A Brief History of Vietnam

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1783 Gia long(Nguyen Phuc Anh,20)

流亡富国岛

Nguyen Phuc Anh was the oldest surviving son of the last adult king of Dang Trong, Nguyen Phuc Khoan, which is why he was hiding in a nearby forest at that time. A rebellion was sweeping the land and the rebels were trying to eliminate all the remaining members of the royal family. At around this time, it seems, Pigneau became a member of a multi-ethnic band of desperadoes: Viet, European, Khmer, Chinese and Thai. Missionaries, mercenaries, generals, princes, doctors and traders, all dedicated to restoring Nguyen family rule. Looking back at this period we can see the legacy of the “four worlds” of Vietnamese history. In the far south, the watery environment in and around the Mekong Delta formed a “Funan World” with a strong Khmer influence. The central coast and its uplands were home to a “Cham World.” Further north, the Trinh were a clan from the uplands of Thanh Hoa, originally part of “Dong World” and the people they ruled in the Red River lowlands constituted a rival “Delta World.” The cultural and political differences between them would sustain a series of conflicts during the final thirty years of the eighteenth century. The result would create a single country, “Viet Nam,” under the rule of a single emperor, incorporating all four “worlds” and stretching from the Gulf of Thailand to the Chinese border.

The Tay Son Rebellion (1771–1802)

注意Tay Son叛乱的阮氏三兄弟无皇家血统，不同于当时统治南部的阮皇室。后来的嘉隆皇帝是Dang Trong皇帝Nguyen Phuc Khoat之子。

领导人：阮惠又称阮光中/阮光平

Emperor Quang Trung (Vietnamese: [kwāːŋ ʈūŋm]; chữ Hán: 光中, 1753 – 16 September 1792) or Nguyễn Huệ (Vietnamese: [ŋwĩəŋ hwêˀ]; chữ Hán: 阮惠), also known as Nguyễn Quang Bình (Vietnamese: [ŋwĩəŋ kwāːŋ ɓîŋ̟]; chữ Hán: 阮光平), was the second emperor of the Tây Sơn dynasty, reigning from 1788 until 1792. He was also one of the most successful military commanders in Vietnam's history. Nguyễn Huệ and his brothers, Nguyễn Nhạc and Nguyễn Lữ, together known as the Tây Sơn brothers, were the leaders of the Tây Sơn rebellion. As rebels, they conquered Vietnam, overthrowing the imperial Later Lê dynasty and the two rival feudal houses of the Nguyễn in the south and the Trịnh in the north.

起义地点：中部地区An Khe。

支持力量：gathered support from Cham, from highlanders and from a coalition of merchants and peasants angered by the increases in taxes being forced upon them by the usurper who had taken power in Dang Trong

背景:His subjects （南方统治者的臣民）were suffering the consequences of military expansion into the Mekong Delta as Khmers and Thais pushed back, and local warlords asserted their own power.

南方皇室的幸存者：（1777）he last survivor was the 15-year-old prince, Nguyen Phuc Anh...得到了南方传教士和多个势力的支持，最后... In 1780, having turned 18, Nguyen Phuc Anh declared himself to be king. The south now had two rival monarchs, in addition to the Le king in the north.

The situation was very different in the south. In 1783, the young pretender Nguyen Phuc Anh had formed an alliance with the new Thai king and that year their joint force attempted to consolidate control of the Mekong Delta. Instead, it suffered several defeats at the hands of the Tay Son. It was after this disastrous performance that Nguyen Phuc Anh fled to his remote island and nearly starved to death. Having been rescued, he and the other survivors made their way to King Rama’s palace in Bangkok to regroup. Over the following year he was joined by more refugees but his forces still lacked the strength necessary to resume their war against the Tay Son. In the meantime Nguyen Phuc Anh was more-or-less a prisoner of King Rama who made use of the Viet troops whenever he needed to repel invasions or subdue rebellions.

Nguyen Phuc Anh was willing to work with all kinds of foreigners in order to tip the balance against the Tay Son: Portuguese mercenaries, Chinese pirates, English traders, Siamese officers—and French priests. In 1786, Nguyen Phuc Anh asked Bishop Pigneau to request help personally from King Louis XVI of France, sending his 5-year-old son along too as a gesture of trust to be tutored by Pigneau en route. Pigneau hoped that the boy would convert to Catholicism and eventually lead a Christian kingdom. The French king agreed to provide soldiers and weapons in exchange for trade privileges, and French control of the port of Tourane (Danang) and the island of Poulo Condor (now known as Con Son) off the southern tip of the Mekong Delta, once the Nguyen controlled the country. Louis XVI delegated the job to the governor of the French colony of Pondicherry (in southern India), but he had little interest in adventure. Instead, Bishop Pigneau took it upon himself to organize sufficient funding from French merchants there to pay for a small force of 40 deserters from the French military and two converted merchant ships. His keenness to assist was motivated in part by Nguyen Nhac’s persecution of Catholic missionaries but partly, it seems, by his admiration for Nguyen Phuc Anh.

The conflict in the Mekong Delta was extremely complex by this point. Six forces were operating in the Mekong: the Nguyen royalists and Tay Son rebels were the largest groups but there were also militias belonging to rival Khmer, Thai, Cham and Chinese warlords. Alliances were constantly being formed and fractured with the military advantage shifting between the various coalitions. The politics was made more complex still by the splits between the three brothers leading the Tay Son during 1787. Nguyen Phuc Anh saw an opportunity. With his multinational band of supporters now strong enough to take on the divided Tay Son, he left Bangkok in August 1787 and landed back at Ha Tien in the Mekong Delta. Local rulers who had supported the Tay Son started to switch sides. By October 1788 he had recaptured Gia Dinh (Saigon) and driven out the forces of the youngest Tay Son brother, Nguyen Lu, who died shortly afterwards.

Nguyen Phuc Anh now controlled the Mekong Delta and started to build his own administration there. He spent two years rebuilding his forces, gathering taxes and suppressing independent-minded warlords and bandits. His long experience of the region enabled him to manage the complex ethnic landscape with care. According to Keith Taylor, he forbade Viet people from taking land away from Khmer farmers but banned the latter from opening new land for cultivation. He ordered the two groups to remain separate. Nguyen Phuc Anh also appointed different leaders to run the five different “Chinese” communities: the Hakka and those speaking the languages of Guangdong, Fujian, Wenchang, and Chaozhou (Teochew). They were allowed to run their own affairs, so long as they paid their taxes, allowed their men to be conscripted and remained loyal to the newly-emerging state.

Now firmly in control of the south, Nguyen Phuc Anh devoted his time to preparations for an invasion of the north. Merchants were encouraged to trade in strategic commodities: sulphur for gunpowder, iron for making weapons and rice for food. Granaries were built to store grain for the armies, boatyards were established to build the invasion ships and former French naval officers were deputed to train the crews to sail them. Nguyen Phuc Anh then waited for an opportune moment to advance. In 1792, hearing that Nguyen Nhac’s ships had assembled in the port of Qui Nhon, he decided the moment had arrived. A raid on the harbor destroyed the Tay Son navy. The next year, he seized Nha Trang and then Qui Nhon. The shock of the losses appears to have hastened the death of Nguyen Nhac, the last of the three rebel brothers. He collapsed and died in Phu Xuan in late 1793, leaving the throne to his 17-year-old son. Both remaining parts of the Tay Son state were formally in the hands of children.

Under the guidance of a French engineer, Olivier de Puymanel, the royalists built a large “Vauban” style fort to guard the river crossing at Dien Khanh, upstream from Nha Trang. This formed the focus of the war for three years, until the royalists were ready to move north again. The mid-1790s saw some of the heaviest fighting as the two sides struggled for control along the central coast. At a crucial moment, it was support from uplanders that enabled Nguyen Phuc Anh to outflank the Tay Son forces and tilt the balance. In later phases of the campaign, he would draw upon alliances with Lao and Siamese leaders who sent their troops over the hills and into the heart of the remaining Tay Son territory.

The campaign also led to the final extinction of Champa. Many Cham leaders had supported the Tay Son and the area of modern-day Binh Thuan province (around the beach resort of Phan Tiet) remained an independent kingdom. In 1794, the Cham king was betrayed by some of his officials who had gone over to Nguyen Phuc Anh. His royal title was abolished and a successor appointed with lower-status. He was ordered to collect taxes from his people and remit them the Nguyen court. In 1797 there were small uprisings against the new regime. Some Cham managed to flee to Cambodia but those who remained were incorporated into the new state that Nguyen Phuc Anh was steadily building.

For the following four years, there was a steady “march to the north” by Nguyen Phuc Anh’s forces. Each spring, as the winds blew from the south, his ships would sail up the coast, land troops behind the enemy’s frontline and take more and more territory. Victory was coming closer but it was a victory that Bishop Pigneau would never see. He died of dysentery during the campaign. The king brought his body back to Saigon where it was interred in a large mausoleum (only destroyed in the 1980s). There was still some hard fighting ahead, however. The remaining Tay Son commanders, although bitter rivals, managed to organize effective counter-attacks and hold back the advance.

In 1801, Nguyen Phuc Anh finally eliminated the southern part of the Tay Son state. In a joint advance with his Lao allies he captured the enemy capital at Phu Xuan. He quickly set about establishing his own government there while his generals prepared their forces for an invasion of the Red River Delta. The north was not yet exhausted though. Its leader, the man whom Nguyen Hue had appointed regent, made one final throw of the dice. He raised an army and marched it south to the Nhat Le River: the old dividing line between Trinh and Nguyen. In early 1802, the two sides fought the final battle of the era. The outcome was the same as in the last fight between north and south at that spot, 130 years before. The northerners threw themselves at the defenses, suffered huge casualties and were forced to retreat. This time, however, the southerners also landed behind them, blocking their escape. Most of the retreating army was captured and the war was over.

In early 1802 Nguyen Phuc Anh needed one vital constitutional question answered: were there another other claimants for the throne? The final Le king, Le Chieu Trong, had retreated to China with the Qing army in 1788 after Nguyen Hue had seized Dong Kinh for the Tay Son. Nguyen Phuc Anh’s officials told him that the old king was dead and that, therefore, the Le Dynasty had ceased to exist. As a result, Nguyen Phuc Anh declared himself to be the founder of a new dynasty, the Nguyen. He declared himself to be an emperor and took an imperial title, “Gia Long” (pronounced zaa-lom). As he journeyed north behind his advancing troops, Nguyen Anh/Gia Long took care to visit the tombs of the Le kings and to meet members of their clan. It was important that proper protocol be followed. One month after leaving Phu Xuan, he arrived in Dong Kinh, taking the city without a battle. The remaining leaders of the Tay Son, the former regent, the young king and all their family members were rounded up and killed by being pulled apart, limb from limb. After that, the north was simply too exhausted to fight anymore.

南部嘉隆皇帝重新夺回权力： Centuries before, Dai Viet had expanded from its northern base into the former Cham lands to the south. It had then divided in two: Dang Trong in the south and Dang Ngoai in the north. Dang Trong, under the Nguyen family, had expanded even further south, eventually asserting control over the former Khmer lands of the Mekong Delta. The dynamism of this multi-cultured domain allowed the last surviving member of the Nguyen family to generate the alliances and resources that sustained his thirty-year military campaign. And the result of Nguyen Phuc Anh’s campaign was, in effect, that the south took over the north. With the capture of the Red River Delta, he became the first person to rule the entire territory between the northern border with China and the flatlands of the south. The shape of Vietnam as we know it today was finally created.

发展：by the end of 1773, their forces controlled most of Dang Trong, with the exception of the Mekong Delta

发展2：北方趁机打着维护皇室的名义侵略南方。南方就此主要有三股势力。There were then three armies operating in the south: that of the Trinh, one loyal to the Nguyen Phuc royal family, and the Tay Son rebels. 发展3：叛军夺取了 Saigon in 1776. Shortly afterwards, in a ceremony at the site of the old Cham capital of Vijaya, Nguyen Nhac declared himself to be the King of Tay Son. His two younger brothers: Nguyen Lu and Nguyen Hue were put in command of military forces 发展4：1777年Nguyen Hue军队抓住旧国王Nguyen Phuc Thuan (a son of Nguyen Phuc Khoat)。

西山叛乱的三兄弟的军队多次侵入北方以及南方的首都。后来三兄弟发生分歧---The result was a stalemate and a compromise that looked very much like a new version of the old partition. Nguyen Hue was given all the lands north of Hoi An, while Nguyen Nhac took everything in the center and Nguyen Lu was allocated the south. Nguyen Hue established his capital at Phu Xuan (Hue), Nguyen Nhac established his at Cha Ban (the site of the former Cham capital Vijaya, northwest of Quy Nhon), and Nguyen Lu ruled from Gia Dinh (Saigon).

北部，旧统治者Le Chieu Thong寻求清朝的支持。Amid all the chaos in the north, the “legitimate” king Le Chieu Thong appealed to Qing China for support. In late 1788 the Qing invaded with 200,000 troops and occupied Dong Kinh. Hearing this, Nguyen Hue had himself crowned as the “Quang Trung Emperor”—greater than a king—and set off to depose the Le Dynasty. The Qing had no desire to involve themselves any deeper in Dai Viet politics, and were preparing to withdraw in early 1789 when Nguyen Hue and his army swept into the Red River Delta. Not expecting a battle, the Qing troops celebrated the lunar new year festival. While they were doing so, Nguyen Hue launched his attack—a “Tet offensive”—catching the Chinese completely unawares. The northerners panicked and ran—thousands drowned when the bridge they were using to retreat across the Red River collapsed. The remainder fled for the border.（阮惠如何成为了击退“中国侵略”的民族英雄。。） Nguyen Hue/Quang Trung knew that he would have trouble from the Qing if he did not immediately repair relations. He sent two eminent Confucian scholars to apologize for the disruption. Remarkably the envoys were able to persuade the Qing court to give up on the Le Dynasty and to recognize Nguyen Hue as the “King of Annan.” The new king was even invited to travel to the court for an audience with the Qing Emperor. Wary of the possible dangers, however, Nguyen Hue sent a double in his place. He was reported to have enjoyed several weeks of diplomatic hospitality at the Qing court’s expense. The subterfuge seemed to work because the Qing would continue to regard the Tay Son “rebels” as the legitimate rulers of Annan for another 12 years. By 1790, Nguyen Hue ruled the territory from the border with Qing China as far south as Hoi An. Having set up his capital at Phu Xuan and solidified his power, he did what good Confucian rulers always do after a crisis: ordered a census, reduced tax rates, encouraged farmers to cultivate the land and attempted to impose stability. Remarkably for a man who had a wild reputation, Nguyen Hue also ordered the translation of the Confucian classic texts into vernacular Vietnamese characters (nôm) and the creation of a system of local schools. At the same time, he continued to act in ways that Confucius would not have appreciated. He had friendly relations with coastal pirates, for example. They delivered a share of their booty to him in return for official protection. He also invaded the Lao uplands to the west, reaching as far as Luang Prabang in 1791 and looting its treasures. He even started to covet the Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Guangzhou and sent envoys to ask the Qing emperor to hand them over. Fortunately for regional peace, Nguyen Hue died while the diplomats were en route and the message was recalled before it could be delivered. In 1792, Nguyen Hue’s 11-year-old son was appointed as the new monarch, with the boy’s mother’s half-brother overseeing his administration as regent. Nguyen Hue had only reigned for four years and had had neither the time nor the inclination to fundamentally change the way the north was run. Many of the former Trinh officials were kept in place after his death—along with their old attitudes and inefficiencies. The region continued to languish. Nguyen Hue’s death was the beginning of the end for the Tay Son rebellion. He was the most talented commander of the three brothers and the rebel regime never regained its momentum. It would, however, take another decade before it finally collapsed.

西山叛乱的结果Aftermath:他们（阮氏兄弟）征服了越南，推翻了帝国的后黎王朝和南部的阮氏和北部的陈氏两个敌对的封建家族。

Gia Long Emperor (1802–19)

阮朝wiki：https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nguyễn_dynasty#The_end_of_the_Nguyễn_lords'_reign Today, the imperial palace in Hue is a shadow of its nineteenth century self. The Têt uprising in 1968, the street–fighting that followed and particularly the bombardment that concluded it, destroyed most of the old imperial buildings. Recent reconstructions give some idea of its former grandeur but modern warfare does terrible things to wooden structures. Nonetheless, the scale of the palace, and the citadel that surrounds it, remains impressive. This was the site where, in 1802, Nguyen Phuc Anh took a new imperial title—Gia Long—and where he established his capital. In a sense, Gia Long copied the Tay Son arrangement of power. He ruled from Hue while establishing trusted generals as subordinate “viceroys” in Hanoi and Saigon. Hue had the advantage, but also the disadvantage, of being neither north nor south. Traveling to the big cities meant a multi-day journey whether by land or sea, slowing down communication in both directions. As a result, the emperor was obliged to delegate considerable powers to the military regimes that he installed in the northern citadel, Bac Thanh (Hanoi), and its southern counterpart, known as Gia Dinh (Saigon).

Gia Long wanted a new name for his country, one that recognized its greatly-expanded domain. He wanted to memorialize both his control of the region of “An Nam” and the Nguyen family’s ancestry from the “Viet Thuong” people. Combining elements of the two gave him “Nam Viet.” Gia Long then sent a delegation to Beijing seeking recognition of his control of the realm under this name. The governor of Guangxi province, however, objected. He suggested the name might imply a claim to the lands of the second century BCE kingdom of Nam Viet (Nanyue in Chinese), which included areas of Guangxi. The Qing emperor concurred and instructed that Gia Long should be recognized instead as the king of “Viet Nam.” The modern name of the country was thus born, although it was not a name that either side actually chose to use. The Chinese stuck with “Annan” in regular communication while Nguyen court preferred “Nam Viet,” at least until 1814 when they reverted to the old name of “Dai Viet.”

Diplomatic recognition was just one step in asserting control. Gia Long needed to create a sense of unity among his disparate people but had to work within the constraints of local expectations. He ordered the building of roads linking the different regions and a postal service to circulate information. He also attempted to reduce the cultural differences between his southern “Dang Trong” people and the more Confucian population of the “Dang Ngoai” north. The realities of power, however, obliged him to allow his northern and southern viceroys considerable autonomy to manage their regions in the most appropriate way. Thus he placed limits on Buddhism—such as requiring permits for the construction of new temples—in the north, but not elsewhere. Nor did he try to enforce Confucian rules of behavior outside the north, although he did encourage the spread of its ideas. The historian Liam Kelley has highlighted how he recognized that different ways of writing had developed in the north and south and hired scribes who could write in both forms so that official edicts could be understood everywhere. The south remained different, however. In the words of Alexander Woodside, it was “more Cambodian, more Buddhist, less Confucian, less Sino-Vietnamese than the center and the north.”

At this time, the population of “Viet Nam” was around seven or eight million—slightly smaller than that of Britain at the time. The establishment of the new dynasty did not mean an end of unrest; local communities continued to resist efforts by the court to create a single identity. Despite the official claim that the Le Dynasty had died out, there were still rebels who continued to assert its existence, and resist the Nguyen. They found supporters among the peasantry whose lives were not greatly improved by the change of regime. Demands both to pay taxes and to work on government construction projects became greater as the state became more organized. Many people simply refused to comply. During the 18 years of Gia Long’s reign, there were well over 100 uprisings in different parts of his realm. The province of Quang Ngai, on the central coast, was in an almost permanent state of insurrection for the whole period.

Just as during the war, Gia Long continued to employ a very diverse group of people to help him run the country. Engineers and military leaders from elsewhere in Southeast Asia and from Europe remained in key positions. The dozens of geometrically-shaped “Vauban” fortifications that still exist in the key cities of Vietnam (including the Hue citadel itself), are evidence of their continuing importance. He had an equally tolerant attitude towards Christianity—so long as it did not spread to his officials. Many people had become Christians over previous decades, which was tolerable so long as their beliefs did not challenge the court. Fundamentally, Gia Long was a Confucian at heart because it provided an ideology and a structure to run the country. The ideas expressed in the classic Confucian texts were familiar to the Vietnamese elite and they stressed the importance of a single ruler and a centralized government. They were useful ideas for Gia Long to propagate. He set up the traditional six ministries, constructed his royal palace in Hue on the same model as the Forbidden City in Beijing and reinstated the practice of literary examinations to train officials to run the government. In 1812, his court adopted the “Qing Code”—in effect, the Chinese legal system, as the backbone of his administration—albeit with many modifications to take account of local customs.

In 1806, however, he broke with orthodox Confucianism by declaring himself to be the emperor—hoang de—of his own realm. Hoang de is the Vietnamese rendition of the equivalent Chinese term huang di but Gia Long and his descendants also used a Vietnamese word, vua, which has no Chinese equivalent. It combines the meanings of “ruler” and “protector,” someone who is close to the people, not aloof like an emperor. In other words, although Gia Long and his court borrowed Chinese ideas of how to organize their government, they also had their own ideas of how a good ruler should behave, which was different to that in the “northern empire.” Through their contact with Europeans they knew it was ridiculous to describe themselves as “sons of heaven” when there were large areas of the world beyond their imperial control. Nonetheless, the idea of the emperor receiving “tribute” and loyalty from less-powerful neighboring states remained important.

After taking the throne, Gia Long had maintained friendly relations with his ally the Thai king, Rama I, dating back to their shared campaign against the Tay Son. The Khmer kingdom in between their countries became a form of “buffer state” over which Gia Long recognized Thai authority but in which his court exercised considerable influence. When Rama I died in 1809, however, his successor, Rama II, attempted to extend his authority deeper into the Khmer territories and push out Vietnamese influence. He engineered a challenge to the Khmer throne, backed by an invasion in 1811. The incumbent Khmer king fled to Saigon and asked Gia Long for help. In response, Vietnamese sent a large force across the border to reinstall the king and force the Thais to withdraw. Gia Long then installed a garrison of around a thousand troops to both protect the Khmer court and ensure that it remained an ally. Vietnamese forces also occupied large areas to the south and east of the capital.

In 1813, Gia Long formally changed the name of the country from Viet Nam back to Dai Viet (without informing the Qing Chinese) suggesting he wanted to appeal to the power of history and recover some “greatness” from the past. It was still not certain that Nguyen family rule would endure. Rebellions erupted periodically, often led by men proclaiming allegiance to the Le kings, Trinh lords or Tay Son rebels. The northern and southern regional were only semi-attached to the central government—glued in place by the personal loyalties of their military commanders. Gia Long had created a single territory but few of its inhabitants felt connected to it. If they felt connected at all, it was to their locality and its local culture. The result was a patchwork of identities across the new country. Gia Long’s solution was to rule with a “light rein,” squashing rebellion when necessary but tolerating local differences.

Minh Mang (1819–40)

Unlike Gia Long’s eldest son who had been tutored by Bishop Pigneau, visited France and fought with his father’s multicultural coalition against the Tay Son, his fourth son—Minh Mang—was conservative, authoritarian and suspicious of foreigners. By the time of Gia Long’s death, however, he was the oldest surviving child and ascended to the throne. Minh Mang (pronounced Ming Mang) inherited a kingdom of parts and set about trying to make it whole. His most effective tool was the power of Confucianism. It gave him and his officials a set of rules about how to run a central government, and a set of requirements about how the people should behave. Another tool was the management of the past. In 1820 Minh Mang ordered the court’s “Historical Board” (Quoc Su Quan) to compile a new history of the kingdom, specifying that “the style, the way of expression and the facts are to be weighed and considered before being recorded.” In other words, inconvenient facts were to be omitted in order to “tell right from wrong” and to set “good examples” for the future, thereby bolstering the idea of a unified country.

At the same time, the Hue court was also trying to control its Cambodian protectorate. Relations between the Khmer population and the Vietnamese occupation forces had deteriorated. In 1819, Gia Long had approved plans to dig the Vinh Te Canal, intended to facilitate easier transport through the Mekong Delta. The project quickly became notorious for the harsh treatment of the workers and the cruel behavior of the Vietnamese supervisors. Tens of thousands of peasants were press-ganged into service until the project was finally completed in 1824. To this day, the stories of the hardship and death involved in this construction project continue to animate ill feeling between Khmer nationalists and Vietnamese. At the same time, but on the other side of the Mekong River, a rebellion broke out against the Vietnamese-backed Khmer king and large numbers of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed. It was only after the Vietnamese army joined the Khmer king’s army that the rebellion could be suppressed.

In 1836, with these domestic problems solved, Minh Mang formally annexed Cambodia as a new province of Dai Viet. He then tried to treat the new province just like any other part of the country. In many ways Minh Mang acted like Chinese emperors had done centuries before when they had tried to control a rebellious Jiaozhi. He attempted to make Cambodia more “civilized” by teaching its inhabitants how to behave. In fact the word he used was hoa—flowering—the Vietnamese equivalent of the Chinese word hua. The Khmer were to be taught how to farm better, how to use chopsticks, how to dress modestly and how to speak Vietnamese. Officials also tried to replace the local Theravada form of Buddhism with the Mahayana form more common in Vietnam. The result of this colonial behavior was, unsurprisingly, an anti-colonial uprising. Fighting against the Vietnamese occupation forces continued for several years. To suppress this rebellion the court was obliged to deploy large numbers of soldiers, which required conscription. To feed and pay them obliged the court to demand greater quantities of rice and higher taxes from the civilian population. Equally unsurprisingly, this created rancor among the peasantry and renewed unrest at home.

Minh Mang must have felt sufficiently confident of his mission, however, because in 1838 he ordered the name of the country to be changed once again. It became “Dai Nam” or Great South. This was, according to the imperial edict, to celebrate his empire’s southward expansion. Minh Mang had expanded his rule from, in the words of the edict, “the shores of the sea to the feet of the mountains.” The name change was also a means to mark the country’s independence from Qing China—although the court continued to use the name “Viet Nam” in its official correspondence with Chinese officials. Minh Mang died in early 1841 (after falling off his horse) with his unifying mission still not fully completed. He had, however, achieved considerable success in imposing his ideas of uniform government and a single Confucian culture. He had confirmed an arrangement of beliefs in which the veneration of the emperor was the state religion, ancestor worship was encouraged and Buddhism was relegated to the realm of personal behavior. He had consolidated his father’s achievements but some of his actions, particularly the execution of European Christian missionaries between 1833 and 1838, would eventually come to undermine them.

Thieu Tri (1841–47)

The echoes of the British attacks on China around 1840 (later known as the First Opium War) were heard all around the region. In their wake, Britain, France, the United States and other countries acquired trading rights and little pockets of territory in China. This led to much greater interest from European governments in the region and a larger presence of naval ships. Britain had Hong Kong and Singapore, Portugal had Macao, Spain had Manila and the Netherlands had Batavia (Jakarta) “Gunboat diplomacy” followed. French captains, in particular, took an interest in the fate of Catholic missionaries in Dai Nam—even though they had no formal instructions to do so. In 1843 one officer sailed his ship into Danang harbor and obtained the release of five French missionaries. Shortly afterwards a French admiral arrived in Danang, this time with orders from Paris to negotiate for a little slice of territory to use as a base. He got nowhere.

Chapter 6 Colonialism and Resistance(1859–1907)

With these experienced soldiers, the French pushed outwards from Saigon, defeating one of Tu Duc Emperor’s most experienced generals and then using the network of waterways through the Mekong and Saigon deltas to seize key towns. At the same time, Tu Duc was facing a more worrying threat to the north: a huge insurrection led by yet another leader claiming to be a descendant of the old Le Dynasty. By 1861 this man commanded a rebel force of 20,000 in the coastal part of the Red River Delta, the fief of the former Mac dynasty, which had never reconciled itself to being ruled by people from further south. Preferring to concentrate his forces against the northern rebels, Tu Duc agreed the Treaty of Saigon in June 1862, ceding to France the provinces of Gia Dinh (Saigon) and its neighbors Bien Hoa and Dinh Tuong. The French also pushed into Cambodia, offering the Khmer king their “protection” against both his Thai and Viet suzerains. None of this was ordered by the government back in Paris, the admirals just created a new international situation and lobbied to have it approved in retrospect. In 1865, “French Cochinchina” was formally established by the French government, which was still ambivalent about the wisdom of seizing so much territory. Colonies were expected to support themselves so, in an effort to demonstrate its utility, the Cochinchina government authorized an expedition up the Mekong in search of a river route to the interior of China. They believed success would help France compete with British colonies in Burma and Hong Kong. The expedition departed from Saigon in June 1866 but, only a few weeks later, its high hopes were disappointed. When the explorers reached the waterfalls at Khone, on the border of modern Cambodia and Laos, they recognized that the Mekong was never going to be the trade artery that they had hoped. Nonetheless, the group pressed on through difficulty and disease, eventually reaching Yunnan province sixteen months after leaving Saigon. The surviving members then travelled down the Yangtze, returning to Saigon almost exactly two years after departing. From then onwards, French hopes of river-borne access to the interior of China would shift to the Red River, and therefore the north of Dai Viet. In spite of this disappointment, Saigon quickly attracted international trade. The French authorities cut taxes and duties and invited merchants to set up shop. The ethnic Chinese community, based just upriver in Cho Lon (the name means “big market”) were encouraged to develop their regional networks and supply the colony with food and goods. One key commodity was opium, which the French authorities licensed and taxed. International shipping services started to make calls at Saigon. Entrepreneurs from France’s other colonies in India and Africa arrived to test out the new commercial opportunities. Vietnamese Catholics, fleeing persecution elsewhere, also moved to Saigon. It became a polyglot entrepôt. The French literally did the ground work; draining the marshes and building the road networks along which the twin centers grew. With success came colonial infrastructure: hotels, administrative buildings, churches, parks and a botanic garden.

https://saigoneer.com/saigon-heritage/18416-photos-into-the-wilderness-of-saigon-in-1867