Rivers, lakes and oceans were home to a variety of aquatic animals across Vietnam during the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945). Drawing on court histories, geographical tomes and folk tales, this paper addresses encounters with two forms of aquatic or semi-aquatic beings – crocodiles and dragons – to interrogate Nguyen imaginings, interactions and experience of the animal world. Crocodiles and dragons are interesting to compare because of their liminal status in Nguyen systems of thought: they traversed boundaries of “water/land”, “protector/threat”, “underworld/upperworld” and “real/mythical”. The paper will consider, for instance, efforts to systematically eradicate crocodile populations in the Mekong delta against the close emotional bonds Nguyen rulers formed with the crocodiles they kept as pets. It will also reflect on the role played by crocodiles in the foundational myth of the Nguyen dynasty – i.e. how the Gia Long Emperor was aided by crocodiles in his defeat against Tay Son forces and his rise to power – and the broader associations of crocodiles with the Southeast Asian naga, divine shape-shifting inhabitants of the underworld. Dragons, another type of divine naga prominent in Nguyen Vietnam, had a strong symbolic connection with imperial power, and sightings and interactions with these magical creatures were regularly documented by members of the Nguyen court and the general public. What do such interactions reveal about attitudes towards the environment and different modes of knowing? This paper thus explores how Nguyen knowledge of the animal kingdom was predicated on both material and imaginative understandings of the world and the fluid transformation between life forces.

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Kathryn Dyt, Past and Present Fellow 2019-21 at the Institute for Historical Research in London, researches the Nguyen Dynasty in nineteenth and twentieth century Vietnam through an environmental lens. Her thesis, completed at the Australian National University, was awarded the 2018 ASAA Prize for the Best Thesis in Asian Studies. She has published her research in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and in the edited volumes, Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and New Earth Histories (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Kathryn is currently completing her monograph: The Nguyen Weather-World and the Nature of Kingship in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam.