HIST 115 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Mekong Delta, Caodaism
Document Summary
Though the ethnic vietnamese are by far the dominant group of the country, they themselves have long been divided in important ways. The greatest divisions among the vietnamese are geographical and religious. The former is partly a result of the expansion into vietnam to the south. After the 10th century a. d. , the vietnamese started to expand southward from their crowded traditional heartland to the vast, open stretches of the mekong. Under these new conditions, the "frontier village" created an environment of independence and individual choice. This way of life, somewhat comparable with the nineteenth-century. American west, was a revolutionary departure from traditional. During the colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the people of the south came under the influence of six french institutions and culture, further accentuating the regional differences. Thus, they were more open to implementing a western economic process-based system and democratic politics.
