What influences did China have on Vietnam?
Answers
It is difficult to overstate the level of influence that Chinese culture had on surrounding countries. Most notably, in Vietnam, the government was not only a protectorate of the Chinese Emperor for much of the last two thousand years, but many aspects of Vietnamese culture, from food and social customs, to government and philosophy, have come almost exclusively from China.
In fact, during the one period of foreign occupation in China, when the Mongols ruled China as the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese cultural norms ended up besting the Mongols, having a role in their inability to govern the vast country as their own and resulting in their downfall. This lesson will take a look at how China's culture permeated two other regions of the Middle Kingdom: Korea and Japan.