Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [337]
The missionaries found a ready audience, especially among peasant farmers and others near the bottom of the established Confucian hierarchy. It didn’t take long before the ruling elite felt threatened by subversive Christian ideas; missionary work was banned after the 1630s and many priests were expelled, or even executed. But enforcement was erratic, and by the end of the seventeenth century the Catholic Church claimed several hundred thousand converts. Then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic missions also provided an opening for French merchants wishing to challenge Britain’s presence in the Far East. When a large-scale rebellion broke out in Vietnam in the early 1770s, these entrepreneurs saw their chance to establish a firmer footing on the Indochinese peninsula.
History |
The Tay Son rebellion
As the eighteenth century progressed, insurrections flared up throughout the countryside. Most were easily stamped out, but in 1771 three brothers raised their standard in Tay Son village, west of Quy Nhon, and ended up ruling the whole country. The Tay Son rebellion gained broad support among dispossessed peasants, ethnic minorities, small merchants and townspeople attracted by the brothers’ message of equal rights, justice and liberty. As rebellion spread through the south, the Tay Son army rallied even more converts when they seized land from the wealthy and redistributed it to the poor. By the middle of 1786 the rebels had overthrown both the Trinh and Nguyen lords, again leaving the Le Dynasty intact. When the Le monarch called on the Chinese in 1788 to help remove the Tay Son usurpers, the Chinese happily obliged by occupying Hanoi. At this the middle brother (Nguyen Hué) declared himself Emperor Quang Trung and quick-marched his army 600km from Hué to defeat the Chinese at Dong Da, on the outskirts of Hanoi. With Hué as his capital, Quang Trung set about implementing his promised reforms, but when he died prematurely in 1792, aged 39, his 10-year-old son was unable to hold onto power.
One of the few Nguyen lords to have survived the Tay Son rebellion in the south was Prince Nguyen Anh. The prince made several unsuccessful attempts to regain the throne in the mid-1780s. After one such failure he fled to Phu Quoc Island where he met a French bishop, Pigneau de Béhaine. With an eye on future religious and commercial concessions, the bishop offered to make approaches to the French on behalf of the Nguyen. A treaty was eventually signed in 1787, promising military aid in exchange for territorial and trading concessions, though France failed to deliver the assistance due to a financial crisis preceding the French Revolution. The bishop went ahead anyway, raising a motley force of four thousand armed mercenaries and a handful of ships. The expedition was launched in 1789 and Nguyen Anh entered Hanoi in 1802 to claim the throne as Emperor Gia Long. Bishop de Béhaine didn’t live to see the victory or to enforce the treaty: he died in 1799 and received a stately funeral.
History |
The Nguyen Dynasty
For the first time, Vietnam, as the country was now called, fell under a single authority from the northern border all the way down to the point of Ca Mau. In the hope of promoting unity, Gia Long established his capital in the centre, at Hué, where he built a magnificent citadel in imitation of the Chinese emperor’s Forbidden City. The choice of architecture was