Jiaozhi
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Jiaozhi

Jiaozhi (standard Chinese, pinyin: Jiāozhǐ, Vietnamese: Giao Chỉ), was a historical region ruled by various Chinese dynasties, corresponding to present-day northern Vietnam. The kingdom of Nanyue (204–111 BC) set up the Jiaozhi Commandery (Chinese: 交趾, 交阯; Vietnamese: Quận Giao Chỉ, chữ Hán: 郡交趾) an administrative division centered in the Red River Delta that existed through Vietnam's first and second periods of Chinese rule. During the Han dynasty, the commandery was part of a province of the same name (later renamed to Jiaozhou) that covered modern-day northern and central Vietnam as well as Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China. In 679 AD, Jiaozhi was absorbed into the Annan Protectorate established by the Tang dynasty. Afterwards, official use of the name Jiaozhi was superseded by "Annan" (Annam) and other names of Vietnam, except during the brief fourth period of Chinese rule when the Ming dynasty administered Vietnam as the Jiaozhi Province.

Chinese chroniclers assigned various folk etymologies for the toponym.

According to Michel Ferlus, the Sino-Vietnamese Jiao in Jiāozhǐ (交趾), together with the ethnonym and autonym of the Lao people (lǎo 獠), and the ethnonym Gēlǎo (仡佬), a Kra population scattered from Guizhou (China) to North Vietnam, would have emerged from *k(ə)ra:w. The etymon *k(ə)ra:w would have also yielded the ethnonym Keo/ Kæw kɛːwA1, a name given to the Vietnamese by Tai speaking peoples, currently slightly derogatory. In Pupeo (Kra branch), kew is used to name the Tay (Central Tai) of North Vietnam.

jiāo < MC kæw < OC *kraw [k.raw]

lǎo < MC lawX < OC *C-rawʔ [C.rawˀ]

Frederic Pain proposes that *k(ə)ra:w means 'human being' and originates from Austroasiatic: he further links it to a local root *trawʔ, which is associated with taro, is ancestral to various Austroasiatic lexical items such as "Monic (Spoken Mon krao or Nyah-kur traw), Palaungic (Tung-wa kraɷʔ or Sem klao), or Katuic (Ong raw or Souei ʰraw < proto-Katuic *craw)", and possibly evoked "a particular (most probably tuber-based) cultivation practice used by small Mon-Khmer horticultural communities—as opposed to more complex and advanced cereal-growing (probably rice-based) societies"

Meanwhile, James Chamberlain claims that Jiao originated from a word also ancestral to Lao, thus meaning Jiao & Lao are cognates. Chamberlain, like Joachim Schlesinger, claim that the Vietnamese language was not originally based in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam. According to them, the Red River Delta region was originally inhabited by Tai-speakers. They claim that the area become Vietnamese-speaking only between the seventh and ninth centuries AD, or even as late as the tenth century, as a result of immigration from the south, i.e., modern north-central Vietnam. According to Han-Tang records, east of Jiaozhi and the coast of Guangdong, Guangxi was populated by Tai-Kadai speakers (whom Chinese contemporaries called 俚 and Lǎo 獠). Catherine Churchman proposes that the Chinese character 獠 transliterated a native term and was shortened from older two-character combinations (which were used transcribe the endonym's initial consonantal cluster); noting that the older two-character combinations 鳩獠 Qiūlǎo, 狐獠 Húlǎo, and 屈獠 Qūlǎo had been pronounced *kɔ-lawʔ, *ɣɔ-lawʔ, and *kʰut-lawʔ respectively in Middle Chinese, she reconstructs the endonym *klao, which is either related to the word klao, meaning "person", in the Kra languages, or is a compound, meaning "our people", of prefix k- for "people" and Proto-Tai first person plural pronoun *rəu "we, us". Even so, Michael Churchman acknowledged that "The absence of records of large-scale population shifts indicates that there was a fairly stable group of people in Jiaozhi throughout the Han–Tang period who spoke Austroasiatic languages ancestral to modern Vietnamese."

Jiaozhi, pronounced Kuchi in the Malay, became the Cochin-China of the Portuguese traders c. 1516, who so named it to distinguish it from the city and the Kingdom of Cochin in India, their first headquarters in the Malabar Coast. It was subsequently called "Cochinchina".

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