Sorry to reopen an ancient thread, but I have new information on this subject, and I think it makes more sense to keep it all in one place.
So, aften ten years of owning this shield and scratching my head about it, I tripped across a second one a few weeks ago and promptly snatched it up. The craftsmanship is rougher than I expected, and the condition could be better, although I suppose I should be happy to find one in any condition at all.
I photographed it next to my first one, so you can compare the two. As you can see, the dimensions are roughly the same, as is the black lacquer/paint in the front and red lacquer/paint on the back. The general construction is similar, right down to the horizontal handle. Curiously, the first shield uses machined nails to hold it together, whereas the second is fastened with iron or steel chunks that are peened over the back of the handle (less elegant, but very effective).
The decoration is a puzzle. Obviously, this is meant to be the eight trigrams of Taoism, but the trigrams are all wrong (without going into details, each of the trigrams should be a different sequence of dashes and lines). Also, the yin-yang in the center is sloppy. I highly doubt that this was painted by a Taoist at all.
Having said that, I'm almost certain this is not a tourist piece. The handle shows a lot of wear, exactly where you'd expect to find it if it were carried a lot. An interesting similarity: both shield handles have a square cut-out to the right of the oblong cut-out that's meant for the hand. One of my early thoughts was that this might be to accommodate a strap to help distribute the weight of the shield, but upon inspection of old photos of a ceremony at Hue (more on that in a bit), that is certainly not the case.
Tripping across this shield re-ignited my research, and I finally came up with an answer to what the crap these things are. They are part of a ceremonial dance, used in a ritual called the "Nam Giao sacrifice." I'm still a little spotty on all the details, mostly due to bad translations through Google, but from what I gather, every three years in Hue, there was a sacrificial ritual to Heaven, the Earth, and the local "genies" (I gather they mean some sort of nature spirits). The Vietnamese would sacrifice animals that they had fattened over the previous year, and part of the ritual involved a shield dance called "Mua Bat Dat," which has something to do with the specific formation of 64 dancers/soldiers in 8 columns of 8. The ceremony disappeared along with the Nguyen Dynasty (I believe in 1948), but the good citizens of Hue brought it back about fifteen years ago as a cultural preservation thing.
As you can see in the photos, the first shield is clearly from this ceremony. My current theory about the second, cruder one, is that it is a rustic version of the official Hue shields, made by inferior craftsmen in both, woodworking and decoration. The wear on the handle makes me think it was used quite a bit, if not in a similar dancing function, then in some other sort of ceremony. The incorrect trigrams and yin-yang are still a puzzle; I'm thinking that it was created by a non-Taoist who saw the Taoist symbols somewhere and tried to recreate them (from memory) for a talismanic function.
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