A quote about the Vietnamese script

FROM Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

"Quốc Ngữ, a romanized phonetic script originally devised by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, and adopted by the authorities [the French] for use in 'Cochin China' as early as the 1860s, was consciously promoted to break the links with China -- and perhaps also with the indigenous past -- by making dynastic records and ancient literatures inaccessible to a new generation of colonized Vietnamese." [p.126, footnotes omitted]