Literary Chinese in Vietnam
Literary Chinese was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the country's history until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing in Vietnamese using the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. The language was the same as that used in China, as well as in Korea and Japan, and used the same standard Chinese characters. It was used for official business, historical annals, fiction, verse, scholarship, and even for declarations of Vietnamese determination to resist Chinese invaders.
Wondrous Tales of Lĩnh Nam, a 14th-century collection of stories of Vietnamese history, written in Chinese
An 1814 printing of the preserved compliance note titled "Đỗi trực ngôn cực gián", written by Jiang Gongfu in 758
Xá Lợi Buddhist temple stele, erected in 601
Stelae at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, recording the names of doctoral graduates in the civil service examinations
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century. Each written character corresponds to a single spoken syllable, and almost always to a single independent word. As a result, the characteristic style of the language is comparatively terse.
The Classic of Poetry, a collection of 305 literary works authored between the 11th and 7th centuries BCE in what is generally termed "pre-Classical Chinese"
A Literary Chinese letter written in 1266, addressed to the "King of Japan" (日本國王) on behalf of Kublai Khan, prior to the Mongol invasions of Japan. Annotations explaining points of grammar have been added to the text, intended to aid Japanese-speaking readers.
