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.