), with the Thơ văn Lý-Trần corpus volumes (Hanoi, 1977-1988) and Phan Huy Chú's Văn tịch chí as the attestation-side controls.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the standard union catalogue of the Hán-Nôm heritage — Di sản Hán Nôm Việt Nam: Thư mục đề yếu, roughly five thousand titles — works composed before 1400 will number under two percent; not one pre-1400 work will survive in any physical witness, manuscript or print, made before 1600; and over half the Lý-Trần titles listed by Phan Huy Chú's Văn tịch chí will have no surviving witness in the catalogue at all (primary clause: the under-two-percent pre-1400 share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Trần Nghĩa and François Gros (eds.), Di sản Hán Nôm Việt Nam: Thư mục đề yếu (Hanoi, 1993), with the Thơ văn Lý-Trần corpus volumes (Hanoi, 1977-1988) and Phan Huy Chú's Văn tịch chí as the attestation-side controls.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The Ming caesura of 1407, the loss testimonia (Hoang Duc Luong's 1497 preface), and the mediated survival of the founding chronicles (Dai Viet su ky only via the 1479 Toan thu, itself oldest in the 1697 printing) are textbook Vietnamese literary history, and the union catalogue (Tran Nghia & Gros 1993) plus the Tho van Ly-Tran volumes supply both sides. But the primary clause is a share - pre-1400 works under two percent of roughly five thousand catalogue titles - and that count, together with the over-half-of-Phan-Huy-Chu's-titles-unwitnessed tally, has not been computed against the catalogue. Materials in print, the percentage un-run. Adjacent.

• Tran Nghia & Francois Gros (eds.), Di san Han Nom Viet Nam: Thu muc de yeu (Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1993)
• Tho van Ly-Tran, 3 vols (Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc Xa hoi, 1977-1988)

Predictions

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