Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Đại Liban" in Vietnamese language version.
This article, bearing the dateline of Jounieh, ngày 10 tháng 7 năm 1919, constitutes, together with Albert Naccache’s "Notre avenir économique published also in La Revue Phénicienne (July 1919), perhaps some of the earliest written and public references to a Grand Liban. For instance, the term does not appear to have been used seven months earlier by the first Lebanese delegation to Paris - at least not in its official releases. Or to cite a later example, the term was not used in the important correspondence from Clemenceau to Maronite Patriarch Huwayik dated ngày 10 tháng 11 năm 1919
Nujaym’s formulation was to become the basis for Lebanese Christian arguments in favor of a Greater Lebanon. It stressed the national rather than economic aspects of that goal. Only extended boundaries would enable Lebanon to exist as an independent state. Nujaym told the European public that the Lebanese question required a definite solution: the establishment of an independent Christian state.
His [(Thongchai Winichakul’s)] study shows that the modern map in some cases predicted the nation instead of just recording it; rather than describing existing borders it created the reality it was assumed to depict. The power of the map over the mind was great:"[H]ow could a nation resist being found if a nineteenth century map had predicted it?" In the Middle East, Lebanon seems to offer a corresponding example. When the idea of a Greater Lebanon in 1908 was put forward in a book by Bulus Nujaym, a Lebanese Maronite writing under the pseudonym of M. Jouplain, he suggested that the natural boundaries of Lebanon were exactly the same as drawn in the 1861 and 1863 staff maps of the French military expedition to Syria, maps that added territories on the northern, eastern and southern borders, plus the city of Beirut, to the Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon. In this case, too, the prior existence of a European military map seems to have created a fact on the ground.
