The name Vietnam was imposed by Manchu rulers to block a Vietnamese territorial claim

Evidence

On his coronation in 1802, Gia-long wished to call his realm ‘Nam Viêt’ and sent envoys to gain Peking’s assent. The Manchu Son of Heaven, however, insisted that it be ‘Viêt Nam.’ The reason for this inversion is as follows: ‘Viêt Nam’ (or in Chinese Yüeh-nan) means, roughly, ‘to the south of Viêt (Yüeh),’ a realm conquered by the Han seventeen centuries earlier and reputed to cover today’s Chinese provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, as well as the Red River valley. Gia-long’s ‘Nam Viêt,’ however, meant ‘Southern Viêt/Yüeh,’ in effect a claim to the old realm. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 621

Categorization

• SHARE: A concrete, dated anecdote about how a modern nation’s name originated in an imperial naming contest — the kind of detail a specific history-nerd friend would savor.

Related

• The name Vietnam was a Chinese imperialist invention Vietnamese rulers once rejected (similarity 0.91)